digging deep in the vaults for this one

Another favorite favorite. The old man has more mischievousness in one rotating leg than Will Ferrell had in an entire career.

count the time in quarter tones to ten

A dreary night on the internet -- I can no more bring myself to write an e-mail than I could those godawful law papers. Procrastinating socially? Really, what on the green earth? So, moping melancholy mad, pipe a tune to dance to, lad: a favorite from the favorites list. Can Ansay, via the redoubtable CptCluster:



And I thought I'd lost that happy feeling forever.

Netflix is a demanding bitch goddess

It's 8:40pm, which means it's time for me to finish making dinner and pop in tonight's disc from Netflix (The Last King of Scotland). It'll probably finish by 11:30, at which point I'll spend another hour or two watching the commentary and goofing around on the internet. Then I'll try to get to sleep. Thus passes the Summer of Jaunty Jon.

Not to lay this all at Netflix's feet, but ... goddamn, that company gives me a great excuse not to read. I bought Nixonland two weeks ago and I'm still only 300 pp. into it (MLK, RFK shot; a nation turns its lonely eyes to Dick). Still meandering my way through Bukowski. And it would be nice if I started studying for the Bar at some point.

But my Queue stands just shy of 290, and there are so many movies I want to get to: nothing I'm particularly desperate about (few films seem "important" or exciting to me as, say, the prospect of Nabokov or Melville) -- yet it's so easy to work through that damned list, and so frustrating to watch it stall cat Before focking Sunrise when there are all those Bergmans and Peckinpahs I've been waiting a year or two for. Not to mention Deadwood! And the prospect of more Deadwood! I think it hurts, too, that I want to get at least 5 rentals in a month in order to "save" compared to renting the same movies from Blockbuster -- and once I hit five, I want to squeeze in as many more to pull ahead (or catch up for all those months of law school when I couldn't bring myself to put Sylvia into the DVD drive).

There's something perverse about the way the movies are eating up my time this summer -- or maybe something microcosmic, suggesting the way video is replacing text as society's basic media. It's been so long since I've been a great reader. Or maybe it's that in high school, in Albany, in Connecticut, I read because I had nothing better to do when I got bored of Goldeneye and shooting basketballs at a hoop. Every now and then I pick up a book that demands my attention, pulls me in for hours, keeps me up all night -- but it's rare, frustratingly sporadic. I'm not sure why. Perhaps the topic would suit a longer essay, Franzen-esque (what was the point of his "death of the novel" essay, again?) ... maybe I'll turn one out for Kaleidoscope in a few days. Or maybe a stoopid comic piece for The Morning News.

At least I haven't wasted much time on this blog.

a refreshing recollection

Today at BarBri, Professor Michael Simon covered Evidence II: Witnesses. And he actually taught something interesting that I don't remember hearing before: witnesses on the stand can have their past recollections refreshed by anything at all. Thus, it would be perfectly appropriate for counsel to hand the witness a bottle of Rheingold (My beer, the dry beer) to help them recall past items or events. He then demonstrated the technique with a can of Bud.

In any event, the lecture draws up from the mind this other memory, and mixes it with doctrine: middle-aged Marcel on the stand, having long abandoned thoughts of times lost, handed a madeleine and a cup of linden tea, holds the damp dipped morsel beneath his moustache as the scents waft up and release from his childhood the relevant testimony.