It's Still August?!

There are a lot of popular misconceptions about law school, but the workload is about as heavy as most imagine. I'm just one week into the process, but I already feel like I should be preparing for mid-term exams. I would not have imagined that $500 worth of law books could fit in a boot box, but their size belies their density.

Slow News Day?

I might be the only American who would bother to read the following article in its entirety, but as someone who both rowed in college and lived in China (and drank Mengniu-brand milk), I'm in a unique demographic group.

China's New Reality Show Goes for the Gold

By MEI FONG
The Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2006; Page B1

BEIJING -- Wanting to be the next millionaire is so turn of the century. Now, a Chinese game show plans to pose an even more exclusive question: Who wants to be an Olympian?

China Central Television, China's normally staid TV monopoly, is launching a new kind of reality show that aims to pluck someone from the nation's 1.3 billion-strong population to become an Olympic athlete.

The position doesn't require brawn, speed or years of training -- just a healthy set of lungs and a good sense of direction. China's Olympics rowing team is searching for coxswains: two diminutive people with big voices who will steer the men's and women's teams of eight rowers in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The nationally televised search to find the lucky winners -- one male, one female -- will draw from parts of "Survivor," "The Apprentice" and "American Idol," as organizers seek to make stars of China's rowers, whose sport doesn't have much of a following in that country.

Called the "China Olympic Coxswain Competition," the show hopes to ride the popularity of reality TV shows in China, sparked by the stunning success of "Super Female Voice," a singing contest produced by provincial TV station Hunan Satellite that drew 400 million viewers to its 2005 finale. By comparison, "American Idol" drew 36 million viewers to its finale this year.

Settling In

SU's South Campus might resemble a military post (they put a fresh coat of battleship gray paint on my building this week), but I must say that the interiors are quite spacious, clean, and comfortable. A couple of my chairs likely date from the (first-term) Reagan administration, but otherwise the amenities are modern. The shower is great and the kitchen seems brand new.

I'm in a quiet, leafy corner of what is an expansive housing complex but this seclusion comes at a cost of convenience. Under ideal circumstances, my walk to the law school takes up to 30 minutes, door to door. Fortunately there's a campus shuttle stop nearby with buses running as often as every 10 minutes.

The exterior shot above is of a neighboring building -- mine doesn't look nearly as nice. The hallway shot is outside my second-floor doorway. The "view" is from my bedroom window. Standing at my front door this morning, I saw a family of deer on a neighboring hillside; you would never guess that one of the most crime-ridden sections of Syracuse is just minutes away by car.

There are no numbers on any of the doors; took me three tries to find mine. The walkway and stairwells smell like summer camp (a mix of fresh paint and musty canvas). The first-year law students are the first to arrive, so the whole university is dead for at least a few more days. I was getting cabin fever after just 36 hours, so I can't imagine what the people who got here weeks ago have been up to.

Gas is Still Too Cheap

I'm visiting friends in New Canaan, CT this weekend -- about 180 miles away. I once made the drive in two hours and 59 minutes, but really wanted to take the train this time, put my feet up, and read a book. Taking the train down would have been doable, but planning a round trip quickly revealed its impracticality. A roundtrip ticket on Amtrak could run me as much as $150 -- unless I want to catch a 4:30am return to Boston. I would also have to pay for parking and transportation to and from the lot. I looked at bus options; the infamous Fung Wah bus to NYC is only $10 each way but makes no stops in CT. Getting to and from Canal Street in lower Manhattan would have been a hassle, to say the least. Greyhound makes regular stops near New Canaan, but the ride to Boston can top six hours, costs $36, and would still leave me about an hour from home. So instead of all that I will drive my own car, pay no more than $20 each way for gas (even at $3.15 per gallon), and wonder at what price per barrel of oil we will truly test the limits of our demand elasticity.

Of Boxers and Bicycle Tires

I'm a boxer-brief guy. I wear knit boxers on occasion but prefer a snug fit. You kids might not appreciate this, but there was a time when such undergarments were not only new but considered something of a luxury and were available only at snooty department stores at prices of up to $15 per pair. While teaching in China in the late 1990s, I had the chance to visit a major source of these and other textiles and scored more than a dozen pairs of shorts for about $2 each. They served me well for nearly 10 years, but I had to retire all but two of them in the last 10 months. While in Thailand for the better part of the last two years I began to restock, but sizing issues were too often problematic. Now that I'm back in the States, I can appreciate the recent sea change in men's undergarments. Americans can now buy quality boxer-briefs and the like at discount retailers for less than what I paid in Hong Kong in 1997.

We can discuss the true "cost" of anything assembled under less than humane conditions and sold by companies that might employ illegal immigrants, but if cheap boxers are not the result of textbook comparative advantage then the global trading system will ultimately be rent apart by protectionist forces in search of a "better" way.

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My "bicycle tire" story suddenly doesn't seem as interesting as it did when I titled this post. Let me boil it down thusly: 1) got a new tire, 2) realized when I got home that it was on backwards, i.e. the tread was facing the wrong direction (markings on the sidewall indicated <--REAR/FRONT-->), 3) brought it back to the French manager/bike tech (turns out the sporting goods store is part of a France-based multinational), 4) guy originally denied there was a problem but finally relented; moment was needlessly tensed by my friend making snide, Tour de France-related comments over my shoulder, 5) picked up bike two days later (after the "killer" heat wave subsided) to find no change to tire or bike, 6) was not able to hide my displeasure, 7) guy's English began to fail him but insisted that A) tire had originally been installed backwards and B) tire was now correctly installed, 8) I countered forcefully that I was not insane and that contentions A and B could not both be correct, 9) finally quit arguing to return home and do what I should have done days before: consult the tire manufacturer's website, 10) turns out the tread faces forward when used as a front tire and rearward when used as a back tire, 11) local Franco-U.S. relations have been slow to recover.

Belated Farewells

According to their website, Sleater-Kinney has decided to go on an "indefinite" hiatus. Seems like every few years there is a flurry of grrrl-rock bands that try to break into the mainstream but SK, even if not the first of that genre, should be considered pioneers. You've probably never heard of them, in fact the only other person I know who owns any SK music doesn't even like them, calling each of their albums a rehash of previous work. I own their last five discs; short of conceding my friend's point, I would say that at the very least each represents considerable gains in production values. At worst, then, each album supercedes what came before it but can stand alone on its own merits.

Their "farewell" album, The Woods, certainly sounds like a band ready to call it quits -- not from a lack of creativity but out of an apparent frustration from trying to shoehorn their raucous style into a radio-friendly sound. SK has been in the biz long enough to realize that anything with a six-minute, speaker-melting guitar solo will not find a place on any corporate radio playlists, it's just that they don't care anymore. Not surprisingly, the album is the better for it. At last check, one of my favorite songs from that album was available as a free download on Amazon.

Now that I think of it, my "appreciation" of SK is an important footnote regarding the salad days of unchecked file sharing. Had it not been for the original Napster, I don't know how I would have ever come across SK (certainly not via commercial radio). But because I was able to download a handful of their songs I ended up buying their CDs and even saw them live a couple of times. There is no better way for a struggling band to get noticed than to carpet-bomb the Internet with free mp3s.

I'm not about to get sentimental over a defunct e-tailer, but AllDirect.com also bowed out recently. They were my favorite source for music and books. I always thought their prices were too good to be true and now I understand why.