I used to be disgusted. Now I try to be amused. — Elvis Costello
Pre-trial quote of the day
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Monthly Archives: May 2011
Why I love videoconference depositions
Because I only have to dress up from the waist up and can wear
badass socks out of camera range.
What would you do for serrano-wrapped dates?
UPDATE (August 19, 2012):
Tim and I went back to the 9th Door today and had a great time. The seating had been improved significantly. All of the low benches and sofas were gone, replaced by very accessible four-tops. Spanish music had replaced the techno. Everyone’s attitude was fabulous. And of course the food remains spectacular.
ORIGINAL POST (May 22, 2011):
Turns out, Tim and I would put up with a fairly annoying level of discrimination and techno music for this tasty treat. We went to our favorite tapas joint last night — Denver’s 9th Door. We’ve always known that an evening at 9th Door is a trade-off between amazing food and a deeply annoying hipster-and-techno-music ambiance. But we’ve been there many times and always been seated politely. Last night, the manager decided we were a fire hazard.
You know how there are phrases that just signal discrimination, that members of minority groups hear often — each time from someone thinking he is original — demonstrating conclusively that you are different, outside, etc. For example, saying an African-American is “articulate,” or an Asian is a “model minority,” or a Jewish name is “delightful.”* Well, nothing says “other” better than calling you a fire hazard.
We got there at our usual old-fogie, early-bird-special hour and the manager showed us to a two-top — one we had occupied on a number of previous occasions — and then started vocally fretting about how she could arrange us so that neither Tim nor I would be a fire hazard. In one arrangement, I would have been sitting in the aisle. She rejected this, causing Tim to tell the rather chubby manager, “she’s only 105** pounds, she won’t take up the whole aisle.” Oh snap! Following much dramatic table-dragging and eye-rolling, we were seated, after which, of course, the entire length of the aisle she was worried about immediately filled up with annoying hipsters, posing a far more serious, non-wheelchair-related, fire hazard.
A word about techno music. Does. Anyone. Like. That. Shit? OK, 5 words. It seems to me to have been composed by lab rats seeking revenge for whatever we’ve done to them in the name of science. Hey, Rats – here’s your data: techno music makes me want to rip my own ears off. Now make it stop.
But I swear to God it was all worth it.
Dátiles: Crispy Serrano ham-wrapped dates stuffed with almonds and drunken goat cheese
Pimientos del Piquillo Rellenos: Fire-roasted piquillo peppers stuffed with fresh goat cheese and rosemary
Aged Manchego cheese with membrillo Cabrales blue cheese with almonds and honey Cabra cheese with dried fig chutney
Alcachofas a la Plancha: Crispy pan-fried artichoke hearts with lemon-thyme aioli
Croquetas de Hongos: Mushroom and rice croquette with sherry wine and mushroom sauce
Albóndigas: Traditional lamb meatballs served in a delicate Moorish mint almond sauce
Extra-bonus sexism. See if you can spot it in their menu blather:
On Spain’s Costa del Sol, located between Malaga and Marbella, sits a quiet little mountain village called Mijas.
During the summer of 1969, after having been made famous by James Michener’s novel The Drifters, Mijas had become an expatriate community of writers and poets. On lazy afternoons, these expats would gather at their favorite bar – one without a name, recognizable only by the number nine that was carved into the door.
Behind the 9th door, they would imbibe on the local wine and brandy and share the tapas of the house, trading stories and reciting poetry to the local women until the early hours of the morning.
Raise your hands if the first time you read the words “expatriate community of writers and poets” you pictured a mixed group of men and women. Ha! Fooled you! Or maybe I’m just being heteronormative: male and female expat writers and poets could all have been seducing the local women. Of this I’m confident: no techno music was involved.
***************
* OK, this one might not make sense out of context. Here’s the context: I’m half Jewish, half, well, WASP. When discussing a friend of mine with one of my older WASPy cousins, he responded to hearing the guy’s name by laughing out loud, repeating it over and over, saying “how delightful!” Not an anti-Semetic bone in his body, but almost nothing could have made me feel more “other” at that moment.
** This reflects the historically accurate weight stated on my driver’s license. Let’s just say: it’s up for renewal this year.
Law Nerd Heaven
If you’re not watching The Killing, you should be. It’s an incredible series, right up there behind The Wire as far as I’m concerned for Best TV Show Ever. But it endeared itself to this Law Nerd when the last episode discussed one of my favorite, slightly obscure, legal topics: organizational standing — citing, by name, to the leading case, Hunt v. Washington State Apple Advertising Commission.
I realize this will be meaningful to only a small fraction of my readership (which might at this point be measure in fractions of actual human bodies). But it made my night!
One Simple Graph Explains Lawyer Stress
I’m a law nerd. Out and proud. Give me an interesting legal question, access to my Westlaw account, and a steady supply of seltzer and pasta, and I’ll be happy for days. I’m also privileged to have the world’s best law partner (my husband) and the world’s coolest co-counsel, with essential qualities like a sense of humor, appreciation for good beer, and knowledge of excellent restaurants. Oh, yeah, and they’re really freaking smart lawyers, too.
Why, then, would I ever experience stress?* I submitted this question to the world’s most powerful computer, which analyzed years of data in the form of briefs, letters, and emails in my cases, applied a complex algorithm** decades in development, and came up with the following answer: The Merits:Bullshit Ratio. It is best understood as a graph:
This means, for example, that in the brief we will receive next week, the bullshit level will be at the far right-hand side of the chart. The question at issue is very simple, and we’re right.*** So why should I stress? Because the extremely low level of merit in the defendant’s position means — I promise you, this is a scientific fact — there will be an extremely high level of bullshit.
You lawyers know I’m right on this. When you’re briefing a complex, interesting, multi-faceted question with some merit on both sides, the briefs tend to be substantive and relatively mature. When you’re simply flat-out correct, and your opponent has no real argument, his briefs are filled with arguments that are the legal equivalent of “I’m rubber, you’re glue,” “takes one to know one,” and “you’re a poopyhead.” In addition, of course, the level of italicized text goes up. Further computer analysis generated this chart:
Having achieved the first part of our research goal (the charts above), I have asked the computer to generate a solution to the stress that results from reading too much bullshit. Preliminary results indicate that the solution involves beer. Stay tuned.
****************
* There are two other well-known reasons for lawyer stress. One is the stress people feel when they really don’t want to be lawyers. This is not my problem: I really really love being a lawyer; I just hate the bullshit. The other reason is trying to balance your lawyer-life with your family-life. I have solved this problem by completely merging the two. It’s not for everyone, but it works for us!
** I love that word. Does it really mean anything other than “equation”? I don’t think so but it makes you sound really cool!
*** We’re always right. That’s why we take the cases we take. Only civil defense counsel get paid to represent wrong positions. If our client has a wrong position, we don’t eat or pay the rent.
Emotional correctness
No one was going to tell me how to mourn Paul Wellstone’s death, and no one is going to tell me how to celebrate Osama bin Laden’s death.
After Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash in 2002, his funeral became a catharsis for those who loved his brand of popular liberalism and had chafed at the pearl-clutching right-wing-defined patriotic correctness that had settled in after the initial bout of unity following the 9/11 attacks. These were Wellstone’s friends and his political allies, experiencing the unexpected trauma of his death in a plane crash, during the period when that news was still raw. It would have been an excellent opportunity for conservatives to shut the fuck up, as a polite individual might when talking to family members of some recently deceased jerk. You would not tell the jerk’s spouse or parents that however they had chosen to express their grief at the funeral was inappropriate. You would don your poker face and say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Yet the former was the uniform conservative — and then, in those days, inevitable mainstream media — response: Liberals didn’t mourn correctly.
I think what’s saddest, to be honest, is the defensive tone of the Media Matters link, “debunking” the “myth” that Wellstone’s funeral was a political rally. I say: fuck yeah! He was an unabashedly liberal politician; an upbeat, funny, articulate guy. He would have loved for his funeral to be a political rally. The only problem was in the heads and hearts of the critics for not understanding this, and in their brain/mouth filter for not stopping the absurd criticism of the mourners before it left their mouths or keyboards.
This criticism was heard again in response to the memorial service for the folks who died recently in Tucson and in the aftermath of Ted Kennedy’s death. As someone who has lost a close family member I can say this: anyone telling me how to mourn will be kicked somewhere painful.
Anyway, I had thought it was the province of conservatives to tell us how we should feel — to dictate emotional correctness — following traumatic national events. But in the past few days, I’ve seen scolding from the left about celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden. Gimme a break! This is a guy who killed 3000 civilians in one day within our borders, and is responsible for all sorts of other death and mayhem around the world. We get a day or two of emotional catharsis. I think this scolding reached the point of caricature in an article — I can’t find the link now — in which we were chided for celebrating bin Laden’s death when there were thousands of American children going hungry each night. So we’re not allowed to celebrate solving one gigantic, hard-to-solve problem until we’ve solved them all?
Per the bumpersticker: “Fuck Yeah” is not a Foreign Policy. So if our entire response to bin Laden’s demise is celebratory swearing, it will be a mistake. But fer pete’s sake — we get a night or two of jubilation that a bunch of kick-ass American soldiers took out a global menace.
Documenting the gelled mullet
Over on my brother’s truly funny blog, he fesses up to a Jim McMahon-style gelled mullet, but only offers indirect proof, that is, in the form of a photo of Jim McMahon. I, however, have definitive proof of the actual Robertsonian gelled mullet:
My law school graduation in 1988. I have several other compelling memories from that day, besides the usual getting a diploma, completing a major educational stage in my life, facing the future, blah blah blah. I seem to recall that Dad spent most of the photography time trying to get Bruce to take off his sunglasses. Ooops. I also recall a wonderful family dinner at which Bruce and I had a great time making fun of the way the waiter said the word “Calvados” … not because we were great connoisseurs of French brandy, but because we’d never heard of it before and thought it sounded hilarious.
Thought Snax 
