Nellie McKay, oh my God . . .

Listening to the new album, and whoa baby. Amazing. Especially the duet with Cyndi Lauper.

Sony, you guys are idiots for letting this girl get away. I mean, she wanted to make a double album for you! The correct answer is, "yes ma'am, thank you."

At least she has a burgeoning Broadway career to fall back on--I'm sure she's awesome as Polly Peachum.

Odds and Ends

I got sworn in at the courthouse yesterday. Woohoo! I just need to get my bar number, then I can sign my own court filings. I've started signing my correspondence "Attorney at Law." I'm the same person I was before I passed the bar, yet I feel so different.

Still no lasting snow. There are flowers outside that are still in bloom. When's winter coming? I'm sick of running in the mud.

Serving subpoenas can either be really uncomfortable, or no big deal, depending on the target.

For governor, should I vote for the moderate Democrat who wants to drill in ANWR, or the Green candidate who's basically invisible?

Baby's first deposition tomorrow. Hope my witness shows up!

Didn't even think about a clever Halloween costume, so I'm gonna go with "Marcel Marceau." Hope the store has some black and white makeup.

My lemon bars turned out weird--stoopid oven. So I think I'll make butterscotch brownies for the Halloween party.

U.S. weapons sent to Iraq are going missing by the thousands? Do tell. Perhaps they're being used to arm the security guards for the parade at which we are greeted as liberators. Or they are being used to teach Iraqis the value of the Second Amendment.

And now, back to the wall.

, Attorney at Law

It has been an incredibly good morning, because I just found out that I PASSED THE FREAKIN' BAR! I get my ticket to the legal profession as soon as I get sworn in. I've been on pins and needles waiting on this lately. Heck, I hardly slept last night. Needless to say, I am ecstatic, so much so that my writing has suffered. So I'm going to get back to work.

Where Is America's Politkovskaya?

Yeah, good question.

The West has used poor Anna Politkovskaya's corpse to do exactly what she fought against: whipping up national hatred, lying, and focusing on evils committed safely far away, rather than on the evils committed by your own country.
. . . .
Why don't we have someone as courageous as she was to tell the story of how we razed Fallujah to the ground Grozny-style? How we bombed to smithereens and ethnically cleansed a city of 300,000 people in retaliation for the deaths of four American contractors? Where is the American Anna Politkovskaya who will tell us about how we directly killed roughly 200,000 Iraqis, and indirectly are responsible for about half a million Iraq deaths since our invasion? Why isn't there a single American willing to risk almost certain death, the way Politkovskaya did, in the pursuit of truth and humanity?

Bar results at the end of the week--on the edge of my seat until then.

Apropos of nothing . . .

. . . but props to stuffonmycat.com. I mean really:

"The Beginning of the End of America"

I'm not much of a Keith Olbermann fan, but this video . . . damn. It's already a few days old, so ignore this if you've already seen it. He quite eloquently lays out the dangers of the Military Commissions Act of 2006--legalized torture, no habeas corpus, no guaranteed right to an attorney, and secret evidence against the accused, among other things. He also puts it in historical context, alongside huge miscarriages of justice like the Alien and Sedition Acts, locking up pacifists during World War I, and internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. And again, the danger is to American citizens, not to mention non-citizens.

My favorite thing about this piece, though? Olbermann says that Bush lied. I never thought I'd hear that on any corporate news outlet, despite it being glaringly obvious.

The text version is here.

I've been to Hell. I spell it . . . I spell it DMV.

It amazes me that the process for getting a drivers license is more complicated now than it was when I was a teenager in the Bush. Four trips to the DMV, just to switch my out-of-state license for an Alaska one. The staff is quite helpful, but it's just a poorly designed system.

And for the first time, my license requires me to wear glasses when I drive. Ah well, my vanity had a good 10 years there.

Iceland Resumes Commercial Whaling

Arglebargle. Iceland is now issuing permits for commercial hunting of minke and (very endangered) fin whales, defying the International Whaling Commission. Part of a disturbing trend--the government of Japan has been bribing small countries with foreign aid to slowly assemble a majority at the IWC to lift the ban on commercial whaling. Ever get nostalgic for those Greenpeace boats that got in front of harpoons in the '70s? Yeah.

In my view, this undermines the case for aboriginal subsistence whaling, which is another soapbox issue for me (I'm happy to send a .pdf of my law review comment, or its journal cite, to anyone with too much free time).

My favorite quote from the article, from the UK Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare: "Iceland has been struggling to sell whale meat obtained since 2003 through its so-called scientific whaling programme. As well as no scientific findings of value being released from this, Iceland has tried and failed to find markets for its whale meat." So this is just a middle finger to people who care about whales, or a boondoggle for the whaling industry?

Bjork, baby, what's going on over there? Talk to them, will you?

Happy Alaska Day

The DMV and courthouse are closed, otherwise everything is about the same. I know I partied all night . . .

The most neglected news story of our time.

Hunger. Hunger hunger hunger. It's not a resource problem, just an injustice problem. And it's a huge problem in this country, as prosperous as it is. And it gives rise to so many health and social problems all over the world. I blame Monsanto and its ilk. Boo-urns!

FISH!

Here's a little bright news from the Russian Far East: all six species of Pacific salmon are thriving on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and the provincial government is trying to create a nature preserve twice the size of Yellowstone to keep it that way. Fingers crossed. It's not like Russia has a stellar environmental record, but then, neither does the U.S..

It always amazes me when politicians show a little vision. With a heaping side of self-interest of course: keeping the salmon population means a viable fishing industry, assuming that consumers know that wild salmon is soooooo much better than that farmed crap they sell in most supermarkets--the salmon that live in big pens off the coast of Chile and elsewhere, wallowing in their own filth and disease. Not that I'm biased or anything.

"Hey, I'm a notary, so I've got that going, too!"

Yes, the esteemed Lieutenant Governor of Alaska, on a break from his strip mall-opening duties, has decided that I pass muster to be a notary public. Watch out: once I get my seal, I'm gonna be notarizing shit left and right. And center. I feel like wearing a green eyeshade.

Now if only I could issue apostilles--a boy can dream, can't he?

Saturday morning antics

These pics are an hour old, and little Dorian Gray is still on the exact same spot.

"The Darkness in Russia"

What a fitting article title--yesterday I saw my first frost in Bethel. I suppose there might have been an earlier frost when I was on vacation for a week, but it's the first one for me.

The Japan Times ran a piece today on three recent high-profile homicides in Russia. The killing of journalist Anna Politkovskaya has received a lot of attention. The killer had the audacity to leave the weapon at the scene, which makes it look like there's no reason for anyone to fear prosecution for this crime. And since 12 Russian journalists have been killed in the past 6 years, and none of the cases have been solved, that's a pretty safe bet. You have to be mighty brave to be an independent journalist in Russia these days. Scary stuff indeed.

The other recent victims were: Andrei Kozlov, first deputy chairman of the Central Bank of Russia who took on corruption in the Russian banking industry (I know a thing or two about that industry, and "corrupt" is a charitable term), and Enver Ziganshin, chief engineer for Rusia Petroleum, partly owned by BP and in the process of being muscled out of the giant Kovykta gas field project by Russian energy behemoths Gazprom and Rosneft. Three unrelated killings, lest I sound like a conspiracy nut, but part of a disturbing pattern nonetheless. Sigh.

The Second Coming

I can't believe it--MacJesus is back! This was just about the funniest thing in the world to me ten years ago. Sacrilicious.

Yay vacation!

So, it's been light blogging lately because I'm in the middle of a weeklong vacation in Boston/Cambridge/Amherst. But today is work day--we're hunkered down over laptops at a coffee shop in Amherst tackling some of the great problems of the world. So, it's a perfect time for a little cyberslacking.

Stanford is 0-6. Sad, so sad.

"Hey, do you feel like it's been too long without a hot war in Caucasus? Something may be coming soon." On a related note, Khakjaan Wessington is convinced that Russia is a military powerhouse on the rise, given its population's higher tolerance for combat casualties, the military's purchasing power disproportionate to its published budget, and the steady growth of the Russian economy. I wonder.

No need to comment . . .

From Wired:

U.N. Parking Ticket Madness

So, there's a lot going on in the world. War, famine, disease, you name it. So what better distraction than a study about diplomatic parking tickets? I actually found this quite interesting--using delinquent parking tickets at the U.N. as a measure of corruption. The blurb about the study was in The Atlantic (scroll down a ways), I found it on BoingBoing, and apparently you can buy the paper as a .pdf here.

From The Atlantic:

Diplomatic Impunity

What makes officials corrupt? Disentangling law and culture is a tricky business, but a pair of economists have come up with an ingenious way to do it: studying the frequency of parking violations committed by diplomats in New York City. Since, as their study reports, there is “essentially zero legal enforcement of diplomatic parking violations,” the authors hypothesized that any cross-national variation in parking-violation rates should flow from culture alone. And sure enough, diplomats from countries with high levels of corruption were significantly more likely to incur parking tickets, suggesting that cultural factors rather than legal norms drive a great deal of official misconduct. The worst offenders were Kuwaitis, who accumulated an astonishing 246 violations per diplomat per year from the end of 1997 through 2002, followed by Egyptians, with 140 violations per diplomat per year; countries whose diplomats incurred no parking tickets included Canada, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. The study also found that officials from countries where the U.S. is less popular were much more likely to park illegally, and that there was a significant drop-off in violations after 9/11, particularly among diplomats from Muslim nations.

Of course, this immediately makes me think of Moscow in '97, when I was living there. Rudy Giuliani started getting tough with the Russian mission to the U.N.--I think he might have even had some of their cars towed. In retaliation, Mayor Yurii Luzhkov of Moscow issued an order to city traffic cops to pull over all cars with plates indicating foreign ownership (that's a lot, trust me).

"They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way."

Back on the Grid

So, I spent the weekend in a real village, Scammon Bay, which was awesome. Did some subsistence duck hunting, and confirmed that I'm a really lousy shot. Oh well, I had fun nonetheless--just a really relaxing weekend, away from the hustle and bustle of Bethel. Lots of good food, and lots of kids running around. And lots and lots of sleep. When I got home, the cat was none too pleased.

Oh, and guess who forgot to bring his digital camera to document the whole weekend? Me, that's who. I won't be so forgetful on my next trip out of Bethel . . .

I had no idea George W. had a webcomic . . .

Thanks, Married to the Sea