Bull Moose Strikes Back

Rest in peace, Paul Harvey.

My dad, a country veterinarian, spent (and still spends, I suppose) much of his time in a truck commuting from farm to farm. For much of that time he didn’t have an FM setting on his radio, and I doubt that his radio is set to FM now that he does. So my dad became quite a conisuer of AM radio and as a kid riding with dad on calls meant hearing a lot of AM radio.

Because this was before the rise of Rush Limbaugh et al, the voice I remember most from rides in the country is Paul Harvey. I remember being amused by the fact that he’d read the page numbers and throw in a commercial on some pages – usually for some kind of vacuum cleaner it seems like.

Years later I remember hearing him again and realizing that he was really good at what he did. I was more of a fan of “News and Comment” than of “The Rest of the Story,” but I would listen to both over almost anything on the radio today. Especially if it is Glenn Beck crying. Really, how did we go from Paul Harvey to Glenn Beck crying every morning?

I always pictured Paul Harvey as an old man when I was a small kid riding around in a truck with only an AM radio, so his longevity amazes me. I stumbled across his show a year or so ago and was amazed he was still on. It seemed like a time capsule hearing him shoehorned in between commercials for gotomypc.com and Legal Zoom, but he was still relevant.

Farewell Paul Harvey. Today certainly isn’t a good day.

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It was kind of dreary here and everyone still feels kind of worn out from our mini-vacation, so we just hung around the inside of the house today. (And I can do that without feeling too guilty now!)

My daughter requested some sort of Star Wars based entertainment, so I played her the Second Movie of the Holy Trilogy: The Empire Strikes Back.

She is most familiar with the “Clone Wars” animated series/movie and the newer Quasi-Holy Trilogy, so she has never gotten much Darth Vader exposure, at least from the movies, there are plenty of Darth Vaders around the house.

She got so excited about Vader, she even decided to put on his mask, which looked pretty funny with a pink tutu rounding out the ensemble:

She said two priceless things while watching the movie.

First, when Luke is escaping from the Wampa: “Run! Run Star Wars! Get away from the snow bear!”

Next, when Vader says, “The Force is with you young Skywalker, but you are not a Jedi yet.” Helen responded with the observation that, “That’s what our Christmas ornament says!” And indeed, I do have a Christmas tree ornament that plays that quote whenever the lights are turned on. Now she knows where it comes from.

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I never thought I’d say that I longed for the restrained budgets of the Bush years:

I do give Obama credit for putting Iraq and Afghanistan expenses in the budget rather than in a supplemental budget. However, those supplemental budgets hardly make a ding in that ugly deficit line.

But don’t worry, President Obama will have that deficit cut in half in five years, so it’s cool.

This is going to be ugly. Governement shrinks a whole lot harder than it bloats. A budget like the one the president proposed will change the government forever, and not for the better. The same “liberals” who railed the imaginary incursions of the federal government into their lives under Bush had better get ready for some real interference from the Feds as federal agencies grab money, power, and control over states and individuals.

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I took the kids on a post bar retreat to the Great Wolf Resort in Grand Mound, Washington to decompress after the bar exam. On Thursday the bar exam cycle will be complete and blogging will return to my usual pace.

My victory yesterday was getting my 4-year-old to be brave enough to go down one of the big slides with us. After it was over she said “That was awesome! I’m never doing it again.”

I bet we’ll get her to do it again today.

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go down the Howlin’ Tornado for the 56th time.

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• I finally saw one of the nominated pictures on Friday night: Slumdog Millionaire. I really liked it and am pulling for it.
• I like Hugh Jackman, I don’t care what Dr. Cox says.
• The opening number was good. Poking fun at the normally overblown opening number is a good sign…
• … which quickly fades as they unveil this awful format of having five former winners introducing the five nominees. I thought the object was to speed things up.
• Milk gets it’s political speech in. Better do it now, Milk won’t likely win another big category. Did the screenwriter say “God?”
• Jack Black was pretty funny. Taking his Dreamworks Animation movie money and betting it on Pixar. Zing.  I’ve grown weary of Jack Black lately, but by avoiding him when I do see him he’s funny again.
• Ben Stiller is always a highlight when they allow him to come on.
• Another good comedy bit with Seth Rogan and James Franco. Laughing at The Reader was good. The Reader is getting picked on a lot tonight. (With good reason.)
• As I expected when I saw The Dark Knight Heath Ledger wins. He would have won if he hadn’t died. I still say The Dark Knight got hosed out of a Best Pic nod. I wish they’d stop calling Ledger’s overdose accidental. It wasn’t on purpose, but it wasn’t actually accidental. Semi-accidental is more like it.
• Who likes Bill Maher? Much like Keith Olbermann, I didn’t like Maher before I knew his politics. He knocks the “petty gods”  that at least two of the winners thanked and that the Milk screenwriter said created gays equally. (For the record, I think Maher was unfairly pilloried after his comments about the 9-11 hijackers. Brave and evil/crazy aren’t mutually exclusive.)
• These Oscars are death. This new format is horrible.
• I’m guessing Paul Newman edges out Heath Ledger is the Death Montage Applause Competition. Or, they don’t even include Ledger. I forgot that Charlton Heston died. Heston got a shamefully small amount of applause.
• I forgot Stan Winston died, but some say CGI killed him long ago.
• Now that Danny Boyle has won an Oscar, I have to reignitethe greatest argument ever had in my college apartment: Shallow Grave sucked.
• I’m hoping there will be a tie between Kate Winslet and Anne Hathaway and they’ll have to settle it by hot oil wrestling.
• My daughter got a Kate Winslet (in Titanic) Barbie doll for her birthday. None of the of the other nominees have one of those. Or is there a Barbie Out of Africa doll.
• I hope Mickey Rourke wins. I want to hear that f-ed up speech.
• Bah. I’ve had enough of Sean Penn. Yeah, yeah, shut up Penn. You get off on thinking we all think that you are “homo-loving communists,” more than any of us actually care. I am self-congratulatory-phobic, though.
• Who is this Spielberg guy? An up ‘n’ comer?
• Huzzah to Slumdog. In what seems like a mediocre batch of Best Pic nods, it seems like the best. I have a hard time believing any of the other tedious nominated movies would be better.
• The show was death this year. The comedy bits were good, every thing else was horrid. The new format is a failed experiment. Not showing clips of the nominated performances but having other actors talk about the performances instead is  inexcusably stupid.

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Here is something I thought about last night: Wouldn’t this exam, the first one since last July, be the exam you’d think would have a Commercial Paper question on it for sure? Or is the bar trying to distance itself from paper?
Another early day today. We had to re-register for the PR exam since a different set of people take that for different reasons: They passed one part and not the other last time or lawyers from other states where the reciprocity agreements are the taking of the PR exams and so forth.

On top of the early morning, I had a late night. I thought I’d get some sleep because I had the subject under command, and then my computer crashed. The only way I was going to fail the PR exam is if I had to hand write it. So I was up until 1:30 trying to figure out what to do. Finally I got the thing booted in safe mode and was able to launch the exam program. Then I had to figure out if I’d be able to get the answer file off the hard drive. I figured out a way to move the file to a USB stick. I went to bed glad I’d be able to type the exam.

My table-mate showed up today: A black lady with a shaved head. When the proctor told her she’d have to get rid of her hat, she threw a hissy fit and was allowed to keep the hat. So, it’s a good thing we were all sent a rules list that was going to be “strictly enforced.”

Then it was PR: Don’t represent clients in cases you can’t handle; don’t write wills that give yourself big gifts if you aren’t related to the person; don’t destroy evidence. Sex and stealing didn’t actually even come up.

After it was over my table-mate said “I did so bad!” Really? I’d guess that most people with common sense who had never set foot in a law school would be able to spot most of the issues and guess half of the rules.

Then I was out of there. I grabbed some lunch with friends in Seattle and then went home. I harvested the exam file off of my computer and uploaded it on a working computer.

And now I wait…

In the meantime, time to watch movies and play Xbox.

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What is up with this hotel? They don’t have WiFi in the rooms, only in the lobby. The rooms have an Ethernet cord laying on the floor that you have to plug into the back of your computer. And it is really slow. Like Sub- first generation DSL speed slow.

Anyway:
The substantive portion is done! Now I just have the professional responsibility portion to go tomorrow.

I’m not making any prediction as to whether I passed. I never come out of law exams feeling like I kicked ass, even when I did. The problem is you get docked for not identifying issues, and obviously if you didn’t identify them you don’t know you missed them. It seemed like every group of three questions had one question that I felt I did really well on, one that I felt I did OK – probably passing – on, and one that I’m not so sure about. Hopefully the ass-kicked questions will make up for the not so good questions.
A couple of my friends complained about the last question of yesterday, as well. Which would make me feel better if the test was curved, but it’s not, so it just made me feel bad for them…
One thing I forgot to complain about: They don’t allow Examsoft to run spell check. What is the point of that? They just want to find out which of us can’t spell “judgment” properly without a spell check when typing 100 words a minute (That’d be me.)

This turned out to be an atypical bar exam for Washington.
Today’s question line-up:

Morning: 1. Criminal Law; 2. Property Law (Zoning/Nuisance/Easements) 3. Limited Partnership.
I checked my work book – I have “RARELY TESTED” written above the half page on Limited Partnership in the 600 page book. Thankfully it’s a lot like partnership and the difference is easy to remember, so I did all right. Apparently it was tested in July, so I think they need to revise their “rarely tested” decree. (The Dean of my school taught review on that particular subject.)

Mid-Morning: 1. Criminal Procedure; 2. Civil Procedure, 3. Secured Transactions.
Secured Transactions is an easy, common sense subject, so that was no problem. The Civ Pro question was asked kind of strangely, so I never did get it organized right. For the second test in a row, they have two Crim Pro questions, up from a consistent ½ to 1 question for years and years before.

Afternoon: 1.UCC Article 2 Sales, 2. Torts (Intentional Torts), 3. Evidence.
UCC Sales is easy like secured transactions, so that was no problem. My rules were pretty bare-boned for the intentional torts, and evidence was a good point gainer for me – I just took Evidence in law school my last semester and got an A.

So, those of you paying attention may notice no Commercial Paper. That stinks because I spent two precious days in the last two weeks to work the rules out so I could spit them out for a big gain. If you have been around me in the last few weeks, which almost no one has, you’ve probably heard me mumbling the rules for negotiability over and over to myself. And then they don’t put it on the damn test.

Also: No Indian Law. Another thing I spent a day on in the last two weeks figuring out.
And this must be the first bar exam in decades to not have a Landlord-Tenant question on it. I’m kind of OK on that, because I always mess up when written notice needs to be given to a landlord and for what, but I think I could have gotten a solid 7.

Oh well, it’s over. Now I wait until May to see if I passed.

Now I’m going to review PR for a few hours. I don’t want to do what so many do and pass the substantive part and then have to come back in 6 months to retake PR because they didn’t take it seriously enough.

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I am checking in with 3/7ths of the Washington State Bar Exam behind me.

I took the ferry over yesterday afternoon and checked into the Kirkland La Quinta (fancy!) Monday night. When I left home my daughter’s rowdy 4^th birthday party was still winding down. The remaining kids were getting high on red dye #4 and watching Tinkerbell.

After check-in, I did a couple more hours of review and then hit the sack. I tossed and turned until after 12:30, and then finally fell asleep.

The day started early at 5:20 this morning with the alarm clock, my phone’s alarm, and a phone call from my wife teaming up to make sure I was awake.

Check in started at 6:30. That didn’t take long, so I milled around awhile, had some free coffee – free with $500 bar exam fee that is – until 7:15 when I went to find my  assigned seat. The big exhibition halls are filled with rows of folding tables, allowing for two people a table. Fortunately, my table-mate is either a no-show or is only taking the PR portion so I had the whole thing to myself.

At 7:35 when they gave us an orientation on how to use the exam software we’ve been using since our first year in law school.

Then it was, at long last, time for the damn thing to start.

The Washington bar exam is unique in the nation as there is no multi-state multiple choice portion. Instead we have two days of three 2.25 hour sessions of three questions of substantive questions. Each question is worth a total of 10 points, and 126 points, an average of 7 points per question, are required to pass.

The problem is that 85% of the grades are between a 6 and an 8, meaning there is a narrow line between failing, and passing, and it is hard to make up a lot of points.

Then on Thursday, there is a separate 6 question 2.25 hour professional responsibility test. (Yes, they make us say that we won’t have sex with or steal from our clients 6 different ways.) Passing both parts is required, but if you fail one and not the other, you only have re-take the one you failed.

Thankfully, the first session included my strong subjects, so I got off to a good start: a wills question I did really well on, a negligence torts question I did well on, and a civil procedure question involving discovery and jury issues that was a little rough, but I’m hoping I grabbed a seven.

Next session was an easy Family Law/Community Property question, a Constitutional Law question with due process and religion clause issues that I think I harvested a fair amount of points on, and a Criminal procedure question that I was weak on the rules, but I think I made up on the other ones.

Last session was an easyish Corporations question, an easyish Contracts question, and a really strange Agency Law/Contract Law/Torts question. At least I hope it was a really strange Agency Law/Contract Law/Torts question. I’m a little weirded out by the question, actually, but I don’t know what issues I could have missed.

I found the question selection from today a little strange. There were no Property Law questions, and there will definitely be at least two [OR NOT - Post exam edit], and there are usually three. So tomorrow we know there will be those Property questions, a UCC Article 2 Sales question, a Secured Transaction question, a Commercial Paper question, an Evidence question, and either a full or a half of a Criminal Law question. That’s six to seven of the questions. I’m betting there’ll be another half of a Civil Procedure question with a half question worth of Indian Law. That leaves a wild card of 1 or 1.5 questions which will be another Property question, another Contract, or Crim Pro question.

I guess I’ll find out tomorrow. I’m going to review Property Law for the next couple hours and run through the rules of Sales, Secured Transactions, and Commercial Paper, since those should be easy to harvest points from as long as I have the rules down cold.

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I have officially entered crunch-time on the bar preperation. I’m looking at 1 week left and have about 2 weeks worth of review which I’d like to do.

So, there won’t be much blogging until next Tuesday when I’ll post my reaction to the first day of the bar exam.

Which is kind of too bad, because from what I’ve gathered about this “stimulus” package I have some hard-core bitching I’d like to do about it.

Oh, well, it’s only week 2 of Obama. When the bar is over there will still be about 200 weeks of Obama to complain about.

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Another find from the picture a few posts below:

A guy wearing a Packers stocking hat. If it was any other team I’d say it was disgraceful. However, a Packers stocking cap is class.

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There is at least one BigLaw opening. From Above the Law:

Having failed to actually graduate from an accredited law school, the associate (perhaps wisely) spared himself the pain of sitting through the Bar Exam. He simply didn’t take it.

But when the results came out in November, he told everybody he took it and passed. According to a tipster “He told all of us that he passed the bar, but that his name wasn’t on the bar list. He actually said it was because of ‘a typo.’”

See, here’s the thing about lying: never try to combine two lies into one lie. You can say you graduated from NYU when you only attended NYU and get away with it for at least a little bit. But if he had said he graduated from Columbia when he never even went there, he would have been caught straight away. With the bar exam, saying that he sat for the exam and then failed it would have been so much easier to get away with than saying that he both sat for it and passed it.

Oh well, at least he’s learned an important lesson for next time.

Today, I received my letter from the Washington State Bar Association informing me that I have been approved to sit for the bar. (I’m squeaky clean.) It’s auspicious that I saw this story today. Nuts to sitting for the bar. I’ll just tell everyone I sat, passed, and that my name not being on the list is a typo.

It’s a little sick but when I saw a letter from the WSBA, I was actually kind of hoping there was a problem with my application so that I could stop studying. Unfortunately, my JD posted to my transcript a couple of days ago, I didn’t lie on my law school application, and I haven’t been arrested for fraud lately so no such luck…

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I was poking around in this image, and came across this part, which fascinated me:

First off, I’m fascinated with Scalia’s choice of hat. Why is wearing the Jughead crown? In contrast, Steven’s hat is perfect for him. It screams,”Yes, Comrade Obama, we will re-build the proletariat!”

But aside from questionable headgear choices, Scalia is leaning in to hear what Obama is saying like he’s listening to the preacher at church; Ginsburg is wearing a snuggie; Thomas has fallen asleep; Stevens looks like he forgot to put his teeth in. Is that the old-folks home section or the Supreme Court section? Or is there a difference? And is that Alito back there? Is he on Botox now?

I have to hand it to Thomas, though. Even though he’s from the deep south, he didn’t need any pussy hat. I’d say Roberts isn’t wearing a hat either, but that helmet of hair he has going on counts as a hat.

And it looks like Roberts is thinking about screwing up the oath.

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You may have heard the leaked Christian Bale tirade (caution – language like that heard in my apartment at the end of Super Bowl XXXII) at the director of cinematography (or some such person) on the set of Terminator 4. (Best line: “McG, you got something to say to this prick?”) A few months ago some old footage of Bill O’Reilly blowing up at Inside Edition along the same lines turned up. (That by the way provided me with one of my favorite things to say when something goes FUBAR: “F it, we’ll do it live!”) Then there’s this one of Chris Berman. And I’m sure there are endless amounts of them from other celebrities.

Now, I know we’re all supposed to “tsk, tsk” at those people acting like prima donnas, but I won’t. And if you want to dig up some footage of Chris Matthews or Keith Olbermann, I’ll defend them too. Here’s why: Because I’m sure if I was on camera as much as them there’d be some even better, funnier footage of me berating someone in an even nastier way for doing something even more trivial. And I won’t apologize for it.

There is an insidious conspiracy of culture that tells us we’re all supposed to put up with a certain amount of incompetence from the people around us. Think about it. You all know a couple people at work who get by on the “understanding” of their bosses. Or the laziness of their bosses, since bosses are also included in the conspiracy of incompetence. And, good lord, we aren’t allowed to fire anyone. We’ll have the union or the HR hug squad down here in a minute.

I remember the very first time I screwed up as a professional. I knew I did. The boss called me into his office to talk about it. Which was good, everyone screws up, the point is how you correct your screw ups. After we hashed out exactly what went wrong and how to do what I was supposed to do correctly I stood up to leave his office. He said, “Thanks. Good job.” I kind of stopped in my tracks, stunned a little. Good job? Well, no, not good job. I screwed something up. That stayed with me for a long time. What if I had a different personality and thought, “Yeah… good job.” I wouldn’t have been motivated to improve my work. I think that attitude is prevalent in the American workplace today, and that is a huge problem. (It didn’t help that this guy was an effeminate repressed homosexual – really, he came out and divorced his wife after I left – who thought he had to be super nice, but I’ve seen the same attitude in non-repressed homosexual bosses.)

I’m sure what happened to Bale and the others was that there was a slow build up of things they weren’t supposed to make a big deal about. The DP is screwing with the lights during your shot; let it go. The teleprompter wasn’t loaded right; oh well. Someone is throwing a party on the other side of the camera; those crazy guys.  So someone softly corrected the situation. Then it happened again a couple days later. And again a week later. And again the next month. Until finally it couldn’t be tolerated any more by the person most effected.

I’ve been in the situation where the only way to get the point across is an extremely loud F-bomb aimed at the right idiot, or beating on really expensive scientific equipment with a wrench, and I’m sure that’s what the tape/video was catching.  And when you look at the people involved in these specific incidents – Bale, O’Reilly, Berman – they are at the top of their professions (commercially speaking) in an extremely competitive world. They have the most to lose from being hurt by other people’s asinine behavior. Why shouldn’t they yell at people who are screwing with their career? I bet the DP doesn’t mess with the lights during Bale’s scenes anymore. I bet the Inside Edition people always double checked the teleprompter. I bet everyone was as still as a statue when Berman did his halftime report.

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Secret Asian Man is usually a terrible comic, but I really liked this one from Monday:

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A few weeks ago my AV receiver went tits up. Which sucks, but on the other hand, because its death coincided with my tax return, it gave me an excuse to upgrade to a 7.1 system with active HDMI switching and lossless audio. That will allow me to get the most out of my new Blu Ray player’s audio capabilities. So I did a little research, and decided that the sweet spot for best capabilities, best reviewed, and best priced was the Onkyo TX-SR606.

Much to my delight, Circuit City is going out of business. On Sunday I decided to go to the local Circuit City and see if I could use my newly minted JD to capitalize on the misery of other people.  The place was already pretty picked over, so I was excited when I found an Onkyo TX-SR606 on display, but there was no price. After 45 minutes I finally found someone to help me. I asked if they had any left. Just the display.

“What do you want for the display?”

“$399.99. Regularly $599.99.”

Choke. “Bulljive, my main man! I can get a brand new one on Amazon for $399.99 right now. I’ll assume this one has been the display model since last summer when the model came out. I’ll give you $225 for it.”

So the salesman goes off for a few minutes and comes back to tell me they called whatever approval line the bankruptcy trustee had set up and told me no dice.  $399.99 firm for the display model. As my eyes started to roll out of my head, he told me he did have some good news. He could give me the display of the Onkyo TX-SR706 that had been the display since the Christmas season for $350. I almost injured myself getting my wallet out of my pants. That was an awesome deal – $200 off the Amazon price. I told him to box it up.

While he went to find the stuff, I thought “Wait… this is too good to be true.” So I took a closer look. I flipped it over to inspect it, put it down, and turned it on. It powered up and it immediatly turned itself off. Hmm… I turned it on again, and it immediatly turned itself off. A false protection problem. Exactly what is wrong with the reveiver I’m replacing.

The guy comes back with the box and remote. I said, “I think this thing is broken.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s why you’re getting the good price.”

I just walked out without saying anything. I must’ve been nuts giving Circuit City one more chance to screw me. They almost got away with it, too.

You’re a piece of crap, Circuit City, and I’m glad you’re dead.

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I never understood Groundhog Day (the day, not the Bill Murray movie). So if the groundhog sees his shadow there are six more weeks of winter. But six weeks from when? Today? And if he doesn’t see his shadow winter ends when? Today?

Maybe it’s because I was always confused because I’m from Wisconsin where there was no way in hell that winter was going to end on February 2 or even six weeks from February 2 in mid-March. It was more like if the groundhog didn’t see his shadow on February 2, maybe it wouldn’t snow on the day of the Brewers’ home opener.

I’m going to start a Bull Moose Day. If, on January 29, the Bull Moose can haul his ass out of bed, winter will end on March 21 (some years on March 20), but the weather might be crappy for the early part of spring.

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7:22 PM Pac-10 Time: Well, at least I didn’t over do it on the beer… sweet merciful crap!

It’s a good thing the wife told me to pick up an extra 12-pack on the way home from checking out the Circuit City bankruptcy sale today.

7:09 PM Pac-10 Time: What a game. The Cardinals hung in there for a team that wasn’t supposed to have much of a chance. The Steelers have 6 Super Bowl wins. I’d like to point out the Packers still have more championships – 12 including three after arbitrary date when the championship started to be called the “Super Bowl.” (I know it’s not really arbitrary, but discounting championships before the merger is arbitrary.)

7:06 PM Pac-10 Time: I think I’m blind from the amount of salty meat I’ve eaten today. We had ribs for dinner in addition to putting the hurt on that sausage pictured below.

7:01 PM Pac-10 Time: I still say Harrison for MVP if the Steelers don’t implode again in the next 35 seconds.

6:58 PM Pac-10 Time: The Cardinals’ turn to implode. Incredible.

6:51 PM Pac-10 Time: I just put my glasses on. This whole time I thought it was the Badgers playing Iowa.

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