Yesterday I hit "send" on my take home exam answer about an hour after finishing my last in-class exam, which ended with a flash of drama when Exam4 crashed on my computer as I was submitting an answer that took over three hours to write. All's well that ends well, I guess. So a day of rest and recreation today. Peg's taking me to Coney Island to partake of a Nathan's hot dog or three. She's obviously trying to be a good wife. Slane looks as worn out with the last couple week

"Their god is their belly" -Philippians 3:19 Behold the visage of a very bad cat. His yowling usually starts at 4:30, but last night he was feeling like an overacheiver and started at 3. Peg chased him into the extra bedroom and shut the door, and I could hear him in there continuing to serenade the building. A little before six I woke up and let him out of cat jail. He had pooped on the floor. He had pooped on the bed. He vomited in front of his litter box. Apparently he's n

There's a new world coming And it's just around the bend There's a new world coming This one's coming to an end -Cass Elliot Fifty-five, gray and damp out there. Twelve more wakeups and it'll all be over. Makes me a little sad. It can't happen soon enough for Slane, however. He screams and howls every morning at exactly 4:30, I chase him into the guest room and close the door, and when I let him out as I'm making coffee a couple hours later he starts it again. I just ran him

"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means." -George Bernard Shaw Another short post. I was out of bed at 6:30, after I awakened outlining my answer to the take-home final for Tax Planning for Real Estate Transactions in my head in the early morning stillness. I got it all sketched out in my horrible handwriting on a legal pad before I forgot what I was thinking, and will write out my actual answer tomorrow morni

Man in Black: “You’re that smart?” Vizzini: “Let me put it this way. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle, Socrates?” Man in Black: “Yes.” Vizzini: “Morons.” -The Princess Bride Again, the need for brevity. I'm falling behind in my final exams regimen, and have paying work I must attend to before diving back into my studies. Sleeping until 7:30 is not helping at all, but when Peg's not working we don't set an alarm. She's been getting up at 5:30 or so for most of her life.

"Time it was, and what a time it was, it was A time of innocence, A time of confidences Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph Preserve your memories; They're all that's left you" -Paul Simon Two finals down, two to go. And these first couple were likely the most difficult of the lot. The next final is in six days, and the other is a take-home that needs to be turned in by a week from today. I'll try to finish a working draft by the weekend, so it's just a matter of clean

"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein Well, International Tax I is in the rear view. A very, very challenging exam. We'll see how it went. Partnership Tax is in about six hours. I'll walk in with 152 pages of outline, and charts mapping out how to perform any of the myriad calculations likely to appear on the test. I've got maybe twenty hours of study time on the books for this one exam, and still feel grossly underprepared. Meanwhile,

First exam in about fifteen minutes. Exam prep was complicated a bit on Saturday by a neighbor disabling their smoke alarm and trying to set the apartment on fire while doing something inappropriate with their stove, but we recovered and I'm about as ready as I'm going to be. Peg's birthday is today. We'll carve out some time to mark the occasion. The hardest of the finals in tomorrow. Now, as my late, great squadron commander Karbo Kline used to say as we'd leave the life su

"Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date." - William Shakespeare May arrives cloudless and cool in Manhattan this morning. Ah, the first of May. Peg's favorite time of year, mine being the fall with all its orange and brown and gray mist. This isn't bad, however. In one season of my life I loved May because it was the very best sailing month in Florida, with steady shore breezes shifting into Gulf breezes in the afternoon, an

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” -Antonio Gramsci So, I guess today's bombshell was the Supreme Court's expected gutting of the Voting Rights Act yesterday. The central holding, as I understand it, was that the Act wasn't necessary because we've achieved racial harmony in the U.S., while reiterating that partisan gerrymandering is more or less immune from judicial scrutiny. As one might expect, the political leader

"The megalomaniac differs from the narcissist by the fact that he wishes to be powerful rather than charming, and seeks to be feared rather than loved. To this type belong many lunatics and most of the great men of history." -Bertrand Russell The news this morning is so, so bad. I'm thankful that this study crunch has limited my time to bask in it. The Atlantic reports that DJT now sees himself as the next Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, or Napoleon, unfettered in his pow

"AI will probably most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies." -Sam Altman Pondering on how AI may destroy civilization as we know it. But first, a word about fried chicken. Yesterday after class P and I took the D train express all the way up to 145th Street, for the lunchtime treat of Charles Pan Fried Chicken at its flagship location in the heart of Harlem. The guy who owns the place is a James Beard nominated chef, and the c

"They finally got you, Hart, they sucked all that Midwestern charm right out of you. Look, he's got you scared to death. You're going to pass, because you're the kind the law school wants. You'll get your little diploma. Your piece of paper that's no different than this [toilet paper roll] and you can stick it in your silver box with all the other paper in your life. Your birth certificate, driver's license, marriage license, your stock certificates, and your will." -The Pape

. . . makes for a really boring blog. I haven't left this building for two days, working and studying. Mostly working. Not great with finals right around the corner. And no adventures to populate this space. But I do get to head up to the roof most evenings to sit with P, admire the skyline, and savor these last few weeks in the city. Two phone conferences and a deposition today, and hoping to squeeze in another video classroom session in International Tax so I can focus on r

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." -Alexander H. Stephens Lately my Facebook feed has included lots of links to pag

"A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people." -John Cleese This morning, amidst the usual cascade of bad news, brought a headline that left me laughing out loud. The Onion has purchased a license to use InfoWars, and turned it into satirical farce. For those unfamiliar with InfoWars, the site has been a steady source of right-wing sludge for many years. Its principal, Alex Jones, has trafficked in conspiracy theories a

A lovely morning out there, clear and forty degrees. But my mood doesn't match, not at all. Reading the Times this morning, I came across an essay by a young mother who lost her daughter to measles. The child contracted the disease at five months old, too young for vaccination, from a neighbor kid who almost certainly was not. She survived, only to die over a dozen years later of a fatal brain swelling that is a known complication of measles. It was an excruciating read. Then

And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it′s sinking Racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way, but you're older Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way The time is gone, the song is over, thought I′d something more to say Home, home again I l

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm After they've seen Paree' How ya gonna keep 'em away from Broadway Jazzin around and paintin' the town -Joe Young and Sam F. Fields Starting to feel a little melancholy after we wrapped up my last class in Tax Planning for Real Estate Transactions. A couple of us exchanged contact information. Thirty-four days and we'll be loading up the Caddy and driving through the Holland Tunnel. Walking anywhere in Manhattan involves an elaborate gam

"The Triune God is the Revealer, the event of Revelation, and the effect of Revelation." — Karl Barth I am, again, hopelessly behind on schoolwork and work work this morning, so brevity is mandatory. Rather than babbling, I'll post a link below to a fairly extraordinary dialogue in the New York Times between Peter Wehner and David Bentley Hart, a theologian and philosopher who's spent a half century wrestling with the meaning of Christianity and the contradictions inherent i