A Rasch of Bad Behavior

It's an interesting back-to-work kinda day when you see one of your law school classmates on CNN.

Also, read him in The Times, in the story about the latest Lulz Security hack:

Hacktivists tend to portray their activities as digital sit-ins, a form of protest. But security experts say their attacks often cause real damage to computer networks and financial losses. LulzSec has been more aggressive than most, and more brazen in its choice of targets.

“This is organized criminal activity that is typically distributed across many different countries,” said Mark Rasch, a former prosecutor in the Justice Department, who is director of security for CSC, a computer services company. “It’s a serious crime.”

I used to see Mark occasionally referenced in articles from his Justice Department days, but had never seen him on the telly before yesterday. The timing was interesting, because I'd just been thinking of him the other day in Manhattan- not on account of remembering him from there, but from a shared experience 400 miles away.

I met Mark late in my first year of law school. He was friends with one of my suddenly-new roommates midyear when my original landlord (an 80ish-year-old PhD grad student at UB, Spanish Civil War veteran on the losing side, redder than Karl Marx's brightest Sharpie, and owner of the dirtiest waffle iron in the universe which I think my sister STILL has nightmares about) lost his lease and we all had to move. Rick and Somebody were my new roomies in a Looney Acres upper, and Mark was friends with one, if not both, of them. He was a proud Noo Yawkah, the complete opposite of my already-begun effort to lose my accent, my in-your-faceyness, and all traces of having spent the first 17 years of my life down there.

At lunch one day, in a brilliant display of his future prosecutorial skills, Mark outed me.

"Bullshit, Ray. Everybody can tell where you're from. Look at how you're eating that pizza."

Sure enough, even though it was probably cafeteria Sicilian, I was making the inbred native move of folding the slice in half.

"Let me guess," he went on. "You never take the top newspaper in the pile but always go one or two down."

Guilty.

"Plus when you get it, and it's The Times, of course, you fold it just so, in order to do the crossword puzzle."

Double guilty.

"And you're from Lawn Guyland, right? So I bet you can name every stop on the Babylon line, in order."

Rockville Centre Baldwin Freeport Merrick Bellmore Wantagh Seaford Massapequa Massapequa Park Amityville Copaigue Lindenhoist and Babylon Guilty Guilty Guilty.

I hung my head in shame. My name is Ray, and I'm not a "downstater." I'm from the Oiland.

----

All of which had already come back into my head (including the station stops, which I just typed from memory despite not being anywhere near the LIRR) as I left Manhattan yesterday. Eating slices of pizza (from the wonderfully Met-friendly Two Boots Tavern) folded in the middle. And grabbing a Times, but not the top one, so I could fold it properly and do the puzzle on the Metro North heading back to my car.