long weekend, short week...

ah, glorious thanksgiving week! i have class monday and tuesday, then wednesday, thursday, and friday off for the holiday. goddamn right! seriously, if it weren't for this short week coming up, i might have ended up committing hara-kiri on the steps of the cathedral of learning.

okay, so it's not _that_ bad. it's not even really bad at all, there's just a lot to do and i pretty much took the weekend off. not that the weekend was uneventful. it was actually pretty fun. here are some thoughts from the past couple of days:

1. the new harry potter movie is almost wizard porn. and it has some flawed contract theory in it. but it is, for the most part, bloody entertaining and i still have a crush on the boys who play the weasley twins, even though i have an irrational fear of twins and i don't generally like redheads.

2. girls who aren't "flowery" do not per se look good in clothes with flowers on them. and i don't care what anybody says. but a green wool cardigan sweater with just the right amount of bling is a good idea.

3. directly following a 2 hour ordeal sorting out a fender bender with a trip to the outlet malls on an empty stomach does not make emily a happy camper. it's a damn good thing i was with good company, or else.

4. i'm a total flake. a TOTAL flake. my friends should all bludgeon me for saying i'm gonna show up at stuff and then ending up at Kmart at 11:30 at night and not even calling to apologize. elizabeth -- i'm a total arse.

5. my mentee is an absolute doll.

6. i think that somebody's smartass teenage intern drafted the response to a petition filed in the PA supreme court in 1999 seeking an investigation into the effect of racial bias in philadelphia capital sentencing. because of excerpts like this:

Thus, there is simply no basis upon which a court could conclude that the unpublished Baldus study, which so has not undergone peer review, is even based upon accurate information, or that it was conducted in a scientifically valid manner likely to produce reliable results, as opposed to producing a vehicle for protesting the death penalty. (emphasis added)

or,

Culpability is not a number. Attempting to accurately assign a numerical value to aggravating and mitigating circumstances is a fool's errand. Anyone who claims to have succeeded in doing so is either completely ignorant of the nature of the capital sentenceing process, or a charlatan.

6. are hara-kiri and seppuku the same thing?