On the subway ride to work toady, I saw a woman reading the New York Times and on the front page was an article concerning the recent peace talks between Israel and Palastine with an accompanying picture of Bush and the Israeli and Palastinian leaders. And this got me thinking (not about the peace talks, which are all well and good, but in some sense as futile as they’ve ever been - always good to talk though) about how hard it must be to translate what President Bush is saying into another language. I mean I have a hard enough time understanding what he says in English. How do you possibly translate it?

So in applying to graduate schools these days, I’ve come across the dreaded “Personal Statement” once again.  What I enjoyed about the college application process (okay, I didn’t enjoy anything about the college application process) was that the essay section had more of a purpose than just saying why I want to go to school there.  You said something in that essay that wasn’t necessarily apparent from the rest of your application.  You wrote about things that inspired you or strange things in your life that changed the way you look at the world.  Every “Personal Statement” that I’ve come across has said “Please write a brief personal statement about why you want to apply to graduate school.”  How many interesting responses are there to that question?  I mean, seriously, how many people write in and talk about the divine revelation they had when they suddenly realized they absolutely positively had to apply for an MFA in creative writing?

More than likely a lot of kids simply realized they loved to write and that they hated office work so much that they couldn’t possibly hold a day job and write at the same time, so they should teach.  I would guess that something like 85-90% of these personal statements say that A) they want more editors and B) they want to teach.  What other reasons are there?

Also of note, whenever I hear personal statement I think of something more along the lines of “I had 13 toes as a child” (NOTE: I did not) than I think of “why I want to go to graduate school.”  Perhaps some rephrasing is necessary, or just something more interesting.  God, I hate this process.

Secretary sent this to me. I laughed.

Integrity…Your Lawyer says this is mandatory reading!

INTEGRITY

I was a very happy man. My wonderful girlfriend and I had been dating for over a year, and so we decided to get married. There was only one little thing bothering me…It was her beautiful younger sister.

My prospective sister-in-law was twenty-two, wore very tight miniskirts, and generally was bra-less. She would regularly bend down when she was near me, and I always got more than a nice view. It had to be deliberate because she never did it when she was near anyone else.

One day her ‘little’ sister called and asked me to come over to check the wedding invitations. She was alone when I arrived, and she whispered to me that she had feelings and desires for me that she couldn’t overcome. She told me that she wanted me just once before I got married and committed my life to her sister.

Well, I was in total shock, and couldn’t say a word. She said, ‘I’m going upstairs to my bedroom, and if you want one last wild fling, just come up and get me.’ I was stunned and frozen in shock as I watched her go up the stairs. I stood there for a moment, then turned and made a beeline straight to the front door. I opened the door, and headed straight towards my car.

Lo and behold, my entire future family was standing outside, all clapping! With tears in his eyes, my father-in-law hugged me and said, ‘We are very happy that you have passed our little test. We couldn’t ask for a better man for our daughter. Welcome to the family.’

And the moral of this story is:

Always keep your condoms in your car.

The First Amendment in our Bill of Rights gives us the privilege of free speech, assembly, religion, etc (as I’m sure you all know). Freedom of speech has always been a tricky issue. Do you allow Klansmen to clean a highway? Do you allow Neo-Nazi protests? Do you allow buttons that protest school uniforms? Do you allow the president of what many would call a dictatorship to speak at an influential university?

Yesterday, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spoke at a widely protested session at Columbia University. My boss, a CLS (Columbia Law School for those not in the know) alum was outraged. Four people I rode up with in the elevator thought he should be able to speak and one even believed he should be let down to Ground Zero (I didn’t stay in the elevator long enough to hear what the others said). I’m not sure how I feel about all of this. On the one hand, I absolutely believe he should be able to speak if invited. On the other, I never would have thought to invite him. That’s the thing I’m unsure about. What did Columbia hope to accomplish with this invitation? Ahmadinejad was predictably evasive in his answers to questions and I doubt students walked away with any insight into his international ideals (at least none that they would not have been able to find in his various other speeches). The speech might have been better off as a PR lecture in how to avoid direct answers to pressing questions.

In the end, he spoke, people listened, people protested, people counter-protested, and I went about my day as normal, watched some Monday Night Football, some Heroes, Weeds, and Californication (do you see what they did there?) and slept easily knowing that the next day I could read all about the speech in the Times.

Things are not going well for one Ron Mexico, aka Michael Vick. If you’ve been following, there’s pretty damning evidence against him in this whole dog fighting, animal cruelty, conspiracy, gambling debacle, and to make matters worse, Tony Taylor has entered into a plea agreement. Generally, this is pretty bad when someone with intimate knowledge of crimes enters into a plea agreement in which all the other defendants have plead not guilty. That’s just not a good sign for the other fellows. At least in my limited legal knowledge. And everyone’s up in arms about it: Senators, representatives, animal rights organizations, other NFL players, big-tittied gambling writers, everyone really. People want blood, so to speak.

And they should get it. If it’s proved that Michael Vick had anything to do with this (or as much to do with it as is being alleged), then he should be held responsible, hands down. And with the recent events of Paris Hilton serving time and now whatever happens to Lindsey Lohan, maybe Vick will actually get what’s coming to him (again, if he is in fact proven guilty). Sometimes I think this is exactly what the NFL needs to do. Goodell has shown some iron-fist ruling techniques with the suspensions of Pacman Jones, Tank Johnson, and Chris Henry, so maybe he’ll actually let this one with Vick play out in the eyes of the law like it’s supposed to. This would be good. Finally send a message that there is some law and order out there. I don’t buy the idea that the NFL or the NBA is full of thugs and that’s why stuff like this happens, but there are bad guys in the leagues just like everywhere else, and they need to face the consequences and penalties of their actions (too easy football analogy/metaphor - I won’t even say it).

UPDATE: Smoking Gun’s got the Summary of Facts.

I’m really going all over the place this morning. CNN, Metro, Wired, Cabinet and now US Magazine. That’s right. Another DWI for Miss Lohan. She’s been in cuffs more times than my entire crew combine. I felt a little bit of my soul leaving it’s hollowed compound deep within my body when I tagged this post with News, but I really didn’t know what else to tag it. So I added Scat. My favorite part of the article, down at the bottom, the commitment to sobriety paragraph. Wooooooooo, doggy.

Seriously though, hire a driver. I’ll drive you. I’ll stay sober all night and drive you around. I really don’t mind. If it will rid the daily news of your presence, I will drive you around. Hell, I’ll drive you all around. Is it that bad to have a personal driver? I stay sober for friends and I sure as hell will do it for pay. Seriously, their publicist should be on top of this I feel. Or someone. At least to spare us the unflattering mug shots.

Uch, I just felt like a tabloid there for a second. Couldn’t you just imagine that headline in big lettering on the front of some penny rag (don’t exist anymore).

Anyway, as I’m sure the majority of you are aware, President Bush commuted Scooter Libby’s prison sentence yesterday (read pardoned). What I love about the President’s quote is that he says that he commuted “the portion of Mr. Libby’s sentence that required him to spend thirty months in prison.” Am I missing something or was that really the most important part of the sentence (perhaps of all sentences)? Basically this means that Bush is saying that he’s guilty, oh yes, he’s definitely guilty, but he shouldn’t have to pay for his crimes. This is how you treat a child’s mistakes not some who leaks information. Once again, I just don’t understand.

The real thing that concerns me though is the implications this has on the power of the executive office. During his consecutive terms, Bush has orchestrated a more dominant form of executive power than I can remember (okay, I have only lived through a few presidents, but I’ve studied them, by gum, I’ve studied them). So what does this mean for the future? While some would like to say this is just one man’s power trip in the office, I can’t help but think future candidates have now seen the true power one can have in the executive chair (especially with the houses behind you). Ideally, the power shifts back to checks and balances, which seemed to have disappeared somehow, but Bush might have opened the Pandora’s box of the executive branch.

Now, click on the image to the right and tell me if the guy is wearing an undershirt or just has some really interesting chest hair going on.

I stumbled across this randomly in a Deadspin thread and was positively blown away. Definitely go there and check out the pics. It’s a convenience store modeled after Apu’s Kwik-E-Mart from The Simpsons (essentially my pick for greatest show of all time - though yes, yes it’s fallen off in these past few years). I think this development is pretty legendary in all honesty. A store modeled off a fictitious store that is in fact a real store. As Jed might say, how meta (I’ve come to realize this phrase means nothing <–very meta).

I do, however, think this is a interesting commentary on how stores and store space operates. While this Kwik-E-Mart is fully operational (not unlike the Death Star in Return of the Jedi - pronounced Yedi, it’s a soft J), it serves more of as an advertising spectacle than anything else, I’m sure. So it’s a sort of hybrid. And then there’s even more extreme examples like the Charmin “store” that existed in Times Square for what was, at most, a month. That “store,” for those of you who didn’t see it, was a quote unquote store because it didn’t actually sell anything. There was no toilet paper or tissues for sale in there. It was a giant public toilet, essentially. The space was a second floor, Times Square centralized location that was only 15-20 public toilets that closed before New Years (interesting note: there are no public restrooms in Times Square so essentially this was a private public service for the time it was there). It was a massively expensive ad space. You went, pooped, and used their toilet paper. And they thanked you for through the entire thing and treated you like hotel guests. Truly bizarre, but yes, the next step.