Something there is that doesn't love a wall

First off, apparently Shark Week is coming up. I don't know this because I have a TV (I don't) or because I went on the Discovery Channel website (I didn't) or because I am especially fond of Shark Week (I mean, it's fine but I don't really care). I know because when I walked to work Monday morning I was greeted with this:

And yes, there's a giant fin on top of the building.

My main project for the week (my first as a paid part-time employee) has to do with the Citizens United decision. I get to explain what it has to do with corporations and unions and elections within the space of about half a page. Condensing 100 years of history into three sentences (to preface the decision) is a bit... difficult. I did an informal poll of my coworkers to see what your typical well educated adult would know about Citizens United and all of them got the fundamental premise wrong, so I'm not sure how I am supposed to make this work for high school students. 

To sum up (skip if you don't care about campaign finance law- the only reason I do is because I have to read about it.):

1904- (General Sentiment) "Roosevelt is in the pockets of the corporations!"

1907- (Roosevelt and Congress) "Corporations aren't allowed to donate money to ANYTHING involved with elections" (P.S. We have no way to enforce this law.)

1907-1970's- (Congress) "No really, corporations aren't allowed to give money to elections because that will make it seem as though they are purchasing the favors of the candidate." (But really, we still have no way to enforce this law.)

1971 and 1974- (Congress) "Let's toss on a cap for campaign expenditures and give candidates public funds so that they can run without being filthy rich. Oh, and here's an agency to enforce these laws!" 

1976- (Supreme Court) "Yeah, that doesn't work so well, you know, with the Constitution and all. How about this: corporations and unions engage in 'express advocacy' within campaigns." 

1977-2001- (Corporations) "Good thing it isn't 'express advocacy' to just make the other guy look terrible in a series of advertisements 'unrelated to' the campaign." (Soft money.)

2002- (Congress) "Very funny, corporations. We're redefining 'express advocacy' so you can't do that, either." 

2008- (Citizens United) "We want to air this movie about Hillary Clinton." 

2010- (Supreme Court) "Well, you weren't directly coordinating with any campaign so that seems like a reasonable, First Amendment thing to do."

2010- (District Court) "Well since it's okay for anyone to air anything about candidates as long as they weren't coordinating with them, then by logical extension corporations should be allowed to donate as much as they want to any organization that is not an actual campaign."

And THAT is why we have more negative attack ads than positive issue ads. 

Anyway, the good news is that because I'm part time I get to spend my free time actually spending time with my friends and getting ready for the next school year. A lot of my time this week has been spent at the new house tearing down walls. On Tuesday I tore down a couple of walls with Jeff and today I took town a couple more with Sara. The ones that Sara and I took down today were especially difficult because there was piping and other things that we weren't supposed to be destroying. Destruction is much easier when you don't have to worry about collateral damage. At this point, I have what you could call an "open" floor plan in my room-to-be. 

After demolition, Goo kindly had us over to her place for dinner (both nights I was there this week, at least). It's going to be really great living so close for the next couple of years. We've also been meeting some of the neighbors, and the people on our street seem very nice. I'm keeping a chart with all their names and the names of their pets, just so we will be prepared.  

When not demolishing things or working, I have been doing school preparations. I got my fingerprints done so that I can teach law in the DC public schools and I went to a DOJ career fair. My favorite people at the fair worked in the Office of Professional Responsibility. I asked them what they did and they said that they investigated misconduct charges of DOJ attorneys. Then I asked whether everyone else in the DOJ ostracized them because of that. I was expecting a "we all get along great" answer, but instead the guy looked at me and said "yeah... people aren't generally too happy to see us." I appreciated his honesty. I may apply there some day. 

Also, I have had time to revisit some of my favorite places, like the museums:

Sid the (Giant) Sloth says hello.

"That's Life"

I'm back in DC after a whirlwind tour of North Carolina and Virginia. It was great to see the family and  introduce Kelsey to some of the best things about NC. Even the people at the DMV were super friendly- which was good, because Kelsey was probably tired of driving everywhere and it is nice to have a license again. 

After arriving back on Friday we met up with Absi, who is back in town for a little while! It was so good to see her and introduce her to some of the people that I have met in DC. Everyone seemed to get along well. Apparently I've been talking up Absi a lot over the course of the year because when we walked into the Frozen Yogurt place where Davia, Jeff, Noah, and Sara had congregated, Davia immediately rushed to Absi and gave her a hug while introducing herself. 

The next evening Steph and Micah invited us out to their place (we cooked for them earlier in the summer and had a really nice time).  On top of being a joint cooking machine, we got to experience Micah's incredible bartending abilities (crafting any drink made up of more than three ingredients is indicative of incredible bartending abilities, I think). After dinner, Kelsey and I took the metro back into the city in order to go see a midnight movie. Of course, there is only one movie that is worth seeing at midnight...

THE ROOM.

I still am unable to put into words how great it was to meet Tommy Wiseau AND Greg Sestero AGAIN. It was even MORE fun, though, to watch my friends meet them for the first time. I primed them all (except for Josh, and I hope he writes a blog about his experience in The Room) with forced viewings of The Room throughout the year, so they knew what to expect. I think Kelsey almost passed out from joy when she saw Tommy for the first time. He complimented her on her red dress and signed her shoe. He also played football with Jeff. 

During the question and answer session, someone asked Greg about Goo's favorite scene (she was in some northeastern state and not in DC so could not be there). In the scene, Greg's character, Mark, knocks another character into a garbage can for no apparent reason. As to why his character would do such a thing, Greg replied: "That's life." ("That's life" being one of the many nonsensical things that Tommy's character says in the movie.) I was further convinced that Tommy is living in a perpetual acting exercise and is fooling us all. I detailed this suspicion in an earlier post.

On Sunday I went over to Jeff's new house to help with the remodeling efforts. I ended up getting to destroy a wall with a hammer. It was awesome. 

This is the view of my room from what used to be a storage closet next to my room.

And this is three minutes later. My hammer of destruction is on the ground.

This week I go back into the office as a part time employee and I start gearing up for the school year.

The People on the Bus

Depending on my mood, one of my favorite or least favorite parts of the day is the commute to and from work. I'm rarely ambivalent towards the ride, because I am either happy to have the chance to read and listen to music or annoyed that I have to keep reading or listening to music. I finished a couple of books over the summer on my way to internship and am currently in the middle of Slaughterhouse Five, which I thought was going to confuse me but actually is a very engaging story.

Today I did my last commute as an intern. When I come back to the office, I will be a "part time employee." They may even give me my own e-mail address. I'm much more excited about the e-mail address than the getting paid part, which may say something about my priorities.  As part of my "last day," a couple of my coworkers took me out to a hibachi place for lunch. I forgot how fun hibachi could be.

The other day I met up again with John McAfee, who I have not seen in a very long time. He had done the lighting for a show at the Capital Fringe Festival- the festival that Usher was in a few years ago. It was a modern day retelling of the myth of Ganymedes (sp?), which, despite my reasonably good knowledge of ancient mythology, I had not heard before. Probably because, in itself, it isn't a terribly interesting myth. The play was good, though.

Currently I am on another train down to Williamsburg and from Williamsburg will be going to North Carolina. The plan is that I will get a new drivers license, but I've got to say that my preferred mode of transportation nowadays is definitely trains.

Trolling as PR

I'll write a normal how-my-day-went post later, but I had to post about this because I am just so delighted by what I see as a new and subtle shift in the world of online social media.

When people become so cynical that normal commercials stop working, companies turn to social media. Quite often social media campaigns will also fail miserably, because the internet is full of people even more cynical than those who watch TV. See, for example, the campaign to send Pittbull to America's Favorite Walmart (and ended up sending him to a remote Alaskan town with a total population 1/20th the number of "likes" their Walmart received). I always wondered what the next step would be, after social media advertising failed. It turns out, the answer is obvious: use the cynicism of the internet against it. In short: troll them.

First, let me direct your attention to a brilliant and gutsy internet hoax that relied precisely on the internet's finely tuned sense of justice. You may have seen Shell's "social media failure" at http://arcticready.com/social/gallery, where Shell had encouraged people to design a new advertisement for their arctic expansion using their "Let's Go" slogan. Thousands of people posted advertisements with slogans such as: "You Can't Run Your SUV on 'Cute,'" and "Pave the Whales." My personal favorite, "We Still Haven't Noticed We're Being Trolled," is I think the most brilliant example here. Brilliant because it is not, in fact, a Shell website that people are looking at when they scroll through the gallery. What appeared to be an act of complete corporate incompetence is in fact a well orchestrated parody. Go check- most of the links pop up with a redirect message:

Temporary Site Maintenance

Our corporate website is momentarily offline while we add new features as part of our new Let's Go! Arctic campaign. Please check back later.


In the meantime, explore our new Arctic Ready campaign. You will be redirected in five seconds...

Checking this would be simple enough to do, but people will generally go along with something if it comports with their worldview- and that doesn't mean that environmentalist hippies went for this and conservatives saw right through it- it means that the site didn't give off any warning flags and the "campaign" didn't seem like anything all that out of the ordinary for a company to be doing- after all, it was the internet that was "trolling" the company. And that's the brilliance of it- why would anyone question it since it was so obvious and easy to explain what was going on? 


New plan, then- find a way to direct the wrath of the entire internet on your enemies by making the internet think that your enemies are trying to be cool.


Downside- parody is only protected under the law (typically) if a reasonable person would "get" the joke. I don't believe Shell is planning on suing the people who made the site (because it would make them look bad and would probably be spun as Shell suing the people who posted the hilarious arctic advertisements), but other companies might- and then we'll have some interesting lawsuits. 


This is also of interest and related.

In Which I Am Humbled by Choreographed Workouts

I'm on the train from Williamsburg back up to DC (if you get the right tickets it's cheaper than driving- not that I could drive anyway because my license expired on my birthday- AND they have free wifi) after another great weekend. As per usual we ran on DOG street and got frozen yogurt (by now I have learned to avoid the places where they scoop the toppings for you because the real draw of frozen yogurt is the toppings and I need to have complete control over that).  We also went to see Ted, which was much better than I imagined it would be. Patrick Stewart narrating "as you know, there is nothing in the world more powerful than the magic of a young boy's wish. Except an Apache helicopter." is pretty much all you need to know about the entire tone of the movie.

Today I agreed to go with Kelsey to her group fitness class, thinking that it would be like every group fitness thing I've ever seen on TV- you know, step up on a thing, step down from the thing, throw a couple of air punches, high five each other for being awesome- that sort of thing. My mistake.

This was a new class with a new rotation of exercises, and so what I got to go to was the special session where all of the trainers at the gym practice teaching the class to the other trainers. Well, the other trainers and me. Despite my reasonable attempts at running every now and then, I have not exactly "lifted weights" in a while. And as it turns out, that's exactly what this class was. Ten songs. One heavy barbell. It was probably not a great sign for my general fitness that I thought I was going to pass out after the first song, which had been helpfully explained to me as the "warmup."

A couple of times, we were allowed to put the barbells down. This was so we could do pushups or something else even less pleasant that made me want to pick up the barbell again. It was an exercise well crafted with negative conditioning.

After an hour that felt like a year, it was over. I managed to say thank you and goodbye to the instructor before hobbling over to Kelsey's office in the fitness center, where I sat silently for about fifteen minutes. Not because I did not want to talk or because I was angry, but because I could not talk.

Kels tried to make me feel better afterwards by telling me that she had seen football players cry while doing that class before. It did not make me feel better. This is all to say that I have decided that, in addition to my running, I am going to get back into working out so that I may one day be able to work out near my girlfriend without appearing foolish.

Independence Day (the movie, which we watched the day after)

I spent another wonderful weekend in Williamsburg. Kelsey and I went to the farmer's market where we bought goat cheese and tomatoes, went to the frozen yogurt place where we got frozen yogurt, went to Trader Joe's where we got lots MORE food.... I'm starting to sense a trend.

We also watched Independence Day, which continues to be the best Fourth of July holiday movie ever made. I learned that they are doing an Independence Day 2 as well as a 3-D re-release of the original next year. I will be there for that.

Saturday night we got a redbox movie. I saw one that had Jason Segal and one of the guys from The Office in it and figured it would be a pretty funny one. Kels looked at me and said "I don't think that movie is what you think it is. Do you want to get another one just in case?" Predictably, this only fortified my resolve that I could indeed judge a movie by its cover and was, in fact, the best movie-I've-never-heard-of analyzer on the face of the earth. "I am certain that this is a hilarious movie. How could it not be?" I said.

Three seconds into the movie, as the bubbly bells-and-synthesizer that is now mandatory in all deep and reflective artsy films revved up, I realized just how wrong I was. To her credit, Kelsey never said the words "I told you so." She did, however, say something along the lines of "do you want to go get a second movie now?" I did not.

So far this week at work has been pretty quiet. I got to start reviewing materials for the a certain  book project that we are working on and in doing so developed a personal vendetta against the book's "electronic support materials." It wasn't off to a good start when I saw that the support materials were spread out over three "CD-roms" (their words, not mine) that were compatible with both Windows and "Macintosh" (again, their words). I am sure that I startled the entire office when I started loudly laughing after I inserted the first of these "CD-roms" into my macbook and was told, apologetically, that the CDs only functioned on "Power PC systems." Power PCs were discontinued in 2006. Also, across the three "CD-roms" I saw that they had something less than 100 megabytes of information. Any CD fits 600 megabytes at least, so I was confused.

When I finally got the program to load on the office computer, I was greeted by some state of the art circa 1999 graphics and the ability to click slowly loading links whose only function was to launch large PDF files and go to a certain page in the file. That was the resource package. The "electronic support materials." In my evaluation of the materials I wrote my supervisor a wildly inappropriate-for-actual-business e-mail that ended with the phrase "destroy these CDs with extreme prejudice." Luckily, I have excellent co-workers who like me when I am being a techno-elitist. We had a conference call today and one of the first things that we were told on the call was that they were replacing the CDs with online resources done by a completely different vendor, so I'm going to take that as their having anticipated my complaint.

Last night I got some good tex-mex with Davia, Josh, and Sara. Then we went to Goo's to watch The Tudors. It was a magical experience as always; there are no bad evenings with that group of people.

High Score Wins, Right?

DC has been quite warm the past few weeks- temperatures in the hundreds and all. So it was a good time to do more walking than I ever have before, right? At least I was walking to fun things.

1: Davia's Murder Mystery 1940's Birthday Party (the second of her parties). Davia was the murderer- of course. 

Though Jeff certainly tried to convince us otherwise...

I mean, he had a sword...

And having a sword is basically a blank check to take pictures like this with everyone at the party.

So that was last Saturday night. On Wednesday I had the day off work for the Fourth of July, so Kels came up and we went to the opening day of the National Building Museum's indoor miniature golf course. Each hole was designed by a different architect and constructed by a different group, and some of them were a little... artsy?

This one was pretty straightforward but very colorful.

This one was called "Guaranteed Hole-in-One"

This was much more difficult than it looks.

Some of them were sort of vague as to where you were supposed to start.

Others were just physically impossible.

At leasts the architects enjoyed themselves.

Afterwards we walked back to Foggy Bottom (from Judiciary Square- it's quite a hike). On the way back we stopped at the fountain outside the National Gallery to put our feet in for a few minutes. (Absi, remember when we did that around this time last year?) 

The next day (Thursday) I took a half-day at work so that I could go see Jeff's new house. It is on North Carolina Avenue NW, near Goo and Davia and Sara (it is also near several of the schools that I may be teaching at through my clinic next year). If all goes according to plan, I should be living there with him once my lease runs out in Foggy Bottom at the end of August. I have claimed the basement area. I took pictures!

This is the basement from the bottom of the stairs. There will be plenty of room for a bed and a desk.

The same spot, rotated 90 degrees left. 

There is a bathroom beyond that doorway, as well as a laundry area and a separate entrance.

This is the closet for now, but it may change before I move in.

Now that we have a house, I have started my campaign to get Jeff to let me build the project codenamed "Defcon Fun." I'm in Williamsburg for the weekend, but will be back in DC on Sunday!