I've got just a few loose ends to wrap up here; then I'll have some time off before I start my new job.

What to do with myself? Two projects. The big one is to finish up a law review article (and to finish reading over Mr. P's note!). The other? Learning Japanese.

If it goes well on my own then I'll step it up, try to find some weekend or evening lessons.

and the intelligent expression, who sat several places down from me at the local wine bar:

Man, were you cute. How unfortunate that you arrived with a guy (who, I had to concede, wasn't an obvious jerk). I would else have speedily gotten the proverbial schwerve on.

Damn chivalry.

the. best. website. EVER.

cymba - the bottle opener people. i mean it.

and this person actually put her real email address on this.

i've got two explanations for this:
1. when i wrote it the title was slated to be a summer book, and
2. i'm planning for this summer to last straight through till graduation.

i love the smoking gun!

by the way, i've been sick. sorry for the absence but huddling in a warm dark corner was marginally more important than sitting at a computer.

p.s. plainsman's absence is unexcused, except, you know, he's a real lawyer. P, where are you?

1. that people use "petal to the metal."
2. that i just saw it in an academic journal
3. that the author was using it in the midst of a huge highway driving metaphor

cars don't have petals. flowers do.

{Listening to: This Is the New Shit - Marilyn Manson - The Golden Age of Grotesque}

this is really cool. (via mr. p, appropriately, over AIM)

send an IM to blogchangebot with subscribe drinkme.whostolethetarts.com as the message and you can be instantly notified over IM. how cool is that?

click here for the link to do it automagically!

{Listening to: Give a Little Bit - Supertramp - Even in the Quietest Moments}

UPDATE: testing to see if it actually works.

how could i not pick this one?

{Listening to: Fight for Your Right - Beastie Boys - Licensed to Ill}

according to my site statistics, drink me is the site that everyone bookmarks, but nobody will link to, or even admit to reading (besides the few faithful, you know who you are).

plainsman and i have done our job well.

{Listening to: boring town - Less Than Jake - hello rockview}

the last time i saw Brazil, I was in college. it's a classic.

it's guaranteed to alleviate boredom.

{Listening to: Get on Top - The Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication}

Sweet! Research has confirmed it: the state of Kansas is "considerably flatter than a pancake."

Kansans, stand tall. (When you do, we can see you from several states away.)

Link via NRO's The Corner.

alice has been busy with three things:
1. work (believe it or not!). after extreme dearth of tasks, my boss has dumped a million things on my desk.
2. partying (yeah, you know it)
3. engaging in serious IMing with Mr. P. if you want to join in the fun, you can find me at alicetarts on AIM.

right now, we are headed out from work to let the boys engage in all you can eat at pizzeria uno. disgusting, really.

i'll leave you with this random link: these people have far too much time on their hands.

{Listening to: Click Click Boom - Saliva - Every Six Seconds}

As I said, it was a good trip.

I will resume the posting of thrilling content tomorrow.

I wonder where Alice is?

I'm away on a business/pleasure-type trip to a town in the bluegrass country. It's been great. I saw some cool stuff yesterday that I won't go into detail about. Folks here turned me on to some excellent sipping whiskey -- I'm usually a Jamesons man, but this was great stuff.

Observations:

1. Things are vastly cheaper.

2. It's easy to find Dairy Queen, the ambrosia of Red America. Man, I miss living near a Dairy Queen. Though they never should have gotten rid of the Banana Split Blizzard. It was uncanny.

3. Lots of flags. Lots of "Support Our Troops" signs.

4. Unbelievable numbers of little brick-and-white Protestant churches of all stripes.

5. Local accent is dangerous. I could easily start acquiring it by osmosis if I spent time here.

More, maybe, when I get back.

oh yeah, now everyone's all high on friendster.

we blogged it first! okay, that's totally not true.

i even got the poonster in on the friendster action. it turns out that the Star Wars Kid is in both our networks.

p.s. Mr. P only has two friends, so if you're a friend of his, you should add him so his network is not overshadowed by my massive 62528 people.

quickly! we have food, booze and various other vices assembled for this evening's activities, but no activity! what shall we do?!

UPDATE: activity consisted of listening to the radio while drinking. i guess it doesn't take much to make us happy.

Wednesday is the day I buy the New York Times. It's all about the Dining section. Amanda Hesser, William Grimes, Frank Prial, and Eric Asimov ... all know their craft and produce lively, precise descriptions.

Prial's got a diverting article on dessert wines today. He tries to coax us Americans out of our guilty relationship toward sweet vinousness:

"[W]e have taken enthusiastically to dry wines — so much so that, except for Sauternes and port, we tend to look down on sweet wines as gauche, embarrassing, the excesses of misspent youth."

This is all true, and I think outside of a few major cities the situation is even graver than Prial suggests. When I clerked in a mid-sized city, I found only a few colleagues who appreciated the joys of port and Sauternes. (So I proselytized.) And don't get me started on the slowness of Americans to appreciate the gossamer amber marvel that is fine Hungarian Tokay.

Prial goes on:

"But the truth is, in a guilty sort of way, we still love our sweet wines. Only now we call them dessert wines. We needn't feel guilty. The Romans liked their wines sweet. The British, during the 300 years they owned Bordeaux, shipped mostly sweet wines back home. And didn't they invent port? When the Dutch dominated the Bordeaux trade, the wines they sent off to Amsterdam were overwhelmingly sweet."

Well, yeah, but deep sweetness was very scarce, especially in chilly Northern Europe, in the days before the commercial processing of sugar cane. It was a big deal, a luxury. People craved as much sweetness as they could get.

Anyway, in addition to being a wine buff generally, I adore complex sweet wine, whether it be vintage port, late-harvest Alsatian Gewurztraminer (which Prial discusses), Tokay, or fine Sauternes, which is one of those rare phenomena that can exist for years in your sensory imagination as an ideal, producing a strange shock of recognition when you encounter them in real life.

"Wow, so you exist."

- P., purply

brought to you by mr. poon and the number 2022.

cubicle dweller!

in my hunt for random blogs, it occurs to me there is entirely too much garbage online nowadays. but look, cubicle dweller likes legos!

anyways, go and take a look around. it's nice and fuzzy there.

{Listening to: Another One Bites the Dust - Queen - Pure Funk, Vol. 2}

p.s. it should have occurred to you by now that my definition of random may be different than the conventional one.

i am connected to 57417 people in my personal network!

{Listening to: Disco Inferno - The Trammps - Saturday Night Fever}

or, what i learned from watching "queer eye for the straight guy."

men can be trained to do absolutely anything.

good boy! now, roll over!

{Listening to: Up for the Down Stroke - Parliament - Greatest Hits (The Bomb)}

i just finished a monopoly marathon. i won by $7,603 after bankrupting everyone else in the game. that means i had every single one of the $500 bills. it gave me some seriously perverse pleasure.

I offered Alice a bunch of music recommendations in the comments section to the "voting" post below.

She has responded with a no doubt judicious silence.

{this morning's listening: Schaufensterpuppen - Kraftwerk - Trans-Europa Express (original German)}

i freakin' just got spammed by a christian tour group operator. it's kind of weird, because it's probably the first piece of spam i've ever received from a (putatively) real company not trying to sell a) real estate b) weight loss items or c) penis enlargement products.

i can't be sure -- i'm no expert -- but i think spam is way unchristian. there's a special level of hell reserved just for spammers and con men. spam, being pure evil certainly is the work of the devil.

i normally wouldn't link to something like this (besides, my linking is clever and funny), but in case someone gets taken in by it, and is smart enough to search, they'll stumble across this post [keywords engaged]. i know for sure i didn't opt in - my particular piece of spam came through on a mailing list whose closest thing to a deity is elvis.

Lane wants to be Number Two.

i don't know if one has really lived until you see jamie kennedy do makeovers on the oprah show.

imagine going from this to this! i wish my grandma could be this hottt.

as ridiculous as these were, watching the tape of it was even funnier. kennedy took on the roles of new age stylist (complete with jingling bells and exhortations to the god of peroxide to stay away), german fashion diva (hissy fit with chair), and british style boy.

i'm a convert. when kennedy is not doing hidden camera stunts, he's ultra-bland. i guess it lends itself well to transforming into different personas.

now back to our regularly scheduled hangover.

today i spotted a casket company truck with a note on the back to PLEASE drive very safely.

i guess anything else would just be crude, eh?

Practically the only time I watch TV any more is when I get home late on a weeknight. I'm a night owl: late to bed; preferably late to rise, though my job compels a different view. Cartoon Network's ever-shifting late-night lineup is in a good configuration right now.

11:00 EST - Futurama - Solid show (despite suffering from inevitable Simpsons comparisons). Deftly animated.

11:30 EST - Family Guy - Very funny, manic. Love the dog and the baby. Sorry I missed it the first time around.

12:00 EST - The Big O - Absorbing. Weird, suave art-deco anime; like Batman with giant gothic robots. Great opening sequence. I like the laconic android girl, R. Dorothy.

12:30 EST - Kikaider - Speaking of androids. Rebooted anime version of classic Japanese SF series from the old school. Simple yet stylish palette makes it pretty watchable.

1:00 EST - Trigun - Dislike it. Sophomoric. Often choose sleep or a book at this point. But if one perseveres ...

1:30 EST - Lupin III - Choice late-70s series about international thief and his sidekicks. Lupin's as famous in Japan as James Bond. The rewritten American version is salty and funny, like the original.

And that accounts for about 80% of my TV intake. I also watch a little Iron Chef on weekends. I get my news about the world and most of the rest of my entertainment from papers, mags, and the Internet. And the stereo.

{Was listening this morning to: Superstar - The Hissyfits - Letters From Frank}

finally, my random site of the day pays off. i think i need say no more than pervscan.com.

(um, yeah, adult material. duh.)

what's great is that it's not only pervy, it's actually quite good. how come i've not heard of this before?

p.s. to the authors - although category archives are good, categories + date archives = even better. in my humble opinion.

{Listening to: How To Make A Monster (Kitty's Purrrrformance Mix) - Rob Zombie - American Made Music To Strip By}

(you should be able to tell by my random linking that i'm really bored. movie night got canceled. i didn't anticipate using any actual brain power tonight, so here i am, stuck, writing silly stuff.)

this post by denise reminds me that i haven't signed anyone up for the international male catalog recently.

it's a truly hilarious prank, especially in a shared mail (male?) situation where everyone reads everyone else's mail. inevitably the jokee protests fruitlessly that he didn't order the catalog. it truly can be priceless. i guess now that people have jobs and a little extra cash floating around, an even better joke would be to place an order for your favorite international male. swashbuckler shirt anyone?

{Listening to: Country Grammar - Nelly - Country Grammar}

my 20-something female brain.

i see the title of this post and think, "yeah, ice cream would be good."

{Listening to: The Untouchables Class - My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult - The Reincarnation of Luna}

i'm not really sure why, but i am strangely captivated by the news that john malkovich may be moving to boston.

don't ask me why, i really couldn't say why anyone would care.

maybe that's why i don't live in new york.

hey, can we get some half-stories built into this building? that would at least provide me with some entertainment.

{Listening to: Lady Alcohol - Praga Khan - Twentyfirstcenturyskin}

as there is no need to seek refuge from the heat this evening in a frosty cold movie theater, die another day is on tap for movie night this week. so we can't really vote for that this week.

so we should all vote for what cd i should buy. i don't really have any choices, because i pretty much own everything i want. so this is an open-ended voting kind of thing. let's be realistic, though. no yanni. :)

{Listening to: Thunderstruck - AC/DC - The Razor's Edge}

my 16 year old cousin has a blog.

it makes me wonder how much time and energy is put into funky capitalization and spelling (e.g., sexiEe, tOo, aLL).

hmm. maybe it's a filter. seems almost too regular. whatever it is, it's frightening. i won't link to it because, well, you know. the whole anonymous bit.

{Listening to: Just What I Needed - The Cars - Complete Greatest Hits}

UPDATE: IM conversation with my cousin
me: hey freakazoid. does your blog site automatically turn good english into weird shit?
her: hahaha
her: oOOO shutp
her: no dats how i type =P
me: even the tOo etc.
her: hahah hey dont hate on the way i type =P
me: silly biscuit.

the next installment of our semi-regular sort of random blog feature:
vacuity and movie reviews

{Listening to: Lithium - Nirvana - Nevermind}

did i mention the insomnia caused by the cold medication i took before i was supposed to go to sleep? i was exhausted, and now i am completely wired. perhaps washing it down with diet coke was a poor idea.

did i also mention my inordinate fondness for "best of" albums over the last month? this contradicts squarely with any album listening experience, but is considerably easier on the pocketbook. especially when you buy cds at half.com.

ok, the cd player has shuffled to the last dj, which reminds me, i've noticed lately that the classic rock station* [which had awesome, fantastic programming over the 4th weekend - barely any dj prattle or ads!] has been REALLY pushing bob seger & the latest led zep cd & dvd. then i heard the announcement of weather from our partner, aol broadband. is this an incident of the editorial content being dictated by aol? i remember some rumblings about this a month ago.

i'll stop now, because my brain is sort of fuzzy.

{Listening to: The Last DJ - Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers - The Last DJ}

* I'd link, but it plays noise. So here. http://www.wzlx.com/

oh, looky, we have search now! not pretty yet, but it works. yay.

{Listening to: Work It [Remix] [Hidden Track] - - Under Construction}

poor adam. perhaps nobody will search for it, but at least one can try to make you the top result.

adam white is a sexy law school bastard.

{Listening to: You Shook Me All Night Long - AC/DC - Back in Black}

comments feed (for all comments) is now available! yippee! i found the template at etc. super cool. thanks!

{Listening to: Nightrain - Guns N' Roses - Appetite for Destruction}

UPDATE: technical difficulties with the permalinks in the feeds. patience.
UPDATE2: things now appear in working order. links go to the blog entry instead of the comments because comments on drink me are only in pop ups. this way you can get context, too. nifty.

Feddie from Southern Appeal points us to this gem.

this one might be my favorite.

People, it's fundamentally very simple. Pick three or four good chords, and set them to throbbing. Apply fuzz. Encase in a sturdy ribcage of 4/4 drumming. Add human voice (and stimulants).

Follow these steps, and your creature will live, and crowds will jump when it approaches. Even if you're Swedish.

{Was listening to: The Hives -- Hate To Say I Told You So}

PS: It helps if you have a bunch of Stooges, Ramones, and Wire records.

sam adams, brewer-patriot.

i burnt my hand with a sparkler (children and alices are not allowed to light these devices by themselves), but otherwise the fourth was great fun.

now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

a week ago i was struck with the urge to put pretty hate machine* into my cd player. i was a grade A nine inch nails freak in middle school and high school. i have hearing damage from listening to broken way too loud on my headphones. i actually owned one of those ridiculously large posters of trent reznor. anyways, it reminded me of the much anticipated release of the downward spiral, and the experience of listening to an album for the first time. it's probably that i have less time to fool around finding current music that matches my interests, but i haven't heard a good album in quite some time. the week downward spiral was released i was on this school trip (i was a freak, but alas, also a geek!). a fellow devotee and i convinced the chaperones to take us to the mall so we could buy it immediately. of course, in those days, the coolest thing to do was to have headphone splitters so you could share your own little listening experience. we listened to it together, sharing that profound event.

but i ramble. listening to new music for the very first time is an experience that just can never be replicated. the second and third listens through are similar to the first, but by then you know the feel of the music slithering through your ears, and it becomes closer to familiar than brand new. you can't ever regain that feeling of being shocked and delighted and surprised (and sometimes disappointed) the first time you listen to a new album. of course, listening to familiar music is good, too. it's intimate. in a sense, it can be effortless -- you don't have to think about it if you don't want to, because you already know it. but that first exposure is just about one of the most exciting things i can think of. your ears struggle to keep up with the different layers of music, and what your ear catches the first time around is never exactly what you'll hear later. the whole thing is very visceral and quite inexplicable.

the thing is that you can never quite remember how it was to listen to something for the very first time. subsequent listens change your perception, make it cloudy with memories of your other senses during repeated hearings. i remember thinking after that inaugural listen that i never wanted to listen to it again (which was very unusual at the time). i wanted to preserve that taste so the rare and strange wouldn't transform into something common and conventional. of course, i have very little willpower, so that didn't quite happen. i doubt i could ever accomplish such a feat. but, in honor of being sixteen again, i can try to listen with new ears.

* one of my top five albums. ever.

{Listening to: Ruiner - Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral}

so, charlie's angels 2 was last night, and it was so much fun! pooh on all the critics that called it a bad movie. sure, incredible, gigantic amounts of disbelief suspension were required, but in the end it was a good laugh and very entertaining. which is my main criteria for a summer flick. save the heavy brain stuff for winter, thanks very much.

plus, the zass puns were just too funny. i mean it.

howard says that sin is back in.

did i miss the memo telling me that it wasn't cool any more? people need to apprise me of the situation as it unfolds.

(apologies to all the upright sorts of people)

David Edelstein in Slate, in a review concluding that Terminator 3 sucks:

"[Claire] Danes, however, is shrill and painful to watch. She looked adorable and sexy with a touch of baby fat, but she's the latest in an endless line of young Hollywood actresses to starve herself down to the bone. Stop the madness!"

Word. The same goes for Jennifer Connelly, Helena Bonham Carter, and a number of other basically crushworthy screen women. (Claire has made some lousy script decisions since leaving high school -- Mod Squad, anyone? -- but she remains basically crushworthy.)

Compare the lovely Claire in 1996's Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet (a highly enjoyable film) with the whip-tautened version on display in this still from Terminator 3. Is this progress?

No, no, no. And it's not just to be chalked up to the passage of seven years' time, which of course none of us can help. Rather, deliberate choices are clearly being made, as in Ms. Connelly's case.

Ladies, please, with all respect: eat more cheeseburgers (or baked potato if you're veg). Drink more beer. These things are tasty and satisfying, and it's for the greater aesthetic good. You should gain about 10 pounds, and I should lose same. Deal?

Someone should also send Ann Coulter a note.

ADDENDUM: There are fairly deep waters here, aren't there? It inclines one to buy into the "media forces insane body images on young women" meme, for one thing. The only moral I can draw is the obvious one: support flicks with non-rail-thin female leads.

See, e.g., Kate Winslet. Titanic was crap -- to this day the only movie I've ever heckled -- but her zaftig presence was a measure of compensation.

sadly, i must announce that the readers' choice for movie night was overruled by some funky scheduling quirks (namely, the one person that couldn't attend took her sister to see charlie's angels over the weekend). so full throttle it is.

i am now taking votes on the fourth of july:
1. frozen pina coladas
2. a quarter keg of sam's
3. both.

Ahhh! The massive project is finally out the door -- it turned out well, I think -- and breathing is eased. I'm now hoping for a brief spell of Cal Coolidge normalcy.

Here is a short list of things to be grateful for, some frivolous, some not:

1. It's summer, it's warm, which is great for a change. You can walk the streets at lunch time, iced tea in hand, taking in the surprisingly various crowd of fellow office building inhabitants in their sunglasses, dresses, jeans and slacks.

2. Etienne Gilson's The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy remains in print (Notre Dame, 1991) and is easily obtained.

3. There is New Zealand sauvignon blanc to be drunk. It is strikingly fresh and eye-opening wine, full of lime and passion fruit and greens and herbs. Yes, I know I'm a Bobo. Kind of. A sorely conflicted one. But delicious is delicious.

4. "Monday Morning Rock" has the best, most indelible chord changes of any pop song.

5. Volume 0:5 of Neon Genesis Evangelion was on TV last night, if you were over at my apartment when I had the DVD on.

so, yesterday afternoon i took a trip to see a gallery exhibit -- Influence, Anxiety and Gratitude.

it was, um, interesting. after you got over the shock of the virtually pornographic images, you could understand it, and the ideas the exhibit presented were really provocative (in a non-dirty way), but some of the stuff was pretty close to raunchy. like the female artist who took pictures of herself wearing a strap-on.

after reading stealing the mona lisa, i have had more art & freudian crap than i care to think about. (btw, i don't particularly recommend the book unless you are really into art theory and/or freud & lacan.)

if you're a modern art lover, check out the exhibit before july 6 (when it closes).

{Listening to: Here Comes The Rain Again - Eurythmics - Eurythmics Greatest Hits}

i can't quite figure out what this is, but i think i like it. (psst - try an about page)

{Listening to: Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine - The White Stripes - Elephant}

i was going to pick a random blog for the day, because i can, but the first one i picked (randomly, mind you) is in japanese.

that just doesn't seem right.

{Listening to: Control - Traci Lords - 1000 Fires}

they wrote an article about me and my friends!

{Listening to: Dimentia 66 - My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult - 13 Above the Night}

Alice asks where I am, and I answer: in one of the fierier sections of Job Purgatory, from which I should emerge exhausted (with soul cleansed?) tomorrow. Thus it's not Job H*ll.

Despite my hopes of redemption, the ratio of covering paper to underlying wood on my desk currently resembles the ratio of meringue to fruit filling in one of those domed slices of lemon pie you can get at Midwestern coffeeshops frequented by state troopers.

As for Alice's post about lawyers at their desks who never speak to non-lawyers, it has no ironic relevance whatsoever, why do you ask?

"Fierier" is a cool word.

{Was listening at 2 a.m. this morning, while checking cites, to: Little Wild One (No. 5) -- Marshall Crenshaw -- This is Easy}

just letting you know that you are special.

{Listening to: Piggy - Nine Inch Nails - The Downward Spiral}

i've decided to let you people vote on my most crucial decisions.

movie night:
1. die another day on dvd at home
2. charlie's angels: full throttle at the theater.

quickly, people! don't be shy!

{Listening to: When Doves Cry - Prince - The Hits-The B-Sides-Disc 1}

who said online dating had anything to do with legal services?

no, no, this is all wrong. it now means all the losers lawyers who didn't make their ultimate catch by the bar exam and are stuck slaving away in their firm offices have an actual chance of meeting a non-lawyer. some of my friends are reaching serious depths of despair as everyone else gets hitched.

psssssst. kylie in honor of plainsman. where are yoooooooo?

{Listening to: Can't Get You Out of My Head - Kylie Minogue - Fever}

and it only took 15 days to get the top spot on google for "microcenter sucks."

the beauty of subdomains!

{Listening to: Living in a Bubble - eiffel 65 - Europop}