Bull Moose Strikes Back

It is time again to celebrate Festivus. Here at BMSB, we celebrate Orthodox Festivus which falls between Christmas and New Year’s Day (since we don’t have much use for Kwanzaa). While the Feats of Strength are not blog friendly, airing of the grievances are. What follows are a sampling of my Festivus Grievances for 2007:

• People in the left lane who wait until they are stopped at the red light to put on their blinker indicating their intention to turn left: What the hell? I see you do this at least once a day on my commute through Seattle. Sometimes I’m lucky not to have fallen for your trick, other times I do. I could have gotten in the right lane if you had the foresight of a common goldfish. Now I’m sitting behind you as you wait to turn, unable to change lanes as cars zip by me. If you’ve screwed me really well, you’ll turn through the yellow at the last second when oncoming cars have stopped and leave me stranded for another light cycle. You suck.
• My female co-workers who wear scarves, hats, mittens, coats, in the lab in the winter: Stop it. It is the exact same temperature in the lab 24/7/365. It has to be. In the same exact conditions in July you wear shorts and sandals in the lab (stop that, too). Are you that easily manipulated by your imagination?
• The Seattle Ferry Terminal McDonalds: Again, you attempt to destroy my Christmas spirit by not having Egg Nog shakes available as late as December 6. Grinches.
• People who can’t be bothered to return their carts to a cart corral in store parking lots: You lazy bastards. If you can push your cart full of Slim Fast, Diet Cola, Bon-Bons, and potato chips to your Suburban, you sure as hell can push it back empty fifty feet to a corral so they aren’t rolling around dinging people’s doors or taking up spots. If I have the time to push mine back, you sure as hell have the time to push yours back.
• People who reply to writing above urinals or in shitter stalls: Stop it! The only thing more stupid than writing on bathroom walls is replying to the writing on bathroom walls. As interested as I am in the ongoing discussion about whether Hillary Clinton is a socialist and whether or not that’s a good thing that is going on above the urinal in the ferry terminal, I will punch you in the throat if I see you writing it.
• Christmas music stations that play Hanukkah tunes: That’s all well and good, until Hanukkah is over. Then it just makes you look ignorant and/or politically correct to the point of stupidity.
• Activision: What’s the point of not letting Rock Band guitars be compatible with Guitar Hero games? It seems you could reciprocate the Harmonix’s (the original Guitar Hero developer) controller impartiality.
• Law firms who interview candidates, and never bother to contact them if they didn’t get the job: I asked around, it’s not just me you did that to. I know we’re just students, but it doesn’t reflect well on the firm that you can’t mail a simple “thanks, but no thanks” letter. I’m not sure I’d want to work for such an unprofessional firm anyway.
• Semi truck drivers who think they own the interstate: I realize you think you own the road because you spend so much time on it, but you don’t. The next one of you who honks at me because I wouldn’t let you cut me off or, worse, doesn’t bother looking for motorcycles before aggressively changing lanes is getting stabbed in the neck with a pen.
• Pakistan: What the hell? Get your crap together. Take some meds or something.
• Time Magazine: Vladimir Putin for Person of the Year? Yeah, I can see the argument, but he kind of pales in comparison after me, the choice last year.
• The Food and Drug Administration: Are you more crooked than you are incompetent? There’s no reason to decide!
• People who liked The Transformers: OK, I get it. It’s all been a big joke played on me to confuse me. We can all admit it was terrible now, right?
• Robert Jordan: You could have died after you finished your opus instead of leaving us all hanging.
• Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Sony Pictures: You bastards are really going to make me buy a Blu-Ray player aren’t you? I don’t expect Sony to go neutral, but the other two should just take a bribe from M$ and Toshiba like Paramount did.
• The Milwaukee Brewers: I’m used to having my hopes built up, only to have them dashed by a collapse. But not like that.

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It seems Mr. Chains, mentioned a couple posts below, has run into some legal problems. Now is my time to strike at the heart of the chain installation business! Of course, I need to get back to Washington first.

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Shortly after my last post, my laptop’s monitor died. When I return I’ll get it fixed by the law school’s Dell authorized service department, for what better be free of charge. (Well, I’m sure it’s built into the price, but it will be no additional outlay of money.)

Anyway, that meant no posting at our Rapid City hotel, and my parents have an ancient computer coupled with archaic dial-up internet, so no posting there, either. I’m at my mother-in-law’s place now, where they have a spare monitor to connect to my laptop and now have DSL as well.

But here’s the short version of what my vacation has been since: After leaving Missoula we were pretty much able to go the Montana “wink-wink” 75-mph speed limit (read 80-85 if there is a cop around) after the sun came up and the black ice melted. There was one really cool accident east of Missoula where a big rig flipped and was split apart and laying on either side of the highway.

We made it to Rapid City in time to enjoy an hour in the indoor water park attached to our hotel. The daughter and I went back down for a couple hours again in the morning. They had one of those cool bowl tube slides with almost no waiting. Awesome.

The next morning, I stopped at Black Hills Harley Davidson, then we went on to Wall for lunch. If you’ve ever been to Wall Drug, most likely it was in the summer and there were hundreds of people there. It is a hugely different experience in the winter. There were only a handful of other people there and we had a nice quiet lunch and then browsed the store. I love Wall Drug. Even though it’s a tourist trap, it’s one of the original tourist traps of Western America and it is so crammed full with Americana it is charming. It’s definitely an argument for driving out this way for Christmas rather than flying.
My daughter at Wall Drug with one of the many cheesy displays:

From Wall, we decided to detour from I-90 for a few miles and instead travel through Badlands National Park, since we had never seen it in winter. Luckily, my wife remembered that we were supposed to get gas in Wall, and we turned around before we were stuck in the middle of no where with no gas, no cell phone coverage, and very few people around.

Badlands in winter:

Some of the specks in the grassy plateaus are some of the parks American Bison, toughing out the winter.

From there it was on to Sioux Falls and my parent’s farmette. We saw this sign at one of the fuel stops on the way:

Isn’t the point of WiFi that there are no wires? I understand what they were saying, but I still found it kind of funny. A couple of South Dakota West River Rednecks (like everywhere else, they have their own particular breed of idiots) pointed and laughed at me as I took this picture. Apparently, they’d never seen a camera-machine before.

Then we had Christmas with the families, and I found a couple of geocaches. A few more days we’ll be heading back.

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Old Man Winter must have read my last post and decided to throw some good stuff at me over the mountain passes today.

Snoqualmie Pass:

Lookout Pass:

As we started up Lookout Pass, I told my wife that if the trucks were going up, I wasn’t worried. As we got up further, many of the trucks were stopped after slipping off the road. My big mouth, I guess. We never had any problems, though, with the four wheel drive on, and the new traction tires. We never even had to get out the chains.

I did get a good idea for making money if this lawyer thing doesn’t pan out, though. Some guy calling himself “Mr. Chains” was set up on Snoqualmie Pass with a sign offering to put on your chains for $25. He and his guys looked pretty busy, too. I didn’t see if he had a stand over in the de-chaining area to get another $10 to take them off. Not a bad way to earn a few bucks from rich Seattle folk going skiing I guess.

On to Rapid City and the indoor water park today.

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We’re starting out on our Christmas vacation trip in a few minutes. Instead of flying this year, we’re loading the kids and the dog in the Xterra, throwing some luggage on the top luggage rack and driving the 2000 miles to Wisconsin and back. The Xterra is 4WD we’ve got new traction tires, and the chains are in the back. That together with keeping an eye on the weather and my extensive winter driving experience, I’m not as worried about driving through Montana, the Dakotas, and Minnesota as everyone in Seattle who freaks out when it snows seems to think I should be.

Today, we’re going as far as Missoula. While Missoula is the most “blue” city in Montana due to the presence of the University of Montana, I hardly consider it part of the enlightened blue archipelago. Compared to Seattle it might as well be Provo, Utah. I’m pretty sure you could park a car with a Bush ‘04 sticker on the street there for a month and not get the car keyed.

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The parking lot of Miller Park is nice, but I have picked another location for the next Bull Moose Nation Conference:

(Thanks to Cortney.)

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It is 0300 Pac-10 Time, and I have just declared myself “done enough” with my Administrative Law take home exam. I’m really starting to hate take homes. While they have some advantages: Being able to use your materials and knowing exactly what to study for, it seems like I end up putting way more time and effort into a take home than I would into just studying the entire subject and going and taking a three hour exam. Take homes tend to be very paper-like with cites, and structure, whereas proctored, closed book exams are an information dump with shorthand encouraged and sloppy organization forgiven.

I worked on the exam for about three hours yesterday and started today after I finished watching the Packer game at about 2 PM. Sixteen hours to write a two question exam is too much, and if I hadn’t declared 3 AM as my absolute stop time, I’d be tempted to fiddle with it for another 5 hours. Even though it’s not due until the 21st, I’m turning it in tomorrow and being done with it. It’s vacation time.

I call this picture “The Take Home Exam.” While there is a Diet Mountain Dew can in the picture, it is the least caffinated thing I have been drinking today:

That’s another problem. I don’t have a proper desk since I got evicted from my den in order to make a room for my son. So I move between an impromptu table (complete with XM reception) set up in his room when he’s not in there sleeping and the kitchen table. It hasn’t been a problem during the semester, since most of my studying is done on the ferry or at my desk after hours at work or at school, but this week was a little trying. I guess I’ll have to buy a bigger house.

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I had my last non-take home final this morning, in Admiralty. Much to my surprise the exam was exactly as advertised. Maybe a tad bit more involved than I thought it would be, but I had at least studied the right topics in the right proportions.

Then I had the last post-exam cookies of 2007. The last post-exam cookies of the year always taste good. If you don’t know about post-exam cookies, we always have a basket full of cookies awaiting us outside the room of the exam for when we finish. I don’t know how they get there – exam ferries, I guess. The winter semester ones are good because they are Christmas Secular Winter Holiday cookies. (We can’t have Christmas cookies, lest we offend any of the anti-religious types going to the Catholic school.) Even though I finished my exam before 11AM, it didn’t mean I didn’t want a frosted sugar cookie in the shape of a Christmas Secular Winter Holiday tree. (Whoops again!)

The cookies might be a little microcosm of the change law school has made on me. The first time I came out of an exam and saw the cookies, I said, “What are these for us? Well that’s really nice!” Now I say, “Where the hell are cookies I’m entitled to? There they are! What! Why don’t they have the exact kind I like best!”

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You know… I think my profs are messing with me this exam period. I had my IP Licensing Law exam this afternoon. The last day of class the professor made a big deal about one particular case, Cyrix v. Intel, about no-foundry clauses, and noted that he had already written the exam. Which I, and everyone else in the class, took as “Wink-wink nudge-nudge, re-read and re-re-read that case for the exam.”

Of course, I open the exam today, look through each of the three one-hour questions and not one damn thing related to Cyrix v. Intel or no-foundry clauses in general.

I think I did fine anyway, but I would have done more fine if I hadn’t spent an inordinate amount of time studying a case that didn’t even end up on the exam.

The way things are going, between this exam and my Real Estate Transactions exam, I’m going to show up to my Admiralty exam tomorrow morning and there won’t be any questions about boats on it.

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Props to Fred Thompson for not being bullied into a “yes or no” gotcha game with regards to a complex, controversial issue like anthropomorphic global warming:

Remember in the 2004 presidential election, when “nuance” was a buzz word for the Kerry campaign? George Bush and the Republicans saw everything in black and white, they said. They didn’t leave any room for the nuance of the reality. Apparently, though, there is no room for nuance when it comes to a pet issue of the Democrats.

All of which reminds me, I never told the “other” story about a co-worker from last Thursday. I was pulled into the parking garage and snuck my motorcycle into a parking spot that only a motorcycle can fit in. The only other spots left were handicap and carpool spots. A Prius came in behind me and took one of the carpool spots. There was one (1) guy in the Prius. As we waited for the elevator I asked him why he took a carpool spot when he wasn’t a carpool. Not because I care, but because I enjoy giving people a hard time, especially self-righteous Prius pilots.

He said something along the lines of that since he was driving a Prius he gets the same thing accomplished as a carpool.

Oh, really? A Prius takes up less space on the road and less parking spots? It’s not all about carbon emissions. It probably never occured to him that there are other reasons that the local government and work encourages ride sharing. Probably the same way he never realized there are lots of good reasons to drive a fuel efficient car besides carbon emissions: Lowering demand for gas, not sending money to the Saudis, etc. Warmists also tend to miss the point that there are more important, pressing environmental issues than a couple degrees Fahrenheit change over the next generation: land and soil degradation, conservation issues, waste management, non-CO2 pollution that does actual harm, etc.

Besides, that guy comes in to work from 30 miles away. If someone drove an H2 to work from within the city, they’d use less gas than his Prius. But it’s not really about the carbon emissions, it’s about making a show that you care about carbon emissions. The only thing more annoying than worrying about carbon emissions obsessively is pretending to worry about carbon emissions obsessively.

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I had the final exam in Real Estate Transactions last night.

Now, I thought our professor was likable enough and was a decent teacher. So I can’t figure out why he let a drunken adolescent monkey write the essay portion of the exam. Everything was going well through the multiple choice section. The questions were well written with one clear answers each. I thought I was rolling along to a B+ or A-. Then I got to the essay portion.

There was one fact pattern followed by three questions. The fact pattern was extremely long and meandering. Fine. Maybe we’re supposed to dig out issues. Then I read the questions. They didn’t have much to do with the meat of the fact pattern; they were on the peripheries. As I was trying to figure out how to write for 90 minutes on 15 minutes worth of issues, I looked around to see if everyone else was as screwed as I was.

Yep. Maybe I’ll be saved from my first grade below B- this late in the game. Or maybe not…
After the proctor said, “Time!” everyone said, “What the hell was that?” at once. Sheesh. I think the curve is going to be pretty flat. I went back and forth about signing up for the Advanced Real Estate class. After this exam, I’m glad I didn’t.

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Have you seen the commercial where the red headed guy and the black dude are driving in a Ford Focus? The day-walker wants to show off his voice activated music system, so he pushes the button and says “Play artist Smashing Pumpkins.” And some Smashing Pumpkins tune starts playing.
His friend asks him to hit it again. He does and the friend says “Play artist Tiffany.” Nothing. He the says “Play artist Michael Bolton,” and some Michael Bolton song starts playing.

The white dude looks embarrassed and quickly hits the button again and says, “Play artist Korn!” And some Korn “music” starts playing.

My question is: Why wouldn’t the guy be much more embarrassed about having Korn on his Ipod than having no-talent assclown Michael Bolton on his Ipod?

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Further proof that I’m turning into a lawyer is that when I read the suicide note of the nutball that shot up that mall in Omaha, when I came to the page marked “Will” I thought, “Pfft… that’s a pretty crappy will.”

When I took Trusts and Estates last year, wills written by crazy peope was my favorite subject. Let’s break this one down:

First of all, does Nebraska even recognize holographic wills? According to this site, yes. However, there has to be some evidence of date, either on the will or with extrinsic evidence. I’m guessing the rest of the note along with the fact that he shot up the mall will probably suffice.

Next, are the gifts valid? The gift of the car to mom seems definite and simple enough. But “my friends” can have “whatever I leave behind?” I’ll assume “whatever I leave behind” can be considered the residue of his estate. However, just saying “my friends” is probably too indefinite to be enforced. That actually seems to be a problem with a lot of non-crazy people’s wills. They ask that things be divided up between “friends,”  “family,” or the like and assume that the probate court will know who those people are.

And what’s with the social security number? Did he think anyone wouldn’t be able to figure out who he was? Wait, which guy who shot up an Omaha mall at Christmas is this?

Anyway, I give the will a D-, because it probably passes his car to his mom (even though it would have went to her through intestate succession anyway) but it doesn’t do much else. I’d say the will wouldn’t matter because his estate will be divided up among his victims and their estates, but I doubt he had anything worth suing over. I’m sure someone will look for some deeper pockets, though.

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The quote of the day comes from my wife, and regards the impending departure of University of Wisconsin Chancellor John Wiley:

Hooray! The jerk is almost gone! Let’s see what leftist, pussy boob they
pick next!

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

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Class is over, and I found the pattern of professor’s post-class, pre-exam availability policies very funny.

Our first time IP Licensing Law professor gave us his cell phone number and told us we could e-mail or call anytime, and he’d get back to us if he was sleeping or in a meeting and had his phone off. I thought that this was very generous, seeing as how he is an adjunct professor with a real job at Microsoft.

Our Real Estate professor is also an adjunct with a real job at a big law firm. He has been teaching a few years. He told us to have any questions posted to the website by 9 PM Saturday and he’d have all the comment he’d give to us by midnight on Saturday.

Our Admiralty Law professor is an adjunct who has been teaching the class forever, and our Administrative Law professor is a tenured professor, who has also been teaching the class for a long time. Their policies were the same: Don’t bother.

It would be interesting to see how long it takes our IP Licensing Law prof to end up where the Admiralty Law prof is now.

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Let us never forget 12-7. Not so much because the Japanese bombed our fleet. We had it coming. (What was our fleet doing out there in the Pacific anyway? We were showing aggression towards Japan by having our fleet so far towards their islands.)

No, let us not forget how FDR used 12-7 as an excuse to both not negotiate a peaceful resolution with Japan and to drag us into a war of choice with Germany. And let’s not forget how the war with Japan ended: With two nuclear bombs being dropped on Japanese cities, something we would never have done to the white, Christian Germans.

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Classes end tonight. Another semester of classes in the books, two more to go.
Just a week-and-a-half of exam hell to go to three weeks of freedom!

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I just got the “Bill Gates is sending money to you if you forward this e-mail” message in my in-box.

So, is it ten years ago? I’m pretty sure the last time I got that e-mail I was at my “students.wisc.edu” e-mail address.

Come on people, try to keep up.

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Sorry I haven’t checked in lately. It’s hard to blog while treading water.

Actually, our neighborhood – which is basically the side of a giant hill rising out of Puget Sound – was spared because the water had somewhere to go and the means of gravity to get there, but it was quite the clusterfuck around town Monday and Tuesday. The main highway into town was flooded and/or covered with mud, bridges collapsed, other bridges were shut down for fear of collapse, sink holes opened up on the roads, and the ferry was packed with people trying to get around the shut down roads.

Most people think of the Seattle area, they think of rain. That’s a bit of misinformation spread by people who don’t want Californians moving up here. From July 5 through late September / early October it is generally pretty dry. We have a lot of rainy days the rest of the year, but not much rain falls. It drizzles constantly, but the amount of volume coming down at once is not great. New York City gets more rain than Seattle, but Seattle has more rainy days. (This is also partially because the windward side of the Olympic Mountains – where the rain forests are – suck up a lot of the moisture.) Anyway, the point is people are surprised when they learn our infrastructure can’t handle a lot of water, but that is the case.

All of that was preceded by rare snowy days on Saturday and Sunday. I love days where it snows around here. I can shop in peace as everyone else cowers in their home from the inch of snow. It is rare to be able to walk into Toys R Us a few weekends before Christmas and have the place to yourself.

The weather and crumbling infrastructure won’t get me down, though. This is my last week of work and class for the year. Then it is just finals next week, and then I actually have some free time until January 7.

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I thought I had settled this two years ago.

Now drop it, get in the kitchen, and bake me a pie.

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