V and Holt Go to Lunch: La Petite Camille

Mr. Holt will be writing the review this time around.  Will post soon.  Good luck sir!

Edit:  Here is the review, posted 2/4/10:

Long overdue…

Holt and Mike V immerse ourselves in fine Vietnamese dining, at La Petite Camille, in Millbrae California

On a chilly January evening with jumbo jets looming overhead, the Villeggiante family and I set out on our latest culinary quest. On El Camino Real sits quite an unassuming old Pizza Hut location. The building looks old and dilapidated, old white paint with green trim stained by exhaust from passing buses and everyday traffic. Upon entering this fine establishment you are quickly greeted with the aroma and sizzle from the grill. The menu is extensive so it was only fitting to order everything our waiter recommended. We started with these unique wraps with steak served on what looks like a hub cap, fresh cabbage and a spicy vinegar sauce which you roll yourself in rice paper. These wraps set the tone for the dishes to follow. Next up was spicy steak which was grilled to perfection with the right amount of spice to make one think twice about the next bite, but not enough heat to clear your sinuses. The 5 spice chicken was next and highly recommended by our Vietnamese counterpart, and was good but slightly overcooked. The BBQ ribs where exquisite, cut how you would expect with maui short ribs but not sweet and rather spicy. You can’t have all this meat without noodles, and these noodles were exceptional, the prawns with them where perfect and never ending. We got some beef dish and I wish I could remember its name but it was fucking amazing. Stuffed beyond the limits of what a normal person could eat this meal finally came to a close with pumpkin curry chicken which was hands down exceptional. If you are ever in Millbrae and need a Vietnamese fix hit this spot up, with its cheap prices it’s no wonder Mike V and I give this quality establishment two forks up.

Final Grade: Two Forks Up

Going, Going, Back, Back

This post is coming to you from about 32,000 feet in the air, somewhere between Durham and Houston. I have to say that, so far, this is probably the best flying experience I’ve ever had – so much so that I felt compelled to blog about it.

Now here’s the thing. I really am not a fan of flying in general. I would prefer to take a train or drive. But given that the distance separating my law school and my family home is about the width of the continental United States, and because I plan on maximizing the utility of any time off from school that I get, flying is definitely the better option (See also my lack of a vehicle).

With that being said, the beginning of the day was fantastic. Last night, I reserved a spot on an airporter shuttle. On the shuttle, my travel companions included two beautiful girls, one doing a dental specialization, the other in the medical school. I will say this much – nice looks, very cute personalities, and good small talk is not a bad way to start a day.

On the other hand, the third person (a little gender ambiguous due to voice/dress, but probably a girl) seemed a little snobby toward the shuttle driver. If I recall, she even notified him that “you forgot the door,” referring to the fact that HER door was left open after she got in. Who knew that Duke’s d-bag reputation was also being promoted on the female side? Anyway, that person left me shaking my head, but it was reassuring that at least three out of four young Duke professional students are not douche bags.

When I got to the airport, I found out that my flight had been delayed!  BUT – this was not a bad thing. I had a three hour layover in Houston ahead of me. Now, I have a one and a half hour layover ahead. No problem. And I ended up getting a benefit out of the delay – Continental Airlines provided me with a free drink coupon (and 10% off my next flight!)! So, I’m thinking perhaps I will procure a bloody Mary soon.

Why did the delay happen, you ask? That’s actually slightly disturbing to be honest. Apparently there was a leaky windshield. As in, when they checked the plane today, the cockpit was sort of randomly soaked. When we got on the plane, the pilot assured us that “they checked all the electronics.” Well, I sure hope so.

Now some of you may be thinking “Functional-yet-slightly-moist aircraft, cute med students, a free alcoholic beverage, a coupon for a discounted ticket – how can this guy’s day possibly get any better?!”

Did I mention I just finished my first semester of law school and now have something like two and a half weeks off to try and get jobs, drink, eat, visit, and generally screw around? Also, the last day I was in Durham in 2009 was filled with snow, cider, bad wine, and some Christmas music. Cheers!

But somehow, the best part of the day so far came from the most unexpected source. A screaming small child on the airplane, seated immediately behind me. Here’s the moment that I still, halfway to Houston, cannot stop chuckling about. Perhaps five to ten seconds after the plane left the ground, we went through a low cloud. The kid behind me was ecstatic, to say the least, and joyfully proclaimed “WE’RE IN THE SKY!!!!!!” Similar moments of joy have followed, although that was by far the most memorable.

Awesome kid.

Now, to review the fall semester of 1L year:

Civil Procedure:

Probably my favorite class in terms of the discussions and relative applicability of concepts in real life. Professor Charles was a solidly Socratic-styled professor, and the discussions were usually pretty good. Bringing in the Minnesota Chief Justice was solid, and his talk was quite memorable (“You should tell them about my bong water dissent” was quite the opening line). Also, skipping all class material for a day to discuss a decision made by the US Attorney General was hilarious, and even more awesome when all of those debates from high school international relations (shout out to Mr. Wayne Phillips) and history class popped up again among the more politically inclined of the law students. I really appreciated “Drinks with Charles” (and Jang and Porter as well) and hope that I can participate again in the future. Charles was also solidly available for office hours, and his lack of saltiness in reaction to my ignorant 1L self was much appreciated. Watching the “Thriller” music video on the last day of class was simply hilarious. Charles exit on the last day – leaving after the music video to a round of applause – was well deserved.

Then there was the exam, which I studied waaaay too much for. Side note – how does one study for possible policy questions? My policy answers seem mushy and uncreative. Anyway, question number one was an awesome, if predictable, fact pattern (“Tigre Woodsy” of the “Professional Gymnast Association” (PGA) cheating on his wife “Zhee Sweede” with various mistresses, and losing his “Neekay” sponsorship). Questions two and three = fail though. Why? Question two I couldn’t really figure out how to answer, and question three I couldn’t think of any creative (read: non-obvious) policy considerations. Dang. Also, I really hate word limits.

Best Case: Christian v. Mattel (hilarious)

Worst Case: Gasperini v. Center for Humanities (Unnecessarily complex. I feel like the Supreme Court wanted to sound smarter than necessary.)

Contracts:

This class could be painful at times. The material could be fuzzy (quite often, really). The equipment could fail (microphones, Powerpoint presentations, and the seating chart were the most common culprits). At times we were in class for nearly double the scheduled time for the week.

But I am more happy that I had this class than any other. The reason? Professor Jerome Reichman, international man of mystery.

There are many puzzling questions that come to mind when I think of Professor Reichman. Where did his accent come from? What was he doing during that 20-year gap between 2L and 3L (and is this related to the first question)? Why are there so many pages in the supplementary coursepack? Why does the coursepack call the Restatement, Second of Contracts “freshly minted?” Who was on the other end of the line that time he picked up his phone and had a chat during class? It does not matter that these questions may never be answered. Why?

Because Reichman is possibly one of the most awesome professors ever. In terms of knowledge, not only do I now know a ridiculous amount about contracts, but also about a lot of policy arguments that go with the subject and what guys like Williston, Holmes, Llewellyn, and (obviously) Corbin contributed to the field. I also will never view boilerplate contract terms the same again. More importantly, this might be the most memorable class I ever take. Beyond the obvious things, like the enthusiastic recitations of various sections of the Restatement and UCC or certain speeches (“Get in. I’ll do the driving.”), Reichman brought both inspiration (I recall an early coursepack reading which stated in different terms, “you will be lawyers in a year,” that was particularly motivational), perspective (“Success on an exam does not mean success in law, and success in law does not mean happiness in life…I know a lot of miserable lawyers”), and kindness. It is also not possible to beat his exam tips (Favorites include: “Stay loose,” followed the next class by “Some of you have been wondering how to ‘stay loose. Well,….’” and “Once you have cut open the corpse…of the contract…”). Negatives? Occasional lack of clarity maybe, but this is law school, so that shouldn’t really be a surprise.

I also thought his test was the fairest and least painful of the bunch. Wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, exam over in three hours, and only one policy question – can’t beat that.

Best Cases: Graulich Caterer, Inc. v. Hans Holterbosch, Inc.; Lefkowitz v. Great Minneapolis Surplus Store; Frigaliment Importing v. BNS; Stambovsky v. Ackley; Krell v. Henry

Worst Case: Whitman v. Anglum

Cases Where Facts Sparked Some Outrage at Injustice: Williams v Walker-Thomas Furniture Co.; Henningson v. Bloomfield Motors; A & M Produce Co. v FMC Corp. (perhaps I have a future in consumer protection?)

<lands in Houston, gets off plane, buys Hanukkah gift for Bennett Roth-Newell at Houston airport, gets on another plane>

Moving on, from the sky somewhere between Houston and San Francisco…

A quick aside: I’m now enjoying some free bloody Marys (an aside within an aside – what would be the proper grammer, capitalization, and punctuation of the plural of “bloody Mary?” That is a hard ass question, good luck.) courtesy of Continental Airlines on my way from Houston to San Francisco. One thing I found pretty appropriate was that the vodka that the airline uses is Skyy vodka. Ha ha ha ha ha. Get it? Be jealous of my free booze. But seriously, that really made my day. Okay, back to the semester in review.

Legal Writing:

Above median on the memo. Got docked on citations like a dumbass though. But hey, I know all about the doctrine of impossibility in DC. Which is pretty cool, right? Right? C’mon…..?

Property:

Ah, the small section class. Section 2, how awesome you are. Bummer that we don’t get a small section class (or for that matter, a softball team…Go Unestoppables!) next semester! Professor Wiener probably made the best use of Microsoft Powerpoint I have ever seen. Of my four professors, Wiener’s slide shows were far superior, combining technical prowess, humor, and utility (in terms of actually helping the class learn stuff). Moreover, Wiener also made an effort to have lunch with everyone in the class, and had all of his students over for some North Carolina barbecue courtesy of Allen & Son Barbecue in Chapel Hill. The meal also included pie.

Now, for the above reasons alone, Wiener was a pretty kick ass property professor, although on occasion his level of saltiness would reach pretty high levels. But let’s add some other deeds of awesomeness, related specifically to our utterly awesome softball team, the Unestoppables. Wiener played in our last game AND came out for pizza and beers afterward. Check-plus.

As for the class itself, I enjoyed that we covered a wide breadth of property subjects, and in retrospect am very glad to have been able to read as much for as many (I think I made a reference there, but there isn’t any internet on the plane, so I’ll have to check online later) property topics as we did. I also enjoyed the (shockingly current) Archie/Betty/Veronica fact pattern. Upon later checking the Wikipedia article, I also learned about some fantastic real-life IP issues between the owners of the rights to the Archie cast of characters and various erotic writers. These issues are why the cluster***k that is Property is great.

On the note of the exam, all I will say is that my concerns from other exams were reinforced here. It is just awful to try and guess whether you should offer more in-depth analysis on fewer than all of the issues, or alternatively just try and touch on every issue. I went with the shotgun approach rather than the sniper approach. Let’s hope that pays off come grading time. Also, again, I suck at policy questions. I am just not that creative.

Best Cases: Schild v Rubin, Stambovsky v. Ackley, Swartzbaugh v. Sampson

Worst Case: Kelo v New London

Cases Where Facts Sparked Some Outrage at Injustice and a Lack of Any Practical Legal Rule: Kelo v New London

The Unestoppables:

Perhaps the greatest team in Duke Law Softball League (DLSL?) history. Never mind the actual record. At least we aren’t total D-BAGS like the teams that TOOK WALKS IN SLOW PITCH SOFTBALL. Also, we didn’t actually argue balls and strikes, which was just as douche-baggy.  But we did field surprisingly well in the absence of any <ahem> athletic support, and the girls on our team could swing the bat a little.  Now, I’m not a moral victory kind of guy, but we were pretty kick ass.

JD Class of 2012:

You know, I have to say, we are pretty awesome. From everything I can tell, we’re some of the least freaked-out, neurotic law students out there. On the downside, all you people are really frickin’ smart, which screws the curve. So I guess it’s something of a push.

Well, not really. Not even close to a push, actually. You’re all just too cool. I won’t go through the list of all of the stuff people have done like Hoye did at orientation (does ANYONE know who the beekeeper is?!), but to say the least, the our class has been unbelievably friendly. Plus, as far as I can tell, grades are based on luck anyway.

LLM Class of 2010:

Definitely the most fun loving group at the law school. My new friends from abroad, mostly already lawyers, definitely know how to party. I will say this much: Halloween + electronic-techno-euro music + Journey (the band) + booze + a form of dancing that resembles jumping around and hugging = a good time. Bravo, non-Americans!

Also, I learned (while bowling with three Belgians against four other Belgians) that the Belgians apparently have a strong claim to “French” fries. I assume that the French probably would just surrender the rights to fries if the Belgians happened to bring it up in casual conversation.

Campout:

Wow.

Duke Football:

DUDE – having a football team is awesome.

Duke Law School Intramural Football:

I played two of the games. This was extremely fun. I shall play more.

Dean’s Lecture Series:

Some of the speakers have been good. I’ll go no further.

Most Overused Phrase or Saying (now taking nominations):

Current nominees include:

“Think like a lawyer”

“Argue both sides

“IRAC”

“Can these cases be reconciled?”

Biggest Complaint:

“Stop arguing about everything!!!” OR

“Talk about something that isn’t law!!!” OR

“Understand when I’m being sarcastic!!!” OR

“Understand my movie quotes!!!”

This Issue: (Euro) Parties and Me Being Very Unaware

As I sit here in the Star Commons reminiscing on what has proven to be quite the busy couple of weeks, I do recall quite a bit of fun in there.  Among the various tasks I’ve been completing (reading, outlining, E & E hypotheticals, legal writing assignments, and whatever else feels right at the time), I’ve also had a bit of time to go out a little.  Some parties and social events here and there along with my newly rejuvenated (but hardly impressive) exercise plan are more or less keeping me sane.  Never mind the lack of sleep (never stopped me before).

Last weekend, a buddy and I went to two places on the same night.  First, we stopped at some sort of “Homecoming” shindig.  It was  quite the event, with an actual dance in the gym as well as free beer and wine in the building next door.  More or less, we stuck to the free booze and tried to meet people who were hanging out in that area.  Ended up meeting a few nice undergrad students and some folks from the business school, but the girls from the environmental school didn’t seem too interested in chatting.  We also ran into some other law students which was a nice surprise.  Anyway, after putting down a few drinks and enjoying some free appetizers (I don’t pass on free food without a very good reason) we headed over to a party being thrown by the LLM students.

As it turns out, I was one of about four Americans at this party.  The rest of the crowd hailed from a fair portion of the world, seemingly mostly from Europe.  There were a few noticeably different things about the house party too.  For one, it was in an apartment (with such a number of people that we surely belonged in a house).  Upon entering the room to strobe lights and techno-electric-something (and not random hip-hop that I have heard at every bar in the history of the world), I was very thankful that somebody out there had something to play at a party that wasn’t rap or hip-hop.  Novelty for the win.  I also learned that a mob of people jumping up and down and hugging (a) counts as dancing and (b) I can apparently do that dance.  Pimpin.  Finally, the two Irish guys who were singing Journey songs even when the techno was playing were probably the best people I could imagine having at a party.  The fact that Journey actually played a few times later on, upon their repeated requests, made it even better.

So after all of this on that particular weekend, I read a lot.

But I also watched football.  Niners looked good, although Brett Favre’s still got it.  That guy beats us all the time.  $^%#!  Also – did the freaking Bengals just beat the Steelers?

Great call on my part in putting Vernon Davis in the line up this week at Tight End though.  Two touchdowns and about 100 yards receiving?  I’ll take it.  Go Niners.  My record thus far is 2-1 in all three of my fantasy leagues.  Goin strong.

However, going on a tangent here – which I can do because this is my blog and I don’t really care if no one reads it or feels like critiquing my writing style – I’d like to illustrate how unaware I can be when exercising.  For those of you out there who are aware of my habits in the gym, you’ll know that I do not have an iPod or similar music player.  This creates an unfortunate scenario when doing cardio-anything, as I become incredibly bored.  Over the years, I have developed something of a method to cope with such boredom.  I call it “math.”  No really.  I literally make up equations and do calculations in my head with the numbers on the treadmill.  For example, I try to determine exact times when I will get to a particular calorie count or distance.  Nerdy and lame?  You bet, but it kind of works.  At least back when half marathons on the erg were the norm.  So anyway, I’m a few minutes into my run the other day, alone in the gym in my apartment complex, when some girl walks in.  She gets on the elliptical – directly in front of me, probably no more than four or five feet away – and does her thing.  I don’t really think much of this (and continue doing math) until later that evening when I decide to Facebook-message a classmate about a very important topic – sandwiches.  I promise this comes full circle, by the way.  So in the course of our discussion, we have an exchange similar to this:

Me: “Yeah I’d love one of those sandwiches right now.”

Her: “I had salmon after the gym today, it was great.”

Me: “You went to the gym today eh?”

Her: “You were there.  I tried to say hi but you seemed really focused.”

…So basically, I’m extraordinariliy dense.  I’m pretty sure that all I could picture in my head at the time was a picture of Captain Jean-Luc Picard doing the facepalm and shaking his head at me (see picture, below).  Although, on a positive note, my run somehow covered about a tenth of a mile more distance in the same amount of time.  So I guess you win some and lose some.

In other news, today may have been the first day I was on call in class and I made a comment that didn’t sound completely retarded.  I feel quite proud of myself for not sounding like a boob today and wanted to acknowledge myself publicly for such a feat.  Interestingly, we had made it a fair portion of the way through class before the professor realized that one of the people on call was absent.  So he looked for a replacement and found “Mr. Villeggiante.”  I’m actually going to call my stats for the day about on par with “1-for-2 with a single and a stolen base” in baseball.  On my first response, the pitcher broke my bat, picked up the ball, and punched me with it for a tag out.  My second response was probably an opposite-field soft liner.  Vintage me, really.

Speaking of vintage me, and to continue the meandering that seems to be a theme in these posts, I found a picture online the other day that brought back some fond memories.  The internet acronym included on the picture actually is fairly accurate to the memory as well.  I’ll just provide the picture and allow you to fill in the gaps:

IBTL!

Speaking of memories, I was reminiscing the other day about various people I’ve known over the years and had a few smiles thinking about them.  Even the ones I didn’t like – and there aren’t many – made me laugh.  It was a very pleasant moment in my day.  Anyway, once I got done smiling and laughing, I got back to work.  So there’s my one truly sentimental thought for this post.  Tune in some other time for more.

1L, D-0

So, orientation is behind us here at Duke, and the first day of the dreaded 1L year has come to pass without completely flooring me.  Although I am a bit sick.  But hey, I’ll still call it a good start.  Anyway, there have been some interesting occurrences this week, which I shall try to summarize a bit, below.

First, at some point last week, or perhaps the prior weekend, I had dinner at a place called “The Mellow Mushroom” (I know).  While the food was notably delicious in its own right, there was one more astonishing feature of the restaurant that caught my eye – they used the same “fine china” as the Sonoma State cafeteria.  Yes, the red-blue-green-yellow plastic discs of awesomeness.  Those plates.  I guess that I just cannot escape my roots.

Which reminds me of a visit I made this week to (one of?) Duke’s on-campus eating areas.  I am not kidding you, in a former life, this place could have been a medium-sized church.  The style of the interior was definitely cathedral-like.  It had the coat of arms of each Greek organization on the walls.  There were about 7-10 restaurants, ranging from a Chick-Fil-A (while I’m thinking about it – delicious fast food) and Subway to a sushi place and your more traditional Southern fare.  To top it off, they had a crazy ass selection of condiments.  What did it for me was the fresh parmesan.  Not even grated yet.  The grater was sitting next to it.  Like, there were wedges of parmesan cheese for students to grate and sprinkle over their pasta.  Classy right?  My eventual selection was the “Selection of the Second” from the hot dog stand outside.  My hot dog was topped with mustard, pickles, coleslaw, and crushed chips.  This was an oddly yummy meal, as in quite good.  Grade (for food chapel as a whole) = A

On the topic of restaurants, I should mention two more: Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill is also fantastic, if a bit pricey for a student.  The traditional barbecue plate (the “NC Sampler,” I believe it was called) was fantastic, as were the “Shrimp and Grits.”  Highly recommended to any who may visit me.  Grade = A

The other is a breakfast place I recently tried twice, most recently with a visitor from Princeton by the name of Zach.  Good coffee and great chocolate chip scones.  Also, a pretty good breakfast menu.  Reasonable prices.  East campus prettiness.  Nothing more to say about that. Grade = B+

Now onto the people.  Although most of the class is from California, we should discuss the cool people that somehow, by some stroke of chance, are not from this awesome state I call home.  Most of these are off the top of my head, and may or may not be real people, but I tried to remember as well as I could.  There is a beekeeper, a Katrina survivor, a guy going for a JD/MD dual degree (who also was apparently a good football player), someone who drove here from Alaska, a number of LLM students from around the world (I’ll also say that watching a live baseball game with people from around the world is really fun), a guy who was at The Bitter End (San Francisco bar) trivia night when my team won the team name competition (“Russia Pulls Out of Georgia…”), two students who are former rowers, a professor who is a former lightweight rower, some distance runners, and generally awesome people from around the country (I’m sure there are some not-awesome ones that I haven’t found yet, but there can’t possibly be many).  My mentor is from the East Bay and is also a Final Fantasy VII nerd, which pretty much instantly makes her freakin cool, as well.

Let’s see, a few things about class today…well, I guess I’d say that class itself was surprisingly fun.  Oddly I encountered a t-test in my first property reading assignment.  There is a lot of preparation involved, which is really all-consuming (and I imagine it will be more so as time goes on), but I really enjoyed class today and thought that I had a generally good idea of what we were talking about.  One thing I did learn about the Socratic method, though: it’s not always harsh, but it is sometimes salty.  Take today’s class on Civil Procedure.  One girl, unsure of the correctness of her forthcoming response to the professor’s inquiry, prefaced what she was about to say with something along the lines of “Well, I’m not sure if I’m right, but -” and was cut off.  The professor interceded with a statement along the lines of “Look, if you act confident, I’ll play with you, but you can’t preface what you’re going to say with a disclaimer because I will assume you do not know what you are talking about.”  He continued, “If you’re working in a law firm, and a client comes in with a problem, and you say to that client, ‘You know, I’m not really sure what I’m doing, but I’ll give it the old college try!’ then you’re in a lot of trouble aren’t you?”

Awesome.

Also, jokes including puns which use legal terminology have not yet become funny, although I can imagine that shortly, they will.

Facebook Statuses, 8/15/09, 3:29 AM

These are the family facebook statuses, currently.  Figure out what happened.  Awesome.

Me:  “When the fire alarm goes off, step one is to go get a cup of coffee and log on to facebook to update your status.”

Lil bro:  “its 3 am in Durham, North Carolina, im sound asleep and some d-bag decides to burn their popcorn so me and my family run downstairs to the lobby while the tv is on and see Nancy Grace on CNN which is equally frustrating”

Lil sis:  “1.) fire alarm goes off @ 3:00 AM 2.)my brother says to my half asleep mom “the fire alarms going off” 3.) mom “no its not” while beating on the alarm clock 4.) we run down to the lobby’ 5.) we find out some tard burnt popcor…n apparently REALEEE bad and woke up the whole hotel. thanks..”

This is awesome.

I don't know why, but this picture of Khoua and Jason = awesome.