happy january 17!

today was pretty good as far as first days of your last semester of law school go, i suppose. cold and sunny with snow on the ground (i.e., perfect). a run, a class (albeit one containing nearly every person i studiously try to avoid these days...), chicken with tomatoes and acorn squash, a glass of malbec. "boston legal." watched the genteel jim lehrer politely but relentlessly call out our commander in chief. who actually came off as fairly articulate for a while there. i mean, he was spewing nine kinds of bullshit, but it was fairly articulate. it's sad: i initially wasn't sure whether that gave me some small sense of relief, or just made me angrier. until he made the comment about the "cracked egg," which precipitated the inevitable spiral into his usual frat-boy, dry-drunk, pseudo-folksy nonsense. until he talked about sending "21,000 more kids" to iraq while flashing that goddamn smirk. until he conceded that he had "considered" bringing back the draft. until he admitted that there was "no timetable" for this whole fiasco. then my blood went cold.

recently returned from new orleans, which kind of blew my mind. rather than write here, i will email some of you about it, since it's important and i'm never exactly sure who reads this thing. in the meantime, there's flickr to tell the story.

thanks to everyone who made the birthday so lovely.

personal to poorani and trevor and lauren: the new sloan album is GOOD. i have been burned in recent years, but this is a total return to form. way better than a 30-song sloan album in 2007 has any right to be. they are using piano again!

hey, chicagoans: what are you doing on the 27th (other than an anti-surge protest, maybe?)? remember how i wrote about wee cal robbins? well, a fundraiser has been coordinated, involving some of the most interesting talent in chicago as well as good-hearted, stalwart kansas citians the life and times(!). peep the raffle items too. i am so gunning for the stop smiling subscription. i have become a fan in recent months, but the latest issue prefigures my slavish devotion from here on out. devoured it on my various flights last week. aside from the obligatory cat power feature (pretty interesting actually), there were interviews with: superwriter joan didion, the editor of the new yorker, the executive director of the iraq and afghanistan veterans of america, and the rza, addressing issues as disparate as bobby fischer (and why he was exiled), mythology, and oliver north:

"i ain't going to talk to you about politics, but look at oliver north. delivering drugs and guns and guerilla warfare material to other countries, right? comes back, steals the money--him and reagan split the cheese--and he gets busted for this shit. oliver north got busted, caught, gotcha. now this nigga's on tv every day. "war stories with oliver north" [on fox news]. he's a fucking criminal."

elemental perhaps, but you couldn't get an observation like that out of 95 percent of my law school peers. WU-TANG.