Deported Playmate tries to get back into the U.S.

Evidently, a deported former Playboy playmate is trying to get readmitted to the U.S. under an "extraordinary ability" visa.

Tucker Carlson interviewed her lawyer. My favorite lines?

CARLSON: So that—you think that that‘s a valid criterion for entry into the country, having an extraordinary body, having a cute butt. That‘s sort of—you know, all the girls with the dumpy butts don‘t get in. But the ones with the cute ones do.

and

CARLSON: Do you think—is there a porn shortage in this country, do you think? I mean, is there a lack of homegrown porn actresses? Is this a crisis?

FELDENKRAIS: I do not believe it‘s a crisis. There‘s definitely a lot of talent out there. And but that doesn‘t stop us from...

CARLSON: Why should we flood the market with cheap foreign imports, thereby forcing our own porn actresses out of work and oppressing their wages?

FELDENKRAIS: I don‘t think we‘re flooding them. I think one person, two people. This is not an area where you‘re going to have 200 million people coming in as porn actresses. But you will have a select few, a very good few, that will be able to do what she does. And you‘re not necessarily letting the floodgates and allowing half a million people come in just because they have a cute butt. No.

Email etiquette

Apropos one of my points from this post, some nice person has compiled a list of email etiquette rules.

Read them. Live them.

Worst day of the year.

It's official. Today sucks.

The Next Best Thing.... continued

At the risk of sounding foolish (which has never bothered me before) David gets his prescience from me. I was wearing fedoras before everyone else (everyone else is now wearing fedoras.... right?). I was wearing suspenders before everyone else. I bought David's motor scooter to ride around town before every other old geezer starting riding motor scooters (every old fart is now riding motor scooters.... right?).
Yes, I can say without fear of contradiction that David got his ability to foresee fads from me (everyone else is now foreseeing fads.... right?).

Random thoughts and rants...

• Everybody who is in front of me on the sidewalk -- walk faster, or get out of my way. Don't stand in the middle of the sidewalk like human cholesterol blocking the arteries of the city.
  

• Attention, blogosphere (and especially blogs written by third year law students): Domestic spying may be unconstitutional or otherwise illegal under existing law. But it's not that clear. Actually, this is good advice for most issues that are Supreme Court fodder -- if it was as much of a slamdunk as you think it is (on either side, guys) then it wouldn't be an issue before the Court. So stop it.
• And the corollary to the previous point: Don't argue policy to me when you're talking about Constitutionality. Even if you're right in your belief that requiring parental notification for a minor having an abortion would cause a thousandfold increase in deaths of 15 year old girls, that doesn't mean that the requirement is unconstitutional. Argue that one to your legislator, not the Supreme Court.
  
• And, oh, yeah, another one I just thought of -- if the majority of this country is pro-choice then it doesn't matter who's on the Supreme Court because there won't be any laws against abortion. So don't worry about it. Or stop insisting that everybody's "pro-choice" the way you view it. Yes, most people believe that abortion shouldn't always be prohibited. But they also aren't really sanguine about abortion "on demand and without apology."
• Last one about the Supreme Court: The Court is not here to protect you against stupid laws. That's the job of the legislative and the executive branches. Stop electing people who vote for stupid laws.
  
• Lost totally freaks me out.
  
• Gray's Anatomy is a great show.
• The West Wing used to be a great show.
• I'm pretty sure you can get a communicable disease from just looking at a picture of Paris Hilton.
• I'm sick of the term "Jump The Shark." Will everybody stop using it? Or at least stop misusing it? (OK, that's mainly for people on the Yahoo West Wing Group.)
• Jakers! The Adventures of Piggly Winks is so good that I'm actually considering joining PBS this year. It's probably not sufficient to overcome the anti-Semitic rantings that PBS likes to put on except during pledge week (when, at least in New York, PBS mysteriously puts on all of the Klezmer specials and "History of the Jews" that languish in the drawer the rest of the year), but the fact that I'm even considering it tells you how good that show is. But I wish they'd move it to Noggin so it wasn't even an issue.
  
• While you're at it, move Sesame Street off of PBS also. Why the show needs a public subsidy when they make zillions of dollars from sales of Check Up Time Elmo and all the other schwag is beyond me.
  
• Please don't use the word "myself" if "I" or "me" would work (e.g. "Would you like to go for a quick drive with Mary Jo Kopechne and myself?"). It doesn't make you sound smarter.
• Email is great, and it's informal and quick, but have enough respect for the person you're emailing to at least make a stab at correct grammar, spelling, capitalization and punctuation, OK? I don't have the time to try and ferret out your meaning.
• If you give me change after I buy something, don't put the dollar bills in my hand and then stick 83 cents in change on top of the bills so that I have no choice but to drop all of the change. Give me the change first, so it's firmly in my hand, and then give me the bills separately, OK?
• Sometimes, when I'm at a class with my son, I look around at all of the other parents and think, "Each one of these parents thinks that their kid is the cutest kid in the world. Poor, self-deluded folk." See, even though everybody thinks their kid is the cutest, one of those kids actually is the cutest. And it's mine.
  
• TiVo is the greatest invention ever. Fire is also a very good invention, mainly because it led to the invention of TiVo.

Updates as I think of more things to complain about.

The next big thing...

OK, let's talk coolness and fads for a moment, OK?

I would not consider myself one of the "in, hip, crowd." When I left my last job, my goodbye party was held at 1 Little West 12th Street, which, in addition to being an OK restaurant, has an "in" bar scene (well, it was in at the time, I have no idea if it still is), velvet rope and all. I left to walk my wife home (I live around the corner) so she could put our son to bed, and when I came back, the guy wouldn't let me back in.

That's right. I wasn't allowed back into my own party until I reached someone inside to come vouch for me.

Now, that said, I seem to be the harbinger of what will be cool.

When I was in law school, I thought smoking cigars was kind of neat, and a year-and-a-half later, the cigar fad of the late '90s hit.

I started talking to my wife about how cool it would be to get a scooter, and a year later, Vespas became the "must-have" accessory of the cool.

We moved to our apartment roughly 4 months before the Meatpacking District exploded into the hippest neighborhood in NYC.

I got interested in poker about 6 years ago, and look around you -- it's EVERYWHERE! (Almost annoyingly so.)

Now, nobody believes me when I say I saw these trends happening and wasn't merely a hanger-on, so I make my prediction, on a time-stamped blog, of the next fad:

Snuff.

That's right, I said snuff. The powdered, aromatic tobacco product that the aristocrats of the 19th century liked.

So in a year or two, when there are snuff bars all over Manhattan, and there's a big glossy 300 page "Snuff Afficionado" magazine on all the newsstands, and you see a clip of Paris Hilton putting something in her nose that is (amazingly) not white, you will remember -- you saw it here first.