If he were not African-American, he would still be alive.
If she were not Muslim, she would still be alive.
If he were not disabled, he would still be alive.
If
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Monthly Archives: March 2012
Is there an Emmy for hair?
I love Justified. It just may be my second favorite TV show ever, after The Wire. The dialog is just amazing. For example, Raylan talking to a couple of thugs sent by the crime boss’s incompetent son: “And he keeps you around so he won’t always be the biggest asshole in the room.” Can’t tell you how many times that would have been a fun, accurate, but sadly unprofessional thing to say in various meetings I’ve attended. And it doesn’t start to capture the Sorkinesque speed and beauty of most of the conversations.
When Walton Goggins gets going as Boyd Crowder, you become convinced it’s your patriotic duty to vote for his corrupt candidate for sheriff rather than the other, equally corrupt, guy. (Note this is apparently taped direct from some dude’s TV. Fair use? I think so!)
This show should sweep the Emmys. But most of all, it deserves an Emmy for Dickie Bennett’s hair:
How not to settle a case with me
If you are in settlement negotiations with me, and it is your goal to make sure the case does not settle,* here are several things you can say:**
- My client is very emotional about having to comply with the regulations because he supports a disabled baseball team.
- My client is very emotional about having to comply with the regulations because he has Parkinson’s.
- I know you feel like you want to create a more enjoyable experience for the disabled, but that’s not what the statute requires.
- My client refuses to create an annuity for plaintiffs’ lawyers.
- With that damages demand, let’s just turn the state of California over to the disabled!
I realize I’m providing advice to my opposing counsel, but sometimes you just gotta reach out.
***************************
* There are many reasons why this might be a defense counsel’s goal: (1) Billable hours. (2) Billable hours. (3) Billable hours. … (n) Billable hours.
** All of these are real. Really.
Bangs gone bad
Got a haircut with bangs. Trying for this:
Thinking I ended up with this:
Sigh.
Why are some atheists such a**holes? Part Deux.
This billboard appeared in an African-American neighborhood of Harrisburg, PA. Did no one’s WTF Alarm go off?
When our office was downtown, many Fridays there was a group of people who would gather on the corner, literally wave Bibles, and yell at passersby to convert, be saved, etc. And not a “good news” sort of yelling; a “you’re gonna burn in hell” sort of yelling. I’d wonder, each time I saw them, “has anyone in the history of religion converted because they were yelled at?” I concluded that these people were not out on the corner to actually convert or save people, but to give themselves the warm fuzzy feeling of religious superiority.
The atheists behind this sign and the “Imaginary Friend” sign I wrote about earlier are cut from the same cloth. They’re just yelling at the rest of us that they’re right and we’re wrong. It’s not going to convince anyone, but — like the corner-yellers — it will give them the warm fuzzy feeling of religious superiority.
PT
I have lower back pain. Whatever. For the past ten years or so, I’ve been treating it with a combination of ignoring and whining. This year, when I noticed an unappealing tendency to grunt when doing complex tasks like sitting down in a chair and getting up from a chair, I decided to whine to my primary care doc, who prescribed physical therapy.
It’s only appropriate to note that Tim had been recommending this for years. He already has a lifetime of I-told-you-sos from the time I left the overhead lights on in the van at the airport for a week, which we discovered when we flew home at midnight, so I guess a few more won’t make any difference.
Anyway, my first PT appointment was last week, and the helpful PT figured out useful things about my spine and prescribed stretches. As we’ve previously established, I suck at stretches. So this week I did stretches. Occasionally. As I headed off to my second appointment this morning, I asked Tim, “What exactly is the point of repeated PT appointments? Do they just nag you to do your stretches?” He politely suggested that this would not be a total waste of time in my case.
It turns out the point of repeated PT appointment is to give you more stretches. I now have a routine of seven stretches I’m supposed to do morning and evening, and a different routine I’m supposed to do hourly sitting at my desk. At least one of them looks like a rude physical maneuver I’ve often suggested — though not to their faces — that opposing counsel attempt.
But this whole blog post was written about what came next. The last stretch the PT taught me involved taking this:
holding it between my back and the wall, and rolling it up and down. The stretch, she explained, is called “balls on the wall.” And then I performed the most strenuous stretch of all: deploying every muscle from my dorsal spinal lumbar stomach region all the way up to my eyebrows not to snicker. And to hold this exhausting non-snicker position through the entire demonstration.
And not once — NOT ONCE — to call it what it obviously is. Yes, folks, I’ll be doing the balls-to-the-wall stretch.
Tim has a blog!
Proving definitively that I married up in the brains department, Tim has started a blog called Data Sauce. In contrast to this blog, where I make up all of the numbers out of whole cloth, Tim actually does research and supports his arguments with data.
So head on over for some excellent writing, empirically-supported arguments, and the occasional hot sauce.
Why Google + is not working
Since I’m a gmail & Google Docs user, I signed up for Google +, immediately connected with six people, and am never motivated to check it once I’ve caught up with my peeps on Facebook. Apparently neither is anyone else. So Google dug deep into its vaunted stockpile of information about me — law nerd browsing habits, clothing orders from LL Bean and Lands End, Lifehacker addiction — and sent the following email designed to lure me back to Google +:
Uh, no. Thanks. Really, I’ll pass on another time sink, this one devoted to Victoria Justice’s new favorite hat, Britney Spears, and some random dude I’ve never heard of.
Thought Snax 