Most importantly, Gina matched to her top choice for residency, Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, which got her in the local paper. It's a great opportunity for her, and it means we'll be living together after the wedding (what a novel concept!), in a Fremont apartment TBD. Why Fremont? Because SCVMC (don't worry, those are the right letters) and UC Berkeley are about 50 miles apart, and Fremont sits somewhere in the middle, albeit favoring the bread winner who will be on call at various times.
I got a job for the summer at a law firm in Palo Alto, DLA Piper. I had been exploring the possibility of working in Google's legal department, but this gives me some variety on my resume, and Google doesn't hire lawyers straight out of school anyway, so I might as well get started on the firm path now and focus on building my experience there. Plus this job will cover a year of tuition, which is timely because...
A major tuition hike is coming to Boalt Hall, gradually eliminating the gap between in-state and out-of-state tuition, and I'll be catching the front end of it; the foothills, if you will. Meanwhile, Stanford announced its new tuition policy for undergrads, which, had it been in place fifteen years ago, would have allowed my parents to send both my brother and me to college for free.
On the bright side, Boalt Hall has moved its way up to 6th on the all-important US News and World Report law school rankings. I thought it might be because they heard I had matriculated, but a leaked memo reveals the methodology at play, confirming our long-held suspicions.
(This parody was so spot on in capturing the regular fluctuations of the rankings that the US News editors had to actually disavow it. Genius.)
There's no March without the Madness, and for the first time in 7 years, Stanford advanced to the second weekend of the tournament, before getting whacked by Texas. At least it afforded me the opportunity to hang out with Dollar, also for the first time in years. He's living a beach bum life in Huntington Beach, with an ocean view, surf boards hanging on the wall, bacon sizzling in the kitchen, and communal neighbors wandering in and out. Needless to say, he's enjoying himself. Maybe too much. :)
Speaking of former Belmont housemates, I went to the movies with Drew and Russell to see 21, which would have been titled Bringing Down the House, after the book upon which it was based, if not for the unfortunate Steve Martin/Queen Latifah romp of the same name.
The book, about the rise and fall of a real MIT card-counting team, is fantastic, the movie only so-so. It's hard to make card counting come alive on the big screen, so the movie drags at points, and a lot of plot devices are added to make the story more traditional, but they end up dampening some of the thrill that comes across in the book. But that's typical; a book is almost always better than its movie. This one is still worth seeing, because the concept is so cool.
This was the first year that I created a bracket of the brackets, and I'm prepared to call the experiment a success. The rankings need some tweaking, but anything that allows me to judge my friends and pit them against each other in competition is a winner in my book.
April's shaping up to be uneventful, but it's simply the calm before the final exam/graduation/marriage storm to come.
The two met in the West Wing while serving in the Clinton administration, Edley as his top adviser on race relations and Echaveste as his Joshua Lyman (Deputy Chief of Staff for the uninitiated). They are both high-level party insiders, he an adviser to practically every Democratic nominee going back to Carter and she a superdelegate. And they are both aggressively working on behalf of their preferred candidate, he for Obama and she for Clinton. Oh to be a fly on their wall...
Well we got to be that fly for an hour, and I could have sat there all night. The two set a high bar for political discourse. Some highlights:
- Edley started things out by telling us that he taught Obama at Harvard Law School, then quickly qualified that by adding he had also taught Spitzer there.
- Edley called Obama one of the three most gifted minds he's come across in his lifetime, along with Bill Clinton and Barney Frank, and said he's a hardcore policy wonk who could absorb incredible amounts of information.
- Echaveste recalled the daunting challenges facing Bill in January '93, then described how the challenges facing our new president would absolutely dwarf them. At this critical juncture, she wanted Hillary's proven track record rather than Obama's potential. Echaveste did a nice job of setting the stakes high.
- Edley pointed out that Hillary's track record included her health care failure, which he attributed to her divisive approach. She demonized the opposition and made all of the decisions behind closed doors. Echaveste countered that Hillary had learned from that failure and become quite skilled at working with Republicans in Congress, while Obama was still largely unproven in this area.
- On Iraq, Echaveste said she understood Hillary's vote to authorize the Iraq invasion because both she and Edley were initially willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, too. Neither could fathom that a president would risk our soldiers' lives based on political ideology rather than sound intelligence. Echaveste assumed that the administration had to have known something she didn't. However, Edley pointed out that Hillary was not in a position to have to take things on faith. Bob Graham, then head of the Senate Intelligence Committee (and not exactly a bastion of liberalism), voted against the war after reading the National Intelligence Estimate, which convinced him that the administration hadn't made the case. They simply didn't have it. But only a small handful of senators read the report, and Hillary was not among them. Egregious! Even Echaveste admitted that she had no answer for this.
- Edley pointed out that many of the red/purple states won by Obama have key battles further down the ticket, and the people in those battles prefer Obama at the top of the ticket.
In the end, Edley said the key to bringing together a party that's been splintered by this process will be to refocus it on what ultimately matters: winning. To that end, he encouraged us to attend McCain rallies and start chants of "Four More Years!" Ah, the inner workings of a top political mind.
By the way, Edley said that Obama's speech on race would go down as of the best of our generation. If you haven't seen it:
While learning about mortgages and foreclosures in Property, Steve says to me, this puts a whole new light on Happy Gilmore. Why didn't Happy's grandmother just exert her right of redemption after Shooter McGavin bought her house at the foreclosure sale?
What a lawyer thing to ask. But he had a valid point. Then again, it's one of those things most people in that situation wouldn't know, so I could let it go.
But then today, I was watching The Thomas Crown Affair, and there's the scene where Catherine realizes the key to the crime: the bench has only two legs now, but it had three in the video. Why didn't she just go back to the point in the video where the bench goes from two legs to three to see who added it? She makes all these keen observations throughout the investigation, including noticing the bench legs in the first place, but she misses that? C'mon.
Now my head is filled with these annoying hypotheticals.
Why didn't the Star Destroyer captain shoot the escape pod rather than hold his fire just because there were no life forms on it? Had he never heard of droids? Hell, his boss was one! Well, mostly.
Why didn't Elrond put an arrow in Isildur's back after he refused to cast the ring back into the fiery chasm from whence it came?
Why didn't Skynet send a Terminator further back in time, before there were weapons in existence that could actually challenge it? Like the Connors clan could have taken on a T-101 with pitchforks and torches.
Just to be clear, I have zero problem suspending my disbelief while watching movies. I can totally believe in a world where there is one all-powerful force controlling everything, whether it's flowing through us all or contained in a ring. I can buy time travel. I am even willing to believe that someone could live as fabulously as Thomas Crown, though that's stretching it.
But don't tell me Skynet's this awesome, self-aware computer system with the capability to create a time machine and human-looking robot assassins, but it can't figure out that it would be better to kill John's ancestors from the 1880s rather than the 1980s. At least include a throwaway line about how the machine can't go back that far, like you did to explain that the T-1000 can't form complex machines with moving parts.
Clearly these oversights completely ruined what would have otherwise been great movies...
This is a great story by Pat Forde of ESPN, and in a small way, I got the ball rolling on it, so it's cool to see the end result now.
It started with a column he wrote earlier this season, containing his Basketball Bucket List, the ten things he wanted to do in basketball before kicking the bucket.
Number 3 on his list? Performing as the Stanford Tree for a game. Awesome.
This actually seemed pretty feasible, and if we made it happen, it would make for a fun story and result in some great exposure. So I posted the column on a Stanford basketball forum to see if we could give it legs, and sure enough, it got forwarded to the current Tree and band managers, they extended the invitation, and he accepted!
Thank goodness this didn't happen last year, when our "tree" looked ribbed for her pleasure. This year's actually looks decent.
The story is a rare good-humored look at our band (as opposed to yet another scathing critique over some overblown controvery) and includes some hilarious anecdotes, so I highly recommend it. Forde seems like a really cool guy and apparently hit up the Dutch Goose with our fans after the Wazzu game later that weekend. Any little thing to overcome that ESPN East Coast bias!
