Interesting Night

The wife and I are at Chili’s last night when I scurry off to the privy. I walk up to the urinal and, as I’m stopping, my right foot hits a wet spot and loses contact with the ground. Thankfully, I managed to plant the other foot and catch myself against the wall. I can’t imagine how bad it would have been to fall: you can normally assume that wet spots in restaurants are caused by spilled drinks, but a puddle directly underneath a urinal is, to say the least, not something I’d like to land in.

When the wife and I leave, we see the most interesting car I’ve seen in a while. It is a mid 1970’s model Cadillac with shiny metallic gold paint and spinner rims around ridiculously small tires. As much as I would love to roll with some wheels like those my car, I live about a mile from the place on I 45 where some guy was shot twice in the head for his rims.

Once we got home, I finally crawled out from under the rock and downloaded Firefox. About the only thing I like about Firefox more than Explorer is that Firefox lets me save my log in info for the grade checker website (Explorer would let me save the username and password, but I had to type in my SSN and PIN). This isn't particularly useful, however, as I normally open up the window as soon as I get out of bed and just continually refresh it. Regardless of the relative merits of the browers (before you castigate me p-man, I know it has security features blah blah blah), but I now get to join the pretentious ranks of Firefox users who mock IE people constantly.

shoot me

Great, it’s 3:30am the (early) morning after Christmas, and I just took my last two caffeine pills and am working on a paper. I honestly think my life will get easier once class starts and I’m done with this infernal brief.

epilogue: “Caffeine” has a funny spelling.

addendum: I really like the word “infernal.” That could be sign that I have too many brain cells devoted to Diablo II.

pocket part: If one were suffering from nighttime demonic possession (very similar to adverse possession), could they say that they have a nocturnal infernal internal problem?

cumulative supplement: I really need more sleep if I’m trying to make jokes like these; I don’t even want to think about how unreadable this brief is turning out.

More fun in downtown Houston

The wife and I are at the school working on the Law Review assignment from Hell when we decide to take a break and go have dinner. Planning on a bountiful feast at the lovely McDonald’s, we start walking to the car. When we were a half-block away from the corner of San Jacinto and Bell, we saw a group of yoots (about four guys in their late teens/early twenties) vandalizing the bus stop; they were knocking over the newspaper holders and throwing the papers around. I'm not sure how one would classify doing this as entertainment, but to each his own.

Not yet having a concealed weapon permit, we turned and walked back to the school. Being civic minded individuals, we called 911 to report the crime in progress. This part is fun. After twelve rings, a person picks up. She asked, in a very slurred and garbled voice, what city I’m in. I reply and, while I’m attempting to explain the situation, she abruptly transfers me. Once I start talking to the next person (who is equally difficult to understand), I explain the situation. She asks if I need fire, EMS or police. I was tempted to request a fire truck just to see the firefighters break out the axes, but I asked for the police. She then―again without warning―transfers me to some other person. This woman again asks if I need the police and then asks me what is going on. I explain the situation and she tells me that I need the Metro Police.

She then transfers me to the even more difficult to hear Metro Police, and I start to tell what happened. About three seconds into the narrative, she cuts me off. I had a full signal, the phone didn’t make the dropped call sound and have never dropped a call at that location (despite talking on my phone at that point twice a day for three semesters). I guess the Metro Police is too busy doing God-knows-what to try to stop a pillaging band of vagabonds who are blocking me from my car and thus my Extra Value Meal.

Stupid Canadians

Two interesting articles about Canada:

Canadian snipers lauded as experts in Afghan action


It appears some Canuck has broken the longstanding record for the longest sniper kill. A Canadian sniper (with US observer) dinged an Afghan at 2,430 meters. Though I’ve said some disparaging things about the Canadian military from time to time, you’ve got to respect them for dropping a guy at 1.5 miles. This beat the 35 year record of 2,250 meters set by American Carlos Hathcock.


Authority to 'chastise' Jews claimed


The point of this story is that a man on trial for his anti-Semitic blog is claiming the defense that he, by virtue of some ancient documents in his possession, has the scriptural authority to “chastise” Jews. Sadly, the crazy racist’s defense against criminal charges doesn’t include a freedom of speech argument (which would presumptively lose in Canada). That’s right, Canada — our ostensibly freedom-loving neighbor to the north — can and will bring criminal charges against you for pure speech on the internet. Not only that, but the Canadian news source reporting on it doesn’t even find the ‘prosecution for speech’ aspect notable enough to deserve comment. It’s times like this where I thank God that we have the ACLU.

Pork Chop Sandwiches

I spent a good hour at this website the day of the tax final (it really helped explain the interplay between §§195 and 212).

Back in the day, a staple of Saturday morning cartoon watching was the GI Joe show (go Joe!). At the end of each episode, they would give a stupid “knowing is half the battle” public service announcement. This wonderful website has taken these POS PSAs and replaced all of the dialog. They made the words match the mouth movements, so some of the statements make little to no sense.

Most of them are stupid, but these are some of the better ones:

when not to use a fire alarm

safety on and around frozen ponds *

fire safety while cooking *

not drinking your parents’ liqueur

skateboarding

dealing with stray dogs

bicycle safety


* Be ye’ warned, these have naughty language.

I think I had a minor heart attack

I logged onto the student inquiry system to check my exam number, and I decided I’d check my schedule to see what next semester’s finals schedule will be. It showed me this semester’s schedule, and something didn’t look right. I’m only taking four finals (evidence, property II, admin and tax), and it had a lot more entries. One was law review, so that’s ok. Another was Appellate Advocacy, so I wouldn’t need to take a final for it either. Also on the list was the wonderful 2 hour class Jurisprudence. I thought I’d dropped the class the second day of the semester. I hadn’t been to the class all semester and the final exam was last week. At this point I’m beginning to panic.

Suddenly, the wife calls to talk about one of our many cats. I know she’ll freak out if she finds out that I may have failed a course, so I can’t tell her until after I know for sure. After several awkward minutes, I get off the phone and run to the registrar. After typing furiously on her computer, the woman told me that the course is still on my schedule, but it is listed (on her computer) as being dropped. That was a truly terrifying ten minutes; it was about as bad as the time in undergrad I skipped a final exam.

the judge is a psycho hose-beast

The other day I made a totally amazing, excellent discovery by finding the case of Noble v. Bradford Marine, 789 F. Supp. 395 (S.D. Fla. 1992). It’s a standard procedure case about subject matter jurisdiction in a removal case. I will offer a brief synopsis of the facts with actual quotations from the court’s opinion. A boat owned by the defendant caught fire and began "hurling chunks" of flaming debris into the air; this ignited the plaintiff’s vessel. The case was filed in state court, removed to federal court and remanded back, as all the defendants failed to join the removal. When all hopes of removal seemed gone, "like a winged monkey flying out of the ashes," the defendants came together to file a supplemental notice of removal. Though this removal came after the 30 deadline to remove, it was tolled because of the previous attempt to remove. "Not!" The defendants argument concerning an alternate source of admiralty jurisdiction was just "a schwing and a miss." The attempt at removal was "not worthy" and the parties were forced to "party on in state court".

It must be fun to be that judge’s clerk.

On a related note, I had an 11th grade English assignment of writing a poem. I couldn’t think of a topic, so I decided to go with a theme: I would write the poem with the sole intent of working in as many Metallica song titles as possible. I have a copy of it somewhere at home, but it ended up with about 30 songs in a single page, and wasn’t too bad. While the whole thing was a well received discussion of the perils and pitfalls of choosing a major, it came off as distinctly suicidal. My friends told me it appeared I was considering killing myself by self-immolation. I would never do such a thing because everyone knows that only anti-war hippies light themselves on fire. Losers.

I realize that was a boring story, but I needed a break from studying.

UPDATE! One of our loyal readers (codename: Smoke-Smoke) has forwarded the follow reference that she herself penned. In the case of Longoria v. Kelly Services*, 2005 WL 1866145 (S.D. Tex. 2005), one Mary Moreno Longoria filed a sexual harassment suit. She argued, inter alia, that she was offended by the use of the term “mojo”; the plaintiff believed the term to be a synonym for the main reproductive organ. Foot note 16 of the opinion, however, defines the meaning of the term and offers the following note: “‘[m]ojo was widely popularized by the movie character . . . Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (New Line Productions 1999).

I would like to applaud this footnote for two reasons. First, and certainly most noticeable, is the use of the full word “Productions” instead of the abbreviation “Prods.” To a casual observer, this is failure to properly abbreviate as per Table 6 of the Bluebook. Your humble blogger is not, however a casual bluebooker. “Prods.” is reserved exclusively as the abbreviation for “products,” and thus would be an improper abbreviation for “productions.”

Also laudable is the title given Mr. Powers. He is not simply “Austin Powers,” but “Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery,” much as my sister is Rachel Lastname, M.D. or I am Sam Jur, B.A.

law school comes full circle

I’m working on my property II outline when I get to recording statutes. I’m trying to come up with a concise explanation for the effect of notice under a race-notice statute. Without even thinking about it, I wrote “lack of notice is not enough, it only gets your nose in the tent.”

Professor Moore would be proud.


UPDATE: upon request from Darcy (Striker!), here is my lovely ASCII camel from the outline.



UPDATE II (to the wife): challenge accepted:

The ASCITTY