Bad Glacier

If an antitrust suit was ever filed against Westlaw, exhibit number one should be a screenshot of Westlaw’s user interface. So ugly!  So confusing!  So hard to navigate!  The world has never seen more convincing proof of monopoly power.

This would never happen, though. No lawyer would want to bring the case, on the off chance that “technical difficulties” will erase all the Lexis/Westlaw material related to antitrust law; she’d be reduced to doing her research with… [shudder] …books. Oh, the horror!

Courtesy of Girlfriend: (article)
Howard Stern moved his show to Sirius Satellite Radio to get away from the FCC’s regulations.  Now, his show is being pirated.  Who does Sirius whine to?  The FCC, of course.

On the “eh”-to-”ROFLMAO” scale of internet entertainment value, I figure this rates as a “ha”: moderately amusing.

Thanks to ambimb for updating me to the new version of WordPress.  The back-end interface is a big improvement–customizable, much nicer looking, and more useful.  Unfortunately, my old theme is incompatible with the update.  I won’t have time to cobble together a new one until this weekend at the earliest, so until then you’re stuck with the boring default.

Anyways, I’m back.  Whee!

I don’t want to go out on a limb or anything, but based on this video clip, I would venture to guess that there is even a little animosity between the two.

I’m not a fan of O’Reilly’s show, but as good as Olbermann’s smackdown was, the pettiness of the whole thing bothers me. I feel like the maturity level of cable news shows should remain at least a few steps above that of the average seventh-grader. I know, I know, this hasn’t been the case for years. That’s why I get my news from blogs! (Not really. Well, not all of it, anyway. Hey, shut up!).

Also: kids nowadays play their music too loud. Where’s my walker?

As of midnight tonight, the badglacier.com domain name will once again be up for grabs. I had big plans for the domain when I first registered it, but I never really put them into action and truthfully, I’m kind of bored with the name. Currently, it’s only being used for email forwarding and to bounce people to my blawgcoop.com address here. Therefore, this year’s $8 will go towards buying me more Ben & Jerry’s Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch ice cream, a pint of which I inhaled this afternoon. In the battle for Josh’s heart, ice cream beats useless technology any day.

I’d been thinking this would be a good occasion to shut down the blog as well–put it out of the misery it has been suffering through for the past few months. It’s been almost a year, and I have apparently ran out of things to talk about. Since classes started, I’ve felt much more self-conscious about posting. I don’t want to invade anyone’s privacy. I’ve been self-censoring a lot, and ever since November or so, I’ve had too much going on to post much, anyway. In a way, it’s nice to not have to come up with intelligent and/or witty posts on a semi-regular basis. Now I’m out of the habit; I no longer ask, “Is it bloggable?” about everything in my life. I should probably

But I can’t bring myself to close up shop just yet. I still might have more to say, and I want to have a place ready for it. So here’s the deal. I’m taking the pressure off myself. Expect light posting while I figure out where I want to take things.

Take-home message: In the future, use badglacier@gmail.com to get ahold of me. My old address will not work any more.

No, seriously. That’s what he calls himself.

I suppose “Scott Spindel, attorney who defends drunk-driving cases” just isn’t as catchy. “Scott Spindel, DUI Defender”? Maybe if he wore a cape.

A Google search for “caped lawyer,” by the way, led me to this story, from the motherland of Ohio.

Back to the drunk driving attorney… Thanks to the wonderfully detailed BAC Calculator on his site, I now know how many Mint Juleps it takes to put me over the legal limit. Not that I’ve ever had a Mint Julep before.

I don’t want to do the rest of my reading for tomorrow. Can you tell?

ALSO: Why am I capitalizing Mint Julep? I dunno.

My post below was unclear. Here’s a simple explanation that doesn’t make me look like a dick:

I had overheard some people acting as if the custodian was mentally challenged because she doesn’t speak English very well. It annoyed me.

Note to the people I overheard talking the other day: the custodian is Hispanic, not retarded. Believe it or not, there is a difference.

Possibly more than one.

I never would have guessed the Heyman Fellows Panel, featuring Harvard grads working on Capitol Hill, would be a good source of unintentional double entendres, but I would have been wrong, thanks to the fellows’ shorthand method of referring to the Senators/Representatives they worked for as their “member”:

“You need a good member.”

“Your job experience all depends on your member.”

“Unfortunately, there are some dud members out there. You don’t want to get stuck with a dud member . . . not for very long, at least.”

“You have to respect your member. You have to agree with your member–not all of the time, but most of the time, or else you’ll be frustrated.”

And the crowning moment of the night:

“It’s great if you’ve got the big member in a committee.”

Indeed.

We can whine about which parts from the book were left out. We can disagree about the casting and whether this was a better movie than the last one. We can argue whether the kids are too old to play fourteen-year-olds.

But I think we can all agree that Moody’s magical eye should not be making motor/electronic noises when it zooms in on people. It’s freaking magic, people. C’mon.

Pandas!

This is a proud day for me. I have just discovered that this site is the first Google result for screw law school.

I am the winner of everything. Bow down and kiss the ring.

From Property: “People today are not big on testamentary freedom. If I held a rally today for testamentary freedom… [sounding resigned] …well, there wouldn’t be a great turnout. I will, though, if you all promise to come.”

Criminal Law [discussing Terry stop-and-frisks]: “It’s very bad police work to get shot by somebody.”

Shortly before I left for class this morning, I got a phone call from someone looking for an “easy lawyer.” I have no idea what that was about, but let’s get one thing straight: I am most certainly not a lawyer.

That is all.

Everyone remember the Pennsylvania school board that voted to teach Intelligent Design? Well, all eight of them who were up for re-election yesterday lost. Awesome.

Congratulations, Pennsylvania. Welcome back to the real world. Kansas, on the other hand…

I skipped classes on Friday and went home for a friend’s wedding. Perfect timing–the never-ending schoolwork was starting to get to me. So I spent my weekend getting dressed up, riding around in a limo, drinking, dancing, forgetting people’s names, and generally making an ass out of myself. Now I come back, and for some reason my work is still here. Crap. I’d better read blogs until it gives up and goes away.

Last week, Professor CrimLaw handed out an old exam question. We were supposed to spend an hour or so over the weekend to write out an answer, then we’d meet again on Monday and go over the problem. This was my first experience with an actual law school exam hypothetical, and damn, those suckers are tough.

In the end I did alright, but not terribly well. I caught some issues, I missed others, and I got one part completely wrong, which made a significant chunk of my answer irrelevant. But that doesn’t really bother me much. Sure, I forgot things. I forgot a lot of things. But I’m amazed at the amount of information I did recall. The big concepts are in my head, and even better, I’m thinking about them the right way. I’m saying the right kind of things and making the right kind of arguments. The details will come, eventually.

My main problem is lack of organization. My answer was a mess. I wrote too much about some things and not enough about others. I discussed some issues in the middle of unrelated paragraphs, and I completely forgot other issues that I didn’t immediately write down. I need to organize my thoughts before I start writing. I need to structure my answer to focus on the main points. And I need a system for writing all this down so I can figure out the organization to use without forgetting points I want to make.

Oh, and I also need to study the material from the first half of the semester while keeping up with my reading for the second half, dealing with extracurriculars, and looking for a summer job at the same time.

Ha!

When I looked out the window a few minutes ago, my first thought was, “That’s weird. The rain’s falling really slow today.” It took a second for my brain to figure out what was wrong about that statement. Finally I realized–it’s snowing! Yay! To celebrate, I’m going to continue thinking about installing Linux on my laptop rather than finish the reading on personal jurisdiction for Monday… or my subciting, or the practice exam question I’m supposed to do this weekend, or…

Yeah.

Girlfriend and I went to Salem today. It was fun. There are a lot of interesting little shops and historical sites around, though it seemed like there were two Witch Museums for every one person who was actually tried for witchcraft.

Still, I think the highlight of the day was on the ride home, when I caught a fellow subway rider picking his nose. Although I guess “caught” is the wrong word, since he was two knuckles deep all the way from MIT to Harvard.

(Alternate post titles: “Pick Me a Winner” and “Ow… Now I Don’t Know Math”)

Today was looking to be incredibly productive, but my lazy afternoon killed it as usual. No matter what I do in the morning, no matter how much sleep I get, my afternoons are always completely worthless. I can get work done in the morning, I can get work done at night, but from about 2:00 to 6:00 each day, I do nothing. It’s terrible.

As it was, I made decent progress today. I won’t exactly be bored tomorrow, but since my subciting session was rescheduled, at least I’ll be able to attend a talk I wanted to see and maybe grab a beer with the ACS folks.

It wasn’t a good day, but it wasn’t a bad day either. Just a day. Let’s hope I’ll be able to say the same about tomorrow.