Back in the Saddle (?)

I always hate to proclaim that I have returned after an extended hiatus, but now that school has finished for the year I don’t have anything BETTER to do than to update HBII, right? Actually, I’m not even finished with school yet. After all of the finals is the dreaded Petition, by which one applies for acceptance onto one of the student run journals at the U of M Law School. I am in the middle of this hell-hole of effort, which stretches the burned out mind of a law student in new and terrible ways. As for the finals themselves, I thought they went very well. Many of you may not realize this, but there aren’t any required classes (except Professional Responsibility) after the first year, so this year represents the last time that any school will tell me what to take. I have realized now that of my 20 years of regimented, full-time education, I have only two left, primary, secondary, and collegiate education being behind me. My mother was educated for about a billion years, I think, and after she finally finished she was able to fulfill her dream of ALWAYS staying in academia and never entering the Real World. It is a pretty good racket if you can swing it, I guess.

What now? I have seen Star Wars, and will admit that I saw it at midnight on Thursday. My impression was that it was very entertaining, but Hayden Christianson and Natalie Portman’s romance scenes were, simply put, awful. Laughable. Not good. Ewen McGregor as Obi-wan Kenobi is fantastic, however. I have never seen an audience that WANTED to love a movie as much as that one did, too. At least we (mostly) left with smiles on our faces.

Links carelessly posted

Nixon was crazy. But we knew that already, right?

The president asserts that America is in jeopardy from this Archie Bunker gay thing:
"I don't want to see this country to go that way. You know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that, so was Socrates."
…
"Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. . . . You know what happened to the popes? It's all right that popes were laying the nuns."

100 great online games. From Metafilter. Avoid Joust. Or try Whatword here. An amusing word game.

Finally, I bet the people in central Oregon are eying this news carefully: South Sister mountain is showing signs that it is coming back to life. Of course, the odds are highly against any eruption, much less a big one, but it does happen, as many of us recall.