Caitlin's photos of this past Friday night at Mod.

My email at 5 a.m. to her asking for her photos:

Yo yo
Where thos pics at?? You have a good time? Shoulda stayed longer.
Word up

And her response:

nice email...can't even wait til the next day??

Skipped law today (Friday) and slept in. Probably one of my best decisions this year.

Awesome J-School party at Mod (84/columbus), again, Friday. Lots of drinks, lots of fun. Roy showed up, and that was cool. Caitlin and Abby were grooving. Even Thome was rocking the bunny hop. With drinks $2 until midnight, we ordered several dozen at 3 minutes to 12. It was crowded and the booze was flowing.

I also have put up mp3s of the radio shows I did in college with my roommate. Some are funny, some are absolutely stupid. They're all around 10 MB, which isn't a lot if you're on a high speed connection. 4-10 is when we played guitar and sang some songs. The latter sessions were fun, with more jokes and guests.

Get them all here.

I'm leaving for Denver on Dec. 17th (hopefully that doesn't conflict with anything) to visit a high school buddy and go skiing. He's a funny guy. When I asked how good a skiier he was, (because the only experience I've had was on a 5-day trip), this is what he said.
---
I've gone skiing on, at most, 3 occasions-- I've gone snowboarding on at most 4 occasions. These stats are for my lifetime-- not last season. Last time I hit the slopes was two years ago.

All said, I'm a fucking awesome skier. I make love to the mountain the way Chef makes love to Kathie Lee... I carve through the powder the way yo momma carves through a juicy thanksgiving turkey... Oh baby, when i strap on my skis you better drop to yo knees, and when I push off with my pole you betta...
--

This was basically the funniest thing I've read in years.

My weeks feel a lot like ExciteBike, the Nintendo motorcycle videogame. If you recall, pressing the B. button would accelerate you in low gear, while pressing the A. button switched you to high gear.

At the bottom of the screen was a little "TEMP" indicator bar. If the red moved all the way to the other side of the bar, it meant your motorcycle had overheated, and the motorcycle would stop, and move to the side of the racetrack for five seconds. This was very frustrating since this was a race against time. The way you would overheat was if you held down the B. button for too long, since the more you held it down, the more the red would creep across the indicator. But by holding down B., you could accelerate very quickly. Holding down A would save you the heat problems, but wouldn’t give you enough power to make jumps unless you had a lot of space. Normally you’d hold B for a second and then hit A for the longhaul unless you get stuck in the middle of lots of jumps and it’s just taking too long to get through.

Anyway, that’s a long drawn out analogy for what I feel like each week. I feel like the first five days of the week I'm basically holding down B during the day, with the temperature level rising, then at night, I hit A and the temp retreats a little. If I successfully make it to the weekend without "overheating," then I'm okay because I can hold down A for the weekend and things settle down.

"Overheating" in this case is getting sick, and A is sleep. I was pretty surprised at how well correlated the maintenance of a motorcycle in a Nintendo game (an old one at that) was with my own health and well-being.

Here’s a funny story I forgot to mention:

In our law class, we have assigned seats where we all wrote our names on a large seating chart blueprint of the classroom. This is used by the professors to call on students with ease. So at 9 a.m. on Friday morning, we all basically pray that the professor doesn't call your name and ask you to explain the fine details of the case we were supposed to read for that week.

Naturally, the math guy I am, I figured that the odds of being called on were so low, I didn't have much to worry about. (The class size is well over 200, and the professor only calls on one or two students per class.)

Obviously, my time had come.

“Mr. Owens?” Everyone looks back to my general vicinity.

“Mr. Owens? Orens?” I’m looking on with everyone. Obviously that’s not my name.

“First name Jeff? Jeff Owens? Jeff Orens?” Silence still. Hmmm, I think, another Jeff, in my row. What are the odds?

“I guess he’s not here… Mr. O’Brian.” Mark O’brian sits two seats to my left.

My throat swells, mouth goes dry. I shiver a bit (but that’s because we sit under that goddamn air conditioning vent that blows cold air directly on us, even when it’s freezing as shit outside.). But I realize Professor Blasi was probably saying my name, which, knowing me, wasn’t written clearly. Novich written illegibly could be misconstrued as “Owens.” Plus, I know of no other Jeffs in the school.

For days I believed I had gotten off easy. I could pretend he wasn’t calling on me and I’d be in the clear because he wasn’t saying my real name. He can’t expect me to CORRECT him! But then I feared he’d probably look up my name and find the “real” Jeff Owens, and then pick on me for the next class. And once more, my throat swelled, my mouth went dry, I put on some chapstick and popped a Propecia (it was 8:45 a.m. before the next law class – and yes, I’m losing my hair).

But I don’t get called on AGAIN! Wow, it’s my lucky day.

Several weeks later, I take a break from doing nothing and decide to look through the facebook. I haven’t looked for a while and felt I needed a refresher on who the cute girls are. I turn the page to 22. Lo and behold, GEOFFREY ORENS!!!! So I sent off the following email to people in my class who would share my relief.

----email
So it's almost 4am, I took a break and skimmed through the facebook... and guess who I found. "Geoffrey Orens," page 22. WHAT THE FUCK huh? So it wasn't me after all who got called on in Law class a few weeks ago. (When homeboy said "Mr. Orens, Owens, Jeff Owens... Ok, Mr. O'brian." Devi, you're off the hook with what we all thought was bad handwriting. So this means that other dude was skipping class, and now I'm fair game on Friday. Bitchin.

Pictures from Suzy's camera of Saturday night... what a night.

I rediscovered one of the most amazing debates I've ever seen.

Alan Keyes / Alan Dershowitz
"Does Organized Religion Hold Answers to the Problems of the 21st Century?"

WATCH

READ

Devi and me made a short list of "things that bother Devi...(that Jeff couldn't give two shits about)"

1. When I write in my blog "Devi and me"
2. Talking with my mouth full
3. Hiccuping (Devi seems to think every time I hiccup, which I guess sounds something like a burp, that I do it intentionally. But really, it's an involuntary muscular reaction that I have little control over. And by the way, it's just a hiccup.)
4. When I talk "over" her – like when I speak louder than her and overpower anything she is saying. A good example of this is when I’m talking on the phone with Devi and ask her a question then immediately answer my own question loudly while she tries to answer them. In fact, when we were compiling this list and as usual I was talking over Devi, I stopped and said "I can't hear you because I'm talking too loud."
5. When I use the phrases "Word up," and "rock on." Devi's catchphrase is "that's a big copy," which I have never given her any shit about. I happen to like my phrases.

On my walk to school, I frequently pass a guy on the street who sits behind a folding table and sells batteries and sharpie markers. The interesting thing about this guy is the batteries come in packs of 16. They appear at first glance to be Duracell. They only cost two dollars.

So finally, I decided I needed two AAA batteries for my digital camera (so I can take a lot more candid shots of journalism school people getting drunk). So I bought it from the guy and left, thinking it was a pretty good deal. Turns out, they aren't Duracell. But they are far more entertaining. The packaging looks just like Duracell, and the batteries do too, only it's "Durasell.”

Here's what it says on the back:
----
No mercuty (sic) added…
Helps protect our environment (sic)
Durasell battrbies (sic)

Explain:
do not charge the batter that hasn't been used up or throw it into fire
do not use it with common (carbolic) batter
according to the use way of equiqments (sic) to install the batter
do not decompose the batter
----

The “battrbies” are slightly smaller than regular batteries. They also have the signature Duracell “battery tester” – painted on. It’s not real!

But what I found most remarkable is where these things are supposedly made:
Bethel, CT 06801

Hmmmm…

But they work so far, and even if it takes 10 Durasells to do the job of 2 Duracells, the $2 was worth it.

I managed to wake up before 1 p.m., do a bunch of crappy writing and other shit for school before heading home to Westchester to, get this, babysit my sister. This probably doesn't sound all that ridiculous until you find out that my sister is 17 years old and is going to college next year. Apparently, my parents wanted to go on a little two-day excursion (it was Columbus Day), but my mother is still so neurotic that she's scared to leave my grown sister home alone. Quite bizarre.

In any case, I was very happy to spend some quality time with her. We wanted to order in some Chinese food, but since our house is kosher, we can only buy from the kosher Chinese restaurant. So we called, but there was no answer. It took us a few minutes to realize that it was Sukkot, a Jewish high holiday. A lot of good our years of Hebrew school did. So instead we went out to eat, and I went over her college essay.

Then we went to see "Lost in Translation," the big Sophia Coppola movie starring Bill Murray that everyone and their mom seems to love. I've taken a lot of heat for this already, but I found the movie pretty dull and pointless. Yes, it was funny at parts. Yes, Bill Murray is great. But ultimately the two main characters did not grow at all. There didn't seem to be a beginning, middle or end, and while I did appreciate the break from the Hollywood norm of super cheesy leaps and bounds that characters make, there seemed to be virtually no real story or narrative. While there might have been a wealth of emotion, that does not make a good movie.

Anyway, I can see why a lot of people liked it, and I don't get off on being a contrarian, but I'll take my lonely seat on the other side of the room. By the way, I also absolutely detested "My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” if that says anything about me, and thought it was mildly amusing, but definitely not nearly as funny as most people thought. I’ll stick to Swordfish and Identity…

Today's big activity after waking up at 2 p.m. was doing my laundry. The next major accomplishment was taking a shower and getting dressed before Roy, Caitlin and Hannah came over to preparty. We went up town to a journalism school party at 167th St. called Dopacabana. Then we trekked to my college friend Avi's party on the Eastside in midtown. Once again, I was very drunk.

I came into law class today exhausted and completely unprepared. Luckily Princeton was asked to sit in front of the class and fielded all of the professor's questions.

Professor Isaacs (Jewish) made a fairly inappropriate comment to Jan-Christophe (German) in Critical Issues: "your background comes from a country that systematically made me the son of a bitch I am today." Personally, I thought the comment was a little bit out of hand, but not all that offensive, given the fact that Isaacs insults most of the class in every breath he takes. I happen to like this class more than any other, and find it remarkably entertaining -- so much so that I've been recording all of them.

We heard from Jodi Cantor, the New York Times arts and leisure editor. She's only 29. She graduated in the same class at Columbia as my two roommates, but they don't know her.

Jacqueline had us all over for wine and cheese. I definitely ate a lot of cheese, and drank plenty of wine. Then most of us headed downtown for Jay's birthday at The Room. I was quite drunk by the end of the night.

I stayed up until 5 a.m. last night working on my radio piece for today's radio broadcast.

After a three-hour nap and a large cup of coffee, I helped out with bouncing all of the pieces to MiniDisc. Besides starting about an hour and a half late, I were broadcast went off without a hitch, and we all went out with the professors to The Heights for dinner and drinks.

Sig Gissler's lecture today reminded me of something funny. He drew on the board a little diagram, similar to this one, showing that the things we don't know we don't know take up most of our minds.

About six months ago I did some computer tutoring for a woman. She worked for a company called Landmark Forum. In the hour I was supposed to show her how to use her e-mail, she talked to me for 45 minutes about how Landmark Forum is a life-changing experience that I should be a part of. She stressed that it was not a cult. Call me crazy, but when someone voluntarily describes their club as "not a cult," a little bell goes off in my head.

“The Landmark Forum is not a lecture, motivational technique, or therapy – it’s a powerful, accelerated learning experience.” Hmmm, sounds like a cult in denial.

Anyway, I brought this up because she began her little sales pitch with the same diagram that Gissler drew. Maybe they’re in cahoots. Maybe he’s a Landmark Forum graduate.

She said a cult takes you away from your friends and family and compels you to be a part of a "new" family, and that her club did the opposite. Well, it sounds to me J-School fits her cult description.

In an effort to convince God that I had repented for the sins I committed over the past year, and have Him add my name to the Book of Life so that I may continue to commit sins for one more year, I fasted today and even went to services this morning at JTS.

Caitlin and I broke fast at her friend Hannah's house. We had to pick up some cookies on the way there, so we bought some at a nearby grocery. The total came out to $6, but I only had twenties so Caitlin paid. I said I would owe her a drink, but not a full price drink, only a happy hour drink.

The highlight for today was buying Stain Stick and doing my laundry.

Just before sundown, I had a huge bowl of Annie's Mac and Cheese and began my fast for Yom Kippur.

I spent the day in Jamaica interviewing people for the bus story.

About two weeks ago, I talked to one shop owner about how the Old Navy and the gap affected her business. She said that had no effect on her business, but that the people who are constantly playing three card Monte outside her store were actually the biggest problem. She said tourists will stop in front of her store before going in and watch them play three card Monte, sometimes taking part. But because the whole thing is a big scam, and they have pickpockets working the crowd, these tourists actually get their wallets stolen lose their money in the game before going into her store. So they find that they have no money, and they can't actually buy anything in her store. She said this has been going on for 20 years. Obviously this is a pretty crazy story, but she was scared shitless to go on record saying anything for fear of getting shot. She said there was a major shootout in front of her store just a few years earlier. She said the police don't really arrest anyone and only scare them away, and that they keep coming back. I tried to convince her that if the police aren't listening to her complaints, maybe she would have better luck with a newspaper article. I explained that many times large changes have come about through the newspapers and not by way of the cops. She agreed, but was still scared shitless.

Anyway, I had never seen these three card Monte guys. But sure enough, there were actually three different little tables set up, all directly in front of this woman's store. I didn't notice any others on my walk through Jamaica Avenue. So I decided to snap a photo, which turned out to be not the greatest idea since a guy from one of the other tables walked over to me and said in a very intimidating tone "you better keep that camera in your pocket." Since I didn't want to get shot that day, I put my camera in my pocket.

There was a great happy hour at the West End, where I chatted for a while with Meena, Juhie and Jodi about their RW classes and other great gossip.

I finished dictating my radio interviews. A total of 12,000 words.

Today we got to sleep late since Law class didn't meet. Critical issues was amusing and enjoyable as always.

In Lipton's Masters seminar, we watched one of the Masters projects from last year, a documentary on German to choose to come to America and work with Holocaust survivors instead of joining the German army. It was called "Third Reich to third generation."

Next we saw a documentary about the Department of human services and the death of a child living with foster parents, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers. It was quite good and compelling.

---------from Lipton's email-----------
Barak Goodman, J'86 and watch the documentary he and his co-producer, Rachel Dretzin, made for PBS:

FRONTLINE: Failure to Protect--The Taking of Logan Marr (2002-2003 duPont Award Entry) Friday, Oct. 3, 4:30-6:30 pm, 607B

The documentary covers a 5-year old girl's victimization by a defective child welfare system. Logan Lynn Marr died while in custody of a foster mother who worked for Maine's Department of Human Services. She and her younger sister, Bailey, were taken from a mother who never abused them and lived in three different foster homes. The documentary covers the family, foster homes, caseworkers, and the eventual death of Logan Marr.

The program demonstrates a complex issue and effectively portrays the perspectives of its many participants. Failure to Protect is a perfect example of long-form television about a national issue told through a specific case study.
------------

Shasha had a thing in Chinatown at a place called "Dim Sum Gogo" where we got to meet her husband. Devi and I picked up Abby and headed over for some dim sum.

A bunch of us continued our night at Otis, a bar at 51st and ninth, and met up with Roy and Dave, and some of Caitlin's friends. Always a good time.

Me and Abby had a lengthy talk about life after school and what the next step was going to be.

I did a few more interviews today Jamaica, and on my way home ran into Matt Trezza at 34th St. Matt graduated the journalism school this past May, and graduated Johns Hopkins with me in 2002. He is still looking for a television job and was on his way to do a little freelance video work for his local television station.

Because I had a couple hours to kill, I decided to go to B&H to check out there DVD video cameras. It was extraordinarily enlightening, and I spoke with one of the rep for a while about the future of digital filmmaking and the pros and cons of recording on a DVD.

The rep told me to check out camcorderinfo.com, a web site run by Robin Liss that has reviewed a lot of video cameras and that Robin has borrowed many of them from B&H. So I went to her web site and wrote her this lengthy e-mail which I think conveys a lot of my enthusiasm for the next step in digital filmmaking:

----------Email to Robin-----------
I'm really interested in digital video, and have been shooting and editing on my computer for over five years. Recently, I've been researching the new DVD camcorders and I'm absolutely amazed that they have not already revolutionized the industry. The ability to shoot on a nonlinear format seems to me one of the biggest improvements that can happen in digital video, yet it seems there are no future plans for a professional grade DVD camcorders, only the Hitachi, Sony, and Panasonic models are available.

The main thing that I have in mind is shooting a documentary somewhere far away where one might not have (or want to bring) a computer to edit video in the field. What usually happens is you go out, spent several months shooting interviews or whatever, and then come home to find you have shot over 100 hours of footage. What a pain in the ass to edit, and then editing usually takes six months or a year to log, and figure out what the hell is going on.

The way I see it, DVD camcorders (or being able to record digital video on a nonlinear medium such as a memory stick) can cut the time spent logging and editing in half. Once you can take a five-minute interview, divided into three segments, and then delete the first minute in the last 3 1/2 minutes, both freeing up space on the DVD as well as trimming unnecessary footage, makes postproduction far more efficient. What I am most amazed with is, even if the DVD format isn't widely accepted or isn't professional enough or isn't high enough quality, it offers the ability to actually create a rough assembly cut in the camera. You could be sitting on the subway coming home from a shoot, editing footage and piecing it together in minutes.

I am a student at the Columbia school of journalism and I've been coming together some radio piece is recently on my MiniDisc recorder, while everyone else in my class has to suffer using a Marantz tape recorder. On my trips home from a daybook assignment, I'm able to insert tracks into long interviews and by the time I get back to the studio to write my script, I already have several of my actualities ready to go.

The other amazing thing is the ability of the DVD camcorder to copy video rather than capture, which obviously cuts a ton of unnecessary time out of postproduction. All you have to do is pop a DVD into your DVD ROM, and without ever having to log and capture anything, you already have your video clips ready to be dragged into FinalCut, or in my case premiere. That blows my mind.

Anyway, the reason I'm writing is because I went to B&H today to take a look at the DVD camcorders I had been lusting over for several weeks, and I have a long conversation with one of the video guys who referred me to you and your web site. He said that the mini DVD medium wasn't compatible with Macintosh, and that the professionals are only now finally accepting miniDV as a widespread professional format. He said that the MPEG-2 that is recorded on the DVD camcorders is inferior quality to miniDV. When I pleaded with him about the usefulness of a nonlinear medium, he told me that in the next few years we would see camcorders that record on memory sticks that can hold maybe 10GB. If you are in the field, at the end of the day you would simply dump the memory stick on to an external 300 Gig hard drive. I thought this was pretty cool.

I was hoping I could discuss some of these issues with you, since you seem to have your finger on the pulse of new DV technology and you would probably know better than anyone what the future holds. Do you know of anyone who is actually using the DVD camcorders to create and cut piece is much more efficiently than tape?

I look forward to hearing from you. Sorry for the lengthy e-mail, I'm using Dragon NaturallySpeaking to dictate it, so I usually write way too much. (Also, if any words don't make sense, it's because I dictated them and it picked a homonym.)

-----------END email------------------

Tonight I dictated over an hour of the interviews that I recorded on my MiniDisc. I used Dragon NaturallySpeaking to dictate in almost real-time, and did almost 6000 words. The ability to talk and have your computer write what you say is one of the coolest things current technology offers. I anticipate having to transcribe hours of videotape recorded interviews in the future, so having this is a lifesaver.

In seminar today, our class critique three of last week's feature stories.

I asked Devi what the news peg in her piece was. The reason I asked was because Julie had given me a lot of shit for not having a news peg in any of my pieces. Also, since this is one of the first questions that my friend Benny, who works for the Boston Globe, asks me whenever I try to pitch a story to him, I simply assumed that everybody knew about this but me. Apparently, nobody got the joke.

Devi seemed to be at a loss of words, and, as I found out afterwards, thought the question was quite confrontational and didn't expect me of all people to ask it. It seemed several people in the class felt the same way, that my question was almost like an insult.

To be honest, if I had known Julie was sitting in the room, I actually would have asked her. She's the one that, for better, I think, has gotten it into my head to start asking those types of questions about everything I read.

"Why are you telling me about this? Why are you telling me now, as opposed to next week? Why should I care?"

Anyway, I met with Laura later that evening to pitch my nonexistent business story. I mentioned something about the buses coming to Jamaica to shop and she jumped at the idea. So that was pretty cool, to come in miserable and frustrated about a shitty story, and leave psyched and pumped up about a piece that might actually have substance after all.