The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Well, actually, on balance it was pretty good, but read on to see why this might seem surprising. And technically it was more than a weekend I was away. It was almost a week, which for me, Ms. "Three Days in Cambodia," is practically a lifetime. And that's pretty much what it felt like too.

After being sworn into New York I hightailed it off to Boston to visit my mom. And my friend, who lives in the area. The Boston part of the trip was probably the longest part, lasting from mid-Wednesday to mid-Friday. While there I rummaged through my room for things I regretted not having earlier stuffed the car with when I moved to California, and my mom taught me how to make one of my favorite kinds of cookies. Then it was off to Foxwoods, a casino in Connecticut, for the Huey Lewis and the News Concert of Doom.

Yes, because this was the night that the bar results were to come out, and right when the band was to take the stage. This situation led to some confused emotions, since normally I look forward to my HLN concerts but for this one I was in no rush for it to happen at all... In many ways it was sort of an atypical concert for me, in part because of that, and in part because normally I go to my HLN concerts alone. It's rare that I can coerce other people to join me, and even if they are interested it's often logistically difficult to arrange. But in this case, because I'd known about my trip back east for so long, and because there were so many friends in the area who I now so rarely get to see, using the concerts as an opportunity to spend time with each other suddenly made a lot of sense.

Of course, on this occasion, even though my friends joined me at Foxwoods, they didn't actually attend the concert. For that I was on my own. But not really. At this point I'm acquainted with most of the people in the entourage, so as I was getting increasingly agitated in anticipation of the results, I talked to some of them about it and got to vent some of my stress a little. Soon enough though 9:05pm came around. The band had still not taken the stage, which is normal because casinos often hold them up while they stuff more people into the theater. So while I was waiting I pulled out my Treo, called up the bar website, entered my applicant and file numbers... and discovered I hadn't passed.

Oh. Ugh. There was a part of me that wasn't entirely surprised by this - I've always suspected that I didn't quite nail the test - but at the same time, I also thought that passing was a plausible outcome. As well as a highly desirable one. In fact, this sucked, and I was soon starting to process all the ways that it sucked. The first one that came to mind was that it was embarrassing. All these people who believed in me, waiting with bated breath for my result... I had to face them, and I had to face them now. So I called my mom, I called my dad, I called my friend there in Foxwoods waiting for me, I called another friend, and I called my sister, although before I could leave her a message the concert broke out...

Which brought to bore another reason why this turn of events sucked: it was ruining my HLN concert, and I feared would ruin the rest of the weekend. As the music started my brain was in overdrive, trying to figure out how to cope with this unpleasant reality. It took my attention away from the show and prevented me from really enjoying it (which was too bad, because it was a nice performance and included some songs I don't often hear them play), but at the same time, I came to be really glad I was there. I had an hour and a half to myself to work through it, with no one I had to talk to, and I was in one of my most favorite environments. Spending that moment at the concert, a moment which I was fated to spend somewhere, one way or another, was like falling into a gentle nest of soft pillows. It was safe and comforting, and that was exactly what I needed right then. I also remember keying in to some of Huey's lyrics in particular, "I'll carry on, as best as I can, I'll find the strength to face another day," which struck me as a nice sentiment to tap into.

(Of course, the rest of the song, being a lament about being cheated on by his mistress, was inapplicable.)

After the show I informed the roadies I'd already talked to that I hadn't passed. They couldn't believe it. After all, they know me as a smart, educated person - surely there was no question I could pass this test. So I got to work on spinning it. "California's a tough nut to crack. It's the hardest bar in the country, with really picky standards." They still held out hope that it was a clerical error, but at this point I didn't. Although I was still largely in an information vacuum, I knew I had to presume that this was the situation, and the sooner I came to terms with it the better. I did worry, because the prospect bothered me, that failing the bar could make me lose people's respect. Surely if I was smart I would have passed, so that does it say about me that I didn't? But the damage control I did to salvage their opinions turned out to be a useful exercise to save my own. The last thing I needed was to beat myself up over it. People who know me know that I can be my own harshest critic, and I could see myself at a crossroads: I could either sulk myself into a morose tailspin that would destroy my entire weekend (at minimum), or I could deal with it. So I dealt with it.

Still, it was enough trauma that after the concert I was ready to call it a day. I met up my friends (who it turned out were still my friends even though I hadn't passed...) and we retired to the hotel. Which was good, because I had an early day the next day. My east coast trips tend to be whirlwinds of traveling and visiting, as I try to see everyone I can. They tend to be exhausting... but they also tend to be rewarding because I do get to see so many people I care about. After Foxwoods I was off to Atlantic City for two more HLN concerts, via a stop to visit my grandma. I didn't have long to spend though, because I had to get to Atlantic City to meet up with friends coming up from Washington, friends I hadn't seen all together since law school (almost a year ago!), and I couldn't wait to see them now.

I had booked a room at the Boardwalk Howard Johnson's, which I knew was crummy but was nearby the Atlantic City Hilton, which is even crummier. In fact, it's so crummy that the band has since declared it will never play there again. But for the moment two shows were scheduled there, and my friends were going to join me for the first. I'd already brought two of them to HLN shows before (I recall one of them remembering, "I hadn't known you five minutes before you'd invited me to a Huey Lewis and the News concert," which he indeed went to) but two of them had never been. And even though the Hilton completely screwed us on our seats, everyone enjoyed the show. I was so glad. And so glad just to spend time with them. One of the benefits of growing older is that you can discover and enjoy what an amazing thing it is to have old friends, the people who know you so well that you never have to explain yourself. It's so comfortable to be with them, it feels like family (except less dysfunctional, perhaps...). Especially this weekend, I couldn't think of anyone I'd rather have spent it with.

They had to leave the next day, so I went to the last concert myself. No thanks to the Hilton, with whom I've spent hours and hours arguing, I did manage to end up with a great spot by the stage and thoroughly enjoyed the last show. And afterwards I got to talk to more of the entourage and get a lot more friendly support to finish scraping what was left of me still on the ceiling. I don't often like to publicly talk about my relationships with any of these people, because it feels contrived and affected, as if the purpose of knowing and talking to them is solely to be able to cite the conversation as some sort of trophy. But at the same time, as could probably be inferred from regular reading of this blog, we're not strangers to each other either, and I've come to know them as lovely people. Very nice, as they are often reputed to be, and also extremely intellectual, much more than people might expect. Which is not to say that people generally believe them to be Neanderthals, but given that the entrance requirements for intelligence in their professional field are not known to necessarily be all that high, it might come as a surprise to some to discover just how erudite they are. As a result their respect and validation has meant a lot to me, and especially did on a weekend such as this.

The next day I visited my cousins, and from there it was time to come home, home to California. I was ready. Surprisingly ready, surprisingly healed, and surprisingly ready to move on.

Well, I was right: I did very nearly pass the bar exam. I needed a 1440 (out of 2000) to pass; I had a 1400. I don't even have the inclination to beat myself up for it, it's all too aggravating and mystifying. Like why is it that I did 15 points worse on the MBE this time around? Particularly given that it was my second experience with it, I didn't feel as shellshocked by it this time around, and I'd actually studied more for it this time than last. It makes no sense, and thus concerns me for going forward. After all, if studying more seemed to undo me, exactly how do I fix that?

Because I'm going to do it again, and I'm obviously going to have to study for it. I can barely remember this crap at the moment, so I'll have to stuff my head with it all over again. Which is a disgusting prospect. I want to stuff my head with actual, practical law, not this garbage. I feel like I'm being asked to do the mental equivalent of being forced to eat nothing but McDonald's for the next two months. Yeah, it won't actually kill me, but I'd be much better off if I instead consumed something more nourishing.

So I will do a bunch of practice MBE questions, even though I fear the entire MBE may be a moving target (I felt like the summer and winter administrations were quite different, and I'm not sure the BarBri and PMBR materials I have to work from necessarily correlate to the MBE's current form). I also will do more practice essays this time around and see if I can up those scores. They were nearly high enough, but not quite given the MBE score I got this time around. I'll be interested to see my answers again, assuming I get them back. (I'm having trouble parsing the letter from the bar on this topic, where the first sentence indicates that you won't get them back and the second sentence indicates that you will.) I know I punted some issues on the First Amendment question and confused some defenses for the criminal law question, but I thought I wrote a model essay for wills, although judging from my score apparently the bar examiners didn't agree...

Back in February as the test neared I'd wished I had had one more week to study, and on retrospect I also wish that I'd done more practice essays, but otherwise it's hard to know how to improve now since I didn't feel, and the results also don't bear out, that I'd completely screwed something up. Perhaps I'd just been too cocky, having passed NY and NJ, and didn't quite apply myself with a sufficient sense of panic. I think I might be able to achieve that this time though, as I really don't want the California bar exam to be the white whale that haunts me for the rest of my life.

So the efforts are underway. I booked my hotel the night I found out about the results, and this week I'll register for the test. Also this week I'll begin studying in earnest. I've tracked down some materials for the new subjects that they'll test on, and next I'll work out a study schedule. I'm going to still work while I do this, which is a tough call, but I can't afford, mentally and financially, not to. Simply having income reduces lots of stress, so in that way it will actually help my studying, and my work is becoming increasingly interesting and I would feel extremely disappointed if I didn't get to do it. Instead I'll cut back my hours and cut back my projects. For the most part, for the next few weeks I'll just be reviewing 30,000 pages of documents, which should be perfect...

Edit: Geez... According to The Recorder (May30, 2007), only 36.8 percent of the people who took the exam passed. I'm sure I'm in some distinguished company, with some future law school deans or attorney generals... But what's really weird, last July 51.8 percent passed. What is going on?

I've come to a couple of realizations over the past week or so, as I've been dealing with the bar result, et al. The biggest one is that I surrender too much esteem much too easily, much too often. For example, I keep waiting to be anointed a lawyer by the jurisdiction where I'm living and working. And obviously that's going to take a while. But as everyone and their brother has been reminding me, and as I have the copies of my certificates of good standing in my pocket attesting to, I am a lawyer. Already. And it's time to comport myself as one, even here.

This means that I am going to detach my bar exam efforts from my career development efforts. Well, to a small extent they'll remain connected, just because the studying will need to take a certain priority for the next few weeks. But I'd kept trying to get all the ducks in a row, to get the license and then look for a job. And I'm not going to worry about doing that anymore. I'm licensed in two jurisdictions, including the second hardest in the country, and that should be able to speak for me. Other people move to California and get jobs on the strength of their past licenses and then take the bar, and so should I be able to as well.

Relatedly, I've been needlessly dismissive of my career thus far, and it's time to stop trying to excuse it and instead start promoting what I've done. Simply because there wasn't a ton of fanfare in being hired for the job I've been doing and the fact that I don't formally have the title of "associate" does not dismiss that it is, in fact, a substantive legal job, where I'm doing associate-type work. I've been there since November, which so far gives me at least 6+ months of experience in what I'd describe as litigation boot camp.

It's a small firm, and as a result there are not levels of staffing strata to dole things out to - the lawyers themselves do nearly everything. Which makes it a great learning experience as I can see how entire cases work, and even though litigation tends to take eons to progress, I've been there long enough to start to see entire stages of their lifecycle. It also means that the work I do can actually make a difference, and I get to be right up close to the cases. My understanding is that in some larger firm environments, an associate might be given a specific task, with no idea of the context for it. Whereas I get to read the case files and know, even when I'm doing enormous document reviews, what I'm looking for and why. And (even though I like document review - ssh! don't tell!) I get to do other things, like work on discovery and even some drafting.

It's sometimes rough. It's all new to me, particularly since I'd had very little firm experience before this. (While having had a previous career as a webmaster might in the long run be a good thing, in the short run it would have been more helpful to me right now if I'd actually been a paralegal instead...) Every day feels like I'm climbing an enormous learning curve. But, from what I'm starting to gather, every first year associate feels that way. And I'm starting to have more and more good days where I do feel like I know what's going on... Also the lawyers I've been working with have been extremely generous about teaching me things. The associate I work most closely with goes out of her way to show me things connected to the practice, even when they don't necessarily bear on a task I need to complete. (She also hounds me to read Rutter guides as well...) The principal of the firm more often tasks me for legal research, and then discusses the legal merits of cases with me, clearly valuing my opinion.

It's been a nice situation, and as I reflect on it I feel really lucky. There is the question though of "what next?" since I don't think I can stay as a post-JD law clerk forever... Discussions have been floated about staying there more permanently, and I need to think about, if it were possible, if I'd want that. From a practice standpoint it's a great environment for learning a ton, and in some important ways staying here would be a good career and lifestyle choice. But I have to decide whether it would be the right one for me. For instance, while there are the occasional tech law/IP things that come up, the practice is mostly built around debt collection (which I don't particularly enjoy, except that it's interesting to see how remedies play out), and real estate/construction defect cases. Those are actually surprisingly interesting and good vehicles for learning about litigation practice. Plus they are fairly tangible cases, with tangible injuries that are easier to assess and value than more ephemeral rights might be. But, while one of my goals is to build up a body of litigation skills, I also wish to build up a body of expertise in technology law, and that may be hard to do here.

Either way, I need to focus more on what I want from my career, and then go for it. I'll probably shuffle along with the status quo up through the bar, but then it'll be time to start making some plans and executing on them, whatever and wherever I decide them to be.

I didn't manage to catch the 7:30am bus this morning, so instead I caught the 8am one. That bus always raises a dilemma for me, because I can either get off it downtown and take the ferry the rest of the way, or I can stay on and keep going into the city. Today my decision ended up being made for me because it turned out the street was closed off up ahead after the ferry stop, thus leaving me no choice but get off and take the ferry. That was unusual though. And unfortunate, because it turns out that all those fire engines and ambulances I saw from the boat on the cordoned-off street were unable to save the pedestrian that had been run over and killed by a garbage truck barely 15 minutes before I got there.

Eventually I got to downtown San Francisco and for lunch walked a block away to a Subway. I'd just filled up my soda cup and was about to walk back with my sandwich when suddenly a half a dozen police cars screeched up to the curb, and all the cops raced out with their guns drawn. Um, ok... Turns out a block away they'd cornered a car being driven by a suspect who'd just shot a different pedestrian and was now fleeing on foot.

I'm hoping tomorrow is a less newsworthy day.

I wasted half my morning yesterday trying to watch the Paris Hilton hearing. I thought it was going to be at nine, but I gather it didn't happen until midday. And it turned out that, as far as I can tell, it wasn't televised anyway, which I think is unfortunate. Because while cameras in the courtroom are thought to inflate celebrity hysteria, it is because there already was celebrity hysteria that we needed that direct record of the proceedings to diffuse it.

Don't get me wrong, I rarely spend my time following these cases of "celebrity justice." I do not watch Access Hollywood, Entertainment Tonight, or any of their tabloid ilk. I don't read Us or People, and I don't even click on the celebrity-related headlines on CNN.com, largely because I don't want to encourage the people who analyze their hit stats to think that people would rather read about, say, Rosie O'Donnell and Donald Trump than, say, the Iraq war.

But the Paris Hilton case is different. The Paris Hilton case was actually important. Although I think it was slightly less important in the ways more people are squawking about, which is about whether there's a difference in how celebrities are treated versus how regular people are treated by our system of justice. Which is not to say that there's nothing to say on this subject. There clearly is, but I do fear that by focusing so much on Paris Hilton's stake in the matter we are ignoring the more serious issues raised by everyone else's stake in the matter.

In any event, her case was only of passing interest to me until she was released to home detention. Because that is what raised some really interesting, and important, systemic legal questions: what power in California has the authority to regulate an inmate's sentence, and to what extent can they?

As I was able to understand it from a printed story later, at Hilton's sentencing hearing the prospect of her serving her time at home had been raised, but the judge specifically foreclosed that option. Then she was handed over to the custody of the Sheriff, who was in charge of her serving her sentence. That Sheriff decided, for reasons only intimated but not yet disclosed to the public record, to let her serve the sentence at home. Now, it seems from reports that normally the Sheriff has that kind of discretion, but in this case the court had specifically stripped it of it.

So the hearing yesterday was all about the tension between the court's authority and the Sheriff's authority. It was hardly about Paris Hilton at all. Yet no news outlet televising the hoopla seemed to have any sense of that. Instead the reports were all about what Paris was wearing, who was with her, the scene outside her house that morning, how the paparazzi were being outsmarted as they snuck her into court... I had to mute the television to keep my brain cells from self-immolating. I wanted to know how the situation was resolving, but watching the coverage of it was telling me everything but. And then these were the people I had to trust to relate the proceedings to me afterwards? Given that they were heretofore demonstrating not even the slightest grasp of why any of this was happening, I didn't think I could do that. I didn't want to know that Paris was wearing a fuzzy gray sweatshirt and clutching a tissue; I wanted to know what the judge asked the attorneys. I wanted to know who from the Sheriff's office appeared, and what their legal arguments were. I wanted to know how the judge responded to them. These were the things that were important. And these were the reasons why I wanted to watch all that happen on tv myself, because I didn't want to have to be dependent on a likely very filtered and very missing-the-point assessment to be able to reflect on it.

It may sound esoteric and technical, what I wanted to see. It may seem uninteresting and unimportant, but in reality it is anything but. Because especially if we want to talk about the bigger issues of celebrity justice, or justice in general, we have to understand how it works. If we think that certain people should be treated more or less harshly by the system, we need to identify by whom. Should the judge have acted differently? Should the Sheriff? If we think changes are necessary, we need to be able to identify where they need to be made, and we can't do that if we have no insight into the process to be able to identify where we think it might be breaking down.

That's why I think it should have been televised, and why more such hearings should be as well. Because we need to be able to go straight to the source and not be dependent on secondary reports by those who are going to be more interested in perpetuating the celebrity than discussing the substance of the proceeding that celebrity has provoked.

I wanted to blog for the record what a disgrace the Atlantic City Hilton is. I'm not even sure blogging is sufficient, and I urge the authorities in New Jersey to further investigate the Hilton's ticket policies, which violate the spirit, if not also the letter, of state consumer protection laws.

As I earlier wrote, I attended two Huey Lewis and the News concerts at the Hilton last month. I've seen the band there before, and on those earlier occasions the Hilton had proven nearly impossible to deal with. But on this occasion it topped itself.

At best it demonstrated abject incompetence. For instance, shortly after the band confirmed publicly that these shows over the Saturday and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend would take place, I and other fans called the Hilton to inquire when tickets would go on sale.

"They're not playing here," we were told. Of course, the Hilton had done this on previous occasions, wrongly denying that the band would be playing there on its legitimately scheduled dates. So I wasn't inclined to take this denial too seriously. After fruitlessly debating with them that the band would, in fact, be playing there, I changed tactics. "Fine," I said, "Hypothetically speaking, if the band were playing Memorial Day weekend, when would tickets go on sale?" Six weeks before the show was the response, which would put the on-sale date at mid-April. We had this conversation in early March.

Less than two weeks later, the tickets went on sale.

But that was fine. Annoying, but fine. It's the Hilton's behavior subsequently that pushes the boundaries of the law.

The Hilton's theater is one large, rectangular room. Impermanent seats are arranged with three center sections in front of the stage, angled sections on each side, and a dividing corridor separating all that from further blocks of seats to the rear. In the past the Hilton has sold reserved seats within that configuration. There was, of course, the one occasion where after having started to sell reserved seats it then tried to retroactively declare that the seats would be general admission, but I believe the band may have interceded and the reserved seats were in fact honored. (However, I'm sure there were people adversely affected by the switch, as at least some had now purchased the wrong tickets while the Hilton kept changing its mind.)

This time they sold all the tickets as general admission seats from the outset. There were no reserved seats. There also were no "tiers" of seats, with different prices for different sections. Instead it appeared - noting in particular the seating chart on the Ticketmaster website - that the whole auditorium was up for grabs, and at $55 per seat. I bought a few for the Saturday show, but held off a bit before getting the Sunday ones. It's a fairly large room so I wasn't worried it would sell out too quickly. And it didn't. As of late April it still had tickets. And I went to buy one. But now, instead of $55, they cost $75, for the exact same ticket. No new seating tiers, no better location - the exact same thing.

Moreover, even though they were now selling the tickets for $75, they were still advertising them for $55 on both the Ticketmaster and the Hilton websites (screenshot of Hilton website from 4/20/07; screenshot of the Ticketmaster page listing tickets at $55 yet selling them for $75). Ticketmaster, after several wasted hours of telephoning, adamantly refused to honor the lower, advertised price. In the end, the Hilton actually did - for me and only for me, and only because I called my way up the phone tree to the director of customer service and phrased it as a customer service issue. But it still took hours and hours on the phone with them to get them to make good on the price, and the director of customer service still refused to fix it for all the other customers who were similarly situated as victims of the Hilton's bait and switch.

And the Hilton wasn't done with us yet. The venue was general admission. General admission shows can be a double-edged sword for a fan. Whereas with a reserved seat you know exactly where you'll be, and you only need to show up in time for the curtain, on the other hand your seat is not likely to be all that great. However, with general admission you can often get the best seat in the house - but you have to work for it, by getting to the venue in time to be on the front of the line.

That's the way it's usually done, and explicit conversations with the Hilton about "how do I get up front" resulted in the expected standard instruction that I should be first on line. So I was, both nights, having gotten there more than three hours before showtime each night. And yet, even though I was the first person through the doors, the Hilton refused to seat me any closer than the back half of the theater the first night, and only put me in the front spot of a side section the second night because I wouldn't stop arguing with them.

Meanwhile, it was one lie after another from the venue's representatives - the ushers and maitre d's. "Those seats," one usher said, pointing to all the ones in the section fronting the stage, "are all reserved seats." Which was a lie, because reserved seats were never sold. "We'll come back and move you if anything's still open," was another recurrent lie. In fact, the only bit of honesty that emerged from any representative's lips came from the one condescending usher who said, "Everything the Hilton tells you is a lie." Then he added, "If you don't like it, you should hire a lawyer and sue."

I'm writing this post because I want to take his advice. Except I don't want to sue. I don't have enough in my own personal damages to justify the effort. But I call upon the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey to make a full investigation. New Jersey has some very tight consumer protection laws with regard to ticket sales, mostly in regard to scalping. But it's not just scalpers who take advantage of consumers; promoters can too, and from time to time the state has investigated behavior by promoters for acting in ways counter to consumer's interests, particularly in situations when consumers didn't stand a chance to get a decent seat due to unadvertised holdbacks. Which was the case here.

In this case:

• The Hilton held back three large blocks of its best seats for "high rollers" of indeterminate and unadvertised origin.
• It did so with no indication to the consumer that the ticket they purchased would be limited to certain areas of the theater.
• In fact, the Hilton explicitly represented that the tickets would be valid for anywhere in the theater, as long as you got there early enough.
• Furthermore, the Hilton box office agents at no time indicated that additional hidden fees were required to secure better seats (read: tipping the ushers, which apparently was the unspoken quid pro quo even though the Hilton expressly refused, despite direct questioning on the subject, to acknowledge to this "custom" to its customers in advance).

All of these tactics are completely inappropriate under the law. Consumers have the right to receive the benefit of their bargains, but with the Hilton they do not. And it's not just me who has been affected by the Hilton's bad behavior. Hundreds of fans were affected each night, and hundreds more are affected every night that the Hilton holds another performance with similar ticketing policies, which I suspect is quite often, often enough to make the number of affected consumers reach well into the thousands. Most of these people probably don't have the educational background or inclination to effectively stand up to the Hilton. And why should they have to? A concert is entertainment, a respite. It shouldn't have to be work to ensure that you aren't being taken advantage of. That's what we have laws, to ensure that won't happen. As it was, even for me, it still took hours and hours to not be completely abused by the Hilton, yet at the end I was still unable to make them act consistently with their advertising.

Furthermore, the Hilton, as an Atlantic City casino, is greatly dependent on the goodwill of the people of New Jersey, who let it do what it does. It's a highly regulated business, and the regulators need to know when it is acting contrary to the public's interest. So when, for instance, the Hilton asks the state for a favor (e.g., permission to expand its facilities) the state is in a better position to decide whether it's in the public's interest to accommodate it. At this point the answer clearly is no.

Because not only is all of the above true of the Hilton, but another fact to note is that at no time was sales tax collected on any of these tickets (neither the ones purchased through Ticketmaster nor the ones purchased at the on-site box office), nor was there any mention that the tax was included in the total price. So unless the Hilton is on its own defying standard convention and quietly treating the 13% sales tax plus Atlantic City luxury tax it's supposed to charge on each ticket as something akin to a value-added tax built into the cost of the ticket that they dutifully pass along to the state as required (which seems unlikely given the Hilton's predilection to make a buck wherever it can, since it could easily pass along this charge to its customers as long as it disclosed it) then the Hilton is also a tax cheat and should be prosecuted as such.

I don't think this post will make the NWZCHIK blog on the San Francisco Chronicle like this other one did... (No idea how that happened, but it was pretty cool to have been linked so prominently.) Nevertheless I wanted to mention two items of news of potential interest to locals reading here:

One, that there's an opening on the houseboat. Wanna be a roommate? If so, drop me a line. (Smokers and people with loud alarm clocks need not apply.)

Also, in other "news"... there will be a FREE HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS CONCERT NEXT SUNDAY IN SAN FRANCISCO!!! How could anyone pass that up? Yes, for the low, low price of ZERO dollars, you too can enjoy the fabulous awesomeness of the best band ever. Or at least get to see why I'm so keen to keep seeing all their concerts, because hyperbole aside, they really are a great live band, and this is a pretty painless way to see what I mean.

But wait! That's not all! If you act now, you also get a FREE PAUL THORN CONCERT!!! He and his band will be opening the show, also for FREE!!! Come see why everywhere Paul goes he collects new die-hard fans like a black sweater collects lint.

Act now, supplies are limited to this coming Sunday at Stern Grove. Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back!*

* (Figuratively. You're on your own for transport and other incidental costs.)</lawyer>

In visting the website for the organization that does the New Jersey CLE courses I have to take, I saw that they had also been offering a seminar entitled, "THE ANTI-SOCIAL SIDE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING."

Naturally, it was canceled.

Edit: Also predictable? Today's shooting on Friendship Court.

An article in the New York Times describes the current controversy in Ridgewood, NJ, over the abrupt refusal of the newly-hired schools superintendent to begin the job for which he was hired. There is a story here about whether he was right or wrong to do that. There is also a story here about whether town citizens opposed to him acted untowardly in expressing it.

But the story underlying both of those is about math. It seems that in 2000 Ridgewood changed its math curriculum from what it had been to something called TERC math (see another article in the Bergen Record). It isn't entirely clear from other articles exactly what it is, nor is it clear from the Ridgewood Public Schools website, but the limited descriptions seems to suggest that it allows more of a free-form problem solving, letting students use props and calculators to solve problems. Obviously the devil is in the details, because from that limited description it's not entirely clear where the problem might be, but many parents are alleging that the curriculum is so free form as to be at the expense of basic mathematical tools that students needs to function.

As a product of the Ridgewood Public School System, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, with nearly every mathematical thing I know having been supplied by Ridgewood schools, my question is, why did they change the curriculum at all? Ridgewood, as the articles mention, has historically been an excellent school system, an example of what public education could and should be. With the exception of just a few sour notes (in particular those from sixth grade and high school) my experience as a 13-year Ridgewood student generally confirms the platitudes. I graduated from the system well-prepared for college, and for adult life beyond. Even in math.

Basic addition and subtraction was covered in first and second grade. I learned multiplication in third grade and was doing long division in fourth. I don't exactly remember the curriculum from fifth and sixth grades, but during the overall course of elementary school there was an introduction to word problems, problem solving, fractions, ratios, estimation, basic geometry, and measurements (including metrics). Starting in middle school (which for me began in seventh grade but for subsequent students began in sixth due to a realignment of the schools) I did a year each of pre-algebra, then algebra, then geometry, advanced algebra, math analysis, and finally calculus. With the exception of sixth grade, and eleventh grade's math analysis, the instruction was excellent and I learned what I needed to get the top score on the Calculus AP test and perform well on the standardized Performance Tests. I would hate to think that any subsequent students received any less.

However, I can only speak to my experience. Throughout elementary school I had the benefit of special enrichment programs beyond the regular curriculum. Also, in third, fifth, and sixth grades the classes did seem to be divided by skill level, and following sixth grade we were tracked into different programs for middle and high school. (Because my sixth grade teacher was so horrible I only was tracked ahead one year, while others were tracked ahead two years, and skipped pre-algebra in favor of two years of calculus later in high school). I do not know what other students learned in their tracks, or how they learned it. But given that Ridgewood students typically test well across the board, and given that most of them eventually were college-bound (I think Ridgewood tends to send 90%+ of its students onto college of some sort), I suspect the instruction was generally sufficient. Ridgewood, as I remember, did offer remedial instruction along with enrichment instruction so I presume that anyone with particular difficulty in math would have gotten support. Otherwise I'm still left with the question, what was so broken about the way math was generally taught that TERC was seen as a necessary improvement?

Everyone learns in different ways, and it's also true that engaging instruction is more effective than instruction that's boring. Furthermore, it has also been true for Ridgewood Schools that creativity has been highly prized and rewarded. In fact, I think that fact has been the Ridgewood school system's greatest strength and the part of my childhood education that has best served me throughout my life. But creativity is best encouraged in areas requiring critical thinking. In art and writing, certainly. Even to some extent in science and social studies where learning exercises permitting creativity can encourage deeper understanding. And even in math, to the extent that creativity can be applied to problem solving.

But creativity won't change the result of two plus two. It won't change a ratio. It won't change a basic measurement. It won't change math's basic mechanics, mechanics that must be fully mastered before anything else can be discovered. So creativity is all well and good, but creativity involves being able to creatively apply the tools you have to get to the result you need. According to these articles, however, the tools students have are calculators, which are hardly sufficient. Despite the increasing ubiquity of electronic gadgets, they can't supplant the basic human ability to calculate figures, particularly in the many situations when calculators are unavailable. Furthermore, there's something about manually manipulating numbers that can itself give insight into how they work. If kids don't get this basic foundation when they're young, it's hard to see how they will be sufficiently prepared for the more advanced mathematical concepts they will face when they're older, no matter how good the rest of the school system may be.

Of course, who knows, maybe TERC would have made me a better math student. Apart from a statistics course in college, I've never had to take another math class after twelfth grade calculus, and that whole side of my intellect has been largely neglected. Maybe a different curriculum would have motivated me to be more mathematically inclined beyond graduation. Then again, simply having a better teacher in sixth grade would itself have done wonders for my interest, confidence, and mathematical learning opportunities - no additional program needed. Ultimately for all students it's the quality of the teaching, more than any curriculum, that dictates how much they will learn. And maybe, as the article suggests, good teachers are keen to use TERC because they see students engaging more closely with the subject. Still, I find myself wary of the program, partly from an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" standpoint, and partly from the fear that just because kids will always gravitate towards things that seem fun and easier doesn't necessarily mean that these fun and easier things will be teaching them what they need.

Speaking of creativity in math...

This poem has been on my regular website for quite some time, but my friend and co-author Amanda and I have just decided to release it under a Creative Commons license so that any educators can feel free to use it with their classes. (Google searches suggest some already have.)

The poem came about because at the end of our Calculus AB class, our teacher asked all of us to write a letter to next year's incoming class about what they could expect from it. This was one of the occasions where creativity and math nicely intersected, and instead of an ordinary letter Amanda and I wrote the poem.

Our teacher really liked it, and had us make a tape of us reading it. From what I understand, the poem then entered Ridgewood High School Calculus Class lore, having been used for many years subsequently (along with the great folk song some students wrote in the 70s reminding us that it's "low-de-hi, minus hi-de-low" when dividing derivatives. In fact, I remember visiting my teacher several years after graduation and her introducing me to some students as one of the authors of the poem. They were clearly impressed.

Anyway, in the spirit of law professor David Kopel's semi-recent post on the Volokh Conspiracy about calculus jokes, the new license, and the earlier post about math in Ridgewood, I thought I'd point out my contribution to it here.

As long as I'm going down memory lane thinking about my public school education, I might as well talk about this.

Ridgewood really did have a very good school system, but it obviously wasn't perfect. As a kid I always thought, for instance, that it was a little full of itself. And even now I'm not entirely sure I was mistaken in that impression. Because Ridgewood tries so hard to be the perfect education system, it can sometimes be a little... much. As I've gotten older, however, I've realized that some its initiatives really did have sound pedagogical value, and even as a kid they never posed any problem for me. I was always an excellent Ridgewood student, the kind of student the many Education Ph.D's in the administration were really trying quite hard to educate as thoroughly and appropriately as possible. I was always commended and valued for my intellectual abilities as well, and while I was often glib about them, as an adult I can see that it was a real gift to have had these abilities as nourished and validated as they were.

Except in sixth grade, when they weren't in the slightest. In fact, they were nearly destroyed.

To be fair, sixth grade was always doomed to be a disappointment. At the time I started kindergarten, Ridgewood had seven K-6 elementary schools feeding into two 7-9 junior high schools, which fed into one 10-12 high school. Due to population shifts, however, they realigned the schools shortly before I reached junior high, so that by the time I got there in seventh grade it was now a 6-8 middle school instead. In many ways I think this shift was a good thing, as sixth grade in an elementary school is an overly coddled experience. Whereas by seventh grade I was given a schedule and a locker and left on my own to get where I needed to be, in sixth grade we were still lining up and traveling as a class to gym/music/art/lunch/etc. together, just as we had been since kindergarten. On the flip side, however, sixth graders got to enjoy particular privileges and activities as being the oldest in the school. And every year as I grew through the school, I eagerly looked forward to when I would reach the hallowed heights of the sixth grade and be able to enjoy them too. Unfortunately, because it turned out the fifth grade would also be graduating with us to go on to the new middle school, we had to share all these things with them, and thus none of the fun or esteem I'd long expected from the sixth grade ever really came to came to pass. It was a huge disappointment.

But none of that was really anyone's fault. Where people can be held accountable is in the teaching, which was inexcusable. At my school there were three sixth grade teachers, each with about 20 students in their class. We were all assigned to one as our regular teacher, and then we were divided up again into cross sections for our math, English, and social studies classes. My regular teacher, Mrs. S., was the social studies teacher. Mrs. B. was the math teacher, and Mrs. Sp. was the English teacher. I don't have as much to say about the English class, except that I found it very boring and unengaging. Mrs. Sp. was always thought to be strict, but that wasn't really the problem. She did tend to take an inordinate amount of class time to lecture us about eating a nutritious breakfast, but that was ok too. Still, I did massively underperform in that class, which makes me generally question her teaching skills given that I'd always been a decent student before that year, and was again subsequently, but the larger problem was that she served as a ringleader for the other, younger teachers, and nothing good came of that.

Mrs. B. was a problem on her own. Prone to histrionics, I don't even remember in full detail how bad she was, but other people who were there with me remember how she seemed to have it in for me for some reason. For instance - and I'm sure there was more, but I've largely blocked it out - I would hand in my homework, she would lose it on her desk, and then she would yell at me! And then there was her tracking recommendation, a recommendation that affected the course of my math studies for the rest of my life, where for the first time ever, a teacher had held me back from being able to educate myself as fully as possible. To underestimate a kid is unforgivable, and especially for a girl at that age to be told she won't be able to do harder math, even though she'd never had any problems with math before, is reprehensible. I may not have excelled in her class, but she had made it impossible for me to do so. (My mom and I once discussed appealing her tracking decision, but then didn't. I suppose we were cowered into believing she was right. She wasn't, and I resent her having instilled in me such self-doubt.)

Meanwhile Mrs. S. was a new teacher who was learning all her tricks of the trade from these other two, and it wasn't doing her any favors. She could have been nice, but she ended up cruel. There was one day when I'd forgotten my spelling homework. The articulated punishment for cases like that was that we'd have to write out each word 10 times, or something like that. I felt very embarrassed that I'd forgotten my homework and, in sincere penance, took extra, meticulous care in copying out my words, using my best possible handwriting. Then I gave it to her. Now, I don't know, maybe I was hoping that she'd see my gorgeous penmanship and congratulate me on my efforts. And maybe that was an unreasonable expectation. But there was no way I ever could or should have expected her to do what she actually did, which was to rip up the papers right in front of my face.

These were clearly not teachers who liked students. One day during social studies class, Mrs. S. collapsed. She wasn't unconscious or seriously hurt, but she was unwell and dizzy and slowly fell to the floor. Stunned, the class at first sat there quietly. Then, very responsibly, on our own volition, we all sat still while we (the students) sent one of our own next door to get Mrs. B. She came in, the school nurse came in, Mrs. S. left and got help, everything was fine. And we'd handled the situation completely appropriately. That, however, did not stop Mrs. B. from tearing into us about how ungrateful we all were that even though Mrs. S. had been so sick she'd still come to school to teach us. I don't know why, none of us had even said a word.

But as kids, we were clearly delinquents in their eyes. There were two scheduled field trips for the year. On the first one, about six kids misbehaved (out of 60, and not all that terribly). As a result, they cancelled the second field trip. I've still never been to the New York Stock Exchange...

Yet all of the above pales to the worst thing they did, which was to institute a policy called "SQ." "SQ," you see, stands for "stupid question." And I don't know who they thought they were trying to fool, but just because they didn't spell it out fully does not exonerate them for the egregiousness of ever calling any kid's question stupid. Admittedly, I think the policy originated from frustration with that annoying habit kids of that age often have, which is to not listen to directions and then ask all sorts of questions about all the details they missed while they were fooling around. I empathize with that frustration. But the application of "SQ" was not limited to just those situations. A kid could have simply not heard or not understood a detail, and they'd get an SQ rather than an answer. Or the teacher could have misunderstood the kid's question and then dole out a misapplied SQ. Once SQ was in their responsive arsenal, it was used quite liberally.

Just so we're clear, no kid's question is ever stupid. Your job as a teacher is to sate your students' curiosity, not mock it. Even if these teachers had done nothing else questionable that year, for this reason alone they should have been sanctioned, although as far as I know none were. Mrs. B. did leave the district the following year, but I heard she moved to Tennessee. Mrs. S. ended up at one of the middle schools, and I think may have eventually gotten tenure, and Mrs. Sp. ended up at the other middle school. In fact, I think my sister may have eventually had her. But maybe once separated from each other and in the company of saner co-teachers their behavior was ameliorated.

For my part, I couldn't wait to get sixth grade behind me, and in seventh and eighth grade I really flourished. Which is a big deal itself, because middle school is a crucial time, particularly for girls, where kids either sink or learn to swim. I did the latter and never looked back. (Except for times like now, in this essay.) I just am thankful that I was able to get away from them and into an environment where I could thrive. Had I been under their thumb for one more year I am sure I would have been ruined and would never have been able to be where I am today.

A weird thing happened on Friday: I did not attend a Huey Lewis and the News concert I physically could have gotten to, deciding instead that it wasn't worth the time or money it would have required.

What do you think? Is this a sign that Cathy is growing up? Or a sign of the apocalypse?

But lest you think I went completely HLN-less, I did get to see them (and Paul Thorn) on Sunday, which was much more fun than a kick in the head. A full write-up of the day's event is here.

I mention this not because I'm trying to make my blog "all HLN all the time" but because a legal issue was raised at the concert that I want to analyze in a subsequent post.

It was a fun show, though. You should have been there.

Photography bans are showing up more and more these days. Sometimes they show up on public transportation systems, as a bizarre and pointless reaction to terrorism fears. I remember once seeing a conductor on a NJ Transit Main/Bergen line train essentially threaten to throw some hapless tourists off a train unless they put their camera away. I cannot even begin to fathom what anyone thought would be accomplished by preventing people from taking pictures of each other while riding on a train. Nor am I sure what the conductor's authority was on his threat. I once did an extensive search on LexisNexis - even consulting with one of the advisory attorneys to make sure I wasn't missing it - to find the law the conductor was enforcing, but interestingly there was no record of one. From what I gather the ban had apparently been a temporary policy invoked by NJ Transit, most likely adopted with no public input, that fortunately went away shortly thereafter. But I understand that other systems unfortunately may still have their bans on the books.

All of these such laws, be they related to transit systems or other public spaces, invoke significant free speech concerns. It is a distinction without a difference that people can observe something and convey what they saw in words, yet they cannot also observe something and convey it in pictures. Some people best communicate, and some subjects are best communicated, in that particular non-verbal medium, so any rule that prevents people from freely communicating what they will constitutes a tremendous imposition on their freedom of expression.

It's also a generally bad idea because an active citizenry able to observe and relate the world around them provides an important check on abuses that the citizenry might observe, be they from public or private sources. It poses a check on malfeasant behavior if there can be proof of misdeeds that the victims can then use to pursue recourse.

But even more neutrally: simply having people be able to observe, record, and convey what they observe increases everyone's understanding of the world around us and enables us to participate in it more effectively.

Of course, there can be downsides to photography. I'm certainly no fan of the unblinking eye of Big Brother with its cameras everywhere watching everyone. Yes, it might also keep people's behavior in check, but not with an authority that a free democracy should tolerate. Rather, the type of photography I'm advocating is essentially gap-ridden, covering only what a person with their own eye at the time could see. Some technological intermediation could be acceptable, e.g. with reasonable zoom lenses and/or time delays, etc. The point though is to (a) not permit cameras to act autonomously, without the inherent limitations of human controllers, and (b) to ensure that parties other than governmental authorities have the ability to monitor and record as well. After all, someone needs to be able to watch the watchers, and private photography is one way to ensure that happens.

The other downside to public photography is that the people being photographed do have privacy rights that can be invaded by being recorded, regardless of who is doing the recording. They can also have other rights, too, such as rights of publicity. There always will be tension between the rights of the recorder and the rights of the recorded, but I think the best course of action is to allow more latitude to the recorders. After all, any harm that comes from the recording stems from what is done with the recording after it is made, so it would be much better to put limits on that later usage as opposed to limits on the initial creation. For instance, if someone took a picture of me in a crowd, I would have my rights of publicity violated if they used it in an ad without my permission. On the other hand, if it appeared on the front page of a newspaper in a story about the event, that would be permissible. As would someone else's private snapshot capturing me that would simply live in their private family album or perhaps be shared among their limited circle of friends and relatives. Maybe I wouldn't really like it, maybe I was having a bad hair day or something... But no one's hair or personal vanity is more important than the public's need to understand the events around them in the way photography permits.

Which brings me to the issue raised at the Stern Grove Festival, where photography was banned. I can understand forbidding audio-visual recordings, which were in fact also forbidden, because copyright law makes the unauthorized fixation of a performance illegal. But I couldn't figure out under what authority the venue could prohibit private photography. It was, as far as I could tell, a free concert at a public park.

Now, if it turns out the "park" wasn't actually public, then that could make a difference. We were allowed to trespass on the land subject to the owner's permission, and that permission could be contingent on our agreeing not to take pictures. However, if the park was public, as it seems it was, then people's attendance did not require permission, and thus making such permission contingent on a no-photography condition wouldn't have been possible. On the contrary, trying to do so raises the issue of state action affecting people's free speech rights, and it is not at all clear that the state would be able to do this constitutionally.

So under what other theory could the festival organizers have banned photography? Perhaps contract? Most concerts are ticketed events, and a ticket is a contract for which both parties (attendees and the venue) give the other consideration (the attendees pay money, and the venue provides the concert). As part of this contract there could be other ancillary terms, such as a photography ban. In that case, taking pictures would be a breach of the contract. But at Stern Grove, there are no tickets. Furthermore, because it's free, patrons don't supply any consideration for being there at all, which prevents any sort of implied contract from being inferred either. Anyone could come or go as they pleased (subject to crowd maximums). In fact, in theory the venue could have even canceled the performance at any time since its advertisement was merely a gratuitous promise and not an offer made to the public as a precursor to forming a contract. (Of course, if the venue had canceled the show it might still have been liable to patrons on an estoppel theory if the attendees had suffered damages in their reasonable reliance that the concert would take place, but that scenario is beyond the point here.) So without a contract there could be no contract term for the venue to enforce to prevent attendees from taking pictures.

There is the possible copyright angle, which does apply to the ban on audio-visually recording the concert since copyright law makes it illegal to fix a performance into a permanent medium without the permission of the performer. However, that rule applies only to performances. It does not apply to the split second pose that happens to be captured by a snapshot, which is likely not protectable by copyright at all. Perhaps if the performance had been a specially-costumed, highly-choreographed spectacle one could find sufficient originality in each pose upon which a copyright could be based, but then again, a snapshot is such a tiny snippet of the performance that then you'd have to consider whether fair use would apply to its capture. In any case, the copyright in such a scenario would be based entirely on what was done with the picture after it was taken. And in this particular case the point is definitely moot since it was not a particularly choreographed or costumed performance (nor are any other events at Stern Grove this summer likely to be).

Rights of privacy also don't seem particularly salient here either: a person standing on a public stage, knowingly performing before thousands of people, can't reasonably claim a right of privacy in that action. Rights of publicity could be relevant, but again, they pertain to what happens to the picture after it is taken, not that it is taken in the first place. Granted, it's easier to control what happens to your picture if you can prevent it from being taken at all, but, as discussed above, there can be reasons for taking the picture that would trump the rights of those possibly affected by it, and thus it should not preemptively be prohibited.

It's possible I'm missing something in my analysis, and I welcome any comments as to what that might be. But running this situation through my head yesterday I couldn't figure out under what authority the venue could enforce its photography ban. Of course, I still didn't take many pictures, because while it might not have had authority to enforce it, that didn't mean it wasn't going to try.

Edited slightly 2/5/08.

I've always thought it sad somehow that people tend to groan at a pun. To be fair, a pun is a little hard to react to because it's not humorous in an obvious, laugh-eliciting way. For a regular joke, or an obviously humorous situation, a laugh is an instinctive, immediate reaction to our recognition of an unexpected absurdity, some sort of ironic contrast between what was anticipated and what was observed. But a pun's humor is often more subtle. It usually has to be thought about or processed somehow, thus evoking a slower reaction, and its humor is often less starkly obvious. As a result, I think people just don't know how to react, because a laugh doesn't just tumble out automatically after hearing one. And in that moment of awkwardness people likely groan in order to shift the embarrassment they feel from being confused in their reaction back onto the originator of the pun.

Still, while understandable, I think it's disappointing that people do that. A pun, a quality pun, is a special thing that deserves appreciation. It's your own limitation if you can't do that; the originator hardly deserves your scorn. Unless, of course, it's a stupid pun. The kind that's so awkward and contrived that it needs to be followed by an elbow to the ribs and a "Get it? Get it?" Go ahead and groan at those, because they're just stupid.

But a quality pun, an efficient package of wit, deserves a more positive reaction, like a genuine giggle upon fully appreciating what was said. It takes some sophistication on the part of the originator to be able to cull from a vocabulary of possible words just the right verbiage appropriate for the situation that can be lobbed like a stealth grenade into the listener's brain, sneaking it into their consciousness where it can then explode in a glow of realized humor. When that realization happens, a giggle - at minimum - should be the natural articulation of the tickle that it makes.

And a particularly well-timed pun should be further admired as a thing of beauty on its own. These are the puns for whom it seems there is exactly one set of circumstances in which their humor could be fully actualized. Said at any other point their brilliance would have paled. It's almost as if the pun was waiting for its moment, or that the moment was waiting for its pun, but, because it is so easy for that unification to have forever gone unrequited, when convergence is able to be achieved it's really something to savor.

It's not just the standard epitaph; it's a demonstrable fact.

I bought Big Game tickets yesterday, which means my streak of attendance at the annual Cal-Stanford football match-up can continue unbroken this November. But I was very, very lucky to be able to, and many, many loyal Cal fans were not as fortunate.

Ever since the two schools decided decades and decades ago to let the football game be the outlet for inter-school antipathy, they have taken turns hosting it in their heretofore extremely large (75,000+ seat) stadiums. By contract each school got to sell about half the seats at either stadium to its own fans, and at a typical game you'd usually end up seeing two-thirds to one-half of the crowd decked out in the home team's colors, and the rest in the visitor's. At least that's how it's all tended to work so far.

But a few things have coincided this year to change all that: One, that Cal in recent years is actually playing good football - of a quality that hasn't been seen in several decades - and thus is attracting more people who actually want to watch it play. Two, the contract between Cal and Stanford agreeing to give the visiting school an allotment of half the tickets apparently expired last year. And three, Stanford knocked down its old 85,000-seat stadium and replaced it with a 50,000-seat one.

Shrinking the stadium obviously was going to reduce the number of tickets available. Split in half, each school was now going to have 15,000 seats less than they would have otherwise. And that's only if they each got half. Because the contract had expired, this year Stanford decided to only give Cal 15,000 seats total, keeping 35,000 for itself and giving Cal only a fraction of what it used to have.

Some rivalry... Particularly when you consider that while Cal's play has had it competing for elite end-of-season bowl games, Stanford was something like 1-10 last year. And when Stanford's not playing well, its fans don't care. Last year in Berkeley the stadium was almost entirely blue and gold. Only a tiny fraction of the crowd was wearing Stanford's red and white, and that included their rather large band. As we could see, when the going got tough, Stanford fans didn't even bother to show up. Some rivalry, indeed.

Obviously anything could happen this year, and the fortunes of either team could easily be reversed. But there's reason for everyone to think that Cal will have a similar season this year as it did last, and the same goes for Stanford. Which makes Stanford's ticketing decision look all the more petty. Because it knows that so many people will potentially be interested in seeing Cal's last regular season game, it looks like it's keeping all those seats to itself to profit off of.

Of course, Cal itself is also not immune to criticism. The athletic department, suddenly faced with a reliably competent football team and the increased local popularity such athleticism engenders, is starting to exploit it in ways that are particularly alienating to those long-suffering fans who have been filling the seats even in all those dark years when the same could not be said. Suddenly being a Cal fan has become a very expensive and very inequitable thing. Which is worth a diatribe itself, but for now the important point is that after 5000 seats were set aside for students, the remaining 10,000 were only available for Cal fans who were major donors or season ticket holders, and of the latter only a small fraction were able to get them. So what's everyone else to do?

So far the best possibility seems to be to buy Stanford season tickets. Which to a Cal fan seems at first like complete sacrilege. But on further inspection, it's a plan with a certain machiavellian brilliance. First of all, it's not economically unrealistic. The Big Game ticket the package includes would have cost about $70 alone, so subtract that price from the package deal to see the true cost of this plan. Then you can also subtract the Stanford-Notre Dame game ticket, which can probably be sold to a Notre Dame fan, possibly even at a premium. The same may also be true for the Stanford-UCLA game. Which means that there's only a few more games' tickets that a poor Cal fan would need to eat.

But here's the thing: wouldn't it be great if Stanford Stadium turned into a ghost town for all those games because of all the non-Stanford fans who bought the tickets and couldn't be bothered to show up? Or, even better, what if all the Cal fans who had to buy the season ticket package turned up themselves at these games proudly wearing their blue and gold and rooting for the other team? As it is I've heard of some Cal fans who'd bought a block of 30 season tickets - that would be a pretty impressive show of blue and gold already.

Is such a plan very sportsmanlike? Well, possibly not. But a healthy rivalry always involves some sort of efforts to subvert the other team or its fans. I mean, Stanford's recurrent attempts to paint the Big C red or the unspeakable things they annually do to innocent little teddy bear effigies aren't exactly sportsmanlike either, but they're part of the rivalry and moral equivalents of this sort of plan. But there's no comparison between these essentially harmless pranks and one school openly screwing the other on tickets. It's not clever one-upsmanship; it's just exploitation. And not by passionate fans loyal to their schools and communities, as has underpinned the 100+ year history of the Cal-Stanford rivalry, but by the academic institution itself.

Incidentally, Stanford isn't the only school behaving this way. The more money there is at stake in these events (and Cal's recent success has greatly raised the financial stakes), the more all the schools are getting sucked into an inappropriate tit-for-tat with regard visitors' tickets. USC last year, for instance, instead of giving Cal its usual 10,000 seat allotment (of the 90,000-seat stadium) to sell to its away-game fans, only gave Cal 5,000, thereby either shutting out thousands of Cal fans who wanted to see this very important game or leaving them to be exploited on the secondary ticket market. So this year, since the Cal-USC game will be played in Berkeley, Cal is getting even by only giving USC a small amount of tickets to sell to its traveling fans.

The Pac-10 really needs to step in and broker some sort of equitable convention among its teams regarding how these ticketing matters should be dealt with. It's bad for fans, bad for the schools, and bad for college sports in general when the schools get so blinded by dollar signs as to shut out their competitors' supporters. It's this behavior that's truly unsportsmanlike and runs completely counter to any notion that college sports can be healthy athletic and cultural activities that complement scholarship. Or even just fun.