graymalkn

A comment by a classmate about aliens destroying the world got me wondering: If I were Arthur Dent, who in my life would be Ford Prefect?

Who is your Ford Prefect?

While researching for my Race and Law paper I came across this glorious WWI French postcard of the 15th Sikh regiment landing in Marseilles.

They look like some very spiffy bad-asses but I especially love the caption.

My Kentucky Death Penalty paper is done and I'm now working on revising and polishing my Race and Law paper on Muslims and Arabs after September 11th. In doing this I've been doing a lot of reading, some of it interesting and some of it damn infuriating. Much of it has been in critical race theory which despite the name is not so much a theory but a school of thought focusing on the use of narratives and on discrimination built into race-neutral laws and social structures. Pretty reasonable on the whole, but some of its adherents seem to share the sentiment popular among critical theory folks that one must take umbrage at everything. They seem to be living the bumper sticker: if you're not outraged you're not paying attention.

Now think of what if anything you might find objectionable about that. Anything? Not for me. But here's the analysis by Suad Joseph, Benjamin D'Harlingue, and Alvin Ka Hin Wong:

The article proceeds like this for 20+ pages, picking apart mostly undeserving quotes from The New York Times. There are a few quotes of real interest, but not many.

And yet a lot of the stuff I've been reading (most in a different book of essays) has been very reasonable and interesting. Maybe it's true that if you aren't outraged you aren't paying attention. But it doesn't follow that if you are outraged you must be paying attention.

Mom came up for Thanksgiving with Heather's family for the first time and it went well. On Friday we took the moms to see the Amish quilts exhibit at the de Young (more interesting than I was expecting), visit the California Academy of Sciences (my first time), have dinner at Max's, and finish up with Bach's Christmas Oratorio at the SF Symphony.

A few pics from the Cal Academy:

waltzingmathea gave me five questions.
Leave me a comment saying "I'll bite" and I'll do the same for you.
Pass it on to your own jounal (post the questions and answer them).

1) What made you decide to go to law school?

The short answer is that I wanted to use my powers of arguing for good, not just for awesome. The slightly longer answer is that until my mid 20s I had no particular interest in law. When I was a kid and teenager I wanted to be a nuclear physicist, but my math was always fairly weak. My grandmother used to tell my mom that I argued so much that I should be a lawyer, but I hated the idea. Then sometime after college it started to occur to me that law would be a good synthesis of my interest in philosophy (specifically ethics) and social justice. I was also considering teaching, but eventually I decided that there were more options with a law degree than a teaching credential.

2) What's the funniest thing you've heard a client at Walden House say?

Probably one of the most recent exchanges:
client 1: "Why you doin' that? You ain't cool."
client 2: "I don't wanna be cool. Being cool got me into prison. I wanna be square."
I've kept a log here.

Since I first wrote this on Monday, I overheard this exchange:
counselor: Congratulations! What are you going to name your baby?
client: If its a girl I don't know but if it's a boy, Knowledge - like from the Bible.

3) If you could take a three-week vacation to anywhere in the world, where would you go, and why?

Tough question. Depends whether I'm alone or with Heather. With Heather, probably either Ireland because we've both loved our past trips there or India, for the food.

If alone, I would want to be airdropped to some random point on the globe (over land, excluding extreme deserts) with $200, my backpack, and appropriate clothes. Adventure!

For a more conventional trip I've thought that Iran might be interesting, so long as I'm not mistaken for a spy. I've heard the people are very friendly and a lot of the country is quite beautiful, and there aren't that many tourists.

4) What is/are your favorite book(s)?

I don't have any one book that is My Favorite Book. A few that have either made an important personal connection or have just been great reads are:

fiction: The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs - A wonderful little story of pre-teen loneliness, houses with secret passages, old people being snarky, necromancy, cookies and cider, and the end of the world. I'm quite sure this book had a lot to do with my fascination with, well, secret passages, the end of the world, old people being snarky and so on.

autobiographical semi-fiction: Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence - Much more than the adventuring depicted in Lawrence of Arabia. Personal meditations on isolation, action, nature, and culture. Admittedly some of the history is fudged (the Sykes-Picot agreement was no shock to Lawrence - what in the book is glossed over and in the movie treated with outrage was in real life complicity) but a fantastic read.

nonfiction: Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond - I know it's getting to be cliche and I know he doesn't say much that other experts haven't said, but he does such a comprehensive job of laying out how geography affects culture that I constantly use the principles he lays down when looking at cultures.

5) How long have you been a vegetarian, and for what reasons?

It'll be 21 years on January 6th. Ethical reasons, essentially: I don't think it's morally justified to kill an animal for a taste sensation. Society as a whole recognizes this in relation to fur, but meat is, for most people, no more necessary to survival. And the environmental impact is not so great, either.

What first got me thinking about it was a PBS show on the Indian religion of Jainism. They preach ahimsa, abstaining from all forms of violence including toward animals (interestingly, Jainism is yet another religion with no gods). Got me thinking - I don't really need to do this to live, even to live a happy life, so best to give it up. I do miss me some bacon, though.

client 1: "Why you doin' that? You ain't cool."
client 2: "I don't wanna be cool. Being cool got me into prison. I wanna be square."

In honor of our 8th anniversary, I would like to share with you some pictures of Heather with cats. No LJ cut for you!

Very friendly Clydesdale at the Pleasanton Scottish Games, though it did get horse snot on my lens and knocked me over in the process.

I got a text message today from the Belgians saying that San Francisco was indeed very nice. I thanked them for coming and wished them well on their drive south on the 101 and they texted back saying they hoped to see me again, perhaps in Belgium. I did not reply saying that I would stop by if ever I was invading France.

Anyway, hopefully they'll email when they get home and tell me what they did here.

I got back yesterday from three days backpacking alone in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. The funny thing about trips like this is that all the bits that are interesting to tell or photograph are only very small parts of my memory of the trip, which will always focus on seemingly endless rocks and boulders, exhaustion, and the din and tangle of crashing through manzanita.

( details and pictures )

me: "So you heard that Michael Jackson died, right?"
her: "Oh - I wasn't aware he was still alive."

I was bringing this up not to gossip but as an opening to tell her about our client-custodian at work who was cleaning our department today when his cell phone went off. He looked at the number, sighed, and answered it with, "Yes-I-know-Michael-Jackson-is-dead, what is it?"

The post-WWI years were certainly a fascinating time of upheaval in Eurasia. For example I knew that the US and UK sent expeditionary forces to Russia to fight the soviets but I wasn't aware that, unrelated to this effort, a convoluted series of events led to the Czech army controlling the Trans-Siberian railway for a few years:


From Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan.

Two movie related items:

1.) Tomorrow (Friday) night Heather will be out and I plan on ordering pizza and watching Frost/Nixon. Anyone interested in joining me?

2.) Moon comes out tomorrow. Must see.

A friend of H's is getting married on Halloween and having a costume wedding so H and I were talking about what to wear. The Futurama phrase Sweet Zombie Jesus ran through my head and it occurred to me that if there is Zombie Jesus there must be Zombie Hunter Pontius Pilate. Anyone know what kind of toga is appropriate for a Roman procurator? Or, for that matter, what kind of chainsaw?

While installing some RAM I got for my mom, I was cleaning out the insides of her PC (lots of cat hair). This was the top of her CPU heat sink, right under the fan. For some strange reason it ran much quieter after I cleared this off.

So I finished my finals for year two yesterday. One of the things I've most been looking forward to about summer is the freedom to read for pleasure again. And of course what's the first book on my list? Lawrence Tribe's The Invisible Constitution (started it when I got it for Christmas, put it down during the semester). It seems I just can't get enough con law. Anyway, today I came across this passage that says very nicely something I've been trying to put into words for some time, then expands on it in looking at the Constitution itself:

To employ “liberty of contract” rhetoric to prevent regulation of wages and working conditions in settings where lawmakers have plausibly found that severe inequalities of bargaining power exist would be akin to employing “sexual intimacy” rhetoric and the trope of “privacy” to prevent regulations of sex harassment of employees in the workplace or rape of wives by their husbands in abusive marital relationships.

. . .

Is there a difference . . . between rights the Constitution affirms in language that looks to end-states or to conditions to be avoided - such as a fusion of church and state, a fully disarmed populace, random searches and seizures, or cruel and unusual punishment - and rights the Constitution describes in language that signals a concern with the locus of choice as between individuals and the government, such as the "free exercise" of religion, or "freedom of speech, or of the press," or the enjoyment of "liberty"?