Food Truck Fridays

Disclaimer: I apologize for not updating my blog in approximately 1 month, but this is what a law student’s life looks like:





But don’t worry, I still have time for fun!



Anyway…

When I first moved to DC, I opined about how lucky I was to be living in the top floor of my building, Hampshire House. Going from one-story stuccos in Florida to seven-story structures in the District, I felt pretty high and mighty pushing the tippy-top button in the elevator to get to where I slept every night.

Then the earthquake came, and I wondered just how strategic it was for the girl who is terrified of heights (re: my airplane post) to live in the top story of a domicile built in 1919 whose elevator dropped twice before finally landing on the requested floor. If you weren’t aware (because I wasn’t, being an East-coaster,) the higher you are in a structure when an earthquake occurs, the more you feel the movement.

Then we had the hurricane, and I praised the lord for putting me in a top floor – furthest from flooding. DC doesn’t take well to uber huge amounts of rain.

Then –*insert suspenseful noise here* my elevator was taken out of commission for replacement. For six to eight weeks.  And the seventh story became a burden once again, especially with a backpack, a laptop, a lunchbox, and rainboots (yay for unbound books!)



In preparation for the sad day of September 19th (the death of the 1919 elevator), I purchased $400 worth of groceries. Why, you ask? Because one big difference from living in the suburbs to living in a city is grocery shopping. My nearest grocery store is 7 blocks away, and it’s a Trader Joe’s. Trader Joe’s is great for fresh items and specialty items, but if you want a can of Campbell’s soup or a box of Kellogg’s cereal, you won’t find it there. So you buy your $100 of specialty items, careful not to purchase more than one heavy item (ie. A bottle of wine or a jar of spaghetti sauce), and you lug it back 7 blocks to your building.

Did anyone really expect me to then drag bags of groceries up six flights of stairs? Because I didn’t expect myself to do that.

So, I took advantage of PeaPod, a local grocery delivery service that brings NORMAL grocery-store items (Campbell’s soup and…SPAGHETTIOS!) to your kitchen with minimal delivery fees. I’m now well-stocked:



But of course, now that I have plenty in my pantry, I’ve decided to explore more of the local cuisine. And look what I found:





Heaven!

It’s Penn Grille, located at the intersection of 20th and Penn. It looks like a hole-in-the-wall, and that’s because it is, but it’s been described as “one of the best-kept secrets of Foggy Bottom.” It’s also conveniently located a block away from the Law School campus, on 20th and H, and therefore requires minimal walking when you’re full to the max.

You get a silver tin and stock yourself up with raw veggies, noodles, and meats, then hand it to a cook, who turns around and cooks it with his back facing you and then places your cooked lunch (or dinner!) on a scale and charges you by its weight.

As the reviews say, “You have to love a place where the only sauce selections are mild, medium, and spicy.” The people who work there are mostly Asian, and smile a lot when you ask for “80% mild, 20% medium.” The first girl who took me here was also an Asian, who warned me that Penn Grill’s spicy = Asian spicy. So if you enjoy spicy foods – go for the medium. If you like to cry and sweat when you’re eating, go for the spicy!

I also had my first food truck meal this Friday with some of the girls from my internship at Break the Cycle. Food Truck Friday was the most exciting aspect of my week. Seriously. DC is divided into streets which run parallel to each other at 90 degrees (the letters and the numbers). Some streets run all cockamamie (those are the states). They’re confusing because they’re diagonal. But each area is centered around a little circle – a literal circle – that typically has a statue, benches, and some green grass (which isn’t too common in the city). I laughed a LOT when a District native informed me that these were parks.

Anyway, on Food Truck Friday, you can eat lunch outside. The food trucks bring you foods of all kinds – from AZN Eats to CapMac (a macaroni and cheese truck that even has parmesan chicken mac and cheese!) to Hula Girl (sticky rice and teriyaki chicken) to the Cheesecake Truck. And all you have to do is walk to the circle that’s closest to you! The meals typically cost between $7-$10.

Anyway, the girls and I had been planning this Food Truck Friday Funday for a full two days. Of course, when the day rolls by, it’s pouring. The DC girls made fun of me for wearing my snow boots (I’m sorry, but my rain boots hurt my feet and no way am I going to wear flip-flops and narrowly miss falling on my ass every five seconds).



There we are by the CapMac truck with our umbrellas!

Sarah and I decided to try the BBQ Bus – we’d both been missing some good barbecue from our home states (FL and GA). It was right next to the Grilled Cheese bus, which you can see in the background.



DC is way cool, guys. These people might all be skinny because you have to walk a mile to get anywhere (and, in some cases, have to traverse six flights of stairs because your elevator is down)…but they sure do know how to eat.

Even the squirrels enjoy good food.



And that’s the way the hippo heckles.

Office Hours: Professor Banzhaf

Wow, it's been almost a month since I last posted!

I've been busy with an internship, 5 law classes, auditing 2 non-law classes, meeting new friends, writing for the law school newspaper, and running for Senate (and losing). :)

I hope to write a nice, long, descriptive blog about DC life soon, but, to tide you over, here is my article in Nota Bene, George Washington Law's newspaper. It's the first of a column called "Office Hours" that will, week by week, (bi-weekly), bring you closer into GW Law by helping you meet some of the diverse, talented, and intelligent professors that my school offers.

Office Hours


His hobby is suing people. He convinced his own father to stop smoking. He has been interviewed by Stephen Colbert. He organized the first anti-smoking organization, made several appearances on Super Size Me, and believes that smokers and the obese should have higher health insurance payments than other citizens. He’s also been kicked out of a McDonald’s in Virginia.

Who is this GW Law professor?

It’s John Banzhaf, Professor of Torts, Administrative Law, Disabled People and the Law, Law and the Deaf, and Legal Activism.

After graduating from MIT with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering, why did Professor Banzhaf decide to go to law school?

“I don’t know,” he said. But he believes that his background in science helped him to remain relaxed during his student experience at Columbia Law. “Lots of students are very scared when they come to law school,” he said. “You want to prove yourself. If you can succeed in law school, you will prove to yourself that you really have it. I didn’t have that. If I didn’t fit into this weird-ass culture of law school, it didn’t make any difference to me. I had a degree from MIT. I had two U.S. patents and had written ten technical papers. I was solid.”

At his alma mater, Columbia Law, Professor Banzhaf said he believes he would have been voted “least likely to become a public interest lawyer.” His main goal, post-graduation, was to become a patent lawyer. Why? “They made more money than anyone else.”

Professor Banzhaf knew the value of money. He worked his way through law school as a gigolo – that is, a man who is paid to dance a jig with a woman. He spent his summers traveling the world as an employee on a cruise ship. His main duty: to dance with the ladies at dusk.

While in school, after a flippant challenge from his professor, a well-respected judge in New York, Professor Banzhaf wrote and published his own Law Review article as a 2L. The article discussed weighted voting calculations and introduced a mathematical concept self-entitled the Banzhaf Index.

Here, though he was an editor of Columbia’s Law Review, he began to form an opinion about Law Review articles.

“Law review articles are damn near worthless or worse,” said Banzhaf. “They’re just professors opining about topics. If you have new ideas for legal rules, principles, strategies or tactics…rather than waste your time sending them to be judged by third-year law students, why not test them in the real world on people who are qualified to evaluate them like judges, legislators, and regulators, rather than third-year law students?”

After his own article was published in Columbia’s Law Review, Professor Banzhaf submitted his paper on the Banzhaf Index to the Court of Appeals of New York.

“God damn if they didn’t rule in my favor. The highest court in New York ruled that if you have weighted voting in New York state, it must be according to the Banzhaf Index calculation. That’s when I began to develop the theory that, if you have a good idea, don’t just stick it in the law review. Do something with it. See if you can get it going.”

The free time provided for by his lack of Law Review articles has allowed Professor Banzhaf to organize and head Action on Smoking and Health, America’s first anti-smoking legal action organization.



Professor Banzhaf's favorite phrase is "Sue the Bastards." His license plate typically says something similar. Here I am in his office when he stepped out, holding one of his figurines!

His anti-tobacco sentiments came not from any inherent issue with smoking, but rather from watching T.V. one Thanksgiving with his father, a smoker, and feeling inundated by cigarette commercials.

He wrote a complaint to the major network CNN which would change his life forever. Though CNN didn’t answer his complaint, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) did, and with an overwhelming response, thanks to the Fairness Doctrine.

Abolished in 1987, the Fairness Doctrine stipulated that any radio or television station broadcasting biased commercials on controversial public issues must provide time for the opposite opinion to be broadcast as well. With the combination of Professor Banzhaf’s complaint and the Fairness Doctrine, television stations had to open air time up to anti-smoking campaigns – for free.

Professor Banzhaf hadn’t intentionally started the anti-smoking crusade. In fact, after he wrote the original CNN complaint, he accepted a job with a law firm whose major client was Philip Morris, the nation’s leading cigarette manufacturer. Professor Banzhaf began to realize something.

“I was getting tremendous pay, and virtually no satisfaction,” he said. He decided that maybe being a public interest lawyer wouldn’t be too bad.

He took on the challenge of helping health organizations to run their anti-smoking ads. “There I was,” he said, “– just graduated from law school – and I saw the anti-smoking messages appear on the air. People came up to me saying, ‘You know, I saw your message on TV. I quit smoking.’ Somebody wrote an article and it said, ‘This young lawyer from Columbia Law School has probably saved more lives than any physician alive today.’ That’s pretty heavy stuff for someone who’s twenty-six. It literally turned me around.”

His own father quit smoking after the televised warnings first appeared.

Despite his influence in the area of public interest, Professor Banzhaf doesn’t view himself as an advocate. “I’m not a crusader. I look for areas where I can put in the least and get the most – the biggest bang for my buck. A three-page letter and an eight-cent stamp got hundreds of thousands of dollars for anti-smoking ads. You can’t get much better than that.”

According to Professor Banzhaf, everybody uses legal action in this day and age. For him personally, it’s a hobby. He said, “There have been a number of situations where I saw an article in the Washington Post and thought hey, I ought to get into that. Not because of any long-standing professional interest.” He throws himself into legal actions which interest him. In the ‘60’s it was anti-smoking; later on, it became obesity, then sexual discrimination in restroom facilities and now, differential health insurance premiums.

He maintained, “Since I don’t write law review articles, I have the same amount of time to put into legal activism – that is, using law in the real world.”