The Agrinautica

   So today I found myself testifying under oath in the Yolo County Superior Court as to what I believe my mohawk represents, and later bringing an entire courtroom to applause. Much later managed to get 52 persons into a room in Olson for an hour and then went to the City Council meeting as an encore. Altogether it was a very successful day.

   This morning I had jury duty in Woodland. This caused me to be a bit torn because I was from the start intrigued, curious and interested in participating, but at the same time I really didn't have time. So I wore my mohawk up and figured they'd surely dismiss me for it.
   I was one of the original 18 jurors selected for questioning and one of the last ones dismissed. Of probably around six jurors dismissed during the cause dismissals, three of them were because they knew the prosecuting lawyer. He's from Davis, chances are someone reading this knows him, seeing as apparently out of a random sampling of 18 people from Yolo county he knows 1/6th of them. Unfortunately his name escapes me at the moment. [Tim Wallace, see 02/18/06]
   One juror acted quite crazy, and quite determined not to be on the jury. I wouldn't be
suprised if he was faking the craziness. If he really was so crazy why would he be so determined to get off the jury? On the subject of being biased towards police officers, one lady who looked to be about forty and very frumpy casually mentioned she'd recently had relationships with "six sheriff-deputies from Yolo County" omgwtf. The judge casually responded that the officers involved in the case weren't
sheriff's-deputies.
   Most of the selection process proceeded without giving me reason to speak up to any of the questions. Finally towards the end the prosecutor asked "so.. Mr Fricke. You have very interesting hair. Could you explain what it means?" or something to that effect. I think he expected me to quickly incriminate myself as a crazy radical, but my answers portrayed me to have a rather healthy under-standing of the relevant principals (I like to think anyway), which led to even more questioning. One of his early questions for me was to the effect of "what do you think of the American legal system" (he no doubt suspected I'd clearly identify myself as a no-good anarchist), but my answer of "excellent" thoroughly flummoxed his hypothesis. In his probing he asked what I was studying and intended to do. When I said that I was IR and pre-law and thought maybe I'd go into diplomacy and negotiate treaties, he said "so.. you want to work for the Bush administration?" (somewhat humoristically) to which I responded "I want to work with for the United States government," and this interchange brought the whole courtroom to applause.
   After this I rather expected the defense was more likely to dismiss me since I had generally expressed a strong belief in the rule of law, however (once four people in a row had been dismissed from "seat 11" - when someone in seats 1-12 was dismissed someone from 13-18 was shuffled into the lower 12) it was the prosecutor who said "Mr Fricke, I like you, but I'm not gonna take a chance with that hair."
   In conclusion, you want to get out of jury duty, mohawk your hair beforehand.

   Upon returning from Woodland, I had to hit the ground running because Michael Newdow was coming at 7:30 to speak for Phi Alpha Delta and I was organizating it. I nearly died from stress over the event, but it all worked out and we had good attendance (51) and I think everyone enjoyed it.
   From there I went to the Davis City Council meeting where they were discussing
implimenting choice voting. I found this meeting positively brimming with tension between mayor pro tem Sue Greenwald and the other four councilmembers, including such comments as "I won the election, the rest of you need to be mature and accept that" (having gotten teh highest number of votes last election, Greenwald will be the next mayor), accusations that other members were "thwarting democracy," and councilmembers attempting to speak at the same time (repeatedly). It was definitely such sauce.

   This previous weekend was the MUN conference we host here at Davis for HS students. As soon as the high school students started arriving saturday morning one of them came up to me and was like "You're emosnail aren't you! Its like meeting a celebrity!"
   Also, as I was leaving at around 12:30 Saturday night, I was walking past Sproul when I noticed only a single window was lit on the building, on the second floor. Glancing up I noticed familiarly pointy hair and glasses. "Lamar?" says I, causing Lamar Heystek to stand up and look around like a meerkat. Turns out he was working on his weekly column, about which he said "this time its going to be good I swear."


In Other News: Yesterday when I went into MyUCDavis, there was a notice asking us to take a survey for the UCD student polling unit, with this incentive: "As a small token of our appreciation, we are giving the first 1500 students who answer the survey a debossed BREATHE wristband (similar to thehe Livestrong band)"
   In addition of course such bands with things like "princess" written on them can be found at various retail locations. I think its very very sad that something that started out as a symbol of support for a certain charity is now being copied into completely frivolous forms because its become fashionable.
   I don't expect such knavery not to appear in retail stores, but for university unit to participate is increasingly deplorable.