New Vocabulary

I saw a cool special on some evening news show that was talking about the power of YouTube and how people are using it to launch themselves into stardom outside of the normal channels of distribution. It seemed like everyone was using one word to describe it: viral. I thought that was a really cool use of the word (sorry, I am a nerd and I do think about cool word usage). They used it to describe the phenomenon of how a video will get passed on from email to email and gets linked from blog to blog and will cover the world in a matter of days. So if you put a video on YouTube that becomes really popular and people get it passed to them in an email and then they pass it on themselves, then your video "goes viral," analogizing, of course, to computer viruses sent over the world through email, etc.

Here's a good example. The tv special highlighted the music group OK Go and how they used YouTube to launch their music career. They had been around for a while and had a funny video that one of the band members sisters had choreographed. That video had been somewhat popular on YouTube, but then they came out with the song "Here It Goes Again," and they got the same bandmember's sister to choreograph their video for that song. She had the idea of doing a dance on treadmills. They did it, and the video went viral. Many of you have probably already seen it. The video has almost 12 million hits on YouTube, the group performed their song and dance on the MTV Video Music Awards, they have sold tons of records, Nike has a marketing campaign using their song, and now there's a supermarket comercial copying the video using the checkout belts instead of treadmills. Anyway, I thought the use of "viral" was interesting and worthy of Musingian's attention(I'm referring to the blog, not to myself in third person).

Interesting Decision by the Utah Supreme Court

Fairly regularly, there are some really interesting and important cases up at the Utah Supreme Court. Jones v. Barlow is one of them. In the case, a lesbian couple decided to have a child together. They did everything they could to approximate the family relationship (civil union, etc.). But after a few years, the birth mother decided she didn't want to practice that lifestyle any more and removed her daughter from the situation. The non-birth mother wants visitation rights, but the birth mother doesn't want that to happen. This case is about whether the non-birth mother has standing to petition for visitation--i.e., whether the non-birth mother has a legal right to ask a court for visitation. The Utah Supreme Court held that the non-birth mother didn't have a legally-recognized relationship with the child and it declined to create such a right on its own. Chief Justice Durham dissented, arguing that the court should have created such a right on its own. Here's an article from the Salt Lake Tribune about the case. I think its a poor article. The reporter wasn't able to see through the parties' rhetoric to the actual substance of the opinion. Here's a link to the article. And if you're interested enough to read the actual opinion, here it is.

Mozzarella & Basil Stuffed Chicken

I got a few requests for the recipe for the meal I fixed for Katie for our early Valentine's. It was easy to make and quite tasty. Katie and I both highly recommend it. Thanks to the good folks at America's Test Kitchen, here's the recipe:

1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup minced fresh basil [I just used dried basil]
2 T. heavy cream [I substituted milk]
1 T. lemon juice
3 garlic cloves, minced
salt and pepper
4 boneless skinless chicken breasts
3 T. Mayonaise
1 cup fresh bread crumbs [I choped up a couple pieces of bread in the food processor, but you could just buy the bread crumbs]
2 T. extra-virgin olive oil
1 pint cherry tomatoes, halved

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 425 degrees. Combine cheese, 2 T. of basil, cream, lemon juice, 2 tsp. garlic, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and pepper to taste [adding the cream or milk to the store-bought mozzarella is supposed to bring out more of an authentic, dairy-like flavor in the cheese].
2. Cut pocket in [in the thickest part of the ] chicken breasts [because there's no marinade, the chicken gets a lot of the flavor from this stuffing, so make sure the pocket you cut goes deep into the chicken breast], stuff with cheese mixture, and seal [with toothpicks]. Transfer stuffed breasts to 13 by 9-inch baking dish and spread tops evenly with mayonnaise [the mayonnaise is just there to make the bread crumbs stick, so you don't need much].
3. Combine bread crumbs, remaining garlic, remaining 2 T. of basil, and 1 T of oil [I used a little more oil]. Sprinkle crumb mixture over chicken, pressing lightly to adhere.
4. Toss tomatoes with remaining tablespoon oil [I used more oil here, too. I think if it were summer and the tomatoes were a little more juicy, you wouldn't need as much oil because you would have more tomato juice], 1/2 tsp. salt, and pepper to taste. Arrange in baking dish around chicken. Bake until crumbs are golden brown and thickest part of chicken registered 160 degrees on instant-read thermometer, about 25 minutes [I only had two really thick chicken breasts, so I cooked the chicken for a little longer; I covered the chicken with tin foil for the first 10-15 minutes, so I wouldn't burn the bread crumbs and the tomatoes, then I took the tin foil off and baked the chicken for another 25 minutes]. Serve.

Book/Play Review: Arcadia

I got a collection of Tom Stoppard's plays for Christmas (cleverly titled 5 Plays). On Christmas night, I took the collection with me up to Katie's family cabin up at Alta, and I read the entire first play, Arcadia, the next day. It was phenomenal. Sometimes plays are hard to read, and understandably so since they are written to be seen. But this play was a delight to read. It reminded me a lot of Oscar Wilde's plays. Like Wilde, Stoppard continuously plays with words through puns, double entendre, and other wordplay. But while Wilde's plays are playful and farcical, this play is playful, farcical, and philosophical. Stoppard incorporates and plays with theories from math, history, psychology, literature, and landscape architecture to explore themes about the meaning of history, what motivates us to act, and the determinability of the present, and it is all fascinating (you would think that a play that dives into a little basic calculus would be terribly boring, but you would be wrong).

The play itself takes place in a single house/estate in England, but it switches back and forth in time from the present to the early 1800's (in the heart of the English Romanticism period). Some of the characters in the present are academics trying to uncover what happened in the early 1800's in a series of events involving Lord Byron. And in the scenes set in the early 1800's, we see what really happened. Think Possession by A.S. Byatt but funny. It is quite funny and quite brilliant.

A note on Stoppard: he has written a number of plays, many of which are supposed to be as fantastic as Arcadia, but he has also done some screenwriting. He won an Academy Award for screenwriting for Shakespeare in Love. And he is rumored to have assisted George Lukas to polish up the dialogue in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (which I could believe because the dialogue is quite good) and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (which I can't believe because the dialogue, although improved from Episode I and II, is still terrible). He is currently working on The Bourne Ultimatum.

I highly recommend picking up Arcadia or another of Stoppard's well-regarded plays.

Mesa Falls Marathon

Yes, that's right. I have resolved to run a marathon. I have always wanted to run a marathon. I remember when I was quite young my Uncle Cory was training for a marathon (I believe; my memories of my childhood are far from perfect), and I thought it was really cool. Since then, I have always admired people who ran marathons. My resolve to run one strengthened at BYU when one of my roommates ran the St. George. We lived together over the summer, so we saw how hard he trained. After the race, he couldn't stop raving about what an awesome experience it was to finish the marathon. Ever since then, I really wanted to do one, and I added it to my list of 100 things to do before I die. I did a few minor biathalons (swimming and running) while at BYU, but I have never been able to fully gear up for a marathon. I have always had a good excuse: I refused to run in the winter (I still stand by this one), I was studying for the bar, I was too busy with work and school, I didn't have an iPod, etc. But circumstances have lined up this summer in a way that has melted away all of my previous excuses: I won't have to train in the winter to run a late summer marathon, I don't have school, I have a flexible job, and I have an iPod. I figure its now or never, so lets get it on.

I decided to run the Mesa Falls Marathon. It is a small marathon, but it is supposed to be an absolutely beautiful and well-organized race. It is a late August run that is mostly downhill. It starts on a Targhee National Forrest park road and works its way down towards Ashton, Idaho. Along the way, there are amazing views of Targhee, the Tetons, the Warm River, and Lower Mesa Falls on the Henry's Fork of the Snake River. Ashton is about 40 minutes from West Yellowstone, so I am planning on spending a few days before the race exploring the area. It will be a great time (aside from the excruciating pain often suffered by marathon runners).

I am excited to run it and am recruiting other participants (one of the interns from our court's chambers has already joined with me because he is from Ashton). There is strength in numbers, so you are all welcome to join in our training. There is also a half marathon for those of you who don't want to do the full marathon. And, of course, even if you don't want to run, you can come explore Yellowstone with us and then fish or sleep or something while we are running.

To My Fellow Bloggers

More and more of my friends and family are joining the blogosphere (Chantalle being the most recent, but hopefully not the last), and I think it is awesome. It is such a great way to share pictures, to keep up to date with people's lives, to keep up on our writing skills, and to engage in witty banter among friends.

I would like to recomment Google Analytics to all of my fellow bloggers. It is a cool program that tracks the visits to your blog. The coolest feature (at least for me) is that it has a big map of the world, and it shows where the people visiting your blog are visiting from. Just this week, I got a hit from the Philipines, which was a first. I have had hits from Spain, England, Sweden, Argentina, and Mexico, along with many others from across the United States. Its amazing how easy it is to connect with people all over the world.

Google Analytics also tracks how many visits you have had in the past week (I get about 75 per week, many of which are probably my own hits). And it will tell you what search terms people have used to find your site (my post about midevil names has garnered the most search engine attention by far, with many people searching for midevil name ideas (I'm glad we offered up some good ones)).

Its really easy to install, and I think its a fun little thing to keep track of. Enjoy.