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"The Situation" Misunderstands His Celebrity

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 01:40:00 +0000

Mike "The Situation" Whateverthefuckhislastnamis has decided to spend season 3 of "Jersey Shore" trying to ruin Snooki's life so that she'll totally lose her bearings, but he doesn't understand that no one wants to watch him do this. It's like watching Burt Reynolds try to play DeNiro's role in Taxi Driver. We want to watch him wearing sunglasses and rambling, not trying to emotionally manipulate a house full of people. It's like The Sitch read the cautionary tale of Spencer Pratt and decided that Pratt had the right idea.

Too Much?

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 20:21:00 +0000

Happy Thanksgiving

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 20:51:00 +0000

Dear Supreme Court of Canada:

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 19:47:00 +0000

Good job getting rid of the notion that your country is silly and way too cold.

Where?

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 05:11:00 +0000

Where does this exist? And how do you get there?

While European women, especially those familiar with combat sports, felt no qualms about giving sumo a go, Japanese women had more to contend with than just the bigger Europeans. Their biggest hurdle came from a stigma that can be traced to the 18th century, when, as entertainment for men, topless women sumo-wrestled blind men. Though this lewd variety eventually faded away in the mid-20th century after being banned repeatedly, a ceremonial form has continued in regional festivals so far out on the fringe of society that it remains virtually unknown.

The Kids Are Right (in which a librarian complains about indexes)

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 17:07:00 +0000

I know that this is not a library blog. But I just need a forum to rant about something excessively librarianish, because in the world in which I work, this might actually be considered controversial:

I deal with a lot of 21-23 year-old 1L students who seem to have never had to look anything up in a set of printed books. Google and Wikipedia have existed since they were first literate enough to be assigned an essay on their favorite animal or a country they'd never heard of. Thus, some of these students need to be taught how to use an index. And there is usually a certain amount of disbelief the first time they look up a word in an index and the entry sends them to a different entry in the index, i.e., if under "Labor" it says, "see Employment Law, this index" (this disbelief is particularly strong, if, as is often the case, this requires looking in a different volume of the index).

My librarian colleagues and the legal writing professors take this disbelief as a sign of the students' naivete and stupidity, because, they say, in order to learn how to research, these students are going to have to learn how to use all of the excessively complicated indexes and numbering systems that have, for over a century, made doing American legal research with print materials feel like arcane shit that monks used to do by candlelight in the Middle Ages. I no longer agree with their view. The students' disbelief is completely warranted. They should never have to learn how to use these crappy indexes and other finding tools.

Case in point. Today, I helped a student use West's Federal Digest to look up cases about whether at-will employees can be fired for skipping work. This was the process of just finding the right section in the Digest:
- Look up Labor in the index, which says 'see Labor Relations'
- Look up Labor Relations in the index, which has unhelpful entries and says 'also see Employment Law'
- Look up Employment Law in the index (in a different volume), and it has a couple of good entries on the topic. They are listed as "Mast & S 8(2)" and "Mast & S 42." (If you did not know already know, like I did, that "Mast & S" is short for "Master & Servant," you would have to look that up in the front of the volume.)
- Look at the shelf. Volume 73C ends with "Marriage." Volume 74 begins with "Mayhem" (gotta love these topic headings). Is Volume 73D missing? There is no empty space for it on the shelf.
- No. I have a hunch. I look at the pocket part for the index. All of the entries for Employment Law point to Labor & Empl., not "Mast & S." There is no 73D. And there are no new entries for the subtopics I had identified in the main volume.
- Go to the first volume for the topic Labor & Employment and find the conversion chart that shows that Master & Servant 8(2) is now Labor & Employment 85 (by the way, nowhere near the section numbers that 8(1) and 8(3) now have), and Master & Servant 42 is now Labor & Employment 835.
- Hand the kid the book and tell him to look at sections 85 and 835.

Look, I know that, while this same task might be somewhat easier to do on Westlaw (with somewhat less comprehensive results), it is undoubtedly prohibitively expensive for most attorneys to use Westlaw for something like this. But, with the existence of Google Books and smart phones, and the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that libraries spend annually on these books, can anyone really defend the fact that we still have to do this shit, using multiple volumes of indexes, pocket parts, conversion tables, and wondering if volume 73D exists? It's bullshit.

Kingnavi

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 16:30:00 +0000

. . . that was the license plate. I really wish that I had a whole series of photos of this car (seen on the road today) and an interview with the owner, so that I could really get inside his head.

Politico-Literary Reference

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:14:00 +0000

I know I'm the only person to have read this book in the last twenty years, but isn't Glenn Beck Reinhardt from Robert Stone's A Hall of Mirrors?

Academic Absurdity

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:05:00 +0000

. . . and to perfectly illustrate why the only liberal arts universities left standing in 50 years will openly admit to being extremely expensive and worthless sleepaway camps for 20-somethings:

Hofstra's Distinguished Faculty Lecture for 2010: Lisa M. Dresner, "Representations of Teen Sexual Decision-Making in American Popular Culture, 1980-Present."

I will be shocked if she has thought about this more than me.

Hall of Fame of Unnecessary Baseball Halls of Fame

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:59:00 +0000

2010 inductees:

Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame

Irish-American Baseball Hall of Fame

Pie

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 22:38:00 +0000

Fireflies

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:44:00 +0000

Last night I was lucky enough to be in a field with thousands upon thousands of blinking fireflies. Seen all at once, their blinking creates a truly beautiful and visually wondrous experience, and there is something very pretty and romantic in the idea that they all create this spectacle so that they can attract each other and mate.

But the individual firefly is a sad, desperate thing, flying around lost, hoping that someone notices his blinking and fucks him before he dies.

Conan's moment of pure genuis

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 18:21:00 +0000

Pete just reminded me about this:

Profanity

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:28:00 +0000

blockbuster.com did not tell me where the profanity occurred here. Was it: "sex," "sexuality," "Salinger," "Woody Allen," or "Scarlett Johansson"? Anyway, they will never accept my review.

Review of Vicky Cristina Barcelona:
Boring. These rich, beautiful women do not have enough at stake with their minor sexual problems to make things either dramatic or hilarious. Woody Allen's view of Europe, and life, seems to mimic the upper crust life from 1950's New York seen in a Salinger novel. Or was that the point? Who cares.

The only thing that would have redeemed this would have been if the Penelope Cruz-Scarlett Johanssen sex scene had been 45 minutes and more graphic. Bardem was great and he couldn't save it.

Another Day in Long Beach

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Thu, 27 May 2010 03:31:00 +0000

I live in the only town in America where you can be hit by a cop car while lying on the beach.

My neighbors will pretend to be shocked by this, but they should not be. The police in Long Beach only use their sirens to race back and forth on our tiny island's four roads, and then sometimes they do the same thing on the beach. The whole idea of having SUVs patrol the beach is insane. It felt dangerous even before they started running over sunbathers. What about patrolling the beach on foot? Or ATVs? I'm just waiting for the inevitable announcement three or four months from now that, although this officer swerved wildy on the beach and had his sirens on, the only emergency call he was responding to when he broke an innocent man's spine was one regarding immediately available pizza or blowjobs. I hope that this spine-injury guy sues the City of Long Beach for its entire budget, which is really just a corrupt welfare system for fat, lazy, mustachioed drunks.

Goodbye for a bit . . .

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:15:00 +0000

This blog will be going away for a bit very soon. I'll be keeping the Twitter account but cleaning it up.

Chastisement

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:53:00 +0000

"A husband may be convicted of an assault and battery upon his wife.

By the ancient common law, the husband possessed the power of chastising his wife.

Perhaps the husband should still be permitted to exercise the right of moderate chastisement, in cases of great emergency, and to use salutary restraints in every case of misbehaviour, without subjecting himself to vexatious prosecutions, resulting in the discredit and shame of all parties concerned."

-headnote from Bradley v. State, 1 Miss. 156 (1824).

Some of those old timey headnotes editors knew a thing or two.

. . .

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:57:00 +0000

"You didn't do too well with conversation tonight," the wealthy man said to the girl he was paying to fuck as they left the fancy restaurant. The only way to tell whether she was a whore, a model, or just a pretty college girl looking for a free meal was the man's age and attractiveness.

Eddie Pepitone

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 18:35:00 +0000

Brooklyn Baseball

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:10:00 +0000

This is a great blog post, even if it is just eviscerating a book review:

This is Pete Hamill's fake apology for the first few hundred words of his review of Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch, in which the reviewer blathers on and on about the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team Willie Mays did not play for, and about his own childhood in the most authentic borough of the most authentic city at the most authentic moment in the whole history of humankind: . . . .

I couldn't agree more. Of Americans who hate baseball, I'm guessing that there is about a 50/50 split between people who actually hate the sport, and people who are just sick of listening to blowhards use the game as an excuse to wax on and on about New York during the first half of the twentieth century.

Sorry Mom, God

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:50:00 +0000

I just noticed that almost all of my blog post headlines for the last month have included the words shit or fuck or piss. Sorry.

ShitLaw

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 19:11:00 +0000

I am very bad about updating the links on the right side of this blog, but you might have noticed that I added a new list of blog links: ShitLaw. These are some good blogs about the higher education scam that has been perpetuated on hundreds of thousands of America's best and brightest in recent years--a scam which happens to pay my bills.

If any of you still labor under the absurd beliefs that most lawyers are wealthy, that law school is a good investment, or that law school is a good place to hide from a recession, go and read these blogs some time. They'll set you straight.

What the Fuck is Going on With This Family?

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:30:00 +0000

Allison Reed is 15. She was born in Michigan. She skates for Georgia in couples ice dancing with the 23 year-old son of the Georgian ice dancing federation and she is his fourth partner since 1994. She has no familial ties to Georgia. Her brother and sister, Chris and Cathy Reed, skate as a couple in ice dancing for Japan. (Their mother is Japanese).

They all live together in New Jersey.

Is This Shit For Real?

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:55:00 +0000

WWTSD

noreply@blogger.com (P. Dgy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:54:00 +0000

I am selling What Would The Situation Do? wristbands. Buy them. All of them.