bowlinger qua bowlinger

September 17, 2007: Luxembourg. The Court of First Instance, Europe’s main appeals court for challenges to the European Commission, will announce its decision on Microsoft’s appeal of Europe’s biggest antitrust case ever.

September 17, 2007: Chicago. R. Kelly’s trial on charges of child pornography begins.

Re-Update (9/5/2007): The Chicago Tribune is reporting that R. Kelly’s trial date has been indefinitely postponed yet again, this time because the Assistant State’s Attorney gave birth last week. This case has been on the docket since 2002.

besides picking blueberries in dexter, there’s something else you can do there on saturday mornings. you can go on a sailboat! for free!

there’s totally a lake there. and the university of michigan sailing club will take you out on that lake on a boat propelled by the wind!

here’s what you do: wake up relatively early on a saturday morning, take some aspirin for your hangover, drink some coffee, drive down the gravel road leading to the boat house(the gravel road is named strawberry lake road, although you will be going to baseline lake), get out of your car, find the guy with the list, and have him put your name on the list.

if you’re lucky, there will be a guy who reminds you of a kind marine drill sergeant on the shore teaching a bunch of you how to put the sails up on the boat and what all the different ropes and sails and parts are named. he will tell funny jokes and question why ropes are named sheets. you will break into teams of people and practice putting up and taking down the jib and the main sail.

then you’ll be taken out on a little two person boat and you’ll be taught to sail. after you’ve had a few lessons and paid your dues, you can take sailboats out whenever you like, it seems. (it’s probably not whenever, but it sure sounds like it’s pretty much whenever)

hot damn. ann arbor ain’t so bad.

fyi (to those that didn’t already hear) - i tore my ACL a few weeks ago at my family reunion when i landed poorly during a game of volleyball. turns out that i’m going to need ACL arthroscopic reconstruction surgery, which i’m planning on doing in early august. i’ve decided to chronicle the whole experience in a separate blog. the blog isn’t going to be particularly interesting, clever, or funny, rather, it’s just going to be informational about what it’s like to go through this kind of accident: from the injury itself, to surgery, to post-operative physical rehabilitation. feel free to check it out, if you’re so inclined: http://ineedanewknee.blogspot.com/

1. I love how the new version of Firefox spell checks for you. This is quite nearly my dream come true.
2. RDA = Reference Desk Assistant = higher hourly wage for surfing the internet than for the “important, real world” work I do during the day.
3. Why don’t summer starters realize that I will not under any circumstances do their citations for them? Also, if you are doing a legal practice assignment, you might want to bring your bluebook. Just saying.
4. Do people really think it is appropriate to talk on their cell phones in a library? I told three people to turn the damn thing off in the span of two hours.
5. Also, no freaking kids allowed in the library! And I don’t know if there is a professor here that specializes in Mexican law and I don’t know how to find out - I am trying to determine where I am going to live two years from now, so go away!
6. Right now, the building services crew is taking down the Reading Room’s chandeliers - some sort of annual maintenance. I wish I could watch, but I am stuck behind a desk answering questions for idiots.
7. I utilized Firefox’s spell checker twice in that last sentence.
8. Seriously, the next person that comes in here with a child or a cell phone is going to get the stink eye from yours truly.
9. Summer in A2 has turned me into some sort of raving mad harpy. But if this is true, I am well on my way to becoming a true townie.

Apologies for the law school-laden post. I spend ten to twelve hours here on Mondays between the two jobs. Sometimes it messes with my brain.

I had my first post-exam professor sighting. After the fact, I realized what I initially took to be a bizarre grouping of individuals actually had a common trait - they’d all clerked at the Supreme Court.

JL looked as fantastic as ever. She was probably saying something intelligent and witty.

GS gestured emphatically. The others seemed to eat it up. Typical.

RP was a bit of a puzzle. He stood silently in one of my favorite electric bass player postures - feet spread about a yard apart, knees locked, torso upright and twisted towards the audience (or in his case, his colleagues). His head was nodding up and down (to the beat?) as he listened to GS. He also had his hands on his hips, adding a superhero element to his pose.

I think RP was the one who really made me lose it. I was choking on laughter for a half hour after seeing him. I know - I’m pathetic. But I haven’t been exposed to anything as amusing in A2 since the undergrads left. I did see an amazing 6′2″ transvestite hooker in Detroit a week or so ago, but that memory can only sustain me for so long.

One of my favorite things about reading law-related material is laughing out loud at the names of some cases. I don’t know why I find them so funny, and sometimes I worry that it might be a sign of incipient mental illness. Anyway, I’ve made a page where I’ll be keeping track of case names that I find amusing, and I hope that other contributors to this blog will update the page as well, with their own discoveries.

They say that some tens of thousands of new blogs are created every minute, and this is just another one. I’m really not sure where they get those kind of statistics, and if they’re including MySpace blogs as blogs, or what. I’m not even sure who ‘they’ are, or why ‘they’ care about all of these new blogs. All I know is that if this kind of growth is going to continue, we’re all going to have to do our part. Google’s not going to do it for us.

I’d like to think that some of my friends have interesting things to say, and wouldn’t mind getting together to talk about them. Hope seems to spring eternally on the internet. Let’s blog.