Alf's Home Planet

February 22, 2006

USC hires a security officer to be around whenever the law school building is open, which is like seven days a week, 18 hours a day. I understand this might be necessary late at night or on weekends, but I think the guard gets pretty bored on weekday afternoons. There probably just isn’t much for him to do. Well, the other day, I saw the guard off in a corner of the third floor of the library, using a computer. I think he might have been looking at porn because he quickly closed his browser and looked back at me when I walked by. If he really was on duty and getting paid for looking at porn, then I am going to drop out of law school and becoming a security officer at the Gould School of Law, because apparently that’s the greatest job ever.

One of my favorite things about the Super Bowl is all the random prop bets you can make online. Usually, they consist of things like “Will Shaun Alexander rush for more or less than 92 yards?” or “Will the first pass thrown in the game be a completion, incompletion or interception?” My favorite bet this year, however, was “What color sports drink will be dumped over the winning coach?” I took yellowish, and won a cool seven bucks.

The sign at the Hermosa Beach Car Wash proclaims that gift certificates for car washes are “Great Valentine’s Gifts.” Ladies, maybe we could take a poll here, but somehow I doubt it.

I woke up last night to a car alarm going off at about 3 AM. I was a bit worried because I remembered I had left my Ipod out in plain site in my car, I thought about going downstairs to investigate. Then I remembered that I don’t have a car alarm, so it couldn’t have been my car being robbed. For some reason, this was enough to put my mind at ease and me right back to sleep.

After South Korean Ahn Hyun Soo beat American Apolo Anton Ohno in the 1000 meter short track speed skating event at the Olympics this year, Kim Jung Kil, the president of the Korean Olympic Committee declared, “Now we know which country is superior.” OK, that’s weird, because I thought our vastly dominant economy, or maybe our nuclear weapons, would count for something, but apparently world superiority is based solely on short track speed skating.

I just heard an interview with the singer Pink on a radio show this morning. Apparently, she doesn’t swim in pools at night because she is afraid of sharks.

The other day, one of my friends made the comment to me that “for a law student, you sure go out and party and stuff a lot.” I’m not sure if that is a compliment or not. Either way, I was definitely proud.

OK, when you are done reading this, you have to go to this website. http://www.sonnyradio.com/chrisbliss.htm

This might be one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Just trust me. Watch it. I like it so much I’m thinking about downloading the song that accompanies the performance. I don’t like the song, it just reminds me of watching the video. I like it that much.

I went to a restaurant the other day and ordered the fruit salad as a side with my club sandwich. My “salad” consisted of cantaloupe and grapes. I think that there should be some sort of formal governing body for restaurants that try to advertise things on their menus, like the FCC controls TV and radio or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms controls, well, alcohol, tobacco and firearms. I imagine if a governing body did exist, however, one of their first enactments would be to require more than two kinds of fruits to constitute a “fruit salad.” Because really, that’s just false advertising.

This year, at the NBA All Star Game, a seven foot tall player won the three point contest and a five foot nine player won the dunk contest.

I have an old email address that I only check rarely (like once a day) and gets almost exclusively junk email. Today I was about to delete 15 pieces of spam when one title caught my eye. “Free Quizno’s for a year for filling out a survey.” Yeah, it’s a contest, and I probably have like a one in ten thousand chance of actually winning free sandwiches, but you better believe I filled that one out.

When I filled out the survey about sandwiches, it asked for me for my birth date, including the year. The pull down menu had the years of 1906 to 2011 listed. Nice to know that surveys.com is prepared to be ready for people born five years in the future to use their website.

Remember that show ALF? I spent half of my Constitutional Law class the other day trying to remember the name of his home planet. Mernac? Melnac? Can anybody help me out on this one? This has been driving me absolutely crazy.

At the NFL scouting combine, where players work out for teams to determine where they will be drafted, the NFL administers a test called the Wonderlic. It’s a basic intelligence test, where questions start easy and get progressively harder and is graded on a 0-50 scale. The average score for a player at the combine is 19. The average score overall — hundreds of corporations use the Wonderlic — is 21. A score under 10 is an indication of literacy problems. Texas QB Vince Young scored a 6. Yes, I’m still bitter about the Rose Bowl.

The Women’s Law Association at school is holding a raffle to raise money for some woman related cause or something and offering, as a prize, tickets to a Lakers game. On their flyers they advertised the tickets by emphasizing KOBE and the Lakers vs. the Spurs. I found that kind of ironic. Oh, the admitted adulteress and accused rapist? Yeah, you can win tickets to watch him, courtesy of the Women’s Law Association.

C-Webb and Pacman

January 28, 2006

Is there any greater waste of paint then putting “COMPACT” on a parking spot? Like that stops anyone from parking there? People must often glance down and think, sure it says compact, but there is no reason why my Chevy Suburban can’t fit here. I see it every damn day, and it continues to amaze me.

So I spent eight hours on Christmas day driving to South Lake Tahoe to work instead of staying home, enjoying a big dinner with my family, and watching two NFL games. I got stuck in the first big snow storm of the year and sat in traffic for three hours, dead stopped. I had to pay $90 for chains, which I had to put on and take off twice. I got into Tahoe past midnight, and called work, who told me not to bother showing up. On the other hand, while I was stopped in traffic, I really did catch fire on spider solitaire. I think I really did increase my percentage games won a ton.

A couple buddies of mine live on Lakeview Drive in Tahoe, which is stupid, because I can’t see the lake for shit from anywhere on that road.

I just found a picture of a bum on the internet holding up a cardboard sign that says “Ninjas killed my family- need $ for Kung-Fu lessons.” I don’t often use the words “bum” and “creative” in the same sentence, but I believe this is such an opportunity to do so.

You know what I hate? Those shower knobs that are super sensitive, so when you want to turn up the water heat a tiny bit, you get burned. Know what else I hate? Those shower knobs that are placed at elbow level, so you bump them all the time while washing yourself. So, take a guess what I really, really hate.

So, I spent my winter break driving from LA to northern California and back again. I have officially decided my favorite dangerous driving game is identifying the movie that people are playing on their DVD players in their SUVs as I drive down the freeway. The other day I saw a Chevy Tahoe playing Napoleon Dynamite. I think I might have pissed off a bunch of people as I drove about 55 MPH slightly behind and to the right of the Chevy so I could watch the dancing scene.

Speaking of DVD players in cars, is anyone else my age as pissed off as I am about the fact that we didn’t have the ability to watch TV in cars when we were growing up? I used to go on family trips, and instead of a nice, comfortable SUV with a TV and DVD player, we had a tiny Toyota Camry with no air conditioning. And usually my sister and I were shoved in the back seat with an ice chest, two folding chairs, and one of those mini gas grills.

My buddy Seth hates the Olive Garden. He calls it the Italian Denny’s.

This year marked the sixth season of the fantasy football league I have been in with a bunch of friends since high school. I think my favorite part of the league may be the creativity we have used to name our teams. Some of my favorites of the past couple years include: Jewish Mormons, Angry Lesbians, Wet Farts, Alejandro Poopskins, Smelly Pirate Hookers, Chinese Asian Hoes, Chinese4USADemise, Claudia Hates Beans (a stab at my exgirlfriend from 8th grade), Beef Curtains, and the Hairy Imbeciles. Man, are we clever.

There is restaurant down the street from my house named Chef Marilyn’s 99 Cent Soul Food Express Buffet. Apparently the fact that the food costs less than a dollar is quite an attraction around here, as I have seen a line stretch out the door several times as I have driven by. However, the allure of food for under a buck for some reason has quite the opposite affect on me.

A good friend of mine recently told me about a job she was considering. It involved doing photoshop work for a magazine that specialized in, get this, school transportation. And it actually has a reader base of almost 1.5 million people. Are you kidding me? A million and a half people care enough about school buses to read about them every month? I now refer to her job as the BMF – the Bus Magazine Factory.

An important life lesson I have learned is to never flush paper towels down the toilet. Ever. Just trust me on this one.

One of the things I love about LA is the fact that the weather is better here than where you are. I don’t care where you are, or what time of year it is. The weather here is better. Seriously. It’s great. I will not argue about this, because I’m right.

Sometimes, when I wake up at 7 AM to attend another day chock full of boring classes, I start to get just a little depressed. I have two and a half more years of really difficult schooling to look forward to, for which I will be going into massive debt. But then I think to myself, you know what, this is much better than prison. I try to keep a pretty positive outlook on life.

Did you know that Steve Smith and Chad Johnson attended Santa Monica College together in 1997? If that isn’t the greatest duo of wide receivers at a junior college ever, I will eat my shorts.

So I was cruising through myspace the other day, and I happened to come across a profile of a person who claimed to be Chris Webber. He had it set up so you could play PacMan on his profile. Well, regardless of whether it was C-Webb or not, I played PacMan for a good half hour. I’m definitely adding that profile as a friend.

I was taking a pee the other day while simultaneously checking my voicemail when disaster nearly struck. My phone, nuzzled between my shoulder and ear, suddenly fell, plummeting directly toward the urine filled toilet. With cat like prowess, my hand shot out and grabbed the phone out of mid air, mere inches above the bowl. Simply put, that might have been the luckiest moment of my life.

Sauceless pizza?

December 24, 2005

So I went to my Aunt and Uncle’s house for Thanksgiving and was a little surprised when I saw the message written on the dry erase board on the refrigerator. I realized later it was meant to be a reminder for my Aunt’s elderly father Richard to take his medication, but I really had to stifle a laugh when I initially saw the note, written in large blue letters: “DICK PILLS.”

From my civil procedure study aid: “In Hilton v. Guyot, 159 US 113 (1895), the Supreme Court declined to give credit to a French judgment, on the grounds that the French courts did not give credit to our judgments.” Apparently, our court system has been officially disrespecting the French for over a century.

It’s Saturday night, a mere week before finals, and there is not a single library on campus open past six p.m. You mean I pay USC eighteen thousand dollars a semester and they can’t pay someone $6.75 an hour to keep a damn library open for me?

"Was that one of the more satisfying dumps you've had?" -- Sideline reporter Suzy Shuster to Nebraska head coach Bill Callahan after he was doused with Gatorade.

I went bowling with my buddy Nate recently, and the guy is one helluva bowler. He actually bowled eight strikes in a row! Eight! I have now made it my goal to get Nate to drop out of school, quit his job, and focus on bowling. I really think he has a shot at the Pro Bowling Association.

So finals is supposed to be like all studying, all the time, which totally sucks. But really, when I have an entire day with no classes, and nothing to do but study, it is really, really difficult for me to get motivated. I set a new record today when I hit the snooze button 11 times. That’s right, I set my alarm for 8 AM and actually got out of bed at 9:39 AM. That’s kind of impressive, in a way.

Driving to Bakersfield for Thanksgiving I saw a remarkable site on the freeway. Apparently, a truck carrying toilet paper had been in an accident, because there were literally thousands of rolls of toilet paper all over the road. It was probably the coolest thing I had seen all week. I almost got off at the next exit so I could drive through it again. I really try to partake in life’s simple pleasures.

I bet students were a lot more productive before the invention of instant messenger, myspace, and the facebook.

Seriously, I don’t know how I would survive without my laptop or the internet. If I had to go to the library and study, and be completely cut off from the world… well I guess I wouldn’t be able to track the score of the Monday night football game, or talk to my buddy six feet away about how much studying sucks. That would be a rough world.

I think it’s time for me to face the facts. I have an addiction. I absolutely love playing spider solitaire. It’s a fantastic game, taking just enough thought to entertain me, but still leaving me room to listen to my torts lecture or talk on the phone. But the amount I play it is staggering at times. Almost sick. I discovered the game early in the semester, and after a month or so, I decided it had to go, and deleted it off my computer. After falling asleep in several classes, I broke down and downloaded the game again. The last few weeks of school, I played over 200 games, and won over 60 (most of the time while in class). To put this in perspective, try playing it sometime (it comes standard with Windows). It usually takes a good ten to fifteen minutes to beat a game playing two suits, and I have done it over 60 times. In related news, I get my grades back in a few weeks. After that, I’m guessing I will decide to cut back on my spider solitaire.

In the history of sandwiches, I don’t believe the sandwich my roommate Jon just made has ever been made before. He made a steak sandwich on a cinnamon raisin bagel, including cream cheese, peppers, and apple slices. I (jokingly) asked him if he wanted to put some pineapple on it, and he was like, “We have pineapple? Where?”

“My friend asked me if I wanted a frozen banana now, and I said no, but I want a regular banana later, so yeah.” -- the late, great comedian Mitch Headberg.

I just found a posting at the law school announcing the “Warren J. Ferguson Award for the best essay on social justice.” The award is a $300 cash prize. Hey, that doesn’t sound too bad. The suggested length of the essay? 25-50 pages. Um, yeah, I might just have to pass on that one. Even if I was guaranteed to win, I still don’t think I would spend my time getting paid $6 per page. Actually, I wonder if anyone is going to enter this contest.

You wanna know what’s a great feeling? Waking up on a Saturday morning and realizing an NFL game is on. What makes that feeling better? When one of your favorite teams is winning 21-0. The icing on the cake? You realize you placed a bet on that team at about 4 AM the previous night. Nice.

“Wells Fargo will contribute $5,000 to the 49ers Foundation to help underprivileged youth in the Bay Area for every 49er touchdown scored this season. (Pause) There’s going to be a lot of sad kids.” – Joe Starkey, 49ers radio broadcaster.

How pissed off do you think the Las Vegas Commerce Association was when the bowl committee voted to invite BYU to play in the Pioneer Provision Las Vegas Bowl against Cal on December 22nd? I just don’t think casinos and Mormons mix too well.

So I just ordered a pizza from some local pizza dive in my neighborhood. Midway through my first slice, I realized that there was no sauce on the pizza. What the hell kind of pizza doesn’t come with sauce? This made me really curious, did the pizza place forget the sauce, or do they make all their pizzas without sauce? And if they forgot it, should I call back and demand another, sauce-laden pizza? But if they purposely did not include sauce, what kind of pizza is that? It was basically cheese bread with pepperoni. Either way, I’m not ordering from Angelino’s Pizza again.

Precios bajos

November 26, 2005

Today is Sunday, and with finals fast approaching, I felt it was necessary for me to spend some more quality time with my new best friend: the library. I really felt proud of myself for getting my lazy ass out of bed and away from the all the football games on TV, until I actually got to the library. There was like twenty other students in one reading room. Goddamn law students make me sick.

I think I might have learned more Spanish driving to school in the past couple months than I did taking three years of it in high school. Used car lots are constantly serenading me with “Precios bajos!” and “Credito facil!” and “E-Z financio!” Actually, I think I might have made that last one up. I have no idea about that, but the constant stream of Lavanderias, Carnicerias, and Iglesias as I drive through my neighborhood offer me a veritable cornucopia of chances to learn the language of my Hispanic neighbors.

So I recently got back my first legal writing assignment, a ten page memo evaluating a hypothetical about whether there was enough evidence to prosecute a dude for felony stalking (I told the district attorney to fry the guy). Anyway, I got a 71, and the class median was 70. When a classmate asked me how I did, I calmly looked her in eye, gave a little nod, and nonchalantly said “above average.” Oh yeah, look at me, I’m intimidating.

It’s kind of cool how laptops combined with wireless internet and instant messenger allows today’s law students to pass 21st century notes in class. It looks to the professor like we are diligently taking notes, when actually I am cursing to my friend about how I just lost Terrell Owens for the season from my fantasy football team.

One thing I hate about LA is the fact it is such a damn city. And there is absolutely no public transportation, so to get anywhere always requires a car. Really, the reason this bothers me is the fact that it is difficult to get a ride home when I want to go out and get plastered. My roommate Jon and I have epic battles of Ro-Sham-Bo to determine who drives and who gets to drink. On the bright side, I would say my alcoholism and decreased by about 50% because of this.

So my civil procedure class took a field trip to the district courthouse the other day to watch some proceedings. Fascinating stuff, really (well, maybe for a law student it was. Most people would probably be bored out of their skull). Anyway, so there was a guy getting sentenced for setting up a drug deal over the phone. Wait, I thought to myself, wasn’t that the same crime NFL runningback Jamal Lewis committed and received a sentence of 3 months of jail time, to be served in the offseason? This guy got 46 months. You mean there are different standards for NFL stars and Mexican immigrants who speak no English? Color me shocked, but I think a little bit of my faith in the legal system might have died that day.

"Maybe I'll buy a chocolate factory" – NBA star Andre Kirilenko on what to buy with his new eight figure contract. Who wouldn’t love a dorky white dude in the NBA who owns a chocolate factory?

I finally did it. I deleted the games off my laptop. I actually did it once before, about three weeks ago, but made the fatal mistake of not emptying out the recycle bin. I lasted about three days, after which I realized good old solitaire and minesweeper were still on my hard drive after I my half-assed attempt to remove them. Needless to say, I made sure to make up for my missed time by doubling my game playing efforts in class.

Having to deal with rush hour traffic constantly, I think there are few things that get me more excited than when the freeways are empty. I practically get a boner when I can drive 70 MPH.

Since I deleted the games off my laptop, class has been a little rough. Without an outlet to distract me from yet another boring lecture on why P can sue D in Oklahoma or New Jersey, but not in New York, I have found another means to get through those 75 minute civil procedure classes. I fall asleep.

So I’m in the library, diligently studying away in anticipation of finals, and I get a call from my roommate. “Dude,” he says, “ I really need you to pick something up on your way home for me.” I immediately picture Jon at home, in an emergency situation, where he sprained his ankle or something and needs some sort of medical help. He goes on to tell me, “I just bought a bunch of Eggos and forgot to get syrup.” I’m not going to answer my phone anymore when he calls.

I just noticed I have really hairy arms.

Taken directly from my torts law outline book: “P and D are on their first date. D, in order to induce P to go to bed with him, tells her that he does not have herpes. P, in reliance on D’s statement, consents to sex. Unbeknownst to either P or D, D in fact has herpes, which he transmits to P. Notwithstanding the mistake, P’s consent is effective, even though she would never have given it had she known the full facts. Therefore, P cannot sue for battery.” Glad we cleared that up.

So I was doing my laundry the other day at one of the local ghettomats, and I noticed there was one of those super discount stores and decided to go in and take a look. I was blown away at the incredible variety of shit they had. From motor oil to ice cream to women’s underwear. What did I purchase? A can of pineapple slices, toothpaste, a set of precision screwdrivers, strawberry jelly, and an assortment of nails. Total bill: $7.10.

OK, so, looking around, my arms aren’t especially hairy when compared to my classmates. I guess I just never realized how hairy arms generally are.

I know I rag on law school a lot, and more than one person has told me that they are reconsidering taking the plunge into a legal education because of some of my stories. Well, I just met a guy who made $2,400 in his summer job. A week. After his first year of law school. Excuse me, but I have to get back to studying.