What's that about raining and pouring?

The loaner car has suffered hail damage. I have no idea how THAT's going to play out.

How stupid am I?

I'm $8,298 worth of stupid.

You - every one of you - may now commence feeling superior to me.

I tried to shift into fourth, and got second by mistake. Now my car is at the dealer, and it's going to be over $500 before they even know how bad I fucked it up.

Well, I certainly never thought of that. Justice Thomas points out that the Establishment Clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.") was "evidently designed to leave the States free to go their own way." Thus, it was designed to protect state establishment of religion. Don't know if I was just asleep the day we covered that in U.S. History, or what, but it never even occurred to me to look at it that way.

D'oh.

So the problem with Civil Procedure, the course, is that all the cases are boring. Sure, some of them have interesting fact patterns, but you never get to see how the law applies to the fact pattern, because what you're reading is an appellate decision focused solely on the procedural aspects of the case. In Torts, you get to read a case about a shatter-proof windshield that shatters, and you find out whether the manufacturer was liable, even though the plaintiff didn't buy directly from the manufacturer. In Civil Procedure, you get to read a case about a motorcycle tire that explodes, causing a collision which severely injures the rider and kills his passenger, and you get to find out whether the manufacturer of the faulty valve in the tire has sufficient contacts with the state of California to be sued there.

So it's not bad enough that I get to spend 7 weeks of my life reading these cases for school... Newdow lacks standing.

Psy.

Can't really argue with this:

Also:

Does anybody else have this problem? I don't have the energy to actually look for it, since no good search terms are coming to mind ("Your search - Firefox render shit ass ctchut7eohbyl - did not match any documents"), and I just pull up the offending pages in IE, but I'm wondering if this is something unique to my system, or what. Here's the offending page, but I get it with other pages, too.

For those keeping score at home, the grades for the writing class are finally posted, and I'm satisfied with the grade I got for the effort I put in; still disappointed with myself for putting forth so little effort. Now I get to switch gears from angsting about what grade I got to angsting about how that grade will affect my class rank. That should be much lower-grade angst, though - with the added bonus that I can't check my class rank by hitting F5 every two minutes.

So now the only major writing assignment that stands between me and graduation is the Rigorous Writing Requirement. Woohoo. Of course, I need to get a C+ on that. Ruh roh.

You know, I read these stories about "authority to set aside the laws is inherent in the President," and it suddenly dawns on me how thankful I am that the current administration is so clumsy and stupid.

Well, I should qualify that. I'm open to the possibility that all this "getting caught" crap is part of the con game - that this is the "Golf? Yeah, I play a little." stage of the game, and we're going to find out just how cunning they really are once it's too late to lower the stakes. I would handle it differently, were I trying to take over the world, but I can see where this is an option.

That possibility aside, I can see two possibilities - either the administration is trying to take over the world, and it's really bad at it, or it's genuinely trying to do a good job, and doing it very, very badly. But looking at it from the "trying to take over the world" perspective - and understand, please, that this is just a hypothetical? I'm not saying they are, just "if they were..." - they have managed to get away with so much. Imagine what someone who was truly hell-bent on (say) postponing the 2004 Presidential election could have done. Not that I think it's too late for the present administration to try, assuming that's their kind of thing. I'm just reflecting on how much easier it would be with a President with a 60% approval rating and an administration that was able to avoid scandal entirely instead of merely being really good at shrugging it off.

Last night, I dreamt that I got my writing grade back. I had failed, which was sad. (This would be the second time I've dreamt about getting my writing grade back - the first dream, about a week ago, I passed. I'm hoping to receive the actual grade sometime tomorrow.) The really fun part of the dream, though, was that I got my grade back on a box of Jell-O - printed in a little white square that had been set aside for just that purpose. I'm thinking the whole "posting to the website" strategy is a bit more efficient, but there is something touching about "You failed - but here, have some dessert."

"Isn't [eugenics] breeding... like Hitler?"

Yes. Yes, it is.