Why I love the Internet...

A couple days ago, my friend tipped me off to this amusing 1995 Newsweek column dismissing the internet as something of a fad. "No online database will replace your daily newspaper," the author declares.

Though the article has a couple suspicious typos, there's something almost whimsical about recalling how the world viewed the internet back in the days of dial-up and America On-Line. Fast forward fifteen years and it's apparent that, at least until all the lights go out, the internet is invaluable.

Why do I bring this up? Well, NYU Law's own biweekly newspaper, The Commentator has been dramatically impacted by the internet. It's a shame in some respects, since I quite love putting the ol'paper together, but it's a distant whisper of the paper it was back ten or twenty years ago. I don't want to believe law students are somehow less engaged (or that I'm utterly ineffective at drumming up student journalists to write a blurb once every other week), so I'll attribute The Commentator's decline to the internet.

If you've been reading this blog--or The Commentator for that matter--you'll be aware of the weird dust-up involving the Student Bar Association. My crack investigative skills turned up next to nothing as no one involved would go "on the record" and The Commenator, as a strange semi-official organ of the school, can't go around libeling people, my discussion of the rumor amounted to a small mention in an op-ed about the SBA and booze.

Well, well ,well, leave it to the internet to finally reveal everything I was looking for! Today, infamous law blog Above the Law is reporting about an email going around NYU regarding disgruntled summers at Mayer Brown.

That's interesting on its own as another example of Big Law shenanigans, but, as was later brought to my attention, buried in the comments is what appears to be a post by an irritated SBA member about my prior rumor. Certainly digging through internet comments can be a tedious (and rhetorically scary) exercise, but, hot damn, thanks to comment boards, a whole bunch of interesting information can pop-up.

Stuff that should be reported in the law school's paper, but stuff that just isn't anymore. Thank you, internet.

Working on my Website

Today I spent a handful of hours tinkering with my long unfinished website. I'll be honest: for the better part of the past year, I've been promising myself that I'd be finally finish up my site, write a triumphant email about it, and leave a finished JoeJerome.com up for all to view while moving on with my life. Of course, finishing this stupid site got delayed and delayed and delayed again. Well, it's pretty much done now. Sure, there's still some stuff not up, some pictures missing, but finally, after five years, all the links (should) work.

This silly website has a long and pointless history. My friend Phil Ohnemus somehow goaded me into buying up my own personal domain name in the fall of 2004. He had me fearful that'd he'd buy up "JoeJerome" before me and stick up some embarrassing photo or another of me onto the interwebs. When that didn't happen, I found myself spending $12/month on domain hosting. As is typical of most of my projects, I didn't get around to even learning basic HTML until almost a year later.

Thus, I spent a distressing amount of my summer between junior and senior year of college, alone in my bedroom working on my website. I was too dim to grasp cascading style sheets, so I built the whole thing using tables (upon tables, upon nested tables) in Dreamweaver. Using tables was already five years obsolete at that point, but I was happy with my work. Even better, by the time college was done, the website was pretty much done...even if it was an ugly beast.

When I decided to take a second crack at designing the site in the fall of 2007, I switched hosting providers--now I only pay $7/month! However, the switchover combined with an ill-timed hard drive crash caused me to loose everything. I've spent the past two and half years rebuilding the site. Sure, it now uses cascading style sheets and isn't the mass proliferation of unnecessary web pages the old site was. Unfortunately, now the design aesthetic is three years old and the image resolutions all designed for computers from 2007. But, hey, the damn thing works!

I even got a feedback form up and running! This weekend I spent hours making my image galleries simpler and my copyright notices completely and utterly up to date. The funny thing is, unless you're reading this, I bet no one on the planet would have noticed any of this...save for me. Let alone admired my new rollover images!

It's time like these that I take solace in my buddy James' advice that you just have to do what you enjoy. And, pathetically, I enjoy tinkering with HTML. Even though I'm no coder and I pretty much cannot comprehend high-end scripting, I'll be damned if I've got a website with out-of-date copyright notices.

If Ronald Reagan could grow a pair...

Time for President Obama to grow some pendulous balls. I honestly don't see how the Democrats don't see financial regulatory reform as anything but a political win.

Can you find me anyone outside of the financial industry that really wants anything to do with Bank of America? Golly, they have ATMs on every corner...after buying up every other bank in the country.

I think Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) put it best:

It would be one thing if they were saying, 'They're making us do things that will cause us to lose money.' But they're saying, 'If you don't let us do these things because they're abusive to consumers, we won't make enough money to survive.' ...So their argument is, they have to be able to cheat consumers to stay solvent. I'm not sure I'm persuaded by that argument, or that a bank that has to cheat consumers to stay solvent is one we should keep afloat.

Nah, it's totally great for Bank of America to find ways to make me pay monthly fees for a savings account at .10%. Also, I'm a huge fan of being pestered with credit card offers (with annual fees but "great" bonuses) each time I walk into the bank.

How about an ice cream social, SBA?

Several weeks ago, the Student Bar Association sent out its usual weekly email detailing its weekly sponsored party. Then, surprisingly, it sent a subsequent email the next day denying any part in sponsoring that party. Rumors started circulating around the school and reached my ears, and in turn, I sought out a number of parties to comment on the record. Everyone politely declined, and that's well within their right, but the whole mess got me thinking about the SBA's Thursday Night Parties.

Why is the SBA sponsoring (or subsidizing) weekly drinking exercises by the student body? I realize I am speaking for the minority here, but from the first week of first year, I've found distasteful the prodigious amounts of money this school and the SBA in particular spends on student drink tickets and booze.

Virtually every Thursday evening throughout the semester the SBA provides drink tickets for the student body to go out and enjoy libations. I certainly don't want to come down on letting loose or having a drink—since drinking is apparently the universal method of detoxing from the stresses of law school, but as I don't much enjoy going to loud Village establishments for overpriced drinks, I don't much like having any part of my tuition funneled into this enterprise. More importantly, I don't much like having all this drinking officially sponsored by my student government.

Now, I admit my limited research into the issue has failed to uncover exactly how much money is being spent on these parties, but it strikes me that in a period where the school is budget-cutting, reducing student symposia, and otherwise trimming expenses that axing students' free booze privileges could be one of the first things to go. I'm not silly enough to espouse getting rid of drink tickets at Fall Ball or any other honest-to-goodness “law school” activity, but do we really need to be funneling business into one Village bar after another?

The unfortunate part is that for all the good the SBA does the student body, it seems most well known for these parties. I said earlier that I was in the distict minority regarding my disdain for the Thursday night parties, but I often wonder if I'm really just in the silent majority. The SBA itself admits that attendance at the parties falls off from class year to class year, and anecdotally, I know a number of students who've never attended a single one. For us, what are we getting out of this exercise except curious rumors and the opportunity to out-gunner people on Friday morning classes? I understand that the SBA's constitutional mission is to encourage the school's social life, and I know there's something to be said for how per-capita student spending can boost a U.S. News ranking. But maybe the SBA can be encouraging other things?

So I propose a compromise: keep your parties but throw in the occasional ice-cream social, as well. Halve the number of drink tickets and replace them with free coffee.

I refuse to believe encouraging Thursday night drinking is the only way to encourage a social life at the university, and I would implore the SBA to look at other avenues for encouraging weekly gatherings at the law school. It'd give me more reason to review its emails for reasons other than suspiciously canceling a Thursday night drinking event.

Frequent readers of the blog will note this is an expansion of my prior post about the Student Bar Association. The was published in the March 3rd edition of the NYU Law Commentator.

Winter Wonderland

Ever since high school, I've been enchanted by Alice in Wonderland, so I thought I'd be clever and go photograph the "Alice" statute in Central Park during today's blizzard. "Winter Wonderland." Get it?

For the second time this month, NYU called a snow day. Now I know I shouldn't be complaining about getting time off for snow at the ripe age of twenty-six, but there's something pathetic about a northern university closing down at the first sight of snow twice in three weeks.

But instead of spending the impromptu holiday inside, I medicated my nascent cold into oblivion (though getting rid of the snot proved impossible) and decided to journal to Central Park for some photo time.

I was a bit disappointed to find most of the park's walkways cleared of snow and nary a patch of virgin snowfall anywhere to be found. Sometimes I forget millions of people live in New York and that they all race to Central Park for snowball fights, snowmen, and sledding as soon as the tiniest bit of snow accumulates.

Still, I had high hopes that a snow storm would photographically inspiring, but I guess not. Most of my shots look like muddy messes. Combine that with my tractionless shoes and dizzy head, and I wasn't exactly leaning out over frozen ponds or kneeling in snow to get unique angles on things.

But hey, posting photos makes for an easy blog post! Anyway, it's unfortunate that I was unable to capture how surreal the lighting was this afternoon. I got uptown during a lull between snow storms, so while the sun never came out, one minute big snow flakes were lightly drifting down and the next the full moon was out.

I do admire the city's dogs, however. I'd imagine all the salt-covered sidewalks would do horrors to their feet, but from the dozens of dogs running around Central Park, sure looked like they were enjoying the blizzard.

Steve King and the New Republican Patriotism

Representative Steve King once again shames my great state of Iowa! Listen here as he justifies Joseph Stack's kamikaze mission against the IRS in Austin, Texas, last week:

Think Progress inquired as to whether Stack's grievances were legitimate, and Rep. King replied:

I can tell you I’ve been audited by the IRS and I’ve had the sense of ‘why is the IRS in my kitchen.’ Why do they have their thumb in the middle of my back. … It is intrusive and we can do a better job without them entirely.

There's something incredibly cynical, no, disgusting about how the conservative movement in this country now can justify de facto suicide bombings against the federal government as an act of patriotism.

It wasn't so long ago that Republicans were tarring and feathering anyone who didn't toe the government's line in the glorious patriotic endless war on terror. One of the lines liberals have repeatedly been criticized for over the past nine years has been the suggestion that the "terrorists" were responding to American behavior. This idea was brushed aside as anti-American!

There is something tragically comic about how conservatives are now reacting to an "America" they do not agree with with flame-baiting and violence. I don't recall anyone protesting George Bush's wars by murdering civil servants, but somehow now the horror of a tax hike makes that okay?

Rep. King, violence is what happens when you stop seeing policy disagreements, e.g., something as apparently basic as the IRS' ability to collect taxes, as matters for debate and instead as somehow akin to a moral affront. Just because I disagree with you (and think you're both a terrible congressman and a dubious human being) doesn't mean you're my "enemy." Well, perhaps you are, but certainly not everyone I disagree with.

Rep. King clearly doesn't feel that way. From his CPAC speech:

But one thing that Sun Tsu wrote about was “nosce hostem,” know thine enemy. Now who are we up against? I want to define that enemy. They are: liberals, they are progressives, they are Che Guevarians, they are Castroites, they are socialists, more enemies on this list, Gramsciites, ring anybody’s bell? Trotskyites, Maoists, Stalinists, Leninists, Marxists. They are all our enemies. Who’d I leave out?

Guess he didn't exactly name check tax collectors!

For the record, Stack's act of patriotism resulted in the murder of one person and injured thirteen others. He's a real Republican hero.

--UPDATE--

The Rachel Maddow Show did a helluva job revealing just how nutty Rep. Steve King is on Friday, February 26th:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Rising and Falling

"I'm twenty-three and unemployed! I thought my life would be better when I was older," the guy whined, as he simultaneously drank from a wine bottle while smoking a cigarette. As I stood downwind on a fifth story fire escape late Friday night, I couldn't help but recall my own panic attacks three years ago. I remember being twenty-three and unemployed, except I was stuck living with my parents in the middle of a cornfield, wasting away my Friday evenings at home watching cable news. For once, I tried to be empathetic, to provide sage counsel, and I suggested being unemployed, young, and free to explore New York City with friends was hardly a dire situation.

It's easy to lose perspective sometimes. I thought James Fallows' piece in this month's Atlantic on the rise and fall of America is particularly telling:

The typical American I see in an office building or shopping mall, stout or slim, gives off countless unconscious signs—hair, skin, teeth, height—of having grown up in a society of taken-for-granted sanitation, vaccination, ample protein, and overall public health. I have learned not to bore people with my expressions of amazement at the array of food in ordinary grocery stores, the size and newness of cars on the street, the splendor of the physical plant for universities, museums, sports stadiums. And honestly, by now I’ve almost stopped noticing. But if this is “decline,” it is from a level that most of the world still envies.

There's something incredibly self-indulgent about moaning about unmet potential and wasted ambition--I know since I do just that all the time. Of course, every once in awhile over the course of the year I'll wake up on the right side of the bed in the morning, and go out into the world with a sword instead of a shield.

Oddly, that seemed to have happened last Thursday. I slept in until almost noon, which on any other Thursday would have meant skipping my copyrights course. Struggling to wake up, I discovered an early-morning email from my professor, cancelling class. Mildly amused by my good fortune, I had a full early-afternoon breakfast: Honey Bunches of Oats, milk, and a glass of orange juice. I even had a banana. And everything has going swell ever since.

Today, for instance, I strode to the library to finish up a cite and substance check for my journal. This particular assignment involved tracking down a copy of the 1869 Louisiana Slaughterhouse Act, which precipitated the (in)famous the Slaughterhouse Cases. (Upholding Louisiana's ability to create a slaughterhouse monopoly, the Supreme Court managed to eviscerate the 14th Amendment in the process. As a result of the Supremes' tragic misreading that the "privileges and immunities" of U.S. citizenship pretty much only entailed the ability to navigate interstate waters, the Court eventually had to concoct "substantive" due process rights...which underly Roe v. Wade and any other number of incomprehensible "constitutional rights.)

Despite the fame of the Slaughterhouse Cases, the actual text of the contested law is less than easy to find. I had to head into the basement of the school library and dig through old microforms. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this, but after all my days in libraries, I've never once had to use a microform magnifier. The entire lonely process was something of a personal achievement for me.

I'll tell you: it felt better than stewing about my displeasure with law school or my dying iPod battery. It was far more productive than drinking and smoking away my evening, too. Or I guess in my case watching the teevee until I pass out.

The Second Mass Effect

I was a big BIG fan of the first Mass Effect. I went into the game blind: despite the game's appeals to my sci-fi loving heart, I hadn't enjoyed Bioware's previous turn-based D&D-styled Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and I had convinced myself Mass Effect would be more of the same. It took a game draught (and my Super Tuesday 2008 dalliance with Firefly) to convince me to spend $30 to take flyer on some video game space drama.

I still remember hesitantly picking up the game on Valentine's Day two years ago. It was almost a burden for me to give the game a whirl the next evening, such was my disdain. But a four hour play session later, I was hooked.

Mass Effect was the first game that actually had me weighing my decisions as a player, and the experience profoundly altered my conceptions about what was possible with gaming. Nevermind Mass Effect was also a pretty cool, if flawed, action packed interstellar adventure.

Its sequel blows the first game away. Despite two years of increasingly high expectations inside my head, Mass Effect 2 is bar none one of the best games I've ever played, meeting and exceeding my hopes for the title. I tried to go into the game with a critical eye, and for the first hour, I found every little deviation from the first game to be an affront but I couldn't put the game down.

Fifty hours of gaming later? Mass Effect 2 is a game that transcends its medium. It's a polished, beautiful experience and a testament to just how far removed video gaming has come from Ms. Pac Man's pursuit of her hubby. I daresay it's the best video game ever made. The game dispenses, once and for all, with the notion that gaming is for kids.

Role-playing, narrative driven games will henceforth be graded on a different scale. The first game captured a fun concept and presented a compelling universe, but the overall experience was ultimately a giant sci-fi cliché. Your avatar was essentially the good marine. You fought the big bad aliens with big guns aboard your own cool spaceship, the Normandy.

Mass Effect 2 satisfyingly complicates this situation, wiping the player's slate clean. Set two years after the first title, you play a virtual free agent out to represent humanity's best interests--whatever you think those may be. Your enemies are whomever and whatever you want them to be. You can be a force for good in the universe, for humanity, or you can throw everything away in pursuit of power or, predictably enough, intoxicating alien orgies. The universe is your oyster.

But what was most impressed me about the game, what makes it such a gaming revelation is how incredibly polished the entire experience is. Usually, the logic behind sequels is to build upon the first's template and make everything bigger and badder. Mass Effect 2 avoids the Michael Bay trap. If anything, the scope of the story is smaller and the amount of sheer stuff the game throws at the player lessened. The remainder is a much better, tighter experience. The first game attempted to provide the player with a number of different gameplay mechanics--some worked well, many worked pretty poorly.

Mass Effect 2 devolves into two key components: actual role-playing and space station shootouts, removing a lot of the tedium that permeates most 20+ hour games. I'd argue the actual shooting, e.g., the blasting of aliens with lasers and the hacking of robots, is a whole lot of fun, but even if it's not as smooth as something the Call of Duty maniacs enjoy, it's entirely playable...something the first game had issues with. The basic set up involves shooting baddies and controlling a two squadmates to provide tactical backup. It's quite a lot of fun to flash freeze a bunch of mercenaries and then have your buddies send shockwaves across the battlefield for a lil' "Hasta la vista, baby" action.

However, enjoyable tactical combat is only half the game. More importantly, Mass Effect 2 redefines what is to play a "role playing" game. Like its predecessor, the game is a digital "choose-your-own-adventure" book. The number of storyline permutations is massive, and if you've played the first game, your decisions in that game carry over, altering the storyline even more.

No, Mass Effect 2 may not be the narrative equivalent of a Crime and Punishment, but the sophistication of the story is pretty impressive and the player is an active rather than passive participant. Do you stand by while a prisoner is tortured in front of you? Do you comfort a daughter who just saw her father die or turn a cold shoulder? Pushing a button to indicate “yea” or “nay” is far more difficult than you’d imagine.

Decisions matter in Mass Effect 2. Take too long to get things done and people die. The wise player further sees how her decisions in the game will impact the story when the inevitable Mass Effect 3 comes around. Being constrained by your decisions is a pretty powerful experience for a video game. In an existence defined by "big" decisions to take out loans for law school or take a job across the country, Mass Effect 2 is the only place where I'm choosing whether friends live or die, even if they are fake video game friends. And much of the game's narrative strength is placed in creating sympathetic characters with which to interact.

This is aided by some stupendous voice acting. Martin Sheen's casting as the ambiguous, cigarette-smoking Illusive Man is inspired. After seven years idolizing the man for his portrayal of the perfect president, Jed Bartlet, I felt strangely guilty for telling off Sheen's morally questionable character within the game. Sheen is just the tip of the iceberg of the vocal talent, but the voice acting is just one element that makes the characters populating the Mass Effect 2 universe compelling.

One of my friends criticized the first game for featuring one-dimensional characters. I'm not sure I agreed with the sentiment, but the first game certainly featured archetypes: the naive child and the violent mercenary, xenophobes and religious zealots. In that respect, the characters served to present certain world views, but the player had the power to push the characters in one way or another.

Mass Effect 2, similarly, presents similar archetypes, but this time around the player actually understands why the characters hold their beliefs. The game's basic premise has the player recruiting a squad of mercenaries, scientists, and other hardcore types to take on a potential threat to distant human colonies out in the galaxy. As your squad grows, you become friends with your crew, taking on intriguing tasks to earn their loyalty before the final suicide mission alongside the requisite black hole event horizon.

One of the first companions you meet is the typical ice-queen, spending many of the games initial hours criticizing the player's every move. Before the game is through, we learn the ice-queen exterior hides a character with a deep-seeded inferiority complex and daddy issues. She even breaks down in tears, after killing a whole bunch of people first, of course. Over the course of fifty hours, she goes from an unlikeable fictional construct, someone I was hesitant to even use in my squad due to her detestable personality, to an invaluable ally that pained me to see bite the bullet at the end of the game.

That emotional investment is the game's biggest accomplishment. By the end game, your squad mates are your (fictional) friends, and your decisions during the climax determine whether they all live to see another day--and Mass Effect 3.

The game's not perfect by any means. The tactical shooting isn't quite as playable as something like Gears of War, and the game still suffers from a few of the most irritating video game prerequisites, e.g., silly immersion-breaking minigames and some braindead player and enemy A.I. routines.

But I'm afraid I can't be too objective with Mass Effect 2. This was a game I could not put down. It gripped me and siphoned away my free time like nothing has in years. Fortuitously for me, I was provided a gift of a snow day to spend the whole day inside playing a video game. It felt like something straight out of middle school and I must admit, some of the most fun I've ever had with a video game.

Google Buzzkill

Maybe I'm getting old (I am), but I've finally been hit with a new technology I don't like: Google Buzz. I got roped into trying to product when I was signing into my Gmail the other day. For those unaware, Google Buzz works within Gmail like some sort of amalgamation of Twitter/Facebook/blogging and, uh, Flickr.

As I said about the iPad, I think there's a lot of potential in Google Buzz. I am all for integrating social networks. Even as they all serve their own small purpose, my interest in having to keep up a presence everywhere is, sadly enough, exhausting.

But from my point of view, the roll out of Google Buzz has been a real buzzkill. Almost everyone I know who signed up for it as of earlier this week have come crying for a way to turn it off. So what's the problem?

One big problem is the one way integration with Gmail. Listening to Google's sale pitch of Buzz, they act as if the sum total of my emails reveals who my friends are. In fact, the opposite is true. Upon turning on Buzz, the program was following former bosses, former flames, and, uh, people I'd never met. Unlike say Facebook and Twitter where I'm finding people based on common interests...Buzz is finding "friends" based on people I email and I email a lot of people I'm not friends with. Or rather, I email a lot of people who's status updates I don't need to know.

The biggest buzzkill is the service's apparently massive security problems. While I have measure of faith in Google, the company isn't infallible. Anybody use Orkut--Google's Facebook? Or Knol--Google's Wikipedia?

Of course, Pete Cashmore posits that "network effects" will result in Buzz's world conquest, but whereas I jumped on the Twitter/Facebook bandwagon, I'm going to be turning off Buzz until further notice...

--UPDATE 2/14/09--

Yesterday Google made the startling announcement that Buzz had irritated more than a few people:

However, many people just wanted to check out Buzz and see if it would be useful to them, and were not happy that they were already set up to follow people. This created a great deal of concern and led people to think that Buzz had automatically displayed the people they were following to the world before they created a profile...So starting this week, instead of an auto-follow model in which Buzz automatically sets you up to follow the people you email and chat with most, we're moving to an auto-suggest model.

Genius, Google, people don't like having you do things for them they haven't even signed up for! Buzz still strikes me as a reactive product. It's as if the company freaked out about the "social media potential" of Twitter/Facebook, unleashed a legion of engineers to warp Gmail into the best of both worlds, and completely forgot to ask if anyone using Gmail wanted any of it. Duh.

The Student Bar Association

I have a long and largely negative view of student government. Sure, part of that is because student government tends to somehow be the domain of the "cool kids," but I've been a part of student government at different points in my now eighteen years of schooling.

The big problem with student government? Same thing that paralyzes Congress: massive amounts of divergent personalities and the real power is always held someplace else. In the real world it's business interests and lobbyists; with student government, its administrators and deans. None of this stops students from running, whether it's out of some idealism to make school "better" or, you know, pad the resume with "leadership skills."

During my entire four years of college, our school's paper regularly bagged on the student union--I think they argued about revised the union constitution at least three times. And don't get me started with some of the shenanigans high school student government entailed!

Why this introduction? Well, over the past few days a number of rumors about the NYU Student Bar Association have been floating around school. Exactly what's transpired is unclear, thus the rumor mill, but it seems some bad blood transpired between the SBA and another student group throwing a happy hour last week. Bad things were said, blood boiled, and now the SBA is in damage control mode.

I don't want to speculate on what happened, but this situation provides me with the perfect opportunity to criticize the SBA (and NYU Law in general) for its seemingly primary purpose: setting up weekly events at bars around the city. I realize I'm in the distinct minority here, but, from week one of 1L, I've found distasteful the prodigious amount of money this school spends (or throws away?) on student drink tickets and booze.

Every Thursday night the SBA provides drink tickets for the student body to go out and enjoy libations. I don't want to come down on letting loose, having a drink, but as I don't much enjoy going to loud Village bars and drinking, I don't much like having some part of my tuition funneled into this enterprise.

I suppose there's some argument that per capita student spending helps boost NYU's U.S. News ranking, but I can think of better things to do with tuition than give it to the SBA to allocate for parties. It seems to me that when the school is budget-cutting, reducing the number of student symposia, and otherwise trimming expenses that axing students' free booze could be the first thing to go. Scratch that--have as much booze at the law school as you want, but do we (or I?) really have to subsidize the otherwise healthy business at one Village bar after another?

And if the SBA wasn't running around co-hosting parties every week, there wouldn't be rumors of lawsuits and racism involved with school-sponsored happy hours.

Snow Day!

The blizzard bashing the east coast got NYU to cancel half a days worth of classes, freeing me from the pains of law school for a few hours. (Though as an Iowan I'm almost insulted for school to shutdown after only seven inches of snow...) Four weeks into the semester and ::surprise!:: I'm behind on things. And what else is new?

A few weeks back I applied to be an "official blogger" for the law school. This application was subsequently rejected. This is probably for the best, considering I've been called a fount of cynicism and the whole point of the blog invariably will be to make NYU Law exciting to all the unemployed prospective law students out there.

That said, I'd be lying if I didn't admit to being disappointed. I figured being a positive blogger for the law school would be a good experience for me--and something I think I'd be good at. Alas, according to the form rejection email, the blog was "looking for a cross section of the student body, bloggers who have a wide variety of interests and experiences."

Either that's an unintentional insult, or it's code for picking out prospective bloggers who are far more accomplished and better at law school than I.

Ah well, I can still vent to the internets with or without some official seal of approval! Though maybe I need to develop a wider variety of interests and experiences!?!

The Deeper Meaning Behind the Late Night Wars

Over the winter break, while having dinner with my folks and their friends, they got to talking about how "goofy" Conan O'Brien was. None of the assembled adults could comprehend his sense of humor, so it fell to me, the child, to explain why Conan was a better comedian than Jay Leno. The entire conversation was a pretty clear indictment against Conan by the baby-boomer generation, and I felt some irony when not one week later NBC was announcing plans to replace him with the Chin once again. The late night drama that ensued, captivating Hollywood and media alike, was largely a superficial event, overshadowing more important crises, but the entire fiasco feels to me like a metaphor for a lot that's wrong with the United States today. Yes, that's something of an absurd claim, but bear with me.

Let's look at NBC: the primetime champion of the 1990s, the network largely blundered through the past decade. It replaced Friends with a season of Donald Trump's reality show, abandoned any sort of network identity ala CBS and its procedurals, and the result? It lost ratings and became a fourth place network in a four network race. Through it all, Jeff Zucker, the adult ostensibly in charge, kept his job. Never accountable, he passed the blame to one underling after another, and today still sits as CEO of NBC Universal.

Conan O'Brien taking over The Tonight Show was, if you catch my drift, a small bit of hope and change. I'll be honest: I was never a Jay Leno fan. His humor is pedestrian, if you can even call reading local newspaper typos comedy (I've never considered The Commentator's misprints that funny), but his comedic sensibilities certainly held some appeal to my parents' generation. Maybe they felt like they could have a beer with him. Conan, however, rode to power on the sensibilities of the key 18-49 demographic. His success a triumph of youth over old thinking, or so it was for seven months.

From day one, however, Conan on The Tonight Show was not the Conan of Late Night. Perhaps it was hype, a triumph of style over substance, or simply a tramautic move into a den of jackals, Hollywood I mean, but Conan wasn't the same. Sure, same silly self-deprecating demeanor, but much of the spark of Late Night was replaced by even more banal interviews and a longer, more topical, more Jay Leno-esque opening monologue. If rumors are true, the directive on high to Conan was to be more serious, more conventional with his comedy.

Obviously, the end result was that America got Jay Leno back, one way or another. This happened despite desperate campaigning by young people and the full mobilization of new media—Team Coco rallied in the rain. If a Team Chin even exists, its my parents happy to not have to watch self-pleasuring bears on the boobtube while balancing their checkbooks. They won; Team Coco lost. Next month Jaywalking returns after the local news and it's like the last year in late night television never happened. After some bold experimentation on NBC's part, the status quo has returned.

Of course, that's not the entire story. All the weeks of fingerpointing and public airing of dirty laundry has made NBC look incompetent, revealing no discernible leadership strategy. Despite the millions in lost ratings and advertising dollars, Conan gets to walk away to a huge payday, not that he needed it. It's arguable that a course-correction was necessary—The Tonight Show was getting creamed by David Letterman, local affiliates were hurting—but does anyone think the restoration of Jay Leno is really more than a band-aid for NBC's problems? Sure, it makes my folks happy, but bigger ratings for The Tonight Show—or more accurately, the hope that they'll just go back to where they were—isn't much of a stimulus for an entire network whose top-rated show gets a third of the viewers as NCIS.

Worse, Conan's staff finds itself jobless after undertaking a cross-country move—their prospects not nearly as good as their millionaire leader's. Many of the staff are young twenty-somethings who are now left adrift and rudderless. From my point of view, the whole NBC imbroglio feels a bit familiar...somehow.

An iPad World?

I'm too tired and too disheartened to comment on a room of politicians applauding their year of collective failure. (Though I suppose 86 rounds of applause in seventy minutes isn't too excessive.)

Fortunately, today also saw Apple's announcement of the iPad. Via a series of texts today with my buddy Adam, I got into a semi-vigorous discussion about the relative merits of Apple's newest wonder product. (For the record--and my personal glory--Adam pegged the price at $750, while I had $600 for the win.)

Adam's not sold on the thing, and neither are many of my other friends it would seem. I say they lack vision. Ever since I laid my eyes on the fancy PADDs used to read things in Star Trek: The Next Generation back in 1994, I've been waiting for an effective tablet device to finally declutter my life. The iPad is a tech dream come true!

I realize tablet PCs already exist and internet tablets are already on the market, but Apple, more than anyone else, seems to understand how to integrate their products into our lives on a whole 'nother plane. It's easy to look at the iPad as a supersized iPod Touch, but I think this is painfully misguided.

I'm probably being too bold to call the printed book dead, but I immediately had visions of reading my casebooks in all manner of gorgeous font displays. Adam dared asked me who needs to be reading PDF files in bed, but that also misses the point. Whether it's a 1200-page casebook or a novel, having all of that on a super thin reading device like the Kindle albeit with a ton of multimedia functionality would be a real boon to my productivity.

Sure, a lot of this depends on whether some app will provide for sufficient annotating ability, but I can picture reading my casebooks by day, watching teevee by night, and, oh yes, reading The New York Times in the morning...and not having to squint at a screen on the subway or, you know, sit at a computer.

A lot of my excitement about the iPad is really future potential, but I thought Steve Jobs presentation of the iPad as a third pillar between the smaller iPhone-esque portable media device and the stand-alone power of an actual computer was apt. It looks to me like the perfect bedside/couch companion in a way a laptop or iPhone just isn't.

The fact that it maintains all of the functionality of an iPhone and apparently most of the bare functionality of a laptop, however, means we're finally at a point where we can integrate our personal data at all times. Perhaps this is an ominous tangent, but last week's premiere of Caprica on SyFy dealt with a similar theme. In the show, a girl's consciousness is recreated using the sum total of data from medical records, shopping bills, emails, music playlists, etc. While I'm not exactly afraid of a virtual Joseph, I can get behind further integration of my digital existence.

What I love most about Apple products is the feeling that they are all extensions of the same design: a MacBook hub, accentuated by an iPhone for the road, AppleTV for the living room, and now an iPad for everything in between.

If nothing else, maybe the iPad makes reading fun again? Everyone I spoke with after the announcement was fixated on using the thing as some big iPod/personal entertainment player, but I think the real value is the potential it has for sharing and manipulating documents. There's finally enough screen real estate to do some cool things, and I'd wager we'll find tablet devices to be indispensible in a decade or so. iPad is just the beginning.

A Pox on High-Fructose Corn Syrup

A couple days ago I saw this commercial put on by the Corn Refiners Association promoting corn syrup:

As soon as one sees such a, uh, syrupy commercial, one knows he's dealing with some insidious interest group, and, as a one time citizen of the Great State of Iowa, I know all about the importance corn syrup plays both politically and agriculturally.

I don't think corn syrup is unnatural or, for that matter, any worse for humans than real sugar. That said, I like the taste of real sugar, glucose, far more. Every time I get to Europe, I find myself binging on all types of soda just because they taste better across the pond.

But in America? Political lobbying assures every processed good in the supermarket is made with subsidized Iowan corn syrup. Yummy! Whenever I'm baking a cake I sure picture myself pouring in the corn syrup.

My point?

Every time I return to Iowa, I end up stealing from and getting addicted to my father's supply of Diet Mountain Dew. Of course, once back in New York, I'm not about to suffer diet soda pops, but my alternative is one corn syrup infused beverage after another.

Except now--due to either consumer fears about the unnaturalness of corn syrup or just sheer marketing--we can get "throwback" Mountain Dew made with real sugar:

My concern: when did our sodapops alter their original formulas to such an extent that putting sugar back into them was a "throwback."

In any case, I don't see why sugar filled beverages need to be a limited time deal here in the United States. We have seemingly endless varieties of low-calorie versions of everything, so why can't we have a permanent sugar version?

At least that way all the moms at the above party wouldn't have to inform their kids about drinking "corn syrup" when everyone understands that sugar actually is sweet.

Freezing Away Corporate Intellectual Property

Further proof that my mind hasn't gotten back into the swing of things at law school, it didn't even dawn on me that Conan O'Brien's divorce from NBC might include losing custody of the Masturbating Bear et al.! Ahh, intellectual property rights!!!

I'm currently taking copyrights, so in a matter of months, I'll be able to pretend I'm an expert on these matters. In the meantime, there's something sad about the potential retirement of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, but what I think is more worrisome is how massive media corporations are so fortunate to reap the benefit of their creative employees. Certainly, Conan's Masturbating Bear was retired before all this drama, frozen in carbonate and/or buried in the back of the The Tonight Show costume room, and now, thanks to the powers that be, you can't even see the bear's farewell.

I understand the power of copyright and intellectual property rights is the power to withhold these creations from the public, but how much intellectual property has been lost as a result of corporate politics? I often wonder if any copies exist of The Wonder Years, lost for all time in squabbles over music rights.

More importantly, corporate influence is constantly expanding the duration of copyright protection beyond any sensible measure. At this point, copyright protection for works made for hire exist for ninety-five years from publication. The House of Mouse has effectively kept Mickey Mouse ::ahem:: in house far longer than Walt Disney could have expected.

Copyright law exists not to ensure corporate profits--or even individual profit--but to encourage the develop and progress of the arts. Maybe in some circles, NBC's ability to lock away vulgar late night creations like Pimpbot 5000 for the next century is a good thing. Me? It hurts the creative well-being of society.