More shipping lawyer fun – in the Lloyd’s Register today, I found a ship called GAYDAR!
[I text-messaged Sue immediately to share this wonderful news. She replied telling me to search Lawnet for an article called The Meaning Of Meaninglessness.]
The little ways we get through the days.
Work is stressful today, but even on bad days the law gives me little gifts. Like discovering that there exists a case called The Dong (citation: [1979] 1 MLJ 152).
(Apologies to any Edward Lear fans reeling in agony at the punniness of this entry’s title. I’m too tired to think of anything remotely witty.)
On one of the first few pages of the latest edition of Street on Torts: This book is dedicated to Lukas, though I hope he never gets the urge to read it.
Fun fact for the day: in the American constitutional rights saga that began with the miraculous “creation” of a general right to privacy and eventually led to the legalizing of abortion, a case along the way that extended this right of privacy to activities relating to marriage was called Loving v. Virginia.
Okay, so maybe it’s a thoroughly boring factoid and would amuse only the puerile, but when trying to research a comparative human rights essay on judicial discovery of unenumerated rights, one must look for these little joys.
Must really stop giggling every time I think of the Boguslawski case, but this is difficult given that my mental connection of the facts of the case with its name involves imagining a bunch of Polish people in an English courtroom shouting “LAWSKI!” and “No, BOGUSLAWSKI!” at each other.
(Sorry, I know that’ll be lost on anyone who doesn’t know public international law. I’ll stop talking about it soon enough, I promise. Monday is jurisprudence.)
You never lose the art of wasting time no matter how long you’ve been out of practice. In the euphoria that followed winning my moot on Wednesday I managed to fritter all of Thursday away in languid nothingness, although given the blood, sweat and tears I’d been putting into the moot I contend (still using courtroom language, oops) the R&R was well deserved. It will, however, be short-lived, given my currently non-existent 8000 word dissertation, vaguely on Jeremy Bentham, specific topic as yet unknown, deadline April.
All the same, yesterday began pleasantly when mum woke me up with a phone call at noon, and continued in much the same vein with a surprise meeting and girliness with Jolene, rambling conversation with Tay where Spiritualized and Madonna were liberally pissed on, final retreat to my room for solitaire (literally, I’m not just smarmily including words in foreign languages in normal sentences just for that sense of je ne s’ais quoi) and eventually, reluctantly, work.
Today has been mostly lectures, mostly dreary, with this one little sunbeam of surreality – in the computer room, this overheard conversational snippet: “My dream night out? Ronald Dworkin, sucking my dick.” This probably won’t make much sense to you unless you’re a disgruntled jurisprudence student, but it’s insanely funny if you are.
[Addendum: French spelling mistake corrected by Russ – my thanks. There is probably a flippant remark to be made here about how I’m relieved he has enough proficiency in at least one language to demonstrate its proper use (I conspicuously fail to mention English) (I also remember our trip to Paris where he explained he could go into great lengths in French about his ambitions and what he did during summer but couldn’t ask if the restaurant was still serving food), but I guess I shouldn’t make that flippant remark.] :P
Oh, I forgot to say: things will probably be quiet here till Monday at least, because I’m Ryanairing off to Ireland tomorrow.
Meanwhile I continue to utter unfortunately phrased and embarrassing statements garnering strange looks from surrounding people in the computer cluster room, such as explaining on the phone to a public international law coursemate that “I really have to get my public international ass into gear”.