Archive for May, 2004

Bits of Flotsom

Friday, May 28th, 2004

There’s really no way to organize this, so here we go:


I started Bar Review class this week, and it has been more time and energy-consuming than I had previously expected.  My attention is rapt; I eye-roll at the cheesy jokes, and I have a newfound respect for Professor Epstein, the person whose book my Contracts Professor taught against (the whole course used and critiqued Epstein’s casebook).  The Con Law lecture from earlier this week brought back delicious memories of Professor Fried savoring beautiful morsels of analyses by cooing, “Delicious,” while talking about particular cases.


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The past two weeks have been a return to San Francisco’s specific brand of urbanity.  Helping French tourists find their way from Soma to Union Square, being interrogated by ditzy suburban teenagers working as spiritual volunteers, savoring the beauty of buildings as they encounter the wrecking ball.  God, I love this City.  I always have.


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Sometimes, if it was not for music, I would doubt my ability to feel emotion.


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I’m headed for Vegas this weekend to savor my favorite, forbidden vice, but you can ping me because I am forwarding my IMs.


 

All About My Sister

Sunday, May 16th, 2004

Chelle has had a good run this week.  Not only does she justify the “We have great legs” slogan on her tee-shirt, but she managed to pull in the Harvard Book award this week (which means that her teachers see her as the best student in her class, or at least that’s how it worked at Rowerr), and she managed to get her picture into the Chronicle (this is old news by now).

I’m outta here!

Saturday, May 15th, 2004

Completely. Utterly. Done.

Un-redact Attack / Culture Theft

Sunday, May 9th, 2004

Another link, courtesy of BoingBoing: researchers have been able to use a computer program to un-blacken redacted material in the DoD memos, to show that they reported that Egypt and South Korea helped the Iraqis.  Yay, for transparency!  This is how it works:



The program rejected all of the words that were not within three pixels of the length of the word that was probably under the blacked-out area in the document.he program rejected all of the words that were not within three pixels of the length of the word that was probably under the blacked-out area in the document.


The software then reduced the number of possible words to just seven from 1,530 by using semantic guidelines, including the grammatical context. The researchers selected the word “Egyptian” from the seven possible words, rejecting “Ukrainian” and “Ugandan,” because those countries would be less likely to have such information.


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On an entirely separate note, I now have another reason to hate McDonald’s; they just trademarked the phrase, “I am Asian.”  Give me back my identity, B*!  Someone, please start a petition about this now.  I am never letting my Hapa kids eat there.

Les Cartes Postales

Friday, May 7th, 2004

I paid a farewell visit to the MFA today to see if the their Japanese woodblock collection was on display.  Alas, the woodblocks were put away, but they had a special exhibit on Japanese Postcards (Leonard Lauder, aka Mr. Estee Lauder, donated 20,000 cards to the museum).  When I first walked into the gallery, I was a bit upset because the cards near the door were rather nationalistic and from the WWII era (I couldn’t enjoy what was essentially Japanese propoganda during a very cruel war).  Some of the earlier works, however, captured my eye, and made up for the missed woodblock prints.  One of my favorites was a card by Takehisa Yumeji, Umbrellas Viewed from Above

Favors for Favors

Monday, May 3rd, 2004

I had this random thought about the pair of champagne flutes that the school passed out at the Law School prom on Saturday.  I think they are all a part of a plan to help HLS alums drop the H-bomb.  I can imagine some really nerdy guy in my class, inviting some future gold digger to his place for some bubbly, then whipping out the glasses, announcing his pedigree with the University’s seal.


It’s a good thing that I’ll be out of here in 13 days — I’m so jaded.