Geeky Chic

I’m sipping on one of my last cups of Torrefazione Italia coffee. 
Friday is the last day for the downtown branch, and their owner,
Starbucks (who bought the chain 2 years ago), is shutting down the entire chain for failure to meet performance standards.

Torrefazione has such great coffee, and their lattes have perfect, let
me repeat that, perfect, foam.  Even when I lived in Cambridge, I
use to lug my books over to Newbury street to study because the
Torrefazione there reminded me of home.  I’m sure Starbucks will
end up marketing their beans as some sort of boutique label, but I’m
sad to watch the stores go.

So, another Starbucks boycott begins.

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This outfit is like so me.  Yep, eclectic and opinionated.

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The Heyman Fellowship,
food for thought.  They just upped the amount to $15,000. 
Hm, sometimes I seriously wonder if I will lose friends when I halve my
salary.  I don’t know what this means about some of my friends.

Anyone have a digital camera to recommend?  Under $400, for simple
point and shoot use?  Something a little bit durable if I take it
out hiking and drop it in the dirt.  My little lomos don’t work
for casual outings and trips.

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The urban planner in me is a little upset that there’s been some recent buzz about “Rural Chic“
as the next big housing development idea.  Let’s dress up the
boonies and sell it to urbanites who want to get in touch with their
inner Thoreau or Emerson, and give it a label, such as “Cracker Modern”
(I’m not kidding, that phrase is taken directly from the Times
article).  Yay, let’s pay money for a Viking stove near
hillbillies.

The only thing that I’ve found more offensive is Evil K’s abuse of the
phrase “Favela Chic.”  When I was in Bush-family territory,
Kennebunkport, Maine, my jaw dropped from the sight of a shop, which casually bore the same name.  Wow, the rich are different from you or me.

Perhaps they should include the SCOTUS nomination process in the
syllabus for Legal Professions.  The coverage on Roberts is
forcing me to evaluate my decisions relating to law.  I like this excerpt from Slate:

I actually remember being 19, and having this exact agonizing debate,
both internally and vocally with some of my goody-two-shoes pre-med
friends.  Judicial career or satiate youthful curiousity? 
God, what a nerd. 

But now that I am 27, someone should bring on the trampy girls.

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Otherwise, I donned a hairnet this morning, and spent a couple of hours putting salt and pepper packets on trays at Glide Memorial.  My only comment: their cafeteria has a much better scent than the county jail.

Now, that the Big Media won the Grokster fight, they’ve shifted their attention to combat burning CDs . See, we’ve lost one battle, but the war continues.

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My geekiness shines through:  I don’t think there’s a published opinion, but I just came across this
case, In re Monosodium Glutamate Antitrust Litigation,
where they
alleged a world-wide cartel of MSG manufacturers who engaged in
price-fixing and market allocation.  I wonder if the class is made
up of anyone who ate at a Chinese restaurant during the class period.

Much attention has been paid to the legal arguments that SCOTUS nominee
Johns Roberts made while working in Reagan’s solicitor general’s office
(most notably the footnote arguing for overturning Roe v. Wade in a
brief) and to his pro bono “advising” of gay rights groups in the Romer v. Evans case.  As with this NYT Week in Review piece,
I believe this attention is a bit misplaced (and fueled by the scarcity
of opinions from his brief stint on the DC Court of Appeals). 
Most of the time, unless the type of case is on the extreme end of the
moral repugnancy scale, lawyers are hired guns and willing to argue
both sides.  While interning for the government, I’ve defended
child molesters.  And in private practice, I drafted a pro-media
opinion piece in the MGM v. Grokster
case, and defended tenants in landlord-tenant cases (even though I
don’t have any peculiar sympathies on the tenant side).  Taken out
of context, this could create a skewed legal portrait of me, when I
feel that my heart lies with the work that I did at the EFF and Berkman
Center (work that I actively sought out and completed without any
monetary renumeration) and my odd fondness for the dormant commerce
clause.  Thus, when it comes time for my generation to step up to
the judicial plate (this time will come — one of my HLS section mates
clerked this year for Roberts, and is clerking next year for Kennedy),
I say look at our non-profit work/affiliations (to whom we donate time
and money) and our weblogs.

Edit: I find it funny that PETA is the group that would most vehemently oppose a Judge Chan nomination.

So, after 3 cars (a ’91 white Geo Storm with a racing stripe in high
school, the white Caddie, and my current black Chevy Blazer), 5
learner’s permits, and 10 years of intermittent driving lessons, I am
now licensed to drive and to practice law.

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Edit:

A link from TK: Bogs will kill us. *Sigh*

Most people my age attend a fair number of weddings, but I feel that I
have been on the funeral circuit instead.  Yesterday’s service was
strange, not in that I lost a relatively young relative (the “cool” cousin), not in that
his mother lost her only son, and not in the fact that it was conducted
in Japanese.  The oddest feeling that I have right now is that my
dearly departed cousin, as the only biological son of my grandmother’s
only brother, was the last Chung.  The Chungs came to America in
the 1800s, and now, they have completely died out.

The other thing that lingers is that his older, adopted brother did not
attend the service.  My grandmother’s brother made the odd move in
the 1950s of adopting a white baby* who was born prematurely (maybe this
was the only way that they gave white babies to Asian couples back
then).  So, this little white boy grew up with Chinese and
Japanese parents and learned how to speak the peasant dialect that my
family brought over with them.  When his father passed away, he
inherited my great-grandmother’s house and soon lost it by neglecting
to pay the property taxes on it.  Last we heard, he became a
meth-head and lost all of his teeth. (I can’t help but think that one’s
family has fully become Americanized once it obtains a meth-addict.)

*He adopted the baby with a different wife than the one mentioned in the first paragraph.

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Otherwise, my body is still reacting to shock from the SF cold, after a day in the LA heat.

I’m at the point where the higher ups run into each other while
dropping in my office to give me work, hence, forcing each other to
realize that I am staffed on EVERYTHING this week.  Mercifully,
they took a project away from me today, but I am still swamped, or, as TK
pointed out, bogged.

Wow, we simultaneously posted about the same topic.  The echo chamber of the blogosphere.

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Sorry, I had to move the last post.  I can’t link to the NY Post on here.

Generally, I have nothing against the shopping magazine genre.  For instance, at Kinokuniya,
they have magazines devoted exclusively to the fall LV line or everything Marc Jacobs; it’s a
very Asian concept. But Cookie, Lucky* for the yuppie parent crowd,
takes this one step too far,
especially with this request for a “less chubby” baby for the debut cover (yes, the link is from the trashiest weblog that I’ll admit to reading).

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And just because I know that at least two of you get a kick out of any
article that uses the term, “boffin,” here’s an article about how poor security may have led to the announcement of the Tenth planet.