As if He didn't have better things to do

So we don't have internet at our new home yet (tomorrow! Finally!), and I'm just taking five seconds off from my busy workday to let you all know something that the Minnesota faithful all figured out, at the latest, on January 17, 1999:

God hates the Minnesota Vikings.

As you were.

So glad it's not triplets

Eh, what's two months?

We've just returned (well, like five days ago) from a trip through western Europe. It was fabulous, and I have lots of pictures, and I'll write some sort of little write-up of it soon. But not now.

I've just seen this commercial again during this afternoon's Sox-Royals game, and I'm reminded of why we have social services.

Now, did those kids write that "song" themselves, or is someone just trying to make people want to kill those (otherwise) cute little kids? I believe there's only one word to describe this commercial and everyone involved in its making, and that word is: eeeeeeeeeeelllllllluuuuughghghghhh.

Speaking of doomed children, we're having one of our own! You probably already knew that, but I felt I should make the announcement anyway. Due in early February, and we're not finding out re. gender until it comes.

Also, we've found a townhouse in northern Chicago, and we're closing on Friday (but not really moving in for a couple weeks). We still haven't sold our house in Virginia, which is going to be that much harder without any furniture in it, but, well, it'll happen sometime.

Another thing that's happened since I've been gone was my ten-year (!) high school reunion. I went, and we looked like this:

It was a lot more fun than I expected. Considering my graduating class was all of 53 people (so that picture there is literally about half of us), and I hadn't seen about 50 of them pretty much since the end of the graduation party season ten years ago, there was a whole lot of potential for awkwardness there, but it didn't really happen. So that's cool.

Oh, and the bar exam. Meh. It'll be easier next time.

So we're going back to C-Ville to throw stuff in boxes and supervise the movers next Tuesday-Friday, then to Minnesota (and even eventually to Minneapolis without the 35W bridge...that'll be fun) over Labor Day weekend, then I start work on September 5. That's all; trip write-up coming soon. Ta!

Everybody's a Critic

...but this is all about me right now. Let's try to stay focused on that.

Here we go!

Waitress
Our sixth (!) anniversary was Sunday, and we took in this little flick (for $6, at 10:15 a.m. at the AMC theater downtown--great deal). I thought it was fabulous.

So basically, Felicity is a strong-willed, down-home, too-cute-for-words waitress (and fantastic pie artist) somewhere in the deep south. She's the kind of person who just couldn't possibly exist (or there'd be a fluffy local news story about her every night of the week), but Russell plays it fabulously well. She has a terrible life and it's suddenly looking a lot worse, and she lets her frustration out by dreaming up new pies and naming them things like "I Can't Have No Affair Because It's Wrong and I Don't Want Earl to Kill Me Pie." That's not really the point of the picture, but it's probably the most creative element. And it made me very hungry for pie.

For a good part of the movie, it looks like every man in this whole little world is dumb, hopelessly selfish and/or evil except Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, but Russell is so lovable and the dialogue between Russell and Fillion (and, to a lesser extent, between Russell and her two caricature-ish fellow waitresses, including late writer/director Adrienne Shelly) is so enjoyable that even that part is okay. And it gets better as it goes. Finally, Andy Griffith (who, in keeping with the gimmick, I should call "Andy Taylor," but that just seems silly since it was "The Andy Griffith Show" and all) just has all kinds of fun in his role as the crotchety old miser with (you find out once it turns out that not all men but Mal are evil) a heart of gold.

It does start out slow (the initial dialogue amongst the waitresses is awfully clunky), but it gets good fast and stays good. Grade: 3.14159.

Knocked Up
This was a really fun, enjoyable movie. There are a lot of things about it that are really creative. And funny, of course. But.

You know how is goes. Everyone keeps telling you how good a movie is. Your friends love it. It scores an unreal (for the genre) 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. And there's just no way it can live up to that.

So it felt a little flat to me, but I'm sure it's only compared to what I was expecting. All the characters except the main two and Paul Rudd's seemed underdeveloped to me. There's a girl that pops up at the stoner boys' house halfway through the movie for no apparent reason and with no apparent purpose (I'm guessing a lot of her character was left on the cutting room floor...but all of it probably should've been). Rudd's character and his wife have a falling-out that revolves around fantasy baseball (!) and really makes no sense at all. And even with the main story, after the initial one-night stand, it's hard to tell how the two characters can stand each other at all, hard to figure out exactly why they drift apart again, and even harder to understand how they come back together in the end.

Again, this is nit-picking. It's just that with reviews like this one got, you expect more than just another gross-out comedy. But, other than kind of a half-assed, weird pro-family message thrown in at the end, it's not. It's just very good for what it is. Grade: Dunno. Right between There's Something About Mary and 40 Year-Old Virgin.

UVA Law Professor K.
I had a very simple, very important (to me) request. You didn't see fit to respond with so much as a "no, sorry." For eight weeks, from April into June. Ten emails, a handful of phone calls, a note on your office door. No response at all. There's got to be a stronger term than "inexcusably unprofessional" for that, but that's what I'm going with. Grade: C+. I'd like it to be lower, but that would really throw off the curve.

Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope
This is not a blog about politics. This is not a review about politics. I like to try to keep myself informed a little bit, though, so I picked up Obama's 2006 book about politicky things.

He's a great writer. Really, at least for a non-professional. He has some really interesting ways of expressing things. Unfortunately, I'd like to say "ideas" in place of "ways of expressing things," but I can't, because there aren't any actual ideas in this book. Alternate titles could be The High-School-Graduation-Speech Dullness of 'Hope' or The Joy of Equivocation. Obama is so careful not to offend anybody and not to take an actual stance on anything controversial, you'd think he'd been planning to run for President or something. He does go way out on a limb in coming out against the war, and spends an awful lot of time patting himself on the back. In fact, Obama comes off as a saint in the book...just a really boring one. The patron saint of wet-naps or something. But he is a good, engaging writer, and I'd really like to read what he'd write if he didn't care (or at least wasn't obsessed with) what quite literally everyone in the country would think of it. Grade: Thumbs sideways.

BAR/BRI this week
I don't want to name names or talk about too many details or anything, because I'm not into being mean for the sake of being mean. But the lecture today was basically the worst thing I've ever experienced (I've led a sheltered life, but still). And more of the same tomorrow. Huzzah! Grade: Zero. Zero. Zero. Again, for your notes, Zero.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"
Who goes and reviews a five-year-old movie? Charlie Kaufman films, I find, are either terrible (I won't say which one or you'll never respect me again, but I really hated it) or great (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, still my favorite movie ever). This, I thought, was one of the great ones. Whatever happened to Rising Star Sam Rockwell? Grade: um, let's say 12.

Okay, so Len Kasper is my Non-Sexual Man Crush

There's so much more complaining I could do about BAR/BRI and this whole process. But there's really no point, and it's boring. I'll say this, though: there's something kind of shady about purchasing education from (and having your practice work "graded" by) an organization that has an incentive to induce you to purchase more education. Think about that. And then go through BAR/BRI when your time comes anyway, because they've made sure you really don't have a choice.

Okay, so I did a little more complaining.

The parents come into town tomorrow, and then my lovely wife (to stay, finally, thank goodness) and my mother-in-law on Thursday. These are good things. Nay, necessary things. I'm spending so much time by myself in this tiny little apartment that I'm pretty sure that given a few more days of this, I'd be drawing a face on and befriending a volleyball. If I even had a volleyball.

The Cubs, while they're the only one of the two baseball teams in this city that I can watch without wanting to vomit a little (and then to think that this man has children!), also are a really, really bad baseball team. I keep thinking, and everybody else does too, that they've got to get better sometime soon, and they do play in the worst division in baseball (where, as of this writing, they're a scant five games out of first). But they've been so terrible, it's getting harder and harder to imagine.

But, I've discovered, there's at least one member of the Cubs organization that's doing his job really, really well, and that's broadcaster Len Kasper. See, if you don't watch much baseball (why are you still reading?), you should know that most baseball announcers and color commentators currently are, well, terrible. They tend to be former players at some level, by and large, and yet tend to know very, very little about the game itself. There's a lot of senseless blather, a lot of "in my day" nonsense. A bizarre fear of most statistics. A little bit of latent racism (there's an unnerving tendency for funny little white guys who can't actually play to be labeled "scrappy" and athletic African American or Latino guys who can to be "lazy"). You know, fun stuff like that.

Kasper's different. First, he's young (36, give or take), and a real live professional broadcaster (most play-by-play guys are, to be fair, but the very worst offenders, like The Hawk, are emphatically not). Second, he actually focuses on the game (whenever he's allowed to, with mandated diversions such as last night, when Larry the Cable Guy wasted 15 minutes of my life in the booth). Third, and most importantly, he understands the game the way people who are paid to present and analyze the game should. He knows the importance of on base percentage, and drawing a walk every now and then.

The best thing about Kasper, and I'm basing this on precisely one moment in time, is that he does his homework. Broadcasters, and baseball media folk in general, have this tendency to go with their gut and make stuff up. Watching Twins games on MLB.TV, I've heard the opposing teams' broadcasters say things about Twins players that are plainly false, and could have been verified with an internet connection and approximately three free seconds. In contrast, earlier tonight, Kasper wanted to know a certain statistic. He said what all broadcasters say, which is something like "I don't know what the Cubs' batting average is this year in extra innings, but it sure seems like they struggle," only then, Kasper got on his laptop, pulled up the best site in the world, and found out what he wanted to know. You just don't know how unusual this is. Baseball-reference.com should be the single most important resource for anyone who works in the game, and most of them seem never even to have heard of it. Unfortunately, he's teamed with Bob Brenly, a horrible manager and a worse-than-average commentator. But that's how it goes.

As Mike was just mentioning to me a moment ago, there's one great baseball announcer left. And Vin Scully can't last forever. What Kasper doesn't have is that classic, soothing sort of baseball voice; but did Vin always have that? I'm hoping that Kasper keeps it up for another 40 or 50 years and finds his unique voice, and then he can be like a stathead version of Vin Scully.

Also, Scully can't rock like this. Or this. Heh. (Actually, if you ever wondered what "Folsom Prison Blues" would sound like performed live karaoke style with every last ounce of soul sucked out of it, click on the second link. It's still mildly entertaining, and I'm not sure whether that's because it's so bad or something else.)

I wish I hadn't lost my passport, and I wish someone would buy our house already.

So, as I've said, I've been sitting around with some time on my hands, and I've looked more than I should at this site. The comments (particularly the long strings of comments after any associate-salary-related post) are terribly depressing. These people are apparently among the top young lawyers in the country, or at least have weaseled their way into the top law firms in the country, but almost to a person they're petty, greedy, offensive, and in many ways just plain foolish. It's become to me kind of like what Jerry Springer is to some people--I know I should look away, and that I'd be happier and healthier for it, but I can't.

To bed!

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.

What a day.

So that whole law school thing? Yeah. That's over. Had my last final today--knocked it out of the park. And by "knocked it out of the park," I mean "wrote words, more or less in response to each question, which may or may not have formed sentences." Significantly, I turned it in, and I'm fairly certain I'll pass.

We're going to Europe in August, and have racked up huge credit card bills in the planning process. Using my impressive grasp of economics, I ascertained that the credit card company would be charging us significantly more in interest over the next few months than the bank would be paying us in interest on my savings account, so I paid the bill in full. Only, using my less-than-impressive grasp of computers and my own motor skills, I inadvertently paid the bill out of our checking account rather than our savings account.

Several days ago. And in the meantime, our bank has happily gone along accepting our checks and debit card charges, charging us overdraft fees, and not saying a thing. When my debit card was finally rejected during my pre-exam water, energy drink and donettes trip to 7-11 this morning, I logged in to find our balance at something like -$4209. A transfer from the savings account stopped the bleeding, and I then spent a good chunk of my afternoon on the phone with the bank's "customer" "service" staff. And let me tell you, nothing takes the edge off after a 3 1/2 hour exam like a solid hour on the phone with a pleasant but woefully incompetent phone-answerer. Anyway, I've got most of the charges refunded, still working on the rest.

I was lucky enough to win a kind of pointless little contest on Seth's popular Minnesota Twins-themed blog, and my prize was a boxed DVD set containing all seven full games from the 1987 World Series put together by A&E. So after I was done with all the bank silliness for the day, I got up on the treadmill in front of Game One. I was at Game One, as an awestruck eight-and-a-half year-old, and I remember Frankie V pitching well and a grand slam and a win, and a subsequent celebration where some loud lady spilled beer all over me (though that might actually have been Game Two), but not much else.

It's really an incredible experience to go back and see through adult eyes how it actually went, and to see players like The Wizard of Oz and the late, great Kirby in the context of a full-length ballgame again. I actually found myself yelling at the TV at times, usually at the umpire for a questionable call (which, as silly as it is in any situation, is at least doubly so when you're trying to yell not only across hundreds of miles of space but across twenty years of time). It was great fun, except for all the running in place and sweating. (Boy, if you've been skimming, that's gonna be a really hard one to decipher!)

Got a call cutting the nostalgia short--had to stop, actually, just after the grand slam--saying someone was coming to look at the house between 5:30 and 6:30. So I go downstairs, and I'm climbing out of the shower at about ten to 5 when I hear our cute little dog barking her cute little head off; there's a car parked in our driveway that isn't mine. I was sure I'd heard them wrong, that really they were coming at 5 instead of 5:30 (in which case they're still early), and I'm standing there in my towel. So I throw my clothes on, having to put on the jeans twice because the zipper stuck in the first pair, and pulling my t-shirt on over my not-nearly-dry upper half, and run outside to discover a very nice realtor and client who were not the people I was expecting, and who couldn't be bothered to make an appointment.

After that I met my wife for dinner and had generally a very pleasant evening. But I was out of breath for like an hour. Really far too stressful for a day when I'd planned to do nothing but enjoy all the done-with-law-school-ness.

***SUDDEN SUBJECT CHANGE!***

I tend to talk about baseball a lot, and yet to totally ignore the issues in baseball that most people talk about when they talk about baseball. For instance, I'm utterly bored by the steroid issue. If it were coherent to say that I was militantly, almost violently apathetic, that's what I would be about steroids (and HGH and what-have-you) in baseball. Similarly (though less violently), I have almost no interest in what Curt Schilling has to say or the job security of various non-player Yankee personnel.

But lately, the tragic yet (or rather, because) utterly avoidable death of Josh Hancock has a lot of people both inside baseball and out talking about the alcohol policy in most clubhouses (namely, that they provide it, and a lot of it). Now, I've read Ball Four, as everyone should. I know that baseball players, for the most part, are thoughtless, sociopathic losers. But I had no idea that teams encouraged this behavior on a nightly basis. This is ridiculous. Now, the firm I'll be going to has a Friday afternoon happy hour, and some people (present company included, once or twice, last summer) get a little silly. But then they (we) walk home or to the train station. Baseball players own big expensive cars, many of which are made to travel very, very fast. It really doesn't take a rocket scientist, or even a smarmy used car salesman, to realize that this is a problematic policy. I mean, come on. As Seth Myers and Amy Poehler might say, "Really, Bud Selig? Really?"