I decided to become an Internet pioneer and do a comic strip making fun of Harry Potter. It's posted over to the other place. One of these days I'll start making separate pages for each strip again, but not any time soon. Because I'm lazy, you see.
November 2005 Archives
Steve just sent me this story, which is severely sad.*
The timeline doesn't really make sense, though. The kiss happened over the weekend, she was given an adrenaline shot "almost immediately," and she died on Wednesday? It looks like something went wrong with the medical treatment. In other words, this isn't like the second opening sequence in X-Men. Acute allergic reactions, I've always been told, are easily treatable if addressed in time.
*I've been checking CNN.com myself throughout the morning, but didn't catch this on my own. The fact that the lead story is "PEAPLE ARE SHOPPING FOR GIFTS ON TEH INTERNRTON!!!!111111" has forced me to leave the page in disgust before seeing any below-the-fold stories.
We went and saw this on Saturday. I hate going to the movies. There are spoilers in this, and they will not be individually tagged. I don't want to hear about it.
In general: A thoroughly enjoyable movie. The story seemed to hold together given what was cut from the book, but as with H2G2, I couldn't tell if it would still have made as much sense if I wasn't able to fill in the blanks myself. But I support the filmmakers' decision to lop off most of the beginning of the book, since the Harry Potter books cough and splutter at start-up more than old Epson bubblejet printers. The elf rights storyline has also been painlessly removed.
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry: This boy is getting f-i-n-e FOYNE.
Rupert Grint as Ron: A very convincing, if annoying, sulky Ron. But the hair was terrible and he looks like he has mono.
Emma Watson as Hermione: The girl does all her acting with her eyebrows. There's a particularly grating part of the movie where she's yelling at Ron for not asking her to the dance in this incredibly forced choked-up voice, and as soon as she storms off we cut immediately to a scene in which she's using the exact same voice to yell at Harry about not having figured out the golden egg. I think Emma spends at least half the movie with one eyebrow raised and her jaw two inches off-center.
Robert Pattinson as Cedric: The guy looks a lot like Zack. I was sad when he died.
Stanislav Ianevski as Viktor Krum: Not ugly enough.
Clémence Poésy as Fleur: Not hot enough. Nowhere near bewitchingly beautiful, which I guess isn't such a big deal in the movie since they cut out everything about the magic hot women. I didn't remember her being so much of a wimp in the book.
Katie Leung as Cho Chang: I haven't been exposed to enough Multikulti to be comfortable with an Asian girl speaking with a Scottish accent, but hopefully that will come with time.
Ralph Feinnes as Voldemort: Solid gold. I'm glad they gave him human eyes instead of big red snake eyes. He clearly needs to breathe through his mouth since his mask covers his nose, but other than that he played the role perfectly. Ralph Feinnes is awesome. And despite the fact that he's bald and reptilian, he's still kind of hot.
I'd see it again, on DVD, as far away from a movie theater as I can get, with their 2:15 "evening" shows and extortionary ATMs. Please see this blog post for a discussion of everything that's wrong with the movies that's astute and vicious in a way that only Kenny can be.
Crooks and Liars brings us the story of revisionist editing in the re-release of the children's book Goodnight Moon. The illustrator photo has been altered to remove a cigarette, and apparently one of the actual illustrations is now missing an ashtray. I never heard of Goodnight Moon until I got married, because my parents didn't love me, but it's one of Meli's favorite children's books. Me, I just hate crap like this. It's like when they replaced the rifles with walkie-talkies in the re-release of E.T., or when Cartoon Network cuts out the racial jokes from Tom & Jerry.
Last night I was feeling like maybe I had burned through all my anxiety earlier in the week, but now I see that I was rong[sic].
*Achtung: Audio file.
Today feels like a milkshake day.
Here's a neat picture I found on the world wide net:
This week is a crappy week.
I posted two more strips. One is observational humor at its unrefinest, the other is based on a true story. Well, they're both based on true stories, but I just want to make it clear that, earlier this week, a paralegal that I had never met before introduced herself into my world by pelting me with jellybeans from outside my office. The following day she accosted me in the parking lot by knocking on my window just as I had parked and pretending to be a CHP officer. When I told her that she needed mirror shades instead of the peach-tinted aviator shades she was wearing, she pulled out a butter knife and tried to stab me in the throat. Then we had a laugh and shared an ice cream soda.
And here I thought I had picked the less wacky firm.
Meli and I had our housewarming party last night, photos of which are here. Eloise has ignored my repeated pleas to turn off the "intermediate size" function. Gene, what the hell is up with that?
Many thanks to all who showed up, and played with the cats, and brought gift-booze, and didn't make a mess. Sorry the place was so hard to find. Our next place will have a searchlight on the roof.
This post should help me gauge how many previously unknown law-types kept reading this blog after the Bar Exam.
Bar Exam results come out in one week. One week! Who's excited? One week and five and a half hours, actually, and only to the people who took the test. The leity will have to wait until Sunday to view the complete list.
Here are some things to think about:
(1) Over eight thousand people took the exam in July. You know what happens when eight thousand people try to log on to a single website at the same time? A website run by the Government? All I'm saying is, don't expect to have your results at 6:01.
(2) From what I've heard about previous years, the low-down is that you go to the website, put in your registration number and your applicant number, and then make with the clickety click. If you passed, it tells you so. But see the thing is, if you didn't pass, it doesn't say "You didn't pass," it says "This number does not appear on the pass list" or something equivalent. This means that if you make a mistake entering your number, you get the "fail" notice, even though you may not have failed. Isn't that great?
I'm going to try not to let this whole thing bother me for the next week, but who the hell am I kidding. I can't hide from my own neurosis. All the thinking about all the studying I did, and how nothing in the exam seemed too difficult, and the encouraging pass rate from my law school, won't change the fact that I'm going to want to jump out of my skin while the results page is loading. Why did I sign up for this again?
There's a new strip, sort of. I was going to do something about the presentation skills workshop at first-year orientation but I couldn't think of a satisfactory punchline so I drew a picture of me holding a roast beef sandwich.
I don't have the funny.
This is a message for the respective officials or institutions in all of the little cities on the Peninsula who are responsible for assigning numbers to street addresses, particularly on El Camino Real.
There are two very basic, and very simple guiding principles in the area of street addresses that are observed almost everywhere except the peninsula. To wit:
(1) When heading in a given direction, such as North, South, East, or West, the street numbers should only go in one direction. Put another way, there should not be seven "1630 El Camino Real"s separated by an average distance of two miles.
(2) All the odd numbers should be on one side of the street; all the even numbers should be on the other side of the street, for the entire street, regardless of what tiny city you're in.
You are all a bunch of idiots.
In its ongoing campaign of cluttering itself up with new and useless features, Friendster recently added a "Who's Viewed Me" page, allowing its users to see which other Friendster users have been viewing their profiles. This is something that would appeal to only the most self-loathing megalomaniacs among us. Needless to say, I can't stop checking it.
But Friendster is having some trouble with this. You see, the introduction of the feature came along with a new "View Profiles Anonymously" option, allowing user to surreptitiously view other people's profiles without the viewees ever knowing. This is in place so people can stalk their ex-lovers cloaked in the familiar anonymity of the Internet. However, since there really isn't anything to gain by intentionally allowing others to know that you're looking at them, I'm sure a lot of people, including me, turned on the anonymity function, just because it seemed like the ninja thing to do.
But Friendster got wise to that one, my friends. Now, if you have anonymity turned on, Who's Viewed Me is disabled. No one-way mirrors. If you want to see who's looking at you, you've got to let others see you looking at them. I'm sure this has paralyzed the minds of many a Friendster user, pitting voyeurism against anonymity, creating a battle between the Internet's two greatest contributions to human interaction. This has all the makings of a bona fide Internet disaster.
But at least they took the goddamn birthday cupcakes off the front page.
This morning, I checked my e-mail to find that Tyler had sent me a picture of my brother Ian peeing in a sink. Tyler and Ian have never met. Over the course of the morning I learned that Tyler was hanging out with his friend from San Diego, and showed the San Diego friend a picture of Ian making the "Tyler face" that I had sent to Tyler. Upon seeing this, San Diego Friend told Tyler that he recognized Ian as someone he met at some kind of Big Lebowski Festival, and that he had a picture of him peeing in a sink.
That was pretty weird, but what's weirder is that this sort of thing happens to me more often than it should. It's been happening so much recently that I'm starting to think I may be the hub of some sort of cosmic sandwich.
Last week, for example, when I was in San Diego with The Firm, a woman from the San Francisco office told me that she had met someone who knew me, though she couldn't remember any details beyond that and the fact that the person, whoever he was, asked her if I came off all "low-key" and didn't tell her about my comedy writing. I only met this woman during the Yosemite trip last summer, so I don't know her very well. Apparently my unrelenting arrogance doesn't present itself until after I'm well-acquainted with a person.
Also, for some time now my best friend since I was a fetus, John (of the Octopus Hat Johns), has been working with a guy I went to high school with. John and I have never lived in the same city or gone to the same school. This wasn't such a big deal, since I didn't know the guy from high school very well -- I knew him, but we never made out or anything. But then a few weeks ago John ended up hanging out with another person I went to high school with, who I was actually friends with.
But the most ridiculous conflation of people-I-sort-of-know arose during the clerkship interview process. This is a complicated story, so if you're already bored go ahead and stop reading. It starts with my federal courts professor, a judge on the Ninth Circuit who wrote one of my recommendation letters. On one of my interviews, one of the clerks I met was the daughter of this Professor-Judge. She was very nice. The following week I had another interview with a whole nother judge, a judge who had the curious practice of inviting two candidates in at a time and meeting with one while the other met with his clerks, and vice versa. The other candidate in this judge's chambers at the time was a woman named Jaynie, who I met for about ten seconds as we traded places. She seemed nice. A day or so later I got my offer from the judge that I'll be clerking for (bringing the total number of judges in this story up to three -- the Professor-Judge, the judge whose clerk is the daughter of the Professor-Judge, the judge in whose chambers I met Jaynie, and the judge I'm going to clerk for). I accepted, and there was much rejoicing.
About a week later I had lunch with the Professor-Judge, who told me that my co-clerk next year will be.... Jaynie! And he knows this because Jaynie is friends with his daughter, who I also met, and I told him that I had already met Jaynie, and what a small world after all. I googled Jaynie but didn't have the nerve to e-mail her; she googled me and e-mailed me, and she'll probably read this. Hi Jaynie.
There have also been other unjustified coincidences involving people to whom I'm moderately connected. At the Ashby BART station one afternoon I ran into a woman I had gone to high school with in Southern California. On my block in Santa Monica -- on my block, not on the Promenade, not even on Wilshire or Santa Monica Boulevard, but on my seldom-traveled stretch of suburban humpastump -- I ran into a guy from my freshman dorm at Berkeley. Another woman I went to high school with appeared at the student health clinic in Berkeley a few months ago while I was picking up a prescription. Oh, and I just remembered the fact that the woman at the center of the UCLALR controversy three years ago sat in front of me for eight hours during first-year orientation at The Firm last week.
So that's really it. A survey of curious coincidences. I don't really know what else to say, except that I'm pretty sure I made up the word "humpastump" just then. But Google seems to disagree.
Step two in my crusade to become Cement Horizon's definitive repository of unexplainable animated gifs of women on Japanese television.
Also, what in the hell?
Meli: No, Pepe! That's my cheese!
Matt: Pepe doesn't understand ownership. He only understands possession.
