star wars --> ron paul

brilliant political commentary, courtesy of xkcd.



this comic has it right. no other candidate's faithful are so accurately compared to fanboys and fangirls this cycle. he's a cult favourite, and so many people are just so...squeeful about him.

i really don't get it.

ye olde bait and switch

i hate when professors snare students with large amounts of reading without giving proper notice.

i'm taking an intersession class about intellectual property. we had to buy a 420-page textbook for it. the professor told me when i emailed him last week that we didn't have any reading for the first day, but i could read the first seventy pages or so if i really wanted to.

i knew where this was going. i knew it was going to be a trap. i was hoping that it wasn't, and that the professor actually was going to assign a reasonable amount of reading for a one-week class...but i've been in law school so long that i knew better. so...i read. i've read over 150 pages of the 420 page textbook. i was hoping it was overkill, but a little voice in the back of my head told me i needed to.

the voice was right. he came in today and told the class to read the whole book by thursday. that means i still have a lot to read, about 270 pages, but at least i don't have the whole thing to still finish.

stupid law school.

::pats Jeremy Clarkson on the head::

oh, Jeremy Clarkson. i love all the stupid things you and your colleagues do with cars on Top Gear. but, you should probably refrain from doing equivalently stupid things with your bank account information.

he thought people were flipping out too much about some financial data that was stolen from the government. he didn't think it was a big deal, because he thought more information and signatures were needed than were on the discs before anyone could steal money. so--he published his account information in a column he writes for The Sun.

a little trusting, are we?

one rather enterprising reader decided to prove Dear Mr. Clarkson wrong. he knew that the British Diabetic Association did not require a signature to set up a direct debit...just the bank account information. that was published. in The Sun. and available to everyone. our Dear Reader set up a £500 deposit out of the bank account, to the charity.

and now, Dear Mr. Clarkson is eating his words. at least he reacted with the same amusing wit he has on Top Gear:

"Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy."

a cookie for the prankster for showing the seriousness of the identity theft risk while giving Clarkson's money to a good cause. another cookie for Clarkson for promptly eating his words and giving me the image of poking identity thieves with cocktail sticks.

six air bags

i saw an ad for a Toyota this evening that pointed out that seven air bags came standard with the car.

i feel vindicated.

on the first day of a microeconomics class i took third year of undergrad, we were learning about cost-benefit analysis. the professor surveyed the class, asking how many air bags we would want to have in a car. he started with one, and counted up. this class had about eighty people in it--and i was the only one in the class who raised her hand when he asked who would pay for six or more air bags in a car.

i was the only one who raised a hand. the professor asked what i was thinking. i explained that i would want one for the driver, one for the passenger, and one side-impact air bag in each door--hence, six for a four-door car. the professor thought i was nuts. my classmates thought i was nuts. in that class, i was known as six air bags for the rest of the semester.

a car now comes standard with seven. who's crazy now?