Bull Moose Strikes Back

I think I’ve found something that will help keep blogging fresh: making comic strips.

Here is my first attempt, based on a true story:

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Thanks for reading this blog over the last year. Even though the couple thousand or so unique users that we draw a day makes this blog small potatoes, it’s fun to know someone is interested in what I – or rather what my blog persona – has to say.

Not surprisingly I had an increase in readership in this election year, but people from all over the world are coming in from a wide variety of searches and referrers. A lot of people came looking for a take on part-time law school, some came in for politics. One person came in on a search for “cartoon caveman shows with a baby that had alot [sic] of snot.” I don’t know what I’ve ever written that would help out with that, but I hope I could help.

If you have linked me, thanks a million.

The focus of this blog over the last three-and-a-half years was supposed to be about my experiences as a white, conservative, hetero breeder returning to academia at a school where those characteristics aren’t exactly treasured. Now I’m not sure what to do. I guess I’ll just go back to the Althousian mix of whatever piques my interest or annoys me that day (if I ever really left it).

I’m thinking about starting a blog with my real name attached this year – a blawg about regional happenings in the law. Most of the lawyers around here are long in the tooth and scared of “the internets” so the upside is there is some room for a blawg like that which I can use to make connections. The downside is trying to get those same long in the tooth lawyers to subscribe to an RSS feed of such a blawg. So I may be splitting my writing between two blogs.

However, I have a feeling with the bar exam, my first year in practice, year one of President Obama, and life as a dad marching on, I’ll have a lot to say in 2009 that I don’t want potential employers/clients to be able to easily find, so BMSB will go on. I’m looking forward to it all, and I wish you all a fantastic 2009!

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It’s that time of year again: Orthodox Festivus. I pull the Festivus Pole out from behind the Christmas Tree and perform feats of strength. Unfortunately for you, you can’t join me for those. Fortunatly for you, you are able to read my grievances:

• We’ll get the annual eggnog shake-related grievance out of the way. Silverdale McDonald’s:  I would never eat there for lunch except for the lure of the eggnog shake (and in March the Shamrock shake). So it’s a little bit infuriating when their shake machine is broken on Christmas Eve day and I’m stuck in the drive-in line.
• The 1 in 5 HDTV owners who can’t tell the difference between HD and SD are legally blind: Why is this one of the biggest problems that the adoption of HD faces? The difference between SD and HD is the same as the difference between black and white and color.  (And anti-grievance to DirecTV who has done a very good job in correcting their former “HD Lite” problem this year. It still can’t compare to Blu Ray / HD DVD, but an episode of “Friday Night Lights” on the 101 looks very pristine.)
• The People who felt the need to yell at me when I had a flat tire on my motorcycle on I-5: May someone laugh at your accident on the freeway one day. And may it be a single-car fatality.
• Football coaches, especially Badger and Packer coaches, who haven’t figured out that the prevent only prevents the win: I only enjoy fourth quarter comebacks if my team is the one coming back.
• The Bremerton K-Mart: Yes, combine K-Mart and Bremerton and it is as horrible as you’d expect. However, that’s not the problem. I’ll accept the terribleness for what it is when I go in there because something is on sale for an awesomely low price or because it is the closest store of its kind. What I don’t care for is the fact that they let salesman for other companies ambush their customers inside the store. One minute I’m looking for kitty litter, the next I’m trying to get away from a guy pitching me storm windows.
• Every other retail store I was in this year: No, I don’t want your credit card. And you know what? No one else needs them either. We need to stop basing our economy, budgets, and government on stupid amounts of crappy debt.
• The City of Seattle: When it snows you let the city fall into anarchy because you refuse to use salt on the icy roads. Why exactly? Environmental reasons? Salt is used on the roads from Montana to Maine, and the perch and trout are just fine. I know it is horrifying to think of all the salt draining down to the salt water of Puget Sound and then emptying with the tide into the Pacific Ocean, aka Asia’s toilet.
• Brett Favre: So… what was the point of all of that then?
• Ben Sheets: That’s a fantastic time you picked to get hurt there. Worked out great, thanks.
• Michael Phelps: I understand the need to cash in while the cashing in is good, but can we expect to ever see you in a pool again?
• Fellow half-marathoners who felt the need to give me a thumbs-up or some other patronizing gesture: Yeah, I know, you don’t see many people my size on the course, so you just can’t help yourself. But I wouldn’t have been out there if I hadn’t been preparing for it. Here is the equivalent: I see a 170 pound guy kicking your 110 pound ass, and I give you a thumbs up for hanging in there against what would be an easy fight for me to win.
• People who use self-checkout stations even though you know you are going to get your ass kicked by it: Please, for the love of God, stop. If you are over 65 or didn’t graduate high school or could never set the clock on your VCR, you really need to ask yourself whether you think following simple prompts from a computer is something you can handle in less time than it would take to wait in line at a human checkout stand. Especially if there is a membership or savings card involved. Especially if it is lunchtime and the regular check-stands aren’t that crowded to start with. Especially if I am behind you in line.
• Related to the above are people who still write checks in retail stores: Are you trying to commit fraud? Then why are you writing a check? I love standing there while the clerk writes down your two forms of ID, runs the check through the computer, and then calls her supervisor when your check makes the computer beep. Maybe you can weigh out some gold dust next time, that might take a little longer and my ice cream can melt completely.
• People who are complaining about gas prices plummeting: Don’t think I haven’t noticed the huge overlap of people complaining about low gas prices with the people constantly crying a river about the working poor. One of the biggest things the working poor need is cheap fuel. Yeah, yeah, alternative energy… this is how this thing is going to play out: If there is an end to the foreign supply, the world will use it up. The price will rise as the third world comes online and the oil supply drops.  At some point some threshold will be crossed where we’ll use our domestic supply of oil while we figure out alternative energy (and ironically, we’ll have Democratic drilling obstructionist from the last 20 years to thank for the reserve). I’m not saying that’s ideal; I’m saying that’s the economic reality.
• Everyone on both sides who made this last election intolerable: It’s hard to make me see an up side to living in a dictatorship, yet you did it.

I guess that’s enough for 2008. I hope that 2009 is much less annoying.

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There has been a series of commercials for some car company about the best Christmas presents of your life. After watching my kids tear into their presents last Thursday, I started thinking about what they would remember and what would not, and what I remembered from Christmas as a kid. The best presents I remember in no particular order:

• Blue plastic pedal car – probably 1977. I hardly remember this, but I remember being devastated when it got backed over in the driveway. Fortunately, I wasn’t in it. There is some good 8mm footage of my 29 year old father,  his 27 year-old brother (then a Lieutenant in the USMC, now a Major General), and their kid brother with a ridiculous ’70’s mustache and haircut, putting it together on Christmas morning.
• Atari 2600 – 1981ish. What could be better than controlling a block around the screen, hiding amongst bigger blocks and shooting smaller blocks at another block? Nothing. At least in 1981. Plus, at 7 years-old I could play all the games for the system (pre-Custer’s Revenge) without needing a clinical psychologist down the road; I won’t let my kids look at the cover for half the games in my Xbox 360 library. Officially, I was to share this system with my little brother, but he was too young to play it for years, so it was all mine!
• Nintendo Entertainment System – 1987. This was the last video game system that was purchased for me. I bought my own Sega Genesis a few years later and then didn’t own a system of my own again until the original Xbox. This one gets knocked down a peg because I had to share it with my brother and even my little sister. We got the system with the light gun (Duck Hunt was awesome) and the Power Pad (which sucked, but gave a hint to the direction Nintendo always wanted to head and would perfect with the Wii). Even the eventual onset of blinking cartridge syndrome (the late ’80’s equivalent of the Red Ring of Death) couldn’t mar this present.
• IBM PCjr – 1984. This is probably the present that had the biggest positive effect on my life than any other present I ever got or probably ever will get. (See a commercial for it here, and an overview of the machine here.) I really wanted a computer after seeing War Games. Commodore, Apple, and Atari dominated the home computer market at the time, and PCs were for businesses. IBM had an idea that was ahead of its time – bringing a cheap IBM compatible computer into homes. However, they were IBM so they screwed it up by over hyping the product and limiting expansion to a proprietary design. (I never had a problem with the much pissed on keyboard. I liked the early attempt at IR wireless.) In the days before you could head down to Best Buy and pick up an eMachine for $299, home computers were expensive and purchased at specialty boutiques. The PCjr was the perfect computer for a third grader who wanted a computer. It was relatively cheap for a PC (1000 1984 dollars for the package including a 5.25″ floppy drive and monitor) and accessible. While the PCjr flopped in the market, it was successful in my house. I was computer literate ahead of my time. By the time PCs in houses became commonplace I already knew how to operate a DOS computer, I learned how to type fast, and I got a good base of layman’s knowledge about how computers work. Making this present a little more memorable is the fact that my parents pulled a Christmas Story on me, making me think I wasn’t getting it and then “finding” it in the stack of my late-sleeping uncle’s presents (the goofy ’70’s hair uncle from above.)
• Huffy dirt bike with mag wheels – 1982. When you give a boy in a semi-rural area a bike, you’re giving him more than a bike, you’re giving him freedom. With no public transportation, parents who declare that they aren’t a taxi service, and friends and play fields miles away, if you don’t have a bike you might as well not exist. I rode that Huffy with inexplicably high quality mag wheels through tens of concussions until it fell apart, literally. The frame broke at the front fork multiple times and was brought to the local farm supply store for re-welding. (I was going down a hill the first time it broke. I don’t know how I didn’t get hurt. Now days my parents would be arrested letting me ride a deathtrap with no helmet. Ahh, the good ol’ ’80’s.)
• Boxing gloves-mid ’80’s. For some reason my dad thought that giving my brother and me boxing gloves was a good idea. We’d brawl at the drop of a hat anyway, so throwing some equipment in was only fueling the fire. This is on the list because of the legs those gloves had. I bet they are still floating around my parent’s storage barn somewhere.
• Imperial AT-AT – around 1981. This, along with the Millennium Falcon, was the gold standard of awesomeness for a boy in the early-’80’s. I got the Falcon for my birthday a couple of years earlier, I got this for Christmas. I still have this plastic monstrosity. (See the vintage commercial for it and the Snow Speeder – which I also got that Christmas – here.)In the old days kids actually played with their action figures rather than keep them in the box. I played the hell out of the AT-AT. Whether it was in the Wisconsin winter snow, in the rain gulch near our house, or just in the living room, the AT-AT struck fear in the hearts of rebel soldier action figures – or if Luke had taken over the AT-AT, the hearts of Imperial Stormtroopers.

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I feel I owe it to Wedding Photo Lady, later MySpace Lady, to report that she did graduate, so she must have been paying some attention. She even had a baby in the middle of it all.

She wasn’t makred as having any honors, so I don’t know how close it was, but she got her hood…

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As the countdown in the top-right corner formerly indicated, I graduated law school last weekend.

As expected, the speech by “Professor” John McKay was awful. He, of course, threw some politics in, but even without the politics it was a stupid speech. The theme was, and I’m not making this up, “the class of 2008 is charged with being stupid, here is my investigation exonerating them.”  Gee, thanks. I charge you with being a whiny bitch who has turned a formerly decent career into a novelty act. You’ve been indicted.

Fortunately, the student speaker right before him was very good. The speaker was a former federal agent who turned out to be the best student in our class. He gave a nice, funny speech about being a part-time evening student. (“Some dean from some other college sent us out to grab the world by the horns. The world sent us back.”) Plus, I think he took a dig at McKay as he introduced him following his speech. (“Did you hear he got fired from his last job, Dean?”)

It was a nice ceremony. Two of my favorite professors hooded me. I got some nice pictures with the kids and me in my cap, gown, and hood. We drank plenty of champagne at the reception the night before.  We had an open house at home on Sunday, but the 10 inches of snow made that an underwhelming affair, leaving lots of cake and booze in the house. (Seattle area conversion: 1 inch of snow in Seattle = 1 foot of snow in a state that touches a Great Lake.) It was a fun weekend to punctuate all of the work I have done and all of the sacrifices the family has made.

But in any case, law school is behind me now. No more irritating classmates acting like 1L gunners in their third year, no more stupid politics of a professor who hasn’t been in the real world for 30 years, no more pretending to care about some area of law because the class fit nicely in my schedule.

So the obvious question, and the question I have been asked a few times already, is: Knowing what I know now, would I do it again? 

At this point, that’s a little like trying to evaluate an NFL draft class before the first game of the new season, but I’ll answer it anyway.

No.

At least, I wouldn’t do it the way I did it. I wouldn’t go part-time at night while working during the day. They tell you that the big time law employers will take the fact that you worked during school and your life experiences into account. They don’t. They look at two numbers: Grades (or class rank) and the rank of your law school. Smaller employers take those other factors into account, but no one takes on a second career, racks up nearly six-figures in student debt, and trashes three-and-a-half years of their lives for a small raise at a shaky business.

Both of those numbers would have been better in my case if I wasn’t splitting my priorities with work and limiting my law school choices to those with an evening program.  Neither of my numbers was bad; I graduated with honors and Seattle University School of Law is pretty solidly entrenched in the lower 80’s. I just think that jumping up another few tenths of a GPA point and going full time to University of Washington’s law school (#30) would have opened many more doors.

It also would have been nice to have more time to do the extracurricular activities that employers get hot-and-bothered over: journals, moot court, writing contests, researching for professors, street law, clinics, kickball… all that stuff.

And of course the area of law I wanted to practice in is one of the first to start hurting in an economic downturn. So my timing was terrible.

Not that I totally regret my decision. I learned a lot; I feel that I have a much better idea of how things actually work in government and business. I got out of the lab just before the company I worked for and the biotech industry in Seattle in general seemed to implode. A JD more-or-less gives me the ability to hang a shingle from coast-to-coast and at least have a chance at making a solid living. I don’t plan on leaving the area any time soon, but severing myself from a big-city industry and knowing I can go live in Whitefish, Montana if I want to is a nice feeling.

And it may turn out that I am good at this stuff. I might look back in 30 years and decide it was the best decision I ever made.  Or I might throw this diploma on my pile of diplomas and find something else to do while cursing my student loans.

But as it stands right now, I wouldn’t have done it if I had the ability to see to 2008 in 2005.

But I did do it. So if you’ll excuse me, I have to start studying for the bar.

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The Packers played the Bears.

That’s good.

The Packers lost in overtime to the Bears.

That’s bad.

The Packer loss prevented the Vikings from clinching the division.

That’s good.

The loss cotained potassium benzoate…. that’s bad.

I didn’t mind losing this game so much, because I would much rather see the Bears in the playoffs than the ‘Queens, but how many times  do I have to see the same loss in the one season?

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…DONE!

Mr. Vice President, help me celebrate!

I will!

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Adoption Law take home exam handed in… Gift and Estate Tax Law exam taken… Just one more thing to do: An opposition to a summary judgment motion in a patent infringement case which is only for 40% of my grade in Biotechnology and the Law.

I’m home with my “sick” daughter, so hopefully I can finish it today while she lays on the couch and watches SpongeBob. (I put sick in quotation marks, because she still has 10 times more energy than I do when I’m feeling 100% well.)

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Did anyone catch the irony that the man who had the shoe thrown at him was the same man who made it so that a person throwing a shoe at a world leader in Baghdad wasn’t immediatly dragged into the street where he had his nuts pulled off with a pair of pliers and then left to bleed to death while his family watched?

‘Cause that’s the first thing I thought.  But I haven’t even really heard any conservative commentators point that out? (Though, I haven’t been paying much attention with exams and such.)

UPDATE: Pretty funny round-up of animated shoe tossing gifs.

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OK, some of you saw Jingle All the Way in my “Netflix at Home” section and have been openly questioning my sanity. It was Jingle All the Way on Blu Ray disc. I’m testing out my new toy.

After the HD format wars ended with my side losing following the betrayal by Warner Brothers, I was in no big hurry to get a Blu Ray player despite my love of HD DVD.

And then I saw The Dark Knight. Batman Begins is my favorite HD DVD, and The Dark Knight is a somewhat superior movie. I knew I’d just have to figure out a way to go Blu before the release of the Blu Ray disc.

The only problem is that I could not go buy a cheap Blu Ray add-on for my Xbox 360 like I did for HD DVD, and since we are up one kid from when I bought my HD DVD drive and I’m facing student loans, an intern salary, and a tight “Total Money Makeover” budget, I kind of wondered how that was going to happen. (UPDATE: Looking back, they asked as much for the Xbox 360 HD DVD drive when they first hit the shelves as they do for my stand-alone Blu Ray now. It just seemed like a lot less because a stand alone HD DVD player was around $500 at the time.)

Then I was paying our credit card bill in early November and thought, “What are these Thank You Points about?” I always see the commercial with the guy falling down the hill because he didn’t have a mountain bike, so I’ve always thought it was a program for people who enjoy being injured or something. In fact, I learned that I would be able to get $250 worth of Best Buy gift certificates with our points, not fractured bones.  I asked my wife if cashing in our points could be my Christmas present and she was more than happy to trade the time and expense of finding me a present for something that she didn’t know existed ten seconds earlier.

On Black Friday Best Buy had a sale on the Samsung BD-P1500 (note that it does now support profile 2.0 via a firmware upgrade).  Together with tax and a service plan it cost me $1.54. (I know you aren’t supposed to buy service plans, but they always pay off for me because I tend to break things. I just replaced my two year old XM radio with a new XMP3 radio with a $30 service plan.)

Then on December 9, The Dark Knight came out on Blu Ray. So I broke my Christmas present out early.

I opened the box and distressingly this was the only cable that came with the player:

Yes, that’s a freaking composite video cable. I wonder how many people buy a new 1080p HDTV and this Blu Ray player, put them together with this cable and wonder what the big deal is. I’ve gotten plenty of free HDMI cables over the years, including with my upconvert DVD player. How cheap is Samsung?

I yanked the HDMI cable out of the back of my DVD player and plugged it into the Blu Ray player, threw in The Dark Knight and enjoyed. I’ve heard horror stories about the load times of Blu Ray players, but it didn’t take a minute to load.

And the Blu Ray quality was… the same as HD DVD. Warner does an awesome job with HD transfers for their premiere titles. They did on HD DVD and they now do on Blu Ray. The Dark Knight was as beautiful as Batman Begins or Blade Runner on HD DVD. Those three movies in particular are very touchy because of all the black. If there is a difference in quality between Blu Ray and HD DVD, it takes a better TV than mine to see it. (And that’s possible. My TV is a 1080i, CRT unit circa 2004.)

I upgraded my Netflix to get Blu Ray discs (an extra dollar a month) and grabbed a couple of family titles – the aforementioned Jingle All the Way and Space Chimps to try out. Like HD DVD, Blu Ray seems to vary widely in quality of transfers. Jingle All the Way looked just slightly better than an upconverted DVD, but the CGI Space Chimps looked stunningly beautiful. (I can’t wait to see Horton Hears a Who.) Unfortunatly those movies weren’t made any better by being on a Blu Ray disc, but they are test runs.

Later, I plugged a network cable into the player to let it upgrade its firmware via the internet so that I could try the Blu Ray Live features of the TDK disc… and it promptly crashed. Fortunately I was able to put the firmware upgrade on a USB flash memory stick, plug the stick into the Blu Ray player and it sucked the firmware off of the stick and saved me a trip to Best Buy. I’m not sure why the network upgrade didn’t take, but I think I will be upgrading the firmware via USB flash memory stick from now on.

Anyway, the BD Live features are OK. Nothing I’d call indispensable. I did get an invitation to watch the movie while Christopher Nolan answers questions, which seems fun, but is more likely to be a one-time novelty than anything. The ability to make my own commentaries to discs is intriguing. I’ve been thinking about doing one on my own to the Star Wars series for quite some time.  Right now TDK and one other movie is the only movie with this feature, but I could see it being a lot of fun for some movies to exchange commentaries with friends. That will have to be after a lot more Blu Ray players are in a lot more houses, though.

It’s kind of sick that a WB movie prompted me to buy a Blu Ray player after WB betrayed me and my fellow HD DVD supporters, but life goes on. I like the format so far, and I’ve gotten a few more titles lined up to evaluate. I got Casino Royale for free via a law school promotion, and bought The Terminator for $13 to round out my high-def Terminator collection (the other two I own on HD DVD – T2 was imported). I suspect Netflix will be what makes or breaks Blu Ray as worth it to me. Bring on Space Chimps 2!

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You know I’m ready to move on from school when I let an exam in a 4-credit, required class pass without comment. OK, I suppose this is comment, but I didn’t say much about it prior to or right after taking it.

But I did take the exam for Evidence on Wednesday night. I was so unconcerned with it, I even took them up on the Alternate Exam date which was a week earlier than everyone else will take it. I’m sure that when the professor throws the exams down the stairs mine will land safely in the D- to A part of the stair curve. There is not enough BS on it to weigh it down to the A+ part of the range, but it is not so light it is in danger of an F. Which is fine, my GPA, cum laude status, and class rank are all but cemented at this point.

Evidence is kind of a strange law school class – everything you need to know is set out in plain black-letter in a small book. There is no bizarre common law, circuit splits, or such that you often have to account for in other classes. All you have to do on the exam is apply the black-letter rule to the fact pattern, which allowed me to be a little cavalier in my preparation for the exam. Most students take Evidence as a 2L because it is a prerequisite for classes taken in preparation of a career of defending drunk drivers. As a 2L applying rules to fact patterns can still be a little challenging, but by the time your last semester rolls around it better be automatic.

Anyway, that’s 4 credits down, 7 to go for the semester. I hope to finish my Adoption Law take home exam on Saturday, then get down to studying for the exam of my favorite class of the semester – Gift & Estate Tax Law – which is on Tuesday. Then I only have to finish a quick paper which accounts for 40% of my grade in Biotechnology & the Law and then I am done! Done I tell you!

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Alert in Western Washington: It may or maynot maybe snow sometime this weekend!  

In the part of Washington west of the Cascades, but excluding the Olympic Mountains, snow is kind of a special occasion. The roads are not engineered for snow – there are a lot of steep grades – the people are inexperienced snow drivers, and the trees get weighed down and fall on the power lines.

Therefore when it does snow it’s an adventure. Will someone kill me before I get home and will my house have power when I get there?

So it is a little exciting and a little worrisome when the weathermen tell us we have snow bearing down on us. However, the forecast has went from 8 inches of snow to maybe it will snow. That happens a lot. It seems like when Western Washington gets buried in snow no one sees it coming, so I don’t bother preparing when they are talking about 10 inches of snow in a week. (Of course, being a former Boy Scout, I’m pretty much always prepared for an emergency, but I don’t make any special arrangements.)

It will, however, be “cold” over the next few days. Cold here is dipping down into the upper 20’s. How cute. Though the upper 20’s + rain water on the road + people who have never driven on ice = trouble, so I shouldn’t poo-poo it too much, but I doubt too many people will get severe frostbite over the weekend.

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This reminds me. I have to start putting together my annual list of Festivus Grievances. It’s going to be an awesome list this year.

I think that the Festivus Pole may have been the only way to go with the story. Everyone involved with the lunacy in Olympia deserves to be mocked, especially the evangelical atheist, and I think the Festivus Pole makes that point nicely.

And if you think this was a circus, just wait until the vernal equinox when I petition the state for permission to display my Feast of Maximum Occupancy exhibit in the Capitol.

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Did anyone call in gay today? Was anyone affected by someone calling in gay? I’m sure that the theater and hair-dressing industries were devastated today, but I tend to doubt that the 10% (2%) of the population that is gay is shutting down many industries outside of San Fran and Seattle. Maybe there are not as many male flight attendants today, I suppose.

I’m going over to Seattle in a few hours for an exam. I wonder if I’ll be able to get a coffee at a non-chain coffee shop on First Hill or if it will be closed up tight.

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The breadth of corruption laid out in these charges is staggering.

Staggering, but I hope no one tries to pretend it is unexpected. I grew up on the shores of Lake Michigan 160 miles north of Chicago and you could taste the corruption in the lake water. (Which, when considering the fact that they reversed the flow of the Chicago River to flow out of the lake, is a nice trick.)
The “Chicago way” isn’t exactly a secret to anyone within 300 miles of Chicago. And the Chicago way is in turn the Illinois state government way since Chicago dominates the state like the Sears Tower rises over the cornfielded portions of the state.

One of the many concerns I had with President-elect Obama is that he is a product of the Chicago Machine. That may turn out to be unfair, like writing off a kid because he comes from a bad family, but on the other hand, there is usually a good reason to be suspicious of that kid.

Between Governor Blagojevich, Senator Ted Stevens, and Representative William Jefferson, the feds are going to have a nice collection of disgraced politicians in the can.

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The USS Jimmy Carter came up in “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” tonight (it was running supplies between Perth and California during the war with Skynet) which reminded me that I had a picture I took of the Seawolf as it snuck by my house a couple of weeks ago:

That picture was taken at the little park down the hill a few blocks from my house rather than from my house like this picture because I couldn’t find my camera quickly enough.

I’m pretty sure that is the Jimmy Carter pretty much by the process of elimination. It doesn’t look like an LA or Ohio Class and according to the press the Jimmy Carter was hanging around the shipyard.

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“Sorry for the running-you-over prank.” “Prank?”

This is why I hate the local news. That was the first three minutes of the KIRO local news tonight.  I know it sucks for the guy and his family, but I’m not sure why his mom crying belongs on the news.

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Uh… Hmm…. maybe I need to rethink my wilingness to be a courtroom-type lawyer:

An Ohio judge has sentenced a lawyer to six months in jail for using the F-word to describe an opposing attorney as he was leaving the courtroom.

Judge Robert Ruehlman of Cincinnati imposed the sentence on lawyer Michael Brautigam, who was in Hamilton County court representing himself in a condominium dispute, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. Brautigam is a lawyer but is not licensed in Ohio. As Brautigam turned to leave, he called opposing lawyer Peter Koenig a “a (bleeping) liar,” according to the newspaper account. “He used the famous F-word,” Koenig told the newspaper.

Six months in the can for swearing? It’s a good thing I wasn’t watching the last minute of either of the last two Packer games in a courtroom. I’d never see the outside of the graybar motel again.

I’ll tell you one thing, if I get thrown in jail for six months for cursing in court, it better be more than a simple “fuck”. It better be a cursing tirade so epic that by the time I’m done I’m an honorary member of the merchant marines.

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