Random snippets from today

Posted by T. Greg Doucette on Aug 9, 2010 in Randomness

Not enough time to polish up a full entry for tonight, so I figured I’d go with bullet points of random things that crossed my mind today:

I made some minor behind-the-scenes changes to the blog, mostly to correct bad coding practices I was too lazy to fix before now Â The only thing you might notice is the blog heading: instead of “law:/dev/null – Musings of a Computer Scientist turned Law Student” as one Ã¼ber-huge title string, it’s now just “law:/dev/null” with the second half as a lower-level heading underneath it. It should still visually look the same, but if it doesn’t hit refresh on your browser to make sure your computer isn’t using a cached version of the stylesheet.
The spam problems that prompted this entry on .htaccess files also appear under control (fingers crossed). Spam comments are still annoyingly frequent, but at least with a fleshed-out .htaccess file I’m only averaging 4 a day instead of 50+
I’ve met 3 incoming 1Ls over the past 4 days; two are folks I corresponded with through this blog before I knew they were coming to NCCU Law, and the 3rd today just happened to visit the SBA office while I was in there. It’s a lot of fun being able to answer their questions, but it also reminds me how little (translation: none) exploration I did before Orientation. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so nervous if I had?
After that 2-mile run the other day my muscles were tighter than a Nancy Pelosi facelift. It was a remarkably unpleasant experience. Lots of stretching and untold milligrams of ibuprofen later, I knocked out another 2 miles today. We’ll see how I feel tomorrow… (fingers crossed again)
Speaking of politicians — horrible segue, I know Â — I’ve been really disappointed in this recent GOP talk of trying to amend the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to eliminate birthright citizenship. I mentioned back on Cinco de Mayo that to me there was something fundamentally un-American in penalizing a child for the sins of his/her parent(s). In re-reading the Constitution for ConLaw I next week, I noticed in Article III Section 3 that it bans “corruption of blood”, an old British punishment where the offspring of a parent convicted of a high crime were themselves sanctioned by being disinherited by the government and often condemned to a life of poverty as a result. How sad that the Founding Fathers (who crafted the Constitution) and the ancient Republican Party (who crafted the Fourteenth Amendment) both agree with me on this principle, but the modern Republican Party (of which I’m a member) does not — and would advocate needless tinkering with the most effective and enduring governing document on God’s Earth for the sake of one election…
I’m also disappointed that “Pretty Boy Swag” ranks as high as it does on the iTunes Top 100. When did sh*t like this become mainstream rap?
To close on a more upbeat note, while I was handing out those Orientation t-shirts I met a 3L who came in asking for one. My admittedly-untrained eye thought she looked like she needed a Small, so I apologized and told her we were out of the Smalls and a Medium would be the best I could do. That comment triggered a huge grin and a laugh that I mistook her for someone who needed a small t-shirt (turned out I was off a bit ). My face turned beet red — I don’t really know why in hindsight, I guess just embarrassment for sticking my foot in my mouth? — but I’m glad I brightened her day