The Blog with No Name

I don’t get this. Another guy has garnered international net-fame for making a funny video of himself lip syncing to a Romanian pop song. There are two things I don’t get about this. First, as you can see, it’s not even that funny. He did a good job lip syncing and all, but I only cracked a smile when he did the eyebrow thing. Second, the guy, who has received national media attention and is currently a big internet fad, can’t stand the attention and thinks it’s embarrassing. Maybe I don’t understand it just because I’ve never been in that position, but the only thing I’d be bummed about is the thought that that would be as good as it gets. I remarked on a similar situation here.

Woo! Woo! She can be my Secretary of State anytime!
I really dig her coat, and even those evil pointy-toed boots look good on her.

This week I’m working on the first half of the dreaded appellate brief every 1L gets. If you haven’t gathered already, posting is going to be light as I sequester myself in the library and read vibrant, colorful cases full of humor.

And people say law school isn’t fun . . .

UPDATE: Having to work on a blasted memo while there is stunningly beautiful weather outside is borderline cruel and unusual punishment. Punishment for my own procrastination and laziness. The only plus side is that I’m ahead of my own schedule, meaning I may actually get to sleep tonight.

It’s also nice to write something, and then read almost the exact same thing in the opinion of a federal judge. I think that means I’m on the right track.

WordPress 1.5 has been released. It looks like a very exciting update that should solve my comment spam problems and provide me with a lot of functionality I’ve wanted for a while. Hopefully I’ll be making the upgrade this weekend or maybe later today.

UPDATE: Okay, doing the upgrade now. Everything should be fully functional now, but I have to implement all my customizations.

The billboards thanking Hollywood for helping Bush get re-elected got vandalized. Though I find the idea of vandalizing this particular billboard pretty humorous, I’m not amused by the idiotic, tasteless branding of Bush as a Nazi. Pretty amazing feat, but why didn’t they do something that took at least a little bit of cleverness? Only historical idiots and wackos take the Bushitler line seriously. Come on, people, be more funny!

Microsoft has a guide on l33tsp34k. It’s strange to see the “rules” of l33t written out. It’s also surprisingly accurate. They even get “teh,” “pwn,”, and “j00″ right.

(Soini pointed this out)

Salem has been blessed with a string of beautiful sunny days that are slightly on the cool side. It feels like spring. Today I almost slept through a class after I fell alseep on the grass. Full blown spring is going to be even nicer, unless it’s raining all the time. Speaking of spring, for Spring Break my little brother and I are thinking about driving down to LA to visit our older brother. That would be pretty fun I think.

These sunny days do remind me of those lazy, sunny Saturdays last spring when I’d go up to the top of Queen Anne hill, get a drink from Tully’s, and then sit in the sun for hours. Those were good times. I don’t think I can really do that down here in Salem. There’s no coffeeshop with decent outdoor seating. Indeed, there’s no coffeeshop with seating in the sun. A town which lacks coffeeshops on the sunnyside of the street is in dire shape. They do have some nice parks.

My apartment has been invaded by ants. This afternoon I found them swarming over my kitchen counter. Earlier I only had a few poking around my bathroom sink. I don’t understand what they’re doing. There’s nothing for them to eat, nor are they trying to eat anything. They just crawl around and annoy me. For example, the largest clump of ants is on the window sill. What are they doing? There’s nothing there. A wise man once advised sluggards (like me) to consider the ant. Well, I am considering the ants, and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to learn. I just bought ant traps, so I’m going to exterminate the buggers. Maybe the lesson is “don’t piss off higher entities, or they might kill you.”

In my zealotry of deleting comment spams, I deleted about 5 real comments. My apologies. . . repost them if you want. . .

Here’s an interesting piece about breaking up on Valentine’s Day. Though the article is severely undermined by such lines as this:

“The dark side of human nature is indeed dark,” he says, in reference to research he conducted at the University of Texas at Austin for a dissertation called “Cues to Commitment.” That research reveals five reasons that a man - men do most of the dumping - may end a relationship on Valentine’s Day:

1. He’s not interested in a deep, committed relationship and doesn’t want to lead the woman on.

2. He’s scared about the escalation of commitment that often comes with sharing Valentine’s Day with a woman.

3. He doesn’t want to waste time and/or money on a relationship he thinks won’t last.

4. He’s dating several women simultaneously and the obligations of the day - dinner, date, etc. - force him to choose one woman and dump the other(s).

5. He’s worried that publicly sharing Valentine’s Day with a woman will reduce his ability to play the field.

What was his sample for this research? Just the frat guys? This seems like some really shoddy research to me. In my experience and amongst the friends I have, women do nearly all of the dumping (indeed, I have trouble thinking of one instance where a guy did the dumping), and I have never encountered a guy described in point 4. Maybe this means I just hang out with quality guys, but that seems like total BS to me.

There is one thing that is definitely true in this article:

“It’s almost worse and more offensive to mislead the other person by going out on a date and going through the motions”

The pity date. One of the biggest fears I have about just asking a girl out. Too many girls do it, and it’s lame. It would be better to just shut the guy down, but most girls don’t have enough guts to do it. At least my lack of guts in relationships doesn’t result in somebody getting hurt. I just get frustrated.

I was really hoping to come up with a good, deep reflection that was appropriate for this day. I tried hard, devoting all my shower times and driving times to thinking about it. But, I got nothing. My thoughts for this day couldn’t get past the mundane and trite. I could have whipped out a nice anti-Valentine’s-Day piece (like this good one at Fringeblog) and unleashed the full fury of my angst, but you know what? That’s too easy. And that really is my conclusion about Valentine’s Day: it’s too big of a target. Saying something right about Valentine’s Day, either yea or nay, is like hitting the broadside of a barn with a shotgun at 10 paces.

What I find remarkable about Valentine’s Day is that it still exists. I’ve only ever heard people knock it. I’ve never heard anybody defending it. Why do we even take note of it? Who seriously celebrates it? Sure, a lot of people go through the ritual of buying cards, going out to dinner, doing. . .other things, but they all know they’re being subtly coerced by Hallmark to do it. So, what’s the big deal? Besides, it leads to the senseless slaughter of millions of roses. Ah, see? It’s too easy to knock it. I’m not even trying, and it happens.

Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love, romance, and the hope that one day, some day, even I might be able to enjoy it. Let’s just leave it at that.

Wow . . . that comment spam is getting annoying. I’m thinking about disabling comments for a while.

Well, one thing they’ve done is almost doubled my site traffic. It’s kinda gross seeing all the porn search referrals I’m getting now.

UPDATE: Wow, I love WordPress’s plug-in functionality. I’ve quickly, painlessly implemented a couple of new things with comments. None of it should effect usability. One is that all links in comments get the rel=”no follow” tag put on them. The purpose of this is talked about here. The second is a function that works in the background that uses an md5 sum check to ensure that comments are really being pumped through the web interface rather than just directly exploiting the php functions. Let’s see if it works.

The really strange thing about this recent wave of comment spam is that there were often no links. It was just a random bag of mixed, uniformly offensive words. Of course, now I get to see all the perverts who hit my site due to outdated search engine results. It’s nice to see high traffic, but it’s just a bunch of sickos . . .

I also made a slight adjustment to the template that should help the site load much faster. At least it’ll load enough to start reading faster.

UPDATE 2: Well, it seems that md5 plugin did jack squat. Comment spammers are getting through still, but they’re all getting filtered out before they get published. Time to try something new.

Remember that Super Bowl ad by Anheuser-Busch which showed soldiers walking through an airport and being given a standing ovation? I liked the sentiment and patriotism it had, but I was rather incredulous that anything like that ever happened. I had never heard nor seen it happen. But apparently it does, and it has happened quite a bit. The Best of the Web has been compiling reader’s stories about just such events and contrasting it with how soldiers were treated when returning from Vietnam. You can read these stories here (first item) and here (scroll down about 2/3). Here’s a sampling:

I travel for business. In the past two weeks I have witnessed American Airlines giving empty first-class seats to soldiers and an entire terminal (in Denver) giving a plane full of disembarking soldiers a standing ovation on a busy Friday night. I pity those both here and abroad who don’t understand that this public, spontaneous, unrehearsed and heartfelt honoring of our men and women in uniform is a privilege enjoyed only by the proponents of a just cause.

In stark contrast to what is happening in Russia democracy movements may start breaking out in other former USSR states.

From Kyrgyzstan on the Chinese border to Moldova, where Europe’s only ruling Communist Party faces elections next month, opposition parties are eagerly studying Georgia’s “Rose Revolution” and Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution,” which led to the triumph of pro-democracy forces. Opposition groups are even selecting symbols for their banners when the moment arrives - tulips for the Kyrgyz opposition, grapes for Moldova’s anticommunists.

“The recent events in Ukraine have made people everywhere understand that taking to the streets gets the authorities’ attention,” says Tatiana Poloskova, deputy director of the independent Institute of Modern Diaspora, which studies Russian minorities in former Soviet countries.

Georgian President Mikhael Saakashvili and newly inaugurated Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko were clearly addressing their former Soviet colleagues last month when they hailed their revolts as the leading edge of “a new wave of liberation that will lead to the final victory of freedom and democracy on the continent of Europe.”

The article does go into some detail about the obstacles these movements face and the authoritarian regimes that must be toppled. It will take a lot of effort and help. Hopefully we’ll be able to step up.

Garry Kasparov shows good reason to believe that Putin is resurrecting the USSR. When I hear people ask why we still have nukes, I wonder if they don’t grasp past history and current events in Russia. Russia isn’t blossoming into the grand democracy everybody hoped it would. It seems everything that would be anathema in the US is becoming common place over there from clamping down on free speech to deprivation of property to separation of powers. Unfortunately, most of Putin’s power plays are being ignored or going unnoticed by much of the West, which he concludes results in some shameful hypocrisy. Kasparov concludes:

With the democratic opposition systematically pushed into the margins, real change will come from the people, not from the top. We are starting from scratch. In places like Russia liberty is more than a filler for speeches. Democracy is more than something that interrupts your life every four years. People born in free countries think that we are exaggerating the loss of freedoms when in reality things are even worse. You see Mr. Putin sitting at the table with the G7 leaders and assume he can’t really be all that bad.

This is not a plea for help, but a warning about what we’re going to have to deal with soon. The patience of the Russian people is wearing thin. With whom will the West side in this coming battle, the Russian people or the KGB?

Hopefully, we’ll never have to face the choice of going along with Putin or standing up for the Russian people, but, if we do, the world will be in an even more precarious position.

Commies in Cuba have banned a lot of indoor smoking.

Smoking will be banned in restaurants, except in designated areas, and cigarette machines also will be removed. The law will also suspend sales of cigarettes to children under age 16 and at stores less than 100 yards from schools.

However, note how Communist Cuba, ruled by an egomaniacal health-obsessed dictator, still has more freedoms in this area than some states in the US, Land of the Free.

Meanwhile, Washington State is working hard to oppress smokers. Interestingly, Matt Rosenberg, who I thought was opposed to nanny statism, is for the initiative.