Colleges are back in session and fall sports are upon us. The Hallmark stores might be busy getting ready for Christmas (and probably Easter by now), but here it’s time for football and water polo. Time to gush ad nauseum about the joys of being both a Bear (Golden) and Vandal. Remember too that due to self-imposed exile in San Diego, sometimes cheering for any of the UCs is better than sitting around bored, so Anteaters, Banana Slugs, Gauchos and Tritons are also cool. Ten alma maters for the price of one. We’ll open the season with a big ‘GO BEARS!’

Sometime in the last couple of weeks this site started getting search engine traffic for something called “Pongo Point.” Apparantly people are looking for a new social networking thingamabob targeted at the Latin American market at pongo-point.com.

To all those new but slightly lost visitors, bienvenidos. Please enjoy your visit and feel free to look around a bit. Maybe you’ll find even something you like. If you hear a growl and the whooosh of a leaping guard puppy, it’s just the wind these days, so don’t worry about it.

Ah.  So nice how just a little dose of chlorine starts the week off so much better.  Not a full dose, mind you.  Not quite ready for that yet.  But a healthy dose, and it feels good.

[A] federal judge has concluded that a California company illegally copied questions from the Multistate Bar Examination for use in its bar exam preparation courses and ordered it to pay more than $11.9 million to the National Conference of Bar Examiners.

From Law.com.

So I guess the question is whether this will hurt PMBR’s business because ethical law students will avoid their tainted courses, or help their business because desperate law students can now point to a judge’s ruling that PMBR had access to the real questions.

It completely ignores the other question of why so many law students, having just paid (or indebted themselves for) three to five years of tuition, feel the need to spend thousands more on review courses for the bar exams. Flash cards by the pool (and while working on mess of temp gigs) and a good book got me through on the first try.

Looking at my little planner for the week I see the Triton Invitational is coming up this weekend.  Fourteen teams this year instead of twelve, including five of the ten UCs.  Twenty nine games spread over two pools for two days.  I can’t spend the whole weekend there, but will watch as much as I can.  Even if the Berkeley campus isn’t sending a team (they’re playing in a tournament at Navy), I can still be a good UC alum and have pretty good odds of rooting for a winner or three.  In case you’re interested, flashbacks to last year’s tournament.

Shoulder’s feeling good.  A short swim yesterday felt a bit stiff, but left no residual pain.  On top of that, pool crowds are going down with school going back into session.  Maybe it’s time to try and get back on some kind of a regular schedule.

Everything else is getting busy enough that I need to make certain I don’t ignore the health.  I was noticing I forgot to schedule an appointment with BorgHealth last month, and need to work that into the schedule soon.  Too bad they couldn’t implant some little detector thingee in the prostate when they were doing the radiation therapy – it would have made the long-term monitoring much easier.

“The next time you come to court, don’t bring your cell phone,” Boswell said. “And when the court asks a question, answer the question.”

Fines and community service for cell-phone rudeness. ROTFL.

Astronomers in Prague have reportedly been debating the status of Pluto as a planet. Different options have been presented that include downgrading Pluto or upgrading a number of other celestial bodies to planetary status. For the most part, the debate has been fairly ignored, because frankly, it’s boring. It’s tough to relate the astronomer’s technical definitions to anything going on around here, especially since NASA has utterly failed in their duty to create a cool space station and send smartass computers to Jupiter/Saturn back in 2001.

But on drive-time talk radio this afternoon, one caller brought it all home to me. While astronomy is the theoretical science involved, astrology is where the bickering and debate will impact my life. How will my life change without Pluto moving through my third house? Will Ceres or Charon traveling through the cusp of Pisces impact my love life more or less if they are granted the propsed planetary status? Enquiring minds need to know.

Really cool news, and not just because I love The Killing Joke.

It seems like I haven’t stopped running since last week sometime. Solo practice is supposed to be about long swims and naps during Passions. Infinitely flexible time that can be folded into a pleasant origami figure of balanced lifestyle options. But on the other hand, WOO HOO! Good projects and sane clients like I haven’t seen in months. With a little luck I might even get paid on time, and get off the ramen before October. But after a quick trip to the Bay Area this weekend, I’m finding myself missing NorCal again. Not the frigid summers though, and it was beautifully sunny here today, not that I had any time to enjoy it. I like the sunshine, even though my doctor tells me it’s not my friend. Especially with one cancer under my belt, er, literally. Going to go back to the paid typing now that I’ve vented a bit. That was always what this place was about, wasn’t it? A place to blow off some steam? Maybe I should make some tea.  Reading through this again, better make it decaf.