Okay, lifting free weights is definitely harder than using the machines…
Ow ow ow. Okay, maybe not ow ow ow, but sore sore sore.
This evening was my first time doing the free weights on my own. Now that I’m at the other end of the floor, I’m a bit more intimidated than I was when I was on the machines. The guys have bigger muscles and there’s more grunting. And I don’t feel like I totally have the hang of it yet.
But my body got a good workout tonight, so I guess that’s a good sign.
I love Dahlia Lithwick. (You can see all her Slate columns here – I have it bookmarked so I can see whenever she has a new one.) Today she provides an entertaining summary of yesterday’s Supreme Court arguments in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Apparently Justice Souter got uncharacteristically angry. As for another justice, Lithwick writes, “What the hell has gotten into Justice Antonin Scalia? Between his extracurricular pronouncements on the arguments in this case (and I urge you to listen to the whole speech yourself) and his extracurricular hand signals last weekend, nobody is quite sure what has come over the man. He is ever more the Bill O’Reilly of the High Court.”
As for the case itself, the issue is (1) the legality of military tribunals set up by the executive branch that it claims are justified by “the war on terror,” and (2) whether the Court is even allowed to hear the case at all, because after the Court granted review of the case, Congress passed a law removing the issue from the Court’s jurisdiction. But (and I don’t know if I totally have this right) because the issue involved habeas corpus, the right of an arrestee to challenge his/her detention, it’s not clear whether Congress was allowed to strip the Court’s jurisdiction in the way it did.
I’m kind of confused here. I guess I would be less confused if I read the briefs. But who has time?
The other night, I used the word “ridonkulous.” Matt was struck by this, because he’d heard someone else use it earlier that day, and now here I was using it as well, but he’d never heard it before. So of course I had to go look it up.
I still like this word better.