In my continuing efforts to direct readers to interesting appearances in the news by Virginia Law professors, I'd be remiss if I failed to point out this delightful little clip, in which Keith Olbermann names Prof. Turner the second-worst person in the world (of the day, of course). Keep watching until the end, when Olbermann calls him "a temp" for a State Department job he held in the mid-80s.
A response to Student Council SBA President Adam Wolk:
Some governments are useful, such as the American government, which collects taxes and keeps the Canadians from invading. In the law school arena, the administration is kind of like a government, in that it collects tuition and keeps Darden students from eating in our cafeteria (by cleverly engineering it so that our cafeteria isn't as good as theirs). The best part is that you can anonymously harass the administration, by asking them to make ridiculous announcements like "someone left their keys in the door of their car," "someone left their trunk open and I wrote down the license plate but didn't bother to close it for them," and "someone rear-ended me in the parking lot and drove away; I'm sure it was just a misunderstanding and not the unfortunate result of spending this month's insurance money on Feb Club costumes instead."
But what I don't get are the governments run by students. From what I understand, they talk about the law school and anything "important" that occurs to them. From the news I have seen, what they do isn't all that interesting. Unless you ran for office in a desperate attempt to pad your resume, and even if you did, you just don't want to hear about what color tablecloths we should have at Barrister's. Of course, if you're reading this, you're probably Adam Wolk doing your daily self-Google the type of person who cares about the SBA, so please don't take offense to this. I don't wish to judge your choice of governing bodies, since I certainly wouldn't want you judging mine. I guess I just don't get it.
Law school gossip is really more TJ's thing, but I wanted to alert everyone that Virginia Law's own Professor (and erstwhile write-in candidate) John Harrison was mentioned by Ann Coulter as one of her "loads and loads of friends who are right-wingers and Deadheads" in this interview she did last June with Jambands.com (scroll down to near the end).
Relevant jokes are left as an exercise for the reader.
The story of Aleksey Vayner (né Garber) reminds me of my roommate from freshman year of college. I will call him "Mike," because (a) it's a common name and (b) his name is Mike.
Mike was a compulsive liar. Over the course of my first semester with him, I wrote down most of the ridiculous things he told me or my friends. The list was quite long, so I'll reproduce only the highlights here.
Mike is very athletic. He benches 310, and is a 5th degree black belt. When he was 15, he placed second in a national competition. (The sort of competition that would get him mentioned somewhere on the Internet, one would imagine.) Because his body is a lethal weapon, he is registered with the state and has an indicator to that effect on his license. (No he doesn't.) He also used to swim. When he was 14, he swam the 50-meter freestyle in 22 seconds. (This is especially impressive, given the world record.) He achieved these accomplishments in spite of the anorexia caused by his verbally abusive swim coach, wherein his body fat fell to 2%. Mike joined his fraternity's intramural volleyball team after they found out that he was All-State volleyball in high school. (Mike's high school shows no record of having a boy's volleyball team.)I just looked him up, and he is apparently now employed at a Big
During breaks, Mike worked as an assistant pro at a golf course, allowing him to meet a number of people. One is in the mafia, and offered to whack anybody Mike needs whacked. Mike once had to write a 500 page paper. He waited until the last minute, of course, and wrote the last 200 of them in around 6 hours. He also speaks Japanese and German fluently. He (or his 6'10" uncle, depending on which time he told me) drives a red Ferrari F50.
Obviously, such a life makes one irresistible to the ladies. Mike lost his virginity at age 13. At 18, he had never . . . helped himself because whenever he "had a need," he always had a willing partner. In addition to having had sex in several locations (including a movie theater and two libraries), Mike also owns a pair of underwear in which he has never failed to get laid.
Student: But what if...[proceeds into long and quite unlikely hypothetical involving banana peels, a set of stairs and some poor fellow who just won't look where he's going.] It's not a very good analogy, but--
Professor: No. It's not.
This article about a geologist's troubles with airport security has gotten a bit of buzz lately and I finally got around to reading the whole thing today, so I was quite amused to discover that the geologist in question is none other than one Robert M. Thorson, Ph.D. I had the opportunity to listen to Professor Thorson speak a few years ago about why a liberal arts education is important. By this I mean ol' Thor wasted a half hour of the audience's time telling us what it's like to write a weekly column and how clever some of his titles have been. Titles like "Canst Thou Hear Me Now?" and "Kerry Ignored the Frog Vote."
I'm actually surprised Thor's story didn't have him saying something like "Don't you know who I am? My column appears every Thursday on page A15 of the newspaper with the 54th-highest circulation in the country! Sometimes I get letters about it! I'm clever, damn it!"
I'm not going to get into how easy it would have been to go back and check the bag. Bradley International Airport is one of the smallest I've ever been to, and the baggage check is a mineral specimen's throw away from the security checkpoint.
I once had my own encounter with a carry-on bag, a stone, and excitable airport security officers, although with a few differences of circumstance. First, I was flying out of Milan, Italy. Second, the stone in question was actually a piece of Pompeii that I should not have been allowed to take out of the country. Third, the security officer apparently thought the x-ray image of the stone looked a lot like the x-ray image of a luger pistol. Fourth, I was eight years old. Fifth, and perhaps most important, I kept my eight-year-old American mouth firmly shut and they let me keep the damn rock.
