Cheney at BYU

I don't know how many of you have heard this, but Vice President Cheney called BYU and asked if he could speak at their commencement. No other school was willing to take him, but, for some reason, BYU was. I think it is a poor decision that reflects poorly on BYU and on its friends and alumni. Aside from his office, I can't imagine how Vice President Cheney--who, among other things, championed the war in Iraq under questionable terms, awarded no-bid reconstruction contracts to friends and donors, and calls anyone who questions him "unamerican"--could be considered a good commencement speaker.

If you also think that it is a bad idea to have Vice President Cheney speak at BYU's commencement, then you can sign this online petition asking the BYU administration to decline the Vice President's request to speak at commencement. I just signed it, and I was 1,099th to sign. Here was my comment that accompanied my signature: "BYU should respectfully decline Vice President Cheney's request to speak at its commencement exercises. Over the past six years, the Vice President has repeatedly demonstrated political mediocrity and moral flexibility. A commencement speaker should be an enlightening and inspirational figure. I will be sorry if the class of '07 is not afforded that opportunity."

W. Speaks on Global Warming

I'm glad the president finally came out with a statement about global warming. I was beginning to get a little tired of Al Gore's junk science and hypocritical powerpoints.

Basketball Weekend

It was a pretty good weekend of basketball. Here were the highlights for me:

Best game: Texas A&M v. Louisville. This was a real heavyweight battle that felt more like a elite eight or final four game than a second round matchup. Both of these teams were really good, and the entire game was closely contested with each team making one big, clutch play after another. Even with fifteen minutes left in the game, it felt like every shot/play was huge.

Best moment: When the little point guard from VCU, who had been getting into it a little bit with Duke's annoying point guard Greg Paulus, took over in the final few minutes and lead VCU to victory. After he hit the game-winning shot over Paulus with one second left, he just stared Paulus down. It was great seeing the Dukies go down hard.

Most disappointing game: BYU v. Xavier. BYU blew it. BYU had its best team in years, and it had several solid leads throughout the game. But it gave the game away. See Jayme's post.

My bracket: this is one of the best brackets I've had in years, probably because of the real dearth of major upsets. For the first time that I can remember, the two teams that I picked to be in the championship game are still alive, although I'm starting to second-guess my Texas A&M pick (they are playing great ball, and I really like their team, but I think they have the hardest road to the final four than anyone).

March Madness

Let the madness begin. I can't wait for tomorrow. I have carefully deliberated my bracket picks, trying to pick the right upsets and to predict the ultimate champion. Here's a brief summary:

My final four picks: Florida, Kansas, Georgetown, and Texas A&M (I have Kansas beating Texas A&M in the final).

Upset specials: in my most daring upset special, I picked Texas A&M Corpus Christie to upset Wisconsin (sorry Cblakes). I will either look like a total genius or a total idiot on this one. A&M Corpus Christie beat Northwestern State in their conference tournament final to get their bid, and I really like Northwestern State (they played Utah State really close last year, I picked them as an upset special in last year's tournament and they came through with a win over 2-seed Ohio State, and they destroyed Utah State this year). So I've got a good feeling about them. I also picked Winthrop over Notre Dame (a common pick), VCU over Duke (another common pick), and Albany over Virginia (Albany beat Utah, Utah beat Virginia, therefore Albany must beat Virginia, right?).

Helping Hippies

Sorry to post about another Utah Supreme Court opinion, but I'm pretty proud of this one. We worked pretty hard on it. It provides protection for pot smokers everywhere. You should all be proud. Its a pretty accessible opinion, so even you non-lawyer types would probably enjoy reading it. But if you don't want to wade through the opinion, here's a link to an article on the opinion from the Salt Lake Tribune.

Staying on the topic of helping hippies, I went to a pretty interesting place for lunch today. Its called One World, and its like stepping into Haight-Ashbury circa mid-1960s. The restaurant is based on two core philosophies: everybody eats and eliminate waste. There are no set prices for the food; you pay what you feel the food is worth, based on what and how much you eat. If you can't afford to pay what you feel the food is worth, then you can work for them for an hour to pay for your meal. Also, they have some rice and beans up front that is always free for whoever wants to eat it.

To eliminate waste, they don't have any serving sizes. You ask for as much as you think you will eat, and they ask that you eat it. You can always come back for more if you want more. And when you clear your dishes, you clear the food that you haven't eaten into a compost bin.

The atmosphere is also very unique. The employees--all first or second generation hippies--are extremely nice and helpful. There is a selection of soups, salads, and vegetables with ample vegan and vegetarian samplings (if there was meat on the premises, I couldn't find it). The dishes and silverware are all of the mix-matched, thrift store variety. The decor is equally eclectic and likely taken from various thrift stores. Instead of one large eating area, there are several separate rooms with comfortable seating arrangements.

The philosophy behind the place is actually really cool. I had some black bean soup. It had black beans and some other organic-looking things floating around in there. They kind of looked like the mosquito larvae that would sometimes end up in your water cup in Argentina. It was pretty bland. They should have found some organic peppers to spice it up a little. I also had a mixed green salad, and a carrot salad with some organic yeast something-or-other. It was ok. If the food weren't so bland and meatless, I would probably go there more often.

Anneversary

Musingian celebrated its one year anneversary on Saturday (March 3). Its been a fun year, and its been fun being a blogger. Here's what I love about blogging:

Interacting with family and friends on an almost daily basis
Being able to brag about Katie and Grace
Keeping a journal-like record of what's going on in my life
Discussing interesting and important social topics
Recording past memories
The self-satisfaction that comes from making a clever joke or writing a good sentence.
Keeping up my writing skills
Getting excited when a post generates good discussion
Opening my blog to find that a new comment has been posted
Linking with blogs of friends and family
Coming up with new ideas for blog posts
Seeing that people from all over the world have visited my blog
Seing my blog's readership consistently increase

Thanks for visiting my blog and for commenting often. Here's to another year of blogging.

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.

Pilgrimage

As the only member of the family (that I know of) to have made a pilgrimage to the land of our fathers, I feel an obligation to share my experiences. For those readers who are not family members, you probably already guessed this (based on my feather-light feet, my antelope-like quickness, and my keen hunting instincts), but I am part Native American. Yes, it is true. My family descends from the Indian princess Pocahontas, daughter of the great chief Powhatan. We have suffered some persecution because of this noble ancestry. When Amber told her elementary school teacher that she was related to Pocahontas, her teacher ridiculed her, and, since that scarring incident, Amber has ridiculed the rest of us for our 'foolish belief in the traditions of our fathers.' Still, many of us remain proud of our noble heritage.


A couple of summers ago, I went with Katie's family to the D.C./Williamsburg area, as Katie's dad had some meetings back there. We saw the sights in D.C. and spent a day in Williamsburg (which is one of the coolest places I've been). But we also went to Jamestown, the first successful settlement in the New World. It was there that our noble grandmother pled wither her father, the great Chief Powhatan, to spare the lives of the settlers. It is beautiful country. The marsh grass is green, and the trees are as ancient as the stars. I can only imagine how beautiful it was before the white man scarred the land with his buildings made of stone and steel. It had a familiar feeling, like a place you would go to in a vision quest. It felt like coming home, and I felt my blood running strong that day, like a herd of bison.


We heard the tour guide speak of the hardships suffered by the settlers. There was a statue of Pocahontas that had been erected in her honor. I had to laugh that the white man chose to memorialize her with cold, hard materials (the same cold, hard materials that they had used to drive the Native Americans from their native lands). Still, I appreciated the gesture of the statute, and I paid homage to these great people, my ancestors.


But what may have been most rewarding was the validation of my family's claim to being descendants of this great tribe. Next to the statue, there was a sign describing Pocahontas' life. It explains her intercession between the settlers and her father, her marriage to John Rolfe, her trip to England, her return back to America, the death of her only daughter, and the survival of her only son. The sign concludes by noting that many Americans claim to descend from Pocahontas through this son. I interpreted this to mean that my family's claim was not some romantic dream created to excite the imagination of the children in the family, but a legitimate ancestral claim.

Book/DVD Exchange for Christmas '06

Amber's book recommendation in her comment on my last post gave me this idea. Because my family didn't get to do our book exchange this year at Christmas, I would like to do one here. Every year, on my mom's side of the family, we get together on Christmas Eve (attendance has grown more and more scarce as we have married and have other families to visit, but it still generally happens). Part of our Christmas party is a spin on the white elephant game. We basically use the rules of the white elephant game, but instead of bringing a gag gift, we bring one of our favorite books or movies. It can be one or our all-time favorite books/movies or it can just be one of our favorites out of the books/movies we have read/seen in the past year. It is quite fun, and we all walk away with a cool new book/DVD and lots of other ideas for good books to read.

So, because we didn't get to do our book exchange this year, I would ask everyone to comment and suggest a few books/movies.

I will start. I would probably bring the play Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. It is absolutely brilliant! I finished it just after Christmas, and I haven't gotten around to reviewing it here yet; stay tuned for that. I might also recommend Elder Maxwell's biography, which is very interesting and well-written (a major plus, since many biographies about LDS leaders aren't very well-written, I feel). I also liked All Over But the Shoutin', which I reviewed here. As for movies, I really liked The Prestige, although I am not very qualified to give movie recommendations because I haven't seen hardly any since Grace was born.

Book Review: Cities of the Plain

If there is a better living American author out there, I would like to know about him or her. Cormac McCarthy is just so good. Cities of the Plain is the third title in his Border Trilogy and is equally good as the first two books in series, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing. As with the first two novels, you have a story set in the Southwest, near the Mexican border, where underspoken cowboys live in a changing world that is starting to phase them out. You also have McCarthy's standards: excuisite writing, a blind sage, brutal fights, and interesting asides into philosphy. This book brings together the main characters from the first two books--John Grady Cole from All the Pretty Horses and Billy Parham from The Crossing. John Grady falls in love with a young Mexican prostitute, who he wants to marry and bring back to the United States. He must wrest her away from her Mexican owner/pimp, however, which is not a rosy proposition. The story and the dialogue are always deceptively simple but endlessly interesting. I would love to read some literary criticism on McCarthy's novels because you always get the sense that there is more there than what you can get out of it on the first read.

In related news, McCarthy just came out with a new book called The Road, which is supposed to be awesome. We got it for Spencer for Christmas, so he'll have to let us know what he thinks of it.

State v. Bradshaw

The first opinion that I did a lot of the work on, State v. Bradshaw, just got published (here's a pdf viewable online if you're interested: www.utcourts.gov/opinions/supopin/Bradshaw2122906.pdf). I wrote a couple of early drafts. Then Justice Nehring did some substantial editing. Then I did another strong edit or two, and it was ready to go (after being read and edited by the other Justices and law clerks at the court). Its a criminal case involving the Utah communications fraud statute. We had to define what a "scheme or artifice" was a little better. I have to be careful about what I say about it, so I'll just let the opinion speak for itself. Its a fairly interesting case. We've got some more interesting cases coming down the pipeline here soon, so I'll let you know when those come out.

Ian & Katie's Costa Rican Adventure

I wanted to try loading some video onto my blog (inspired by Cblakes), so this is the video you get. This is a little video montage I put together of our trip to Costa Rica. Its over a year old, but I still think its a pretty cool video with some pretty cool pictures. Maybe it will inspire some of you to take a trip to Costa Rica. Pura Vida!

The Canadians Hoarked Our Idea, Eh

Cblakes and I did a lot of smooth things while we were down at BYU together, but one of the smoothest things we did was to make a romantic fire video. While languishing away in our little apartments during the long months of Provo's winter, we longed for the comfort of warm fire. We longed to curl up in front of a cozy fireplace with a book and a warm cup of cocoa. So we decided to do something about it. We made our own fireplace. With the help of either Mike or Judd (I can't remember which one of you was on a mission and which one was helping us at this time), we got a camcorder and recorded the gas fire at Jim and Jane's for about an hour or so. While we were recording the fire, we played smooth, romantic songs for background music. The finished result: a video of a warm, inviting fire that we could play on our apartment TV that played smooth love songs in the background. We were very proud of it. Tell me that idea and execution were not brilliant. What girl could resist such charms?

So what do I find out the other day from my cousin Whitney's (the Canadian) blog (http://whitneyjdavis.blogspot.com)? The Canadians have hoarked our idea. Not only do they have a cable station that just plays video of a fireplace with Christmas background music, but you can also buy DVDs that do the same thing! I'm not sure whether to be mad because the Canadians hoarked our idea or to admire them for their brilliance.

Welcome to the Blogosphere

I hope you will all join me in giving Katie a warm welcome into the blogosphere! She has started a blog, and we have been working on getting it ready for the public for the last couple of weeks. It is now ready to launch. Enjoy: www.katiecafe.blogspot.com

Stupid Microsoft

This is a really funny video review of Windows' new operating system, Vista. It compares Vista with Mac's OS X. Its short, and I promise you will like it. It appears that this guy does weekly video reviews of technology-related things for the New York Times, and the few that I looked at were pretty funny. This might be a site to bookmark, especially for technology buffs like Cblakes (I don't know why the URL is so long, but it works).

http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=b26f34614:10f8c404286:-3172&rf=sitemap&fr_story=d14603c1e23e6ce37920a8134a2e27b1405a4991&st=1166290646873&mp=FLV&cpf=false&fvn=9&fr=121606_120614_26f34614x10f8bf8e912x694d&rdm=999742.9494534861