"It's been a long Monday." "It's Tuesday." "Right."

So to preface, I just wanted to say that my thoughts are with all those who I care about who are having a crappy week.  There are multiple groups of people who that applies to, because apparently the start of this week was just not good for anyone.  Here's hoping next week will be better.

This guy is also having a bad week.  The car was parked on 395 right outside my window and just started burning for no particular reason.  No one was in the car.  Exciting and unexpected things happen on campus daily, it would seem.

Things have been relatively good up here in DC.  Ben and I got a shipment of food delivered from the grocery store today, and that is always like Christmas.  As a special treat we bought ourselves a big steak which we plan on having for lunch on Thursday, because steak is even better at times when you know for certain no one else is eating steak.

I've been trying to figure out some way to occupy myself in classes when people are asking questions that I don't care about.  I finally came up with a great game that should help with my case distillation process as well.  What I do is take the case and then figure out what the opening of CSI Miami might look like if the show were about that specific case....  Not that I've ever watched CSI Miami, but it has a classic formula which is easily adopted in this situation.  If you have never seen an opening one-liner for CSI Miami, go watch one and then come back.

Example: Leonard v. PepsiCo- a famous case in which a kid in 1996, upon seeing a "Pepsi Stuff" commercial featuring a Harrier Jet offered at "7,000,000 points" embarked on a quest to get 7 million points and hence the Harrier Jet.  When he actually did (he sort of cheated, but you'd have to) send in the points, Pepsi did not send him a Harrier Jet so Leonard took Pepsi to court alleging that the advertisement on TV clearly offered a Harrier Jet at 7,000,000 points.  The judge wrote a hilarious opinion in which she slowly explained, point by point, exactly why the commercial was not an offer and why no reasonable person could possibly take it seriously.  Here's how I boiled down the salient points, CSI style:

I'm going to pretend that this is going to help me study later.  The concept has already gotten some very favorable reviews from other people in class who want to take shots at writing their own for a study-guide compendium of CSI analyses of famous cases.  At least when I'm not paying attention in class I'm still doing something law related...

Went to a public interest dinner tonight and it was great- the panel was obviously very passionate about public interest and had lots of helpful things to say about how to go about it.  Also there was free food. I'm never going to turn down free food.