I think I look the captain from Das Boot with the full beard...and the goatee is boring...but, I WANT commentary.

Maybe I'm getting due for a different car...

So, on the way home for Thanksgiving, the roads were horrid, and a number of cars were stuck or disabled at the side of the road. Of the ones that I stopped for, only one stands out: an early 1990's Oldsmobile. It was a rusty, barely functional car, stopped at the roadside with the hood up. The owner was pouring brand X antifreeze into the radiator when I stopped:

Bob: So, hey, are you OK?

Redneck: Yeah...

Bob: You sure? You need any tools or anything? Can I help you with it?

Redneck: Naw...I just gotta add coolant every 30 miles or so.

Bob: Ok...You sure that we can't fix the leak or something?

Redneck: No....Hey, you want to buy another one of those?

Bob: Heh....Heh, no, I can only drive one at a time.

Redneck: Naw, you can put mine up on blocks for parts for that one you're driving. Hell I have it in my yard for parts, but I don't need it any more now that I traded up to this car. Think about it, you gotta need parts.

Full Beard and Goatee pictures should be up within the week...

So. Starting sometime in the next week or so the inevitable end of the semester hell will descend. The entire month of December will be spent in near hibernation in the law library cramming my mind full of all the intricacies of Corporate Law that I should have learned in August when I wasted away lazy days without regard to the horrors I was postponing. As usual, the onset of fall exam hell corresponds with snow and crappy weather, which started today, simultaneous with the first small breezes of anxiety over a massive 7,000 word paper that I'm ill prepared for. I am desperately happy that law school is only 3 years long, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

In order to take a small, undeserved break from the studying, I'm moving a new and rather unique item of furniture in to my room this weekend. The idea is to methodically polish the heck out of it while studying. That is, if the 150lb weight doesn't break through the floor and kill the poor girl underneath me.

The whole 3L job hunt is scary, tedious, and at times amusing. Keeping with the cardinal rule of blogging, nothing about the topic will be posted here for some time, but when I can, I shall have some amusing stories to tell. In the meantime, I still haven't accepted a final offer anywhere, so keep your eyes peeled with regards to positions for patent attorneys.

I've gone from clean shaven, to a full beard and back to clean shaven this semester, with brief stops at goatee and trucker-stasch. I'm currently leaning towards a full beard again, though, currently I'm just a day scruffy. Opinions? (I don't personally have any photographs to post of the various options, but my friends do...so email them and I'll post them.)

Interesting interview in Christianity Today about church/state relations. I know that Talcott and Jared Cook have hashed some of this out in the past, but I thought Ted Haggard had some excellent points.

I need a 12 step program, or intervention, or something. I've been killing baby seals again.

I read worldnetdaily about once a week...sort of like the onion. Like the onion? Yes, like the onion, because apparently the clever engineers at GM are Reagan conservatice, being that they install daytime running lights on pretty much everything. Oh, I know, perhaps the intrepid journalists at worldnetdaily factored out daytime running lights, but ehh, I doubt it.

Ice heathen from the north

So I read Rolling Stone. I suppose it is the literary equivalent to inhaling ether: you can't really be proud of it in sophisticated circles, but it feels pretty good at the time. Anyway, usually the quality of writing is pretty decent, and the most recent issue has an interesting piece on the latest round of intelligent design court cases. I strongly disagree with the author's conclusion about the relationship between evolution and religion, but I have to admit, I'd love to be accused of being an "smart ass ice heathen from the north."

And in another attempt to get rid of Dean Barker via Heart Attack...

Casual sex in Hillsdale.

Halloween

A. I had a mostly normal childhood.

B. My parents are great people.

C. The somehow managed to screw up Halloween.

I never got to go trick or treating when I was young. I hadn't really thought about it for years, if ever, but this weekend I realized that I totally missed out on that part of American cultural tradition. My parents live some 3 miles from Montpelier, OH, a rather average small town of 4,500 in Northwest Ohio. Although I suppose I could have trick or treated at the handful of neighbors we had out in the country, it was never suggested, and I doubt they would have had candy to give out to the 2~5 possible children they might get each year. So, that left the possibility of trick or treating in Montpelier itself. Unfortunately, Montpelier was in the grips of some sort of candy-tampering paranoia at the time, and was conducting a school sponsored candy distribution.

The way it worked is that you showed up at the school on a designated night around Halloween with or without costume. You could participate in a costume judging contest, but mainly you stood in a long line with all the other children to receive your allotment of candy. (That's right, Children on the government's candy dole.) So, after standing in this line, in the cold, for an hour or so, you received a bag of candy and went home. In fact, as this was occurring near the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the USSR, whenever I heard about soviet or east German citizens standing in lines for food, I thought it was like the Halloween candy distribution. Sometime after I gave up on the Candy Distribution they either eliminated it entirely, or simply officially gave it as an alternative to the regular official trick-or-treat hours (daylight weekend only times near Halloween). At that point I was sort of, as I remember, too old to be interested, and wrote off the whole holiday.

Oh, I did carve the jack o' lantern (always outfitted with a flashlight, I only recently discovered that some families use real candles), and eat candy, but I never did anything else with the trick or treating.

Sometimes, I've heard conservatives complain that they are unfairly labeled as heartless jerks. For those conservatives that wonder why the heartless jerk label:

Ryan Thompson posts about food stamps:

"The food stamp program angers me a lot because those people end up buying better food than the average American. They have prime rib several times a week while the average American might only have it once or twice a month if they are lucky. Furthermore, people often use these programs to buy junk instead of feeding their children properly. They are just creating another generation of slobs who will drag down our healthcare system too."

My views on the topic are in the comments, but for those too lazy to follow links:

A. I don't care if you want to oppose food stamps for philosphical reasons.

B. Making up BS about prime rib ignores those pesky statistics that show that the average food stamp family is scraping by on $640/month while feeding 2.3 people.

So, I have a bunch of half-finished ideas floating around, and I've decided to dump them out incomplete over the next couple of days, rather than let them exist in the non-ending limbo of my "Bookmarks" folder.

Vaccination.


So, I ran into this nifty comic book about the history of polio the other day, and since then, I've been debating a post about vaccination in general. Earlier this summer, I read the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. article purporting to link autism and mercury preservatives in vaccination, and did a bit of research on the topic, finding a number of good critical sources on the mercury issue. At the time, I was disappointed with Salon/Rolling Stone, and amused to see Slate spank Kennedy's butt, but thought little more about it. I've always been rather pro-vaccination (despite a wildly irrational personal dislike of needles), and found most anti-vaccination arguments to boil down into a selfish dependence on freeloading on herd immunity combined with scientifically weak supposition.

So, anyway,the other day, when considering the merits of the chicken pox vaccine for myself, I was exposed to yet another round of silliness about vaccinations, namely that the use of mercury preservatives in vaccinations intended for export amounts to a medical ethics problem on the scale of Tuskegee or Mengele. This is, well, silly. Vaccinations intended for the 3th world are very likely to be shipped in multidose bulk containers, and used in less than ideally sterile environments. After the 1928 Bunaberg staph disaster, it has been a serious public health issue to provide anti-microbial preservatives in multidose vaccination vials. Thimerosol happens to one of the safer, cheaper options, not some wild conspiracy to screw over the poor.