I'm not sure how much of this I should say. I got back to my dorm room late this afternoon when my roommate gave me some awful news. Apparently, one of our suitemates tried to kill himself last night. He took about 60 pills, and he's apparently still in the hospital.

I wasn't sure what to do when I first heard about it. Couldn't we have been better friends with him? He definitely has other friends, but he's never really been very happy. And I know that forging a friendship with him wouldn't solve all of his problems, but everybody could use some more pals. But now look. He's in the hospital, and he might not be back here for a while. I wasn't sure what to do when or if he comes back, so I thought I'd ask you all here.

As I was writing this, Evan and Joey from down the hall came in, and we talked about it. Evan said it would be nice if we could visit him in the hospital tomorrow; after all, it's right on campus. It looks like we're going to do that tomorrow morning. I hope we can get some more people to go.

Jack Kevorkian spoke here at UF last night, and my sister and I went to hear him. So did a lot of other people. The speech was at the basketball arena, and there was a huge, huge line outside that moved pretty slowly because they searched everyone with metal detectors. Kevorkian, an advocate (and erstwhile practitioner) of physician-assisted suicide who was recently paroled after eight years in prison, is no stranger to controversy. There was a relatively small number of protesters outside as people slowly filed in, and the bomb squad was there too. (What better way to stop people from dying than by killing somebody?)

Pretty much everybody expected that Kevorkian's speech would focus on euthanasia. Of course, that's an issue that's important to him, but he didn't talk too much about it because apparently the conditions of his parole stipulate that he can't talk to anyone about it "in detail." He did try to set some things straight. He made clear that he killed people to relieve their suffering rather than for the sake of them dying; he compared this to a doctor amputating a person's leg to get rid of a cancer rather than for the sake of cutting off the leg. He also talked about the historical use of euthanasia among the ancient Greeks, who pretty uniformly accepted and even regulated it. (Only the Pythagoreans, he said, were opposed to it, and it was their fringe belief that was incorporated into the Hippocratic Oath.)

The second part of his speech was concerned with reforming the judicial and penal systems. (If you feel you were wrongly imprisoned for such a length of time as he was, you'd probably concern yourself with the same thing.) He presented the idea that people who break the law should be placed in a "sanctuary" where they would be able to work out with the victim and his family how they should pay for their crimes. (If the perpetrator is uncooperative, only then should he go to jail.) This, he said, would minimize guilt and wouldn't ruin people's lives like prison often does. He said he read about this idea in a book and has since made contact with the author. He also called on UF's law school to offer classes on the "sanctuary" idea and sponsor a pilot program.

The last part of his speech concerned civil liberties, and the Ninth Amendment in particular, which reads in its entirety:

He said that the Ninth Amendment has been pretty uniformly ignored. I'll agree with that. But he also said it has never been used in court, which is obviously not true. He was big on civil liberties, saying that the government is pretty authoritarian in structure, like Nazi Germany, but "more subtle." (An actual example he gave was that "the tyrants" make you wear a seatbelt so you'll think that they care about you.) He said that the Republicans and Democrats were basically the same, and that the only way to go was to vote Libertarian. The audience applauded. But at almost the same time, he said something pretty confounding: "Everyone should refuse to vote. That will give the tyrant a message." This was one of the only times he was booed by the audience. And although he was running over time, he spent some time condemning the war in Iraq and listing some characteristics of fascist states that sounded uncomfortably familiar: things like rigged elections, pompous displays of patriotism, the glamorizing of soldiers, and the if-you're-not-with-us-you're-against-us mentality.

When his speech was over, a lot of people started leaving, even though there was going to be a Q and A session with questions submitted in advance through a moderator. I figured I'd heard enough by then. It was interesting to go to, although I wish he could have talked more about euthanasia. He sure did stir up a debate around here, though, and I guess that was the idea of hiring him.

Here's a humorous version of the Microsoft End-User License Agreement (Flash).

Learn some Everyday Loopholes "to get annoying things done the easy way."