You Take Your Car

I'm having a midlife crisis. Except it's more of a "I've spent the better part of 5 years in SoCal & I haven't done anything cool" crisis. So, I've taken up basketball & surfing. With the basketball, it's more like, I learned how to throw the ball at the hoop correctly & I practice that a lot, but I'm not very good at executing it. And for the surfing, ok, I only did it once, but it was the most fun I've ever had in my life. I felt like Gidget. I said words like dude and rad. I caught waves and stood up on my board each time, even though I only lasted about 3-4 seconds each time. I sang that Weezer song as I carried my board to the beach. I swam with dolphins. No one who hasn't tried it knows the rush of getting up on the board, knowing that the only way you're going to come back down again is when you get your ass knocked down by mighty Mother Nature face first into jagged rocks. Knowing this to be the case, you do it anyway. Why? Because it's there, I guess. Nuts to law school.* I want to be a beach bum.

*Ok, not really.

Happy birthday, Marian, wherever you are!

The Legacy

For those of you who didn't attend Chez Martin, there was a "tribute" skit to John Marie that would have brought a tear to your eye. A couple, all dressed up, go to dinner at a nice restaurant and as they look over their menu, eat, drink wine, etc., a curious thing happens. Over. And over. And over. A light bulb & shade is suspended from a beam (this is in the commons) and hanging down is a thin rope. The light is on. On either side of the room is a set of three young men, dressed in collared white shirts & bow ties, on their knees, facing each other. One set crawls on hands & knees to the light, one pulls the rope to turn off the light. As they turn around to crawl back, the other three crawl towards the light and pull the string to turn it back on. As they turn around to crawl back, the other team moves in. This goes on for about ten minutes. At the end, the couple leaves the restaurant (of course oblivious the whole time to the lamp shenanigans) Daniel Lendman, the waiter, reads, in Italian, from Plutarch and Dante. The end.
It was lovely.

update: I'm all (?) better! Yay! i just hope I can get my defense scheduled soon, cuz I don't want to drag this out!I wish I had something more interesting to talk about than my teeth. Tell Maxabillion happy birthday!

Pericoronitis

I might have to postpone my thesis defense like a sissy little girl if my pericoronitis doesn't ease up. That's fancy for impacted wisdom tooth, which is fancy for tiny creatures camping out under my gum and making me cry.

This drove me batty and I hope it will do the same for you:
It is impossible to have 5 continuous (ie, each area is continuous with itself) areas all touching each other (in one plane). Use any combinations of curves & staight lines. Can't be done. I assume this holds for more than 5 also. This was discovered by people who were trying to pick colors for countries on a map.

SP Confidential Pt. 2 coming soom.......

24

Jack Bauer: Do you see that thing out there that looks like hedge trimmers?
Waitress Hostage: You mean the bolt cutter?
Jack Bauer: Yes, the bolt cutter.

I got an email encouraging the use of www.prolifesearch.com , a pro-life search engine (it's powered by google- use it; the more hits they get, the more they can donate to pro-life causes, plus it works jkust like any other engine) and just for kicks I entered my blog name. Then I found out that there's a FANTASY BLOG STOCK MARKET and they've got all these stats & graphs about my blog & I have no idea WHAT THE HELL this means. Check it out for yourselves! If your blog names are too mundane, maybe it won't come up, but if ou type in somethinginmyeye this weird stock market is one of the first links. And it's got a list of other TACer blogs too if you scroll down, with their market value or whatvever. crazy.

I got my full ride to Ave Maria! No stipend though, apparently....

If anyone has any suggestions of books to read (or places in the Summa) that concentrate on man's love for God, not as a practical meditational thing, but really delving into the meaning of it, please let me know. Thanks (Thesis- panic-time!)

Questions I asked myself while driving past the post office today:
If you mail something to your local post office, do they just open it when it gets there? Do they cancel the stamp?
If you pay by weight, what happens when you ship a big box of helium? Do they pay you?

Applications are all in. Now what? Oh, right: the 87 other top priorities I've been neglecting whilst I worried about law school.

Chappa-licious!

"The GOP team working with the White House to win confirmation of conservative Samuel Alito is putting out a warning to Alito's Democratic critics: Question his ethics and character at your own peril. In their sights: Sens. Edward Kennedy and Joe Biden.
'We're absolutely prepared to have an ethics debate with Teddy Kennedy,' says one indsider who mentioned the 'C' word: Chappaquiddick."
-USNews & World Report, Dec. 19

Break out the noisemakers!

Philosophus has just blogged his 500th blog!

165 this time around. 93rd percentile. Good, but not great. oh well. Ave here I come. Merry Christmas!

recant

Dammit. this is what happens when you date someone smarter than you. All your pet theories are short-lived. What took me over an hour to write he tore apart in ten seconds by pointing out that what I just posted can't follow because not only do animal populations not increase exponentially they remain the same overall size throughout unless they have room to spread out which most do not. Dammit. Well, I grudgingly sacrifice my theory on the altar of truth. Dammit.

Who's your daddy?

Where to begin? I have so many objections to Darwin. One is that he never shows that what he claims is even possible, much less probable much less unquestionable, namely, that a mutation that happens to be useful could become the norm and consistently passed down with few exceptions from generation to generation, and secondly, that that helpful mutation is so much more helpful than other mutations or even the old way that it beats out everyone else. For example, a big pack of wolves: most are the same, a few are born with slightly bigger tails- I don't know. But all the parents of that generation looked the same. It's only 3 out of 800 that had the slightly bigger tails. Then, say, 600 of those 800 cubs grow up (the rest die as cubs). Let's say those 3 mutated-tail cubs are among those 600. However, of those 600, maybe 2 are born with a mutation (and by mutation I mean, something different from their parents) of having especially white fur, another 3 have especially dark fur, etc. But these are freak occurences. Again, maybe another 1 or 2 have abnormally good eyesight, another 2 or 3 have abonormally bad eyesight, and perhaps so forth till about 40 or 50 of the 600 who made it to maturity have some sort of abnormality, be it beneficial, harmful, or indifferent. That sounds pretty reasonable, right?
The assumption here is that- and must be that- starting with this generation, be it ever so gradual, these slight little mutations are important enough to actually cause the especially white wolves (let's say it's snowy weather) or the bigger-tailed wolves or whatever, to survive longer and produce young. But wait! There's more!
Not only do these slightly different wolves have to reproduce, but they have to reproduce children who inherit the same slight trait that they themselves only got by a freak occurence. And these cubs in turn have to mate with other freak cubs etc ad infinutm to affect any change. And under Darwin's theory, there can't be an ongoing coexistence of mini-breeds of freak-wolves who have their advantage due to different mutations; i.e., it's either the long-tails or the white-furs, or the sharp-sights, etc etc etc, but no more than one. In other words, different mutations can't give equal advantage (ie, equal survival rates) to a group. Not only does the, say, white fur have to be an advantage, but an advantage consistently passed down, and not only that, but it has to be significantly more advantageous than the freak cubs born with bigger tails, which, while helpful, don't make the cut. Darwin says that any advantage, no matter how slight, will win out given enough time. I do not see that that follows. And of course, the biggest objection that I can think of at the moment is, well, it's twofold, and I've mentioned them already but I want to drive home how absurd it is, that
1. Cub A is born with mutation X. Siblings do not have mutation X. Maybe one other cub (Cub B) in the pack has mutation X. Same with mutations Y, Z, etc. Of course, these will not be the majority, even put together, because if we proceed from experience we see that children are usually born in the image of their parents; not that all kids are slightly mutated but it's so slight we don't notice. Cuz that's a different can of worms but if anyone wants to duke that out I'd be more than happy. Anyway, so that mutation happens to be beneficial and Cub A grows and has his own cubs. Chances are he did not mate with that one other cub in the pack that had X. He has 6 cubs, maybe one of which has the same mutation. meanwhile, the rest of the pack is expanding almost exponentially (granted a pack can't actually grow like that; only the Grimms can, but you see it's like that in nature). Keep in mind, it's only been one generation, and while Cubs A & B have had about 6 cubs each, so has every non-mutated member of the pack. Which means, that with every successive generation, those cubs born with mutation X, while possibly more and more in number each generation, but less & less percentagewise, will have to have a bigger and bigger edge over the non-mutated or differently-mutated cubs in order to even eventually phase them out. And remember, this "accumualation" in concentration of mutation X is so gradual that it can barely be noticed from one generation to the next, yet somehow it's responsible for, in every generation, a decided advantage to the Xers. And it DOES have to be a decided advantage in every generation in order for this to work. If someone wants to argue with me, please address this, and don't come to me with "but we know that evolution is true to some extent because yada yada yada" unless your defense actually relates to what I'm talking about. I really would love to know the answer to this.
I have more to say but I'm spent.

I was a Darwinist until I read Darwin.

Joel's father knows a lawyer who represented, pro bono, a couple of young men who were clearly guilty of bombing a Jewish temple. This is his story.
While the prosecutor was examining the key witness, the lawyer (Mr. Feil's friend) kept scooting his chair little by little to the side until he was at the prosecutor's table, at which point he starts going through the prosecutor's notes. The prosecutor notices this and gets livid. The judge gets livid. The lawyer apologizes and returns to his own table. The prosec. continues questioning the witness. The lawyer, once again scoots his chair over to the other side. This happens four times. Each time the prosecutor goes into a rage, the judge bangs his gavel, "Contempt of court! Contempt of court!" Finally, the jury is dismissed and the judge takes the 2 lawyers into his chambers. When the jury is brought back again, they see a chalk line drawn down the middle of the courtroom. The prosec. once again continues his examination of the key witness and the defense lawyer stands up and chucks his chair across the chalk line. The judge loses it.
"CONTEMPT OF COURT! CONTEMPT OF COURT!" Gavel banging, judge roaring, prosecutor shrieking, defense attorney maintaining his innocence-
"MY ASS DIDN'T CROSS THE LINE! MY ASS DIDN'T CROSS THE LINE!"
"CONTEMPT OF COURT! CONTEMPT OF COURT!"
2 weeks later when the trial was over (the defendants, by the way, were acquitted and their lawyer did a month in jail for contempt of court) the jury were interviewed about the key witness, whose testimony should have put the defendants in prison.
They didn't remember a single word of the testimony.

I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone it, People Like Me!

A fellow TACer and good friend's father went to Notre Dame Law. We'll call this good friend X. At my & Nick's prompting, X told his father he had 2 friends who wanted to meet with him & talk about getting into ND Law School. So, X's father suggested we come over to watch the ND/Tennessee game last Saturday. We went to their house, X introduced us, and X's father immediately begins giving Nick ND literature. The boys go to the kitchen to get some beers & I am left alone with X's father.
"So, what do you want to do when you leave TAC?" he asks me.
Pause.
"... law school..." I say timidly.
It dawns on him. "Oh! YOU'RE the other one!"