Geeky Chic

This is how I know that I am a nerd:

I want to find the time and energy outside of Bar studying so that I can make an in-depth reading of the Hamdii, Padilla, and ACLU v. Ashcroft opinions.  What a good week for civil liberties, yet a bad one for free time.

SF is finally getting an H&M.  Yay, I still have access to disposable clothing!

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I started paying attention to the Illinois Senate race, after this New Yorker profile about a fellow Harvard Law grad, Barack Obama, who is the Democratic nominee for the seat.  The race took a weird twist this week as the divorce papers from the GOP candidate became public — in what the Times describes as “prurient turmoil” (which for some reason, “prurient turmoil” is my favorite phrase of the day.).

It looks like the 11th Circuit sided with us in the DirecTV v. Treworgy case, and even cited the argument about standing from the EFF’s amicus brief (for once, I shall toot my own horn — I helped to draft part of this brief).  As a result, DirecTV has promised that will no longer sue or threaten people for merely possessing Smartcard devices.

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Also, I am currently trying to settle on an email account to which I can forward my post-Harvard email.  Does anyone have any advice?  I’m testing out my gMail account, but as someone who complains about privacy rights, this option feels wrong.  Finch set up an account for me on his server, but I am not crazy about his webmail interface.  My hotmail account gets too much spam because Network Solutions sold my jhu.edu address when I registered the Geeky Chic domain back in college.  So, what to do, what to do?

I am in a hurry because my parents are picking me up for the airport in less than an hour, and I still need to pack and pick up my skirt from the dry cleaners to wear to tomorrow’s ceremony.  So, here are my abbreviated thoughts:

1. I was obligated to go to a charity concert last night, where the China Disabled People’s Art Troupe performed.  I can’t decide if it was exploitative and a form of propaganda (the PRC government essentially announcing, “Look we’re humane, see we don’t let the disabled fall by the wayside if they have talent.”  While the reality is that these performers have the same cosmic lottery ticket as those tiny gymnasts, out the millions, 10 were picked out for a better life), or if it was a celebration of people overcoming their disabilities (the money from the event went to two local organizations which do a lot for the disabled).  Asides from this question, parts of the concert felt surreal, in particular a dance routine led by a principal dancer who lost both arms from an electric shock at age 5 (during the dance, the man would use his feet to hold a cloth to wipe his forehead, and spin a giant straw hat upon his head).  My comment  was, “Wow, this makes me feel as though I am in some sort of giant, live South Park episode.”  In the end, I was fuming because the performance ran for 3 hours without an intermission.
   
2. On 6th Street, I saw a sign that said, “Reagan Rot in Hell.”  I personally have no bad feeling for the man, and the coverage in the wake of his death actually reminded me that he was a very charismatic and eloquent man, a true performer.  The thought that has occupied my mind, however, is that Reagan seems tarnished by the types of people who claim him as their idol.  The narrow-mindedness of people (I’m speaking about the caustic Rush Limbaugh types, and the the cut taxes and shrink government at all-costs Norquist types) seem to weigh Reagan down.  An opposite example of this effect is how the people rallying around Howard Stern, following his FCC and Clear Channel woes, have elevated him, and made him appear less distasteful.  Ira Glass’s halo is indeed brightening Mr. Stern.

During an interview, a partner once described his experience dining at Les Halles.  Everything had gone wrong that evening.  There was a mix-up, and he and his wife were forced to sit at the bar for an hour and a half, despite having a reservation.  To their increasing chagrin, someone at the bar puffed away in their direction.  When they were finally seated, the partner’s anger was at its outer edge of containment.  But at the moment when he bit into the first course, the perfection of the dish washed away the restaurant’s sins against him.

This is how the Shins concert felt this evening.  I had been to the venue many times before, but this is the first time that I didn’t have a ticket for general admission on the ground floor.  Instead we had actual seats on the balcony, and they could best be described as noseblood seats.  The venue had a policy of absolutely no beverages on the balcony, so as our beer wore off, we became more irritated at the two mediocre opening acts (who played for over an hour and a half).  By the time the Shins came on at 10, my mind had calculated the lost time that I could have spent at home doing practice sets.  But after the first song (Kissing the Lipless, if I recall correctly), we were all smiles, and enjoyed the remainder of the show, which featured the Shins’ brand of peppy-sounding (yet slightly dark, upon closer inspection) rock with a hint of country twang.  They engaged the audience in between songs, and threw Reeses candy into the crowd near the end of the show, and made Chris Rock “tossed salad” references.

The following lyrics frrom the Shins’ Pink Bullets are some of my favorite of the moment:

Since then it’s been a book you read in reverse
So you understand less as the pages turn
Or a movie so crass
And awkardly cast
That even I could be the star.

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On an entirely unrelated note, the Times is doing an interesting (though I don’t like this style of reporting) series of articles called American Dreamers: The Lure of Las Vegas, which describes the harsh realities of living there.  This is on my mind because one of the girls in our party this weekend asked, “Geez, where do you go to party if you live in Vegas?”

There’s really no way to organize this, so here we go:

I started Bar Review class this week, and it has been more time and energy-consuming than I had previously expected.  My attention is rapt; I eye-roll at the cheesy jokes, and I have a newfound respect for Professor Epstein, the person whose book my Contracts Professor taught against (the whole course used and critiqued Epstein’s casebook).  The Con Law lecture from earlier this week brought back delicious memories of Professor Fried savoring beautiful morsels of analyses by cooing, “Delicious,” while talking about particular cases.

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The past two weeks have been a return to San Francisco’s specific brand of urbanity.  Helping French tourists find their way from Soma to Union Square, being interrogated by ditzy suburban teenagers working as spiritual volunteers, savoring the beauty of buildings as they encounter the wrecking ball.  God, I love this City.  I always have.

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Sometimes, if it was not for music, I would doubt my ability to feel emotion.

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I’m headed for Vegas this weekend to savor my favorite, forbidden vice, but you can ping me because I am forwarding my IMs.

Chelle has had a good run this week.  Not only does she justify the “We have great legs” slogan on her tee-shirt, but she managed to pull in the Harvard Book award this week (which means that her teachers see her as the best student in her class, or at least that’s how it worked at Rowerr), and she managed to get her picture into the Chronicle (this is old news by now).

Completely. Utterly. Done.

Another link, courtesy of BoingBoing: researchers have been able to use a computer program to un-blacken redacted material in the DoD memos, to show that they reported that Egypt and South Korea helped the Iraqis.  Yay, for transparency!  This is how it works:

The program rejected all of the words that were not within three pixels of the length of the word that was probably under the blacked-out area in the document.he program rejected all of the words that were not within three pixels of the length of the word that was probably under the blacked-out area in the document.

The software then reduced the number of possible words to just seven from 1,530 by using semantic guidelines, including the grammatical context. The researchers selected the word “Egyptian” from the seven possible words, rejecting “Ukrainian” and “Ugandan,” because those countries would be less likely to have such information.

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On an entirely separate note, I now have another reason to hate McDonald’s; they just trademarked the phrase, “I am Asian.”  Give me back my identity, B*!  Someone, please start a petition about this now.  I am never letting my Hapa kids eat there.

I paid a farewell visit to the MFA today to see if the their Japanese woodblock collection was on display.  Alas, the woodblocks were put away, but they had a special exhibit on Japanese Postcards (Leonard Lauder, aka Mr. Estee Lauder, donated 20,000 cards to the museum).  When I first walked into the gallery, I was a bit upset because the cards near the door were rather nationalistic and from the WWII era (I couldn’t enjoy what was essentially Japanese propoganda during a very cruel war).  Some of the earlier works, however, captured my eye, and made up for the missed woodblock prints.  One of my favorites was a card by Takehisa Yumeji, Umbrellas Viewed from Above.