Philosophy Lite- now, with fewer calories!

There's a 2 week class called Moral Foundations of the Law, led by the dean the 1st week, and co-led by Bork week 2. (Exciting! I'll get a chance to meet my idol! But...) The problem is, that when you have a forum of 70 people, mostly from different educational backgrounds & many professing different ideologies, you get nowhere unless A) The matter at hand is limited and clear, and B) terms are defined from the beginning.
Our scenario was about spelunkers-turned cannibals (spelunkers are starving to death in a cave & they get word over the radio that they will die of hunger before they can be rescued. They form a "social contract" whereby they agree to roll dice & eat the low-roller. They are rescued days later & tried for murder. This country only has 1 penalty for murder: death. Questions: Should they be found guilty of murder; is it hypocritical of the cheif justice {this case was appealed to the Supr. Ct. of that country} to say, guilty, but recommend executive clemency?, etc.) As you can imagine, we got a barrage of "I thinks" and "In my opinions" but there was almost nothing solid to refer to (cf "Do you have text for that?) I hate this class. 2 of my fellow TACers use it for a study hall. I kid you not: Hobbes' "state of nature" was being confused with St. Thomas' idea of a "natural right" WITH RECKLESS ABANDON and it was heartwrenching. Someone suggested that instead of murder, the spelunkers could have waited for the 1st person to die naturally and then eat him instead. Many objected. The dean, rightly, asked, "Do you object on moral grounds or from repugnagce to eating human flesh at all?" One student then made up some vague, unsubstantiated, and incorrect reference to "Aquinas, like, asserts that humans have, like, dignity and so you can't, like, eat their bodies under any circumstances." To which fellow TACer & I replied that a dead body is really just a corpse, so you're not eating a person. And if that's the only way you're going to live, you have the right to do it. Then some hotshot yelled angrily in our direction, "Well, I believe in the resurrection of the body! You can't eat a dead person."
Sigh. But wait- there's more!
"Humans don't naturally have dignity anyway," pipes up another. "It's a social construct."

Howdy

Here I am at Ave Maria School of Law. I just got an email 5 minutes ago officially telling me that Notre Dame will not be able to accept me. Ha! As if I would want to go to a dump like that! I don't know where they ever got the idea I was interested..... anyway, I like Ann Arbor. My roommates are wonderful, as is my apartment, and I extend an open invitation to everyone to come and visit. Almost everyone. I've alreay developed a reputation here for sleeping through orientation lectures. Yesterday I woke up to hear the head librarian saying, I assume in some context, "Everyone go to the stacks and find a treatise!" I snorted awake and jumped up with everyone else and grabbed a book called "Law of Fraud." I showed it to the nice lady and she approved, so I went back to sleep. Law school's weird.
I also got stung by a wasp and I won an Ave Maria School of Law bath towel (MSRP: $19.99) for knowing the correct answer to how far away from buildings we can smoke. That's it for now.

I learned something interesting. Everyone knows that quote from Henry IV "First, kill all the lawyers." But did you know that that was not a criticism of lawyers, but, in context, was referring to how to create anarchy? I looked it up & to be honest I couldn't find proof, but I'm going to read it again more slowly to be sure. It reminds me of another oft misinterpreted Shakespeareanism. "If music be the food of love, play on! Give me excess of it.." I have that on a mug w/ happy cherubic child-lovers swinging gaily on flower-covered swings. But, read on! "That, in the surfeit, it (love) may sicken, and so die."

Still alive, just nothing much to say. Rosie & Adam's wedding was lovely. I'm finishing Brothers K after reading it steadily for about 6 or 7 months.

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.