random roundup

Apologies for the lack of interesting, original content of late. Things have been busy. I have actually resorted to Leechblocking myself from most sites of interesting content, and trying not to read too much political coverage because I used to be prone to anxiety attacks. This results in less material for the blog, sadly.

Anyway! This week's random roundup:

1. This is why I don't watch the current crop of TV shows about privileged, rich white high school kids. At least Buffy, while conventionally pretty and in a former life a cheerleader, was about as outsider as you could get with her supernatural slayer powers and penchant for bad boy vampires, and Veronica Mars is one sassy little blonde P.I. with more cojones than most dudes out there. There's nothing interesting to me about shows like The O.C., the new 90210, Gossip Girl, ad nauseum. Blergh.

2. I am a big fan of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot series. The recent discovery of her tapes is exciting.

3. If you do not Google people before the first date, you are technologically backward, have a too romantic conception of dating's magical mystery, an excessive amount of trust in your fellow man, and do not value your time very much. Also, the reasons the author gives (yes, yet another stupid Modern Love column) are not very compelling. Believing that there should be some sort of "magic and mystery" to the dating process sounds like something only high school seniors believe. And if you can't react with the appropriate social cues to information, then you're just pretty badly socialized. Of course, there's the problem of disambiguation, and also false content online, but really, do you want a person who does not pay attention to their online presence? I expect people to Google me, thus I limit my Googability (cough pseudonymity cough). There's also a lot of other Real Life Alter Egos out there, but you could figure out that I'm not the urologist or biologist. Googlilng someone isn't tantamount to looking them up on DontDateHimGirl, so not a huge violation of privacy, or even of expectation. I totally looked up TD before the first time. Nothing much to be found. He did go to the college he said he went to. Most of our first meeting was talking about what we were reading/thinking/interested in, which was not something you'd find on some lame social networking profile (the settings of which are set to private, anyway). If you only have the superficial Googled stuff to talk about, it's already a bad date, anyway.

4. Sarah Palin quotes are almost as tragicomically funny as Sarah Palin facts, but more tragic, less comic. Apparently, you can see Russia from Alaska, but it's boring. Did I mention I'm an expert on Mexico?

5. New Kid on the Hallyway, a Medieval-history-professor-turned-1L, gives a definition of that law school beast, "the gunner." Her readers, mostly humanities-types, wonder if this beast is particular to law schools, or cross-disciplinary. Others wonder if gunners are just modern day ass-kissers. Because I was a tiny bit gunnish in my day, I will not comment. New Kid has been one of my favorite bloggers since forever (I myself like Medieval literature and history), and best of luck to her in her 1L year of hell. Things will get better. I'm particularly looking forward to her posting on the different nature of legal pedagogy, and what the heck is up with legal writing.