true story.

A Milestone in the Health Care Journey

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:04:08 -0500

A Milestone in the Health Care Journey :

Fantastic article about the economics of the Senate Health Care bill currently being debated.

inourskulls: slow day at work. my friend luke is funny.

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:57:33 -0500

inourskulls:

slow day at work.

my friend luke is funny.

(via juliasegal)

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:11:47 -0500

(via juliasegal)

Just booked my flight(s) for my winter field study in...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 01:57:00 -0500

Just booked my flight(s) for my winter field study in Nairobi!

We’re flying Emirate Airlines, which has a reputation for being awesome. So far, so good. I mean, just look at all these different options I can choose from for my in-flight meal. It’s been so long since I’ve had a bland meal on a flight, I’m glad there’s an airline that allows me to specifically request one.

Even awesomer than the meal options, Emirate lets you add a stopover in Dubai to your itinerary at no extra cost. I’m pretty wary of Dubai, but I figure I might as well take the opprotunity to see it for myself. Besides, doing climate-specific outdoor sports in places where they shouldn’t be possible is pretty much one of my favorite hobbies, and Dubai’s basically the capital of that. So, in conclusion, I’m going to fly 7,000 miles to go skiing in the middle of the Arabian Desert - take that, energy crisis!

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 01:05:49 -0500

The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate :

[The upcoming relaunch of the Large Hadron Collider] will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

Holy trippy science, Batman!

Andrew Sullivan: “Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne Cheney, welcomed their...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:35:00 -0500

Andrew Sullivan:

“Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne Cheney, welcomed their seventh grandchild, Sarah Lynne Cheney, Wednesday, November 18, 2009. She weighed 6 lbs., 14 oz and was born at 8:17 A.M. at Sibley Hospital in Washington, D.C. Her parents are the Cheney’s daughter Mary and her partner, Heather Poe.”

Many congratulations to the Cheney family. And congratulations on the word “parents.”

Dear newest roommate,

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:27:00 -0500

I know you own pants.

I’ve seen you wear them before, albeit rarely.

Please make use of them more often. Preferably, all the time.

Sincerely,

the girl in the next bedroom over, who is rapidly going blind.

Me: Facebook just sent me an ad for becoming a JAG officer. How did they know?!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:48:00 -0500

Me: Facebook just sent me an ad for becoming a JAG officer. How did they know?!
Julian: They know you're graduating law school, they know what state you're from and they know who your friends are. People are predictable.
Me: No way that should be predictable. Based on my internet behavior I'm a flaming liberal hippie.
Me: I wonder if facebook wire-tapped our apartment?
Julian: Dude no one wire-tapped our apartment, we're not that interesting. Can you imagine listening to our convos about Miley Cyrus, football and Wall-E all day?
Julian: The answer is yes because that's our life.

One of my college buddies just asked for advice on incorporating...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:17:00 -0500

One of my college buddies just asked for advice on incorporating his new small business venture: Piss Off, Inc.

I miss my college buddies.

This is one of the best things ever. (The embed doesn’t...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:10:05 -0500

This is one of the best things ever.

(The embed doesn’t work so you’ll have to click over to youtube to watch. It’s worth it, I promise.)

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:17:00 -0500

Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks:

I love it when Onion headlines fool me into thinking they’re real headlines.

Photo

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:31:14 -0500

someone get espn on the phone

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:03:00 -0500

While it’s no secret that certain NCAA coaches are getting on in years, reading today’s Deadspin article on Bobby Bowden really drove home how ludicrous it is that some of these guys are still coaching.

Seriously, think about that for a second: just minutes after his shootout loss to Clemson, Bowden actually asked a reporter whether or not his team had lead at halftime.

Now, I understand that as you get older things get harder to remember. Hell, most 80-somethings are probably happy just to remember what day of the week it is in time to catch some of the game.

But Bobby Bowden isn’t just another grandpa. The man has over 30 years of experience, gets paid millions of dollars and . . . well, other than that he’s pretty much just another grandpa. It’s a wonder he remembers what team to root for.

So anyway, the moral of the story is, Bowden needs to retire and he can take JoePa with him. But then again, it seems like such a shame to lose two such legendary head coaches to something as trivial as senility, you know? That’s where my awesome new idea comes in. Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden need to co-host a commentary show. Between penetrating analysis of games they can almost remember, nostolgic longing for “the good old days” and attempts to figure out how their microphones work, those two guys would be a match made in commentator heaven. It’d be like Pardon the Interruption meets those cranky old muppet guys …

… who I think might actually be related to JoePa and Bowden, by the way.

They can call it, “The Peanut Gallery with Joe and Bobby”.

Brilliant, right? I better get some royalties out of this.

best advice ever

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:16:00 -0500

Me: Hi, I need to find some particular Kenyan and Ugandan financial regulations. Specifically the regs that govern deposit-taking microfinance institutions.
Reference Librarian: (whose job it is to help me find stuff) Good luck.
Me: Oh, you can't help me any?
Reference Librarian: Probably not. Those regs may not exist. And if they do, they may not be published. And if they are, they may not be published in English. And on the off chance that they are, we probably don't have them. We liquidated a lot of primary African sources to make room for the Japanese collection.
Me: Oh, I see. Well can you give me any advice on where to start?
Reference Librarian: Well, you could start by studying Japan instead of Africa.

I’m back in New York after a whirlwind vacation in...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:02:00 -0500

I’m back in New York after a whirlwind vacation in California, which was pretty much the best thing ever.

This pic sums it up fairly nicely - that’s me in my panda hoodie (leftover from my halloween costume) on a NorCal beach on my way to Big Sur.

This was only taken a few days ago, but right now from my desk at the law school library, it seems like a lifetime ago. I sort of want to start planning my next vacation …

Intro video played before Phish’s Halloween set, a tribute...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:11:16 -0500

Intro video played before Phish’s Halloween set, a tribute to the 99 albums that were in the running to be the Halloween Costume.

at the halloween festival

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:30:00 -0500

me: (walkin' around the campground in a panda costume)
random guy: (yelling from the ground) i'm sorry we endangered your people little panda. why don't i give you some candy and we can call it even?

Led Zeppelin - Going to California (live at Earl’s Court,...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:43:00 -0400

Led Zeppelin - Going to California (live at Earl’s Court, 1975)

Tomorrow night, I’m going to rush right out of my Constitution seminar into a cab headed for JFK. If I’m lucky, I’ll make my 8:30 flight and I’ll be in LA by morning. Then I’m out to Indio for the weekend for the Phish Halloween festival. As if that festival wasn’t reason enough to get super freakin excited, after it’s over I’ll begin a week of hopping around California - from Indio to San Diego to San Fransisco to Monterey to Big Sur to Oakland - visiting friends and family and wine tasting and seeing music and going to beaches and just generally enjoying the crap out of life.

I’ve got a million things to do before I leave town tomorrow, but every time I even think about getting even a tiny bit stressed about it, I remember myself how awesome this trip is - and how awesome my life is in general - and I calm the hell down.

It also helps that this song has been playing in my head all day.

PS - Shout out to Matt over at Trapped in Time, whose steady stream of Phish-festival-related posts over the past week have contributed to my growing excitement.

A message to my cousin from her boyfriend fiance, on the...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:13:00 -0400

A message to my cousin from her ~~boyfriend~~ fiance, on the jumbotron at the UMiami game they attended last weekend after he proposed. So cute!

Can the Muppets Make Friends in Ramallah? The most contentious...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:56:00 -0400

Can the Muppets Make Friends in Ramallah?

The most contentious segments were the ones in which the Israeli and Palestinian Muppets interacted. Each set of Muppets lived on their own set — so where would they meet? An American adviser from Sesame Workshop proposed the Muppets meet at a neutral third location on the border of their sets, perhaps a park, but the Palestinians weren’t comfortable with that idea — they wanted to know who owned the park. Dolly Wolbrum, the show’s producer at IETV, told me she thought that wasn’t a question that 3-to-6-year-olds would wonder about, but Kuttab said he felt Palestinian children would assume it was an Israeli park. He proposed dividing the park by a low wall, an idea Wolbrum said was a deal breaker. They finally agreed that the Muppets would visit one another’s streets rather than meet in a park. But again, controversy arose: the Israelis were in favor of spontaneous Muppet drop-bys, but the Palestinians insisted the visits had to be by invitation only. “The only Israelis who come to Palestinian neighborhoods uninvited are settlers,” Kuttab explained to me.

If I saw that quote without seeing the rest of the article, I probably wouldn’t believe it was real.