August 2002 Archives

I realize as I write this that it's Friday in some parts of the country, but "Bonus Cartoon Friday" just doesn't have the same kick to it. I've tossed up a strip a propos of exactly nothing. It's something I drew about a year ago that never found a home. But I think it's a solid joke, so I decided to give it one. I figure the time to take such indulgences is now. I Fought the Law proper will return on Monday night when I get back from glorious San Francisco.

As I just alluded to, I'll be driving up the great state of California sometime this weekend. I'll decline to state the actual day that I'm leaving lest some rogue thief read this and decide to break into my apartment in my absence. Also, I'm taking all my valuables with me. The point is that, this being Labour Day Weekend and all, I'm in for a hoary sea hag full of traffic regardless of when I decide to make my escape. Accordingly I set out today to buy for myself a book-on-tape. Since length is the key, I figured my options were Lord of the Rings, The Bible, and The More Redundant and Non-Substantial Works of Ayn Rand. Arriving at my friendly neighborhood Waldenbooks I grabbed nine hours of The Iliad and was on my way.

Hey! You pipe. What the hell? There's, like, hardly any law school humor in this blog! Well...

We just learned the term res judicata in my civil procedure class, which is Latin for "adjudicated thing" or something along those lines. It refers to claims or issues that have already been litigated and can't be litigated again. It's like double jeopardy for car accidents. Anyway, for some reason after I read it but before I actually heard it pronounced by my professor I had it in my head as res judaica, which as far as I know means "Jewish thing." That's not very funny, but it's what I've got so far.

Next week are SBA elections. I'll have funny things to say about them. Jest you wait.

If law school doesn't work out for me I want to open a vegetarian restaurant. The hottest (pardon the pun) item on the menu will be "The Steaming Pile," which would be a big plate of steamed vegetables. It would be good for eatin' at.

I'm not sure if this is a byproduct of my being a social butterfly (well, more of a moth) and coming into contact with a great many people, but for some reason I've been noticing a lot of people around campus who look a lot like people I already know. One person in particular looks like what would happen if two of my ex-girlfriends had a child together. Very disturbing. Notice I've omitted the hybrid's gender.

This phenomenon isn't limited to people I meet in person. The actor who plays the main character in Scrubs, which is basically ER with uglier women and a laugh track, looks like a similar concoction involving my friend Miles and my friend Marc. I'm really not sure what to make of all this. I just hope I don't end up projecting my feelings toward people I know onto people who look like them. That being said, if I ever go up to you and punch you in the face for no apparent reason it's probably because you resemble someone from my laundry list of enemies.

Here's a joke I made up last night: What do you call the ghost of a potato? A spectater. You heard it here first.

Apparently here at UCLA Law they stick their used chewing gum to the top of the table instead of the bottom. Unfortunately I only noticed the gum at the library table I've chosen after I set up my laptop, and I'll be damned if I'm going to unhook the power cable, ethernet cable, and security cable and rig them all up again somewheres else just to avoid someone else's saliva-covered rubber. I 'spect it'll just inspire me to finish my briefs that much more quickly.

We're in the exposition phase here at I Fought the Law, so these first few strips will serve to establish characters. Or at least those worth remembering. Last week we saw Kam in all his inanity and Ellen in all her disdain. This week, meet Ted. Check in next week for some smooth Spanish flava.

I had planned to give a shout-out to my Squelch roots in the form of a "Top Ten Things Heard at UCLA Law Orientation," but I could only think of two: "I really wanted to go to Boalt" and "Hi, I'm [forgettable single-syllable name]." The names Mike, Dave, Scott, Todd, Jeff, John, Tom, Matt, and Mark are distributed amongst my male classmates in an order which I can't be expected to remember after only one week (nor do I expect anyone to remember my name at this point). But as devoted frienships, spiteful rivalries and lukewarm acquiantanceships develop over the next few months I'll probably have a better time with things.

Disjointed thought number four: I'm realizing that as the archive grows it will become extremely difficult to keep it current without learning some code beyond what I learned in HTML for Untalented Megalomaniacs. So either I earmark all day Sunday to keep the archive current or I start learning Java on the bus. Or Javascript. Okay, learning which code I should learn will be the first step, then I'll actually learn the code. Put suggestions here.

I'll wrap this up with a story about a cat. The meanest cat in the history of the Universe lives in the unit behind me. The weekend I moved in I noticed this grey and white cat hanging around in the grass behind my building, apparently the charge of one of my rearward neighbors, but I resisted my usual inclination to go up and try to pet it. Enter my girlfriend, who likes cats even more than I do, and insists that the two of us head back and introduce ourselves. Fine. So she stoops down and holds her hand out, palm-side-up, like you're supposed to, and the cat responds with the most sinister, serpentine hiss that ever escaped the mouth of a feline. What made it so disturbing was the fact that apart from its face the cat was completely unperturbed by our presence. It remained curled up, its ears remained forward, and the fur was thoroughly off-end. Its hissing mouth and quivering tongue were all the acknowledgment it felt the need to afford us.

Taking the hint, we went about our business. The following week I was heading back with a load of laundry, and Evil Cat was drinking from a puddle. When it saw me, it walked through the puddle, lacking the concern for getting its paws wet that any mortal cat would have expressed. That's when I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was in the presence of Evil.

Cut to today. I've been living in the shadow of Evil Cat for three weeks now, and it's been driving me crazy. How does a cat lose all faith in goodness and purity like that? What must its parents have been like? Then, it hits me. Even mean cats run away from people, so why doesn't this one? The answer? It's OLD! Hissing is its ONLY extant means of protection! Its geriatric feline limbs won't allow it to run away from danger, so it must forestall any threat by establishing who's boss right from the start! This also explains why its fur is rumpled, since it's probably no longer limber enough even to groom itself. Poor thing.

After realizing this, I decided to give Evil Cat another chance. I would approach it again, and this time it would know that I understood its problem. We would be friends. So I approached the Evil One, genuflected appropriately, and held my hand out. It looked at me with suspicion, but no hiss. So far so good. I inched my hand a little closer. Evil Cat frowned and pulled its head back ever so slightly, but still no hiss. I could almost feel its wheezing breath at this point. Gathering all my courage I nudged my proffered fingers just a little further, and then the bastard scratched me. Then it hissed.

Bite me twice, folks. Bite me twice.

If a language is a dialect with an army, an online comic strip is a blog with a private security firm. In addition to nearly bankrupting the VHS porn industry, the Internet has brought forth a shining new era of vanity publishing. No longer must ambitious yet talentless writers and artists pay thousands of dollars out of pocket for a giant box of unsellable books to rot away in their joyless garages and attics. The glorious Internet allows anyone with a computer - well, access to a computer at least - the wherewithal to publish their efforts for all the world to see. The precious delusions of grandeur created by this trend of online publishing - the ability to become convinced that millions of people are accessing our articles when in reality the only eyes that ever see these things belong to hapless wanderers who click out of curiosity after searching Google for the word "Balls" - are crucial to those of us who fancy ourselves important enough to be heard. That being said, welcome to my nightmare.

So what's this all about? I Fought the Law is a comic strip, an online comic strip, based on the lives of a handful of fictional law students. You'll notice as we get started that the first few strips have very little to do with law school. This is because a number of them were created in the summer before my first year as a law student, when I didn't know anything about law school. But they should be funny nonetheless.

You'll also notice as we get started that I've gone ahead and put up an Archive page despite there being only one actually published strip to work with. This is just a way for me to avoid having to build one in the future, and in the meantime I've posted a handful of draft strips that didn't make the final cut. Feel free to peruse them at your leisure to see what kind of humor not to expect in future postings.

As for the Log page, which you're currently reading, it will most likely be updated more often that the strip itself, which will come along once a week (every Monday). Hence the blog with a security firm comment before. I'll try to stay true to the spirit of the strip and post comments that are at least tangentially law- or law-school related, such as commentaries on current events in the court systems, but don't be surprised if you bring this page up one day and find a lengthy diatribe about the silverfish in my apartment.

Back to the Archive. I'd like to offer a few words about why each Out-take strip was taken out. Out-take 01 is, in fact, a true story that was funny when it happened but doesn't translate well to panels. Out-take 02 is a shameful piece of cartooning, an obvious gag devoid of content, and poorly drawn even by my standards. It was the second I Fought the Law strip I drew, and at that point I was so excited about my new diversion that I was willing to forsake quality. My apologies. Out-take 03 is actually one that I like, but test audience reactions were less than encouraging. Out-take 04 is beyond comment.

I think that's all I have to say for now. Here's hoping that law school doesn't consume my life to the point where I can't entertain the handful of friends who'll actually be reading this thing.

This is a blog about my life in the San Francisco Bay Area. Entries consist principally of boring stories about myself and pictures of my cats. I blog about non-confidential legal issues of national interest or of the man-sues-dog variety.

I do not blog about cases I am working on, have worked on, or may work on in the future. I don't blog about my job, co-workers, clients, or other people I encounter through my job. I also don't use my real name, or any real names if I can help it.

That being said, please enjoy.