TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S): Oyez! / Club 33

Howdy, y'all, and greetings once again from deep behind the orange curtain in beautiful Irvine, California, a spectacular festival pageant of nighttime magic and imagination in thousands of sparkling lights and electro-syntho-magnetic musical sounds. :P

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On with the show ...

----- Oyez! -----

Back in the dark ages before NCSA Mosaic, a bunch of people at Northwestern University created this really cool Hypercard stack called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court." The stack had in-depth information about every US Justice, summaries of significant Court decisions, and even sound clips of oral arguments from important cases.

Once the graphical Web exploded onto the scene in the mid-1990s, the folks at Northwestern ported the Guide to the Web and named it "Oyez, Oyez, Oyez" after the announcement made by the Court's Marshall as the Justices file into the chamber:

The Honorable, the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court

You can find the Oyez site online at

http://www.oyez.org/oyez/frontpage

What makes Oyez so cool is that the folks at Northwestern have done a TREMENDOUS job of keeping the site updated. In fact, the site now contains more than TWO THOUSAND hours of Supreme Court audio, including every audio the Court has recorded since 1995.

Of course, with more than 2,000 hours of audio recordings awaiting you, figuring out where to start might seem a bit daunting. Might I suggest you check out Oyez "Top Cases" page at

http://www.oyez.org/oyez/portlet/topCases/

This page contains links to Oyez's 20 most popular cases (Miranda v. Arizona, Roe v. Wade, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell, et al.) You can also browse the cases by subject area at

http://www.oyez.org/oyez/portlet/directory/

Each case has its own Web page that tells you the facts of the case, the questions presented, and the conclusion of the Court. To hear a case's oral arguments, click on the audio link on the left side of that case's page and then click on the blue speaker icon (which looks an awful lot like a blue iPod). This opens your RealOne player and you're off to the races.

There's also a link on the right side of the audio page that lets you download the oral argument in MP3 format, although I have to warn you that the MP3 files are nothing short of gargantuan (the Grutter v. Bollinger MP3 is just shy of 75 megabytes!) And while the MP3s are cool, they don't include the on-screen text transcript that is embedded into the RealOne files.

Oyez also offers a virtual tour of the Supreme Court at

http://www.oyez.org/oyez/tour/

The tour uses QuickTime VR, so you'll need Apple's Quicktime player to see the images. You can download the player for free for both PCs and Macs at

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

Remember how the original Hitchhiker's Guide had information about every Justice? Well, that information has also been ported to Oyez. You can find it at

http://www.oyez.org/oyez/portlet/justices/

Oh, and when I say "every Justice," I mean *EVERY* justice from James Wilson and John Jay to Stephen Bryer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Neat, huh?

If you ever wanted to learn more about the U.S. Supreme Court, you owe it to yourself to check out Oyez.org.

Inside Club 33

One of the better-kept secrets about Disneyland is that high above New Orleans Square is a private club called "Club 33." Barbara Mikkelson wrote about it a little while back at

http://www.snopes.com/disney/parks/club33.htm

Well, for those of you who are fans of the holy rodent empire, you'll be happy to hear that your fearless bus driver was recently invited to Sunday brunch at Club 33 ... and I took pictures (using a friend's camera.)

So, here are some pix I took at Club 33. I apologize for the quality. The images require the free Macromedia Flash 6 plug-in. Click to zoom in, and click and drag to move around the images.

Upstairs Hallway: http://tinyurl.com/hlez

Buffet Line: http://tinyurl.com/hlf9

Buffet Line (2): http://tinyurl.com/hleg

Buffet Line (3): http://tinyurl.com/hlfk

Dining Room: http://tinyurl.com/hlfr

Dining Room (2): http://tinyurl.com/hlg1

The photos were stitched together with PowerStitch 3.1. The Flash zoom was done with the TrueSpectra Image Server 4.0 (see http://www.truespectra.com/).

And, before I leave you, I have one last page to share with you:

http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/t2_03.jpg

Freaky, isn't it?

That's it for today. Have a safe and happy weekend, and we'll talk again soon. :)

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 (\__/)  .'     )  ))       Patrick Douglas Crispen
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