since i finally got mine done, i can now be the annoying one and remind everyone else.
lani and i had a productive weekend. on friday night we visited lani’s mom’s friend and her sister and three children. children are entertaining but would be much nicer if they came with an off switch. saturday we walked 5 miles as the beginning of an attempt to actually get ourselves in shape. then we had japanese food in williamsburg with cheryl before she sets off to hike the appalachian trail. sunday we went to JASmart and chinatown and stocked up on asian groceries and health food. we’d planned to get a rice cooker in chinatown but couldn’t find a model with a built in steamer tray so instead we ordered one online. then, if grocery shopping weren’t exciting enough, we did our taxes. looks like i’ll be getting a little bit back this year. woohoo!
i guess their recent european, west coast, and florida tours are paying off. the Music Choice channels are, as far as i know, nationwide. i don’t listen to the electronica channel that much but the metal channel has always been pretty good at playing bands just before they start getting big and get played on MTV or Much Music.
the amount of press Ave D has been getting is pretty astounding (though deserved) for a band that doesn’t even have an album out yet. i’ve heard from others that their songs are staples in some of the cooler clubs in London and a worldwide fanbase is developing.
i think that when their album finally comes out, it will be exciting times.
somehow, without any major mishaps, lani and i made it from DC to manhattan with a truck full of her belongings this weekend and now she lives with me.
some of the major accomplishments:
didn't hit any pedestrians, vehicles or stationary objects substantial enough to leave a scratch or dent on the truck.
managed to locate, stop at, and register to win a vespa at 8 Target stores within easy reach of the highway.
never really got lost despite doing a lot of off-highway driving around maryland and new jersey looking for Targets.
gerard miraculously found and secured a parking spot for us right in front of the apartment
managed to unload the truck in about half an hour
lani managed to wake me up at 7am so we could drive the truck to the drop-off point in new jersey by 8am.
survived morning rush-hour traffic in manhattan and got through the lincoln tunnel without incident
were slightly late returning the truck but didn't get charged any late fees
now, we just have to get lani’s stuff unpacked.
this whole cohabitation thing will be new for me. i’ve only had experience with long distance relationships. even as far back as high school, i’ve never dated someone who lived in the same <em>town</em> as me, let alone the same apartment.
my friend prasanth has been doing his rotations for medical school for the last year and will be doing them for another year or so. about a year ago, he foolishly went out and bought a custom made dual 1GHz pentium machine without thinking that he would be travelling to a different city every 6 weeks for a long time to come and having a big desktop machine wouldn’t be very convenient. unsurprisingly, it’s remained in storage almost since he bought it.
so this weekend i bought it off him for cheap. this works pretty well for both of us. by the time he would get to use the machine it would be way obsolete so instead he got to convert it to a bit of cash that he can put towards a laptop which will travel better. my old computer is a 400MHz celeron that i bought in 1999. i run linux and don’t really play video games so i don’t feel a strong need to have the fastest machine on the planet. still, 400MHz is feeling slower and slower every day as everyone else around me upgrades (although realistically, with all the performance improvements that have been made to the linux kernel, my 400MHz machine has actually been getting faster and more responsive since i bought it). moving up to a dual 1GHz machine is a pretty significant improvement for me.
so <a href=”http://www.gentoo.org/“>gentoo</a> is installed on it and kde is compiling while i’m at work.
a coworker of mine was just on a jury for a drug possession case. he expressed some regret that they convicted despite his feelings that drug possession should not be illegal.
<p>for years, my dad has been ranting about the concept of ‘Jury Nullification’. the short version of which is that juries don’t have to convict someone of breaking a law that they feel is unjust even if the facts of the case clearly indicate guilt. if juries consistently nullify convictions under certain laws, those laws don’t tend to last long (the Fugitive Slave Act and Prohibition were ended in large part because of jury nullification). in times past, juries used to be explicitly informed of this concept before they were asked to try a case. during the vietnam war however, things changed and they stopped informing juries about jury nullification. </p>
<p>so when i spoke with my coworker about this concept, i was a little surprised to hear that they had been explicitly told that their duty as jurors was to decide based on the facts alone and that they could not take their own politics into account (probably something worded similarly to <a href="http://www.bostonbar.org/dd/patjuryinst/CRPJ0LX5.HTM">this</a>).</p>
<p>a google search for “jury nullification” will turn up dozens of pages discussing the idea. what i’m looking for is something more official. i want to know where to find the actual legal precedents behind jury nullification (as far as i can tell, it is considered ‘Common Law’, ie, it was common practice when the Constitution was drafted but was not explicitly put into it) and what the current state of jury nullification is. if, as everything i can find seems to indicate, jury nullification is still allowed, how can courts justify purposely misleading jurors by telling them that they have to convict based on evidence alone? </p>
<p>the closest i’ve come yet seems to be this article wherein a judge <a href="http://www.levellers.org/jrp/orig/jrp.juryrevolt.htm">warns other judges and prosecutors</a> about the impending dangers of <a href="http://nowscape.com/fija/fija_us.htm">fully informed jurors</a>. he’s clearly against jury nullification, but provides the best legal background i’ve seen yet that establishes it as a right of jurors. eg, he mentions <a href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=254&invol=135"> <span class="caps">HORNING</span> v. <span class="caps">DISTRICT</span> OF <span class="caps">COLUMBIA</span> , 254 U.S. 135 (1920)</a> in which an instance of jury nullification is upheld: “…but the jury were allowed the technical right, if it can be called so, to decide against the law and the facts…”</p>
<p>anyway, i’m not a lawyer. that’s why i will be very grateful if someone can get me a reference to the actual legal status of jury nullification (preferably as interpreted by an actual lawyer and not someone with an agenda one way or the other).</p>
this morning my cellphone rang. i was at work and the number came up as ‘withheld’ so i sent it straight to voicemail. 5 minutes later i checked it and found a message from some woman in what sounded to me like swedish or some other scandinavian language. i played it for <a href=”http://www.thegogglesdonothing.com/“>peter</a>, who is our resident expert on scandinavian languages (i think he speaks swedish, icelandic, and danish). he was mystified. he said that the cadence was norwegian and he thought he recognized a couple icelandic words, but otherwise couldn’t figure out what language it was.
unfortunately i deleted the message. it would have been fun to digitize it and put it online.
in other news, this morning i woke up one minute before my alarm was set to go off. sweet.
last night i went to see napalm death, strapping young lad, nile, dark tranquility, and berserker. the headlining band was Nile. who is Nile? i’ve been listening to death metal since high school and i’d never heard of them before yesterday. and there they were with top billing above Napalm Death, one of the most influential bands in the genre. apparently Nile is currently popular with the kiddies…
the other really strange thing about the show was the venue: BB King’s Blues Lounge. not exactly the kind of place you’d expect to see a metal show.
met up with angela before the show and we went to the BB King grill which is in the same building as the lounge so i could get a quick bite to eat before things started. about half an hour before the show was scheduled to start, the first band, Berserker, went on. we were in the restaurant part and we oould hear them pretty clearly through the walls. it was then that we realized that the staff pretty much had no idea what they were in for. when the band started playing, a couple of the waitresses disappeared off to the lounge to see what was going on. the came back in looking absolutely mortified. it was quite amusing.
we wandered back into the lounge with just enough time to grab a beer before Strapping Young Lad started playing. SYL was the main draw of the show for me. their set was unfortunately somewhat disappointing. they only got to play for about half an hour and the club’s sound still wasn’t well setup. it was about 20 decibels quieter than SYL deserves (and needs) and tinny sounding. even with the poor sound, the band was still fantastic. Devin is a pretty goofy guy (“water, water, it’s good for your heart, the more you drink the more you… have in your system”) which makes for an odd contrast with the sheer crushing heaviness of their music. Gene Hoglin, the drummer, is positively inhuman.
after SYL played, angela and i each ran off to our respective bathrooms. as i was coming out of the narrow hallway leading to the bathrooms, someone says 'excuse me' and slides past me and into the women's bathroom. i had to stop and blink a couple times. it was Juliya, the host of Uranium the metal show on Much Music, one of the few tv shows that i actually watch on a regular basis. 5 minutes later angela comes out of the bathroom. i'm about to say something to the effect of "do you realize who was just in the bathroom with you?" when angela beats me to it. apparently she had a long conversation with her while they were both applying hair spray at the sink.
after our little celebrity encounter, Dark Tranquility went on. like Nile, i’d never heard of them before that night. they were pretty good though. sort of at the goth end of the death metal spectrum. growly vocals and heavy guitars but mixed in with keyboards and occasional clean vocals. i’m really a sucker for that style of music so i’ll probably pick up one of their albums.
the Napalm came on and showed everyone how it's done. holy crap. the first two songs were a little muddy sounding but then the band really tightened up and they got the last kinks out of the PA. most napalm fans have been disappointed with their last couple albums. thankfully, they played almost all old material with just two or three songs off their new album. napalm's first album, Scum, is an absolute masterpiece of extreme music and single-handedly invented the grindcore genre. but it was recorded for almost no money and production wise was pretty terrible sounding. so i was thrilled when they played about half of that album live (the whole album was only 28 minutes so playing half of it wasn't that big a chunk of time) because i got to finally hear the songs with decent quality sound. the other highlights of their set were "Suffer the Children", "From enslavement to obliteration", and their cover of "Nazi punks, fuck off".
after Napalm was Nile. by now my curiousity was killing me. who the hell thought they could be billed above Napalm Death? being the headlining act implies that you're better than the opening bands. being presented as better than Napalm builds up some pretty high expectations. sadly, Nile fell far short of those expectations. they were pretty generic, cookie-cutter death metal. they played pretty well but not exceptionally so. angela walked out after 5 minutes of their set. i lasted another 20 minutes but i was getting tired by then and after seeing napalm play, Nile were just bringing me down.
last night i watched Resident Evil and American Psycho 2.
RE was fun and cheesy. basically a direct ripoff of Aliens but with zombies instead of aliens. it had the strong female lead character surrounded by well trained and equipped soldiers trapped in an enclosed space with some relatively difficult to kill nasties. almost every character from Aliens had an equivalent. there was even a final showdown with one particularly nasty and powerful enemy. strikes against it: 1) complete and total lack of originality 2) uninspired dialog 3) no bishop. what it had going for it: 1) good soundtrack 2) milla jovovich 3) i actually got a kick out of how much it looked like a video game.
American Psycho 2 was just bad. i didn’t expect it to be any good but i was still disappointed. it had no redeeming qualities whatsoever. who’s stupid idea was it to follow up a fantastically good movie with complete crap?