PORT-U-GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Portuguese are going to the Euro Cup finals for the first time ever, and a party has started here that prob'ly won't end until early in the morning. It's all crazy here. Pictures later.

i threw i-raq... and i-ran.

so i was thinking:

is this early transfer thing kind of sketchy, or is that just me? it's playing out kinda like getting a birthday card from your parents two days before your birthday, but with no money in it; just a brief message: "Best wishes on the rest of your life, sucka... see you around."

and now iraq is no longer in the running for fifty-first state. except that we've still got all our troops over there, all of the people we appointed in power, and a huge complex of administrative buildings that will now become the largest (and probably most secure) American embassy in the world.

speaking of invading masses showing up where they aren't welcome, the republicans are coming to new york. maybe you heard. no one has yet been able to give me a good answer as to why they are doing this, but rest assured that they will do everything in their power to faithfully uphold the sanctity of marriage while they're in town. good to know, eh?

nevarkian portuguese soccer mania update....

maybe you thought i was making it all up?

johnny be white

i hope none of you intend to pick your president based upon his potential to RAWK a bass guitar. because there's a very good chance that lyndon larouche could rock harder and with greater efficiency than our current great (very) white hope. i very much doubt that anyone involved with this record ever would have thought that it would be (1) reissued (2) because their gawky, perpetually-confused-looking bass player was the presumptive democratic nominee for the 2004 presidential election.

so, as garage bands go, these guys sure do suck. check out the drummer's sad attempts to find a pickup on "three blind mice," for example (where's the beat? where's the beat? oh, there's the beat... no, wait....) or our man john's constant struggle to stay in tune (and on time; and remember this is the bass player, whose entire job is to keep the time) in "you can't sit down". this might just be the whitest, squarest, least-happening garage cover band the 1960's ever produced. NOT kerry's best shot at connecting with the MTV generation. can't this guy do anything without looking like a stiff, cantankerous, old-money fraud? please?

actual picture of Nevarkian Portuguese post-Britkicking festivities...

and how!

they do this thing here after portugal wins where they drive around and yell and wave their flags and yell and honk their horns and activate their car alarms. and yell. it's fun, for about an hour. but then there are next four hours....

clear and present stupid

but jack ryan already is president. after a commercial airliner was crashed into the capitol dome by japanese terrorists. not that i read the book or anything.... clancy got a little too silly for me after debt of honor. and middle school.

so, jeri ryan is totally single now. huh. hope she's got good security. those lamer voyager fanboys are ruthless.

on a related note: how and why did voyager ever last so long? is it over yet?

fist of the west side!

in penance for my previous overlong, overserious post, i offer: lots of funny pictures with very little text! this actually made me laugh out loud.

also still available: thesupremecourtsucks.com

scaliasucks.com, sadly, is currently being wasted by some gaming hack. why go to the trouble of taking that domain if you're not going to at least attempt to fire a few shots in the direction of the most objectionable supreme court justice in US history?

i don't want to turn this into a legal issues blog (i should prob'ly just start one of my own, anyway), but i think every person currently in the united states should be familiar with the "Hiibel v. Nevada" ruling that just came down today. The Supremes just (narrowly) held for the state of Nevada on this one, which (1) kind of almost surprises me and (2) SUCKS.

basically, at least as he'll tell it, Dudley Hiibel was your typical Nevada cowboy, standing by the side of the highway having a cigarette when the cops pulled up and demanded that he identify himself. He refused something like 14 times, at which point they finally threw him down, cuffed him and took him down to the station. (course, he was probably kind of drunk... you can watch the creepy "what country is this from, anyway?" video and decide for yourself. But maybe the craziest thing about this is the victim... these kinds of flagrant police-abuse cases almost never involve rural white people.)

anyway, turns out that a recently-passed NV law actually allows cops to arrest people for refusing to identify themselves, even without any probable cause whatsoever. NV upheld the law, citing the usual post-9/11 "now more than ever" security concerns in its opinion, and apparently the Supreme Cort has just confirmed that ruling. I haven't read the opinion yet, but it's a pretty disappointing precedent, one that only a hardcore Bushie or a wacked-out, cop-loving, jackbooted law student (and there are all too many of them) could love. You can read more about it all at Hiibel's propaganda site. yes, so maybe it's the logical extreme (we can hope) of one of Warren court's finest decisions (Terry v. Ohio), but i'm not really into logical extremes anymore. good thing Earl Warren's already dead, or he'd be having a heart attack today.

backwards day!

okay, so you might have seen the new york times's palpable disgust for clinton's new book from the drudge link. weird, right? but now Fox News LOVES Fahrenheit 9/11:

As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, "F9/11" — as we saw last night — is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty — and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.

err... that wouldn't be the same stupidity and avarice that fox news has been encouraging america to fall in line and support without question for the past four years, would it? (in a related note: "a indictment"? always nice to have major grammatical errors only a word from "stupidity.")

do no harm... to anyone but lawyers

then again, maybe I shouldn't trust anyone in the medical profession ever again:

Some doctors are refusing medical treatment to lawyers, their families and their employees except in emergencies, and the doctors are urging the American Medical Association to endorse that view.

I really thought this was a joke. Then I remembered that McPaper NEVER JOKES.

I didn't know the gmail invites were random. Didn't mean to gloat. I can send you an invite in the morning if you want.

So it looks like I'm selling (or renting, anyway) my body to science. I was looking for extra ways to make some cash before heading off to the second most expensive city in the world, and then I remembered that I live in the heart of our nation's pharmaceutical industry. Turns out I can in stay in a secure facility in nearby Hackensack for a weekend and take experimental antibiotics for $750. TV, internet, pool table... and dozens of little cups to pee in. But unlike my friends at ABR, the asshats at Bristol Meyers Squibb wouldn't even finish putting me in the database when I admitted that I had (very) mild exercise-induced asthma. They pay the big money, too--$2700 to $4500 for a series of three-night sessions. The best part is that I could sit and do my legal research and writing onsite instead of in the library.

Yes, I need money. Stop looking at me like that.

Has everyone signed up for their Gmail? You can get an invite via Blogger, if you hadn't noticed. It's the best email system ever, and I signed up early enough to get the username "mattcameron."

from the bowels of adolf hitler...

i wish i'd never found this, but now i'm going to share it and make you think about it too. this low carb nonsense has to end soon.

just wanted to point out this hip new blog following the 877 superstars of the federal judiciary, billed as "a combination of People, US Weekly, Page Six, The National Enquirer, and Tigerbeat." probably not as interesting to you as it is to me, but you really should read the june 14 entry for a peek into just how truly incestous the highest ranks of the legal profession are. not that i'll ever really know.

in other legal-type news, Rush Limbaugh (whose most recent wedding was officiated by "uncle" clarence thomas at his VA home) is on his third divorce now. blame the internet, i guess (they met and conducted an extensive relationship online after she emailed him to ask how to deal with a Reagan-bashing professor)--or, better yet, those socialist homos, whose demands for "marriage" are clearly responsible for these staggering rates of divorce. anyway, here's some poorly-refuted evidence of his blustering stupidity as well as this masterful audio collage, easily the best thing of its kind EVER. listen to it now. it'll be in your head all day.

au contraire, mohatma

quickest path to blissful regression: new tmbg! the new EP just went up on rhapsody. they're doing a free show in brooklyn in july... what better place to see 'em?

thanks for the advice, T. some things i hadn't thought of there. i've been looking for ways to diversify--I'm not sure if this is it, but it was a long-term investment that I was looking for. there's no minimum for how much you put into it if you want to do it as an IRA, so I was thinking about doing it that way. but there's plenty of other good stuff out there. we'll see.

donald rumsfeld is now both the youngest and the oldest secretary of defense in U.S. history. think about that one...

saluting, waving the flag, and humming the star spangled banner in no time at all.

Here's an old-fashioned 3-D adventure game that'll have you feckless peacemongering heathens voting the way God would vote if He believed in democratic elections. these level names really say it all: "The Wandering Path," "Bizarre World," "One Way," and "Leap Of Faith." (and it has "a link to the official campaign website!" for free!) anyway, this software company seems to specialize in stupid 3-D games designed to get the blinders on homeschoolers eh-sap. Prime material for a drinking game, this is.

I've been watching this Eastern European mutual fund this week. I'm tragically bad with numbers, but 110% return in the past year is good, right? Emerging markets that have just joined the EU, new telecom markets, Russian oil--it all seems like reliably growth-oriented stuff. Is this worth throwing money at? Times like this I wish I knew someone with an MBA...

like a kid in a carpet store

you can thank the rise of nations expansion for my recent silence. RON was good, but T+P really makes it the blend of Civ3, Risk, AOE, and old-skool C+C it was supposed to be.

Matt: you might make a great lawyer. Not really a compliment, I guess, but it's true enough. From what I can tell, most of the best lawyers make it on that mysterious thing called "personality"--they have other people who can work out the legal stuff for them.(which is just another reason I'm never going to be an "actual" lawyer.) here are my thoughts on this--and this goes for all y'all...

i will venture to guess that the real problem is that you are, much like myself (but even more so) a raging generalist. you're interested in everything. lawyers and law students are pretty much interested in (1) money, (2) possible sources of more money, and (3) drinking. (the worst part is the monumentally uncreative ways [think Caribbean resorts and Meat Loaf CDs] in which they spend all of this money.) it's painful to watch.

as for its PLU-type qualities... well, it's bad. granted, I'm doing this in a particularly vacuous region, but I've been assured by law students from UW to Harvard that the crushing majority of these people are pretty much soul-sucking philistines anywhere. it comes with the territory. maybe things would be a little better if you went to leftier PNW institutions like UW or Lewis and Clark, but probably only superficially.

anyway, I would never directly advise any of my friends to go through this. and, for the sake of your mental, physical, and marital health, I might actually advise against it in your case. my last two years have been reasonably happy and rewarding, but that has more to do with my personal growth than anything else. I'd say you're too smart, too creative, and too (for lack of any better adjective) good for all this. this isn't to say that I am any of these things, of course... i think it's too late for me. fortunately, I don't intend to pursue any kind of "traditional" legal career, so my life is still plenty salvagable.

casey just stopped by my study room to escape racial bias in juror selection, and offered the following: "Tell him to go get a PhD in Europe. Or something. Anything else." this from someone who double-majoried in IR and poli-sci. there you have it.

i'm becoming just a little obsessed with Jim Jones. do you think this might be a problem?