Running Diary, part two.

Once again, a running diary from one of my classes. Probably the last one I'll do for a while. Here's how class went.

1:28:22 PM- Prof. Has decided to start class early, I'm guessing she will make up for it by dismissing us late.

1:30:08 PM- Prof. Essentially doubles our homework load for the weekend and laughs about it. Someone's car is getting keyed.

1:32:06 PM- Prof. asks "Why do you think I am giving you so much work on affirmative action?" At least a dozen students silently scream, "Cause you are the devil!"

1:34:20 PM- Prof. announces that our journals will be due November 15. In other news I will be typing a journal furiously on November 14.

1:39:23 PM- Our Professor explains how a hypothetical involving a very unflattering portrait of anti-gay activists is "based on an actual case." Good thing she captured the one-dimensional aspect of all people who oppose homosexuality who, as we all know, are hate filled homophobes who only speak shrill irrational epithets and are incapable of any kind of logical thinking.

1:42:12 PM- Our one sided hypo is being answered by Jake. Jake is fairly right wing so this should be good.

1:43:05 PM- The professors phone starts ringing. With luck it's her shrink telling her to pick up her lithium.

1:48:50 PM- We're still working our homosexual hypo. This could go on for a while.

1:49:52 PM- Prof. yells at Jake for not knowing an obscure case that she has "cited 3 times in class." Geez Jake, it's not like you have other stuff in your life that's more important than this class. Try to keep up, dude.

1:53:33 PM- She's finally off Jake's ass. Inku is the next victim.

1:54:08 PM- Inku commits Hari Kari and says he didn't do the journal entry. He gets off the hook in a matter of seconds. Inku gets points for being mad smart.

1:56:45 PM- Professor seems to be getting worked up. There could be an explosion before the end of class.

1:59:22 PM- Professor says "This could be a fun exam question." She has the same look in her eye that Jack Bauer gets before tearing off a terrorist's nipples with rusty pliers.

2:04:20 PM- Professor talks about how no one got the point she was trying to make when she used the hypo on a test. Most people in this situation might take this as a negative reflection on their teaching ability.

2:05:08 PM- Prof. wonders aloud, "Maybe I'm a bad teacher." 40 heads start nodding. Sadly, I'm pretty sure she didn't notice.

2:09:56 PM- 40 minutes of class, still no bar material.

2:11:24 PM- Prof uses the never before heard word "differentialis." I'm guessing that it is a combination of different and Cialis, two things I'm sure she's very familiar with.

2:12:45 PM- Someone mentions Kennedy and the Prof starts doing a dance. In other news, I finally found the only thing more scary than The Exorcist.

2:14:50 PM- Professor seemed to finally be willing to move on, and some student decided to ask a question and pull her back in. Thanks a lot, jackass. You are now the law school equivalent of a prison snitch. Go watch Oz and see what lies in your future.

2:18:18 PM- Someone mentions that the Republican Party has a lot of homosexuals in it. Maybe, but, "We don't got Britney, We don't got Lindsay Lohan…."

2:20:16 PM- Prof. is dancing again. This dance bears an uncanny resemblance to Elaine's dance from Seinfeld.

2:22:36 PM- Hold on, we may be getting into something that might be useful for the bar.

2:24:59 PM- False alarm.

2:25:55 PM- Prof. asks "How many women can lift 200lbs?" I'm feeling real good about my bar exam. That $27 grand in tuition? Money well spent because I am learning so many useful things.

2:27:25 PM- Prof asks, "How many men can lift 200 lbs?" There are a lot of pansies in this class.

2:32:06 PM- Professor places a tent over her head. We've officially left law school and entered a David Lynch film. Any moment now the room is going to be stormed by backwards talking midgets.

2:35:54 PM- Twenty minutes left and I'm still searching for something that could be useful on the bar. At this point, O.J. has a better chance of finding the real killer.

2:45:41 PM- It's soapbox time. That's the point where the Professor rails against the evils of humanity and I tune out and read tvguide.com's synopsis of tonight's Episode of the office.

2:47:47 PM- Professor mispronounces Rudy Giuliani's name. Class is too busy reading about tonight's episode of the Office to care. I really hope that Pam and Jim dating doesn't kill that show.

2:50:50 PM- Prof. asks "How many do not like poor people?" I don't. They don't pay their fair share of taxes, they get free health care, and they drive the price of cocaine way up. We'd be better off without them.

2:53:42- PM Professor again wonders why no one comes to see her in her office to work through a hypo. I can't speak for anyone else, but personally, I'd rather slit my wrists and do push ups in salt water.

2:54:47 PM- Class is over. Our long nightmare is over.

Running Diary

Here is the running diary from one of my classes today.

1:40:21- Prof. confesses never having eaten twinkies as a child. Apparently twinkie deprivation can cause lesbianism and bitchiness later in life.

1:42:07 PM- Matt texts me and tells me we may have a make up class for this section tonight at five. I start to die a little inside.

1:50:37 PM- Conversation turns to children in casinos. The class doesn’t seem to have any problem with the kids being in bars or casinos.

1:58:03 PM- Class has now been going on for almost a half hour and we haven’t actually learned anything.

2:05:07 PM- Prof. uses the phrase “The other critique” 5 times in quick succession. I smell a drinking game.

2:08:45 PM- Prof. confesses that she wants us to regurgitate on the exam what she tells us in class. Thank heaven she told us now before I started trying to think for myself.

2:12:19 PM- It is confirmed, there is a makeup lecture today at five. Sadly, I forgot my cyanide pills at home today.

2:15:24 PM- One of the five people who insist on talking every class in spite of having nothing to say makes her first comment. Normally this happens in the first five minutes of class. She must be feeling ill today.

2:17:32 PM- We start to talk about a case arising out of an Anti-Hippie statute. Comments are made by people who have been observed eating special brownies.

2:21:41- We’re talking about a law that discriminates against retarded people. The more I sit in this class the more I think there are not enough laws discriminating against retarded people.

2:25:12 PM- Our serial hand raiser makes another comment. I can’t for the life of me figure out why she doesn’t just jump up and down and scream “LOOK AT ME!!!! I AM SO SMART!!! I KNOW THINGS!!!” No one cares girl. I’m reading spoilers for tonight’s episode of Gossip Girl and you are distracting me.

2:27:07 PM- Prof. says “I can’t see what hippies and retarded people have in common.” Several people in class bite their lips to keep from laughing.

2:29:54 PM- Class begins to discuss an Amendment in Colorado that discriminates against gays. Professor is a very out of the closet Lesbian. This should be fun. I’m guessing that the word bigot or homophobe come out in the next five minutes.

2:31:14 PM Professor totally misstates the law in question. She’s not letting her personal feelings on the issue cloud her judgment at all.
2:33:13 PM- Student tries to point out Professor’s error. Prof.’s not budging.

2:35:27 PM – It just hit me that the power point slides have more colors than usual. A veritable “rainbow” if you will…

2:38:41 PM- We are ten minutes into the “professor stands on a soapbox and defends gays.” Portion of class.

2:40:06PM- We’ve now shifted into the “Scalia is a wrongheaded bigot” portion of class.

2:42:21 PM- The other girl who feels the need to comment several times in class now objects to legislating morality. It seems like time stops in this class to allow people extra time to say idiotic things.

2:45:48 PM- Prof. makes the startling pronouncement that “Pedophiles aren’t popular.”

2:48:20 PM- Class embarks on a discussion on polygamy. Lots of the class is Mormon. This should be fun.

2:53:14 PM- One class member says that polygamists were never persecuted. Tune in for tomorrow’s class where we talk about how the Holocaust never happened.

2:54:34 PM- Another class member says "Maybe polygamists were put in jail, but they weren't subjected to violence that gays were." The twelve Mormon students in the class all cough loudly and Brad wonders aloud if the bullets in Parley Pratt's back had been inserted there for medicinal purposes.

2:55:34 PM- Class mercifully ends.

That's all for class today. Tune in Thursday for more.

NBC doesn't get it.

For anyone who hasn't heard, NBC recently pulled its contents from iTunes. Word on the e-street is that NBC wanted to raise the price of video downloads to $4.99 an episode, while iTunes wanted the price to be $0.99 or less. Recently, word has come down that NBC is going to offer their content on their own independent download service, which they are hoping to market as a viable competitor to iTunes. NBC will make their videos available for download a week after the show airs, for free. The downloaded shows will have commercials embedded in the file that the user will not be able to skip through, and the file will expire a week after download.

What does this mean? It means you should start shorting your NBC stock.

Could there be a program more destined for failure? This is just another example of corporate decision making that is out of touch with modern society and a business model that ignores the way things are. NBC is making the same mistake that record companies continue to make and that continues to feed illegal downloading. They are ignoring what consumers want and acting as if they can control their product.

Consumers do not want to watch commercials, and they hate DRM. For those of you who don't know what DRM means, it's the copyright protection that companies attach to your music or movie file to keep you from giving it to other people. In short, when you download a song from iTunes, or Walmart music, or anywhere else, you really aren't buying the song, you are buying the right to listen to the song on one machine, and to burn the song onto a cd a certain number of times. You are buying an inferior product. If you went out and bought the CD, you could rip the file to your computer, copy it an infinite number of times, and distribute it as you see fit.

DRM is the reason that there are 100 million music downloads from iTunes in the same space of time as 1 billion illegal downloads. Consumers have rejected DRM. Consumers have the obstinate view that if they pay for music, they should own it. Illegal downloading of music will not stop while you have to pay $1 for a song you will never truly own. You're better off downloading the song off Limewire. The risk of being sued is so low that consumers are willing to run the risk and go get the product they want. Steve Jobs, head of Apple, and by extension, iTunes, knows this, and has been fighting tooth and nail to get the record companies to dump DRM, but they won't budge.

What the music industry should be doing is abandoning DRM and lowering the price of music. Most consumers would gladly pay 25 cents for a song for the guarantee that they own the song and not having to risk a lawsuit. Record executives resist this idea because they think that if they remove DRM then there will be more pirating. That idea is stupid. Pirated music is not hard to find, and even with DRM's in place music piracy is RAMPANT. Music companies seem to take the view that "if we just sue enough people, we can turn this around and force people to do things our way." It's ludicrous. How could you ever hope to stop a billion downloads? How could you ever hope to even make a dent in that kind of movement? The answer is they can't. Downloads increase every year. Record companies are far better off conceding defeat and adjusting to meet the changing market. It's painfully obvious to everyone but the record companies that this is how it must be. The record companies no longer control the product and now they have to deliver the product to the public on its terms or the public will go elsewhere. This is the lesson that NBC seems to have also missed and its what insures NBC's new service will be a loser.

As it stands right now, you can download any episode of any NBC program for free, two hours after it airs on the east coast, in fairly decent quality, from the internet, with no commercials, and the file will be yours as long as you want it. The only limitation is the speed of your internet connection (it's nearly impossible without high speed) and the space on your hard drive. You can download the entire season of 24 and wait til the last episode has aired and then watch the whole season at once to avoid the maddening suspense that comes with trying to watch that show as it airs. You can send the files to your friends. The file is yours to do with as you please. You essentially own it. NBC wants you to download a show from their website a week after it airs and then impose limitations on your viewing. The public isn't going to go for it, not when there is a better product available, and its stupid to think they will. People who want the show with no restrictions are just going to take their chances and get the product they want somewhere else.

What NBC should have done was offered a competitive product. 50 cents for a TV show with no DRM restrictions. Or even better, free the day after it airs possibly a short add at the beginning. I realize that TV networks think that downloads hurt their DVD sales, but so far there is no real evidence to back that up. Besides, until the internet has the bandwidth to transmit shows in HD, online downloading is never really going to be a threat to DVD sales, especially Blu-Ray/HD-DVD sales.

The bottom line is, NBC needs to realize it has to compete with people who are offering a better product at a lower price, and no matter what they do, that product is always going to be available. NBC, it's time to quit living in denial and start competing in the present.

Pando

Frequently, people will tell me about a new album, TV show, Movie, etc. that they just saw. When people say, you've got to see ________, your first reaction is to try and find it yourself. However, it's a pain to track files down and download them. Also, if you've ever downloaded an album or show onto your computer, you know that the files are very large. The average episode of LOST is around 350 megabytes. Sometimes you're lucky and your friend has burned whatever file in question onto cd/dvd/jump drive. However, if you are like me, your friends are spread out all over the country. So, if you want to share an album with someone who lives far away from you, how do you do it?

The answer is a brilliant and free program called Pando, available at pando.com
Pando allows you to send very large files by email. You simply type someone's email into Pando, and you upload the file to Pando's server. Then, the person receives an email with a pando attachement. He clicks the attachment, and pando opens on his computer and downloads the file. It's great for moving large files to people all over the country. So if you want to share a song with your friend who lives the next state over, you just point and click. It's a great program and I highly recommend it to everyone.

P.S. I in no way condone or advocate illegal downloading or piracy no matter how evil record/movie companies are.

Open letter to CBS

Dear CBS,

This is not a letter; it's an intervention.

Look, I understand the decision to put Katie Couric on the news. She had good ratings on her old network, she seems so sweet on the air. It was a good gamble. Really, it was. But the time has come to face reality. She's not working out. She's awful. She doesn't have "it." Audiences hate her, and no one watches her. She doesn't have the "gravitas" of a news anchor. Time to admit your mistake and move on. She's unwatchable. I'm begging you to replace her. It's not that she's a woman. I don't care if you replace her with another woman. You could replace her with a hyper-literate iguana who does the news via sign language and it would be an improvement. Cut your losses and walk away. You're both just embarrassing yourselves and it needs to stop.

Sincerely,

A concerned former viewer.

Links, House Cleaning, Etc.

So once again, I've reformatted the blog. I was having too many problems with the other template and it was driving me insane so I just changed it. Besides, the picture of the tree was really getting on my nerves. Expect the blog to change templates again in a few days when I finally force myself to learn html.

You may notice that I've updated the links section. I tried to provide a link for some of the people I know who have blogs and actually update them. If you feel left out, just drop me a line and I will add your blog. New to the links section is Paul's blog, which I've mentioned in the blog before. Paul is an old friend from my Provo days and his humor is the stuff of legend (remember when we told everyone Emily was a widow!?). I also added a link to Peter's blog. Peter grew up down the street from me and now happens to be the leading authority on immigration policy on the west coast.

I also put in a link for Lileks, whose site specializes in twisted commentary on old advertising. Trust me it's hilarious. If you've ever sat through an Andrew WK video with me, or church for that matter, you know that this is exactly the kind of thing that would appeal to my twisted sense of humor.

Finally, I was going to link to my friend Sterling's blog, but he insists upon never updating it, in a dramatic statement of web based irony. While I respect his artistic expression of apathy, I'm not linking to it until he puts up new stuff. In his place I put John Mayer's blog. Whatever you may think of the man's music, his writing is hilarious. If you never saw his one-off tv show send me an email and I will Pando it over to you with all due speed. Here's a small taste


Other fun stuff I've run into on the web lately:

Great article on Mental Floss about how the KKK started as a pyramid scheme. That's right, the most evil and hateful organization in America started out as a way to sell custom made sheets.
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/7912

Good rundown from the guys over on Freakonomics about whether the Surge in Iraq has been effective.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/is-the-surge-working-ask-the-data-not-the-politicians/

For those of us who lament the death of television as a medium to promote music, the A.V. club has 13 signs that MTV hates you.
http://www.avclub.com/content/feature/13_signs_that_mtv_hates_you

Brilliant parody of both far left and far right movie reviewers.
http://moralmovies.blogspot.com/

If you ever watched Star Trek: The Next Generation, you probably developed a pathological loathing for a certain Wesley Crusher. The actor who played the galaxy's most annoying teenager has gone on to become a successful author and blogger. In an effort to atone for his Wesley related sins, Wil Wheaton periodically publishes a hilariously snarky episode guide for ST:TNG. It's very funny and if you ever watched the show, you show check out his blog, it is hysterical. Wheaton gets bonus points to his frequent references to alt.die_wesley_crusher.net
http://www.tvsquad.com/bloggers/wil-wheaton

Noted LDS author, Orson Scott Card, runs a blog on which he reviews pretty much everything. The author of Ender's game has, what I can only describe as "interesting" taste in movies, but his reviews are well thought out and entertaining.
www.hatrack.com

Finally, back when I was a lowly freshman at BYU, Eric Snider wrote a column for the Daily Universe, BYU's almost entirely unreadable newspaper. He's gone on to become a professional columnist and movie critic. I highly recommend his website, especially his movie reviews. Do yourself a favor and read the reviews of movies he DIDN'T like (anything with a D grade or worse).
www.ericdsnider.com

Happy Birthday Little Danny

Dear Little Danny,

It’s your birthday, shout hoo-ray!

Your one more year older today.

A little bit wiser and closer to death,

Closer to hair out your ears, and foul smelling breath.

I’m guessing this day goes by in a whirl,

With presents from family, and kisses from girls.

Present from Mom, and Money from Dad,

A hug from Amanda, and a poem from Brad.

Why didn’t your brother get you a real gift?

Why, cause he wanted to give you a present with thrift.

Anyone can give you presents with class

But your brother Brad finds that to be crass.

He’d much rather give you something with style,

Something you’ll remember for more than a while.

A poem from the heart that goes to your head,

It’s all Brad can afford; he’s out of bread.

He spent all his money on the A/C in his truck

The week of your birthday, darn all the luck!

He wishes he could get you something real grand,

But it hot here in Vegas, he hopes you understand.

But a poem from Brad beats any gift,

It can make you feel better, give you a lift.

It doesn’t need batteries or fancy software,

It never breaks down; no need to repair!

Yes a poem from your brother’s a very fine thing,

Better than diamonds, it’s fit for a king.

So on this, your birthday, I want you to know,

I’m so glad you’re my little bro.

Happy Birthday Little Danny,

(Please girls, whack him on the fanny)

How to be a hated Professor

How a Law Professor can guarantee that he/she will be hated.

1) Try as hard as you can to focus on background material and abstract theory. The less likely something is to be on a test, or be useful later on in life, the more time you should spend on it.

2) Try to avoid anything that could appear on the bar. Just because your students have accrued tens of thousands of dollars of crippling debt in the hopes that they will be able to pass the bar exam is no reason for you to try and help them with that. It's far more important to have intellectually stimulating conversation.

3) Make sure your intellectual conversation is liberally biased and any conservative or moderate thought is reviled. Take extra care to point out that anything written by Scalia is wrong and must be dismissed simply because he wrote it. Try and underline as often as you can that he doesn't belong on the court and that law professors hate him.

4) When discussing a case, try and drag the case out as long as you can. Sure, Brown v. Bd. of Education is only 4 pages long, but make sure you spend several class periods on it. Repeat yourself endlessly and make sure to waste a lot of time analyzing the case from different viewpoints.

5) Pay close attention to minute unimportant details of a case. Torture students for several minutes as to why a name in the case might be misspelled, then tell them the answer. Whatever you do, obscure the important law in the case. The class should leave the room wondering, "Why did we read that?"

6) Randomly triple your students' workload. Make sure to act like yours is the only class the students have. If you have to cancel a class, make sure that you schedule a makeup class at an inconvenient time and add an extra writing assignment. You should make sure that the students pay for any of your mistakes.

7) Waste student time with writing assignments. Since you don't actually teach your students anything, there's no real reason for them to do the reading. In order to make sure they do the reading, add writing assignments and other wastes of time.

8) Do not, for any reason, prepare your students for the final. The final is close to 100% of their grades, so you should try to make them as nervous as possible about it. Make sure that all questions are overly broad and could not possibly be answered. Try to test on vague and unimportant things.

9) If at all possible, make sure most of the final covers a topic not introduced until the final week of class.

10) Schedule a review session, but make sure it's unproductive. Don't give any help that could relate in any way to the final.

11) Turn in your grades late. Remember, rankings, scholarships, law review, and a whole host of other things are dependent on grades, so try to hold everyone up as much as you can. Try to aim for the lowest justifiable curve. Try to ruin the greatest number of lives with as much casual indifference as you possibly can.

50 on 50

All right y'all, this is my 50th post as a blogger. To commemorate the 50th instance of bored ramblings from an unremarkable mind, I tried to come up with something special. First, you'll notice that I updated the blog's design and placed a way feng shui picture of a tree at the top of the blog. I've given considerable thought as to what my 50th post should be. I thought about blogging about the apostasy filled church meeting last week, or my mechanics inability to fix my air conditioner regardless of the significant monetary sums paid to him, but those didn't seem right. I then considered doing a rundown of some new tunes that are playing in my mp3 player lately, but that seemed to standard and I haven't really had any good tip offs about up and coming indie artists lately. I was going to do a running diary of the VMA's but decided that mere words were insufficient to convey just how bad that whole freak show was. I then briefly considered doing an update on the presidential election in the form of another "If they were bands" post, but decided I would save it for later in the week. Instead of all of these, I've decided to blog about the most historic 9-11 commemoration that will ever happen. An event so monumental that your children's children will be talking about it. I'm talking, of course, about the rap battle between Kanye West and 50 Cent that airs tomorrow, September 11, on the BET program 106 & Park (check local listings for times).

Some of you might be thinking, "I don't like rap, how could this possibly affect me?" Well, I don't like terrorists, but somehow, they keep affecting my life. More to the point, it's important that we be aware of our surroundings and the important events that occur in our world, and this is the most important rap beef since Biggie and Tupac.

That fight did impact your life whether you know it or not. Tupac died, basically eliminating the most socially conscious voice in the mainstream rap/hip-hop community at the time. Then Biggie died, and Puff Daddy was able to prostitute the memory of his friend to make millions of dollars degrading classic rock tunes by sampling the music and replacing the lyrics with the tripe that had the musical nutritional value of a twinkie. His success perpetuated itself on selling an image, through flashy music videos and eye-catching public appearances. The music industry realized that it didn't need people with talent to create music sensations and rushed to put out pre-fabricated stars who valued image over substance. Subsequently, kids quit spending money on musically talented alternative acts or worthwhile hip-hop artists and started spending their money on Britney Spears, AFI, Ja Rule, and other "artists" whose image was strictly manipulated by the record companies. Since the music was no longer important, there was no need to to sell CD's. Why listen to a music act whose whole appeal is derived from being seen? Since the Music was no longer important, MTV quit playing music video, preferring instead to show reality shows of Abercrombie models and rich spoiled brats being as promiscuous and titillating as possible to drive up ratings. When music videos were shown, they were constantly interrupted by annoying visuals and distractions so no one would notice the sub-par music. To compensate for lost CD revenue, record companies drove the price up (which they'd been doing for years anyway). Prices topped out at a ridiculous $20 or more for a CD which might only have one good song. Music lovers tried to fight back by downloading the music they wanted and avoid paying obscene fees for music. Most real musicians were secretly delighted as they only cared about having their music heard. They only made an average of 50 cents off a CD anyway. However, a few control hungry bands (I'm talking to you Lars Ulrich) and greedy record producers combined to shut Napster down. Technology found a way and music downloading continued to flourish on limewire and Kazaa, a company designed and conceived with one express purpose, avoid litigation. Music downloading made consumers the boss, and allowed them to find the artists they liked. Artists focused on putting their music out there for people to hear, on the net or on myspace, and contented themselves with making money off concerts and licensing fees (Is there a flaming lips song that hasn't been used in a car commercial?). The indie scene flourished and is in the middle of a dramatic renaissance. Subpop, an indie label famous for signing Nirvana and other acts I guarantee you know and love, is now one of the hottest labels out there. The indie band, The Shins released an album this year that debuted at #2 on the charts. Now, I'm not saying that the Biggie Tupac fight caused all of this, but the current state of music has its roots in a rap beef that has directly and indirectly influenced music in the years subsequent.

So, why is the Kanye v. 50 battle important? Neither of them can hold a candle to NWA or Tupac. Neither of them are especially intelligent (50 Cent is a barely literate felon and Kanye, well, just go watch the clip of him an Mike Myers on the Hurricane Katrina fundraiser). The importance in this rap battle comes from a fundamental difference in style and background. Kanye is the son of an English professor and was raised in an upper middle class home. 50 cent is the child of a drug dealer. He grew up on the streets and went to jail. This fight is about two different outlooks and two different styles. Which view will win out? The results might tell you something about our society. I know I'll be watching.

The Issues

So, today was probably the worst church meeting I've been to since I've moved to Vegas. I'll probably blog about it later this week, but the horror is too fresh in my mind to blog about it right now. The upshot is, I really want to go to a new ward, and might even consider a family ward just to get out. Anyway, to ease my pain, I've spent the day immersed in socially conscious New Zealand music. My friend Matt recently turned me on to Flight of the Conchords and I'm hooked. Below is one of my favorite Flight of the Conchords videos. Usually, I prefer more esoteric Indie Rock, but I think that the issues that they break down in this song are so universal that they appeal to everyone, and they certainly spoke to me. Enjoy.