"It seems late in the day to notice to Erwin Chemerinsky is a prominent liberal," said John Jeffries, University of Virginia Law School dean. "That's been true for as long as I've known him. It's rather like discovering that Wilt Chamberlain was tall. How could you not know?"
I did another interview with my fly open today.
Sarah seems to think I could be a source of "intelligent commentary" on a topic like this news story, which is about a lawyer who jumped from an office on the 69th floor of the Empire State Building and died upon hitting a 30th floor platform, while his newly-severed leg fell to the street below.
I'm flattered, but a little confused, as I tend to be more a source of inappropriate jokes and bad puns.
That said, I couldn't pick just one, so choose your favorite!
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.
"We are certainly going to put public safety ahead of these civil liberties concerns."
There are too many ridiculous things wrong with this proposal and I don't have time to list them, so I link without much comment.
I will say, however, kudos to Laura Ahearn of Parents for Megan's Law for pointing out the obvious technical flaw in the program, then immediately making a nonsensical alternative suggestion.
Virginia is for Lovers. Heterosexuals in Religiously-Sanctioned Long Term Monogamous Relationships.
I'm sure it will be just as popular with the tourism board.
Now be honest: Which one of you cast a write-in vote for Professor Harrison?
It's the first Tuesday after the first Monday of the eleventh month of an even-numbered year that's not evenly divisible by four. That's right, it's the midterms. So if you haven't checked a box, filled in a circle, flipped a lever, or touched a screen, get out there and do so before it's too late.
Because America without democracy is like law school without wireless internet access: scary and out of your control.
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.
My deadly viral mumps.
What is going on with this school? Two weeks ago, it was meningitis, now this. Did I move to the South in America, or did I move to South America? Keep an eye on the news in October, because I'm starting a pool on which highly infectious third-world disease crops up here next. My money's on Ebola.
Winner gets a free trip to Atlanta, courtesy of the federal government.
China's official news agency seems to be a bit confused between Neil Armstrong's "one giant leap for mankind" and Mao Zedong's "Great Leap Forward."
I guess it's an easy mistake, although as far as I know Armstrong wasn't responsible for the famine deaths of 20 to 40 million people.
Attention hack reporters: We know Popeye eats spinach. Mentioning Popeye in your articles about spinach tainted with E. coli is not clever. You are not clever. Stop it.
Rock, Paper, Scissors is archaic. I'm settling my next dispute with a best-of-three match of Crocodile, Steve Irwin, Stingray. The hand motions are easy, it makes more sense than "paper beats rock," and best of all, it's topical.
Remember, kids, crocodile beats stingray!
Sign you're in a pretty safe town: when the manager of the four-screen theater you're watching Snakes on a Plane in calls the police to handle rowdy patrons, they send five or more officers.
That's correct, at the 7:30PM showing this evening at the Regal Seminole, the manager stopped the movie right as Kenan "Good Burger" Thompson took the stick so he could yell at the audience for helping to make a mockery of the movie even Samuel L. Jackson isn't taking seriously. I guess he was worried about a riot, because he brought five cops with him to ask a few people to leave.
So we sat and watched ads for about 10 minutes as the manager and the one guy who felt like speaking up bickered back and forth, then stared each other down until the guy and all his friends got up and left.
At that point the manager reminded the rest of audience that "All you college kids need to remember there are other people in here and they want to see the movie too." Then he left, feeling quite proud of himself and apparently pretending that the six people who were removed had been responsible for a full theater's worth of clapping, cheering, and yelling.
The rest of the movie finished without incident, although there was a marked change in the atmosphere after that. Until, of course, the final scene. No amount of police presence could take away the power of that scene. The Tank Man would have remained in place to witness that scene in all its glory.
