So bored.

It's not that I haven't had time to post. As much work as studying for the bar exam is (and there's really a lot to do), if you've only got one single thing to focus on in your entire life, odds are you'll be able to find time to do that one thing and much more besides. And with my beautiful wife and dumb but adorable dog still sweltering down in Charlottesville, with not having a whole lot of money, and with most of my friends busy with the same thing I am (only on different schedules), bar review has pretty much been my one thing. So I've had the time...just haven't had anything to say. Because, you know, all I'm doing is bar review.

Studying for the bar exam is dreadful. There're no two ways about that. You're spoken to like an eight-year-old about things 90% of which you already learned in law school, some 50% of which are so dumbed-down for bar exam purposes as to actually have been made blatantly false, and at the end of the day you're likely to have forgotten most of it anyway. For you visually oriented people, it's really very much like this, only much, much less funny.



I'm sure the exam itself will be markedly less pleasant than even this. But then I'll go to Europe and be happy for two weeks.

I almost feel bad about posting this, because this guy was so obviously trying to draw otherwise undeserved national attention to himself, and it's an awful example for the kids that play baseball for him and all that (not that the five people who will watch it on here add appreciably to the two million or so who have seen it on YouTube or the untold millions who saw it on SportsCenter, but it's the principle of the thing). But nonetheless, it's pretty funny.



Still probably not quite as good as this one from last season. This one was slightly more creative, but not nearly as crazy (crazy though it was). But enough of that.

I know I had something more to say, but it's gone right through my already empty head. I suppose that's good; maybe I'll remember and come back in something less than three weeks.

One thought and one offensive video

Mostly just to demonstrate that I'm still alive. By the way, in the last week I've driven from Charlottesville to Chicago, flown from Chicago to Charlottesville, graduated from UVA Law School, and flown back to Chicago. But back to that one thought:

If it wasn't for the NBA, no one outside of southern/central Texas would have any idea that there was a city called San Antonio. I mean, sure, the Alamo is there, but historical significance isn't really all it's cracked up to be in terms of national attention (visited St. Augistine. FL, or, for you non-UVA people, Jamestown, VA lately?).

And isn't that the NBA's biggest problem? The two best teams of the past five-to-eight years (okay, so I don't pay nearly enough attention to the NBA to justify writing this post) do their bidness in San Antonio, which is a non-entity on the national scene, and Detroit, which is frankly an ugly, boring city to the rest of the country (though it has a great airport, which I've visited twice in the past week). Moreover, those teams are defense-oriented, which to the non-basketball-obsessed public is dull, dull, dull. The second most exciting player plays in Cleveland, home to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Drew Carey Show and (as far as America is concerned) nothing else. And while the most exciting player plays in L.A., he's surrounded by, well, stiffs.

So the Pacific Northwest is about to become the epicenter of professional basketball. The Portland Trailblazers got the first pick in this year's NBA Draft, with which they'll take Greg Oden. Oden is no Shaq, but he's an incredible defensive player who, teamed with Rookie of the Year Brandon Roy, will immediately make the Blazers a force in the Western Conference.

It should be noted that while I'm not really such an NBA fan these days (though with the sustained absence of player-to-fan violence, I've become determined to pay more attention to it as of tonight--we'll see if that holds until next season), my two favorite teams are the Timberwolves and the Sonics. So more interesting, to me, is that the Seattle Sonics improbably managed to nab the second pick, with which they'll take Kevin Durant. Now, even if Oden ends up being the more efficient player (which is likely), Durant is the kind of exciting player that fans love a lot more than they love defensive-minded centers, and Durant plus Sonics mainstay Ray Allen equals an exciting, fast-moving, high-scoring kind of team. So between the Sonics and the three-hours-south Blazers, the Northwest looks like it'll be the place to be for exciting basketball for the next couple years. So that's fun.

Speaking of fun, here's a scene that involves Will Ferrell acting with a toddler who is made to say some things that toddlers should really never say. I can't stop watching it or laughing at it. You've probably seen it, but it's worth watching again. (And again, and again, and again.) Can I have four beers?



Let's see if that works. And let's see if I can manage sitting through a 3 1/2 hour bar review class, which happens every weekday starting tomorrow. If not, this summer is going to be...really fun. And then I'll get a job at Starbucks or something.

Dave Foley really does know funny, Libelous thoughts, other notes

I watched both premiere episodes of Thank God You're Here last night, which you can waste up to two hours watching at the link just provided. It's far too early to tell whether I should be embarrassed at having watched it. But I thought it was mildly entertaining--a really interesting premise that would be more interesting with better celebrities/comics involved (Joel McHale, Kevin Nealon and Jennifer Coolidge were great; Richard Kind and Mo'Nique, not so much).

Here's the thing, though; the show co-stars one of my heroes, or rather a shockingly old-looking, wild-gray-haired-and-goateed imitation of one of my heroes, and it's kind of sad. Dave Foley, probably the most talented and consistently funny member of the excellent--nay, legendary--Kids in the Hall comedy troupe, is the "judge" of the program, which means that David Alan Grier asks Dave what he thinks about each performer, and that at the end Dave gets to pick the "winner" (who wins a little plastic trophy). But, at least for the first two episodes, what Dave "thought" was essentially that the performer was absolutely fantastic--just really great--and he then picked the "winner" seemingly at random.

This is a sad waste of a brilliant comic talent, and a man who, despite appearances, clearly does understand what is funny. Observe (less than a minute, PG, really funny):



My hope is that he's trying to be nice to everybody to encourage bigger and better stars to come on the show in the future, and that he'll start being more realistic if the show gets picked up. But you never know. I just really love this video (especially the end: "requests?"). I wish I could find a version that's not captioned in a language I don't recognize.

Other notes:

• -In leaving a comment on my own blog this morning (does it get any more self-indulgent than that?), I noticed that it said that anonymous comments are not allowed. That seems silly. So they're now allowed. Just not as enthusiastically encouraged as the alternative.


• -The leadership (er, "junta") for the 2008 Libel Show was elected last night. A little sad, since it's the very last time I can even pretend to be involved with the Show. Also, I've decided after experiencing it three times that the election process is about as poor as we could possibly make it. People are nominated or nominate themselves for a position, and speak for a minute or less about their qualifications, and then leave the room while the rest of us discuss their high and low points for something more like ten minutes before the vote takes place. This is supposed to be a secret thing; what is said in the room stays with the people in the room and so forth. Of course, UVA being what it is, with the Honor Code and whatnot, everyone finds out precisely what was said about her while she was out as soon as the meeting ends. So it's like this: there's all sorts of opportunity for people to make unfounded, often ridiculous accusations against a candidate (and that certainly happened last night); the candidate has no opportunity to defend herself, relying on her friends to do it for her, which often makes it a really awkward pissing match; and then afterward, the candidate hears all about it and can do nothing but get angry and/or feel sorry for herself. So 1Ls and 2Ls? Fix that. I'm not sure what the best way to do it is, but you could scarcely do worse.
  
  
• -I took my facebook badge off of the sidebar, because I decided there was a difference between being open and personal on the one hand and actively inviting identity theft on the other. But I also changed my facebook profile picture today, to the headshot that was taken of me for the lobby during the Show, and now you don't get to see it. So here it is:
  
  Terrifying, no? I should probably change the adjective in this blog's title. Nonetheless, I like it. It's probably my favorite bad picture of myself ever. And there have been so many.


• -The Twins did indeed lose last night, and Mr. Ponson didn't quite give up 25 runs, but he was good for 8 over 6 innings (though one who watched it much closer than I said he wasn't actually all that bad). Nonetheless, Ponson remains roughly as worthy of a rotation spot as I am.


• -I left my cell phone in my car. Be right back.
  


• -Back! But it turns out I've nothing left to say.

Wow.

I have almost nothing to say right now, except that it's Opening Day, and the Twins won, and I'm happy.

But I had to put this up, despite the fact that it was released today and appears to be pervading the entire InterWeb right now, because I think it's brilliant. It's great when genuinely good artists turn out to have great senses of humor too.



It also shows how a truly talentless performer can release perhaps the foulest pile of elephant dung ever recorded, and then a genuinely good artist can make it almost enjoyable. Just amazing, really.

Enjoy!

Not Dead Yet

This blog isn't, that is. I'm hoping this will be more than a once-a-week thing, perhaps starting as early as this week.

So the Show was last week, and was everything I'd hoped and then some. I got to make fun of Packer fans and dress up as a gender-bending glam rocker. See?



Oah, jeeze, come on in dere!

The girl in the upper picture is the makeup artist who did this horrible thing to me. Anyway, it was amazingly fun. Tickets sold well, and the show went over well. I was up until 3:30-5 am every night, and still kind of waiting to recover. You'd never believe how many talented and, especially, incredibly funny people you can find at a law school (or at least at UVA Law School). I'm going to miss it terribly, but looking forward to sitting and watching the whole thing next year (assuming I can escape the office for a day or two).

This weekend is the annual UVA Law Softball Tournament. Some 100 teams from other law schools come out to UVA for a weekend every year to, essentially, live like a Virginia law student and get soundly beaten by a Virginia law softball team. This is the first year that I'm "playing" in the tournament; I'm on the least competitive of our six teams and probably won't play in the field much, but it's exciting to be a part of it. I'll hope to check in over the weekend with photos and amusing anecdotes (there are many from the Libel Show, but I'm not sure which I can/should share).

To that end, true story: just a few short minutes ago (hey, I type fast), I was in class and was lectured on the dangers of maintaining a blog and facebook profile, because employers and such can see them. Which is, of course, a perfectly valid point (and a hearty hello to Prof. Morris, if she's reading this). It's a little scary. But, horrifying stage makeup aside, I don't think there's anything particularly controversial (or even, frankly, anything all that interesting to anyone but me) about all of this. I trust you to let me know immediately if that ever changes.

Finally, one more very funny/interesting thing I've found that is probably common knowledge among the general web-obsessed public but is brand new to me: OverheardInNewYork.com (as well as its companion sites, overheard at the beach and office). It's fascinating, and updated with astounding frequency. Enjoy!

These shoes are three hundred f^&%ing dollars.

Saw 300 on Saturday night. That movie sucked hard. Powerful hard. It was a lot like Braveheart, if Braveheart had been written, produced and directed by developmentally challenged seven year-olds who had played a lot of really unrealistically violent video games rather than by a drunken anti-Semite who happens to be really, really good at making movies.

On Friday we had about a dozen friends over for a four-days-late birthday party. The classic combination of wine, gourmet pizza, cookies and leftover birthday cake. It was a great time. Not much more to say about it, except some of my friends showed me the video below. There's a whole lot of amateur crap masquerading as comedy on YouTube, but this almost makes it all worthwhile. Some dirty language and stuff, and it gets better as it goes:


We had our first Libel Show run through last night. We have another tonight and one tomorrow before the show opens on Wednesday. At the end of this week (Saturday through Friday), I'll have spent approximately 42 hours in Caplin Auditorium, around the same amount of time sleeping, perhaps eight hours in class, and precisely 0 hours studying. In other words, it'll be the best week ever, and then I'll sleep for a day or so.

Past my peak

Among baseball geeks, there's a school of thought (formed, basically, by exaggerating the importance of and grossly misapplying a real statistical trend) that essentially holds that age 27 is the ideal, peak-performance year for a ballplayer. It's been inflated by some to the point where a player's "age-27 season" has kind of a mystical, magical quality to it.

On the other hand, another, more realistic group says that a player's "peak years" run right up through age 32. So I've got five good years left in me.

I'm not thrilled to be spending my birthday in Libel Show rehearsals until 10:00 p.m., but there are worse things. I mean, I'm sure there are going to be people at the school at that time that will be, like, studying and stuff. No one I know (or care to), but people.

When I said away back in February that I'd be bringing you stuff from other places that I find funny, I never would have guessed that the very second one I brought to you would be a stand-up comedienne, or, even less likely, a ventriloquist, but I find this woman kind of awkwardly hilarious (it's a bit raunchy, but just a bit):



Her name (as it may say in that clip) is Nina Conti. We watched For Your Consideration two nights ago, and while it had its moments, I found it really disappointingly lazy for a Christopher Guest film (basically Waiting for Guffman goes Hollywood and loses most of its wit and charm on the way). But Conti (with her monkey) plays a weather woman on the local a.m. news program, and there's a lengthy clip of her doing her material in the bonus features, and I think the DVD is worth a look just for her. Cute and funny. And really a very talented ventriloquist, for whatever that's worth.

Off to continue "enjoying" my "birthday."

A Collection of Clearly Connected, Non-Random Items

This is my all-time favorite SportsCenter commercial (and there have been so many great ones):



I went to see Pan's Labyrinth tonight with my beautiful wife. It was gory, and weird, and subtitled, and fabulous. I cried. (I cry at movies sometimes...I'm okay with that.) I probably wouldn't be able to sit through it again, but I'd recommend it to anyone who could handle, say, the first eleven minutes of Saving Private Ryan.

When we were waiting in line for popcorn--which is really the only reason we go to the movies rather than waiting for the DVD--we discovered that waiting behind us was one of Charlottesville's three biggest stars. No, not Dave Matthews, and not John Grisham. It was none other than Howie Long, star of many enjoyable commercials and such action-packed cinematical smash hits as Firestorm.



He's much taller than he looks on TV, but I suppose one should expect that of an action superstar (I heard he used to be a decent football player, too, and they're sometimes kinda tall). He was also very scruffy, and oblivious--the poor girl behind the counter must've said "I can help the next person" half a dozen times before she finally said "Mr. Long?" in a kind of politely irritated voice.

I mean, I shouldn't make fun of the guy, except for that Firestorm thing. Seems like a good guy, from what one can tell (which is to say, from nothing at all), and of the two most visible personalities on the Fox Sports NFL pregame show, he's the one who doesn't typically have me reevaluating the merits of eugenics. So, it was good to see ol' Howie. I guess. Honestly, I'll have forgotten it by next week. My mother, sister, and wife saw (-slash-stalked) Dave Matthews on the downtown mall some three months ago, and will never forget it. I'm pretty sure my little sister's life has been forever changed.

That's pretty much all I got. Here's an old picture of my dog: