An e-mail from my civil procedure professor last week:

"A brief note to those of you who are playing computer games during class. I hope you're paying close enough attention to what's going on in the room that you occasionally fail to put a red nine on a black ten!"

A follow-up today:

"In my last e-mail, I tried to joke people out of playing computer games in class, but I guess that wasn't a complete success. You have every right to be bored, of course, but I don't believe it's fair to those around you to try to relieve the boredom that way. Give day-dreaming a chance."

Awesome. He's right that it's awfully distracting to see all the people around you playing solitaire, hearts, minesweeper -- or on rare occassions, even kung-fu fighting games, tetris-like block-falling games, and snood-like ball-shooting games. Not that I'm totally innocent of all this -- I haven't yet resorted to playing games in class, but I sometimes start changing the color scheme of my screen, gratituously running the spell-check on my class notes, or playing with Word's autotext feature to make "sc" turn into supreme court automatically, "jur" into "jurisdiction," and, perhaps my biggest autotext triumph, having "oms" turn into "objective manifestation of subjective intent." You wouldn't believe how often that comes in handy. But I do (perhaps mistakenly) take the moral high ground since I don't play solitaire. What's most distracting is when the guy or girl next to me wins and the cards fall down like springs across the screen. Very hard not to be sucked in. Mind-numbing...