Don't get too excited. I'm just piling on the gimmicks early on to get people interested and hooked, like Y107's short-lived no-DJ policy and Jet Blue's soon to be short-lived $29 plane tickets. Next week we'll return to glorious, blinding two-tone.
So yes. Bar Review. I noticed early on that no one, at any point, is ever amused or impressed by the name. Not even at orientation. In fact, hardly anyone even bothers to spell out the joke. Anyone who utters anything along the lines of, "Oh, yeah, 'cause we take the bar exam, but bar review in this sense means an actual bar. That's pretty good." is almost certainly doomed to drop out of law school before week four. And good riddance.
The key thing about bar review, see, is that it introduces would-be lawyers to the importance of alcohol very early on in their training. As John Grisham notes in his runaway best-seller The Firm, lawyers and alcohol are like vampires and blood. Sure, there are a few holdouts who cling to their temperance and wring their hands fretfully at orientation about the evils of alcoholism even as their fellow panelists joke and laugh about how much fun bar review is, but it quickly becomes apparent that such temperance, like everything in the legal profession, is entirely image-oriented. The insufferable pricks in college who take every opportunity to mention that they don't own a television become insufferable pricks in law school who take every opportunity to mention that they don't drink.
As for the actual weekly bar outings, I'll refrain from going into any great detail about any funny stories I may have about my own bar review expriences (hint: there aren't any), but I will say a few words about the specific topic of this week's strip, insofar as it deals with one of the more curious elements of recent bar review venues: darkness. Deep, impenetrable darkness. The kind of bars you walk into and feel like someone's going to club you in the back of the head as soon as you get in the door. There's only one theory I've come across which might explain the "dark bar" phenomenon: the darkness accelerates the beer goggling process by adding another layer between ugliness and visual perception. This theory is total crap. Bars like to sell beer, and they sell more beer when people need it to score with people. If you make it easier to score without benefit of beer, you sell less beer, and make less money. It's unlikely that bar owners are facilitating casual sex among their patrons out of sheer benevolence. So it seems the mystery of dark bars will remain as opaque as the bars themselves.
As far Claudio's final line, more information about what he's talking about is available here. This is one of those rare things that's creepy but also true.
