Walking the dog just now, I picked up the mail for the first time in several days and retrieved — as I thought I might — two rejection letters from Phoenix firms that I interviewed with the week before last. One was from a firm where I had a callback; the other was from a firm where I had an initial interview, declining to offer me a callback. So that brings the running tally to:

Offers: 1
Rejections after callback interview: 1
Still waiting to hear back after callback interview: 2
Callback interview scheduled for Fall Break: 2
Rejections after initial interview: 3

Honestly, I’m almost relieved at the rejections. That may seem odd, but the truth is that, since I very much liked the firm that already made me an offer, I really can’t go wrong at this point. And although I also liked the firms that rejected me — and I also liked the firms that I’m still waiting to hear back from — there’s a part of me that just wants to get this whole process over with.

Having multiple offers would undeniably be a good “problem” to have — a “champagne problem,” said one of the attorneys I interviewed with — but even so, the process of deciding would still require a great deal of time and effort, especially given my tendency to agonize over such decisions. [”Brendan’s not in the habit / Of closing the book / On his options when they’re still alive / So he dragged out his choice / And considered it well / Though his friends for finality strived” -ed.] Time and effort is, of course, a valuable commodity — it could alternatively be spent on law school (or blogging, hehe), if it isn’t needed for job-offer agonizing. And the time and effort (and NALP deadline pressure) would only increase with a greater number of offers.

So since all possible options are good ones anyway, I’m not really that upset about having two fewer options. After all, I only need one job! :)

Guestblogger: David Kreutz

Well since Brendan is slacking on his football coverage looks like it is up to us guest bloggers to cover for him. I’ll leave the rest of the country to other people. Here is the round up from the Conference of Champions.

We all know #1 USC’s 42-21 victory over the Wildcats of Arizona at the Colliseum in L.A.

The next bit of Pac-10 action came about as far to the north as you could get in miserable Pullman, WA, where visiting Stanford Cardinal, who last week lost to lowly 1-AA UC-Davis, beat the WSU Cougars 24-21. The Apple Cup is looking a bit more hopefully for the Huskies.

A short while ago #10 Cal blew a 40-28 lead against the hated Bruins, the final score was 47-40 #20 fUCLA. The USC/UCLA matchup later in the season is shaping up to be a great game.

Meanwhile we are at half-time down in Tempe with the game between #17 ASU and #25 Oregon close, Oregon having scored a last minute, 51 yard field goal, to take the Ducks up 13-10 over the Sun Devils.

Washington managed not to lose this week.
They had a bye.
As did Oregon State.

Next weeks matchups:
#1 USC at #12 Notre Dame
OSU at #10 Cal
Washington at #25 Oregon
#20 UCLA at WSU
Stanford at Arizona

ASU has a bye

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: Oregon beat ASU. So the Sun Devils are likely out of the Pac-10 championship picture (they’ve got two losses in conference). The teams with zero or one loss in conference are: USC (3-0), UCLA (2-0), Cal (2-1), Oregon (2-1), Oregon State (1-1) and Stanford (1-1). Next week, Oregon State will play Cal; the other one-loss teams will face teams further down in the standings, as well undefeated UCLA. USC, of course, is playing a non-conference game against some team from Indiana.

UCLA 47, Cal 40, final. What a comeback by the Bruins!

There are nine undefeated teams left in America — and two of them are in L.A. The Trojans and Bruins are both 5-0!

Looking at UCLA’s schedule, they have an excellent chance of being 9-0 heading into their last two games, against Arizona State and USC. The battle for the Victory Bell on Dec. 3 could turn out to be huge! Tran and I may kill each other before it’s all said and done. :)

In other news, the losses today by Tennessee, Ohio State and Cal mean that #12 Notre Dame will crack the Top 10 unless both Penn State and UCLA leapfrog them. I’m guessing the former will happen but the latter won’t, which would put the Irish right at #10 heading into the USC game next week.

The Nittany Lions are 6-0 after beating Ohio State, 17-10! Congratulations to JoePa, B. Minich & co.! Next up for the Lions: a date in Ann Arbor with Michigan, which is 3-3 after losing today to Minnesota.

Meanwhile, Cal is beating UCLA 40-28.

Confirming my fears, the death toll in Pakistan from yesterday’s earthquake is now at 18,000, according to a CNN Breaking News alert, citing “a spokesman for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.” There are at least 41,000 injured.

Will next week’s USC-Notre Dame game be a Top 10 matchup?

Notre Dame was #12 in both polls last week. #8/7 Tennessee’s loss to Georgia will undoubtedly bump the idle Irish to #11. But can they climb to #10?

If #16/18 Penn State beats #6 Ohio State tonight, maybe… but it’s also entirely possible that the undefeated Nittany Lions would leapfrog Notre Dame in that case. A better bet, I think, would be if #20/16 UCLA beats #10/9 Cal, which I think would be less likely than a Penn State win to hugely impress the voters enough to give the winner a massive boost in the polls (thanks to West Coast Bias).

But dammit, I don’t want to root for that! I hate UCLA! :) Still, a #1 vs. #10 matchup next Saturday would be cool…

P.S. An LSU loss to Vanderbilt would also do the trick.

USC 42, Arizona 21, final.

Bring on the Irish!!!

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USC 28, Arizona 21, 1:47 left in the third quarter.

USC seriously needs to stop dancing with disaster, and actually start playing up to their potential. The defense and special teams are not impressing anyone at the moment — c’mon, allowing big plays to Arizona?!? — and the offense has been consistently inconsistent throughout the last three weeks. What the hell is going on?

UPDATE: Now 35-21, with 12:48 to go in the fourth quarter. Apparently USC is nearing a school record for the number of first downs today… but that just means they’re not getting as many big plays as usual. I guess it shows how spoiled we Trojan fans are that I can complain how we’ve “only” scored 35 points against Arizona. But still…

Anyway, if USC can stop Arizona on its current drive and score another touchdown, I think it might finally be time to switch from “BEAT! THE WILDCATS!” to “BEAT! THE IRISH!” … :)

UPDATE: 42-21. Woohoo! Beat! The Irish!

Oh, poo. ;>

Confident that we’ll get the Real poop presently from Perfesser Mike :), this is guestblogger Joe Loy again already :), Rounding Out today’s Triptych of Doomy Gloom. ;>

Thursday’s New York Times reported scientists (and no, not Mad ones ~ well, apparently not; hi Mike :), in an Astounding achievement (no, really, it IS), have reCobbled together the 1918 Pandemic Killer-of-Multi-Millions Flu Virus and found, Guess What, that it Began as ~ Yup. “Peep Peep!” (Flapflapflapflap…Flop.) :|

Well, yes but did it Mutantly Migrate to Man? OH yeah. BIG time.

The 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history’s most deadly epidemics, has been reconstructed and found to be a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, two teams of federal and university scientists announced yesterday.

It was the culmination of work that began a decade ago and involved fishing tiny fragments of the 1918 virus from snippets of lung tissue from two soldiers and an Alaskan woman who died in the 1918 pandemic. The soldiers’ tissue had been saved in an Army pathology warehouse, and the woman had been buried in permanently frozen ground.

“This is huge, huge, huge,”…

[interlude: y’know, somehow I’m reminded…Oh my God, never mind. :> / ~ the guestblogger :]

…said John Oxford, a professor of virology at St. Bartholomew’s and the Royal London Hospital who was not part of the research team. “It’s a huge breakthrough to be able to put a searchlight on a virus that killed 50 million people. I can’t think of anything bigger that’s happened in virology for many years.”

The scientists painstakingly traced the genetic sequence, synthesized the virus using tools of molecular biology, and infected mice and human lung cells with it in a secure laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The research is being published in the journals Nature and Science…

The findings, the scientists say, reveal a small number of genetic changes that may explain why this virus was so lethal…

The research also confirms the legitimacy of worries about the bird flu viruses, called H5N1, that are emerging in Asia…

The research on the 1918 virus is directly applicable to current concerns, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a joint statement. “The new studies could have an immediate impact by helping scientists focus on detecting changes in the evolving H5N1 virus that might make widespread transmission among humans more likely,” they said.

The bird flu viruses now prevalent share some of the crucial genetic changes that occurred in the 1918 flu, scientists said, but not all. The scientists suspect that with the 1918 flu, changes in just 25 to 30 out of about 4,400 amino acids in the viral proteins turned the virus into a killer. The new work also reveals that 1918 virus acts much differently from ordinary human flu viruses. It infects cells deep in the lungs of mice and infects lung cells, like the cells lining air sacs, that would normally be impervious to flu. And while other human flu viruses do not kill mice, this one, like today’s bird flus, does…

The research, and its publication, raised concerns about whether scientists should actually resurrect this killer that vanished from the earth nearly a century ago…

Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers, said he had serious concerns about the reconstruction of the virus. “There is a risk verging on inevitability, of accidental release of the virus; there is also a risk of deliberate release of the virus.” And the 1918 flu virus, Dr. Ebright added, “is perhaps the most effective bioweapons agent ever known.”

But Dr. D. A. Henderson, a resident scholar at the University of Pittsburgh Center for Biosecurity and a leading expert on bioterrorism, said he agreed with the decision to reconstruct the virus and publish its genetic sequence. “This work is of the greatest importance, and it is very important that it be published,” he said…

In gene-swapping experiments, the scientists found that small substitutions weakened the reconstructed virus so that it could no longer replicate in the lungs of mice, kill animals, or attach itself to human lung cells in the lab.

The ultimate goal, Dr. Taubenberger says, is to make a checklist of changes to look for in the bird viruses. “Now you have all these viruses going around and we don’t know, is it going to adapt to humans? Is it going to cause a pandemic? We don’t understand the rules,” he said. “There is a lot of science to go.”

Highly recommended: read the whole thing. It’s a Remarkable story of Scientific Sleuthery. :>

Today’s NYTimes has a Bad-news/Good-news Editorial on it.

There are both frightening and promising implications in this week’s announcement that research teams have deciphered the genetic sequence of the devastating 1918 influenza virus…The worrisome news is that the 1918 virus appears to have jumped directly from birds to humans, and that the genetic changes that allowed it to do so are already beginning to appear in the [present-day] avian strain…

…it may be traveling slowly down the same evolutionary path as the 1918 virus. Two top federal health officials said that the H5N1 virus has already acquired five of the 10 genetic sequence changes associated with human-to-human transmission of the 1918 virus…

The new findings offer promising leads to health officials who are concerned about preparing for a possible pandemic. Scientists should be able to prepare a checklist of the most worrisome genetic changes so they can monitor the evolution of the avian flu virus and rush medical help to any area where it looks as if the virus is becoming more transmissible. They may also be able to develop drugs and vaccines aimed at the most important genetic targets, thus allowing them to treat or even prevent influenza more effectively.

Nobody knows whether the avian strain now under the spotlight will become a big threat to humans. But some day a potential pandemic strain will arrive. The new findings could help develop tools to contain it.

Whole editorial.

All righty then. / Paging Dr. Mike. PAGING DR. MIKE! :)

Footnote: on Thursday Brendan’s “Around the Brendansphere” post (see Section on Modesty archives :) linked to “Andrew Leyden talks about resurrected viruses“, wherein said Andrew linked to the also-excellent Washington Post piece re all this ~ beneath Andrew’s mournful headline :), “Yeah, but can they bring back my dead cat?“, and with his moving comment :) “I have a dead cat buried in my sandbox back home. Maybe he is next in line?…” To which may I say, we all devoutly Hope so, Andrew Leyden; but just do us a favor and don’t climb over the deadfall behind that sandbox, there, Church old pal. ;> mmwaah-ha-haaaa…(cc: the Wendigo :)

For those keeping score at home, there are, at this moment, 11 undefeated teams in Division 1-A college football. (There were 12, until Wisconsin lost to Northwestern earlier today.) Rankings from the AP:

#1 USC (4-0)
#2 Texas (5-0)
#3 Virginia Tech (6-0)
#4 Florida State (5-0)
#5 Georgia (4-0)
#7 Alabama (5-0)
#10 Cal (5-0)
#15 Texas Tech (4-0)
#16 Penn State (5-0)
#20 UCLA (4-0)
#26 Nebraska (4-0)

With Texas Tech playing Nebraska (and leading by 7) right now, and Cal playing UCLA later, that list will dwindle to nine at most by the end of the day. Texas, Virginia Tech, and Florida State already won today. USC is leading unranked Arizona by 14, and Georgia is leading #8 Tennessee by 10. Alabama is idle. Penn State plays #6 Ohio State, the nation’s highest-ranked one-loss team, later tonight.

UPDATE: Nebraska lost. So we’re down to 10. It’ll be either 9 (if Penn State beats Ohio State) or 8 (if the Lions lose) after the Cal-UCLA game.

Okay, seriously guys, this “first-half struggles” thing is getting old. USC 7, Arizona 7, 11:49 left in the second quarter. Argh. (Recall that Arizona sucks.)

I have no doubt that we’ll end up hanging like 50 points on the Wildcats [knock on wood -ed.], but it’s still annoying that we can’t play well right out of the gate.

A subtropical depression has formed southeast of Bermuda — “subtropical instead of tropical due to the interaction with a large mid/upper level low south of the cyclone,” according to the discussion. It could become Subtropical Storm Vince — or Tropical Storm Vince, if it completes the transition — tonight or tomorrow. I’m not sure whether subtropical storms that never achieve full tropical status “count” toward the record, but they definitely use up a name from the list. And we’ve only got two left! [UPDATE: My fellow weatherbloggers tell me that subtropical storms do “count.”]

The forecast track takes S.T.D. 22 south of Bermuda and toward the East Coast, which is already getting slammed by the remnants of Tammy.

According to Dr. Jeff Masters, “most of the computer models are forecasting that a second tropical cyclone may form behind TD 22 by Monday.” Moreover: “Long range computer model forecasts continue to show that conditions for breeding tropical storms will be excellent until at least the last week of October, so two more named storms–Vince and Wilma–will likely result by October 21. This would tie 2005 with 1933 as the busiest hurricane season ever. It is interesting to note that in 1933, the final three storms all showed up after October 25. If 2005 follows a similar pattern, we’ll have Alpha, Beta and Gamma in addition to Vince and Wilma before it’s all over.”

Finally — finally — Texas is going to beat Oklahoma. Congrats to Mack Brown and the Longhorns! See you in Pasadena! :)

Speaking of which, USC leads Arizona early.

In other news, Northwestern upset Wisconsin.

Oh, and Buffalo was winning, 7-0, but now they trail Akron, 13-7 in the fourth quarter. Bah.

P.S. Newington High is in action right now.

It’s a Bad one. Afghanistan & India clobbered in addition to Pakistan. Casualty count High and of course Rising. / ~ guestblogged by Cheerful Joe “The Banshee” Loy ;>

UPDATE BY BRENDAN: More than 3,000 are feared dead in Pakistan, including 400 schoolchilden in two destroyed schools, according to the BBC. Given the way death rolls tend to rise in that part of the world, I suspect we’ll be looking at five figures before this is over. :(

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has described the quake as a “test of the nation,” according to the BBC..