Something Requisitely Witty and Urbane

I Swear, I'm still here

I'm taking a Maymester class and moving tomorrow, so I've been unbelievably busy, but I'm still here and I promise that my much-heralded (by one and all) return to blogging wasn't a lie.

Hopefully I'll at least have time to recount last night's Mavericks/Spurs game (hereafter to be referred to as the Greatest Game in the History of All Basketball - assuming all basketball is confined to games played in Texas).

New Articles

As promised, here are the latest articles I wrote for the school paper.

TABC's Bar Sting Withdrawn After Public Intoxication Arrests Criticized - My favorite, and most newsy article I've written so far.

Overstepping their Bounds - My op-ed about the TABC policy, including a picture of my amazing, incredible girlfriend's arm.

A Suggestion for Disabilites Services - Which is one in a monthly column I intend to write highlighting individual suggestions given to the campus, and how they were acted upon.

How to Start Your Own Blog - The second in my series about blogging, though this piece was slightly truncated (and a little boring).

The first perk I've gotten as a member of the press is that I got an official Press Credential to the Byron Nelson PGA tournament, and will be spending tomorrow there.

Gnawing at my Conscience

On Monday night, I had a Law and Order moment.

I was out with some friends, and had gone to the restroom.  Leaving the restroom, I saw two people leaning against a wall, he pinning her to the wall, making out.  Trying to be inconspicuous, I walked by ignoring them.

I mentioned to some friends, as well as a manager of the establishment who was hovering around our table because he is familiar with some of us, that there were two people really going at it.  Pretty typical bar behavior, for the most part.  We all chuckled about it and then moved on to other things.

About 30 minutes later, four police officers are in the bar and a lady is sobbing in the bathroom.  It's attention-grabbing to say the least.

As best as I can ascertain, the lady called the police claiming that the man had tried to rape her.  Obviously I'm not privy to all the details, but little details get pieced together as conversation and speculation swirl in situations like this.  In the process of the police trying to figure out what had happened, the manager mentioned that I had seen the two of them together, so the police asked me what I had seen.

"Not much," I said.  I told them that I had been walking out and saw them making out.  I couldn't even tell them what either of them looked like, except the color of the man's shirt.

Today, talking to one of the people who were there, I asked if he'd heard anything else about it, and he hadn't.  I recounted telling the police what I'd known, and that I wouldn't even be able to recognize any of them.

"I just think that I'd tell the police I didn't see shit, and keep my mouth shut," he said to me, in a tone of voice that was surprisingly judgmental, but difficult to tell how pointed.  "I mean, in situations like this, I think that both people are probably a little at fault, and it sucks that someone is going to have to go through all kinds of trouble, all because he thought he was going to get some pussy."

I stayed sort of quiet.  For some reason, I can't explain why, I was taken aback by it all.

"Well, I had mentioned it to the manager," I said, "and then he must have told the cops."

My response has bothered me all day, today.  The fact of the matter was simply that: I told a manager, and he mentioned it to the cops.  But something in the way I responded to this guy, today, was more of me trying to weasel out of it and explain that I didn't have a choice.

My conscience has been gnawing at me about it all day, because I'm pretty upset with myself that I responded in such a cowardly way.  The truth is this: A lady says that a guy tried to rape her, I saw something, and I told the cops what I knew.  This same scenario could play out 100 times, and I'd still tell the cops what I saw.  There comes a point where the guy code (for whatever THAT is worth) should be overshadowed by the need to be a decent human being.

I just kinda wish I'd said that, today.

500 Greatest Songs Since You Were Born (assuming you fit into our 25-ish demographic)

Blender has put out a list of the 500 greatest songs since 1980.  The top slots on the list might be a little debatable, trying a bit too hard to establish its underground/indie cred.  That being said, not too many people would try to square off the reigning champ in such lists, "Smells Like Teen Spirit", with "Billie Jean," and, if it comes down to a battle of those two songs, I think Blender gets it right.

At the very least, the top 50 has some interesting, time-killing writing.

Mavs/Spurs - Game 2

Just want to revisit what I said yesterday, about game 1:

It's easy to look at game one as letting a juicy fastball that you could have easily driven get by you, but if you do that, you'll miss the more important point:  The Mavs can play with the defending champs.

And don't look now, but they might be better.

The Mavericks prove me right in Game 2.  They lead the whole game, opening it up to 20 points for most of the game.  As I said yesterday, if you hold the Spurs to 87 points, you'll win most games.

The Mavs didn't hold the Spurs to 87.  They held them to 91.

Yes, their offensive output was more like their typical game, and yes, their defensive effort was indicative of what Avery Johnson has brought to the team and very similar to game 1's effort.  But there was something more important that happened in this game.  The Mavericks, for the first time on the national stage, put to bed the idea that they are a soft, unphysical team.

Quite the opposite, actually:  The Mavericks went for the jugular, and they didn't let go until the Spurs tapped out.

Avery's inspired move to start Devon Harris, the promising second year player who only started four regular season games this year, payed off in spades.  The best player on the court, he drive the lane, he masterfully maneuvered the San Antonio defense, and when he could find a way around them, he went through them.  That elbow (clean, legal, and by no means cheap) that he hit Ginobli with got more than just an and 1: He sent a message that this team, from top to bottom, will scrap for every point.

The Spurs are too good a team to get walked on the way they did and not come back out fighting in game 3, but this one is sweet.  This was the best post-season win in this franchise's history.

If Only They Could Find The Boy Who Could Fly

This is horrible:

Jared didn't know there was a war raging in Iraq until his parents told him last fall -- shortly after a military recruiter stopped him outside a Portland strip mall and complimented his black Converse All-Stars.
             
"When Jared first started talking about joining the Army, I thought, `Well, that isn't going to happen,"' said Paul Guinther, Jared's father. "I told my wife not to worry about it. They're not going to take anybody in the service who's autistic."
             
But they did. Last month, Jared came home with papers showing that he had not only enlisted, but signed up for the Army's most dangerous job: cavalry scout. He is scheduled to leave for basic training Aug. 16.

I don't know it happened, but somewhere along the way military recruiters have positioned themselves to threaten lawyers at the top of the vox populi disdain-o-meter.  Methinks the higher-ups have put much to much pressure on these guys to meet increasingly unmeetable quotas that they will stop at very little to fill them.

Required Viewing

Jim Emerson, the film critic who writes on RogerEbert.com, put together an interesting list.

This isn't like Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" series. It's not my idea of The Best Movies Ever Made (that would be a different list, though there's some overlap here), or that they were my favorites or the most important or influential films, but that they were the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They're what I like to think of as the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat "movie-literate." I hope I can assume these movies are experiences we can all assume we share.

I try to explain to people why movies and music mean so much to me, but I'm beginning to think that, for those who already get it, there's no need to explain and, for those who don't get it, they won't really get it anyway.  Pop culture is more than just fun facts, it's a sort of communal language that those who understand can speak with one another.  Sometimes, watching a movie isn't about burning a couple of hours or providing myself with entertainment as much as it's about connecting myself to a collective consciousness.  The more I've seen, the more connected I'll be.

So, here's the list, I've added asterisks next to the ones that I've seen.

"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) Stanley Kubrick ***
"The 400 Blows" (1959) Francois Truffaut
"8 1/2" (1963) Federico Fellini ***
"Aguirre, the Wrath of God" (1972) Werner Herzog ***
"Alien" (1979) Ridley Scott ***
"All About Eve" (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
"Annie Hall" (1977) Woody Allen ***
"Apocalypse Now" (1979) Francis Ford Coppola ***
"Bambi" (1942) Disney ***
"The Battleship Potemkin" (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946) William Wyler
"The Big Red One" (1980) Samuel Fuller
"The Bicycle Thief" (1949) Vittorio De Sica
"The Big Sleep" (1946) Howard Hawks
"Blade Runner" (1982) Ridley Scott ***
"Blowup" (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
"Blue Velvet" (1986) David Lynch ***
"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Arthur Penn ***
"Breathless" (1959 Jean-Luc Godard
"Bringing Up Baby" (1938) Howard Hawks
"Carrie" (1975) Brian DePalma ***
"Casablanca" (1942) Michael Curtiz ***
"Un Chien Andalou" (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
"Children of Paradise" / "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945) Marcel Carne
"Chinatown" (1974) Roman Polanski ***
"Citizen Kane" (1941) Orson Welles ***
"A Clockwork Orange" (1971) Stanley Kubrick ***
"The Crying Game" (1992) Neil Jordan ***
"The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) Robert Wise
"Days of Heaven" (1978) Terence Malick ***
"Dirty Harry" (1971) Don Siegel ***
"The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972) Luis Bunuel
"Do the Right Thing" (1989 Spike Lee ***
"La Dolce Vita" (1960) Federico Fellini
"Double Indemnity" (1944) Billy Wilder ***
"Dr. Strangelove" (1964) Stanley Kubrick ***
"Duck Soup" (1933) Leo McCarey
"E.T. -- The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) Steven Spielberg ***
"Easy Rider" (1969) Dennis Hopper
"The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) Irvin Kershner ***
"The Exorcist" (1973) William Friedkin ***
"Fargo" (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen ***
"Fight Club" (1999) David Fincher ***
"Frankenstein" (1931) James Whale ***
"The General" (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
"The Godfather," "The Godfather, Part II" (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola ***
"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Victor Fleming ***
"GoodFellas" (1990) Martin Scorsese ***
"The Graduate" (1967) Mike Nichols ***
"Halloween" (1978) John Carpenter ***
"A Hard Day's Night" (1964) Richard Lester ***
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"It's a Gift" (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
"It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) Frank Capra
"Jaws" (1975) Steven Spielberg ***
"The Lady Eve" (1941) Preston Sturges
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean ***
"M" (1931) Fritz Lang
"Mad Max 2" / "The Road Warrior" (1981) George Miller
"The Maltese Falcon" (1941) John Huston
"The Manchurian Candidate" (1962) John Frankenheimer ***
"Metropolis" (1926) Fritz Lang ***
"Modern Times" (1936) Charles Chaplin
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail" (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam ***
"Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman ***
"The Night of the Hunter" (1955) Charles Laughton
"Night of the Living Dead" (1968) George Romero
"North by Northwest" (1959) Alfred Hitchcock ***
"Nosferatu" (1922) F.W. Murnau
"On the Waterfront" (1954) Elia Kazan ***
"Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) Sergio Leone
"Out of the Past" (1947) Jacques Tournier
"Persona" (1966) Ingmar Bergman
"Pink Flamingos" (1972) John Waters ***
"Psycho" (1960) Alfred Hitchcock ***
"Pulp Fiction" (1994) Quentin Tarantino ***
"Rashomon" (1950) Akira Kurosawa ***
"Rear Window" (1954) Alfred Hitchcock ***
"Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) Nicholas Ray ***
"Red River" (1948) Howard Hawks
"Repulsion" (1965) Roman Polanski
"The Rules of the Game" (1939) Jean Renoir
"Scarface" (1932) Howard Hawks
"The Scarlet Empress" (1934) Josef von Sternberg
"Schindler's List" (1993) Steven Spielberg ***
"The Searchers" (1956) John Ford ***
"The Seven Samurai" (1954) Akira Kurosawa ***
"Singin' in the Rain" (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly ***
"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Billy Wilder ***
"A Star Is Born" (1954) George Cukor
"A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951) Elia Kazan
"Sunset Boulevard" (1950) Billy Wilder
"Taxi Driver" (1976) Martin Scorsese ***
"The Third Man" (1949) Carol Reed
"Tokyo Story" (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
"Touch of Evil" (1958) Orson Welles
"The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) John Huston
"Trouble in Paradise" (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
"Vertigo" (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
"West Side Story" (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise ***
"The Wild Bunch" (1969) Sam Peckinpah
"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Victor Fleming ***

56 out of 102 for me.  That's a little better than I expected to do.  I'd be interested in seeing how many my readers have seen.  Do this on your blogs and trackback here, if you feel so inclined.

The Waiter Rule

Office Depot CEO Steve Odland remembers like it was yesterday working in an upscale French restaurant in Denver.

The purple sorbet in cut glass he was serving tumbled onto the expensive white gown of an obviously rich and important woman. "I watched in slow motion ruining her dress for the evening," Odland says. "I thought I would be shot on sight."

Thirty years have passed, but Odland can't get the stain out of his mind, nor the woman's kind reaction. She was startled, regained composure and, in a reassuring voice, told the teenage Odland, "It's OK. It wasn't your fault." When she left the restaurant, she also left the future Fortune 500 CEO with a life lesson: You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she treats the waiter.

This is from a USA Today article which is like manna from heaven for upscale restaurant waiters like myself.

It's funny, because for all table-waiting horror stories I have, the majority of the customers I wait on are genuinely nice, so much so that when you get the occasional rude table it sticks out like a sore thumb.

An interesting fluff article and well worth a read.

Imprisonment

Andrew Sullivan points to this PDF report about the rate of imprisonment around the world, measured by the number of people per 100,000 citizens:

The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, some 714 per 100,000 of national population, followed by Belarus, Bermuda and Russia (all 532), Palau (523), US Virgin Islands (490), Turkmenistan (489), Cuba (487), Suriname (437), Cayman Islands (429), Belize (420), Ukraine (417), Maldive Islands (416), St. Kitts and Nevis (415), South Africa (413) and Bahamas (410).

However, almost three-fifths of countries (58%) have rates below 150 per 100,000. (The rate in England and Wales - 142 per 100,000 of the national population - is above the mid-point of the World List).

Sullivan also points out that Texas has an imprionment rate of over 1,000 per 100,000 in national population. What does it say about my state when we more than double every other country in the world's imprisonment rate, save for its own?

You Have Chosen Wisely

This is so fetch.

Via BB:

Rock journalist Christopher Dawes and his friend/neighbor Rat Scabies (of the punk rock band The Damned) are on a serious quest to find the Holy Grail.

Scabies became interested in finding it after researching the "mystery of Rennes-le-Château," a town in France where a poor priest suddenly became fabulously wealthy in the mid 19th century. Rumor has it that he discovered a treasure trove which included the Holy Grail.

To fund their committed search, Rat Scabies and Christopher Dawes have decided to auction off 2% of the grail to one lucky bidder on eBay.  The contract they've drawn up is truly inspired:

(3) If           the Holy Grail manifests itself as a cup or a chalice or a bowl or some           other kind of vessel for holding liquid, it is hereby agreed that:

       

(i) The Grail Stakeholder will be allowed one sip from the vessel of a beverage of the Grail Stakeholder’s choosing, which beverage to be provided by the Grail Stakeholder at the Grail Stakeholder’s sole expense. The Grail Stakeholder may thereby gain eternal life and the healing of all physical ailments. However, because the Grail Finders cannot be held responsible for the mysterious powers of the Grail and all that, the Grail Finders shall not be held responsible for any failure on the part of the Holy Grail to give eternal life to the Grail Stakeholder, or to alleviate physical ailments, and the Grail Stakeholder hereby warrants to make no claims of any kind against the Grail Finders in the event of such failure.

(5) If the Holy Grail does not manifest itself in physical form and cannot be financially or otherwise exploited in any way, the Grail Finders will do their best to make sure that the Grail Stakeholder experiences whatever experiences can be experienced through, with, from, or as a result of, the Holy Grail on a pro-rata basis commensurate with the  Grail Stakeholder’s overall two per cent ownership of the Holy Grail. However, because the Grail Finders cannot be held responsible for the mysterious powers of the Grail and all that, the Grail Stakeholder accepts this may not be possible, especially if the Holy Grail turns out to be a one-off phenomenon, such as a religious vision of some description. In this event, the Grail Finders will use their best endeavours to recreate    and emulate the phenomenon using recent desktop computer technology for the sole enjoyment, on a one time basis only, of the Grail Stakeholder. The Grail Stakeholder hereby warrants to make no claims of any kind against the Grail Finders with regard to the perceived level of entertainment offered by such emulation.

Go read the whole contract.  As of this writing, the bid is at 100 British pounds, about $185