more mailing list sins

Lawyers who respond to an entire 112 KB digest of 25 messages by hitting "reply" should not be allowed to post messages to mailing lists. Sheesh.

even county clerks are blogging now

I find it very encouraging that someone from the King County Superior Court Clerk's Office is keeping an occasional blog. It doesn't matter that there aren't many entries--at least someone there knows what a blog--or a blawg--is.

really, he's got a point

I generally agree with the opinion that Tim Eyman is a horse's ass. Mainly because Eyman appears unwilling to accept Washington state's constitutional provisions against logrolling of initiatives, he costs the state millions of dollars in dealing with the consequences of enacted initiatives that are unfortunately as unenforceable as they are popular. Consider, for example, the sad history of I-695. On the other hand, maybe he just can't write initiatives. Either alternative is bad for the state.

I think Eyman's completely correct, however, that H.B. 1014 is a good idea. This bill looked to be a sleeper technical correction item until Eyman publicized it by speaking in support of it in Olympia. Let's face it, 8 1/2 by 14 inch paper is an anachronism. It's still called "legal" paper, but every court in which I practice switched over to letter-sized paper years ago. It's also hard to imagine that this bill will have any particular opposition (who? the paper companies?).

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

mystery of the missing archives

According to Blogger, my archives aren't "missing," you just can't see them on my page. At this point, September 15 entries and following don't show up as archive links, and I have a May 10, 2002, critique of Cardinal Law's deposition performance that I'd like to be able to refer to, but I practically have to stand on my head to find it. I've deleted index entries and re-indexed till I'm blue in the face, but no go.

This is very annoying.

Considering that I have just today figured out that I can add fixed links to my posts (although my attempts to format this turned the coding on the page katywompus for half an hour), which enables me to surface the previous Law entry, and that I have a totally free blog, my expectations are awfully high. If I'm going to do this, I want to do it right.

actual replevin update

We are still looking for the damned cab of the eighteen-wheeler. We got the drop-deck trailer by peaceful means (hitching it to another truck and towing it away) last year.

Damn.

dg phone home

Now you can blog from a cell phone. That's good. I have a very devil of a time getting AvantBlog of which I believe I am one of the 19 authenticated users as of May 9, 2002 to work.

Okay, will someone please invent a cell-phone news aggregator now?

802.11g

Here's the deal. I get a new PDA that's wired for wi-fi and use a PDA news aggregator. Desktop? Desktop? We don't need no stinkin' desktops.

Only drawback so far, aside from my needing to purchase the above-referenced PDA--this "way alpha" software is only available in Wince, which I refuse to use.

Signed,

Clinging lovingly to her Betamax

oh, you mean that rod and staff!

The latest Kafkaesque view of reality as seen by the RCAB: By 1991, Cardinal Law had twice approved psychiatric treatment for the formerly Reverend John Geoghan because of allegations Geoghan had sexually molested numerous children. But when another bishop told Law that year that he had received a complaint about Geoghan ''proselytizing'' at a Waltham swimming pool and perhaps showing a ''prurient'' interest in a young boy, Law was not alarmed.

From Law's deposition:

Q: Didn't it concern you at all that Father Geoghan was now at a place where children were congregating outside his parish?

A: You know, the case, as it was brought to me, was a complaint relating to proselytizing, and I was taking it at that.

Does Law expect us to believe that he believed Geoghan to be doing God's work? Really, I couldn't make this stuff up.

the end of dialup

I may be the last technofan in America still using dialup access.

However, I have now seen the app that will force me to DSL, despite my cheap-and-worth-every-penny use of The Evil Empire. No, I'm the kind of girl who is longing for a desktop news aggregator. I just can't see doing that with dialup.

in defense of "stupid" sayings

The very thought that Lake Superior State University wants to banish words from the language makes me perversely interested in using them. Maybe I'm just touchy because their very first entry criticizes a phrase as being "contract lawyer-speak," as if there was anything wrong with that.

More seriously, they are just wrong, wrong, wrong in criticizing the phrase "black ice" as being meaningless. Maybe they don't have that up in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan/Ontario, but where I come from black ice is a thin layer of transparent ice that takes on the color of the road. I guess in the Twin Saults, ice is always thick and opaque (and probably year-round....but I digress). Ah, the limited world view of the provincial.

I could go on with this exercise, but do I really need to?

save your nigerian fraud emails!

I never even thought of collecting them, but Larry Kestenbaum has. What a great idea! Almost as good as the artist who makes sculptures out of the AOL CDs I (and many others) sent him. This being the Northwest, the salmon with CD scales ("Silver") seems particularly fitting.

almost too much content to bear

The world of Joy London appears in excited utterances, which is a fabulous name for a blog. London writes about knowledge management in law firms, not necessarily the oxymoron that some might think. Too much for my poor brain to absorb. In some cases knowledge management for a sole practitioner means turning off the darn computer.

jerry lawson is blogging!

Jerry Lawson, the deservedly acclaimed author of Internet Tools for Lawyers, or perhaps I should say content provider of same, started a blog on New Year's Day. Now that's the kind of New Year's resolution I like.

It will be interesting to watch a master of the Internet in real time making decisions about what content to allocate to his website and what content to post to the blog. Myself, I find blogging so addictive that I have been shamefully neglecting my own website, which is in the throes of an upgrade behind the scenes in any event.

who preps these guys?

My morbid fascination with deposition transcripts of highly-placed Roman Catholic clerics continues. Reading these things is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

The latest victims of Church hubris? Bishop John B. McCormack, now of New Hampshire, but late of the RCAB, and Bishop Thomas Daily, now of Brooklyn, also an alumnus of the RCAB.

McCormack's explanation of what he thought of Father Shanley's advocacy of NAMBLA positions (as it were) really is priceless. You'd think by now I would be used to the idea that a priest would lie under oath, but I'm not.

Daily is more likeable but also has what I have taken to calling Law's Disease, a seemingly congenital inability to allow the interrogator to finish his questioning before jumping in with an answer.

In any case, these men seem not to have reviewed the documents produced before their depositions. It did not serve them well.

e-prime

I hear the sound of my father rolling over briskly in his grave. "Only a fool could think of e as an integer! Why dishonor Euler so? Have the idiot legislators who set the value of pi to three even struck again?" he thunders. Um, come to think of it, I should actually imagine Dad's jar rotating in his columbarium niche. More detail than you want, perhaps?

Sleep well, father. E-prime provides linguistic, not mathematical discipline. If you don't want to follow the link, that means: "In essence, E-Prime consists of a more descriptive and extensionally oriented derivative of English, that automatically tends to bring the user back to the level of first person experience." It works its magic by eliminating all forms of the verb "to be" from speech, written and spoken.

I find this hard to do, but notice that the above blog entry contains no such structures. Of course, my training in Russian gives me a leg up because the Russian language lacks a present tense form of that verb. So I worked without it regularly in my youth.