Monthly Archives: February 2011

Nerds in South Beach

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Tim and I spent three lazy days in South Beach, defrosting after a long, cold Denver winter.  This is sort of a photoblog of our trip.  Enjoy — and at least have the decency to be a little jealous!

We stayed at a hotel right on Ocean Avenue.

with a very hip lobby

The first day brought a very unusual event:  Tim and Amy eating breakfast at 10:30.

Tim chose the restaurant.  Wonder why?

The great thing about breakfast at 10:30 is that there is very little elapsed time between breakfast and happy hour.  Say, 20 minutes.

After our first night, when we had the pleasure of finally meeting Matt and Debbie Dietz for dinner, but the misfortune of sitting in causeway traffic to get there, we decided to ditch the van and just goof around South Beach.  This mostly involved rolling/roller blading around, soaking up sun, and people watching.

We connected with some great food, including the famous Joe’s Stone Crab.  Mmmm!  Curry aioli, where have you been all my life?

While New York may have the Met and Washington, the Smithsonian, South Beach apparently has its own intellectual life.

So sorry Laura Hershey is not around to see this, though I would have had to confess to her — and she would have gotten to make fun of us for — the fact that we didn’t, um, take a tour.

I’m not at all sure what this museum is about:


or these excellent public murals:

The water was gorgeous

Though as we’ve previously established, I don’t swim.

Saw some local wildlife

And the city was obviously trying to make Denverites feel at home with a random blue bear statue:

I loved the architecture, especially against the blue sky.

So very sorry that we ever had to come back to reality!

We’ll miss you, Judge Williams.

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“Are y’all some kind of thrillseeker?”  That was the question to litigants who were stupid or ballsy enough to defy Judge Richard Williams’s courtroom procedures or, God forbid, direct order.  I had the honor to clerk for him the year after I graduated, and Tim and I were lucky enough to persuade him to marry us in 1993.  Now, with deepest sadness, I mourn his passing.

I can’t begin to list all the things I learned from my clerkship year with Judge Williams.  He was a brilliant jurist, a gentle and good-humored teacher, and a hilarious storyteller.  Late last year when my friend Laura Hershey passed, I explained how she was part of my Mental Greek Chorus.  Well, Judge Williams is right there in my head every time I stand up before a Court or sit down at my computer to write a motion or brief.  I aspire to be both smart enough and professional enough that I would not risk his good-natured admonition.

Herewith some random photos and memories.

Chambers the year I clerked:  Randy; Spence; Maria; Skip; Mark; and of course, The Judge.

Others will do a better job of telling his story; even the outline is amazing.  Raised on a peach orchard in rural Virginia and educated in a one room schoolhouse, he joined the army and ended up surviving the attack on Pearl Harbor.  After the war, he benefited from (in his words) “the biggest affirmative action program of all time,” and attended the University of Virginia and UVa law school on the GI Bill.  He was in private practice in Richmond, then served on the state bench before being appointed by President Carter to the federal bench.

Learning from the Judge went far beyond the courtroom.  In chambers, we heard stories from his practice and his tenure as a judge that were generally hilarious and ultimately provided an education toward the legal Holy Grail:   how to be a good advocate, while being professional to your colleagues and opponents, and keeping a sense of humor about the whole business of law.  My only complaint is that he completely spoiled us.  I left my clerkship after a year expecting the practice of law to be as fair, learned, efficient, and humorous as I had experienced in Judge Williams’s chambers.  Alas, this turns out not to be the case.

He was also a learned naturalist, and both during the clerkship and during later visits to Denver, we had long, educational hikes with the Judge and his wife, Gene.  I became very comfortable answering the Judge’s Socratic questions about my bench memos.  What I didn’t realize is that this this mode of interaction would extend to the natural world, as well.  When we hiked near Richmond,

I was happy to learn (= internalize briefly) the names of the local flora and fauna.  When we hiked Waterton Canyon near Denver,

it turned out I was actually supposed to know things about the natural world near my adopted home town.  The dialog went something like this:

Judge:     What is that?

Me:        A bird.

Judge:    And that?

Me:        A tree.

I think he came away very relieved that I had only been his law clerk, and that he had not had to rely on me for Birding Memos.  During that visit, we also took the Judge to a Rockies game

and, if memory services, convened an “investment opportunity” — of the seven-card variety — in our apartment with former clerk Sunhee Juhon and her husband, Arthur Hodges.  We called the judge “Judge.”  Once during an “investment opportunity” at the Judge’s cabin, my co-clerk Mark Batten called him “Coach.”  Although it didn’t stick (and probably would not have been preferred) it was accurate.  He was our coach, during our clerkship year and after.

Judge Williams was also — for some unknown and, for us, heartwarming reason — a big John Elway fan.

When we sent him a jersey one year, we were very pleased to get back the photo above, which remains one of my favorites of him.  But my all time favorite is this:

Of all the wonderful things Judge Williams brought to my life, marrying Tim and me was the one for which I am the most grateful.

Today we attended his funeral and met and heard stories from many of the people whose lives he had touched.  It’s hard to believe I’ll never again hear his gravel-inflected voice telling us a rip-roaring tale of the cast of characters who populated his practice and his courtroom.

We’ll miss you, Judge.  Thank you.

New Business Plan

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Here is our existing business plan:

  • Focus your legal practice on a statute that permits liability to be established using a tape measure and smart level.  No sobbing witnesses who later turn out to be axe murderers.  Just data.
  • Establish the data incontrovertibly.  Tape measures + photos.  Occasionally add in a jointly-selected, court-appointed expert.
  • Hear from even your most civil — even friendly — defendant that while you’re likely right and will likely prevail, it is economically preferable to the defendant to keep litigating for a few more years.  Unless of course you’d like to cut your fees in half.  (The defendant at the other end of the spectrum has kept this up for 8 years.  Someday, it will be our annuity.)

Here is my Alternative Business Plan

  • Find smart friends to write simple software connecting a database to document images.
  • Print money.
  • Buy bonbons & retire.

My alternative plan comes from our recent experience with document software.  We’ve had one program — rhymes (almost) with Mummification — since we started our practice, dutifully shelling out $2,500 per year for a supremely annoying program that, for us, is basically a flat Excel file attached to a bunch of document images.  We decided not to pay last year; this year we find ourselves needing the software again and have to pay a penalty to start up again:  all fees in arrears plus one year going forward.  That’s right, our reward for 15 years of faithful patronage is to be charged twice what we’d be charged if we were signing up for the first time.

Did I mention how annoying Mummification’s software is?

Their chief competitor wants $6,000 just to get started.  Won’t name them either, but in the spirit of Talking Back to Westlaw, I’ll just say:  nothing says cutting edge legal software like a middle aged white guy in a bowler hat apparently literally being put out to pasture.

And the supposedly small-firm-friendly upstart enthuses over the phone that the “software is free!  it’s all web-based!  you just pay for storage!”  That’s right, $1,600 PER MONTH to store the documents in our biggest case on their servers when we just paid several thousand dollars for a two terabyte* server, not to mention the Citrix server that lets our beloved co-counsel have the privilege of hating on Mummification as much as we do working on the case remotely.

So seriously, my computer-nerd friends — and you know who you are, especially the one I’m married to — this just can’t be that hard. Database + Images = Bonbons.  Let’s get to work!

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* We have terabytes right there in our office!  Isn’t that cool!?  I love that word!

A Night out in Denver (NSFV)*

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Took Tim out for dinner for his birthday, and decided to try a new steak joint.  We’re generally devoted fans of the bar at Sullivan’s.  Excellent steaks, copious side dishes, live jazz, and sports on TV.  It’s so therapeutic we’ve come to call it “Dr. Sullivan’s.”

But last night we decided to try the Capital Grille.  While the steak was fantastic and the dessert one of the best ever, I’m not sure how I feel about the ambiance.  This was the view from my seat:

That’s right, moose nostril.  Mmmmm!  Tim’s view was even scarier:  a much-bigger-than-life portrait of Adolph Coors.**  And just to underscore that we are definitely not in DC anymore, Toto, we had the opportunity to take in some uniquely Denveresque culture:

For those of you too lazy to click on the photo, it says:

Art of Winter: An Outdoor Gallery of Ski and Snowboard Art

So ha! you coastal types who ridicule our art scene.  Do YOU have ski and snowboard art at MoMA?  at the National Gallery?  at the de Young?  Didn’t think so.  Did I mention the dessert?  It really was incredible!

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*Not Safe for Vegetarians.

**Sorry, no photo – I had just made a major dork of myself with the moose nostril photos.

Early-adopters and never-let-goers

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Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup is a wonderful book for many reasons.  For example, anyone who has kept a vigil for a loved one in the ICU will not want to miss Buckley’s hilarious updates from his father’s hospital bed.  But the part that rang the truest for me was his description of his father’s devotion to WordStar.  Remember WordStar?  William F. Buckley was apparently an early user of this ancient word processing program, and would be goddamned if he was going to give it up, even as it required extensive and increasingly energetic technical support.*

My father, too, was an early-adopter/never-let-goer.

Throughout our childhood, he always talked about wanting to be the first kid on the block to have a Buck Rogers Ring.  I think that was something related to a comic book that came in a cereal box or something.  Bruce and I did what we always did with pronouncements like this:  ignored it.  Turns out it would not have been a bad thing if he had actually gotten a Buck Rogers Ring and, say, held onto it so he could bequeath it to his kids:  http://www.hakes.com/item.asp?Auction=199&ItemNo=86752

Anyway, Dad led the pack in buying things like a Polaroid camera.  The first one looked like this:

and required him to apply some vile smelling chemical** to the photo with a tiny squeegee.  The final Polaroid camera looked like this:

and produced color photos that would develop before your eyes.  I think that was the last camera he owned.

Dad was also a very early adopter of the cell phone.  He was a big telephone talker, which was really annoying when we had kid activities on his agenda and he just had to finish up a few more words with, say, Al Blumrosen, but a huge boon when I was living in Taiwan and he was willing to ignore the killer international phone rates to call up and chat.  The cell phone opened up vast new parts of his life during which he could talk on the phone, though it often seemed that its primary use was calling us from the driveway to help him carry things into the house.

Kids today probably barely remember roaming charges; back when my Dad bought his first cell phone, there were roaming numbers.  To contact a cell phone owner who had traveled away from home, you’d have to dial some sort of access number first.  As Dad drove from Washington to New York — a trip he made often — we’d have to guess where in the journey he was and call the appropriate number:

My favorite example of his early adopting/not let going was his word processing . . .  machine.   Dad had a very early word processor called a Lexitron, and in my memory it had green text on a black screen and was approximately the size of an upright piano.  A Google Image search reveals that I was only slightly off on the size:

Dad started using this beast sometime in the late 70s or early 80s.  As I recall, the only advantage the Lexitron had over a typewriter was that you could draft your document on the screen before printing it.  While that was a huge advantage, you had to do all the formatting manually:  hard returns; footnotes; pages; etc.

When he passed in 1997, the machine was still in his office.  While his secretary had kept up with PC technology, he had never moved on from the Lexitron’s green and black screen.  She later told us that when she showed him how to put a music CD in her desktop PC, he exclaimed, “the typewriter is playing phonograph records!”

From time to time, I try to imagine what he would think of the technological world as we now know it.  The summer before he passed, he sent his first email and looked at his first website.  He just couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about until I found a copy of the Code of Federal Regulations online in a click or two.  Government nerd catnip!

I’m guessing he would be a staunch defender of books printed on dead trees rather than streamed to a tablet, Kindle, or iPad*** and that the world of Facebook and Twitter would have been lost on him.  But I think he would have been a world-class texter.  He loved his cell phone primarily because he loved to stay in touch with people and he was a big writer of long, newsy letters to my brother and me, and to other family members.  I’m guessing the ability to write to his kids and grandkids from his cell phone would have been irresistible.

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*  This is not comparable to my continuing use of WordPerfect, which I do not because I am an aging conservative political commentator incapable of keeping up with technology, but because WORDPERFECT IS A BETTER PROGRAM.  Think of it this way:  Word is McDonald’s; WordPerfect is your local farmer’s market.

** Who are we kidding?  I LOVED the smell of Polaroid developing chemicals, almost as much as I love the smell of magic markers!

*** He often opined that if God had intended baseball bats to be made of metal, He would have made metal trees.  I’m guessing the response to the Kindle would have been similar.

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UPDATE:  My brother has a “camera museum” of Dad’s old cameras and reminded me that one of his real early adopter feats was the Minox:

I’m guessing he got this in the 50s or 60s sometime.   Maybe we really were a Russian spy family!

Bruce also had a photo of the actual original Polaroid:

I would also like to note that we have a history of museums in our family.  None of us is very good at getting rid of things, even when we replace them.  For example, the kitchen in our summer house featured a toaster museum: