The Agrinautica

Highlights From the Case # 31 Hearing
   On Tuesday we had our hearing for Case # 31, Van Schoelandt v. ASUCD Senate. The Defence was represented by Greg "the big city lawyer" Russel, while Hanging Chad Van Shoelace represented the plaintiffs. I was taking the minutes, so of course they are excellently recorded. Due to my inability to properly prioratize however, my attention to the minutes probably had an inverse effect on justice in general.*
   Anyway, without giving away any secrets, I thought I'd share with you some highlights from the hearing.
Witness Thomas Lloyd: "Unfortunately [Senator Ari Kalfayan] had the floor, and was probably the most confused of all of us."
Witness Avi Singh: "[Senator Ari Kalfayan] has a demonstrated history of not doing things correctly"
Court: “Was anything damaging said [during the Closed Hearing?” Singh: "I don't remember. ...so my girlfriend, she had a job. We were very terrible for this association. She had to work at 6am. Got soup thrown on her while she was here, said she wasn't going to come anymore. But if she didn’t show up she’d get checkmark on her background. You gotta keep your head up. I have no idea where I’m going with this [pause] I'm going to Harvard law school!! [applause]"
   "...I feel bad because I told Greg I'd prepare for this but I don't really remember..."

   Also of note was how other justices were going back and forth with Lloyd about what it means to be a co-author and then I read him our definition of co-author from Case 22 ... which was followed by Singh saying he thought our definition of co-author was completely bogus, to which I read him the conclusion of Case 22, which asked the Senate to redefine co-author.
   Then he pointed out that he was unlikely to know of a 2003 case since he wasn't involved in ASUCD back then. A good point which inspired me to write Judicial Directive 11 later that night. It lists the orders of the cases since Fall 2003 ... and establishes that all are responsible for knowing them.

See Also: Plaintiff witness Jonathon Leathers posted an account of the hearing. We of course take no responsibility for the views expressed by this plaintiff witness.

*Actually the minutes probably suck and it would be a compliment to justice if there was an inverse effect.


Wiki Adventures
   So I have to be ready to give a 5-7 minute informative speech on something cultural tomorrow for my introduction to public speaking class. I've chosen to do it on Daviswiki. I need at least three sources, one of which comes from something scholarly like a book or scholarly journal article (any suggestions?) and at least one visual aid. For the visual aid I'm thinking of trying to wrangle powerpoint into displaying a picture of the front page of Daviswiki or something.

   In related wiki news, Daviswiki's sister wiki, Rocwiki, which is hosted on the same machine and uses the same code, recently surpassed the 2,000 page mark.

   In more sordid wiki news (which don't worry I won't be covering in my speech), it seems just when we thought things had quieted down, contention has once again broken out on the Halema Buzayan page. Previously unknown user "NancyGrisby" has burst onto the page with guns blazing, vehemently defending Officer Ly. E-detectives have determined that the IP address of all NancyGrisby's edits has come from the Sac State campus, which interesting is where Officer Ly's brother goes.

   Also, curious as to the excessive amount of comments to "Charity Classic" I investigated and found there to be a raging debate about the water shortage in Africa. Interesting.


   On the subject of Africa, yesterday while I was marauding the Farmer's Market I was waylaid by someone who was going around handing out flyers for a protest of the genocide in Darfur. And not just passively handing out these flyers but very energetically seeking out everyone she could find to flyerize them.
   Now the thing is, the genocide in Darfur is caused by the ethnically Arab Janjaweed militia, not-very-secretly backed by the Sudanese government, trying to drive out the non-Arab native inhabitants of the region (which isn't to say there are no Arab native inhabitants). This conflict is of course intricately linked with the Chad/Sudan conflcit I've been covering. Pretty much everyone, the United States included, agrees that the Darfur conflict is a Bad Thing and put the utmost pressure on Sudan to behave itself. And so, my point, is that it is utterly useless to protest the situation here. No one here thinks its not a bad thing. There is NO chance that even the 7th cousin of someone who once was the roommate of someone who is responsible for whats going on there is EVER going to know there was a protest at UC Davis, much less care. And so this falls firmly into the category of things I find infuriatingly dumb.
   At least its not actively counter-productive like the movement to cause the UC Regents to divest from Sudan.

Picture of the Day

This is what AMPAC ESCWA 2006 might have looked like discussing water access in Africa
and its affect on the Darfur Conflict

   Mara recently got some pictures from our committee's Lebanon. As you can see, MUN is FUN. Note in this one the tall blonde guy -- he (Iraq) was totally on MTV's "Date My Mom." And Mara & I causing a ruckus at the dias.
   Also, it turns out Mara's friend Megan ended up falling madly in love with the lad she met when they visited Davis, or something, so she's coming up for picnic day & dragging Mara with her -- so Mara will be here for picnic day!

In Other News
   So Kristy works as a kitty technician at a feline nutritional research lab. Basically they feed cats stuff and observe the results. Nothing weaksauce. Anyway they were supposed to get a shipment of this raw meat cat food the other day ... only employee Olivia opens it to find LIVE LOBSTERS!!?! It was suspected that an order had gotten mixed up and somewhere a fancy restaurant was opening a box of Wild Kitty Cat Food.

   I arrive at Court on Friday to find a table there is absolutely heaping with St Patricks Day themed desserts & snacks -- including TWO complete cakes, a set of cupcakes, as well as chips & dip et cetera. Someone remarks "If you want healthy food, its all in criminal division, they have celery & carrots and things." I wonder if the different faire is caused by subtle psychological nuances related to working in criminal versus civil division, or merely a groupthink effect forged by the personalities of people who happen to work in the respective divisions.

   On Saturday Kristy & I made an expedition to Roseville and retrieved my Mercedes.
   On Sunday I put the car through a trial run .. by driving it the 400+ miles from Davis down to Orange County.
   On Monday I hung out with my good friend Petty Officer 2nd Class Aaron Aviv, who's back on leave from the USCGC¹ WPC-13² Shamal. We (Him & I plus two of his friends) were nerdcore and went to this place that has like 200 networked computers and played Battlefield 2.
   Today is Tuesday, I don't know what I'm doing this evening yet, but hopefully I'm doing something.
   Tomorrow, Wednesday, I return to Davis.
   On Thursday, Kristy & I are seeing Franz Ferdinand in Sacramento.
   On Friday a large group of us, approximately consisting of the group of people who usually go on the annual New Years Tahoe trip (which didn't occur this year), will go on a roadtrip down to Vegas. We will return on Monday.

¹United States Coast Guard Cutter
²W? Patrol Coastal


   My internet is acting extremely wonky at the moment. Pages on livejournal & wikipedia are opening fine, but most other pages are not opening at all. Previous to these problems there had been no changes to the set up here since last night when everything was working fine -- except Myspace;
   Myspace is also not loading at all now, but yesterday my login would bring me to the "register new user" page. If I typed in an obviously bogus login, it would tell me I had the wrong username/password, and I further confirmed that it was recognizing my login by telling it I forgot my password and verifying that the information it sent back to me was what I was typing in -- so for some reason its recognizing my login as not a nonaccount or incorrect login, but sending me to the register new account screen.
   And of course AIM is down. This is all extremely alarming because AIM is the principal way I communicate with people and during my very short stay here its extremely important to me to try to make the most out of my visit and see as many of my friends as I can. Myspace is also important to this goal.. I was able to briefly get through and post a bulletin announcing I'm in town, but otherwise I'm cut off from myspace as well for some reason. )=
   Update 9:24pm - things seem to be working better now.


In Other News: So I have a radio in my room here, unlike in Davis, so I'm catching up with whats on the radio now ... and its SHIT. Man what crap, I'm not missing anything. I'm suprised by how often Green Day - When September Ends is still on, man I loathe that song. I can't believe such an obnoxious affliction to the ears was spawned by Green Day. --update 6:44 GOD ITS ON AGAIN!!!! IT MAKES ME WANT TO DIE


Picture of the Day

Bailey celebrates St Patricks Day
He had a moment of celebrity as the St Patricks Day image on the front page of Daviswiki for most of the day.
See also: stuffonmycat.com

   Its officially Valentines Day. That means that as of this moment, I have known Kristy Heidenberger for approximately three years and one hour. <3


Anything But Clothes
   On Saturday Corey Quackenbush, Cheryl Miller and their parrot Coco hosted an "Anything-But-Clothes" (ABC) themed party. Kristy wore balloons. I made myself a suit of samurai-armour out of some of the 800 flyers I still have from my last campaign for Senate ... it was like megalomania armour. Sashie wore a starbucks apron. Host Corey had an awesome suit of cardboard armour.
   Since I'd had wisdom teeth out the day before however I didn't drink. It was still quite fun though. There was also drunken trampolining. Unfortunately Sashie hurt her ankle doing this however. Anyway, I commandeered Sashie's camera for most of the party and consequently there are about a million pictures.

   Some dood from Sac State tried to drunkenly talk to me about student government as we were leaving. The only thing worse than drunken talks about ASUCD politics is drunken talks about how some other school has it better -- he was saying we should have different representatives from the various colleges and things. Silly Sac State and their less-evolved government.


   Speaking of ASUCD, one of our justices has had a family emergency. As we are kept at exactly quorum, we can't do anything without the involvement of all of them. We are currently in a state of ongoing deliberations regarding Case # 29 -- when we end deliberations the judicial codes indicate we have three days to produce the opinion. Remaining business on this case can be resolved via email but I don't know if he's going to have access to email (he's left town for the week). If he doesn't, it could be a week before we can do anything. Reason number a million that we need more than just quorum of justices.


Daviswiki Today: The Clarification Holy Wars
   Renaming things for "clarification" on Daviswiki has become somewhat of a Holy War. It started out with people renaming things like "Internal Affairs Commission," because apparently it alarmed them that they didn't know immediately what it was (there is, however, only one Internal Affairs Commission in Davis). More recently it has spread to renaming all the pages for people's pets with things like "the dog," "the rat," "the ravenous bugbladder beast of traal," etc. Wiki messiah Philip Neustrom has ruled that this is acceptable but smote down changes to make "The Anonymous Crowd" into "Band / Anonymous Crowd." Things started to get saucier when Travis "I Only Post Negative Comments in Kris' Livejournal" Grathwell (sivart13) renamed MichaelGiardina (who had been renaming the pet pages) to "MichaelGiardina the Person." This too, was reverted, possibly because "human" would be more in keeping with the naming convention. Once again tapping into the dark side, Darth Laabs tried to rename Sen. Rob Roy to "Rob Roy the Fucking Legend," but Neustrom was waiting with his +3 Revert Hammer. SaulSugarman has yet to weigh in.

In International News: Chad & Sudan recently ended their war over Chad's renaming of the United Front for Democratic Change to Sudanese / United Front for Democratic Change. The United Front for Democratic Change, or F.U.C.*, aims to overthrow the current Chadian government. It was formed by the combination of eight independant rebel groups who have denounced partisanship, under the philosophy that anyone's better than the current government. Libyan leader Muammar Kadafi has told Chad & Sudan both to STFU and play nice, basically. *I'm not making this up!


Towing Run-Around
   So University Imports has proclaimed something to be seriously wrong with my car's engine, and that it needs to be looked at by a Mercedes specialist in Roseville. I called around and it'll cost between $175 and $215 to get it towed there. However, (for the cheapest company at least) I can't book them directly, I have to go through AAA. AAA, however, books the closest towtruck to your location when you call them. Hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to convince AAA to let me go with the cheapest company.


Quotes
"Police-cars are painted like orcas" - Me
"Orcas are painted like police-cars" - Jardine
"Police-cars evolved from orcas" - Kristy


Picture of the Day

see ABC Party above

   So one fine day on Daviswiki, contention erupted over the shadiness factor of Campus Crusade for Christ. To help solve this controversy, Emosnail staff benevolently volunteered to do some polling on the subject, but in response noted local Republican George Andrews stated "having Fricke do a poll on Campus Crusade in EMOSNAIL is like having me do a poll on Nathan Thomas/Black Caesar/Dan Beeman Approval ratings among DCR members."
   We then posted polls both here and on the UC Davis community (ucdaivs). Ostensibly this was to ascertain the shadiness factor of CCC, but really we're just using jedi mind tricks to make you think thats our motive -- the true motive was to show that CCC would get a higher shadiness rating from the UC Davis lj community than from the readers of this livejournal (the postings were exactly identical).
   At this point, more than 18 hours after the polls began, and with 60 responses: the ucdavis community has rated Campus Crusade for Christ at a shadiness factor of 7.14, while the emosnail readership has rated it at 6.33. Clearly Emosnail does not foster antireligious mentalities.


Resistentialism
   The other day my browser (mozilla) inexplicably crashed and when it came back up, all my bookmarks had been lost. I find this very aggravating because I had quite a few things that I regularly used bookmarked. I miss the most-recent-pictures-updated-to-livejournal webpage that I haven't been able to find again. )=
   Last night apartment-mate wdsguy came home from LA, where he spends the week steeped in the adult entertainment industry (you think I'm kidding), and promptly unplugged my internet and went to bed -- presumably without actually realizing I needed it (we don't have a router because I live in a cave so only one of us can be connected at a time). So I spent the rest of the night in the computer lounge working on my paper. When I returned in the morning I was plugged in again but our internet was down, appeared to be a problem with our service-provider. When it finally came up trillian (my AIM client) crashed and burned horribly. When I was finally able to get it up again all my friends groups had been eliminated, so I now have 435 people all in one big group. I promptly created the missing groups and garnered a small amount of satisfaction sending some people to the gulag (my friends-list category of that name anyway). I believe resistentialism is taking root in my computer. Either that or its developing bovine spongeform encephalitis ("mad cow disease").


The Order of Trogdor
   EMOSNAIL is proud to present Daviswiki creator Philip Neustrom with our highest honour, the Order of Trogdor:

   Neustrom is seen here receiving the prestigious medal in the traditional ceremony. (with the medal on)
   Neustrom has exemplified the most admirable interests in promoting community understanding, combined with illustrious competence in creating the Daviswiki and making the wonder that it is today.
   Truly, if there is anyone who deserves to be on Davis Mount Rushmore, it is Phil (incidently I've never heard of four of the five people listed there).*

Weekly ASUCD Shadiness Rating
   We're overdue for the weekly ASUCD shadiness rating. Since last polling, ASUCD went ahead and passed unanimously the legislation preventing members of the ASUCD judiciary from authoring legislation, and Kalen Gallagher was replaced as President by Caliph Assagai and Darnell Holloway (but not before Gallagher characterized choice voting as a disease he would squash). Here's an Aggie article on the recent adventures of ASUCD.
[Poll #457889]

Daviswiki Entry of the Day: Magic Items of Davis


Shady Quote of the Day:
PrzemekP: true, but if it's possible, have him hold off, like I said, the worst possible for her would be her nominating herself
PrzemekP: haha, or better yet, if Fricke does it!
amazonjedimaster: you have enough pull with fricke
amazonjedimaster: have him do it
amazonjedimaster: have fricke nominate her first
PrzemekP: I'll see what I can do
PrzemekP: but there is a part of me that thinks Fricke might vote for Veronica
amazonjedimaster: because if you want the worst person to nominate .... fricke is that person
PrzemekP: true
amazonjedimaster: janet and i made it clear to centian people that we hate kris
amazonjedimaster: with a passion
amazonjedimaster: some of them are peons at berkely
PrzemekP: yeah, but like I said, a part of me feels Fricke might vote Veronica
amazonjedimaster: you think nomiating gena will change how he votes?


Year Ago Today: Ice Cream Sandwich Cravings - & rooommate Jill asks us sausage themed questions for her lover.

*if someone wants to use the above picture to make it look like Phil (& Amie) are on the real Mount Rushmore I think that would be ridiculously funny, and um, I'll buy you a twinkie.

   Daviswiki special operation commandoes in conjuction with the clandestine operations division of the E.M.O.S.N.A.I.L. organization recently conducted a daring mission to infiltrate and observe UC Davis' secret society, Swords and Sandals. The above items were seized unnoticed from the SS in the middle of their summit - a tribute to the craftiness of our agents.

   Upon publication of the results of this mission on daviswiki, ASUCD President Kalen Gallagher declared the SS and its activities to be mundane and overhyped. He then demanded the return of the contents of the plastic bags. Some observers have speculated that he will be sacrificed if he cannot reclaim the bags for the SS.


In Other News - In the News
   It has just come to our attention that UCLA Today published an article in December on Kris Fricke.

   Aggie opinion columnist Ian Watson apparently thinks Kris Fricke needs to travel more. Watson once spent two weeks in China, giving him unchallangeable "perspective" on things; Fricke has lived in three countries and that is not including the two weeks he once spent across the former iron curtain in Eastern Europe or similar visits to other countries.


Quotes
"Fuck you ... you suck balls, Lietenant Aiken ...sir!" -Coleman to Nizzle after the former stumbled in Saturday night completely intoxicated. He proceeded to write something unintelligable on the whiteboard, fall down the stairs, and eventually pass out in his room.

   Also at Sashie's place we watched Harold & Kumar Go To Whitecastle -- a movie I found very excellent. Azver was Kumar at the party on Friday night incidently, complete with Whitecastle burgers.


Previously on EMOSNAIL
   Two Years Ago Today: The D1 Case - arguably the biggest case in ASUCD Court history. Incidently I was looking at the Court records from that period and found that my dissenting opinion, the case I subsequently filed myself, and the case we later heard (which was promptly dismissed) that had been filed by myself and Mr Igor Birman were all conspicuously missing from the records. What was it called in 1984 when events were deleted from history?