Queen Elizabeth II is coming to the White House, and President Bush is brushing up on his manners. Heh.

A judge has sentenced Paris Hilton to 45 days in Los Angeles County jail for violating her probation on a reckless driving charge.

Visit CNN for the latest.

“I know it’s not Game 7, but it sure feels like do-or-die tonight,” writes Bfloblog’s Kevin on the open thread for Game 5 of the Sabres-Rangers series, which is tied at 2-2, with Buffalo needing the win tonight at HSBC Arena to hold onto home-ice advantage.

I won’t be able to watch the game, thanks to ConCrimPro cramming. But I hope the Sabres will recognize the exigent circumstances and take full advantage of all goal-scoring opportunities that are in plain view, as well as those that require some coersion. Nobody deserves a good stop-and-frisk(-and-punch) more than Sean Avery. Meanwhile, hopefully Ryan Miller will be practicing the exclusionary rule on the other end of the ice, making sure all Rangers shots on goal are inadmissible. (And hopefully someone will remind me I have the right to remain silent, and any further bad jokes I make can and will be used against me in the court of public opinion.)

Anyway… LET’S GO, BUFF-A-LO! Box score here.

UPDATE: Okay, so I lied. :) I’m watching the game after all (while studying…sorta), and what a game it’s been. After 56 minutes and 43 seconds of scoreless hockey, the Rangers scored what looked like it would be the winning goal with 3:17 to go. “Good night, folks. Good season,” wrote Seth at Bfloblog as the clock ticked down toward zero. Then, amazingly, with 7.7 seconds left, perennial postseason hero Chris Drury scored to tie the game and send it to overtime. Incredible!

Here’s Rick Jeanneret’s call:

source file

UPDATE 2: Sabres win!! Maxim Afinogenov, who was a healthy scratch in Game 4 because of shaky play in the first three games, scored the game-winner. WOOOOOHOOOOO!!! Here, again, is Jeanneret’s call:

source file

UPDATE 3:

‘Nuff said.

Just got back from my tux fitting at Louie’s, which was positively crawling with high-school kids getting ready for prom. Made me feel very old. :) And as if feeling old wasn’t enough, I also got to feel fat! In explaining my measurements to me (in case Andrew’s people have any questions), specifically why my coat size is five inches larger than my underarm size, the woman doing my measurements said, “You’re like me — you’re pear-shaped.”

That is, I guess, the next stage in the evolutionary process of the skinny fat guy. From skeletal to normal-sized to mildly chubby to “pear-shaped.” Thanks a lot, Louie’s Tux Shop lady. ;)

Good news for Newington’s Joe Serfass (a.k.a. Mr. Tara Boisvert): he has been promoted from the Single-A Port St. Lucie (Fla.) Mets to the Double-A Binghamton Mets. Way to go, Joe!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
Gang aft agley,
An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
~ Robert Burns, “To A Mouse”

The Electoral Commission said it had begun “with immediate effect” an investigation into the Holyrood election voting chaos.

The polls have been hit by major problems with seven counts suspended and up to 100,000 ballot papers spoilt.

The Scotland Office said “serious technical failures” had delayed the announcement of some results.

Confusion about how to fill in ballot papers and problems with postal votes have also been blamed for the problems.

…Concerns have been raised about the decision to stage the Scottish Parliament and the local authority elections on the same day.

Voters were presented with two ballot papers and different voting systems.

The local authority ballot used the new Single Transferable Vote system.

…During his acceptance speech as the new MSP for the Gordon constituency, SNP leader Alex Salmond criticised the voting arrangements and also earlier problems with postal voting.

He said: “The postal voting arrangements for this election across Scotland were totally inadequate.

“It is also the case that the decision to conduct an STV election at the same time as a first-past-the-post ballot for the Scottish Parliament was deeply mistaken.

“As a direct result, tens of thousands of votes across Scotland have been discounted. That is totally unacceptable in a democratic society.”

Of course what we Have here (primarily) is: Voter Error. Exacerbated by an unfamiliar, and bifurcated, new balloting system. I.e., forget Birnam wood: ’tis Palm Beach County come to Dunsinane :}. Naturally the always-heroic election officials :> tried to Warn the Politicoes ahead of time, telling them ‘You know, there are ways you can Mitigate some of these predictable problems.’ But No. ;]

In a Presumably unrelated (??? :) election glitch, a disgruntled voter in Edinburgh bashed the ballot boxes with a Golf club and Ripped up the Voting Papers, causing “absolute bedlam” amid “scenes of terror”. (Actually, it occurs to me that if a few Palm Beach County oldsters had Protested at the Polls that way early on Election Day 2000, Al Gore might be President today. :)

More after the jump…

(more…)

Okay, the title is a bit of a stretch, but the point is to blog some pretty pictures from Becky’s and my trip to Warren Dunes State Park this evening, and also some more pretty pictures of Notre Dame’s campus in springtime. First things first, the Dunes:

Also, check out the 360-degree panorama! (Again, thanks, Calico!)

Full gallery here.

As for the ND pics… I already showed you this one, but there are lots more. In fact, my newly created Spring at Notre Dame gallery goes all the way back to April 1. Today’s photos start on Page 2 of the gallery. A couple of highlights:

Again, the full gallery starts here and continues here. Enjoy!

That’s the final score in the Warriors’ (42-40) series-clinching Game 6 win over the top-seeded Mavericks (who were 67-15); it’s the first time a #8 took out a #1 in a seven-game first round format.

Who saw THAT coming? I sure didn’t!

I’ve made clear before that I absolutely despise the law-school message board Xoxohth (a.k.a. AutoAdmit). As I wrote then, “the cretins who inhabit that message board are a bunch of dishonest, pretentious, snobby, racist a**holes who delight in anonymous character assassination and tearing down their fellow human beings.” I stand by those words. But even so, to be perfectly honest, I take no joy in this:

[Law firm] Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge rescinded its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, the 3L at Penn Law who resigned as “Chief Education Director” of AutoAdmit last month. He resigned in the wake of a WaPo exposé on how the site in part served as a platform for attacks and defamatory remarks about female law students, among others. …

Charles DeWitt (pictured, left), managing partner at Edwards Angell’s Boston office, where Ciolli was slated to be a litigation associate, told the Law Blog: “He worked for us last summer. He’s not going to work for us in the fall.”

Ciolli took time from working on final exams to talk to the Law Blog. “Three years of legal education has been wasted because of an unmoderated message board,” he said, adding, “The timing is absolutely horrible.” The 23-year-old…added that “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”

To be honest, I feel bad for the kid. As much as I hate the product he helped create, I wouldn’t wish his fate on any fellow law student. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think he doesn’t deserve what happened to him; there is some factual dispute over how much control he had over the content of the message board, but certainly, through his role in creating a disgusting site widely known for character assassination, he set himself up for this fall. As a commenter on Above the Law put it:

Dude had it coming. He decided to get involved with a free speech experiment in which he helped run an unmoderated message board. People posted insidious lies in the forum he hosted, and those lies have caused harm to the career prospects of innocent people. Now his career has been affected, too, because of what he allowed to happen to the careers of others. In what world is this not justice?

True… and yet, and yet. However much of a scumbag he might be, I can’t bring myself to be happy about what’s happened to him. It sucks, it just really sucks, to be 23 years old and have your career s***canned because you made a mistake, even a big one. I honestly feel for him. And this is precisely why I find the behavior of the a**holes on AutoAdmit (and, cough cough, ND Nation at times, among other places on the wild, wild ‘Net) so baffling: they don’t think twice about tearing down their fellow human beings over nothing, and they frequently take immense joy in their peers’ failures and foibles… while I, on the other hand, don’t even feel the slightest twinge of schadenfreude over something like this (even where the punishment arguably fits the crime quite nicely). And I don’t consider myself an unusually noble or magnanimous person. I’d like to think I’m pretty normal in terms of my tendency not to celebrate other people’s misfortunes. But maybe I’m wrong about that? I dunno. Perhaps I’m naive, but I think most people are good at heart, and at worst are thoughtless rather than spiteful. Once faced with the humanity of another person, I think most people feel empathy. The problem with the Internet, sometimes, is that you don’t have to face the other person’s humanity, you can just treat them like a series of pixels or a string of binary code. That leads to dehumanization and a lack of empathy. And I think we need to strive to fight that.

In this particular case, given all the circumstances, I don’t blame others if they do feel a bit of joy over Mr. Ciolli’s pain. I can understand the viewpoint of the commenter who wrote, “I hope this is only the first for the assholes at AutoAdmit.com. They are truly the worst this world has to offer, and I hope all of them are ruined.” I agree that they are, if their online behavior is any indication of their true character, “truly the worst this world has to offer,” but as for hoping that they’re “ruined”? No, I don’t hope that. I hope they see the error of their ways and reform themselves. I hope they make amends with the people they’ve hurt. But I don’t hope they’re “ruined,” and I’m not glad Ciolli is jobless. It was probably the right decision, and he probably deserves it, but I’m not glad about it. All I can think about his situation is, “man, that sucks for him.” Again, I don’t mean to make myself sound noble or anything, that’s just honestly how I feel. And that’s why it truly confuses me that some other people, especially when surrounded by the cloak of Internet anonymity, can become so strikingly mean and nasty and hurtful, for no reason. Do they not understand these are real people they’re hurting, just as I understand that Anthony Ciolli, whatever his flaws, is a real person? I don’t get it. I really don’t.

If you thought my Google phrases were funny, check out Adrienne’s. Heh!

(But what I want to know is, are any more captian underpants books coming out?)