It's funny: I'm home at the moment, and I was just going through a box of stuff when I found my old facebook from sophomore year.

Yeah, I remember that girl.

This just in from the "truth is stranger than fiction" department. Who bops a giant sausage?

Hate to be predictable, but it was probably inevitable that my choice for the most beautiful girl in the world would also be the star of the best movie ever made.

Well, my two biggest movie crushes of the past few years are:

Lauren Ambrose in Swimming (You have to see the trailer for the full affect. Most notably, her smiling on the beach and the change in her face when the van door opens.)

and Rachel Leigh Cook in Josie and the Pussycats, again, watch the trailer for the full affect, but this picture is alright.

If any of you still have the adams photo gallery from our sophomore year, there was this senior named Marla Genoni who I met in the laundry room who was one of the two most beautiful women I've ever met (the other being Julie our french teacher, of course).

I'll leave Virginie Ledoyen for Alec to post about.

I don't have any specific nominations for most beautiful girl in the world, but after walking around campus for an hour this afternoon I've come to the conclusion that she must go to UC Berkeley, as pretty much every girl I passed was extremely attractive.

Also, Noah and I (and 3 others) now have a beautiful house with a spectacular view in the Berkeley hills. You must all come visit. He's sitting 3 feet to my left now and presumably posting on the same topic, so I'll leave the description to him.

All in all, I think I could be convinced to like California. :)

One of the reasons posting has been slow is that Dave, Flora, and I have been house hunting. But we found a place today... It has 5 bedrooms, a huge living room with a fireplace and two story ceilings, three bathrooms and two kitchens, a backyard, a deck, a garage with a pool table, a hot tub, and a spectacular bay view, all within in short walk of campus (15 minutes down, probably 30 up). Here's where it is: yay Mapquest

I'm bored at work, and it's been kind of quiet on this blog recently, so I thought I'd toss out a surefire discussion topic:

Who's the most beautiful girl in the world?

Links to pictures a must. Idiosyncratic or underappreciated nominees welcomed. I'll post my choice(s) sometime tomorrow.

I finally subscribed to Netflix, and now that I'm a member and the DVDs are rolling in, I'm astonished that I never tried this earlier. I think I know why I waited so long, however: I just moved into a new apartment where I'm living on my own, and Netflix is much better geared towards solitary viewing than watching movies with friends. Usually when you make plans to watch a movie at home, it involves coordinating times and preferences, and you need to have the movie ready at a certain time. With Netflix, by contrast, the nature of the DVD-by-mail service (although it's very reliable and fast) means that you're never quite sure when your movie will arrive. Hence it's much better geared towards a solitary, casual movie at the end of the day, which is precisely the sort of thing I'm doing all the time now. (No Internet, no cable…there isn't much else to do at the moment.)

In case you're curious, my first three selections from Netflix were three classic movies that I've always been embarrassed to say I'd never seen: Bonnie and Clyde, Sunset Boulevard, and Grand Illusion. Next week, unless I'm mistaken, will be Double Indemnity, On the Waterfront, and The Conversation. The only recent movie currently in my rental queue is American History X, which suddenly seems to have become essential viewing. Any futher suggestions, as always, would be much appreciated.

This is my last day in my apartment here... Surprisingly enough, looking back it's been a pretty good year, somehow the spring has almost overshadowed the fall, and 2003 is shaping up to be an excellent year. I'll miss being here, I don't want to leave my view of the park, and I'll miss living in the social center of my set. And it is very disappointing to realize that I got through the entire year without kissing any girls in this apartment... On the other hand I'm so glad to be nearly rid of our landlords. Anyway I should run, we're cleaning up and I'm blogging from a laptop on our kitchen counter.

[We apologise for the 'p' errors. They have been rectified. -Ed]

Today is my last day in England. This afternoon I packed in all of the things that everyone has to do in Cambridge but I never got around to doing: see the Botanic Garden (stunning!), view Cambridge from the top of Great St. Mary's Church (thus indulging my predilection for high places), have tea and a scone with jam and clotted cream (ok, I'd done that one before). Earlier in the week, still repenting for never having gone to either the Fogg or the MFA (except for the one time Lisa took me to the Guston exhibition), I went to the Fitzwilliam museum, which has a small but impressive collection in a large and even more impressive building. Now I have to try to cram all of my remaining stuff (I've spent £300 on shipping in the last two days) into three suitcases, after which I'll be cooking risotto with Lucy and trying to convince her to help me finish my remaining alcohol (of which there is much).

It hasn't been the greatest year ever, but England, Cambridge, and Emmanuel have been good to me, and I'll miss them. Over the last week I've been trying to think of specific things I'll miss and not miss, and here's what I've come up with. (These lists are subject to modification, so check back later!)

Things I'll miss about England (in no particular order):

• Trains.
  
• McVitie's digestive biscuits.
  
• The Emma bar.
  
• Tax included in the prices.
  
• Ubiquitous text messaging. (I'm going to try to bring this one back with me.)
  
• The Emma ducks (and oh-so-cute ducklings!).
  
• 10.30 pm sunset in summer.
  
• Scones with jam and clotted cream.
  
• Laundry service.
  
• Pre-dinner champagne and post-dinner port.
  
• No open-bottle laws.
  
• Stansted Airport.
  
• The accents (especially the Scottish ones).
  
• Drinking because it happens to be a Tuesday.
  
• Indian food everywhere.
  
• Being able to ring anyone at 2 am without worrying about waking them up.
  
• Scottish nationalism.
  
• Classical music on WHRB from 6 pm to 3 am.
  
• Not bringing the bill until you ask for it.
  
• Good cheddars.
  
• No stress.
  

Things I won't miss about England:

• British plumbing.
  
• Rain.
  
• Pubs closing at 11 pm.
  
• Tiny fridges and no freezer.
  
• 17.5% VAT.
  
• 3.30 pm sunset in winter.
  
• Slooooow internet connection (not entirely English in nature, but frustrating nonetheless).
  
• Bad Chinese food.
  
• Pennying.
  
• Buses wider than the streets.
  
• Everything closing at 5 pm.
  
• Did I mention the plumbing?
  

I'm beginning to question whether I really want my welfare for the next five years to be in the hands of the state of California.

However, it is slightly comforting to know that California doesn't have a monopoly on government incompetence.

Gave a talk at UC Davis on wednsday, which went well. Davis is an interesting town. I'd heard before that there were a lot of bicycles there, but i wasn't quite prepared for the reality. There are bikes parked everywhere, and it isn't even during the school year. There must be thousands and thousands of them. There are many of them on the street and the streets are all generous and wide. Furthermore bikes are a popular topic of conversation... When we asked for directions the person we asked couldn't stop raving about how cool peter's bike was, and when i waited for a train coming back there were people discussing what sort of things joining the handlebars to the frame Schwinn was making in the 60's when they made this one particular model...

Speaking of waiting for the train, on the way back it took several hours because of an accident on the track. The girl next to me complained the the trains were better when she lived in Siberia a decade ago...

How in the world could anyone describe Sean Connery's performance in The Untouchables as "much-mocked"? "Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?" "Yes...yes I do." "Good, 'cause you just took one."

I'm also not sure why Pete Postlewaite appears on that list. Yes, his accent was a little stilted, but bear in mind that in The Usual Suspects he's an Irish actor playing a Pakistani lawyer with a Japanese last name who doesn't exist.

Turns out Strom was a miscegenator... Probably a sodomite too.

Here's an interesting top 10 list.

("Top ten whats?" you ask... Does it really matter, you're going to read it anyway.

In the last 6 months his only non-unanimous majority opinions are: Chavez v Martinez and Woodford v Garceau. The former was one of the more important decisions this year which said that the government does not break the 5th ammendment by compelling testimony so long as this testimony is not used against the person. It's a rather complicated decision because there are different majorities for different parts of the decision, but Thomas wrote the most important part and announced the decision.

The links are to findlaw which is a really good reference for all things legal.

According to a Lexis-Nexis search for "OPINIONBY(Thomas) and dissent," Thomas has written 50 non-unanimous majority opinions in his time on the court. For comparison, in the same time Souter, a judge of similar seniority has written 63 non-unanimous majority opinions.

Since the year 2000 the number of non-unanimous majority opinions by each justice is (in order of seniority):
Rehnquist: 25
Stevens: 25
O'Connor: 27
Scalia: 16
Kennedy: 24
Thomas: 18
Souter: 15
Ginsburg: 15
Breyer: 15

There has been a lot of stuff over at the Volokh Conspiracy trying to debunk the "Thomas is a stupid lazy idiot" myth which is how I figured out how to do this sort of search, see this post, for example.

Roger Ebert has an amusing review of T3: Rise of the Machines where he compares it, unfavorably, to the sort of cerebral science fiction favored by Analog magazine:

In the dawning days of science fiction, there was a chasm between the concept-oriented authors and those who churned out space opera. John W. Campbell Jr.'s Astounding Science Fiction, later renamed Analog to make the point clear, was the home of the brainy stuff. Bug-eyed monsters chased heroines in aluminum brassieres on the covers of Amazing, Imagination and Thrilling Wonder Stories.

The first two Terminator movies, especially the second, belonged to Campbell's tradition of S-F ideas. They played elegantly with the paradoxes of time travel, in films where the action scenes were necessary to the convoluted plot. There was actual poignancy in the dilemma of John Connor, responsible for a world that did not even yet exist. The robot Terminator, reprogrammed by Connor, provided an opportunity to exploit Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics.

But that was an age ago, in 1991...

What can I say? Ebert's the best.

I probably shouldn't admit to this in such a public forum, but I've become embarrassingly fond of Kelly Clarkson's new single, the Christina Aguilera-penned "Miss Independent." It's a Neptunes ripoff, but a good one, and it's the sort of perfectly packaged pop confection that I miss hearing in my friends' cars in high school, or even at the occasional college party with the girls upstairs. I'm not sure I could ever put it onto a mix CD with a straight face, though. Maybe for Haiwen....

Reading this article got me wondering: have they ever let Clarence Thomas write an opinion for a non-unanimous decision? (I don't have the time and/or the internet connection to answer this right now. The Supreme Court site has all the decisions listed with authors but you have to download the whole thing to get the votes, and Google can't seem to find a summarising list.)