Can you handle The Truth about 4/29? Heh. (Hat tip: Insty.)

P.S. Protein Wisdom is on board with the 4/29 Truth movement: “Bush is trying to get us into a war with bay area sea lions.”

UPDATE: The evildoers have struck again:

DEMOPOLIS, Ala. (AP) - A freight train carrying segments of the space shuttle’s solid rocket boosters derailed Wednesday after a bridge collapsed, authorities said. Six people were reported injured.

The article says “the cause of the bridge collapse [is] under investigation,” but we all know that “investigation” will be nothing but a cover-up. The Truth is out there!

Sarah LeFoll’s family has started a scholarship in her honor, which will be awarded annually to one Newington High School senior who plans to attend a four-year college to pursue a major in Fine Arts or Performing Arts. The first scholarship will be given out next Thursday. Detailed information, including how to donate to the fund, is after the jump.

(more…)

Like a half-dozen different people have sent me this, so I figure I’d better actually post it. :) Here you go:

Heh.

Speaking of USC football, the kickoff times for a bunch of their games were announced yesterday, along with the rest of ESPN/ABC’s Saturday Night Football slate.

So, because nobody got kicked off American Idol on last Wednesday’s “Idol Gives Back” charity show, last week’s Idol pool votes get thrown out, and everybody gets to make two brand-new predictions. Which pair of singers will be voted off this week? Make your picks after the jump! (I’m posting this now so I won’t forget later. :)

Incidentally, here’s a YouTube clip of last week’s Elvis-and-Celine digital duet:

(Hat tip: Diane.) And here’s another clip explaining how they did it.

While President Bush is trying out his VeTo, I'm trying out my TiVo. :)

Kevin at Bfloblog sums up what I think a lot of Sabres fans are feeling:

Buffalo is not playing up to the standard that they set for themselves during the regular season. When the team looked a little “off” during the Islanders series I chalked it up to the fact that they were merely looking past Round One and saving their energy for Round Two. After three games of the series with the New York Rangers I am very concerned that the Sabres appear to be sleepwalking through most of the games. I can understand not being able to get fired up to play the Islanders but how can the team not feel challenged enough to bring their “A” game when they are facing Jagr, Straka, Nylander, Roszival, and Lundqvist every other night?

It’s nice to be up 2-1 in the playoffs when you’re not playing your best — when, as Mark puts it, “the Sabres have only truly out-played the Rangers in two out of eleven periods” — but let’s be honest, this series should be 2-1 in the other direction (Buffalo was very lucky to win Game 2). The Sabres can’t safely assume they’ll be able to continue to get by on luck and half-assed-ness. At some point, maybe in this series, maybe in the next one, but certainly sometime between now and hoisting the Stanley Cup for the first time in franchise history, the Buffalo Sabres will need to actually start playing like the Buffalo Sabres. Otherwise this great season is going to come to a very disappointing end.

Anyway, Game 4 is tonight at 7:00 PM on Versus. Once it gets underway, the box score will be here. LET’S GO, BUFF-A-LO!

UPDATE: Whatever’s wrong with the Sabres, it’s still wrong. Rangers win, 2-1, to tie the series at 2-2.

President Bush vetoes a war spending bill which includes a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, the White House announces.

Visit CNN for the latest.

It’s gone. It’s done.

I just turned in my Electoral College Paper, much-hyped and oft-quoted here on the blog, to Professor Mayer. It came to 78 pages, 21,563 words — 26,533 including footnotes. (All this for 2 credits!) The title:

COUNT EVERY VOTE—ALL 538 OF THEM
A Pragmatic Defense of the Electoral College

Several people have asked already if they’ll be able to read my paper once it’s finished. Well, first of all, although it’s “done” for law-school purposes, it still needs a bit more work before I would consider publishing it. (It’s amazing how naggingly incomplete a 78-page paper can feel when you’re this immersed in the material.) And I do intend to try and get it published — er, that is to say, published somewhere more prestigious than BrendanLoy.com, heh. But I’m not sure what publication(s) I’ll be targeting, and thus I’m (obviously) not sure what their policies are on uploading papers to SSRN during the submission/pre-publication phase. (Once it’s on SSRN, I’d be able to link to it from the blog.) From what I hear, a lot of places are fine with “pre-publishing” on SSRN, but some might not be, and I don’t want to risk having my paper rejected on that basis. So, in other words, I’m not sure. But one way or another, you’ll get to read it eventually (either on SSRN soon, or in a prestigious publication of some kind a little later, or on SSRN much later, once I’ve gotten rejected by enough prestigious publications that I give up and just upload the damn thing :). Stay tuned, as they say.

And now, having spent practically the entire semester earning 2 credits (well, 3, including my other directed-reading paper), I get to learn everything from all the rest of my courses — 13 credits’ worth — in the next 10 days. Woohoo! :)

But first, I’m going home and setting up my newly arrived, still-boxed TiVo (my graduation present to myself). Constitutional Criminal Procedure (the subject of my first in-class exam, on Saturday) can wait; there’s a Sabres game to watch. And rewind. And watch. And pause. And watch. LET’S GO, TI-VO BUFF-A-LO!

P.S. About the paper… once I make the changes I have in mind, but before submitting it for publication, I might need a few “beta-testers,” so to speak, to read the paper over and make suggestions/comments/criticisms/corrections. So if you’d be interested in doing that, e-mail me at bloy[at]nd.edu. (I’ll probably only pick a handful of people, though, so no promises.)

Indianapolis, specifically. It’s only a simulation, of course, but I couldn’t resist the sensational headline. :) Excerpt:

A hurricane roars ashore in Rhode Island. A nuclear device goes off in the Midwest. And terrorists begin wreaking havoc in Alaska. What do you do?

The Pentagon and other US and Canadian agencies plan to answer that question in a major exercise called Ardent Sentry-Northern Edge 07 that began Monday and will play out over the next 18 days, involving thousands of US troops and state and local officials.

The US Northern Command said it is “the largest and most complex exercise” it has undertaken, combining natural and man-made disasters to test preparedness plans on a national level.

“The intent obviously is to stress the system,” said Mike Kucharak, a spokesman for the Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

The peak of the exercise will come next week when a hurricane bears into Rhode Island under one scenario, and an improvised nuclear device is detonated in Indiana in another.

Interspersed with those crises will be simulated terrorist actions in Alaska, some of which will take place at sea while others will involve aircraft.

That will allow participants to explore what might happen if terrorists try to take advantage of catastrophic events, Kucharak said. “How would that stress the system?”

Yes, but why would anyone attack Alaska or Indiana?

More here.

[Originally posted at 1:53 AM, but bumped up because I wanted this headline on top of my homepage for a while. :) -ed.]

P.S. The current juxtaposition of this post with the top line of my “upcoming events” sidebar suggests an obvious answer to the question of how to handle multiple simultaneous catastrophic events: call Spider-Man! He’ll set things right.

…from the recent (relative) dropoff in my blogging frequency (and, perhaps more noticably, the odd hours* at which I’ve been blogging), we’re getting into the heart of “crunch time” here. Today is the last day of classes (though I’ve been done since Thursday), tomorrow and Thursday are “stop days,” and exams start Friday (my first is Saturday, not counting the take-home final that’s sitting in my bag right now; I also have in-class finals next Tuesday and Friday). For those keeping score at home, I’m in the bargaining phase right now; I expect the depression phase to set in tomorrow or Thursday, followed by the acceptance phase sometime on Friday. :) But at the moment, I’m not even really thinking about exams, as one of my directed-reading papers was due yesterday, and the other (the Electoral College one) is due today at 5:00 PM — that’s less than 12 hours away, and I still have lots of changes to make, and citations to fix… eek! Anyway, the point is, I’m a wee bit busy, and blogging will be light-to-nonexistent today until the Sabres game this evening. In the mean time, talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: the interstate-compact-based “National Popular Vote” plan is neither “national” nor a “popular vote.” Discuss. :)

*I was awake for approximately 33 consecutive hours Sunday and yesterday, then went to sleep around 4:00 PM yesterday, woke up at 1:30 this morning, and am now at the law library — I got here at around 4:55 AM — surrounded by my research materials (and a big mug of coffee).

If you think Notre Dame Law School’s administrative problems are bad, check out what’s happening at Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor. Yikes. (Hat tip: Stephen.)

Of course, as discussed previously in comments, Ave Maria is the school that former NDLS admissions director Chuck Roboski joined in January 2006 as the Associate Dean for Admissions and External Relations. I have no idea of his role in, or position on, the current troubles there, I just mention him because I’m sure this will now make its way into the ongoing NDLS debate.

Anyway, more about the Ave Maria situation here and here.

P.S. On a more positive note, I recently learned that Sean Seymore, who graduated from NDLS last year, will be joining the Northwestern faculty as a visiting assistant professor starting in July. He’ll teach Patent Law in the fall and a patent-related seminar in the spring. Congrats, Sean!

Former Notre Dame runningback Darius Walker — who declared for the NFL a year early, then went undrafted this past weekend (oops!) — has been signed as a free agent by Da Bears. (Hat tip: Emily.)

The Blue-Gray Sky has a complete rundown of which Notre Dame players went where, drafted and undrafted alike. There’s also a lengthy post about Brady Quinn’s precipitous drop in the draft. Among other things, it strikes me that Charlie Weis is really putting his reputation on the line for Quinn — well beyond what a coach would naturally feel obligated to do for an ex-player, I think — and if Quinn flops in the NFL (not that I’m predicting that), Weis’s prediction that he’d be the next Tom Brady or Peyton Manning is going to come back to haunt him, chipping away at the “genius” label. Just saying.