Just for the Record

I found out that some folks are simul-blogging the Oscars. Um...okay. I'm not. And I'm still cool.

Talk to me

You vill leaf me comments und you vill like it, ja.

Um...okay

Ever wanted to walk through a colon? Yeah, me neither...

My cat

My cat is the noisiest eater I have encountered. I stared at her - she looked up from her bowl and said, "myaaaaaaaaaaa." Not meow. Not mew. Myaaaaaaaaaaa.

Now she's jumped up on the couch. She smells like cat food. I try to pet her. She says, "myaaaaaaaaaaa" and then burps. Such a lady. She surveys her realm and swishes her tail contentedly. It must be great to be a cat.

Automobile bello

The discovery requests (which I should probably note are for a class exercise, not a client) are done. Well, as done as anything ever is. Re-writes are sure to come tonight. With any luck all the parts will work together like a well-oiled machine and I'll get the info I need from my 'opposing counsel' a/k/a another student in my class.

Speaking of well-oiled machines, yesterday I had a random encounter with an amazing car a few blocks from my apartment. I wish I'd had a camera with me - there, parked on a street in Nowhere, Wisconsin, in the middle of winter, sat one of the most striking automobiles I've ever seen: a 2005 Maserati Quattroporte. I'm still reeling.

This is a town of Subarus and Jeeps and other 4WD vehicles assaulted by sodium for 6 months a year. A Maserati, with its smooth, delicate looking skin, sticks out here as something fragile and terribly beautiful that belongs in a temperate land of sun and olives and good wine - some place where people appreciate all the things a Maserati is without any worries about how it handles in snow. Sigh.

Speaking of snow, according to the pile of heavy, wet snow I swept off my car this afternoon (yep, swept, with a broom) we've had at least three inches since last night. I hope the Maserati is safe somewhere in a heated garage and that its owner has more sense than to drive it today.

Discover this!

I've been working on written discovery requests for a couple of days now. I wish I could just write something like, "give me any information, in any medium, that could be helpful to my client's case." I know that'll never work and understand why...but, man, I'm tiring of this pretty quickly.

I also discovered that there really is some kind of law saying, "if you wash your car, the weather will turn rotten." I got the car washed a few days ago to clean all the salt off of it. It's been snowing since last night. Oh well.

Ah, my eyes!

After actually reading my blog, I realized the template I chose initially (black background/white type) was really unkind to the eyes. It looked sleek and urban, but if you can't read it, what's the point?

A labor economist spoke to my Poverty Law class today. The economist was funny and made the material as enjoyable as possible. Poverty Law is a fantastic class, but one of the drawbacks is having to learn and work with 'statistics' and 'economic theories'.

Law students in general fear math. My first-year Torts professor often said, "you came to law school to avoid math...your counterparts who like math went to med or engineering school." He once asked us to quantify the 'preponderance of the evidence' burden of proof in relation to the 'clear and convincing' burden of proof. He lost me at quantify.

At any rate, in class today I started having flashbacks to 12th grade economics (the last exposure I really had to the subject unless you count living on a student's budget as 'economics'). I vaguely recall things like the Invisible Hand, supply and demand, and even something about free lunches.

In Trusts and Estates ("TnE" to law nerds) tonight we discussed the Rule against Perpetuities ("RAP" to law nerds). The idea behind the RAP, basically, is that the living, not the dead, should control property. At least that's what I got out of the lecture. There's nothing more uplifting than talking about preventing corpses from controlling your property. How does that happen? Is that damned Invisible Hand somehow involved? I'll spare the non-law readers the nasty details, but here's some indication of how beastly the RAP is:

"Of the California law on perpetuities ... it has been said that few, if any, areas of the law have been fraught with more confusion or concealed more traps for the unwary draftsman, [and] that members of the bar, probate courts, and title insurance companies make errors in these matters;...
In view of the state of the law relating to perpetuities ... it would not be proper to hold that defendant [an attorney] failed to use such skill, prudence, and diligence as lawyers of ordinary skill and capacity commonly exercise.
Lucas v. Hamm, 364 P. 2d 685 (Cal. 1961).

The good news we glean from the above passage? The lawyer's not tapped for malpractice because the lawyer was only of ordinary skill and the RAP is considered beyond the skill and capacity of the ordinary lawyer. Anybody else see a little problem there?

Back to Reality

After several days of above-normal temperatures, I woke up to a 0F windchill this morning. Forget the frozen custard. I'd like to thaw out.

Frozen custard in February

I went out a while ago to grab some frozen custard, which seems to be available everywhere in Wisconsin. Before I moved here, I'd never heard of frozen custard. What a deprived existence I led...

If nothing else, February here is great for frozen custard because you can walk along the sidewalk at a leisurely pace, enjoying your frozen treat with nary a worry of its melting.

In a weird way, this leads me to the recent sillyness in the NHL. Perhaps if professional hockey were restricted to only those cities in which liquids naturally become solids in the winter, the NHL and the players wouldn't be in such a ridiculous situation. Or maybe they would. Greed and selfishness seem to take root wherever they can. I don't know that a smaller league would make any difference in this case.

Just something to think about.

So...I'm blogging

Cool beans. Welcome to my blog. There are about 200 other things I should be doing right now but, eh, this is more fun.

Maybe someday I'll post something interesting here. If I do, it'll be about music or politics or how Wisconsin really is the strangest place in the world...

Be nice to each other and check back sometime.