October 2003 Archives

Top Ten Topics on This Evening's O'Reilly Factor

10. Are liberals to blame for the California fires?
9. Are liberals doing enough to protect our children?
8. Are liberals doing enough to protect our children from the California fires?
7. Are the California fires doing enough to protect the liberals from our children?
6. Why do secularists hate America so much that they're not protecting liberals from California's fire children?
5. Secularists fire liberals for children who hate America Western Europe?
4. Mel Gibson (The Personal Story Segment Tonight)
3. Al Franken's lies about Bill O'Reilly protecting NPR from the liberal children
2. Viewer mail
1. Handjobs

Happy Halloween! Somewhat early. But if I were in charge Halloween would be every day. That's right, if I were in charge a lot of things would be extremely terrible.

The John of John and Kobe is the guy I mentioned here. I'm hoping that more and more high-profile sexual disasters will pop up every now and then so we can start ourselves a veritable Rotary Club of fingerbangings and backdoor deliveries.

In other news, I had my bachelor party over the weekend, and accordingly I'm not drinking again until the wedding. The wedding of my first grandchild.

Here's a new strip that covers something I mentioned a while ago, the collateral effects of our new robot governor. I wonder what Arnold's signature looks like. Will it be in crayon? Will he use superfluous umlauts? All the more reason to rocket myself toward graduation. Well, that and the money.

Interview season is thankfully winding to a close, and I have an offer, god damn it, so the pressure is off. Two more interviews left and it'll be a miracle if I'm sober for either of them. Especially considering that one firm doesn't even want me to wear a suit. Can we say Pantsless Interview Wednesday? I think we can, oh, I think we can.

I once met a bartender who told me that he hated bartending, but he'd much rather tend bar for the rest of his life than go out and find another job. They say that when cats chase mice it's not the having, it's the getting. Well, when it comes to employment it's definitely the having for me. I hate job interviews. I cannot begin to tell you how relieved I am that I don't have to face Spring OCI. Anyone who has met me just once or twice can attest to the fact that I'm not the warmest bun in the oven when it comes to making first impressions, and convincing dozens of attorneys that I'm the kind of person they'll enjoy spending twelve hours a day with in thirty minutes or less has proven to be quite the challenge. Exacerbating this innate personality flaw is my recently-developed tendency to have asthma attacks after three or four interviews. So as my lungs begin to close my affability decreases even more, and after I sneak an inhaler blast the adrenaline makes me jittery. In short, I'm a recruitment fucking train wreck.

And this train just derailed. I'm off to study.

Screening interviews: 21
Rejection letters: 6
Firms that have probably rejected me if I haven't heard from them by now: 3
Callbacks: 9
Office visits scheduled: 10
Offices visited: 6
Cities visited: 4
Lava cakes eaten: 2
Number of interviews featuring the phrase "worthless as tits on a bull": 1

Offers: 0

A few things.

First off, yes, CompUSA continues to broadcast their relentless incompetence. Or at least I continue to broadcast it for them. When I brought the laptop back after they broke it the guy at the repair desk lied and said he'd send it out the next day. Over a week later I called to check the status and learned that it had been sent out the previous day. Yesterday (almost two weeks after I dropped it off) we got a call that they had diagnosed the problem and needed to wait for the part. ETA: "How the fuck should I know? I'm just a CompUSA employee with an impenetrable cloud of ignorance following me around wherever I go."

This talk of liars and incompetence brings me to the second target of this week's ire. During orientation we filthy transfers were given voter registration forms. I specifically asked if the form would register me in time to vote for Larry Flint in the October 7th election, and was met with an affirmative response. Well, October 7th rolls around, nothing has come in the mail, and the pollworkers down at First Presbyterian have never heard of me. I filled out a provisional ballot that never had any hope of being counted and headed to campus, where I spoke with another transfer who had also been un-voted. I fired off an e-mail to the Dean of Students and asked her what was what, and this morning someone from the Boalt Hall Students Association e-mailed me with his deepest apologies about not ever bothering to send in the fucking voter registration forms, but assuring me that my in-state status would be unaffected. In-state status? I've lived in California all my life. How about my Constitutional fucking rights, you lazy idiot? What, were you too busy deciding how much to charge for those OCI lockers? That seems to be the only thing the BHSA has accomplished so far this year, apart from disenfranchising dozens of transfers and 1Ls.

But, on the lighter side, Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature is going to be on my law school diploma. So I've got that going for me.

Yes, it's true. Germans will compete over anything.

Dear Gus Van Sant,

Congratulations on your recent honors at the Cannes Film Festival. I'm sure American audiences are eagerly awaiting the domestic release of your masterpiece, Elephant. I had the good fortune of viewing the trailer for Elephant over the weekend when I saw Lost in Translation. Boy, that Bill Murray is a card, isn't he?

Anyway, at first I though the trailer may have been for that movie Thirteen, despite the trailer's overall lack of latently homosexual teenage girls. Then I saw the shot of the two boys dressed in camoflauge entering the school carrying big scary looking duffel bags, and I knew that something more was afoot. When the pretty blond boy asked the camoflauge guys what was going on and one of them said, "Leave and don't come back," I became very excited indeed. Not only had someone finally mustered the courage to make a film about Columbine, but they were even including the minute details of the actual event. As we all remember from the media saturation following the shootings, one student related his chilling account of being warned of the impending chaos immediately beforehand. And there it was, playing out right in front of me, on a movie screen. Way to go, Gus! I thought.

Excited about the prospect of a Columbine dramatization, I rushed home to investigate the film further on the Internet Movie Database. And you know what I found? Oregon. Orefuckingon. A movie about a "Columbine-like event" at a high school in Oregon.

At first I was disappointed, but now I realize what you're up to, and I applaud you for it. You obviously read the Time magazine article discussing the videotape that Dylan and Eric made before the shooting, wherein they mused about big directors fighting each other over the film rights. Not wanting to vindicate them, you stole their story and changed their names. Brilliant! That'll show 'em. And which is more, you're respecting the victims by not exploiting them in film form. Why, not only have you, as I said, changed the names of the students who were killed, injured, or otherwise deeply traumatized by having their high school taken over by two gun-toting killers, but you further removed them from their own experiences by moving the action several hundred miles away, into a whole nother state! I'm sure the residents of Columbine appreciate your sensitivity, Gus. I know I do.

Keep up the good work, Gus. I'll be the first in line when Elephant hits theaters here in the states. And if anyone says, "Oh yeah, that's that movie about Columbine," I'll be sure and say, "What kind of insensitive prick would make a movie about Columbine? Elephant is a wholly original work about a fictional event in Oregon. Written and directed by Gus Van Sant. You know him, he did the Psycho remake."

Regards,
Robert H. Bork

P.S. If you run into the director of Sylvia at any of your indy film parties, you may want to let her know that, despite what her trailers may say, Sylvia Plath was not the most powerful voice of the 20th Century. I doubt she'd even make the top ten.