renegadeRICEcracker

chicago gay pride

heyhey - yesterday was my first pride parade. it was awesome. mad crowded with festivities and awesome floats. highlights included the flock of dykes on bikes and r.o.t.c., the righteously outrageous twirling corps - from now on, whenever i see men in uniform, i will wish that they were marching and twirling plastic white rifles in unison. there were also hella politicians - while we were generally less impressed with them because they on the whole were not astride floats with drag queens (though some were), we were excited to see professor obama there.

anyway, at one point or another we sent tana off on a quest for beer. she comes back quite a bit later with clear plastic cups filled with a luminescent neon green liquid. she said that it took so long to find a place selling alcohol that she figured, to be time efficient, she should just go hard alcohol. what was in the cup? midori, triple sec, vodka... and a little lime juice.

yeeaaahhhh...

by the time tana and ben returned from a second run with cups filled this time with nasty pink watermelon flavored alcohol, i had finished one on my own (remember, low tolerance, and VERY VERY strong drink) actually decided to cut myself off. "uh, connie... what time is it that you're cutting yourself off?" "um... 1:40..."

i did try to drink a little more later, but shawna pointed out that i was bright red and stumbling all over myself and cut me off... don't worry, ben and babs took my car back for me and later tana and i just took the red line home. at least.... we thought we did... until we realized we were in fact on the brown line. we got off, wandered around downtown a little bit and then took the jeffrey express back and met up with ben to finish out the day with whatever beer was in my fridge.

yay pride!

connie and 3-man --> the combination is a bad idea...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TED AND GABE (AND BARBARA)!!!

it's been/is a birthday weekend. (i put babs in quotes not because i don't love her but because, despite her party having been last night, her birthday is not for another 3 weeks - but fair 'nuff, the actual day falls precipitously close to the bar exam...).

we fired it up last night at the lava lounge, where the quasi-birthday girl unexpectedly got tamales and pizza in the middle of the festivities (though it's not hard to see why - the unadulterated enthusiasm and excitement it brings makes feeding this girl one of the more precious joys in life). the rest of the weekend has been kicked off with a keg at the big house, procured by a losing bet on ted's end... but since he will be drinking a large portion of the beer this weekend, you could also say he's the winner... but then you could also say he's the loser...

as i'm sure you know, a keg holds a LOT of beer. so it's just chillin' in the kitchen, and hard work will be put in to finish it by the end of the weekend.

in the name of kicking off that hard work, i learned a new drinking game. it's called 3-man. it's your standard dice game where you take turns rolling dice, and what you get dictates who drinks, who you can make drink, what rules you can institute, etc. and every time a person rolls a 3 or a 1-2 ("3 the hard way"), the 3-man drinks. and if it's 3 the hard way, the 3-man rolls and drinks that number. 3-man is also pimped out to refresh the pitcher and anything else the crew wants the 3-man to do. the 3-man remains the 3-man until he/she rolls a 3 on his/her turn.

i was the 3-man for the first two rounds in a game involving ten people.

ponder that for a moment.

people roll 3s a HELLUVA lot more than you would think. and each turn lasts until that person rolls and no one drinks. rounds last a very looong time. and as you probably know if you are reading this, i have a very loooow tolerance.

yeeaaahhhh...

suffice it to say that people had stopped delegating drinks to me by the time i stopped being the 3-man. not that that stopped me from drinking - by the time we finished, the damn rules said you had to drink if you: i) swore, ii) said "drink," "drank," or "drunk" - as in, "tana - you just swore! drink! oh shit, now i have to drink! argh! now i have to drink again! argh!!!!", iii) pointed at anyone, iv) used anyone's name, or v) were the last to touch your nose once miguel touched his...

ahem.

i did not, as it turned out, throw up, despite eating all the fried greasy things that robbie was nice enough to make for us on top of all the beer, but i never did make it up from that couch for the rest of the party... which was fine, it was getting on toward that time by then anyway, so i just faded in and out of sleep until i was sober and could drive home.

speaking of which, i should head off to sleep now in order to be rested tomorrow for the pride march, ted and gabe's birthday dinner, and adam's party. (i'm sorry, what i meant to say is that i want to be rested in order to put in a full day of studying tomorrow...)

peace out.

signing on to the "homosexual agenda"...

In Texas, calling a person a homosexual is slander per se because the word "homosexual" "impute[s] the commission of a crime." Plumley v. Landmark Chevrolet, Inc., 122 F. 3d 308, 310 (CA5 1997) (applying Texas law).

Supreme Court Strikes Down Texas Law Banning Sodomy

so... Lawrence v. Texas came out today. you can read the court opinion here. i'm relieved (that the statute was struck down)... and disappointed (that they didn't make sexual orientation a suspect classification - not that anyone thought that they might, but still)... and annoyed at all these tv commentators talking about the new constitutional right to homosexual sodomy (no, scalia, there is no deeply rooted tradition of holding homosexual sodomy up as a 'fundamental right'... but if we broaden the inquiry to whether's a deeply rooted tradition of privacy in sexual relations... of course, i should stop here because when i tried to address this same issue to him i ended up stumbling over and botching my question, and he got an entire auditorium to laugh at me...) and what we are going to do about society's apparently serious problem with criminalizing orgies (because apparently society's big problem is all the consensual sex between adults).

people are also on tv yelling about how the court today said that right and wrong have nothing to do with the law. i mean, scalia's point about how the court's reasoning basically ends morality legislation is true (which seems fine until you realize that a huge chunk of our laws are morality legislation and we're fine with that because we tend to agree with them). but why hasn't anyone discussed the morality plus principle (moral grounds insufficient for legislation absent harm to another party, or something like that)? we talked about this in law school, and it seems like it would apply here... i assume, as usual, i'm just missing something?

i did like scalia's discussion on why the sodomy laws don't violate the equal protection clause:

Men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are all subject to its
prohibition of deviate sexual intercourse with someone of the same sex. To
be sure, §21.06 does distinguish between the sexes insofar as concerns the
partner with whom the sexual acts are performed: men can violate the law
only with other men, and women only with other women. But this cannot
itself be a denial of equal protection, since it is precisely the same distinction
regarding partner that is drawn in state laws prohibiting marriage with
someone of the same sex while permitting marriage with someone of the
opposite sex.

i mean he's right, if we treat this as a violation of equal protection then that kind of battens the hatches for *gasp* gay marriage... i just happen to be okay with that.

overall, i'm happy, the court did good:

Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and it is not correct today. It
ought not to remain binding precedent. Bowers v. Hardwick should be and
now is overruled.

so i guess my last opportunity to commit that particular felony passed in alabama...

productivity is all relative.

i need to learn how to just go to bed rather than obsessively latch onto whatever new project i have decided to undertake. i just spent four hours researching my next compilation cd, which for some reason suddenly seemed pressing enough that it had to be done /right now/.

this is like when i kept foregoing sleep during finals week because i had to do important things like figure out how to retrieve my backed up palm files from my old laptop and transfer them to the new one at four in the morning even though i hadn't used my palm pilot in at least six months.

um.

i now seem to have been e-mailed the actual book in word form. huh.

that's odd...

on saturday, the day after the new harry potter book came out, i was e-mailed said harry potter book. in its entirety. the .pdf document has 357 8x11 pages. strange, right? but you know, people are crazy, and someone, somewhere apparently is manaical and a bit wanting for activities to fill the calendar.

well, i read a few pages. i was disappointed. the bit i read was tired and cliched - i got bored. i stopped.

but so i'm sitting in this coffeeshop with mitch, who happens to have the aforementioned fifth harry potter book with him. i ask him if i can see it.

um. yeah.

it's not the same book. at all. i mean, a few of the chapters have the same title, and the file shows a careful attention to painstaking detail that only a true (read: crazy) harry potter fan would have (this is what mitch says, anyway - he is one of the, ahem, "true" fans).

but yeah. apparently what i hold is a three hundred and fifty seven page hoax. and it's not just a three hundred and fifty seven page file. we scanned through it and read bits and pieces here and there, and all signs point to this being a three hundred and fifty seven page /book/. someone wrote this /book/. someone on _crack_ wrote this /book/.

yeeaaahhhh...

if you want a copy, let me know and i'll e-mail it to you.

(yes, yes, i realize i should have been more doubtful of its authenticity to begin with but, you know, everyone around me seemed to believe it, and if nothing else, i am a sheep...)

hmm...

well the picture works now. not that /i/ did anything. i'm just rackin' up the asahis that i owe brian. hopefully i'll have it figured out soon, though.

gar... i just sat through 3 1/2 hours of the contracts lecture i missed last friday. after 7 1/2 - 8 hours of barbri my brain is all mushy. i think i'm supposed to be packing up so i can go do some work, but now i'm all engrossed in smallville. clark and lana were going to go on a date but then whitney returned from the marines and she was all happy to see him. but apparently he is actually dead and seems to have some sort of evil supernatural powers. (oh no!)

ah, tee-vee... i've neglected you for far too long...

i know there's a wagon somewhere...

... but ever since i fell off it i haven't been able to locate it. i think i strained my study muscle. it's healing slowly, but isn't really helped by my ADD.

i was not so worried about the fact that four of the six days in front of me have hard plans involving heavy alcohol consumption, but then august had to go and point out that there are only 2 1/2 weeks of barbri class left. hmm...

that's alright. i'm sure i will be properly motivated once i'm in new york next weekend.

hey - if you go to school with me i bet you can figure out who sent me this: Pride (and $50) at Steak

and now i'm going to add a picture, because i just learned how:

this is in the leaky cauldron, at a harry potter street festival celebrating the new book last friday. (no, i did not buy the book. yes, i did think the idea of a recreated diagon alley was cool. shut up.)

okay - apparently i don't know how to upload pictures. hopefully this will work sometime soon.

fun with logos...

ok, so after the fun with fonts from earlier today, i whipped up version 1.0 of the renegade rice cracker logo, nothing too fancy... i was told "make it orange" and that's about all i had to go on... see how i deftly incorporated orange, as well as the lovely accent of rice cracker mosaic... genius i tell you, or something that closely aproximates it at least =P

post up what you think, maybe connie will do a poll to see if it sticks around for more than 5 minutes after she sees it ;)

font changes!!!

props to brian... who ROCKS!!!

i tried this font changing business earlier, with no success. not in the slightest. (so what we have figured out is that i have no competence whatsoever with this webpage schtuff, but am fortunate enough to have friends to leech off of...)

on a beautiful sunny day...

... there's nothing like holing inside the green lounge and doing 3 hours of multistate bar exam questions.

my friends are having a lively argument over the rules of "bitter woods" (don't ask me) and are accusing each other of cheating.

all in all, a perfect afternoon.

and just in case you didn't believe me...

when i got my iPod i was a little perturbed that my handy little remote broke after a day. jen told me to plug it in harder.

oh.

(if you're not wondering at this point why you even talk to me, you should be... though there is that entertainment factor.)

i am an idiot.

so... i figured out what was wrong with my printer. actually, even more embarrassing, ben figured it out for me - i couldn't do it on my own.

the night before graduation, my photo printer, still relatively new, punked out. i changed the color cartridge (there is also a black cartridge), and it didn't help. i ran over 10 cartridge cleaning runs. i tried a second brand new cartridge. i called hp and they had me run several tests. it didn't help. no matter what i did, the light magenta bar of the diagnostic page would not come out.

hp sent me a new printer. same problem. i returned the 2 new color cartridges because i thought perhaps they were defective. didn't help.

i thought it might be apple. i called apple. a not-terribly-helpful guy informed me that iPhoto does not support my printer in a smarmy, sugar-sweet tone that made me want to kick him. especially after ben and i found that you can buy my printer through the mac website. i was told that it's strange that my printer ever worked at all.

i downgraded to iPhoto1. didn't help. upgraded back to iPhoto2. didn't help. i recruited ben and brian. we uninstalled and reinstalled my driver. didn't help. we researched all over the web for info on this light magenta problem. nothing.

"did you change the /other/ cartridge?" "the other cartridge is black - i replaced the color cartridge several times." "oh, that's where the black one goes, but you can also have a second photo cartridge for higher quality photos." oh.

yeeaaahhhh...

i took out what turned out not to be a black cartridge at all, and stuck a black cartridge in its place so photos would print solely from the other cartridge.

the printer's fine.

i want to shoot myself.

dare i say...

that renegadeRICEcracker might be up and running soon??? props to jen... who ROCKS.