And he’s back. Late night losing my shirt at poker over at Tyler’s last night, so now I’m up and about and ready to write at 11…pm. How come those World Series of Poker guys always pull pocket rockets and pocket royalty and all that? I’m stoked to see a Q-4 unsuited, heh.We even wore the green poker hats.
Working at the Busta, I watch a lot of movies. The Perfect Score is the worst teen movie ever made. “It’s the Breakfast Club, only with a heist!,” says Studio Exec One. Six total stereotypes, unable to do well on the SAT, plot to break into the ETS building and steal the answers. The heist goes so slowly that, I kid you not, at one point there is a five-second shot of two of the characters twiddling their thumbs waiting for their friends to arrive. You can’t make this shit up.
Speaking about stupid movies, here’s the latest in the “Michael Moore is funny, but he’s still a hack” newscast. Famous French Philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, who considers Bush “a catastrophre for America”, dismisses F911 as dishonest. The scene of kids flying kites in Iraq before the war in Iraq, with no mention of, y’know, the endless wars of agression, tortune of citizens, and genocides, are what, for some reason, irks him the most. Dave Kopel, who voted for Nader in 2000, lists 56 Deceits in F911 in the new National Review (a conservative magazine). Some of the “deceits” are a bit of stretch (like, dude, some of the things Moore says are meant to be ironic or funny), but quite a few of them are spot on.
Kerry-Edwards it is. My verdict? It’s not bad, but it’s not great. Edwards is young, inexperienced, weak on trade and economic issues and too much a populist for my liking. Then again, he’s a reasonable and intelligent guy, and I agree with him on more issues that I do with someone like Dick Gephardt (or Dick Cheney, for that matter). I would have much preferred John McCain, Anthony Zimmi, Wesley Clark or Bob Kerrey; national security is the issue of this election, and we really need someone who’s very good on defense issues. But, ah well, Edwards isn’t bad, and he’ll help Kerry in places like S. Carolina and Arkansas.
I agree completely with UChicago professor Jacob Levy on the problem with Bush and the reason why libertarian types should go with Kerry this time around. An excerpt: “I dislike Kerry. I’ve disliked him for fifteen years; in New Hampshire we had plenty enough exposure to him to leave me sick of him a long time ago. And, man oh man would I prefer to be supporting a pro-Social Security privatization, pro-voucher, pro-tax cut incumbent president who was serious about fighting the war on terrorism and democratizing the Middle East and who might appoint Supreme Court justices who would enforce a strict reading of the Commerce Clause…But we’ve had no Social Security reform, no push for vouchers, atrocious incompetence and policy made for the wrong reasons on the important foreign policy questions, protectionism, agricultural subsidies, and a spending explosion.”
I was tossing the football around with Stiegs the other day, and decided to try kicking a few field goals. Like 4 years ago, I was planning to kick and punt for my high school, but I played soccer instead. I could punt a solid 40-45 and I kicked a 40 yard field goal. I hadn’t kicked in 4 years, though, and didn’t think I could do that anymore. So we set up, and I nailed an extra point. Then a 30-yarder. Then hit the crossbar from 40 on the first try, and made the 2nd. Then hit from 45. Then came up just short from 50 the first try, and hit the right upright on the second. That’s ridiculous. I’ve talked to some people, and they say to start for a top Division I football team, you should be able to hit every once in a while from 55-57, and be pretty automatic from inside 40.
I’m pretty damn close to that. I’ve kicked the last few days (off a tee, and it fookin’ sucks; I’m much more used to kicking with a holder or off the ground, like a soccer ball) and hit a couple from 50 and some from the left and right hash at 45. I’m also punting a solid 45-50 yards with good hangtime. Crazy. I’m going to practice a little more and try to play for a semipro team in Boston. How sweet would that be?
Did you see that Dick Cheney told Sen. Leahy from Vermont to “go fuck yourself”? Yeah. He said it on the Senate floor, too. Then, when asked about it days later, he says that he “probably” said it, and that “he felt better about it afterwards.” What the fuck? Only 10 year olds curse out their peers when their angry and, instead of apologizing, feel good about it days later. And “probably”? The entire damn senate heard him tell the Senator to perform the amazing feat of anatomy. I guess when Cheney talks about “sharing values with middle America”, as he did in a campaign speech, a sense of fucking decency isn’t one of them.
(Even better have been the rhetorical contortions that the newspapers and TV had to use to describe Cheney’s verbal proposterous persiflage. Thanks that the online media will drop an F-bomb without concern for the innocent civilians in its trajectory.)
I’ve sold stuff on ebay all over the world, but never any as remote as Lappland, Sweden. This is the very northermost part of Sweden. Reindeer. Northern Lights. 24-hour daylight and darkness at some points of the year. But even there people want to buy our nintendo games, hehe.
Hey, sweet, one of my old professors is in Slate today. Sheldon Glashow won a Nobel in Physics and did a lot of work on quarks and unified theory, among other big physics ideas of late. I’m sure you guys have all at least heard of “string theory”, which is a popular new theory on how the Universe is made - it involves vibrating “strings” and multiple dimensions, so I wouldn’t explain it even if I’d understood it. Sheldon (or “Shelly” as we called him, no joke) thinks it’s all a bunch of bunk, and no better than philosophy, as the Slate article notes. I almost didn’t take the class with him (Physics of the 20th Century), but it turned out to be very cool. 14 people in the class, *3* in our discussion section. Me, my bud Mike and this nice Indian girl whose name I don’t remember would go up to Sheldon’s office and ask him about anything for an hour once a week. I’m not a science guy, so I didn’t have many questions for him, but I did have one:
Are space and time (essentially the same thing, ol’ Einstein tells us) continuous or discrete? That is, assume the smallest particle in the universe. It moves 10^(-35) centimeters (less than Planck scale). Does it move “through” each point between its starting point and ending point, or do objects “jump” from point to point at the smallest scale? It turns out that the answer hasn’t been discovered yet. Now, my intuitive side says that space-time should be discrete even though it seems continuous - after all, we know that piece of metal is made of discrete atoms made of discrete subatomic particles even though the metal seems continuous. But Einstein called space-time a “continuum”, and he tends to be right on these things.
Do a DNA test at a London restaurant - if you’re related to Genghis Khan, you get a free meal. More next time on the “This sounds more like a sci-fi movie than real life” show.
Biggest star competitor in America these days - Barry Bonds? Lance Armstrong? No. It’s Ken Jennings, the nerdy 30-year old Mormon software coder who has won 26 straight on Jeopardy and racked up 828,000 bucks. Honestly, the guy knows everything. I’ve been going to soccer late everyday because I can’t stop watching. He doesn’t just beat people - he humiliates them. The last few shows, Final Jeopardy hasn’t even mattered because Jennings has been winning by so much. I am in awe.
Cool Academic Work of the Week: Much Respect: Toward a Hip-Hop Theory of Punishment in this month’s, no joke, Stanford Law Review. An excerpt: “For some time the debate about why people should be punished has been old school: Each one of four theories of punishment - retribution, deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation - has acceded to prominence, and then lost its luster. Hip-hop offers a fresh approach. It first seems to embrace retribution. The “unwritten law in rap,” according to Jay-Z, is that “if you shoot my dog, I’ma kill yo’ cat … know dat/ For every action there’s a reaction”…Many people in the hip-hop nation have been locked up or have loved ones who have been. Punishment is an exercise of the state’s police power, but it also implicates intimate family relationships. “Shout outs” to inmates - expressions of love and respect to them - are commonplace in the music and visual art. You understand criminal justice differently when the people that you love experience being “locked down all day, underground, neva seein’ the sun/ Vision stripped from you, neva seein’ your son.”
The hip-hop theory of punishment acknowledges that when too many people are absent from their communities because they are being condemned by the government, prison may have unintended consequences. Retribution must be the object of punishment, but it should be limited by important social interests.”
I’m pretty sure Jay to the HOVA has never been cited in legal scholarship before.
It’s now been over 4 years since I started this site. How crazy is that? Honestly, some of the stuff I wrote about the first few weeks seems soooooo long ago, like meeting the South girls, having Candace rip me off when I aced her at tennis, and getting in that brawl at Shari’s. Good times. The first post, though, was in typical Cure style: I wrote about the 2000 Mexican Election. What’s even worse - I’d been in Mexico the week before, and my only souveniers were a couple of campaign posters (la propaganda, as they say) and a bottle of Fanta. Mmmmm. Then again, reading way back then, I had awfully bad taste in music, heh.
OK, top 12 songs of the 2nd quarter of 2004:
12. The Ordinary Boys - Talk Talk Talk
11. Beatallica - Everybody’s Got a Ticket to Ride…
10. Houston ft/ Nate Dogg, I-20, Chingy - I Like That
9. Nina Sky ft/ Jabba - Move Your Body
8. The Living End - Tabloid Magazine
7. Outkast - Ghettomusick
6. Zero 7 - Somersault
5. Kevin Lyttle - Turn Me On
4. Black Eyed Peas - Let’s Get It Started
3. Baitercell & Schumacer - What’s Down Low
2. Ben Watt ft/ Sanada Maitreya - Stronger Man
1. Muse - Time is Running Out
