Second Effort

Historian Gingrich wants to go to the Moon

2012-01-30T15:15:00.002-06:00

At one of the recent Florida debates, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tried to shamelessly pander to the significant segment of recently-unemployed Shuttle Program employees in the Sunshine State by suggesting that the U.S. should set up a lunar colony immediately. (Space program jobs for Florida! Yippee!)

Going back to the Moon, and establishing permanent bases there, is certainly a policy I support -- so, therefore, I must support Historian Gingrich's White House bid, right?

Oh, puleeeze.

Historian Gingrich doesn't mean it -- he said it only in hopes of grabbing a couple of votes in tomorrow's Florida primary. If he survives the Florida primary, the lunar idea will be conveniently shelved as he moves on toward Super Tuesday.

If, somehow, Historian Gingrich were actually nominated and elected, the plan would not be revived.

And if, somehow, the idea were revived, President-Historian Gingrich would find it unpopular, even among his fellow Republicans. Mitt Romney was, predictably, against the idea. Ron Paul, at least, got off a good line by stating that he would not want a full-fledged colony, but he could think of certain politicians he'd like to send to the Moon.

The future of this country is out-of-this-world. This is a frontier nation; we urgently need a new frontier. We've expanded from sea-to-shining-sea (much to the chagrin of most of our original inhabitants -- although they are slowly getting even with us, one slot machine at a time....)

We've expanded from sea-to-shining-sea and there's nowhere to go but Up. President Kennedy knew that that the space program wasn't about a handful of votes in one state's primary, but about our entire nation's destiny, about the dreams and aspirations of our restless people, bottled up in our increasingly crowded and regimented cities -- he knew we need new places to boldly go.

But Newtie won't take us there; nor has he any intention of really trying.

I imagine President Obama must pinch himself every morning, trying to reassure himself that he is really awake: With the economy still in the dumpster, our out-of-control national debt, our crumbling infrastructure, the stalemate in Congress, his poor personal polling numbers -- with all these negatives, he can't be other than thrilled beyond measure with the likely Republican opposition in November. And when President Obama kneels down at night by his Presidential four-poster, saying his evening prayers, I am sure that he includes a fervent prayer of thanksgiving for the Good Lord sending him Historian Gingrich.

Honesty is a pretty good policy

2012-01-27T08:23:00.004-06:00

No, that's not the way I learned it either. But I think that's the way it is.

I'm not talking about softening the sharp edges of honesty for questions like, "Do these jeans make my butt look big?"

One can always safely give an honest answer to that question, as long as one is... careful. For example, explanations must be avoided at all costs. "No" is a perfectly sufficient -- and honest -- answer, especially where the explanation might be something like "your butt was big to begin with."

I'm thinking instead about the candid disclosure of unhappy information to prospective business partners or referral sources. I've touched on this subject before. Basically, when things are going great, lawyers insist they are on the edge of bankruptcy; when things are at their worst, lawyers tend to insist that all is well. Think about it: Would you feel comfortable entrusting your fortune or future or perhaps your very freedom to someone who's trying to keep the phone company from acting on its Red Notice?

I didn't think so.

So the lawyers who are obviously the most prosperous cry poormouth -- while the lawyers in desperate straits try and look prosperous and cheerful.

And we expect people to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

So... the lawyer who is plummeting into the abyss needs to reach out for help, for assistance, for cases -- but how? Too much sad truth and one is branded a leper; too much false bravado and possible sources of business may conclude that you don't really need their work.

I am sorry to say that this is my challenge for 2012. If I figure out how to do this, you may be fairly certain that I'll start to cry poormouth. So how, Dear Reader, will you know the difference?

I don't know why this doesn't dominate conversation either

2012-01-26T08:50:00.003-06:00

(This image taken from Yahoo! Comics. Arlo and Janis
appears locally in the Chicago Sun-Times.)

No less an authority than Steven Hawking states, "I think the human race doesn't have a future if it doesn't go into space." Yet only comic strip artists and Curmudgeons talk about it.

How sad.

Romney and Gingrich -- taxes and history

2012-01-25T08:59:00.003-06:00

The 'revelation' that Mr. Romney pays a smaller percentage of his taxes because most of his income comes from investments is hardly shocking, the glee in the Gingrich and Obama camps notwithstanding. Our tax laws are written to reward those who take risks and invest as opposed to those who merely take salary. Just Plain Folks in traditional swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania -- and, of course, Florida, the immediate battlefield -- should not take umbrage at the relatively low percentage paid under these circumstances. That Mr. Romney donates extensively to charity should, indeed, help him in most circles; that these charities are mostly, if not exclusively, Mormon will cause murmurs among a few -- but these are bigots and others just looking to fan into flame any possible sparks bigotry among us gullible Just Plain Folks.

More interesting is that Mr. Romney closed a Swiss bank account just prior to entering the current presidential sweepstakes. He has acknowledged keeping some money in the Cayman Islands. These are two places where many rich people, from many countries, stash money to avoid paying taxes in their native lands. But the consensus, in the news reports I've seen so far, seems to be that Mr. Romney has not engaged in any overly 'aggressive' tax strategies. He's apparently paid his fair share under the law.

Meanwhile, what can one say about Speaker Gingrich?

Just before the South Carolina primary Gingrich's second ex-wife made a public accusation that he, Historian Gingrich, suggested that his not-then-ex-wife permit him to have an "open marriage," apparently because his affair with his not-then-present-wife had come to light. Somehow Gingrich turned this accusation into a positive -- into votes -- from arch-conservative Bible-thumping South Carolinians. This wasn't making a silk purse from a sow's ear -- this was the electoral equivalent of making a silk purse from pig 'stuff' (I'd use the more accurate four-letter Anglo-Saxon word, but I blush).

Somehow the serial adulterer became a champion of family values.

It occurs to me that Historian Gingrich may actually be a champion of family values. Really, really old-fashioned family values -- like droit du seigneur, perhaps? If the 'right' of the noble lord to deflower every virgin in the village was largely mythical, the noble's ability to pluck concubines from among the fairer flowers of the peasantry or servant class was often very real indeed. Fathers would push their daughters forward; the entire family might rise in the world. If a pretty girl could just catch the attention of a king long enough, her bastard offspring might be made a Duke.

Of course, these rules did not apply to peasants. But Historian Gingrich surely does not see himself as one of the sturdy yeomanry; rather, by virtue of his skill and intellect, he sees himself as one of Nature's Elect. But I can tell you this much: If Historian Gingrich is the nominee of his party, my wife will not vote for him. She would not vote for him even if President Obama campaigns in his boxer shorts.

President Obama must pinch himself every morning just to be sure he's not dreaming. This Republican field could not have been better designed to secure his reelection than if David Axelrod had recruited the entire GOP field himself. And, inasmuch as Mr. Axelrod is a veteran of many Chicago elections, I do not immediately dismiss the notion.

Several justices of the United States Supreme Court are quite taken with the notion that their task is to discern the original intent of the Founding Fathers. I wish I could convene a meeting of the Founding Fathers just long enough to ask them what they think about the fact that the next Chief Magistrate of their experimental republic will be named either Barack, Newt or Mitt.

Today is National Peanut Butter Day

2012-01-24T13:06:00.003-06:00

Honest, I'm not trying to refocus this blog as a 'foodie page' or anything. It's just I ran across this tribute to National Peanut Butter Day, which just happens to be today.

Well, naturally, I was curious... if today is National Peanut Butter Day, is there also a separate National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day?

I've mentioned eating peanut butter and jelly in passing on this blog on prior occasions, but I don't seem to have ever said that PB&J has been my near-daily luncheon for pretty much my entire life. After I had large portions of my insides removed (nearly five years ago now) the doctor was trying to suggest dietary changes that might help keep me out of the bathroom for an hour or two at a time. "Have you ever eaten peanut butter?" asked the doctor -- and Long Suffering Spouse and I both burst out laughing. There probably haven't been more than 15 days since where I haven't had PB&J for lunch -- and I'm including Ash Wednesdays and Good Fridays (these are fast days for Catholics like me) in this total.

Anyway... today is National Peanut Butter Day, but National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day turns out to be April 2.

Mark your calendars.

National Pie Day yesterday -- and I missed it

2012-01-24T11:10:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, January 23, was National Pie Day and I missed it.

Sorry, Bee.

Yearbook controversy brings back memories of yearbook controversies past

2012-01-20T07:10:00.001-06:00

You probably saw this photo in the news earlier this month: A Colorado teenager -- we really don't need to put her name here -- who was miffed when this photo she submitted her official senior portrait was rejected by her school.

I'm not exactly sure why high schools would let kids provide their own portrait, as opposed to allowing the kid to make a choice from the standard photos taken by the school yearbook photographer. But I'll come back to that.

And in answer to your first and obvious question, according to this report from Today.com, the young girl's mother supported her daughter's protest about not being allowed to sport this getup in her senior portrait, even waving a placard out in front of the school one day recently along with other defenders of cheesecake shots.

I didn't run my take on the story when I saw this -- if it doesn't officially take me into dirty-old-man territory, it at least brings me uncomfortably close to Creepy-Old-Guy-ville. But that wasn't the only reason. I was sure I'd seen something like this before; I wanted to review the record first.

Well, yesterday I stumbled on this image, from back in December 2006, in the archives.

Surprisingly, the news story I linked to at the time is still online. This kid's mother did more than picket. She sued, demanding that this picture be published in the kid's yearbook.

Now... let's see... December 2006 to January 2012... that's over five years ago. The young man in the picture is probably through with college by now. Maybe he's out looking for a job.

Do you think maybe he's come to regret demanding that this be his senior portrait?

The young girl in the shawl and the smile could learn from Sir Goofyhad here. Although, now that I've looked it up, I guess the young man's picture is worse than the young lady's.

But back to the topic of senior pictures generally: The high school that my boys attended required all graduates to pose in a black tuxedo (with a standard white shirt and black tie) for the official senior portrait. The photographer supplied the tuxes, too -- so there were none of the embarrassing styles like I wore on more than one formal occasion back in the day. And my daughters went to a high school that made all the graduates wear a black sweater and a pearl necklace. The photographer supplied the pearls -- I know this for a fact -- and I think the photographer carried a supply of appropriate turtlenecks just in case some girl came unprepared. Or wearing only a shawl. At both schools, the kids were allowed to bring other clothes for other poses -- which the photographer would gladly try and sell parents. But there was no nonsense about what would go in the yearbook. And no lawsuits or morning TV show appearances either.

Grand Avenue comic explains parent-teacher conferences

2012-01-19T08:43:00.005-06:00

Last week, Steve Breen, the creator of the comic strip "Grand Avenue," did a series of cartoons sending up parent teacher conferences. These, I thought, were the best:

I suspect Long Suffering Spouse would agree that these parent-teacher conferences are uncomfortably close to reality.

These "Grand Avenue" comics were obtained from Yahoo! Comics (locally, the strip appears in the Chicago Sun-Times).

Curmudgeon should turn the TV off before falling asleep

2012-01-18T11:50:00.005-06:00

Have you ever noticed that, when you fall asleep in front of the TV, whatever's on the screen has a way of working into your dreams? This happened to me again just the other evening, when a nightmare about our corporatist future got tangled up with an insurance commercial....

Int. auto -- day. An anxious-looking man, hair mussed, suit jacket rumpled, tie askew, is talking into a dash-mounted cellphone (hands-free). He becomes increasingly agitated, and begins gesticulating wildly.

Voice Over:

The pressure of providing superlative-quality customer service had begun to get to Agent Angus Nussbaum. Our PhoneTracking™ software detected evidence of suicidal ideation in Nussbaum's speech patterns. Nussbaum's possible self-destructive behavior might jeopardize sensitive customer data, so we activated our AgentControlChip™ in Nussbaum's prefrontal cortex.

Nussbaum's eyes suddenly pop wide open and he stops talking. As the voice over continues, we see Nussbaum pull over to the curb (a legal parking spot), remove his cellphone and computer briefcase. He locks the car and hails a cab....

Voice Over:

Under our direction, Nussbaum took all steps necessary to secure his vehicle and our sensitive customer data. He returned to Home Office and accepted our offer of therapy.

Ext. prison, day. We start with a long shot emphasizing the armed sentries in the guard towers and then zoom into one of the buildings. There we see Nussbaum, secured to a chair, wearing a gray jumpsuit and a telephone headset. His hands are free to type information into a computer and we see him chatting on the phone and typing away merrily, an idiotic grin on his otherwise blank face.

Voice Over:

Now Agent Nussbaum is living in company-provided housing, and once again providing the best possible customer service, six days a week, 12 hours a day, until he works off the cost of his therapy. (Beat.)

Protecting customer data and providing superior customer service; that's our policy. (Beat.)

What's yours?(Beat -- the camera is still watching Nussbaum work.)

You're in our clutches with Deva-State. (Fade to company logo -- a mailed fist ready to crush a stylized line drawing of a house, a car, and a family.)

If that voice-over sounds suspiciously like Dennis Haysbert, you're not alone. That's exactly who it sounded like in my dream....

Time to shake the blues with silliness -- starting tomorrow

2012-01-17T09:38:00.006-06:00

Yesterday was the King holiday in the United States. It was also "Blue Monday," the most depressing day of the year (although even Wikipedia dismisses the calculations that lead to that designation as pseudoscience).

The two are not related -- although one news report I heard suggested that a good way to cope with Blue Monday would be to take the day off. On the other hand, most people in the private sector here don't get the King holiday off. I took the day (courts were closed) but spent it working on my checkbook. That did nothing to help my depression.

This morning, I heard that today is the day that most Christmas bills become due and also the day on which most people abandon their New Year's resolutions. (Who spends time figuring this stuff out? And how do they live with themselves?)

It's still dark in the morning when we trudge to work, and dark when we start for home. The Christmas lights are gone, mostly, the desultory remnants merely a teasing reminder of the twinkling beauty that held back the night just a month ago. Nothing holds back the night now.

So... it's time to be silly. I promise to be frivolous and frothy for the rest of the week. (OK, I reserve the right to be bitter, as long as the intent is to be funny.)

But that's tomorrow. We all have to get through today.

How yesterday's snow (may have) made me lose my glasses today

2012-01-13T08:34:00.003-06:00

It all has to do with pockets. Let me explain.

It snowed anywhere from 4-8" in greater Chicago yesterday; our little corner of the world, near O'Hare, probably got 7" or so.

A lot of that -- more than half, easily -- was on the ground before I got home from work yesterday and, to his credit, Youngest Son made a concerted effort to remove said snow from our sidewalk and driveway before my arrival. But it kept snowing well into the night; it was obvious that there would be more to shovel this morning.

I was pretty sure that I had nothing scheduled today, but I snuck down the steps in my boxers this morning to check my diary, just to be sure. As a solo practitioner I can set my own dress code -- and, now that I'd verified that I didn't need to dress for any court appearance or other appointment that might require a coat and tie, I donned blue jeans and a flannel shirt and went out to tackle the driveway.

Long Suffering Spouse was already out there, as I knew she would be. Between us, we got the accumulated snow reduced to a minimal film of packed snow and ice, leaving me time to drink nearly half my morning coffee.

But I mentioned pockets. I use my glasses more and more these days, particularly to see the computer screen. The focal point of my vision is changing -- moving away, apparently from the monitor. The glasses help keep the characters on the screen, if not my actual prose, crisp and sharp.

But the glasses go in the inside right pocket of my suit jacket. When I'm wearing Levis for Old Fat People (these are actually marketed as "Dockers") the pockets are deep enough that I can slip the case for the glasses in the pants pocket. Of course, at that point I look like I'm wearing a codpiece -- and a very irregularly positioned one at that.

The glass case won't fit in the jeans pocket, at least not with all the other junk that has to be carried in the pants pockets (like my cellphone, for example) when I'm not wearing a suit coat.

Long Suffering Spouse was anxious to get started, and she has to drop me off at the train on her way to school. She was already in the car when I devoted a nanosecond or two to the idea of how to convey my glasses. I had to much garbage in my briefcase to fit the glasses in there -- not and carry my sandwiches too. So, I thought, there are big, roomy pockets in my old down jacket that I wear on days like this. There are two pockets on each side, a top-opening pocket and a side-opening pocket. I can't imagine what the side-opening pocket is for. Gloves, perhaps -- as long as those gloves are completely expendable.

I put the glass case in the top-opening pocket of the down jacket.

Or, at least, I think I did.

All I know for certain is that, when I got to the train platform this morning, I felt my pocket to reassure myself that the glasses were safely in place.

They weren't.

Either they fell out of my pocket when I jumped out of the car to get to the train or I forgot to actually act on my decision about where to put the glasses. I'm hoping for the latter, obviously.

If it hadn't snowed, I'd be wearing a sport coat at least. And the glasses would be in their usual pocket. So, unless I'm going soft in the head (certainly a possibility), I lost my glasses today because it snowed yesterday.

Not riding up to South Janesville College; it may snow today in Chicago anyway

2012-01-12T09:36:00.006-06:00

Youngest Son's baseball coach asked our son if he would cut short his Christmas break and return to South Janesville College this week to work concessions at a couple of basketball games. (South Janesville College is the fictitious name I've given to the place where Youngest Son really does attend school.) The coach said he would square it with the residence hall people.

We haven't seen much of Youngest Son during the holidays. He's slept through most of them. Most of his few waking hours have been spent away from home, visiting friends. One wonders what he does at his friends' homes: At our house, if we can get him out of bed, he hauls his carcass down to the couch and falls asleep again in front of some sports program on TV.

So, while we might miss Youngest Son were he to leave early, there was an equally good chance that we might not notice his absence at all. We gave our consent for his early departure.

The residence hall people, however, did not consent to his early arrival.

They were offended, apparently, that the baseball coach presumed to tell them that six kids would be coming in before Sunday's scheduled check-in. So the baseball coach went to Plan B: He asked each of the kids to email the residence hall people and ask -- ask nicely -- beg, if necessary.

Youngest Son complied.

That's almost redundant, looking at it. Of course, Youngest Son complied with a coach's request. A coach can tell a serious athlete to jump off a bridge and the athlete will most likely ask only "which bridge, Coach?" Parental requests to the same kid are processed, if at all, as a much lower priority.

But, though I am certain that Youngest Son's email groveled appropriately, the residence hall people demurred. We've already covered this with your coach, the answer came back, and you are not allowed in the dorm before Sunday at noon.

This was a good thing.

We were originally going to take the boy back yesterday. Yesterday the temperature here in Chicago reached the 50-degree mark again. It's been so Spring-like 'round these parts that trees and flowers are budding and my sinuses are killing me. But the drive would have been easy.

Plan B would have delayed Youngest Son's departure until today. Today we are supposed to get snow in Chicago -- and more is expected in the vicinity of SJC than here.

We've had precious little snow here this winter. This is fodder, I suppose, for the climate change alarmists, or it would have been, had they not made such dire predictions about the probable severity of this winter.

I can't complain -- much -- if it really does snow significantly today. If the weather really does turn, people who have lived in the Chicago area for decades will mysteriously forget everything they learned about winter driving and there will be accidents all over the area. But I wisely took the train this morning.

If I were obligated to make the Wisconsin run today, you could bet the mortgage money on it snowing a lot. When the residence hall people got all prickly about their prerogatives, I was spared the opportunity of testing that hypothesis. But we've had so little snow here this season, I won't be surprised if we get some even though I'm not driving.

Last night, Youngest Son said he was thinking about making the trip despite the dorm veto.

"There's about a 98% chance that they'd never even know I was there. The keys will work and there are no guards," he told me.

"That means there's also at least a 2% chance that they'd catch you and put you out on your ear."

"Yes," he admitted. "We'd have a problem then."

"We?"

"You'd have to come pick me up."

"No," I said. You'd just have a problem."

I laughed. He made a rude gesture. Fortunately, his mother didn't see it.

Curmudgeon outraged by apparent need to haggle -- about everything

2012-01-11T08:33:00.006-06:00

When did American commerce adopt the manners and methods of a Third World bazaar?

There was a time -- I think -- when automobile dealers were the exception. Automobile dealers and, a generation ago, in Chicago, anywhere in the famous Maxwell Street Market and at Polk Brothers.

Nearly 30 years ago, shortly after we were married and bought our first house, my wife and I went into Polk Brothers shortly before closing. I'd been home long enough to grab a quick bite to eat and change out of my suit. My wife was dressed for painting and deep cleaning, which was how we occupied our time in those days. (One of the bedrooms in our then-new home was painted a bright orange; the kitchen was two different shades of green. We never could completely cover up the darker shade in the 14 years we lived there.)

Anyway, we walked into the Polk Brothers store (it was somewhere near the Maywood Racetrack as I recall) and the store was pretty much empty. The salesmen were hanging near the front door so they could scout, and pounce on, any likely prospects that drifted in.

We did not look like likely prospects apparently.

The old guys took one step back, leaving the youngest among them inadvertently out front. His colleagues pushed him toward us. Go, they were saying, you need the practice. To the more seasoned among them, we must have looked like bums -- or, worse, browsers. But we needed a stove, a washing machine and a refrigerator and we were prepared to buy.

We picked the items out in 10 minutes. We didn't haggle. In Polk Brothers, you were supposed to haggle. I didn't know that then. Besides: the prices were in line with what we were prepared to pay, the brands were reputable, the store would deliver, and I wanted to go home.

The other salesmen trailed along behind their junior colleague, just a few at first, but in increasing number and excitement as he whisked us from refrigerators to stoves to washing machines. There was an audible groan from the peanut gallery when I produced a credit card. Here's where it falls apart seemed to be the consensus; surely the card would be rejected. I think some of the senior salesmen may have begun rehearsing insincere words of comfort for their soon-to-be-disappointed junior.

The young salesman took our card and went somewhere to seek credit approval. He was gone for a long time. My wife and I felt ourselves increasingly under the scrutiny of the elders.

Of course, my memory may be playing tricks with me, or I might be inventing this for dramatic effect in the retelling of the story, but I think the kid's legs were wobbling slightly as he walked back to us, bearing our card in one hand and a sheaf of necessary papers in the other. We signed and signed and signed and the kid may have made more money in commission from this one transaction than the other salesmen had all day. Looking back, I can almost hear them muttering to each other: Damn Yuppies -- Oh, sure, you said they looked like browsers -- Can't you tell a serious customer when you see one? -- They're idiots! I would have given them 10% off....

But -- again -- I thought Polk Brothers was the exception, not the rule.

I thought the American rule was that the merchant set his or her price and the consumer decided whether to pay it or take his or her trade elsewhere. I thought this was called capitalism.

I've decried the spreading of Polk Brothers-ism into health care (Blue Cross gets one price from the hospital -- Unicare gets another -- and the person who comes in off the street with no insurance is billed the most of all) and higher education (try and find a college that will tell you, straight out, what it charges for tuition, room and board -- go ahead, try). But now I begin to believe that the exception has swallowed up the rule.

Yesterday, one of my wife's colleagues asked her whether she takes any newspapers.

"The Tribune. Why?" (No names are being changed here to spare anyone's feelings or avoid embarrassment. No way. Indeed, I'm hoping to inflict some.)

"How much do you pay?"

"I don't know," answered Long Suffering Spouse. "$400? Something like that, I think." (She was right. Like a lot our bills lately, we haven't actually paid this bill -- which is substantially increased over last year's charge -- but that is roughly the amount of my most recent bill from the Chicago Tribune.)

"Well, that's what we were billed, too. But then I found my neighbor was paying $132 for the same one-year subscription."

"What?"

"Well, that's how I reacted, too. So I called them yesterday."

"You called the Tribune?"

"Yes," my wife's colleague said. "I told them I wanted to cancel my subscription. The price increase was just too much, I told them. Right away, they dropped the price to $200." (That would be less than the price the Tribune charged me last year.)

"What did you do?"

"I said 'no way.' I told them I knew my neighbor was paying $132."

"And?"

"The Tribune gave me the same price." My wife's colleague was proud of herself.

I'm outraged. I love newspapers. I've subscribed to the Chicago Tribune for decades. I read the Chicago Sun-Times every day I take the train. Yes, I increasingly get news online, but I like newspapers. I want them to succeed. Or I did.

Look: Discounting your price cheapens your product and insults your loyal customers. If you can make a go of it for $132 a year, that's your price. If you can't, charge the price you need. But don't charge $400-a-year-or-whatever-we-can-negotiate.

Haggling rewards obnoxious behavior: The person who screams the loudest gets the best "deal." Is this the way we really want to live?

God, I hope not. Am I totally out of line here?

Trying to be fair: On the TSA cupcake controversy

2012-01-10T11:21:00.001-06:00

It was such a tempting story: A woman flying home to Boston from Las Vegas just before Christmas had her cupcake confiscated at the Las Vegas airport. In the stated view of the TSA agent on the spot, the frosting could be confused with an explosive gel. Either that, or the cupcake looked too delicious to be allowed on the plane. This was just the sort of story that I'd blog about. In fact, I checked the archives this morning just to be sure I hadn't.

I admit: I don't much care for the TSA. The TSA, in my opinion, is an enormous boondoggle, providing an authoritarian illusion of security, at tremendous expense and great inconvenience to the traveling public. (This is a bi-partisan complaint: The Bush administration foisted the TSA on us in the panicked aftermath of 9/11. But the Obama administration has done nothing to dismantle it. You'd think a constitutional law professor, even a part-time one, would know better.)

Anyway, I'm certain that most of the men and women who work airport security for TSA are just ordinary people doing a job to support their families. And a lot them probably take a lot of crap for it, too, from the unfairly inconvenienced traveling public. It must be particularly difficult for well-intentioned, conscientious TSA agents, especially because some of their TSA colleagues really are officious, nasty little tin-pot dictators with delusions of godhead.

The abuses of this minority lead to the inevitable parade of TSA horror stories (such as don't touch my junk! or searching Granny's diaper or many more in the Popehat essays linked below).

However. I want to be fair.

When I thought of "cupcake" I envisioned the pastry shown on the left in the photograph above. The AP reports today (via Yahoo! News) that the TSA is defending the actions of its Las Vegas employee on the grounds that the actual cupcake in question was a "cupcake in a jar" like the one shown on the right.

I wouldn't have recognized that concoction as a cupcake. And, I suppose, something bad could arguably be concealed beneath attractive icing.

I went looking for some of the initial press coverage about this matter that I'd seen online last month. I didn't find it. I can state that the press coverage I saw left no doubt in my mind that the cupcake in question was the familiar one, not the in-a-jar variety. Looking this morning, however, I find that the surviving coverage of the incident correctly identifies the kind of cupcake involved.

Indeed, this January 2 report, for the online Salem Patch, includes an image of someone (I believe it may be Rebecca Hains herself) holding up an exemplar of the controversial cupcake-in-a-jar.

My search today even revealed the original source for the story, an understandably sarcastic first person account by the aforementioned Rebecca Hains, an assistant professor of communications at Salem State University in Salem, Massachusetts, that appeared December 22 on Boing Boing. As one might expect from one who instructs others in communication, it is quite clear from Professor Hains' account that it was the in-a-jar sort of cupcake that was confiscated from her in Vegas.

I can't imagine how subsequent news accounts might have confused the issue....

Oh wait -- of course I can -- it's a much better story if the reader believes a traditional cupcake was taken. Starkly black and white -- no shades of gray. No momentary confusion on the part of fuddy-duddies like me who've never heard of a cupcake-in-a-jar to temper our initial flares of outrage.

So, to be fair, the cupcake in question was not what many of us think of when envisioning a cupcake. Of course, the TSA gate agent who questioned the cupcake-in-a-jar because of suspicions about the frosting, could have and should have allayed his fears by simply looking at the jar, opening it, perhaps, or maybe inhaling the fragrance. If doubt remained, one imagines that these could surely have been satisfactorily resolved by taking Professor Hains up on her offer to gobble up the cupcake right there and then, under the watchful supervision of as many TSA agents as may have been reasonably necessary to protect the western world against this sugar-based potential threat to national security.

Oh, wait, is my fairness is slipping? No. I am satisfied that I've now been fair: The confiscation of the cupcake -- even the cupcake-in-a-jar is still stupid and offensive. In my opinion.

But it's an ill wind that blows no good.

Wicked Good Cupcakes of Cohasset, Massachusetts has reaped a publicity bonanza from the cupcake contretemps, inasmuch as it was the supplier of the contraband confection. In fact, Wicked Good Cupcakes has changed the name of its "National Velvet Cupcake" to "National (Security) Velvet." That's wicked good.

And so, too, are these Popehat posts (beware of strong language):

Today's TSA: Even Petty Power Corrupts. Perhaps ESPECIALLY Petty Power.
We Are The TSA, And We Approve This Message
Reciting Constitutional Rights To The TSA Is Disorderly Conduct
Complain About Being Sexually Assaulted By A TSA Thug? THEY'LL SUE!
Good Americans Don't Criticize The TSA! Only a COMMIE Would Do That!

Remember what Ben Franklin said (circa 1755): "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Curmudgeon stealing signal while waiting for the Almighty Telephone Company

2012-01-09T08:41:00.004-06:00

In this post on Thursday I ranted and raved about my Internet being out... then mysteriously coming back on. There was no change in the physical connections in the meantime (I connect, or I'm supposed to connect, to the outside world via wires).

You can guess what happened Friday from the absence of a post here, and you'd be right: I had no Internet again. This time, however, in my frustration, I did call the Almighty Telephone Company for assistance. I went on the Passage to India. I clicked what I was supposed to click. I read the information on the screen to the man on the other end of the wire. I didn't ask if he was in Mumbai. I often do -- I usually like to learn about the world -- but I just wasn't in the mood Friday.

I went into the equipment room while he tested our modem. The green lights were replaced momentarily with red ones. He could communicate with it. (Happy day!) But the IP addresses showing up on my computer were not the ones they were supposed to be. I disconnected from the firewall, at the request of my Almighty Telephone Company service representative, and plugged the wire from my office directly into the cable modem.

Still, no communication.

Finally, the lightbulb went on. I am not reaching the Internet at all via the wires I pay for. I am stealing a neighbor's signal. I have no idea whose signal I'm using; his -- and I'm using the male pronoun here for convenience and not because I have any idea whether I'm being gender-appropriate -- wireless network does not bear the name of any company in the building. I checked. And if I had a wireless network in my office, I wouldn't want it to bear my company name either, as at least some sort of security measure. Of course, happily for me, my neighbor's wireless security isn't as good as it might be. Once I figured out what was going on, I proved it: Sure enough, when I disabled wireless access, I no longer had the globe representing the Internet on my "Network and Sharing Center" screen.

I think what happened was this: My neighbor -- whichever one it is -- probably took some time off during the holidays and worked some irregular hours. He didn't have his wireless Internet on when he was wasn't in the office. On those occasions "my" service was irregular or nonexistent. I thought it was my equipment. But my equipment -- the stuff I'm paying for -- is apparently irrelevant to my service.

This makes me feel real secure about the confidentiality of my data, too, let me assure you.

My service representative told me he could dispatch a repair person who would arrive between 4:00 and 8:00pm. On a Friday. I said no.

He said he could send someone between 8:00 and 12:00 this morning. I said OK -- as long as this one shows up. The last time I had a repair person promised for Monday, he showed up on Wednesday.

So, I'm waiting here -- impatiently -- at the Undisclosed Location -- for the repairman. Stealing signal in the meantime.

This is completely unacceptable.

Curmudgeon not the retiring type?

2012-01-05T12:55:00.005-06:00

There's a little scene from Darby O'Gill and the Little People that's been much on my mind of late.

Lord Fitzpatrick is bringing his new caretaker -- yes, that's a very young Sean Connery, so young I think that may actually be his own hair under that hat -- to the manor house when he runs into Darby's daughter:

Lord Fitzpatrick: That Katie's a grand girl. Almost makes up for her father.
Michael McBride: What ails him?
Lord Fitzpatrick: Oh nothin' at all, but he retired about five years ago and didn't tell me about it. He'll be down at the inn now tellin' stories.

I'm beginning to feel as if someone retired me and forgot to tell me about it.

The office rent is due today. I don't have it. I'll charge my malpractice insurance payment this month because I don't have that either. I have a stack of unpaid bills in my drawer here that would choke a horse. It isn't quite as bad as it looks -- but only because foolish creditors keep sending new bills every month, and they tend to pile up. It's bad enough.

I can't get paid on anything these days. My case load is down -- losing a few appeals in a row will do that for you -- and the stuff I've got left ranges between awful and impossible. I said in my post earlier today that I spent yesterday curled up in the fetal position hiding under a table.

That's a slight exaggeration. But only a slight one. I couldn't move -- I'm afraid to move. When nothing is going right, why do anything? My wife thinks I'm depressed. Depressed? If depression were a contact sport I'd be a mass of welts and bruises from head to toe.

Of course, I suppose, like Darby O'Gill, I'm sittin' here at the Inn[ternet] tellin' stories.

And now I've told this one.

And, so, back to work.

And people wonder why I'm technophobic: Curmudgeon's Internet goes down again

2012-01-05T12:04:00.004-06:00

I stayed home yesterday, largely curled up in the fetal position, hiding under a table. But I'll come to that in my next post, possibly.

The point is this: When I left work Tuesday my Internet was functioning normally; when I arrived this morning, there was a teeny-tiny yellow triangle on the status bar telling me I was not connected to the Internet.

And, yes, we paid the bill. I'm pretty sure.

Well, I went into our little closet/storage-area/rats'-nest-of-wiring here at the Undisclosed Location and unplugged this and that and counted green lights and did all the normal things one does in order to make the little yellow triangle go away.

But it wouldn't.

I pulled up the Network and Internet section of the Control Panel on my desktop and, sure enough, there was a big red "X" across the line that goes from my "network" to the Internet. ("Network" is in quotes because I don't have one. There's just me and my machine. My office mate and I do not share a common server, just an Internet portal. But the machine apparently considers that a network, too. Does it really matter?)

There are wireless networks in other offices here at the Undisclosed Location, as you might expect, and some of these show up on the list of available networks that my computer says it can detect... but to which I can not connect.

(Poetry in the digital age.)

One of these has a rather euphonious appellation, and one I'd noticed before (on a prior occasion when I was forced to look).

I checked the physical connections in my office, plugged and unplugged, rebooted, and clicked around the troubleshooting menu in the Control Panel. Eventually, the machine said I was connected to the network with the pretty name -- though, of course, I wasn't actually connected to anything.

It was at this point that I decided to go for a walk. I told our tenant I was thinking of trying jump in the river, but I was afraid I'd miss. Such has been my luck of late.

I walked. I walked through the Pedway that connects the Daley Center and City Hall to the CTA Red and Blue Lines and winds around the basement level of the old Marshall Fields State Street store (now just a larger, older Macy's). The Pedway is at its widest around Macy's. There are alcoves set in the wall, too, each one occupied this morning by a sleeping homeless man. Another man was leaning against the wall, shouting some of the lyrics to the old Commodores' song, "Brick House." What he couldn't remember he made up. He didn't seem to be trying to sing.

Once I got around Macy's, the Pedway took me to Michigan Avenue and the Millennium Station. From there I could go up into a couple of office buildings or out onto lower Randolph, past a subterranean entrance to the Harris Theatre. I could do any of these things; I did all of them, searching in vain for the Pedway connection into Illinois Center, just south of the Chicago River on East Wacker Drive. I went topside for just long enough to enter 205 N. Michigan and wander into the Pedway tunnels there. I'm pretty sure there's a below-ground connection. It seems to me there are others, going even further east, that I couldn't find today.

Eventually, though, I went back to the Undisclosed Location. Back to my desk. Back to my computer. It still said it was connected to a network with a pretty name that I know nothing about. And, of course, I wasn't connected.

Our tenant encouraged me to call the Almighty Telephone Company (my current Internet provider) and see if they could help. Let's see... the last time I made this Passage to India, the Almighty Telephone Company promised faithfully to send out a repairman that day (Monday). I was working from home on the following Wednesday when our tenant called to tell me the promised-Monday-afternoon repairman had just showed up.

For some reason, I was not thrilled at the prospect of calling the Almighty Telephone Company.

But I'd stalled away the whole morning now, and I swallowed my bile and resolved to make the call. First, though, I thought I would try... just one last time... just one time out of the hundred times I'd already tried this morning... to launch the Internet.

If this really publishes, you'll know what happened: The darn thing started. The network map still has me routed (via a "switch") into the network with the pretty name. And I'd done nothing new -- nothing even recently -- to try and reestablish contact.

It did it by itself.

Arbitrarily.

Randomly.

I know I should be happy. I need the stupid Internet to function. But... as a person trained to believe in reason and logic and cause and effect... you have to understand that this is driving me crazy.

OK, crazier.

When do the holidays end? An unscientific survey

2012-01-03T09:51:00.002-06:00

When do the Christmas holidays end?

I've been reliably informed that the Chicago radio station that was playing Christmas music 24/7 since early November switched back to whatever its regularly scheduled format is on the Feast of St. Stephen (December 26).

I'm back in the office today. I expect that the holiday decorations at City Hall and the County Building will be gone today. Last week I saw workmen dismantle the Christkindlmarket that had been set up in the Daley Center Plaza before Christmas.

The City of Chicago will begin accepting Christmas trees for mulching on Saturday, January 7. The Catholic Church marks the Feast of the Three Kings on Sunday, January 8. I used to think that was the official end of the holiday season -- but the Allstate BCS Championship Game won't be played until Monday, January 9. The Magi will be well on their way back to the mystic East by the time that game ends. But how can the holidays be over when there are still bowl games going on?

Our Christmas tree might come down this coming weekend -- but it might have to wait a week, depending on what else needs to be done. Long Suffering Spouse returns to her classroom this Thursday. But Younger Daughter doesn't head back to school until coming weekend. Youngest Son doesn't start his second semester until after the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday on January 16. How can the holidays be over when the kids aren't yet back in school?

When he worked for the county, my friend Steve used to consider King Day as part of the holiday season. Indeed, since Cook County offices are closed twice in February (for Lincoln's Birthday and Presidents' Day) and then again on the first Monday in March (for Casimir Pulaski Day), Steve used to say the holidays lasted until then (just in time, he might sometimes add, for the start of Chicago's High Holy Days -- the many observances of the Feast of St. Patrick).

So I'm uncertain. I therefore open the floor up for discussion. When do the Christmas holidays end in your opinion? And (if different) when should they end?

Curmudgeon's blogging year in review

2011-12-30T07:10:00.006-06:00

All the big media outlets do year-end retrospectives. This allows a lot of reporters to take the day off -- retrospectives take up a lot of room and can be done by newbies or even interns.

It doesn't work as well for bloggers. I can prepare a retrospective in advance, I suppose, but I still have to do it.

On the other hand, Ken Levine just published his year-end retrospective and he is (according to Time Magazine) one of America's Top 25 Bloggers.

Yes, sadly, I was overlooked by Time again this year. I also didn't make the ABA's Top Blawg 100. I've never even been one of the Blogs of Note. But I still have my delusions of grandeur, however undeserved, and therefore, without further adieu, I herewith present my blogging year in review (or, if you prefer, second guessing Second Effort):

With informative, educational posts like "How not to carry on in court" (January 7) it really is a wonder how the ABA could have overlooked me. Again.

I was actually way out front of a national legal story on January 12 with Lies, damned lies, and statistics: Lawyer employment and salary surveys conceal more than reveal." Later in the year, the University of Illinois Law School would be caught up in a scandal for falsely reporting the credentials of recent incoming freshman classes. And, speaking of the ABA, it just posted an article online, "How Long Can the Law School Bubble Last?" I really can't imagine why anyone would consider going to law school at this time. It used to be that two kids in the class got good jobs (grueling apprenticeships and 80-hour weeks, yes, but with prestigious, silk-stocking firms) and everyone else got jobs that ranged from OK to crappy. Today, crappy looks good. And the law schools are all charging $50,000 a year or more.

Never one to resist trying to tie into a national story, no matter how tenuously, I did a riff on the 'Tiger Mother' controversy with "Tiger mothering and Youngest Son's doctor visit" (January 24). I liked the piece, anyway.

A rant about blue jeans, "Curmudgeon blue about modern blue jeans," was a February highlight. At least it got picked up by Jay Harrison's ezine BoomSpeak.

February also saw the passing of the Last Doughboy. Second Effort observed the occasion with "The War to End All Wars (and didn't) passes into American history."

In March I looked at hangovers from both sides of the Generation Gap in "On mushrooms, White Castle, and other dodges" and reported on the accidental discovery of chewing tobacco in Youngest Son's jacket in "Discovery in a jacket."

My legal post in March, "Curmudgeon learns the true meaning of sanctions," was about an unusually harsh appraisal of a lawyer in a published 7th Circuit opinion by Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook. In November, however, Judge Richard A. Posner made a bid to top the case I wrote about with the release of Gonzalez-Servin v. Ford Motor Co., Nos. 11-1665, 08-2792. The accompanying illustration is from that case -- seriously. See, slip op. at p. 6. (I wonder if West will reproduce the picture in the Federal Reporter?) I still think Judge Easterbrook was harsher, however.

Second Effort marked the coming of the baseball season on April 21 with "Curmudgeon gets conspiracy-minded about 1918 Cubs World Series loss." It seems there may be reason to believe that the infamous Black Sox of 1919 -- the "Eight Men Out" -- got the idea to throw the World Series that year from their North Side rivals: The Cubs may have tanked on purpose against the Boston Red Sox in the 1918 World Series.

I admit it: I was unfair to, and perhaps a teensy bit harsh regarding, the auto repair industry in an April 4 post, "Check engine light means sanity check imminent." I still think that if you buy a brand new car and simply drive it from the showroom around the block into the dealership's service bay, someone there will -- with a straight face -- try and tell you that your brakes need replacement. However, the problem that I described at the end of that post did have an innocent and non-monetary explanation. If you're curious about it, I'll tell you in an email. Use the link in the Sidebar.

Middle Son is still dating the young lady under discussion in "Easter dinner involves more than chow at Curmudgeon home" (April 28), and he still hasn't brought her around to meet me or Long Suffering Spouse. And he doesn't even know about this blog, so that can't be the reason.

In May, I took a look at how wedding showers (and wedding greed lists, er, wedding registries) have changed since my trip to the altar. As is so often the case here at Second Effort, one of the villains in the piece is technology. Perhaps I shouldn't wonder why so many persons with sufficient technological savvy to use the Internet fail to relate to my blog posts. In May, too, I got to chronicle Youngest Son's Senior Prom. Young parents, take note: The dance is the least of your worries -- but take a look for yourselves and profit by my experience.

Our other car went into the shop in May (Curmudgeon has a grand time getting the family van repaired). Follow the link and see how even when I'm right I'm still wrong.

June was a busy month for me at work -- a terrible month, but a busy one. I only posted twice here. One of these, "Putting down roots -- and the dangers of transplants," is worth reading. And, unlike most of my posts, it's fairly short.

From July, I'd recommend "How Long Suffering Spouse is spending her summer vacation" (July 12). The painting project lasted quite awhile. See, "Hotel open for business during remodeling" (July 22). See also, "Definitely time to go back to school" (August 12) and "Who knew that simplifying your life could be so complicated?" (August 18). No, these posts aren't really just about painting.

The start of Youngest Son's collegiate career was extensively documented in "The Magic Book -- or -- A room with a view." You may be relieved to learn that that woman did indeed have a husband; he was present at the Fall baseball barbecue. Although that woman was more suitably attired on that later occasion, Long Suffering Spouse still wasn't too wild about her.

But Long Suffering Spouse reserves her deepest hatreds for critters that get in the house. See, "There's a mouse in the house" (September 26). Actually, there must have been two. After a dozen traps failed to ensnare the little bugger, we put out at least a half dozen packets of d-Con. One Saturday evening, after this post appeared, a little gray creature crawled out and expired next to the chair in which my wife was sitting. In which my wife was sitting until she noticed said creature. The darker mouse that both of us eventually saw must have had the good manners to die inside the wall somewhere.

And, speaking of critters in walls, I did a legal post in September, The large law firm and the ant hill compared." But still the ABA Blawg 100 ignored me.

More recently, may I recommend Parent-teacher conferences, now -- and then" (October 20) or "Yet another illustration of why the Federal Government is in trouble: student loan edition (November 4)? And I may have inadvertently summed up this entire blog in this one post: "Focus... or lack thereof... at Second Effort."

I celebrated my sixth 'Blogiversay' this month and published my 1500th post in October. If I could just find a way to make a living doing this.... Stay with me next year, won't you?

Political cartoon art -- and a little American Gothic fun

2011-12-29T09:15:00.011-06:00

This Mike Lukovich editorial cartoon (obtained from Yahoo! Comics) caught my attention and tickled my funny bone.

I don't know if anyone from Iowa ever looks in on this blog, but I'd be willing to bet that most Hawkeyes are pretty darn sick and tired of the Iowa Caucus Circus.

The cartoon also got me thinking about the source material, the original painting by Grant Wood (this image obtained from Wikipedia):

(Fast fact: Wood's original art training was at the Art Institute of Chicago.)

Anyway, looking at these pictures got me thinking about all the other many parodies of this iconic image that have been done over the years. I thought I'd post a few this morning (these taken from American Gothic Parodies -- Google searches can be so very literal -- and the American Gothic House parodies page). There's lots more where these came from:

(A Great Recession-flavored version taken originally from the AARP Magazine)

(Jersey Shore Gothic? Really?)

(Ken and Barbie Gothic. The Ottumwa Dream House was never as big as seller, for some reason, as the Malibu Dream House.)

This last image struck me as seasonably appropriate, don't you agree? Happy New Year.

Curmudgeon is techno-busted

2011-12-28T09:13:00.006-06:00

It was Christmas Eve. I had the morning set aside to clean off my desk at home. Oldest Son and his wife Abby would be staying with us tonight -- them and their dog, Rodent.

There are two ways a pack-rat can clean. There is the panic clean-up -- where everything loose is swept off the table and into a bag or box and hidden away somewhere where no one is supposed to look. A closet, perhaps. If there's room there. More likely, a room that will be declared 'off limits.' Depending on how (or whether) one remembers to bring all the stuff back after the guests have departed, such a room can quickly resemble the set of one of those awful 'Hoarders' TV shows.

The other method, and the one I greatly prefer, is the controlled clean-up. I move stuff from one pile to another, mostly, but I keep track of what I'm doing and how. I always assemble a large pile for recycling or shredding but, somehow, the pile on the desk doesn't look any different. I know this because Long Suffering Spouse tells me.

Anyway, the family computer is on my desk in the den. The old computer is like a spoiled child. Though I may urgently need to do something else, entirely independent of said computer, the machine will desperately require my attention. A grayed-out antivirus icon in the status was my clue Saturday that my controlled clean-up was going to have a computer maintenance feature as well.

The antivirus wanted to run a backup. This is my tentative toe-dipping into cloud-computing: I bought some online backup space with my latest antivirus renewal. I tried to back up my music files -- and found I would need three or four times the space I'd purchased in order to accomplish that task. So I let the antivirus backup business languish; I had other things to do. Now the computer would punish me for this.

One part of my clean-up routine was to transfer my files from the office into the home computer. That's how I back up. I have two mostly-equipped offices this way as well as some protection against machine failure. I put my work files on a thumb-drive at the office and bring them home in my briefcase. Moving my briefcase upstairs was an action item on my cleanup agenda. So I opened my briefcase to pull out the thumb-drive... and it wasn't there.

I yelped in frustration. I'd left the stupid thing in my computer at work. I must have gotten distracted on the way out the door yesterday.

Long Suffering Spouse heard me bellow. So did the neighbors, I suppose, but none of them offered to drive me downtown and fetch my thumb-drive. Long Suffering Spouse put on her coat.

The Kennedy was pretty wide open early in the morning of Christmas Eve. By pretty wide open I mean that what traffic there was was moving at NASCAR speeds. I was at the office in 15 minutes. The offending thumb-drive was right where I'd left it. I plucked it from the office machine and looked quickly around the Undisclosed Location.

You can imagine the Undisclosed Location this way: Paper here, paper there, paper everywhere. Boxes of paper. Shelves. Files. And office supplies. Mailing labels. I have a ton of mailing labels at the office. These are wonderful for getting Christmas cards out -- and, no, we hadn't done that yet and, yes, I know it was Christmas Eve already. If some spare brain cell triggered a recollection about mailing labels, however, I ignored it. I had mailing labels at home, too. And I was here to collect my thumb-drive.

My wife and I were home in another 15 minutes. I returned to my desk; she went back upstairs to whatever holiday preparations she was making there. I plugged in my thumb-drive.

My computer was still running the antivirus backup. There's a lot on the hard drive, I guess, and the computer (being very literal) needs to make sure it has scoured the entire thing before deciding that it has identified every file to be backed up (Since the antivirus seemed to be insisting that it must back up something, I'd decided to back up financial files -- in my case that definitely wouldn't take up too much external storage space.)

I suppose I should have thought about what I was doing before jamming the thumb-drive into its slot.

The thumb-drive slows e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g down. The pace of my controlled cleanup was never more than glacial to begin with; this was not helping.

After a period of time -- weeks I thought but, no, it was still Christmas Eve morning -- I finally figured out that there was a software conflict between the antivirus and the stuff on the thumb-drive.

See, my thumb-drive wasn't blank. It was given to me when thumb-drives were brand new technology and this one came loaded with a number of teeny-tiny little programs, none of which I cared one little bit about. But those programs had to load before I could move my files.

And they weren't loading.

I tried to safely eject the thumb-drive -- there's a procedure for this -- but the machine said a program was still running on the drive even though I'd terminated them all. Or thought I had.

And the antivirus icon was still grayed out. And nothing had yet backed up there either.

So... I thought... I'll do something else while I'm waiting.

I have a netbook computer that I also use at home. When the family computer gets this slow I can turn to that for the Internet at least. Read the comics. Stalk my kids on Facebook. That sort of thing.

I'd been looking at Facebook off and on Saturday morning but that wasn't particularly productive. So the thought occurred to me... why don't I dig out those labels? Long Suffering Spouse had only asked me about them 100 times or so. Here would be the Christmas Miracle: I actually did something I was asked to do!

So... I looked.

And looked.

And looked some more.

I began to wonder if perhaps the reason why I had so many labels in the office was that I'd brought the ones from home for some reason. Maybe they didn't print well on the printer at home?

There was just one more place I could look, but I was beginning to have serious doubts about that.

And, then, on impulse, I posted my frustration on Facebook. I didn't want to shout. I'd bellowed enough already. It seemed harmless enough to tell the world on Facebook. Long Suffering Spouse isn't on Facebook. And she was the only one I didn't want to tell about the labels. Not after she'd driven me downtown once already.

I tiptoed up the stairs and into our room. Long Suffering Spouse and Younger Daughter were sitting on the bed. I didn't really look to see what they were doing; I understood that they were doing artsy-craftsy stuff.

I tried to look casual. I tried to look casually, too, if you see the distinction. No... not in the bookshelf. No... not on the desk....

"Looking for something?" I could hear the barb in Long Suffering Spouse's question.

"Um," I said. I looked at what my wife and daughter were doing and, for the first time, I noticed Younger Daughter's laptop was open.

Busted. On Facebook.

But the antivirus cleared up eventually. Last night, was it?

Closed for the Holiday

2011-12-23T09:30:00.003-06:00

I'm sitting at my desk here at the Undisclosed Location -- a location I'm going to have to abandon in a month -- hoping to get a phone call about a check. Not expecting, mind you, merely hoping.

I'm usually not anxious for the page to turn on the calendar. I've begun to realize there are more years behind me now than ahead -- and why should I want to add to that imbalance?

But I'll make an exception for 2011. I'm ready to shake the dust of 2011 from my sandals and move on. I'm hoping for better in 2012 on all fronts. Not expecting, mind you, but hoping.

After the Last Supper, Jesus went into the garden at Gethsemane to pray. He knew what was coming. Still, He asked His Father -- you know, just in case -- if it was at all possible, whether He might yet avoid crucifixion. He concluded, though, "Not My will, but Thine."

It's a prayer that's been a comfort to me, when I've remembered to say it, many times recently.

As a male, as an American, and particularly as a lawyer, I want to be in control. I want to control my destiny. But I've been forced to realize that so much is beyond my control. I can do the best job I can for the client. I can't make the appellate judges read my brief. I can charge a fair price. But I can't make the client pay the bill. I can serve my clients honestly and faithfully, but I can't make them hire me for the next matter (particularly when I can't even get the judges to read the brief).

I can't give up -- that's yielding to despair -- and it's pathetic. But I can give up control. I can do what I can do. After that, not my will, but Thine.

I never could run. My Youngest Son runs a couple of miles just to get loose. I had to run a mile in gym class in high school and the battle for last place was between me and the grossly obese kid. He usually finished ahead of me. And I hadn't then been a smoker. I ran like I was wearing high lead boots.

And I haven't gotten any better at it since, I assure you. I feel this morning like I'm trying to run in high lead boots in ankle deep sand. Some days are worse: I feel like I'm running in neck-high water. This is why I am so tired. I am fighting everything. My practice. My bills. My failures. Because I can't say -- and sincerely mean -- not my will, but Thine.

The Internet gives a Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, credit for this prayer (though good Catholic boy that I am I keep trying to tie it to St. Francis instead):

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

I want you to know -- I want me to know -- I'm working at it. I'm trying to work at it, anyway. Not my will, but Thine.

Merry Christmas to you and yours.

Some assembly required? Shudder

2011-12-22T09:17:00.006-06:00

I've stated in the sidebar here for years now my belief that the three most dreaded words in the English language are "Some Assembly Required." This is something I sincerely believe.

One of my favorite comic strips, Brewster Rockit, is having a little fun illustrating the concept this week:

(From the Chicago Tribune Comic Kingdom site.)

(Ditto)

I remember hearing the late Bill Veeck explain how he tried to assemble a rocking horse one year for his kids. (This was Veeck's second go-round as a father, and he was already a big time, big league baseball operator.) He consumed a number of barley pops during the course of the endeavor and, when he announced he was done, his wife, Mary Frances, pointed out that the head was where the tail should be and vice versa. "That's no problem," said Mr. Veeck. "We'll just call him Charlie O. Finley."

I'd forgotten the story over the years -- there are only so many synapses that can remain connected at any one time, even if one is not trying to dissolve as many as possible in an ocean of ethanol -- but the story came back to me vividly one Christmas Eve as I tried to assemble a rocking horse for my own kids. I did no better than Mr. Veeck -- and my wife, not surprisingly, didn't get the Charlie O. Finley reference.

Some people are blessed with hand-eye coordination. I am not. I tell people all the time that if I'd had better hand-eye coordination, I'd have been able to find honest work. My junior high shop teacher called me 'his little disaster.'

I didn't find out until much later that there are apparently a lot of lawyers who are lacking in the mechanical or craftsman department. I didn't know it as a kid. My father was a lawyer, but he was a craftsman too. He was the kind of guy who liked going to hardware stores and generally found something useful whenever he'd go. The old Sears store on State Street, the "World's Largest Store," was a favorite lunchtime haunt for my dad. Because he was also an educated, professional man, he'd explain his fascination with gizmos, gadgets and the latest power tools with the famous quote by Archimedes (give me the proper level and I will move the world).

My father tried to pass along his love of tinkering and building things to me. He'd buy me models. I'd glue my fingers together. The ball of plastic stuck to my sleeve would look nothing like the P-51 Mustang on the box. My father would invite me to assist him in his shop on one project or another -- but I'd get bored and difficult.

Years later, I worked for a guy whose father -- who was not a lawyer -- also failed to pass along his mechanical inclinations. My boss told the story about how his father completely lost his temper one day. My boss was in high school and his dad asked him to fetch a wrench. He brought a screwdriver instead, not knowing the difference.

This story helped me on two levels. I wasn't alone in my incompetence -- and I wasn't the most incompetent apprentice ever.

My wife is the fix-it person in our family. (My dad figured that out early on -- and was pleased as punch to have someone who could understand him when he explained to how to install this or take out that.) For my part, however, I have come to accept what I am, and what I'll never be able to do. But if I ever became King of the World, one of my first decrees would be to ban the sale of partially assembled toys.

And partially assembled furniture.

Don't even get me started on furniture....

Curmudgeon explains payroll tax stalemate

2011-12-21T12:46:00.004-06:00

Here's the deal: The Republicans say they want to extend the payroll tax cut that President Obama sought and obtained for 2011. President Obama says he wants to extend the payroll tax cut. The Democrats say they also want to extend the payroll tax cut.

Naturally, therefore, the payroll tax cut stands on the verge of expiration since neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can agree on how to extend the tax cut -- and both want to blame the other more than they want to accomplish the stated goal.

The Republican-dominated House of Representatives passed a bill including a one-year extension of the payroll tax cut -- but it also contained things that the Democrats don't like, such as support for a pipeline to bring Canadian oil to Gulf Coast refineries. The Republicans pitch it as a "jobs" bill, because it would, allegedly, create 20,000 direct construction jobs and 100,000 related support jobs.

The Democrats don't like this. It's not that the Democrats like Arab oil better -- or even Venezuelan oil -- and they're certainly not mad at the Canadians. Shucks, everybody likes Canadians. But there is an obvious environmental risk in pumping crude oil across the United States. There is the risk of spillage and pollution. There is the risk of disruption of wildlife habitat and migration patterns. There is also the risk that Republicans might get credit for the pipeline.

So the Democratic-controlled Senate passed their own bill, extending the payroll tax cut for only two months. Then they adjourned.

This was an in-your-face, take-it-or-leave-it move. Closing up shop for the holidays avoids a House-Senate conference, at which compromise might inadvertently occur. And it's a win-win. If the Republicans refuse to take their deal, they are the heartless Scrooges who raised everyone's taxes at Christmas. If they take the deal, though, it sets up a March 1 expiration date for the payroll tax cut, and a brand new "crisis" right during the height of the primary season, so the Democrats can gain maximum leverage from the inevitable stories of Republican intransigence.

Oh, and benefits for long-term unemployed people -- the victims of this interminable recession -- will also expire if the Democrats and Republicans can't find common ground. (Both bills had provisions to extend these benefits, too.) Now the House has adjourned too. And common ground seems further away than ever.

You will hear much in the next couple of days about who "wins" and who "loses" in this latest artificial crisis. Let me simplify this for you: If you're a Democrat, you will think the Republicans look unreasonable. If you're a Republican, you will think the Democrats look unreasonable. But the only real losers will be those people whose paychecks will shrink, even if only a little bit, after the first of the year.

This "crisis" is even dumber than the budget ceiling crisis because, here, there is near unanimity about the supposed desire for a payroll tax extension.

At least the politicians claim to want a payroll tax cut extension.

But let me ask an heretical question: Exactly what was the payroll tax supposed to do?

I thought it was supposed to spur job creation because it would lighten the tax burden on employers. But the employers' tax burden -- the employers' contribution -- stayed the same. I suppose there was some benefit in lowering the overall withholding obligation on employers -- but did you see any stimulus in job production where you live? Have the numbers of unemployed really fallen? (Allow me to answer again: No, they didn't. This, of course, is why Congress is also supposedly agreed about the need to extend benefits for the long-term unemployed -- which they might as well make permanent since they aren't even proposing to do anything about employers who freely, openly and blatantly discriminate against those who haven't been working for any length of time.)

If the payroll tax is just another failed economic stimulus, could it be that both sides really want to kill it, but no one dares admit it?

Youngest Son shows up, takes keys, leaves dishes

2011-12-20T08:40:00.003-06:00

Youngest Son has returned to the Curmudgeon home, arriving late yesterday afternoon. We thought he was to be driven by a baseball teammate who had to pass through Chicago anyway on his way to points elsewhere but, in the event, he was chauffeured by one of his high school classmates who lives near us. He decided to drive up into Wisconsin, fetch Youngest Son, and bring him back.

"Why?" I asked, when the kid came in the house to get a glass of water.

"I was bored," he said.

"How long have you been home?" I asked.

"A week."

"So your folks are already sick of you."

"Pretty much," he admitted.

I'm not one of those who sniffles and pouts about the "empty nest." I'm happy when the kids go, happy to see them when they come back -- and increasingly anxious, and well nigh desperate, to see the collegians go by the end of Christmas Break.

With two kids home, one will take my chair, one will take the couch and both will fight over what to put on the TV. Neither will wish to watch anything I want. Both will stay up far later than normal people. Much of the time they will wake me up when they stumble up the stairs. They'll leave lights on behind them. They'll sleep past noon.

And, yes, I am jealous.

It will be fun for a couple of days -- catching up -- hearing the few stories they think safe to share, talking about the classes they've taken and the classes they're planning to take. Youngest Son is going to pledge a fraternity next semester. He used to be a mix of Irish and Cuban -- now he'll be a Greek, too. Over Thanksgiving, after Youngest Son informed us of this decision (we'd never had a kid pledge a frat or sorority, although Long Suffering Spouse was Chaplain of her sorority, back in the day, and my son-in-law Hank was active in his frat) I went online and pulled this out:

Yes, Youngest Son plans to pledge Sigma Chi. Long Suffering Spouse looked at me with mixed wonder and consternation. "How do know stuff like this? More importantly, why?"

There's no good answer.

Our future pledge seems happy enough in college, so far. He says his offseason baseball conditioning is proceeding well, and to the satisfaction of his coaches, and he claims to have done well in his classes.

To those of you who don't yet have kids in college: Unlike grammar school and high school, you don't actually see the kids' report cards in college. Privacy concerns, you know. The schools are very sensitive about that. On the other hand, they seem to overcome these delicate feelings to make sure you see the tuition bills.

But I digress. Youngest Son dropped his dirty laundry in the living room, plopped on the couch, and went to sleep. His mother woke him to feed him. He ate. He insisted we put on a movie. He dozed.

Then his cell phone went off. And then he took the van keys and headed out.

I had to pick up his dinner dish last night after he left. This morning, when I started the van, I turned off the country station he'd left blasting on the radio, and removed the glass he'd left behind.

I'm happy to have him home. Really. But I can see where I'll get over it pretty darn soon.

Curmudgeon household so busy that...

2011-12-19T08:21:00.005-06:00

I actually went to the grocery store yesterday. Solo.

Long Suffering Spouse almost completed the holiday baking this weekend. The cookie runs (the only reason some people talk to me at all) were supposed to have begun today -- but will be postponed now until Wednesday because...

Long Suffering Spouse did the Christmas shopping yesterday.

We've been postponing this -- much to my good wife's chagrin. She hates last-minute shopping. (I, on the other hand, can't quite see it: Christmas is still several days away. It's not even close to the last minute yet.) The reason for the delay has been strictly financial. I haven't brought a check home since mid-August. This has a deleterious effect on one's Christmas spirit. Mine, certainly.

But we must appear with presents for Nochebuena at Abuela's house. My wife's sister Josephine and her new husband Ferdinand will have presents (gift cards or bottles) for all of our kids, a bottle of scotch for me, and a sweater for my wife that she'll hate. Josephine's kids are younger; her oldest is in college, the youngest in third grade. Josephine favors two of her four kids; her partiality is obvious to strangers in the street. Long Suffering Spouse and I think more highly of the other two. Someone has to.

I floated the idea of not bringing presents this year -- if you can't tell family you're having a crappy year, who can you tell? -- but Long Suffering Spouse would have none of it. We're using her schoolteacher's salary to try and keep up the minimums on the credit cards during this downturn, so I was reduced to raiding a savings account for Christmas cheer. We have two. Between them, they could barely make one mortgage payment. Now they can't do even that. There used to be more there, but what could we do? At this special time of year, Long Suffering Spouse had to go out and buy Christmas gifts for people she doesn't much like and which they won't appreciate with money we can't afford to spend. Tra la la la la la la.

Younger Daughter -- home from school as of the end of the past week -- volunteered to go with my poor wife on this mission. Long Suffering Spouse offered me dispensation. After confirming, as best a clueless male can, whether this was really dispensation or a loyalty test, I agreed to stay behind and finish the week's laundry. I probably did not adequately conceal my relief.

I watched the Bears self-destruct again and tried to work on a PLA that needs to be in the hands of the referring attorneys by Christmas. Where was this work earlier?

I was actually making progress when Long Suffering Spouse reported in from the field.

Crowds were miserable, she said, prices were high, parking well nigh impossible. Nothing on sale was worth buying; anything worth getting was overpriced. She and Younger Daughter were going to a different mall.

This was when I mentioned the groceries.

Sunday is grocery day in the Curmudgeon household. I sometimes accompany my wife on this mission; usually I stay home. I could tell from the gathering dusk, however, that my wife was never going to finish what she was doing and get to the grocery store. So I volunteered.

Long Suffering Spouse protested; she'd get to it, she insisted. You don't have to, she told me. I persisted. "The list is on the refrigerator," she finally said, "and we need milk, too, and orange juice." I'll remember, I said. "Call me if you have problems." I will, I promised.

Then, screwing my courage to the sticking-place, I headed for the local Jewel.

Long Suffering Spouse has a methodical approach to grocery shopping. She starts are one side of the store (the Osco side) and goes up and down each aisle until she winds up on the other side of the store (the produce section). But I had such a short list. I steered my cart right up the middle of the store, toward the back, where I knew the milk was kept.

My method was simple: Find the stuff I knew, in the places where I knew where to look, then worry about everything else.

A simple plan, but complex in execution: A GPS would have been unable to track my progress through the store... up this aisle... down the next... doubling back... first left, then right... wasn't I just in this aisle? Why didn't I see this before? I knew where to look for things. The modern grocery store is arranged so that anything I want is on the bottom shelf. I think security was following me before I was through; my course was that erratic.

One of the top items of the list was gluten-free pretzels. I don't think I ever heard of 'gluten' until the last couple of years; I'm still not sure what it is. I only know two things: (1) some people need to eat "gluten-free" and (2) most things I want to eat probably contain it. These pretzels were needed for the very last item on my wife's holiday baking list (she dips them in chocolate).

I found pretzels in several aisles of the store, pretzels of every size and shape -- but nothing that said "gluten-free." This was one of my calls to Long Suffering Spouse in the course of the mission. (No, she told me, "0 transfats" is not the same as gluten-free.")

Knowing she was already highly stressed, I limited my calls as much as possible. Still, I probably called four times. And I forgot to buy bagels. And I got the wrong paper towels. And I got the wrong potatoes, too. But I remembered the game pieces for the holiday contest the store is running. And I remembered to bring and use our cloth bags.

Long Suffering Spouse and Younger Daughter didn't get back from the stores until nearly 9:00pm. I got the better end of this deal by far.

Zombie-slaying Crusader Curmudgeon rides again!

2011-12-16T11:25:00.006-06:00

When a client tells me, "It's a matter of principle," I always counsel caution.

Principles are nice, I answer, but they're awfully expensive.

That looks awful in print, I realize. Some principles are worth fighting for -- even worth dying for. But... in the ordinary course of events... for Charlie Claim Examiner or Paula PI Plaintiff... the kinds of "matters of principle" that come up in the course of private litigation really aren't those fighting-or-dying kinds of principles. But they are expensive. And, when the client's passion cools, and it will, the client will invariably blame the lawyer for allowing the litigation to "get out of hand." And nothing cools a client's passion more and faster than a lawyer's bill for services rendered.

On the other hand -- some things absolutely set me off.

Zombie debt collectors are an example.

Also known as scavenger or junk debt collectors, these bottom-feeders buy debt that others could not collect.

Let's say you fail to pay Mr. Visa this month. Mr. Visa will promptly unleash his battalion of debt collectors on you -- but suppose, for some reason, you still fail to pay. Then the matter will be referred to "collection" -- an outside debt collector -- who will try and collect the debt charging Mr. Visa a fee of up to 50% of the amount collected. If these efforts fail, suit may be filed.

But not always. Sometimes, when people owe a lot of money, they move quickly, under cover of darkness. The debt collector can't find the person who owes the money; suit may never be filed.

The collector can still make money off these uncollected accounts, though, if it sells them to someone lower on the food chain. The entity that buys the debt pays pennies on the dollar because these debts have already proved resistant to collection. But the new collector can seek 100% of the original amount owed (and all the interest and late fees and other junk larded on initially). So the new collector only has to 'hit' on a few of these debts to make the investment pay off handsomely. If the new collector can get a default judgment against the debtor, it can garnish wages and levy property and do all sorts of things that really can squeeze blood from a turnip. Legally.

And the dregs -- the ones that couldn't be found, now twice filtered, are sold again, now for pennies of each dollar that the second buyer paid. In theory, the process can be repeated indefinitely -- at least until the statute of limitation on the debt expires.

That can be a long time. In Illinois, suits on a written contract can be filed up to 10 years after breach.

You think the matter is gone and forgotten... but it keeps coming back. Thus -- zombie debt.

I represented a young lady last year who was sued by one of these collectors. Her father -- a Chicago resident -- was served with process on her behalf. The sheriff doesn't have to put the suit papers into the defendant's hands in order for service to be accomplished. It is enough, at least in Illinois, if the summons and complaint are served on a member of the defendant's household (as long as the person served is above the age of 13).

Problem was, in this case, my lady was not living with her father. She wasn't even living in Illinois. She'd moved, some years back, to England.

My job was to acquaint the court with these facts and obtain an order 'quashing' service. I could do that. (In the process, I learned the English notary seals are much fancier than our homely Illinois version.)

But I had to ask the question of my lady: Were you responsible for this debt?

Sometimes the answer is no: Zombie debt collectors will make astounding leaps of faith in connecting persons they can find to debts they want to collect. A person with a similar name, living in the general area where the deadbeat once lived, may be 'confused' with the actual debtor. It doesn't really matter to the zombie debt collector: If the person sued does not take timely steps to protect him or herself against the suit, the zombie debt collector will get a default judgment.

If the person sued fails to vacate that judgment in apt time, he or she will be saddled with that judgment.

As the song lyric goes, in time the Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar will tumble -- they're only made of clay -- but default judgments are forever.

But in this case last year, my lady conceded that, yes, she probably did owe some money on this card. She'd moved around a lot over the years, and her mother kept track of the bills and she took care of things with her mother, but her mother took sick and died some years back. This was, she admitted, probably a bill that she'd overlooked.

Well, with that information, I was able to go back to the zombie debt collector's attorney and settle the case on very favorable terms. He really didn't want to try serving her in England. I don't think it's necessary to talk about exact numbers here, and I don't want to betray a confidence even inadvertently, but I think I can safely say that we settled for less than 10 cents on the dollar.

My lady sent me the money; I paid the other attorney. We entered a dismissal order containing very specific release information. I sent a copy of the order to my client with very specific instructions to keep that paper handy. You never know, I warned her, whether -- despite the settlement -- some day some other zombie collector might pop up trying to collect that same debt all over again.

Some day came today.

I got a letter today from a new zombie, reciting that he'd bought the debt from the old zombie, the one I'd settled with, and saying that he'd noted that I had represented the lady from whom he was trying to collect the debt and I should darn well better tell her about this.

I spent time instead trying to find out which state agency has jurisdiction over this species of fraud. And I sent a very civil letter to the new zombie saying either he or the old zombie was trying to commit a fraud either against my old client or on the court and, by the way, I was reporting this entire incident to the state. And I have.

Another hour-and-a-half of my life I will never get back -- but it's a matter of principle!

A matter of concern? When colleagues 'disappear'

2011-12-15T08:52:00.003-06:00

When you've got money in your pocket and more in the bank, you're a popular person. Have no illusions: The smell of money is what makes you popular; when the scent (and the cents) dissipate, so too does your popularity. As the song lyric goes, "And when you've got money / You've got lots of friends / Crowding 'round your door / But when the money's gone / And all your spending ends / They won't be 'round any more."

The ease of finding people is inversely proportionate to the amount of money they owe you. If they owe you a lot of money, they'll be darn near impossible to find. Of course, if you owe a lot of money, you do your best to make yourself invisible, too. At least to those who would ask for payment.

And I've had a couple of colleagues vanish on me in recent months -- both owing me money I desperately need.

But, sometimes, it isn't just the money.

I caught one of the lawyers who owes me money in his office just the other day. While I was waiting for him to get off the phone (the way his office was set up he couldn't get by me; there was no back door), his secretary asked me if he'd told me about his recent operation. No, I said. She clammed up. "I'll let him tell you. If he wants to," she said.

He did. And he did. He has cancer. He had a growth removed from his neck and he was looking ahead to both radiation and chemotherapy in the coming weeks. He could talk to me about this, I think, because he knew I'd been through something similar.

Not very similar, mind you. My cancer barely qualified as such. I did have most of my colon removed and it took me a year to really feel like myself again -- but I never had to have radiation or chemo. "My oncologist asked me how I liked the surgery," my colleague told me. "I said it wasn't too bad. I wouldn't want to do it again any time soon, but I could handle it. 'Well, that's good,' my oncologist said 'because, compared to the surgery, the chemotherapy will be like get hitting upside the head with a baseball bat. The radiation will be worse.'"

Charming bedside manner, I thought to myself. I made some sympathetic noises.

My colleague continued. "'Get ready to lose 40 pounds,' the oncologist told me. 'You're not going to want to eat. Drinking water will feel like swallowing razor blades.'" (It's his neck that's to be irradiated.)

Messrs. Master Card and Visa won't see it this way, but even a dim guy like me begins to understand that getting Curmudgeon paid may not be at the top of his to-do list in the present circumstances.

And I mentioned that other colleague who has disappeared.

She doesn't even really owe me that much money. But we do a lot of work together -- and she's stopped pulling her end. I have to scream to get her attention.

Thirty years ago, when someone dropped out of circulation, we used to joke that he or she had "fallen in love" and would likely resurface only when the lust settles. Often enough, we were right.

These days, though, among my contemporaries, I begin to suspect health issues. I don't want to be right.

Seasonal sidebar updated

2011-12-14T07:10:00.001-06:00

After over 1500 posts, I'm just egotistical enough -- or lazy enough -- to think I've got some stuff worth recycling. I've been trying to come up with 'seasonal' stuff for the sidebar and I've just put together a Christmas collection (scroll down the page -- you'll find it).

Take a gander. Enjoy, if possible. Those of you who've been regular readers are excused from reading anything again... unless, of course, you really want to. If you're new to this blog, the linked posts might be an easy way to check out the archives without making a career out of reading somebody else's blog.

Can anyone make a career out of reading someone else's blog?

Can anyone make a career out of making a blog in the first place? I've read stories... but I have my doubts.

Anyway, more new and scintillating original material -- or at least the kind of dreck you've come to expect here at Second Effort -- should be up Thursday.

The Good Lord willing, and the creek don't rise.

Newt Gingrich needs a map -- and, no, this post is not political

2011-12-13T12:10:00.003-06:00

Honest.

It's just that (according to the caller ID) Newt2012 keeps calling my house, sometimes more than once a day. I haven't answered, nor will I, and the ex-Speaker never leaves a message.

Now the Iowa caucuses are coming up soon and I understand Mr. Gingrich is hoping to do well there.

But Mr. Gingrich, please: I live in Illinois, not far from the shores of Lake Michigan. Iowa is a good three hours away, on the other side of the Mississippi River. As a native Chicagoan, I've never voted in a Republican primary in my life. (All the action is in the Democratic primary 'round here. A very Republican, conservative, suburban cousin of mine recently excused me to friends of his: "He's from Chicago. He has to be a Democrat. It's not his fault.)

But, actually, even when I was young, and lived in Boondockia with my folks for awhile, I still voted in the Democratic primary. That way I could look at the local paper the week after the primary and see if the election authorities tallied my vote correctly. (On a 'per thousand' basis, there were about as many Democrats in Boondockia as there are Republicans here in Chicago.)

So: If Mr. Gingrich is calling to get me to go to a caucus for him, he's geographically confused. If he's calling me for money, he's really confused. If he's calling to make a provisional offer for me to be Ambassador to Whatchamacallitstan or Assistant Deputy Undersecretary in the Department of Putting Things on Top of Other Things should he be elected, I wish he'd leave a message. I'm not holding my breath.

Choosing your battles wisely in this so-called 'War' on Christmas

2011-12-12T09:19:00.000-06:00

(Duplex comic obtained from GoComics, although I read it
-- in print this morning in the Chicago Sun-Times)

There was a brief buzzlet around Black Friday, with certain conservative Christian groups demanding a boycott of retailers who refused to use the word "Christmas" in their seasonal advertising and retailing strategy. When the sales associate wishes you 'Happy Holidays,' the argument went, you should put down what you've selected and walk out. Shouting "Bah Humbug!" perhaps over your shoulder?

For me and mine this is Christmastime. And I don't understand how and when wishing someone a Merry Christmas became potentially offensive.

Not that I haven't myself caved in to the apparent cultural decree: I once found myself wishing people "Happy Holidays" -- in the vestibule of the parish church after Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

Why should saying "Merry Christmas" be offensive? Christmas surely has a well-developed secular component. I forgot to set my DVR yesterday for the annual showing of A Flintstones Christmas -- and there's an Ice Age Christmas special I'm looking forward to catching at some point -- but how sensitive must you be to take offense at these and similar projects? Unless, I suppose, if you're a particular sort of prickly Christian who can't get over the idea of cartoon characters celebrating "Christmas" thousands of years before the birth of Christ.

Actually, looking back on the holiday classics I grew up with -- Miracle on 34th Street, for example -- the concern was that retailers were co-opting Christmas for their own selfish, commercial purposes. So... maybe... shouldn't that mean that I not get upset when a storekeeper says "Season's Greetings" or "Happy Holidays"?

I admit that it was a little jarring to watch the Patriots-Redskins game yesterday on CBS (the Bears had the late game, in which they were the latest overconfident bunch to get Tebowed): CBS kept running a 'holiday' promotion for its shows in which the words 'jingle' or 'holiday' seemed to predominate. I kept waiting for at least a throwaway Merry Christmas, but none was forthcoming.

I think there is a growing hostility to religion in some quarters, and a growing hostility to certain religions in many quarters. Take a look at this thoughtful essay on Popehat, Lowe’s, “All-American Muslim,” And Living From The Inside Out, if you have a moment. Stephen Chapman's column in yesterday's Chicago Tribune, Obama's 'war on religion' (which offers a partial defense of certain of Gov. Rick Perry's recent accusations) is also worth your time this morning. (More important, from my point of view, Chapman explains how Catholics like me are also in the cultural crosshairs to some extent.)

But just because you believe that "Jesus is the reason for the season," does not mean you can or should act like a jerk, OK?

Banking: The Game

2011-12-09T07:10:00.002-06:00

(From the webcomic Married to the Sea)

Sadly, I think the little guy has the rules down just about cold.

Back online at the Undisclosed Location... but how?

2011-12-08T10:23:00.006-06:00

After our month-long Internet outage here at the Undisclosed Location (from August 23 to September 20, if you can believe it), we dropped our former ISP and went with AT&TT or BP&P or whatever it is that I'm calling the telephone megalopoly these days (note to future OED editions -- "megalopoly" is here used to mean a particularly sinister or evil monopoly, the word "monopoly" alone not having a sufficiently pejorative dimension).

How nuts were we, eh?

But our tenant was using The Phone Company and her Internet came back in a day after the August 23 power outage in Chicago's Loop. Maybe, we thought, The Phone Company service was actually reliable.

Then our tenant had problems last month. She can write about those on her own blog. Maybe she already has.

But her service, though with The Phone Company, was separate from the one that I and my remaining partner in the rental of this Undisclosed Location share. We didn't have real problems until Monday.

And, then, as it turned out, my remaining partner (who wasn't in Monday) was able to access the Internet on Tuesday -- after I'd waited in vain all day Monday for a repairman from The Telephone Company to come out (as promised).

My post Tuesday (on which the video seems to have already failed) and my Blogiversary post yesterday were both launched into the ether from home.

And I was working from home yesterday, too, when I got a call from our tenant who advised that a repairman from The Phone Company had just showed up at the Undisclosed Location.

When you're a megalopoly, Monday from 12-4 can damn well be Wednesday morning if you say so.

Now, of course, no one could access my machine at the Undisclosed Location except me. And I wasn't there. And the reason I was home was because I was preparing for a doctor's deposition at 1:00pm. Our tenant watched the man from The Phone Company and she saw that he was able to get on the Intertubes from our equipment room. But she could not see how he did whatever he did.

I begin to suspect that rattles and magic dust were involved.

But I'm online now... and I'm not complaining.

Much.

Anymore.

After I close out this post, I mean.

It's my sixth Blogiversary today

2011-12-07T08:28:00.003-06:00

Blogiversary -- anniversary of blogging -- whatever you wish to call it, maintaining a blog for six years is some sort of achievement.

A dubious one, perhaps.

Or a frivolous one.

And this isn't even my first blog. That blog, so long ago abandoned that I can not even remember what I called it, was created so I could communicate more easily with Older Daughter while she was studying in Spain. She set up a blog where she could share her experiences of her semester abroad with the rest of the world. I set up a blog so I could comment on hers, and possibly exert a moderating influence on what she shared with the entire world.

A wet blanket, as it were.

Then she came home and that blog fell into disuse. Maybe I even forgot the password.

But then I decided to start this blog, my second blog, my second blogging effort (hence the blog title) and I've maintained it ever since.

This has never been a daily venture, although I've tried to post most weekdays. I would have posted nine days in a row before today but for the fact that my office Internet was out again on Monday.

Again.

I don't look forward to moving out of the Undisclosed Location in a month or so. I think I'll be able to stay in the same building, which will minimize the disruption. But one thing is certain. I am going to personally supervise the installation of the Internet in the New Undisclosed Location so that I know how it is set up, how it works, and how to troubleshoot it if problems arise.

And then I wake up.

In the meantime, thank you for dropping by. Keep coming back, if you can stomach my incessant whining about money, technology, and other things that get under my skin.

When can we go? Kepler Space Telescope finds potentially habitable planet

2011-12-06T08:23:00.003-06:00

(Obtained from Space.com.)

OK, so Kepler 22-b is 600 light years away. And we'll have to get the marketing department to come up with a better name.

But Mike Wall of Science.com writes in an article posted today on Yahoo! News, "If the greenhouse effect operates there similarly to how it does on Earth, the average surface temperature on Kepler-22b would be 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius)."

I'm ready to leave tomorrow. Do you suppose the neighbors will be friendly?

Curmudgeon and Long Suffering Spouse go see a movie

2011-12-04T12:30:00.003-06:00

Someone game my wife two AMC theater passes last Christmas; we used them yesterday to go see The Muppets.

I enjoyed it, mostly, although Amy Adams is a bit much for me. She was doing the same schtik she did in Enchanted and I know I'm supposed to just think she's icky-sticky-super-sweet. But -- for me at least -- she's a bit much.

And one other objection (I don't think this qualifies as a spoiler): The plot centers on the Muppets being forgotten. Forgotten? Not in my house.

*Singing now* It's time to play the music/ It's time to light the lights....

Was any of this going on at your Thanksgiving gathering?

2011-12-03T06:34:00.002-06:00

(Today's "Pearls Before Swine," by Stephan Pastis.
Obtained from Yahoo! Comics.)

I was complaining just yesterday that I have the attention span of a gnat. But, as my mother used to say, there's more truth than poetry in this comic: By comparison to our kids, who are nearly always with gadget-in-hand, we are profiles in concentration.

The question is, do we get angry about it? Or do we live with it?

I admit: I tried getting angry about it. I achieved sullen compliance some of the time. But when people are fuming at one another the conversational flow is decreased, not increased.

So I've joined the live with it group. The devices become an aid to conversation -- fact-checking your assertion that so-and-so was in that movie, answering the question about who won the MVP Award in 2007, reassuring someone else that flights out of O'Hare are still 'on time' (as 'on time' as they ever get, anyway).

Armed with my wife's iPad (because it has a screen much bigger than the kids' smart phones), I can even play along.

However: All connected devices were banned from the killer Scrabble game that followed Thanksgiving 1 this year. Oldest Son pulled out his phone during the course of the game, but only to put the timer feature on -- he left it on the table so all could see it (and, hopefully, from his point of view, be intimidated by it). Of course he said he put the phone out only because he was unhappy with the performance of the game-supplied egg timer that was supposed to measure out turns....

Are you with the 'getting mad about it' group? Or are you willing to live with these devices, even at family gatherings? Are you sneaking a look at this post right now, underneath the dining room table?

Focus... or lack thereof... at Second Effort

2011-12-02T08:36:00.008-06:00

I'm like the dog in Pixar's Up these days -- almost anything steals my attention -- Squirrel!

Yesterday, for example, I read with great interest a story about Georgetown students who have pieced together a frightening portrait of tunnels deep underground in China, wherein the Second Artillery Corps of the Peoples' Liberation Army can shuttle nuclear missiles from one location to another. The students (and their professor) have suggested that China may have 3,000 warheads that can be run around these underground tracks, a number nearly four times prior estimates of China's nuclear capability.

And it occurred to me, why would our Chinese masters need all these missiles? If they want to destroy the West, they have only to call their loans. Or stop selling us stuff. Foreclosure seems easier -- and less likely to trigger nuclear winter -- and Squirrel!

I recently published an article on my other blog, the one I write in my own name, and I linked to it from my Facebook page. I got a few nice responses, which I take with a grain of salt. Some people (including me) can't take a punch. But I also have trouble taking a compliment.

A message I received from my sister Betty may explain why. Having reviewed the favorable comments, she wrote, "I don't really understand much about what you write, but I like to see you get acknowledged for it." How Irish of her! An insult dressed up as a compliment: Betty holds bachelor's and master's degrees in English. She teaches English in a suburban high school. If she can't comprehend what I write, it can only be because it's incomprehensible. I'm still smiling as I write this -- a masterful put-down is a thing of beauty. I was still trying to formulate an appropriate response when -- Squirrel!

I read a letter to the editor in the Chicago Sun-Times yesterday from Perry Sainati, of Belden Universal Manufacturing Co. A healthy excerpt (since letters don't last too long online on the Sun-Times website):

For the past two years, manufacturing all over the country is rebounding like it hasn’t in decades. There is a whole new face of manufacturing in 2011. That’s why manufacturing is now leading this country’s economic turnaround.

What’s more, as American manufacturers embrace innovation, automation and the value proposition, they’ve become the most efficient in the world. And that’s why in 2010, despite a 4.4 percent reduction in labor costs, they realized a remarkable 6.7 percent spike in productivity. In other words, these days American manufacturing is growing, and doing so with new demand for highly paid skilled workers. Some 20 percent of all manufactured goods worldwide are made in the U.S.A. This is a market share that has held steady for decades.

If you want to write a trend story, please write one that’s timely. Write about how many good manufacturing jobs continue to go unfilled in this country, even with 9 percent of our workers unemployed, because so few unemployed U.S. men and women are trained to do them. Write about how manufacturers who are producing “offshore” are facing escalating costs, long shipping lead times, detrimental quality and security concerns, are now starting to “re-shore” many facilities back to America. Write about how, thanks in large part to lean, forward-thinking Illinois-based companies like Caterpillar, and the millions they’ve invested in lean state-of-the-art plants, manufacturing is actually stronger in many states, including our own, than it’s been in years.

Gosh, I hope Mr. Sainati is right -- but all I hear on or read in the news these days suggests we are headed for Hell in an increasingly threadbare handbasket. I tried to think about how I could investigate (and hopefully verify) these claims and maybe do a post about it and -- Squirrel!

An article that pushes back the timeline for when humanity came 'out of Africa' caught my eye. And, in reading the article, I was struck by the assertion that Arabia, like the Sahara Desert, was once a lush, green place -- you know, climate change that predates even Al Gore? -- in other words, the world's climate is changing now because it changes always and the question is the extent to which humanity contributes to that change and whether we can hope to influence the changes that must come regardless of what we attempt -- and Squirrel!

That got me thinking about the coming winter. Chicago is bracing for another brutal winter, according to another article I saw. All the forecasts, from The Farmers' Almanac (not your go-to destination for meteorological science) to Accuweather, are lining up to suggest that we may have a colder, snowier winter than we're used to here. (And we're used to a lot, not that it keeps us from grumbling about it....)

Well, that got me to thinking about Jeane Dixon. When JFK was assassinated, everyone remembered her prediction -- and forgot her subsequent prediction that Nixon would win in 1960. Although she might have been right about that later one: If Richard J. Daley hadn't desperately needed Dan Ward to beat Ben Adamowski in the race for Cook County State's Attorney, Kennedy wouldn't have gotten nearly as many votes from Chicago -- LBJ may have stolen Texas, but Daley the First did not steal Illinois for JFK; that was just a happy consequence of straight ticket voting -- the dead hated to ticket-split -- for which Daley was able to take credit. But, on the other hand, if Dixon had been right about Nixon winning in 1960, then no one would have remembered her earlier prediction about a the assassination of a Democratic president elected in 1960 -- and that got me back to the grim weather forecast: I wondered, does anyone ever follow up on these dire weather predictions and see how often they come true? Now THAT would be an interesting -- Squirrel!

You know, this Information Age is fascinating. There's so much to know. If only I could pay attention long enough....

Squirrel!

Birds do it, bees do it...

2011-12-01T07:10:00.000-06:00

Bizaro comic obtained from the Chicago Tribune
website -- even though I read this one (in print, no less)
in the Chicago Sun-Times.

How old must one be to get this one?

I shudder to think. (Don't they teach our kids anything these days?)

But I was humming the tune as soon as I saw it.

Singing along with the Curmudgeon

2011-11-30T11:11:00.005-06:00

Now that Thanksgiving is behind us, my iPod has gone all-Christmas music, all-the-time.

There's a lot of Christmas music to play; I may not get through my Christmas playlist before the Big Day. I surely won't get through it twice.

Variety may or may not be the spice of life; it is surely the spice of Christmas music. There can't be more than two dozen traditional carols -- but the variety of performers and styles makes it so pleasant.

As the iPod shuffles along, Bing Crosby yields to U2. Ray Charles is followed by Mannheim Steam Roller. Yogi Yorgesson sings about playing Santa Claus at the PTA, Vince Guaraldi plays "Christmastime is Here," and some English church choir weighs in. My son-in-law, Hank, actually can tell which choir is which. "That's Canterbury," he might say. Or, "that's York. I've sung there." (He's gone on tour with his choir.) A couple of times, when he's made these assertions, I've checked. He's been right. I'm impressed -- I certainly can't tell one from another -- but I know which are the Beach Boys and which are the Chipmunks. Then the Boston Pops takes me for a "Sleigh Ride." And the Sackville All Stars and Doc Severinsen and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass....

I don't think I could sit all the way through the Caribbean Christmas disc I bought a couple of years back -- most of the tunes aren't recognizable, to my Gringo-from-Chicago ears at least, as Christmas music. And my album of Medieval Christmas carols doesn't sound much like Christmas music either. One album is in Spanish; the other is mostly in Latin. But when one of these tracks gets shuffled in between songs by Julie Andrews and the Muppets, it's just wonderful.

What will be next? Pearl Bailey asking for that five pound box of money? Louis Armstrong asking "'Zat You Santa Claus?" No, it's the Philadelphia Orchestra doing the "March of the Toys."

I don't look forward to putting up a tree. But I look forward to playing Christmas music on the iPod. What song will you request?

Conversation in a courthouse hallway

2011-11-29T08:42:00.004-06:00

Not all attorneys are jerks.

The old joke is that attorneys are always wonderful in the first person (my attorney, our attorney) -- lawyers are rat-bastards only in the second or third person (your attorney, their attorney).

And, of course, when the bill comes in.

My opponent in the case heard yesterday morning is not a rat-bastard. It's a thankless dispute among unit owners in a condominium association that hate each other so cordially that they are willing to spend themselves into bankruptcy in order to punish their opponents. My client is an insurance company which is (a) contractually obligated to pour gasoline on the fire (by funding one side's defense) and (b) desperately hoping I can find a way to get them out of this obligation.

Anyway, another attempt is being made to mediate the underlying dispute. Mediations can take whatever form the parties agree to -- but the form that is most likely to work here would be a cage match to the death. There would be too much paperwork involved in that. Because of this pending mediation, however, my opponent wanted to put the brakes on my coverage suit. The court obliged him and we stepped outside in the hallway to hash out the wording of the order.

We also had a poormouth conversation.

A lawyer seldom admits that he or she is doing well to another lawyer. I don't know why this is so; it merely is. Smith gets out of his Rolls at the country club and sees Jones alighting from his Maybach. He asks Jones how things are going.

"Terribly," Jones says, lighting a stogie about the size of a nightstick with a $100 bill. "I don't know how much longer we can keep going with the economy the way it is."

"I know what you mean," says Smith, with all the sympathy of a lion addressing a sickly wildebeest. "We are struggling to stay afloat."

These sorts of conversations can go on for quite awhile. One must have a strong stomach to eavesdrop on such a conversation.

But my conversation yesterday with my opponent was different. He is struggling. So am I. He went to a virtual office setup in hopes of saving money. It hasn't worked out as well as he hoped. I'm four months behind to Westlaw and just put my rent money in the bank yesterday. My November rent money.

My opponent began talking of looking for a new career. He's a few years older than me -- somewhere around 60 -- but too young to retire. Especially since he has kids younger than mine. And he's a good attorney. I know; this is not our first case together. And we've worked together in bar activities too. He says I'm a good attorney. I think he means it. But it doesn't help pay the light bill.

Thanksgivings 2011, Curmudgeon style

2011-11-28T11:10:00.001-06:00

When the kids were little, getting together as a family was simple: I had only to come home.

I always came home. Sometimes -- rarely -- I came home later than expected, having stopped longer than anticipated at a local watering hole. If I came home very late, my wife would turn off the lights, lock the door, and salt the stairs going up to our bedroom with a number of the kids' toys.

She would suppress her evil chuckles while I tried (often unsuccessfully) to suppress my curses as I lurched and lumbered up the stairs.

But the point is, when I came home, the family was together.

Time passed. When the kids began entering their teens, Long Suffering Spouse and I would have to wait, often long into the night, to get the family together. Now, as the youngest is almost done with his teens, the kids still at home are still going out. But I'm not necessarily waiting up. In fact, the kids tend to go out about the time I fall asleep. I snooze in my chair, watching TV through my eyelids, until they return. But the point is, as time went on, getting the family together took a little more effort.

Now we come to the present. Older Daughter and Oldest Son are married. Older Daughter lives in Indianapolis. Middle Son also lives away from home. Younger Daughter and Youngest Son are away at college. Now getting the family together involves serious coordination -- and panic clean-ups.

I took the day off Wednesday, in fact, to get my stuff together. It was a scheduled day off for Long Suffering Spouse.

Long Suffering Spouse is far more organized than I am. Because she has to create a lot of the materials she uses in teaching, and because she has so many different classes, from pre-school through 8th grade, my wife has stuff in several places around the house. The dining room table is her main home office, but she ordinarily has piles of binders by her rocking chair in the living room, bags of papers by her chair in the den, and stacks of folders on what (in other houses) might be the kitchen table. My pile is concentrated around the computer desk in the Curmudgeon family den. But if I were to allow someone else to sweep up all my stuff so as to dog-proof the area, I wouldn't even know what I had lost, much less where to look for it.

Ah, yes -- dog-proofing. Over the course of the Thanksgiving weekend, we were scheduled to play host to both Rodent the shih tzu (the pocket dog owned by Oldest Son and his wife Abby) (see, Christmas with Rodent & The Curmudgeon Clan, Parts I and II) and Cork (don't call him Corky), the much larger golden retriever puppy recently acquired by Older Daughter and her husband Hank.

We weren't supposed to have both dogs at once. As you may recall, we didn't expect to get the family together at all this Thanksgiving. We were reconciled to having Thanksgiving 1 and Thanksgiving 2.

But when Older Daughter got moved to the day shift on Thanksgiving instead of the overnight shift, she became determined to get to get to Chicago before the end of Thanksgiving Day. She almost made it.

She worked her 12 hour shift at the hospital. Then she joined her husband Hank at their church choir director's Thanksgiving party, already in progress. This was controversial: She called us from the party, ripping mad. The choir director was originally supposed to serve dinner around mid-afternoon. Somewhere along the line, however, he pushed the start of dinner back to 6:00.

Six o'clock? On Thanksgiving? There are only three acceptable times for serving dinner on Thanksgiving Day: Halftime of the Detroit game, in between the Detroit and Dallas games, or (if you're feeling positively continental) halftime of the Dallas game. Anything later creates the risk of family tragedy. One too many egg nogs gets consumed and all manner of family skeletons can be unearthed.

Anyway, with the late start time, Older Daughter was in time for dessert at the choir director's party. She wasn't happy about it; she was insisting on leaving for Chicago right away. She managed to get Hank out of the party but they still couldn't get on the road. They had to go home first and bundle up Cork.

Cork travels with a giant cage. I wish I'd had something similar for my children when they were small.

Anyway, by the time Older Daughter et al. got on I-65, the killer Scrabble game that followed our Thanksgiving 1 meal (served between the Detroit and Dallas games) was already almost burnt out. Abby won again, as usual. The kids all play "Words With Friends" (as close to Scrabble as the copyright laws allow) on their smart phones. They compete against each other -- and Abby usually wins those games, too.

I don't participate. I have no smart phone. Also, I have no friends.

By the time Older Daughter called to confirm that she was beginning the long northward trek (and, in turn, almost all of us tried to talk her into waiting until morning) Abby was looking at her husband, and at her watch, and making it clear that it was time to leave.

That's what good wives do -- they pull their spouses out of situations, even while they're having a good time... lest they have have too good a time and make donkeys of themselves.

Oldest Son was beginning to bray. He had knocked back several Sam Adamses during the Baltimore-San Francisco game (he managed to keep a watchful eye on those proceeding while still playing Scrabble) and, while he was still reasonably presentable, he was becoming boisterous. And he needed some non-beer time before he could drive home.

And then, somehow, Oldest Son decided that they would wait for his sister and Hank -- and Cork. The canine cousins needed to be introduced, he said. Abby was not amused. That Cork might swallow Rodent whole in a single gulp did not seem to enter into Oldest Son's calculations. Middle Son proposed a game of Risk.

There's nothing like a board game devoted to taking over the world to hold Oldest Son's interest. And so the game began.

I'd had a few scotches myself, but these were the least of my problems. I was tired. It had been a long day Wednesday preparing for the kids' arrival. (After a day of cleaning, Long Suffering Spouse had made an apple pie, two pumpkin pies, pumpkin bread, a tray of brownies and a double batch of sugar cookies. I was bushed after organizing and dog-proofing my corner of the den. But I cleaned an occasional tray and kept Christmas carols playing on the Bose machine. And I did stay loyally awake.) And Thursday had been a long day, too, even before the kids came, because I had to do errands as required while Long Suffering Spouse got the first of the turkeys in the oven (and the potatoes and sweet potatoes and corn and beans and dinner rolls and, of course, her homemade cornmeal stuffing and gravy).

In other words, it was past my bedtime when the Scrabble game ended. I entered into the Risk game (holding South America against all challengers) while eating Ritz crackers, Wheat Thins, Triscuits -- anything to stay awake. Abby played, too, her continuing efforts to induce Oldest Son to leave being studiously ignored. At one point Abby said she would take the keys and drive home with the dog. "I'll come get you when you crash the car," said Oldest Son. "You might make it to the end of the block." Abby has a driver's license -- but apparently has not driven a car since high school.

I have only a vague idea what time it was when Older Daughter arrived. I think it was somewhere around 2:00am Friday morning. There must have been some warning -- a text or something that was not directed to me -- because Abby had hold of Rodent before the front door opened.

My clue that new visitors had arrived came when the little dog began shaking and barking and barking and shaking and growling, all at a very excited, high pitch. Moments later, I heard deeper growling and barking: Cork had come into the house. When I saw him standing in the living room he was shaking, too. I'm not certain whether this shaking was meant to convey hostility or fear or merely curiosity. What it conveyed to me was this: Older Daughter is here. Now maybe I can go to bed.

Younger Daughter was all over the new canine arrival. "Aren't you the cutest thing? Oh, yes, you are?" She'd become acquainted with Cork on a recent trip to Indianapolis.

Oldest Son laughed. "No wonder Rodent is barking. You're being unfaithful to her." Younger Daughter glowered.

"I am not!" she protested. "But Abby has hold of her."

"I don't know," said Abby, playing along, "I think Rodent is shocked at how fickle you are."

Long Suffering Spouse had, by this time, been asleep for at least an hour, maybe two. She'd sat in my recliner in the corner of the den farthest from the noisy Risk game in the dining room and, at some point, passed out. Who could blame her? I merely envied her.

The new dog noise roused Long Suffering Spouse somewhat. She got up and stumbled toward the front of the house, heading for the stairs to our bedroom, passing the dog, passing her son-in-law, passing her newly arrived daughter. Along the way she said something like, "Oh, I'm so glad you're here. Happy Thanksgiving. Good night."

I followed close behind. I was less articulate. "You're here. Good night."

Abby needed only one hand to hold Rodent. With her other hand, she dragged Oldest Son toward the front door. "So nice to see you. What a lovely dog. Good night."

I gather Middle Son stayed a moment or two, but he had a wedding to attend on Friday and needed to be home hours before. Younger Daughter apparently stayed up awhile to get her sister and brother-in-law settled. And to play with the dog of course. But you can't prove it by me.

Long Suffering Spouse and I were out of bed a few hours later to start the second turkey. (You can't have Thanksgiving 2 with leftovers, can you?) I ate. I fell asleep. My mother-in-law came by for a few hours after dinner. I stayed asleep throughout. She told my wife she was worried that I was so tired. I'm not worried. I was exhausted.

I'd like to tell you we spent the rest of the weekend recuperating, but it would not be true. We got Cork and Hank and Older Daughter back on the road to Indianapolis Saturday night. We got back from dropping Youngest Son back at South Janesville College and then from dropping Younger Daughter at her dorm on Sunday afternoon just before dark. It was then time to start looking for all the things we'd squirreled away in order to dog-proof the house. Then we could start the weekend chores. Much of the conversation in the car between Long Suffering Spouse and Younger Daughter concerned how little Older Daughter realized all that we had to do to prepare for her visit.

Don't get me wrong: I really was happy to have the whole family at home this weekend. But, these days, it's a lot of work.

Commercial air travel a real turkey

2011-11-22T09:04:00.004-06:00

I don't think that, given a choice, anyone would really choose a week in prison over commercial air travel in the United States during the coming holiday weekend -- but with each passing year, determining the better choice is increasingly difficult.

Not that air travel was ever truly glamorous -- not in my limited experience, anyway.

But before 9/11 air travel wasn't the miserable, bleak, soul-destroying punishment it has since become.

I recall having a deposition in Columbus, Ohio in 2001 -- before 9/11. I booked a flight on Southwest, which I hated to do because Southwest does not fly to O'Hare. Still (we Chicagoans are very lucky in this, at least) I was able to take the Blue Line downtown and change for Orange Line. The Orange Line runs right into Chicago's Midway Airport, a Southwest hub.

But I had an early flight -- I think the dep was at 10:00am local time and we're an hour behind that in Chicago -- and I had to be gone before sunrise in order to make the flight comfortably. Unfortunately for me, the horizon was already pretty bright when I started from the Harlem stop on the Blue Line. Then I had to wait an inordinate amount of time for the Orange Line train at Clark and Lake. The upshot was that I was running through the parking garage at Midway (there were lines on the floor to direct train passengers in those days -- I haven't been there recently) toward my gate just a few minutes before the scheduled flight time.

I ran through the airport like O.J. Simpson used to do in the old Hertz commercials (I'll bet Hertz hates it when its former corporate spokesman is remembered) and got to the gate just as the door was being closed.

I think I went to the check-in counter and not the closing door to the jet bridge; I can't say for sure. Wherever I went, I remember being told that if I had tried the alternative, I would never have made the flight. It doesn't matter now anyway: If I tried that today, I'd be shot seventeen times before getting anywhere near the gate. If I somehow made it through, the entire airport would be closed down until I was hunted down.

But, in the summer of 2001, I made that flight to Columbus, on time for my deposition. It wasn't glamorous, but it was reasonably efficient.

Then came 9/11 and, soon after that, Richard Reid, the would-be "shoe bomber."

The next time I flew was after those world-changing events. Once again, I was flying Southwest, from Midway. I was going to join the rest of the family in Louisville, there for a baseball tournament with Middle Son. (I had to be in court that day and couldn't drive down with the rest of them.) Leaving from Chicago's downtown, Midway or O'Hare are equally convenient to the air traveler. (That should qualify me for a Chamber of Commerce award -- don't you think?)

It had been a busy day. I don't remember exactly what I was doing, but it was hot, I was wearing a suit, and I'd been walking all over the Loop on one errand or another. The last thing I wanted to do was take off my shoes -- and any sane person should have respected my wishes in this regard. The olfactory consequences were entirely predictable -- but, as I learned when I gave fair warning, the TSA were already, in 2002, a humorless bunch. Fortunately, the TSA agent with whom I was dealing on this occasion chose to tell me about the rubber gloves, as opposed to showing me.

Air travel has only gotten worse since. I've had occasion to watch conditions deteriorate because I have traveled a handful of times in the intervening years -- but not so often that I can't see the decline. The Curmudgeon family traveled as a group to Oldest Son's wedding in San Antonio in May 2010 (well, Oldest Son was down there already). Long Suffering Spouse hadn't flown for many years by that point; I think that was Youngest Son's first flight. I tried to warn them about what to expect, how to cope with the oppressive "security" and so forth, but nothing can prepare the uninitiated for the actual events. Sometimes I think the ultimate goal of the TSA is to discourage all law-abiding citizens from air travel. On that day (which surely will be soon) the government can simply arrest, on grounds of suspected terrorism, anyone who wants to fly.

And now we near Thanksgiving, traditionally one of the busiest travel weekends of the year. I give thanks I don't have to travel anywhere, particularly by air.

Update on the spamming front

2011-11-22T08:34:00.006-06:00

(Today's installment of Pearls Before Swine is grabbed from
GoComics because my usual online source for the Pearls strip,
Yahoo! Comics, is running a day behind for some reason.
I saw today's Pearls in print in the Chicago Sun-Times.)

I deleted 14 spam "comments" this morning -- Blogger had flagged nine of them; the others were awaiting comment moderation.

We're in the grips of the pre-Thanksgiving blogging slowdown here in America and traffic is down. There's too much to be done in the real world. And I don't get a lot of comments when traffic is high.

So I hated to cut out comments, even obvious spam ones. But I did. And I'll continue to do so, too. I just will continue to have mixed feelings about it -- deep inside, there's that nagging fear that Second Effort may suffer from the same problem that Rat says is afflicting Goat's blog in today's Pearls Before Swine.

By the way, Mr. Pastis' recent comics about blogging have prompted me to go looking for his blog. I found this one and added it today to my sidebar.

Everything I need to know I get from the comics, part 4,791

2011-11-18T12:22:00.004-06:00

(From the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner.)

This strikes me as indisputable.

Anyone care to dispute?

Meanwhile, in Memphis, Tea Partiers invited a couple of the local Occupy protesters to a meeting to look for common ground. Writing for the AP, in a post appearing today on Yahoo! News, Adrienne Sainz reports:

By the end, the Occupy Memphis members and their audience — made up mostly of whites over 40 years old — reached common ground on some issues, such as their perception that the government and politicians no longer listen to and serve the people they represent.

They also found some agreement in their stances against taxpayer-sponsored government bailouts and "crony capitalism," the idea that close ties between lobbyists, businesses, and other self-serving interests can influence government officials and the exercise of capitalism.

(snark)Some of the Occupy kids also got their Moms and Dads to increase their allowances.(/snark)

And if the Tea Partiers and the Occupiers ever get together on their disdain for banks too big to fail, we may yet have some reform in this country. Or at least a lot of really nervous politicians....

Long Suffering Spouse doesn't think this is funny

2011-11-17T07:57:00.003-06:00

(Today's installment of Pardon My Planet, by Vic Lee, which
appears locally in the Chicago Sun-Times -- although this image
was obtained from the Chicago Tribune "Comics Kingdom.")

I showed this to my wife first thing this morning, when she asked me why I had just guffawed.

Note to those who still use the expression "LOL": When people really do laugh out loud, and the cause of their amusement is not immediately apparent to those in the vicinity, people in the vicinity are apt to become concerned. Or scared.

Long Suffering Spouse doesn't think this is funny because she believes some teachers actually think like the gentleman in the cartoon above. On the other hand, I think the cartoon is funny... because I also believe that far too many teachers actually think like the the gentleman in the cartoon above.

Note, too, that the cartoon is set inside a teachers' lounge.

The cartoon reminded me of a passage I'd seen in an article in the current Wilson Quarterly ("Teach to the Test?" by Richard P. Phelps, Autumn 2011, pp. 38-42). From Phelps' article (p. 40):

... John J. Cannell, a medical resident working in rural Flat Top, West Virginia, read about the claims of local school officials that their children scored above the average on standardized tests. Skeptical, he investigated further and ultimately discovered that every state that administered nationally normed tests made the same claim, a statistical impossibility.

In other words, administrators claimed that, out of all the children who took the tests, more than half were above average. This was dubbed, for reasons obvious to those familiar with Garrison Kellior's work, the "Lake Wobegon Effect." In other words, as Mark Twain apparently did not say, "Figures do not lie, but liars figure."

But, now, I'm starting to explain why I think something is funny. Bitterly funny. Laugh-so-I-don't-get-red-in-the-face-angry funny.

And the surest way to kill a joke is to explain it. So I'll stop now. I'll save the education reform lecture for another day.

Thanksgiving 1 and Thanksgiving 2

2011-11-16T10:38:00.001-06:00

When Older Daughter was a baby she would not crawl. Other babies crawled, but Older Daughter apparently considered that beneath her dignity. In an effort to get Older Daughter to conform, my wife would sit the child in one corner of the playpen and her favorite objects in the corner farthest from her. Older Daughter looked at the toys. She wanted the toys. But crawling was out of the question. Eventually, she figured out that, by pulling the blanket on the floor of the playpen, she could draw the objects she wanted to within reach. She remade the world according to her needs.

I suppose that sounds critical. I don't mean to be critical. I am amused at Older Daughter's consistent view that the Universe is something she can manipulate and control according to her whim. No amount of evidence to the contrary seems able to shake this certitude.

For example, when Older Daughter studied in Spain for a semester, back in her undergraduate days (several years ago), she assumed that all costs and expenses would be expressed to her in dollars. After all, she was an American and Americans use dollars. She was shocked -- shocked -- to find out that Spaniards would use euros even when dealing with her. At the exchange rate then prevailing, Older Daughter's budget was shreds and tatters in a fortnight.

The latest blow to Older Daughter's worldview came in connection with the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. Older Daughter is, you will recall, a nurse. I don't think she thought that sick people would actually take a 24 hour timeout from their various illnesses so as to permit her to come to Chicago for dinner. On the other hand, while she might have understood, in the abstract, that sometimes nurses (and doctors, and policemen, and firemen, and so forth) have to work on holidays -- even Thanksgiving -- she did not think that she might be required to work on a holiday against her wishes. Her managers, however, for reasons entirely their own, this year thought differently.

When Older Daughter stopped fulminating about the unfairness of it all, and agreed not to quit her job in protest, she suggested we move Thanksgiving instead.

Grateful that she was not insisting on an Act of Congress, we initiated negotiations with the rest of the family to see if it might be possible to have our Thanksgiving dinner on Black Friday.

That won't be possible this year. Middle Son has a wedding on Friday and so will certainly not be able to come. So we decided to organize Thanksgiving 1 and Thanksgiving 2 instead. Whoever can come to both, comes to both. Younger Daughter and Youngest Son, who will both be home from school, and are therefore available generally, wholeheartedly endorsed this plan. Older Daughter and her husband Hank have agreed in principle (mainly because Long Suffering Spouse relented and said they could bring their giant dog here too). Oldest Son has committed to Thursday; he is still casting about for an excuse to keep him from having to come back on Friday. He likes us well enough, you understand -- but he prefers us in small doses. And he and his wife are notoriously picky eaters; judging by the contents of their refrigerator (empty) they are particularly averse to home-cooked meals.

However, grateful as I am for having found this solution, I know another problem looms just over the horizon: I don't know how we can do a family Christmas portrait this year.

But I'll just bask in the triumph of this moment for as long as I can.

This is a test... this is only a test

2011-11-15T09:00:00.008-06:00

You couldn't watch the news earlier this month without hearing all about the nationwide emergency alert scheduled for November 9.

I suppose I never knew that these frequent tests weren't national in scope before this month.

The tests were initiated during the Cold War. In case the Reds pushed THE BUTTON, serious-looking announcers were supposed to "interrupt this broadcast" to provide the bad news -- and offer helpful tips about what to do and where to go to shelter against the coming nuclear winter. Somehow, I doubt that would have happened. More likely, the serious-looking announcers would have headed for the hills as soon as the teletype message became clear. I can see the last two guys in the studio -- one with his hat and coat on -- trying to persuade the other to make the announcement. "You've always wanted to go on camera," he'd say. "This is your big chance."

And maybe the soap opera would have been interrupted, finally, by a scared, pimply young man, hair uncombed and tie askew, saying, "Are we on?" There there would have been that impossibly bright flash... and the Stone Age would have restarted.

Fortunately, the Reds these days aren't likely to push THE BUTTON (although, some day, they may CALL THEIR LOANS -- which would be just as fatal, if slower). Yet we still have the Emergency Broadcast System. But why? In case the government needs to warn us that someone or something has come looking for what didn't crash at Roswell in 1947?

No, come to think of it, I doubt the government would want to tell us that flying saucers were coming, even if someone in authority were persuaded it was real. Think of the panic in the streets -- the probable riots. And, besides, it would probably depress the heck out of the stock market.

No, we continue to have this national Emergency Broadcast System because... because... because... because we have it, OK? And it had never been tested nationally, and so, all other national problems having been fully and fairly resolved, the government decided to test it on November 9. And everybody needed to be warned because every TV channel and radio station was going to carry the same warning and people might be scared. (Where did Judge Judy go? Did Kim Kardashian get remarried?)

Long Suffering Spouse and I were quite sick of the repeated warnings about the forthcoming test as last Wednesday neared. How much repetition is necessary? Who could possibly misunderstand that they'd miss 90 or 120 seconds of Maury or a soap opera on Wednesday and that it meant absolutely nothing except that the government was just trying to see if the system worked? We'd just seen still another warning on the news Tuesday evening when the phone rang.

It was my mother-in-law.

"Did you know there's going to be a blackout tomorrow?" she asked, breathlessly. "Should I turn off my computer? Do I have to unplug my refrigerator?" Not satisfied with the saturation news coverage, the police department in Abuela's nearby Chicago suburb decided to call all the seniors in town with a prerecorded message. I don't know exactly what was said -- but it was the call from the police that prompted her call to us.

Long Suffering Spouse talked her in off the ledge. "Mom, it's just the test on the TV and radio tomorrow."

"The test?"

"The Emergency Broadcasting System. You know -- 'this is a test, this is only a test?'"

"A test like that? Like they do all the time?"

"Yes, Mom."

"Why are they making such a big deal of that?"

"I don't know, Mom."

"The power will stay on?"

"Yes, Mom."

And the best part of the test? Go back to the linked article at the top of the page. From a civil libertarian's perspective, the most comforting thing about the government's attempt to control all broadcast communication in the nation didn't work particularly well. According to the linked story on Yahoo! News (by Mark Clayton, originally for the Christian Science Monitor), "In some cases the disclaimer was broadcast. In other cases the message was missing altogether or did not include the audio caveat. * * * It has also been reported that a Lady Gaga song played through the test period for some viewers." Clayton also quoted this Tweet: "Did not see it on Comcast in Northern Virginia. Instead, saw about 30 seconds of QVC (was watching MSNBC at test time)." And people watching kitten videos on YouTube or blowing up dragons on World of Warcraft never knew about it either.

Christmas season not too long... just too early

2011-11-10T08:55:00.002-06:00

Long Suffering Spouse is not amused that every program, on every channel, is punctuated now by Christmas commercials.

Did you know Wal-Mart has brought layaway back in time for the holidays? No? Seriously? Have you been in a coma?

Chicago's WLIT-FM (Lite FM -- presumably to distinguish itself from all the other, heavier stations on the FM dial) became the "Holiday Lite" this week -- all Christmas music, all the time. The other night the 10:00 news ended with a time lapse presentation of the erection and lighting of the giant Christmas tree at the State Street Macy's (what we diehards continue to call Marshall Fields).

"It's not even Thanksgiving," groused Long Suffering Spouse. "We go from Halloween to Christmas and Thanksgiving is ignored. Why?"

I could answer that: Except for grocery stores, Thanksgiving has no real retail component, thus making it inevitable that it would be overwhelmed and overshadowed by Christmas, Inc. But I know a rhetorical question when I hear one, and I wisely keep my mouth shut.

(For once!)

"Thanksgiving is a nice holiday. It's a family holiday. It's an important holiday," continued Long Suffering Spouse. "Persons of all faiths and traditions can celebrate it. It's one thing that binds America together."

The phone rang at that point and the speech had to be put aside in order to deal that.

But Long Suffering Spouse is right, of course.

On the other hand, merchants are not going to shorten the most profitable season of the retail year.

Therefore, allow me to make this modest suggestion: Instead of squeezing Thanksgiving off the calendar, why not extend the retail Christmas season past Christmas Eve? Why should we go back to Lady Goo Goo on the radio and Viagra commercials on TV on December the 25th?

Yes, in America gifts are given, and opened, and (in the case of toys) demolished, as soon as possible after sunset on Christmas Eve. But in Latin American tradition gifts aren't exchanged until Epiphany -- the Feast of the Three Kings -- in early January.

Why not let the Christmas music and Christmas commercials continue until the BCS National Championship Bowl on January 9, 2012? That would take in all 12 Days of Christmas and Three Kings and a couple of days beyond. And there a lot of parties in that time... retail opportunities abound. And maybe the retail Christmas season might imbibe a particle or two of the actual Christmas season... wouldn't that be nice?

Extending the Christmas season into January would give Thanksgiving a little breathing room and calm Long Suffering Spouse. I see this as a win-win-win for all concerned. And memo to Christmas, Inc.? Feel free to leave a small gratuity in my stocking this year.

Thank you.

A kind word about Thomson-West -- and another opportunity to bash the phone company

2011-11-08T08:50:00.002-06:00

It wasn't my first choice to become a deadbeat. I'm still fairly new at this. Yes, I've joked that prioritizing my bills is a little like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic -- but, until recently, icy water was not sloshing across the decks.

I've complained about collection calls since I started this blog -- but, I've always managed (until now) to see a clear path out of the financial thicket. I used to get impatient about impatient creditors: Didn't they know I was going to make good ASAP? Today, the path is overgrown with weeds. Or past due bills. And I've had so many collection calls lately I feel I've become something of a connoisseur.

Thomson-West provides my Westlaw subscription. It also supplies a number of books I use in my practice. Until a year or two ago it also provided me online CLE. (That is, I used it until I figured out I could satisfy my obligations for free or by doing stuff I would have/ should have done anyway -- without shelling out an additional $80 a month.)

Westlaw is very useful in my practice -- but it is staggeringly expensive. It is particularly expensive for me because I need Federal court cases and out of state cases for my (lately imaginary) insurance practice. In round figures, it costs something like $600 a month.

Lately, West's competitor, Lexis, made a pitch for my business. They could provide me with the same stuff (without the proprietary West 'key numbering,' of course) for $350 a month. For this amount I'd also have access to all sorts of databases that I don't use because I don't have them on Westlaw... but which might be interesting.

I can add and subtract. Taking $250 a month out of overhead would be a big deal for me at any time. But, even several months back, I could see that this was shaping up into a terrible year -- and I was therefore particularly anxious to avoid getting in over my head. If possible. But I wasn't sure when my indentured servitude to West expired. I looked at my records -- and, as near as I could tell, I was already out of subscription.

What? A lawyer whose own records are incomplete? Don't be so shocked. Haven't you ever heard the expression, "the shoemaker's children are always poorly shod?" We mind other peoples' business so well, we sometimes neglect our own.

I sent West a goodbye letter -- and West responded by sending me a copy of the contract I apparently failed to keep -- one that keeps me in fetters until next summer. We expect you to honor your contract, West said. For its part, Lexis said it would charge me only $50 a month until my West contract expired -- and then start the clock running on my three year deal with that company.

Let's recap, shall we? I tried to save myself $250 a month -- and wound up costing myself an extra $50.

What a businessman I am, eh?

When the hard choices came between between Westlaw and rent or Westlaw and mortgage, Westlaw kept losing out. I just recently paid the Westlaw bill that was due at the end of July. Just to show good faith.

Faith, I've got.

Westlaw calls now, every couple of weeks. They've outsourced the collection work to India, and the callers are unfailingly polite. I tell them there is no way I can make a payment now but -- if someone pays me -- I will gladly pay them. They've been good with that so far. They appear to understand that I need the service to continue operating and, hopefully, dig out of this hole. And I appreciate this. Not enough to pay them $600 a month one nanosecond longer than necessary -- but I do appreciate it.

I'm hoping for a check this week that will get my rent current and take care of my October mortgage. There should be something left over for West. And so the bill for the end of August should be paid soon.

Why did they insist on keeping me again?

On the other hand, there is the phone company. I wrote in early February of getting a dreaded red notice from the phone company. (I had to go to the Illinois Commerce Commission to clear up a mysterious charge on my bill.) I got the red notice when I fell more than two months in arrears on my office phone bill.

It happened again this fall. I didn't really have the money to pay these latest overdue phone bills -- but I went down to near zero in my office account to get the phone company off my back when I realized that disconnection only works one way: I can't do business by calling out. People can't do business with me by calling in. But the evil phone company can still call. After making these payments, my next bill was due October 27 -- but, remember, I was, except for that bill, current.

I was therefore not too worried when I had no money to pay the phone company on October 27. (The phone bill used to be due on the last day of the month, but the due date has been creeping up for some reason.) I had to harbor my meager resources to put a downpayment on next year's malpractice insurance.

But the phone company has had just about enough of me: Even though I was only about a week late, the phone company sent me a disconnect notice.

I will probably have to move from this Undisclosed Location early next year; the lease is coming up for renewal. I don't think we can or will renew.

Of the four of us who moved here in 2006, one died; another abandoned us for Florida. That left two of us to share costs that four were supposed to divide. We carried two extra offices until earlier this year when we finally got a tenant who is very nice -- but who is paying substantially less than a quarter of our current expenses. Clearly we are paying more than market. The landlord will probably offer a reduction in the rent -- but I think my remaining colleague is already committed to moving out. I certainly can't carry the space by myself, so I will have to go, too.

I will probably abandon my land lines when I do. This is another $180 a month headache I do not need. And you had better believe that I will abandon Ma Bell to her fate when I do establish alternative service.

Ken Levine explains what a curmudgeon is

2011-11-07T08:49:00.002-06:00

Small "c" intended. Mr. Levine defines what a curmudgeon is in the course of eulogizing Andy Rooney:

There’s an art to being a curmudgeon. It’s not enough to just complain about things, you have to be entertaining while doing it. Otherwise you’re just a crank or running for office. A good curmudgeon can say the things we wish we could say if we weren’t worried about losing our jobs or friends.

Andy Rooney was the best. You could watch him every week for 30 years and rarely say to the screen, “Oh shut up!” I’m sure Andy would consider that the ultimate compliment.

He was also one of the last curmudgeons. Yes, we still have Lewis Black, Fran Lieborwitz (when she's not just freeloading in the Hamptons), and a few other notable malcontents, but it’s not like the old days. Back in the ‘40s to the ‘60s, when Andy Rooney was just middle aged, the airwaves and publications were filled with these golden arch voices. George S. Kaufman, Oscar Levant, Henry Morgan, Fred Allen, and Dorothy Parker were just a few. (The ones I missed would probably say, "Typical!") They would showcase their razor-sharp wits on game show panels, radio shows, talk shows, newspaper columns, and celebrity funerals. It was certainly their heyday. There were way more forums and way fewer anti-depressant drugs.

I'd like to think that there is still one other curmudgeon out there -- namely here. You'd think that, if a true curmudgeon is really such a rara avis, there'd be opportunities for somebody like me.

But go back and read Mr. Levine's post again: "It’s not enough to just complain about things, you have to be entertaining while doing it."

We may have just identified the problem with Second Effort.

Yet another illustration of why the Federal Government is in trouble: student loan edition

2011-11-04T08:37:00.004-05:00

And, no, this is not a political post; it is a sad, but true, family story.

My sister (I call her Betty on this blog because that is not her real name) has had some tough times, none of which are immediately relevant to this discussion. It will suffice to say that she has emerged from bankruptcy and divorce with a responsible job (she is a high school teacher). Her oldest child, a daughter, is now in college.

My niece is a bright girl and could have been an engineer. Engineers, particularly female engineers, are in great demand in America, but engineering jobs, though well-paying, come and go according to the state of the the economy and opportunities are not evenly distributed over the landscape. My niece has been shaped by her environment and her childhood experience; she is therefore cautious about reaching too far and has decided to be a nurse instead. Nurses, she is sure, will always find work wherever they are. I think she's right. But I still wish she'd tried engineering.

Anyway, my sister has had to apply for a loan to finance her daughter's tuition.

The U.S. government, you may know, has taken over the student loan business. Student loans should be the safest loans for taxpayers to make; they must be repaid in almost all circumstances. Student loans can not even be discharged in bankruptcy. But loans to students are insufficient to cover the costs of college.

Parents of college students know too well that when we fill out our FAFSA forms, the government calculates an amount, based on all the financial data supplied, that a parent should be able to contribute. I have found, in general, that this amount is always about three times more than I think I can contribute.

Betty's experience, apparently, has been similar. But the government, having grossly overestimated what Betty is capable of "contributing," is willing to give her a loan for the amount that she can't pony up on her own. Isn't that nice? And isn't that insane? If you have to take out a loan, then you really couldn't "contribute" the calculated amount, could you? (I take the time to spell out the obvious in case someone from the federal government should chance upon this post and attempt to read it.)

I don't know if Betty's credit history figures into it -- for reasons I will come to in a moment, I doubt it -- but the government, in its impenetrable bureaucratic majesty, was unwilling to give Betty a loan (over and above the grants and loans it will give to my niece) unless she could get someone to "endorse" her loan.

You've already guessed who she asked.

I've skimmed through all the verbal sludge on the studentloans.gov site and it appears that, basically, Betty had asked me to be a guarantor of the loan; that is, were Betty to stop paying, the government could come after me. (Why the government chooses to call that an "endorsement" instead using the perfectly understandable, traditional word "guarantee" is beyond me.)

I warned my sister that I didn't think I could possibly qualify. I co-signed a loan for Older Daughter's car some years ago without too much trouble -- but I wasn't two months behind in my home mortgage or a month behind in my office rent or carrying $30,000 in credit card debt then.

I am now. (Those parental "contributions" really add up over time.)

I wouldn't loan me 75 cents to buy a newspaper.

I explained all this to Betty. With family, you have to level. But she asked me to please try anyway.

So I did.

This morning.

The studentloans.gov site expressly warns that it will run a credit check. This is done during that ominous pause after you've approved said check while the government computer queries all the computers on Wall Street to see how your finances really are. I was sure that any rational computer would have a hearty electronic belly laugh as it spit my proposed "endorsement" back on my screen. Though humiliated, I would have thereby discharged my familial duty without further jeopardizing my (increasingly dim) future.

But a computer is only as rational as its programming. And this was a government computer, programmed (I guess) by government employees.

The darn thing accepted my endorsement.

Thinking my credit is any good is absolutely crazy. I emailed my sister this morning after this experience advising that the computer could only have accepted my endorsement because it is so sure that Betty will be able to pay back the loan. Because, obviously, I could never. If the government really thinks otherwise, it is no wonder the government is in such trouble.

Curmudgeon's latest theory on social networking

2011-11-02T08:49:00.003-05:00

Younger Daughter is scheduled to graduate from college in the Spring. She has begun to think, finally, about what she might do after she leaves school. In other words, she's begun to look for work.

I'm useless as a source of advice or practical assistance: My own experiences in interviewing have been awful -- and have never led to an actual job offer. (See, for example, Oldest Son's interview brings back memories -- really, really bad ones.) I've been self-employed, now, for 13 years. And I still hate my boss.

So I'm doing more listening than talking when Younger Daughter tells me of her job search strategy. One thing she said her school development office was quite keen on is LinkedIn. I've written about that, too (see, LinkedIn IPO finds Curmudgeon left behind -- I've never let my ignorance of a subject keep me from forming definite opinions about it) but I'd never accepted anyone's invitation to join. However, when Younger Daughter said she'd joined and asked me to join I really had no choice, did I? After several weeks, I'm connected (at last count) to six people. None of them appears to be connected to Kevin Bacon. None of my connections have offered me a job. Or a book contract. Younger Daughter is still looking for work, too.

But this experience has helped me crystallize my thinking about the various social networks. Here's my current working hypothesis:

LinkedIn is a combination of job board and trophy case. Those who are looking for work are desperately trying to make connections. Those who are already successful use LinkedIn to showcase all their many achievements. Either way, there is no humility on LinkedIn.

Facebook is an office Christmas party that runs all day, every day, 24/7. Holiday parties are a time when everyone gets together to retell the old, familiar stories, like when the guy who used to sit three cubicles over got sloppy drunk and groped the gorgeous new accountant. And how the accountant turned out to have a husband who was as muscular as she was gorgeous. Everyone will laugh, nervously, and hope they won't become the object of next year's holiday party story. In other words, holiday parties are fraught with peril. So is Facebook. On Facebook you have to act like you're having a good time -- even though your boss might sneak up behind you at any moment. And Facebook is even more dangerous than a never-ending office holiday party in this sense: Your friends and neighbors aren't at the office party; they wouldn't be invited. On Facebook, though, your real-life friends or family can embarrass you (and fatally damage your career prospects) in front of your boss at any moment. Such fun!

Twitter is just a handy means for athletes and actors to get into trouble. Journalists sometimes get into trouble by prematurely Tweeting something entirely unfounded, but it's athletes and actors who get caught in public with the wrong companion or who tweet out something incredibly stupid. (See, for example, the collected works of Rashard Mendenhall.) If there is a practical use for Twitter (beyond what could be accomplished just as well in a group email at least), I've yet to figure it out.

Do you agree or disagree?

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Arguably Related: Avoiding disasters at office Christmas parties

Best line of the night award

2011-11-01T09:04:00.002-05:00

From Jay Leno's monolog: He says a kid comes to his door trick-or-treating. "Gimme candy," the kid says. Leno forks over a couple of Butterfingers. "And five bucks, too," the kid says. "Who do you think you are?" asks Leno, indignantly. "I'm the Bank of America," says the kid.

Halloweens past linger on in Curmudgeon's basement

2011-10-31T08:41:00.005-05:00

Does that title sound like it might be the set-up for a ghost story? Or, worse, some horror story about kids found with eggs on their persons whilst on the old, scary guy's premises, intent on holiday mischief, but who wound up chained in the basement of the old, scary guy's house until first the eggs and then the persons rotted away?

If so, I'm sorry to disappoint you. Although, I must add, if she thought she could have gotten away with it, Long Suffering Spouse would have been sorely tempted a few years back to chain certain miscreants in a deep, dark, dank dungeon: Because we live in the neighborhood where my wife teaches, and because we had a flock of kids ourselves, the location of our home was too well known. For several consecutive years our house was egged annually on or around All Hallows Eve. Thankfully, we have been spared these attacks in the last few years.

By my mind is cast back further, this morning, to a happier time, when our kids were little enough to go trick-or-treating.

Long Suffering Spouse found a pattern for dinosaur costumes one Halloween and made two, one for Older Daughter and the other for Oldest Son. These were used for many years, by each child in turn. Later, store-bought costumes were preferred. Some of these did not last the holiday for which they were purchased. But Long Suffering Spouse found Star Trek Next Generation uniforms somewhere which were durable. At various stops along the line we picked up Civil War forage hats or kepis. Long Suffering Spouse made a general's uniform for Oldest Son for some school function; she even sewed on replica shoulder insignia. U.S. Grant was, thereafter, a frequent Halloween visitor. And there were cowboy hats that my parents picked up on trips. Somehow we acquired a pretty good vampire cape. The Conquistador helmet was only thin plastic, but it looked surprisingly good and lasted a lot longer than we thought it would.

All of these treasures, and several more besides, wound up in a toy box in our basement. Back in the day, the kids did not wait until Halloween to explore its contents. When Middle Son's Webelo (Cub Scout) den met at our house, the boys would often plunder the contents of the box. When they'd start dueling too vigorously with the (plastic) Star Wars light sabres, Long Suffering Spouse or I would have to intervene.

Yesterday, Long Suffering Spouse was looking for the large bowl we use for trick-or-treaters. She was looking in the closet in the basement and I told her she was looking in the wrong place. The bowl, I was sure, was on the other side of the basement, on a shelf between the furnace and the fuse box. But why should Long Suffering Spouse listen to me? I was the guy who, earlier in the morning, couldn't find the hot dogs in the freezer when she told me exactly where to look.

So she didn't find the bowl (believe it or not -- and you have to because this is my blog -- it was right where I said it was). But she did find the toy box. And the costumes, and the memories, are still there.

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The spam storm continues unabated here at Second Effort. The Blogger detection system is working a little better and the comment moderation on older posts helps enormously. I like to think of this as a good thing -- if I can command the attention of spammers, perhaps I may yet command the attention of actual readers. Time will tell. Meanwhile, don't let moderation deter you from leaving a real comment on any post you want.

Curmudgeon goes back to school

2011-10-27T21:56:00.003-05:00

For the week anyway.

I've been tied up in a seminar all week -- something that may allow me to increase my business. I'd rather not say what sort of training I'm receiving.

But it's been a looooong week, especially when I've touched base at the Undisclosed Location before and after each day's session. Tonight I was in the office just long enough to cleverly leave my homework on my desk.

Yes, I have homework. Just like when I was in school for real.

And I didn't get it done tonight. Just like when... well... you won't tell my kids will you?

Parent-teacher conferences, now -- and then

2011-10-20T11:04:00.000-05:00

Long Suffering Spouse will be working late tonight. She has parent-teacher conferences starting after lunch and continuing until 9:00pm. No appointments are necessary. My wife is not expecting that a lot of parents will be coming to see her, in particular, but the math teacher is next door and my wife is sure to get a lot of her overflow crowd.

We didn't have parent-teacher conferences when I was a boy. We had report cards every so often -- but if further contact were required, it was because someone was in big trouble. And that someone was always the student.

I was in a Chicago Catholic grammar school through the sixth grade. This was in the days when the Catholic schools were pretty well chock full of nuns; a lay teacher was a rarity. Sociologist and popular author Fr. Andrew Greeley sometimes referred, in his fiction, to the parish in which I spent my youngest years as "St. Praxides." I think that's how he spelled it, although the closest name in the actual Litany of the Saints is probably St. Praxedes. Fr. Greeley actually functioned as an assistant in my parish in the late 1950s; one of the most minor accomplishments of his distinguished career is that he baptized me. But Fr. Greeley's St. Praxides was a troubled place. The hostility toward the South Side that emerged in his later books was understandable: the West Side Irish (which he was) and the South Side Irish did not always get along. John R. Powers' books about "Seven Holy Tombs" (a reference to all the cemeteries along 111th Street) were more or less about St. Christina's, not the parish in which I was born, but those familiar with The Last Catholic in America, etc. will know a lot more about the culture I remember from my childhood than those who have read only Fr. Greeley.

In that culture, whatever Sister said was Law. If Sister said I misbehaved, I'd get clobbered at school. If I complained to my mother, she'd clobber me too, just for upsetting Sister. If, on some rare occasion, my mother thought that, perhaps, I might have been unjustly accused, she'd still lay into me -- "That's for a time you got away with something then," she'd say. Or, "Offer it up." The debits and credits of heavenly accounting were, and remain, a Mystery to me. But, apparently, one's unfair suffering today could be applied to reduce the just punishments we'd earned from real sins at other times. My mother was just cutting my eventual sentence in Purgatory. Besides, in all fairness, most of the time I got in trouble at school, I was entirely at fault.

Tonight, my wife will meet her students' parents and say mostly positive and supportive things about the children's progress and potential. I don't even know why the schools have these conferences any more. The parents already know the kids' grades because my wife's gradebook is online. Tonight is not a social occasion -- my wife is dreading it -- but, if the conversation is forced or awkward, none of my wife's meetings tonight will be as awful as the one that concerned yours truly, some 44 years ago.

I was in the fifth grade. The fifth and sixth grades had recess in the morning. One morning, for some reason, the sixth graders refused to immediately line up to return to class when the bell rang. I have no idea why the sixth graders staged this impromptu sit-in (which probably lasted a minute and a half... or less). Maybe it was just because it was 1967; revolution was in the air. Still, as I recall it, I and my classmates lined up in good order when the bell rang. We'd not done anything wrong. Nevertheless, because we were there, our class was also punished. We were ordered to write "I will get in line and return to class quietly when the bell rings" 100 times.

I chose not to do the assignment. Showing all the flair and passion that would later make me an abject failure as a lawyer, I instead used most of my time to prepare a brief demonstrating that the sixth graders were entirely at fault and the punishment meted out to us fifth graders was entirely unjust. Not satisfied with these efforts, moreover, I decided to add a personal note expressing my outrage at this treatment. Naturally, when speaking on my own behalf, and not on behalf of my peers (as their entirely undesignated spokesman) I felt no need for any rhetorical restraint. I signed my name and everything. (I wonder, now, if I put "JMJ" on the top of the first page of either document. The initials stood for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and were pretty much required on every paper we submitted in those years.)

Looking back, signing my name was not particularly brave: After all, by process of elimination, the identity of the malcontent would have been readily determined. But I certainly eliminated any need for lengthy investigation.

I was dragged by my ear to the principal's office. There it was determined that this transgression was so horrible, so outrageous, that my parents would have to come to school and show cause, if any, why I should be retained in the school. Notice the use of the word "parents." Most of your run-of-the-mill felonies could be handled by calling a kid's mother. This, however, was so awful, so contemptible, that my father would have to brought in as well.

As near as I can recall, this marked the one and only one occasion where my father actually entered a school building for or because of me. I grew up in the age of Paternal Aloofness. Fathers worked. Mothers handled the domestic scene. Fathers left early in the morning and came home at dinner time. Then they did whatever they wanted. Or whatever they had to do. My father was a lawyer. But he used to teach the real estate licensing course at night to pick up a little extra money. Whether fathers were home at night or not, kids generally stayed out their way. If a father was obliged -- forced -- to enter into the domestic sphere, it amounted to a disruption of the Order of Nature.

I remember nothing of the rest of that terrible day until the evening. I remember sitting in the living room of my parents' home that night awaiting their return.

I was imagining the savage reprisals that would be inflicted on my person because I had caused my father to be summoned to school. I fully expected to die. I had even begun to imagine that death might be a blessed relief.

Then my parents returned.

My mother must have rushed past me. Clearly, I was no longer her concern.

My father sat in one of the living room chairs. It was become the Throne of Judgment, I thought. I braced myself.

"So," he said, rather wearily, now that I think of it, "I understand you've been doing some writing...."

He never raised his hand to me. But he sounded so disappointed. It was the severest punishment possible -- and one I did not, and could not, have anticipated. To this day, I still wish he had just gotten angry and given me what for.

The rest of my penance was fairly light, at least when compared to my imaginings: Instead of writing the sentence 100 times, I was required to write it 500 times. I did... more or less. I know I wrote it, as directed, well over 100 times. But I also edited the sentence, slightly, shortening it. The sum of the assigned sentences and the shortened sentences equaled 500 and the nuns decided I was back in their good graces. More or less.

Post No. 1500: Not yet an overnight sensation

2011-10-18T12:50:00.002-05:00

According to the Blogger counter, this is post no. 1500 on Second Effort. Technically, this might even be considered no. 1501: Back in 2007, I chose to delete a published post at the request of an individual named therein. I believe -- mind you -- that I was entirely within my rights; the individual was originally named in published court opinions from which I had quoted. But there was no compelling reason to leave the post up. The piece in question was supposed to have been humorous. I don't know whether anyone else found it funny, but that man did not. There was no reason for me to be a jerk about it.

So let's just call this post no. 1500. I wanted to do something special for the occasion -- but all my drafts came out needy or whiny or unusually self-indulgent. Even by my standards.

On the other hand, a great many of these 1500 posts have sounded needy or whiny or self-indulgent... so another post along these lines would be, in its own unfortunate way, appropriate.

Most of the posts on Second Effort have been substantially original. I'm proud of this. I republish comic strips or link to news stories from time to time, and sometimes quote more from news accounts than the Associated Press might like, but I think I've been pretty good about providing appropriate links and attribution. And I've tried to add something original, even on posts where I've used material created by others, whether because of the combination of things cribbed or because of the content I've added.

I've noticed, in my years out here in the Blogosphere, that blogs that focus on very specific topics tend to do better than blogs (like this one) that wander aimlessly among multiple, unrelated topics. I don't mean a blogger can write obsessively about her love of puppies or kittens and find a big audience -- but the dog breeder who has some expertise to share will probably develop a following. The person who posts a picture of a different kitten every day may find an audience, too. Writing incessantly about certain political topics should also develop a following... if only with the FBI or other law enforcement agencies.

I've also noticed a lot of self-revelatory or confessional blogs out here in the Blogosphere. I don't mean Post Secret; that's an ingenious (and wildly successful) single-topic blog, that topic being other people's confessions. I refer instead to the many deeply personal blogs that seem to come and go around here. Some of these are raw and screechy, but many have been eloquent, heart-felt, compelling -- and almost always short-lived. The blogger finally decides to leave her husband. The blogger recovers from a terrible disease. The blogger quits his or her job. I remember someone saying once that we -- all of us -- have one good book inside of us. Most people don't have another. Circumstances change. The person who couldn't start the day without venting on the keyboard eventually moves on.

But not me. Not yet, anyway. I'm still here, mostly trying to be funny, sometimes trying to be serious. Sadly, I get the most laughs from posts I meant to be serious. *Sigh*

There is an old rule of show business that no one is an overnight sensation. What seems like overnight success is usually the product of long labors in obscurity, honing one's craft. (The person who formulated this rule probably never heard of Justin Bieber.) So I remain here... honing away... thankful for those who stop by. But, c'mon, in this age of social networking and six degrees of Kevin Bacon, doesn't one of you know a book publisher?

Vigilant parenting and potentially creepy social network connections

2011-10-17T08:45:00.002-05:00

The duties of parenthood continue to evolve. When I was a brand new parent, 27 years ago, I never dreamed that I'd become obliged to monitor my children's Facebook postings. Good grief, 27 years ago I'm not even sure that Al Gore had finished inventing the Internet.

But this is how things developed: I started out monitoring my older kids' statuses on AIM when they were in college (I learned all sorts of things from paying attention and, I like to think, I saved them some embarrassment by advising them to take down or revise certain posts). When Facebook came along -- and after I finally persuaded the kids to "friend" me -- I began monitoring these posts instead. Today, AIM is consigned to the dustbin of technological history, but the habits of vigilance learned with that comparatively primitive technology have served me well.

I don't worry too much, these days, about what the older kids post. I wouldn't put up as many details of my life as Older Daughter does of hers... and I wish her husband wouldn't put up strident political posts every few days... especially because I so seldom agree with him.

But the ones I really watch carefully are the younger kids, the two still in college. I don't want either of them to put something up that will cost them a job some day or get them into trouble at school. And I surely don't want to see anything that I'll have to tell their mother about.

Youngest Son chafes at the level of supervision I provide. What really galls him, I suppose, is that I'll leave comments that let him -- and his friends -- know that I'm watching.

Lately, I've been watching a lot of pictures that have been posted in which Youngest Son has been "tagged" with this pretty girl or that one or, more frequently, with two or three at a time.

I see these photos and I walk thereafter with just a little extra spring in my step. He's a chip off the old block, I lie to myself. (I'm very gullible that way.)

But then, the other day, I noted that my sister Betty had become 'friends' with one of the young blondes who has appeared frequently with my son in Facebook pictures.

Cue scary music here.

My real-life friend Steve says it is important to maintain a proper degree of separation between the generations on Facebook. Thus, I am Facebook friends with Steve, but not with Steve's son.

My rule of thumb has been, generally, that I will accept invitations from my kids' friends, but I will not request that any of my kids' friends become my Facebook friends. I varied from this only once: After Oldest Son got married, I did ask his wife, Abby, to 'friend' me. I thought, at that point, it was probably appropriate.

I got a little nervous when Younger Daughter's boyfriend, Olaf, asked to 'friend' me -- but they've been going out so long now I didn't think it would be a problem. (I checked with Younger Daughter immediately after. She approved.)

But, now, there was Betty friending this blonde. I'll call her Maureen because that is not her real name.

Yes, call me paranoid, but Youngest Son just started his freshman year of college. He's just met Maureen. And she's starting to infiltrate the family? Is this a Fatal Attraction scenario in the making?

I decided, reluctantly, not to panic. Panic is my ordinary default response to a wide variety of situations and circumstances... but, I thought, Youngest Son is coming home soon for Fall Break. I'll ask him privately. If the answers don't make sense, I'll call Betty and talk to her. (OK, I probably would have begun by screaming what in the blue blazes is the matter with you? Have you lost your mind? But, if Betty didn't hang up on me in those first moments, I probably would have begun talking. Eventually.)

Youngest Son came home Saturday. I asked him about this right away.

There actually is a valid reason for Maureen to 'friend' Betty. Maureen's mother and Betty are long-time friends in real life. I did not know that.

So that issue turned out to be happily resolved, and without family drama or police intervention. But a father's work is never done.

Bank reform -- Curmudgeon style

2011-10-14T08:28:00.005-05:00

I was walking with a colleague in the Loop yesterday afternoon. It was cool, it was damp, and my colleague (who did not have a raincoat or umbrella) was paying more attention to which buildings had overhangs than he was to the people in the street before him.

So he wasn't paying any attention to the drumbeats coming from the vicinity of LaSalle and Jackson. I gently suggested we might want to turn north on Clark rather than walk over there.

"What?" he said, momentarily taking his mind off the task of avoiding raindrops. "Why?"

"The Happy Radicals," I said. "It's not just Wall Street they're occupying; they're over on LaSalle Street, too."

"Oh, I suppose," he said, not particularly pleased at the prospect of standing still (and letting the rain hit him) waiting for the light to change.

"Besides," I said, "if we go over there, I think I might have to stay."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I wasn't kidding either.

It's not that I fully support the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Talk about 99% -- I'd be willing to bet that 99% of those drum-beating, sign-waving individuals don't agree with the positions espoused by the person standing next to them. There are unemployed persons, students, anarchists, unionists, environmentalists and (if you believe New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg) oversexed opportunists hoping to get lucky in those confused, but angry groups, parading now in our biggest cities' business districts.

Their anger is really all they have in common. They're not all agreed on who they should be angry with, much less what they should do about it.

A lot of them, though, seem to have some vague notion that banks are part of the problem.

And that's why I'd feel obliged to stay. I agree with that.

Break up the banks!

I don't practice real estate law -- but I know a number of attorneys who do. I know a number of judges who hear mortgage foreclosure cases. The stories I hear are unbelievable.

Banks are not just callous or arrogant or irresponsible or uncaring. They are also incredibly, breathtakingly stupid and incompetent. Just to cite one recent example from a story relayed to me by a real estate practitioner, how can a bank agree to a short sale, on the one hand -- and I don't mean in theory, I mean with a willing buyer, with money, and a closing date set in stone -- and still insist on proceeding with the foreclosure case?

In It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter was the evil monopolist wannabe who owned the bank and bought up the department store and the bus company and every other business that tottered in Bedford Falls at the height of the Depression. But big as he was made out to be, and as powerful as he thought he was, Mr. Potter would not be a pimple on the backside of the Bank of America.

We need George Baileys, and lots of 'em, not Bank of America. We need someone who knows who his or her money has been lent to, and who can exercise some discretion when he knows that a customer is having difficulty. The sale of mortgages should be flat out prohibited. The person who makes the loan should have to live with the consequences. This would encourage a banker to make only responsible loans. A bank should be able to live comfortably, if not extravagantly, on the spread between the rate at which it loans money and the interest rate it pays to the depositors who provide the money to be lent.

The big banks need to be broken down into teensy weensy, itty bitty pieces. Oh sure, if the big players want to maintain their giant investment banks, so they can piss away billions in the stock markets and ruin small countries, we should let them... on one condition. They must get out of retail banking. Forever.

If the investment banks fail, they fail. No more bailouts. They won't be necessary, either, because Grandma's CD and Junior's college loan and your mortgage will not be bothered by the investment banks' rise and fall. The new banks should be prohibited by law from putting one red cent in one of the surviving super-ultra-mega investment banks. Anybody else stupid enough to invest with them should suffer the consequences.

In the recent economic unpleasantness, the giant banks, having created and fed the housing bubble, making and selling irresponsible, impossible loans, and then sucking the nation's economy right into the sewer, had to be bailed out by the U.S. government. And with that government money, the banks paid enormous bonuses to their wildest speculators, completely ignoring the people who had been plunged underwater in their suddenly supersized mortgages (except to foreclose on them). Most of the banks paid the government back, sure. But they paid the government back with money squeezed from thee and me with larger checking account fees and higher interest rates on credit cards. That slowed what little recovery there was. Bank of America now wants to impose a $5 monthly fee for people to use their debit cards.

But I'll stop ranting for now. I have this almost irresistible urge to make placards.

For one brief shining moment....

2011-10-13T08:40:00.007-05:00

When I started Second Effort, I dedicated one of my email accounts to blog comments. Over the years I've accumulated a hefty pile of comments -- but recently the numbers of comments have dropped precipitously. Over the years, I've found that the best way to get comments is to leave comments on other people's blogs.

I did that for awhile. I spent far too much of my work days in this pursuit. And only some of the people I visited would reciprocate with comments here. So now I read what I want to read. Sometimes I comment. Most times I don't.

And, I've found, a lot of folks blog for awhile -- and lose interest. A few of my regulars have died. Others have found real jobs. Or other hobbies. It takes a peculiar stubbornness to keep blogging, as I have, for nearly seven years now. (This blog will soon turn six. But there was a blog before this one. It was long ago deleted.)

Even though my comments are down, I still get lots of "hits." Because I have nearly 1,500 posts (I'll probably reach that milestone next week) and such a wide variety of topics (or lack of focus, depending on your point of view) this blog apparently pops up in a lot of searches.

It's that lack of focus that has really helped to keep readership (and comments) down. I'll write about legal topics for awhile and maybe attract some interest from persons interested in the law. But then I'll start in on family topics again. Or whining about money. I'll try and position myself as a humorist. But, then, if I start getting people dropping in looking for a chuckle, I'll go on a political rant and offend conservatives and liberals alike. Then, just in case anyone has stayed with me anyway, I'll stop posting for a week. Or two. Once people realize that they can start their day without a dose of the Curmudgeon, they forget all about me and start looking for kitten videos on You Tube.

But I posted yesterday morning and, yesterday afternoon, from sheer force of habit, or forlorn hope, I thought I'd check my comment email.

I had over 40 new emails. New comments! I was over the moon. I was on Cloud Nine. I was irrationally exuberant.

Obviously (I thought) one of my many, many posts here had finally resonated in the Blogosphere. I'd gone viral, baby! That book contract was as good as sewn up.

I started looking at the list of unopened emails. Almost all comments, yes, but not all on the same post. Bad sign.

I looked at the first email. It was from "hair care products." My balloon began deflating. Sure enough, the "name" of the commenter was linked to a website.

I opened the next. This one, at least, was from an actual human name. If, that is, you accept "Mervyn" as a human name. It at least resembles the human name "Merwyn." "Mervyn" was moved to comment on my baseball playoff predictions. Not the wildly inaccurate ones I recently posted, mind you, but the equally inaccurate predictions I'd made in 2007.

And what did "Mervyn" have to say about my lack of prognosticating skills four years after the fact? "This will not actually have effect, I think so." And "Mervyn" thoughtfully provided three links to other sites, allegedly for video game stuff.

Others in this barrage of comments were from indisputably human names -- but every blessed one of them was along the lines of, "Quite worthwhile piece of writing, lots of thanks for the article," or "It's all erroneous the thing you are saying." And nearly every one of these "comments" had three links for game sites, pharmaceuticals, phone apps, antibiotics.... The ones that didn't have three links had four.

I started deleting frantically. Despite the precaution of requiring word verification on comments, I'd been massively infected with spam links. The Blogger spam filter caught less than a quarter of them, too. The vast majority had been published -- and I spent a good chunk of time yesterday afternoon unpublishing them.

For one brief shining moment, though, I thought my obsessive blogging had finally turned me into an overnight sensation. For one brief shining moment, I thought I saw a glistening castle on a hill. Then my vision cleared, and the "castle" turned out to be a pyramid made of spam.

A one-day jury trial -- part last

2011-10-12T10:24:00.005-05:00

Back again after another gap -- would you believe my Internet was out again at home and at work at times during this interval? No, seriously.

I've taken one day's work and blown it up into four posts now, chock full of war stories and inside (and almost certainly obsolete) observations about the Cook County Circuit Court and still haven't told you about how I managed what I'd previously thought impossible: I tried a civil case to a jury in a single day.

Isn't blogging amazing?

And people wonder what editors actually can bring to the process of writing....

But no more teasing: Today, I will reveal my hard-won secret. And here it is:

Eliminate the witnesses!

I don't mean we did anyone any physical harm. No one was stuffed in a trunk or anything.

Rather, we used evidence depositions.

Evidence depositions are a distinctive feature of Illinois procedure -- we may be the only state that does things this way. We can decide, in advance (the recent exceptions incorporated into Supreme Court Rule 212 notwithstanding) whether we will take a deposition for "discovery" or "evidence." If for "discovery," we can ask pretty much anything we want. I don't remember ever asking anyone a Barbara Walters question (if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?), but it is perfectly acceptable to ask questions that would otherwise be objectionable (did anyone tell you about what they claimed to have seen in the accident?). Contrary to all the rules you learned from watching television, we can ask questions to which we have no clue what the answer might be. Discovery depositions are often quite useful.

On the other hand, an evidence deposition is intended, from the outset, to be read at trial. That means if your opponent asks an objectionable question, you must object right then, just as you would at trial, or else your objection is waived.

Evidence depositions are difficult in that it is hard to be as sharp a year before, or even a month before, the actual trial. Samuel Johnson said that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully. Something similar may be truthfully said of the two weeks before a fixed and definite trial date.

In Illinois, evidence depositions are most often used to obtain the testimony of treating physicians. Doctors think very highly of their time, and very poorly of lawyers. A doctor will typically charge a king's ransom to come to court, but only a duke's ransom, or maybe even a viscount's, if you go to the doctor's office, before or after office hours, and take the doctor's testimony in an examining room. Or the doctor's private office. Somehow, the setting is never quite as inspirational as the courtroom.

We took an evidence deposition of the treating chiropractor in the case allegedly under discussion in this posts. We were in one of his examining rooms. Instead of a conference table, there was an examining table. I was perched on a stool. Opposing counsel had a chair from the waiting room. The court reporter had to look out around the heat lamp. I asked nearly all the questions I was supposed to -- but, though I had the doctor identify his own bill, I did not have him state the amount of that bill on the record. Opposing counsel (who was not the attorney who tried the case because she had a conflict that day) made objections she didn't need to make and forgot some she might have made.

But the point is that the court reads the deposition in advance, rules on the objections, and what is read to the jury has all the extraneous verbiage cut out.

And what works for doctors works equally well for other witnesses as well. While the evidence deposition of a doctor may always be introduced, regardless of the doctor's technical availability at time of trial (SCR 212(b)), the evidence deposition of anyone else is supposed to come in only if the deponent has since died, or is out of the country (and the party procuring the deposition didn't cause that to happen), or if "the party offering the deposition has exercised reasonable diligence but has been unable to procure the attendance of the deponent by subpoena" or if the court finds, in advance, that "exceptional circumstances exist" that make it desirable to allow the evidence deposition to be used instead of live testimony.

This last, of course, is the exception big enough to accommodate the small, one-day trial. As a practical matter, an exceptional circumstance is likely to be found where the parties' attorneys agree to procure and use the evidence depositions of this witness or that one (SCR 212(b)(1)-(3)).

Are you disinclined to accept this as adequately exceptional? Look at it this way: There are a lot of lawyers in Congress. When do they ever agree on anything?

Thus, in our case, by agreement, we had evidence depositions of two occurrence witnesses that could be read as well.

And, by the way, unless the deposition has been videoed, that's the way the testimony comes in. They are read. We get to play act! Someone plays the witness, and someone else reads the questions. It's better, certainly, if trial counsel does not step outside his assigned role and play a witness, too. Defense counsel procured another attorney from her office to act as the witnesses in her evidence depositions (and the reader was great -- emphasizing every point that was in the defense's favor but not so blatantly that we had any basis upon which to object). I, on the other hand, was obliged to demonstrate a little versatility. The attorney who asked me to assist with this trial played me -- and I played the part of the chiropractor on the stand.

A movie contract is about as likely as a book contract at this point.

But, still, without the delays inevitable to live witnesses (she promised me she'd be here by 2:00, judge), we could rip through the evidence depositions in a fraction of the time. And we got the case done.

We even got a verdict in our client's favor.

It was nearly twice what the defendant's insurer offered -- and about half of what we wanted. We're fighting over the adequacy of one element of damages awarded. But I'll see some revenue from this case... soon. The most important thing, however, is that I can now say I've tried a case recently. Because people who watch too much TV think that's what you have to do if you're a real lawyer....

A one-day jury trial -- part three

2011-10-06T08:49:00.003-05:00

I didn't post yesterday because I had no Internet. Again. I had planned to work from home yesterday -- and when I sat down to my desk, I discovered that I was offline. I'm going to try to do today everything I set out to do yesterday -- including this post.

I've been marveling at the idea of starting and finishing a civil jury trial in a single day in several posts this week. I closed last time saying that my experience had persuaded me that it couldn't be done.

I started out in this business as an insurance defense attorney. Insurance companies would hire my firm to handle cases on behalf of their insureds. As appointed counsel, I would be the insured's attorney just as much as if the insured had picked my name out of the phone book. On the other hand, I would report to, and would be paid by, the insurance company that hired me.

The Bible says that no man can serve two masters. Well, lawyers can, as long as there's no conflict of interest or, in certain circumstances, where the conflict of interest is waived.

Most of the insurance defense cases I handled were in the Law Division of the Cook County Circuit Court. Although there have been some experiments with other methods (commercial calendars and individual calendars) during the course of my career, for the most part, the Law Division has operated on a 'master calendar' system. That means that x judges were assigned to hear pre-trial motions, y judges were assigned to hear pre-trial conferences (trying to settle cases), and z judges were designated to try cases sent to them by the assignment judge. Over my years, x expanded (from two to three to four to eight to 10 -- although the actual number now may be less than that) and y fluctuated and was sometimes even zero (meaning that motion judges and trial judges took on settlement conference duties in addition to their other tasks).

Serving as the assignment judge was no picnic. It may have been strictly coincidence but, for awhile there, every judge assigned to that position died soon after. One of the more stressful aspects of the job was that almost no one who was supposed to be ready for trial actually was ready for trial. There was always some problem: A doctor had gone on vacation, an expert suddenly became unavailable, a key witness just had surgery. Something. Many times the excuse would be that the attorney that was supposed to try the case was already on trial in a different matter. One Law Division assignment judge kept a phone under his bench for these occasions. He'd pull it out with great flourish and ask, "What judge is your attorney in front of?" He would threaten to place a call to verify the information. Sometimes the information was even true.

I recall one occasion under the old black line system -- which distinguishes it from the new black line system, now several years old and oft-revised. (Lawyers are good planners. We always have plans. Judges, being one-time lawyers, are equally good planners. There've been many serious plans to streamline the trial assignment process and get cases out to trial faster and more predictably. These well-intended plans, like battle plans generally, tend not to long survive contact with the enemy. Although, in the legal profession, as in Walt Kelly's Pogo, we have met the enemy and he is us. And have I mentioned that lawyers tend to wander off topic a lot? I have? Good. There's no need, then, to mention that again.)

Besides, I was telling you about this one time, many years ago, when I had a case come up above the old black line, which meant, in theory, that the case was supposed to be ready for trial and could be assigned out at any moment. Only my case was on page 20-something that morning. As you might expect, cases on page one would have priority.

Anyway, I answered "ready" when my turn came. But, by page 20-something, all of the available judges had cases assigned. So I was told I'd be held day-to-day until a judge became available.

Well, I could count. I was case 250 or 300 or whatever I was and it seemed to me that day-to-day would turn into week-to-week. Maybe even month-to-month. I went back to the office and spent the rest of the day calling witnesses and telling them that we weren't going to trial anytime soon; that they might just as well pick up the pieces of their lives and move forward and that I'd let them know, in a week or two, if I heard anything more definite about our prospects.

The next morning my case had vaulted from page 20-something to page three. I don't remember whether I got a judge that day, but it was now obvious that I was likely to get a judge within a day or two at most. Badly shaken, I went back to the office and called everyone again.

They thought I was an idiot. Wouldn't you?

After the fact, I went to visit a court administrator to find out what happened. What happened, he told me, was that I had a real case and represented a client on behalf of a "standard" insurance company. Most of the cases in front of me were defended by the "sub-standard" carriers and were never going to answer ready. Therefore I was jumped ahead of all of these. How I was supposed to know this, however, was never quite explained to my satisfaction.

Anyway, once one got a case assigned to a judge, the lawyers would call the judge's chambers or wander over and ask when the judge might be available to see them. Even if the judge was immediately available, there would be no immediate dipping into the jury pool. The judge might want to look the file over, and possibly discuss settlement prospects. Were there any motions assigned with the case? (It frequently happened that 11th hour summary judgment motions would be assigned with the case to the trial judge.) How many motions in limine did the parties anticipate? How long did we think these would take?

If you know about trials only from television you've never heard about motions in limine. You just see the beautiful lawyer in the skirt so short no lawyer would ever wear it to court, jump up from her seat in response to some sneaky question from her evil opponent and yell, "I object!" Then a commercial will come on for cars or soap.

Well, yes, lawyers do object sometimes to questions posed in court. But lawyers try to minimize these objections because we believe that jurors hate the interruptions and might punish the lawyers who make the objections -- even if the judge rules in their favor. Dark thoughts may form in the back of jurors' minds: What are they keeping from us? As trial lawyers, we don't want jurors having dark thoughts about us or our clients.

So motions in limine are supposed to anticipate testimony that might be objectionable and get the court to decide, in advance, what will come in and what will be kept out. Sometimes these are used by a party to get the judge to agree in advance that questions along a certain line may be asked or that a particular witness can express this opinion or that one. As a practical matter, however, both sides will often in addition come up with list of motions designed to totally hamstring their opponent's case. I was once in a case where we had two solid weeks of in limine motions. The answer to 'what are they keeping from us' is often 'plenty' -- but the jurors never know what they missed. In fact, sometimes cases settle because of the trial court's rulings on the in limine motions: The attorney for one side or the other realizes that his or her case has been gutted and seeks a truce.

I therefore do not wish to give the impression that any of these pre-trial maneuverings are bad or inappropriate. While in limine motions in particular may be overdone (and it is the trial judge's responsibility to rein in excesses when they occur), all of this stuff is a legitimate part of the process. These procedures are not conducive, however, to getting a case tried in a single day.

Now it was also my experience that less tended to get done on Friday afternoons than on Monday mornings. Yes, this is like experiencing that it gets dark out at night and brighter in the morning. But it used to be, and probably still is, a fact that a lawyer in a case assigned to a Law Division judge on a Friday would probably not have to worry about jury selection before Monday morning.

Did I mention that the case that this series of essays is ostensibly about was tried on a Friday?

You've probably forgotten all about that case by now. I'm surprised I still remember it. But I'll finally talk about that case tomorrow. Maybe. Probably. Even if tomorrow is Friday.

We interrupt this discussion of Curmudgeon's recent trial --

2011-10-04T09:12:00.003-05:00

-- to point out that Captain Picard's Journal is still offline. (I'd link to it... but it's offline.)

I had a comment over the weekend from the proprietor of said blog who said "Blogger identified my blog as spam and removed it. It will return soon, following a review."

I would point out to Blogger that it once honored Captain Picard's Journal as a "Blog of Note." While that may not be akin to a Pulitzer, it is an honor that has never been bestowed on this blog. And surely this credential should have counted in its favor when Blogger received a challenge concerning same.

This is the second blog that I read regularly to be shutdown for no apparent reason. Dave, the Atlanta-area lawyer who pens Rather Than Working, recently suffered a similar fate.

I look forward to the prompt return of Captain Picard's Journal.

A one-day jury trial -- part two

2011-10-04T08:27:00.002-05:00

I didn't think a one-day civil jury trial was possible until a year or two ago when Long Suffering Spouse served as a juror in just such a case.

Of course, hers was a property damage subrogation case, a particular kind of case that has clogged our local dockets. When Car A rear-ends Car B, and when both cars are insured by "standard" carriers, the subro claim by the carrier for Car B against the carrier for Car A is more than likely handled in a phone call or email. Make the facts more interesting, so that Car A is attempting a left hand turn when it comes into contact with Car B, and the two carriers may have something to argue about. But the "standard" carriers have executed binding agreements with each other, agreeing to keep those arguments out of court and resolve them by arbitration. Locally, these claims are heard by a company called Arbitration Forums. I understand AF to be a national company but, as I recall, it has a local office in north suburban Deerfield.

Not all insurance companies have signed the inter-company arbitration agreement. The companies that have refused to sign are generally referred to as "sub-standard" carriers. Claims involving these carriers are generally not settled over the phone. They do not go to arbitration. They go to court. The sub-standards always, always, always demand a jury trial. And there are a lot of these cases. (A new Illinois statute is supposed to cut back on these cases; a constitutional challenge may delay, and ultimately prevent, the implementation of the proposed reform.)

Somehow -- and I don't know how, so don't ask -- the sub-standards make money by doing business this way. It may have to do with the value of money over time. I did know a guy who really knew the secret, once upon a time, but he died before he could share it with me. Not that he ever promised to do so, mind you. Not that he ever hinted he would. But once I found out that he knew, had he lived, I would have kept trying to find out.

Anyway, the case on which my wife served as juror was one of these sub-standard PD claims. The attorneys, she said, were younger than some of our children, and she thought one of the attorney's voices was not through changing yet. He must have squeaked a few times. They read from notes; their notes shook when they read. But there could only be three witnesses at one of these trials, the owner of Car A, the owner of Car B and the insurance adjuster who calculated the damage. There are only so many questions one can ask of any of these. And, most important, the trial judge was insistent that this case would be concluded before the end of the day.

And so it was.

From a policy standpoint, I thought this was a tremendous idea. The sub-standards want jury trials? Give them one in every possible courtroom, one a day at least. Stack them up like cordwood. Try 'em one after the other. The strain of finding and securing witnesses, getting them to the courthouse, and keeping them available would put a strain on the firms handling these cases. Eventually, I believe, the sub-standards' business practices would have to change.

But I don't know that there are enough judges willing to pursue this course. My experience has taught me otherwise. And I certainly didn't think that other types of cases could be pushed through in a single day. Again, my experience taught me otherwise.

And I'll talk about those experiences tomorrow.

Do you like how I'm getting a week's worth of posts out of a one-day trial?

Another day, another jury?

2011-10-03T08:35:00.004-05:00

I mentioned briefly last week that I would be on trial Friday.

Some small part of me never expected that to actually happen. The insurance company's attorney did her best to make me believe that we would go to trial -- but I've been the insurer's attorney, too, and I know that there's a certain amount of bluff built into any prediction, no matter how confidently made, that this case will go to trial.

I am a civil lawyer. I don't mean that I'm nice and polite to one and sundry, though I like to think I usually am; rather, I mean that I handle civil cases.

In the broadest sense, civil cases are those in which money is on the line. In other words, no matter how badly I screw up, no innocent person will wind up in durance vile. This differentiates me from the "criminal lawyer," most of whom are not themselves criminals, but who spend most of their days trying to put people into, or get people out of, jail. A lawyer who inadvertently stumbles upon this post might point out, correctly, that some criminal cases involve only the threat of a fine, not imprisonment. A lot of future lawyers used to get beat up every day on the playground for making valid, subtle and entirely unimportant distinctions like this.

In Chicago, the orbits of civil lawyers and criminal lawyers rarely intersect. It must be different in smaller venues, where there is only one courthouse, and all cases are heard there, sometimes by the same judge. However, in Chicago we have a Criminal Courthouse, at 26th and California (which has more to do with the location of former Mayor Anton Cermak's political base than anything else) and the Daley Center downtown. There are some criminal cases heard in the Daley Center -- the Traffic Court occupies the basement -- and serious DUI's are, I believe, heard on the 4th floor -- but the vast majority of the building is given over to the handling of civil matters. Torts. Contracts. Divorce (which too often involves both torts and contracts). Probate. Chancery.

One of the few places where civil lawyers and criminal lawyers come together is when some among them harbor judicial ambitions.

When I first sought judicial office (in 1994!) I had to appear before the judicial evaluation committees of the various bar associations. The Chicago Bar Association JEC, it was rumored, was supposed to be overstocked with assistant state's attorneys (what you may call DA's in your jurisdiction).

Rumor had it that the ASA's scoffed at the seemingly limited jury trial experience of civil lawyers. I know that I had only a bare handful of jury trials under my belt in 1994. I've had not much more than a handful since. In my world, though, going to trial was considered a disaster. One of the guys I worked for used to say, "If you try a case, you've already lost. If you're in court you're not taking care of your clients who are calling the office. If you win, your client wants to know why you couldn't have figured out how to get such an obviously weak case disposed of without trial. And you might lose...."

I found out, eventually, that this was an exaggeration, but only a slight one. The claims people at the Acme Insurance Company didn't really mind you trying a case now and then -- as long as you kept up with their files in the meantime -- and as long as the trial was for some other company. That way they could say they were sending business to seasoned trial attorneys without having to pay for the seasoning.

Criminal lawyers, on the other hand, were rumored to try cases to juries every day, sometimes finishing two before lunch. This gave the criminal lawyers a certain swagger. On the other hand, we civil lawyers noted a distinct shortage of paper in criminal files. Where were the briefs? The motions and supporting memoranda? The mountains of research? The discovery? The discovery disputes? Civil lawyers would argue that these many criminal trials were shallow, pale imitations of "real" trials -- even if many of the unhappy losers in those criminal trials were sentenced to time in the Crossbar Motel.

Still, some of us wannabe judges -- me, for example -- looked at the ASA's and Assistant Public Defenders who claimed to have logged 100 or more jury trials with something of a jealous eye. The voting public, conditioned by television to believe that all legal disputes resulted in jury trials, naturally favored the lawyers who could honestly claim that they'd racked up large totals of same. Some of these well-seasoned trial lawyers would attain judicial office and, in the ordinary course of events, be assigned to a civil calendar, where the staggering amounts of paper would come as an unpleasant shock.

I've often wondered what "seasoning" should be associated with the trial of a case, anyway. Given the way lawyers sweat out every case, no matter how trivial, I suppose it must be salt.

Anyway, I was on trial Friday -- I started the trial and I finished the trial on Friday. It was rather exhilarating, actually, and time and events permitting, I will talk about that trial a little bit here this week on Second Effort.

About that football post....

2011-09-30T08:15:00.004-05:00

I know I'm testing Bee's patience, and maybe yours, with so many sports-themed posts in a row. It's just the way things worked out.

And, speaking of how things worked out, remember that football post I promised a couple of days ago?

It didn't.

Work out, I mean.

It's a great story -- you'll simply have to take my word on this one -- but one that doesn't work nearly as well without providing details that could easily lead to the identification of some of the persons involved. That's kind of inconsistent with the anonymity thing I've got going here.

So, I'll pass on that story.

Besides, I am on trial this morning and must get over to the courthouse.

But the idea was to have a post introduce my change in Sidebar topics. I've decided to plumb the archives from time to time -- there are nearly 1,500 posts on Second Effort -- at least some of them must be worth reading -- and highlighting some of these in the Sidebar so that people who might be new to the blog can, voluntarily, sample more of the fare here. (I'm a dreamer, I know.)

I've taken down the back-to-school posts that were in the Sidebar and replaced them with football-themed ones. Different themes will go up from time to time.

Here are the new posts in the Sidebar:

Seasonal Stuff, Gridiron Edition

Why my sons play football – or – why The Curmudgeon is not a psychologist (September 2006)

Oldest Son went to the Bears game... (January 2007)

Homecoming toilet paper caper (October 2009)

The last Homecoming toilet paper caper (September 2010)

Youngest Son learns (and forgets) things about football (October 2010)

You see now why I was hoping to introduce these with a football story, right? Ah, well.

Fearless MLB playoff predictions

2011-09-29T20:10:00.000-05:00

I haven't revealed my bold predictions for the baseball playoffs here on Second Effort for a few years now. My prognostication skills have not improved in the meantime. So, please take note: Reliance on these predictions, and particularly the placement of any sort of bet based upon these predictions, is, well, stupid. Second Effort is not responsible for any losses you may incur based upon these predictions.

National League Playoffs

St. Louis Cardinals vs. Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies have to get to the World Series this year. They have to win the World Series, really, or their season will be judged a disappointment. Meaning no disrespect to my fellow barrister Tony La Russa (he passed the Florida bar exam in 1979 when he was manager of the Chicago White Sox), Philadelphia should prevail rather handily.

Arizona Diamondbacks vs. Milwaukee Brewers. The Diamondbacks' Geoff Blum was a hero of the 2005 World Series while with the White Sox (he had one home run in the regular season -- but his homer in the top of the 14th inning of Game 3 snapped a 5-5 tie). D-backs ace Daniel Hudson showed a lot of promise in his brief career with the Sox but was among the players shipped to the desert in the trade for Edwin Jackson. Their closer, J.J. Putz, was sometimes effective in a set-up role for the White Sox last year. When he pitched well, people were perfectly willing to pronounce his last name as "pootz." When he pitched badly, however.... The Brewers have former Royals ace Zack Greinke, and Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder. They've been dominant at Miller Park and they have the home field edge. Milwaukee should prevail.

American League Playoffs

Detroit Tigers vs. New York Yankees. The Tigers finished strong. The Yankees, though, are still the Yankees. I hate the Yankees. But they will win.

Tampa Bay Rays vs. Texas Rangers. This should be the best of the divisional series. Joe Maddon has once again coaxed the best from his low payroll squad. Texas has had a great year and has earned its return to the playoffs.

Of course, Long Suffering Spouse still hasn't forgiven Nolan Ryan for pounding Robin Ventura back in 1993. I've always thought that Mr. Ventura more or less lost his nerve as he charged the mound that night -- but Mr. Ryan wasn't going to take any guff from this young pup.

Anyway, this will be the series that should be the most fun to watch. Even if Tampa plays in the ugliest stadium in the major leagues. (To think -- that's where the White Sox almost wound up....)

I don't even know who I want to win this one. I think, maybe, I'm rooting for Tampa. So I'll pick them to win, too. Which, if you're a Ranger fan, should be a great comfort.

Speculating on the ALCS and NLCS

If these predictions -- by some miracle -- come true, the Brewers will play Philadelphia and Tampa Bay will play the evil Yankees.

I don't want to say this, but I think the Phillies should wind up facing the Yankees in the World Series. (I'll be rooting for the Rays -- if they get to the ALCS -- but I don't think it'll do them any good.)

As a White Sox fan, I always root for the American League team in the World Series.

I make only one exception: If the Yankees are the American League representative, I will root for the National League team. Go Phillies?

On the occasion of Mr. Buehrle's departure?

2011-09-28T16:37:00.002-05:00

(Photo obtained from the Chicago Sun-Times)

I hope that Buehrle's not gone -- please understand -- but I'm very much afraid that Adam Dunn and Alex Rios have sucked up all the money that should have been available for Mark Buehrle's new contract with the White Sox.

If he is gone, it seems appropriate to recall some of Buehrle's White Sox career highlights. There have been many. I didn't watch his perfect game live -- it was a day game and, believe it or not, I was at the Undisclosed Location, working diligently at my desk.

Well... not really working. Long Suffering Spouse was relaying the play-by-play over the phone during the last couple of innings. People who don't live in big cities may not realize it, but we can't get an AM signal in any of the skyscrapers downtown -- so we can't listen to the ballgame on the radio at work.

Anyway, the perfecto was Buehrle's second no hitter. Second Effort covered the first. From April 19, 2007, here's an excerpt from "Buerhle's doing very well tonight, isn't he?" (and, yes, that link will take you to the complete post):

That's what Long Suffering Spouse said when the line score came up as the Sox broadcast went into a commercial break.

I looked up. I see what you mean, I thought -- but all I dared say was, "Yes, he is. I hadn't noticed."

And I hadn't noticed.

I'd gotten home late and didn't turn on the game until the 5th inning -- in time to see Jermaine Dye's grand slam. Dye's been hitting poorly of late and Youngest Son was threatening to cut Dye from his fantasy team. (Yeah, that'll teach him.) When Dye hit the home run I wondered if Youngest Son had made good on this threat -- making a mental note to tell him to cut all the White Sox from his team if he had. We could use the offense.

So I did not notice just how well Buehrle was doing -- until Long Suffering Spouse pointed it out.

Without saying any more than I've already said she said, of course. Because even in our den we might jinx it.

So we said nothing -- and, for that reason alone, no doubt, Buehrle was able to accomplish the near-impossible.

No, that's silly.

Actually, Buehrle was doing his best, that night, to jinx himself. While the other players shunned him in the dugout, in keeping with the best traditions of baseball, lest they disrupt whatever magic he had channeled into, he would sidle up to a group of teammates and say, "Did you know I'm throwing a no-hitter?" He did stuff like that all night. And he completed the no-no anyway. He must have been channeling contrary karma that night.

Anyway, Buerhle has long been one of my favorites -- long a favorite of most Sox fans -- maybe not of the beer vendors, since he works so quickly and his games tend to be a lot shorter than most -- and, if Buerhle has to go, I hope he knows he'll be sorely missed.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Let me add here that I'll miss Ozzie Guillen, too, but I'll save my favorite Ozzie story for the next time the Marlins meet the Sox in interleague play. Assuming Ozzie is still their manager then.

I can't understand why anyone would voluntarily go work for Jeffrey Loria. Joe Girardi managed the Marlins in 2006, was named the NL Manager of the Year, and was fired. From Wikipedia:

Girardi was nearly fired in early August when he got into a vocal (and visible) argument with Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria during a game. According to witnesses and video footage, the Marlins owner was heckling homeplate umpire Larry Vanover. When the umpire warned Girardi about the harassment, Girardi and his bench coach Gary Tuck then turned to Loria and told him to stop. Loria had to be talked out of firing Girardi immediately after the game.

On October 3, 2006, the Marlins announced that they had fired Girardi, despite him winning manager of the year. Girardi said only that he appreciated the opportunity to manage the club, a move that was seen as classy across the Major Leagues and kept him at the top of many teams' list of manager candidates.

Girardi has done well since, of course. Then again, he was smart enough to use the Cubs' managerial vacancy last year as leverage for a contract extension with the Yankees. He didn't push his way out of New York because there might be more dough in Chicago.

Things were not ideal for Ozzie in Chicago the last couple of years. If his kids didn't cause the rift with Guillen's boss, Sox GM Kenny Williams, they sure exposed it. Ozzie was expected to win it all this year, but Adam Dunn was a huge disappointment. Dunn was supposed to drive in runs. But by mid-season, fans reckoned a Dunn at-bat successful if he merely struck out and did not hit into a double play. Alex Rios was a hazard to navigation in the outfield and spent much of the year with his batting average hovering near the Mendoza line. And Rios' batting average looked good compared to Dunn's. Gordon Beckham regressed at the plate. I could go on... but this is painful.

Ozzie was underpaid in Chicago -- managers with far less seniority were making far more than he was here. And he wasn't the one who put Dunn and Rios in uniform. And he'll get a lot more money in Miami... but at what cost? Ozzie may soon regret that he pushed his way out of town.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Programming note: Now that baseball season is over in Chicago, I need to do a football post. I'd like to do my fearless baseball playoffs predictions post, too, but I make no promises. Besides, I don't want to test Bee's patience by doing too many sports-related posts.

Still, the football post should be next. I don't know that I'll get it done by the end of the week, however. I'm on trial Friday supposedly and I have stuff to do in anticipation of same.

Curmudgeon wasn't the only one miffed at missing out on a MacArthur Grant

2011-09-28T00:01:00.002-05:00

It appears recovering lawyer Stephan Pastis is disappointed as well, judging by yesterday's Pearls Before Swine strip.

I only mentioned my disappointment in passing this year:

[O]nce again, I've been denied a MacArthur Genius Grant. If you follow the link, you'll see that a local architect, Jeanne Gang, who has won awards for "green" designs, was among this year's honorees. I can understand that -- but, I've studied the complete list now and found not a single anonymous blogger among the lot. How about a little love for us anonymous bloggers? We're struggling to make the world a better place, too, you know -- and/or secure a book contract, whichever comes first.

Losing out on the MacArthur Grants has become an annual disappointment for yours truly. But I don't think I really whined about it here on the blog since September 2007.

I think I've suffered in silence long enough: I hereby announce my candidacy for one of next years MacArthur grants. Want to join me in this quest, Mr. Pastis?

Reading a successful visit to the eye doctor's office

2011-09-27T10:39:00.007-05:00

I don't mean the little chart

20 V C H K N O

(Blogger won't let me space the letters like the chart does anyway.)

I always guess one or two letters, but decades of reading fine print have made me a pretty fine guesser. And when they ask me to read the same line for the (weaker) left eye that I just read with the right eye -- well, my short term memory isn't completely shot. Not yet.

Today was my visit to the doctor who treats my glaucoma. I'm not his favorite patient. I entirely understand. I've decided how to take my eye drops, never mind the directions, and my vision has been pretty stable for 15 years or so. An eye surgeon can't put his kids through college on routine office visits.

"I've got so many interesting patients this morning," he told me as he walked in. His tone and manner made clear that I was not among these.

"Nice of you to take time out from all that, then, to come see me," I said.

He was a little embarrassed. "You don't want to be interesting," he said, maybe to me, maybe to himself.

"Not really." (Not to doctors, anyway. I still hope to be interesting to blog readers.)

The doctor's assistant had already taken my pressures and made observations of my frayed optic nerves. The doctor did have to sign the new prescription the assistant had written out for him, and he did so, then riffed through the chart indifferently. He turned on the little bright light and held a magnifier in front of his own eye and took his own quick look at my optic nerves. He made a notation on the chart: Stable again, darn it! (I'm reasonably certain that those weren't his exact words although I didn't actually check.)

But that's not why my visit this morning was successful.

I was actually on time -- a few minutes before my scheduled appointment time, in fact. That can happen in the morning, though hardly ever in the afternoon.

So that was good.

Better still, there was a reasonably recent edition of The New Yorker magazine in the waiting room rack.

As a life-long Chicagoan, I am deeply prejudiced against all things New York. But The New Yorker has long been one of my guiltier pleasures, even if I wouldn't let it in my house.

It's not just the cartoons. It strikes me that the long-form articles in magazines like The New Yorker are perfect for a doctor's office. It makes the inevitable delay much easier to tolerate.

I think that I got hooked on The New Yorker when I was a kid -- the magazine was available in the pediatrician's office. It was in the pediatrician's waiting room, in a back issue of The New Yorker, that I read my first Woody Allen essay.

Yes, I was a strange child.

I was so early this morning, and the doctor's other patients so interesting, that I just about finished a feature article on the Egyptian Revolution. I even got to study the pictures that accompanied the article and read all the embedded cartoons. That, I submit, was a successful visit to the eye doctor.

---------------------------------------------------------------
And, because this is a full service blog, I'll even link to a 2010 Woody Allen essay from The New Yorker, "Udder Madness."

There's a mouse in the house

2011-09-26T12:50:00.002-05:00

Long Suffering Spouse harbors no animus toward any living creature, so long as said creature stays out of her house.

Thus, we enjoyed watching a number of skunks parading through our backyard at dusk almost every evening during the summer months now ending. They were on that side of the sliding glass door; we were on this side. We have also seen possums and raccoons and coyotes in our backyard. A deer was supposedly spotted in a neighbor's backyard, just around the corner from us. We saw a fox one night, too, crossing the street in front of the local hospital. All of these observations were made within the corporate limits of the fair City of Chicago and all of these were just fine, thank you, with Long Suffering Spouse.

Long Suffering Spouse even defends the rights of spiders and ants and other creepy-crawlies to exist in their own sphere. When she was on playground duty recently at her school, she chided kids who were seeking out and stomping on spiders in the bushes by the school building. "Leave them alone," she scolded, "they have a right to be in their home undisturbed by us. Just as we have a right," she added, "to be left alone in our homes undisturbed by them."

The kids looked at her funny. She'd gotten so intense, all of a sudden, and was staring off into the distance.

But you see where my wife draws the line. And it is a bright line, admitting of no fine distinctions. A spider, an ant, or any other bug is toast if it comes within my bride's line of sight inside the confines of our home. If she sees a centipede, she will scream before dispatching it -- or, if I am available, or if the centipede is too fat and furry, before I am summoned to do the honors instead.

"And wipe the stain off the wall," my wife will call, from as far away as she can get and still stay in the house. Centipedes leave a distinctive purple smear when they are squished. And -- here I share my hard-won expertise with you -- they are best approached at a right angle. Coming in ahead or behind the creature will send it scurrying -- and some of them can jump -- but, for some reason, a centipede never detects the approach from directly above it (directly beneath it if it is on the ceiling) until it is too late.

As you would certainly expect, given this description, creatures larger than a centipede -- and most mice are larger than even some of the megacentipedes I've dispatched in our basement -- are absolutely intolerable to Long Suffering Spouse.

When we were first married, living in an apartment in Rogers Park, my wife and I had a mouse problem. We had a mouse population explosion, more like, with seemingly endless brigades of little field mice. But until we were married, and the then-not-yet Long Suffering Spouse moved into the apartment I formerly shared with my friend Steve, I had no idea we had any mice at all.

But Long Suffering Spouse knew instantly. She could sense them. She didn't have to see them to know they were there.

And, ever since, on those occasions every so many years when a mouse does get in the house, Long Suffering Spouse has known immediately. She gets unbelievably tense, and the tension is contagious, I assure you. And this is before the little varmint is actually sighted.

Except for this time.

I was home Thursday morning. I'd had an errand out at the Rolling Meadows Courthouse and I'd stopped home on the way in. (It's on the way. And traffic was still miserable heading inbound on the Kennedy.) I walked into the kitchen to get a glass of water... and out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw something tiny and dark dart from behind the wastebasket (the one we've dedicated to recycling) and scurry underneath the refrigerator.

I have glaucoma. The corner of my eye, particularly my left one, doesn't pick up as much as most people's eyes are supposed to. And I wasn't entirely sure what or whether I saw what I thought I saw.

So I said nothing.

Long Suffering Spouse was in the kitchen Friday night making pizza. Younger Daughter had come over, with her faithful chauffeur Olaf, to eat the pizza. Then, after Olaf was sent on his way (Younger Daughter having elected to stay the night so she'd be better positioned to go out to breakfast in the morning with her Abuela), Younger Daughter and Long Suffering Spouse made cookies. I figured my wife's keen mouse-sense would pick up on the little bugger if indeed it was there.

But nothing happened.

On Saturday Long Suffering Spouse and I went up to the place I'm calling South Janesville College to visit Youngest Son and see his baseball team perform in its annual fall intrasquad game. But on Sunday Long Suffering Spouse was back in the kitchen, making cupcakes this time, because Younger Daughter's birthday is tomorrow. Younger Daughter came over, with Olaf and we all had a pleasant time.

And Long Suffering Spouse heard nothing, saw nothing, intuited nothing.

I'd begun to think I'd imagined that little blur on Thursday.

But, then, this morning, as I walked into the kitchen to refill my coffee, I saw it again. The same blur, going the same way, right under the refrigerator. I exclaimed something. I don't believe I screamed like a little girl, but even if I did, this is my blog and I don't have to admit anything. I think I said something, however, like Pshaw! or Fiddlesticks! or perhaps something slightly more pungent. Whatever I said was sufficient to attract the attention of Long Suffering Spouse. "What did you say?" she asked.

"We have a mouse."

"What?" The tension level in the house spiked. I could fell my wife's cringing from several feet away.

"We have a mouse," I repeated. I explained what I saw.

For the next half hour or so I was treated to a monolog about how the mouse might have gotten in. Younger Daughter was named as a suspect; perhaps she'd left the front door open too long over the weekend. My wife's theory, clearly, was that the mouse must be a brand new arrival. After all, she'd not perceived it. Finally I had to break down and confess: I thought I'd seen something Thursday.

She may, eventually, forgive me for not having told her sooner about this. In the meantime, however, there will be no peace in my home until that wee beastie is destroyed.

All the experts are wrong (again)

2011-09-23T08:57:00.002-05:00

If you've been following the news in the last couple of days you've no doubt heard the financial wizards debating whether the current market setbacks portend the start of a "new" recession. Some insist a "new" recession is underway; others insist that the latest Wall Street panic is merely a speed-bump on the road to recovery. (Some of these call this a "low trajectory" recovery, as if it were an aimed cannon ball or something.)

Rubbish.

All of these experts are totally off base. How can we start a "new" recession when the one we've been struggling with lo these past several years still hasn't ended?

The large law firm and the ant hill compared

2011-09-21T08:33:00.005-05:00

You're looking at an ant colony here, the queen ant being tended by her faithful, anonymous, fungible worker ants.

A partner in a large law firm is much like a queen ant. Or, depending on the annual bonuses, a queen termite.

It's not a pretty sight -- but it's efficient as all get out.

The queen in the termite mound -- or ant colony -- or beehive -- has only one function: Lay eggs. But, then, there's usually only one queen in a termite mound, etc.

There can be lots of partners in a law firm. Partners in large law firms have only two functions: Bill time or generate business. The really big partners generate business; the lesser partners bill time. Either way, they must be surrounded by faithful, anonymous and largely fungible minions whose sole purpose in life is to maximize the productivity of their assigned partner.

The partner in a large law firm never has to clear a paper jam from a printer or copier. In a really large firm, the partners may not know where the copiers are located. A large firm partner never spends an afternoon filing. S/he has people who write checks, look up cases, locate witnesses -- whatever the partner needs to keep productive, and whenever the partner needs it.

Another key difference between the ant hill and the large law firm is that, in a law firm, some of the workers may someday become partners themselves. Not the clerical help, of course, but the associates, with their fancy Ivy League degrees. They may start out legal life as props, something that the business-generating ~~queen~~, er, partner, can brag on to prospective clients ("we just hired the editor of the Yale Law Journal; we turned the editor of the Harvard Law Review down flat"). However, with sheer determination, tireless struggle, the occasional sacrifice of principle (sure, we can justify ignoring those oil rig safety standards) and incessant brown-nosing and false bonhomie, at least a few of the associates can some day rise to the top of the anthill.

On the other hand, in the anthill, the young and fresh worker ants tend the queen and the next generation of workers. Then, when they're older, they join foraging parties. When the survivors of these adventures get too old for that, they become the nest's guardians, rushing out to absorb the attack of any invading predator. It is difficult for a worker ant to die of old age. Of course, ulcers and heart attacks claim a lot of law firm support personnel as well; others may be fired for failing to adequately serve or protect their partner.

The National Geographic website mentions that there is a third class of honeybee, the drone. "Several hundred drones live in each hive during the spring and summer, but they are expelled for the winter months when the hive goes into a lean survival mode." This is similar to the way that associates and non-equity partners -- and the least productive partners -- are expelled from law firms whenever economic conditions warrant.

Social insects, like honeybees, are considered more 'advanced' than their solitary cousins. There are bees, wasps, and even ants who do not live in colonies, but who try and do everything themselves. In other words, solo practitioners. Like me.

I remember when Blackberries first burst on the techno-scene. All the big firm partners had them -- increased efficiency, you know -- and each email received from the device proudly bore the legend, "Sent From My Blackberry."

Of course, if the message was spelled correctly and punctuated, chances are the message was typed by a worker ant.

The big firms were behind the efiling movement that has swept the federal courts -- and is gathering momentum in the state courts as well. And why not? The partners in the big firms did nothing different from what they'd done before. They waved their hands (billing 4.5 hours for the task) and minions crafted a brief. That the brief was filed differently than heretofore would not have registered on the big firm partner -- he or she had never filed anything before either.

The problem is, I can change an ink cartridge -- even in the postage meter -- and solve paper jams deep within the copier. Given enough time (we know, now, it takes a month) I can figure out why my office Internet died. I know where all the courthouses are and how to file papers in each. But, sadly, these hard-won skills are not valued.

Gosh, I wish I had minions.

The Internet returns to the Undisclosed Location!

2011-09-20T08:40:00.002-05:00

I am pleased to announce that, for the first time since August 23, I am blogging to you live from the Undisclosed Location. My Internet is back.

But regular programming will not resume this morning for two reasons.

First, I have to put my creative energies into a hate letter to my soon-to-be-former ISP.

Second, I'm still too bummed that, once again, I've been denied a MacArthur Genius Grant. If you follow the link, you'll see that a local architect, Jeanne Gang, who has won awards for "green" designs, was among this year's honorees. I can understand that -- but, I've studied the complete list now and found not a single anonymous blogger among the lot. How about a little love for us anonymous bloggers? We're struggling to make the world a better place, too, you know -- and/or secure a book contract, whichever comes first.

Actually, for a MacArthur Grant, I'd drop my cloak of anonymity. Which sounds ever so much more refined than saying I'd reveal my secret identity.

Meanwhile, on to the hate letter....

Curmudgeon turns down some business

2011-09-13T20:50:00.002-05:00

Still no Internet at the Undisclosed Location -- three weeks now. I think I figured out the problem -- no thanks to our alleged ISP. Which P has provided neither I nor S. I think we'll be changing providers in the next day or so. Someday, when I have the Internet back, maybe I will tell this story. But, meanwhile, this quick post from home:

The phone rang at the Undisclosed Location. I didn't recognize the name or number on the caller ID, but -- one never knows -- this could be the elusive million dollar case. I answered the phone.

"You the lawyer?" It was a woman's voice. Not a young voice. A smoky, raspy voice.

"I am," I said.

"You sound too sexy to be a lawyer."

I like to think this is a true statement. I've been told I have a pretty fair announcer's voice. Years ago, a female attorney told me I "gave good phone." But my vocal abilities were not the issue here. "How did you get my name?"

This is a question I ask any caller I don't know. I suppose that makes me sound like the old-time ward committeeman who told a young Abner Mikva, "We don't want nobody that nobody sent," but there is -- I hope -- a valid reason for my standard inquiry. A lot of my business comes by referral from other lawyers. I call the direct contact business "retail" -- and I'm wary of it. I've been burned on referral cases, too, but I almost always lose on retail clients.

"I got you from 411," the woman said.

"411?"

"I asked Directory Assistance for the names of lawyers in your building," she said. "I used to work there."

"Really?" I said. "I didn't know the operators were looking out for me so well." (I work in a building in which there may be 500 lawyers. Maybe more.) "Tell me about your case."

The woman recounted a sad story about a fall on the Labor Day weekend. She'd gone to a restaurant on the West Side of Chicago. She walked in and tripped, or slipped, and fell, hitting her head. "What happened to you? How were you injured?"

"I had a skull fracture," she said, "and tore the ligaments in my leg."

"Really," I said. "What did the doctors say?"

"I didn't see the doctors yet," the woman said. "I got some names from the emergency room, but I'm not going to them until I get me a lawyer."

"I see," I said, and I did. I reached for my office diary. "I don't think I can help you, ma'am, but let me give you a number you might call. The Chicago Bar Association has a Lawyer Referral Service. You call them and they will match you up with a lawyer who handles this kind of case."

"I think somebody already gave me this number."

I'll just bet, I thought. But aloud I said only, "Let me give you the number anyway. I think that might be the best for you."

"Alright," she said -- and I gave her the number.

I need business. And I know I'm a bad businessman. But I really don't think I need this kind of business.

Old as the Dickens -- or -- Curmudgeon learns to read

2011-09-09T07:29:00.005-05:00

(Still blogging surreptitiously -- and quickly -- from home because my office Internet is still down. Yes, I am screaming, OK? You don't realize how hooked you've become on this Internet-thingy until you are deprived of same.)

Older Daughter -- the nurse in Indianapolis -- was, you may recall, an English major in college. Yes, English... not the most commonly trod path to a nursing career.

Anyway, on the bookshelves in the room that she shared with Younger Daughter are some paperbacks that, I would like to think, are souvenirs of her college classes. On the other hand, now that I think about it, given that these are books by DWG's, it is entirely possible that these paperbacks were assigned at the girls' traditional Catholic high school.

DWG's, as you may know, have been in bad odor for some time among college English professors.

Is the acronym putting you off? DWG stands for Dead White Guy. You know, like Shakespeare. Or Milton. Not the sort of thing that modern English students are encouraged to read at all.

Among the titles on my daughters' bookshelves were Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations. I'd never read either. I'd seen the movie version of Ivanhoe somewhere along the way. I was never an Elizabeth Taylor fan, for some reason, but I liked her in that role.

Well, I read Ivanhoe and enjoyed it. So I decided to try Great Expectations next.

Now I realize that, as a supposedly educated person, I'm supposed to love Dickens. But I couldn't stand him.

My attitude may stem from an incident in childhood. I think it was in 5th grade, while I was a participant in the Junior Great Books program, that I was assigned to read A Christmas Carol. Oh, did I hate it. I was bored to distraction. Every page weighed a hundred pounds. I got through it somehow -- but I could never read anything by Dickens again.

I found out later that Dickens got paid by the word and also that his books were typically serialized in magazines -- and he had to structure his prose to refresh the reader's recollection from issue to issue. That explained a lot. But I still couldn't slog through one of his books. And, over the years, from time to time, I've tried.

And, now, recently, I tried again with Great Expectations. My own expectations were as modest as could be -- but I found that, with patience, I actually could read, and even enjoy, the book. I'm not saying I'm going to go out and look for David Copperfield next, but somehow I feel as though I've accomplished something here.

Resting from our labors on Labor Day

2011-09-06T20:21:00.002-05:00

There's still no Internet at the Undisclosed Location. It's enough to drive me buggy. I have 90% of everything I need at home, 90% of everything I need at work -- and, wherever I am, whatever I need is in that absent 10%.

We had a very busy weekend, Long Suffering Spouse and I, involving all sorts of family stuff. On Saturday, for instance, our van, our cooler, and one of our tables got to go tailgating at the Notre Dame game. My wife and I did not go tailgating. We did get to drive Younger Daughter to babysit Oldest Son's dog. And at midnight -- after the weather-related delay -- when Oldest Son and his wife, Abby, and Abby's sister and one of their girlfriends from Texas all finally returned, and when Oldest Son finished unloading our van and sat down in his chair, asleep before his cheeks hit the upholstery -- we got to drive into Yuppieville again to bring Younger Daughter back to our place.

But Monday -- Labor Day -- was something else again. We didn't do anything. We had our coffee. We watched movies. We watched the Sox games. I worked on a post for the blog I put my real name on. Later, I played computer games. Long Suffering Spouse graded some papers and read a little. It was like a sick day without the inconvenience of being ill. I didn't feel a bit guilty about doing nothing. It was, after all, a holiday.

Now... why can't Christmas be like that?

Reuters says two of the ugliest public sculptures located right here in Chicago

2011-09-02T08:09:00.014-05:00

This link to Yahoo! Travel will get you the Reuters article. Reuters, in turn, lays the blame for this list on an outfit called Virtual Tourist. I can neither confirm nor deny this assertion. I noodled around the Virtual Tourist site for awhile this morning and could not find the source list. But that's not to say that it's not there: The British press might hack your cellphone, but they wouldn't make up a list like this... would they? I figure it's more probable that my Internet skills have rapidly deteriorated in this now 9 days and counting of no office Internet.

But back to our story.

Two of the pieces of public art on the aforementioned list are situated right here in Chicago. One is temporary; the other is a permanent blot on the landscape.

The temporary piece is the Marilyn sculpture on North Michigan Avenue, in Pioneer Court, just south of the Tribune Tower.

My readers are likely to remember the inspiration for this statue, namely, Marilyn's performance, opposite rodent-faced Tom Ewell, in the Billy Wilder comedy, The Seven Year Itch.

This statue was put on display quite recently and has been controversial from the start. A few days back, your crusty correspondent decided to wander over to the North Bridge area to see for himself what all the fuss was about. (It's a healthy walk from the Undisclosed Location, but I will bear any burden for the sake of a possible post.)

Having now seen for myself, I can truthfully report that the statue rather creeps me out. As Tribune columnist Mary Schmich wrote in a July 15 column, "The original image is coy. Marilyn on the Mag Mile is crude."

It is all a matter of scale. In the movie, Tom Ewell can almost see what he should not; in the posters, we see only a glimpse. But when Marilyn is 26 feet tall, we get this sort of thing:

Marilyn will be on display -- and I do mean on display -- until some time next year.

Our other nominee for most ugly piece of public art is not going away any time soon. It is called "Monument with Standing Beast," something I never knew before the Reuters article (and something I am likely to forget shortly after I publish this post), even though I walk past this thing almost every day.

This piece is located on the plaza outside the State of Illinois Building, 100 W. Randolph, kitty corner from the Daley Center, at the northwest corner of Clark and Randolph.

I can't say I share the strongly negative views reported in the Reuters article ("This ten-tonne behemoth is said to represent an animal, a portal, a tree, and an architectural form, but to some it just represents bad taste"). But I would believe it if you told me that this piece arose from a misunderstanding. I can just see Helmut Jahn, the architect of the State of Illinois building, displaying a three dimensional model of the building he had yet to build. I can see him crumpling up a piece of paper, putting it on the southeast corner of his model and saying, yes, we should have a work of public art there -- and, somehow, that crumpled piece of paper was mistaken for the design of the piece to be placed there. You be the judge.

I think my explanation is as plausible as any other. Do you?

Still no #$@%! Internet at the Undisclosed Location

2011-08-30T14:34:00.003-05:00

My Internet has been out at work since Wednesday last. Tomorrow being Wednesday next, that's an unacceptably long time, particularly in this day and age, to be unconnected.

How can I send or receive emails from clients? How can I do online research? Where will I see videos of water-skiing squirrels?

Well, I suppose I really shouldn't be searching for water-skiing squirrels during business hours.

How dependent we've become on the Internet! I had a project to work on Thursday, Friday and yesterday, so I really could stay home. (I went in yesterday just long enough to be certain that I'm still unplugged. And to call someone who might do something about it. But who hasn't so far.) Today I had to go to court, so I had to go in -- but I've snuck home since. I'm waiting for a phone call now on one of my nightmare cases. This will make a fine 'war story' some day -- if I don't get killed in the meantime.

Anyway, regular programming here is only one of the things disrupted by this unsettled shuttle between home and office.

Meanwhile, I keep looking at my phone, willing it to ring. I need to resolve this nightmare case soon (mainly because the court in question has put me on an extremely short leash in this regard) -- but it won't happen; it can't happen without the phone ringing.

I can think of two ways to make the phone ring, but neither of them are very professional. One involves taking a nap. The other involves taking the newspaper to the reading room. I sure hope that phone rings soon....

Empty nesters? Well, not exactly....

2011-08-26T08:11:00.002-05:00

With Youngest Son off at South Janesville College and Younger Daughter packing up the van yesterday to move into her dorm, you might think that Long Suffering Spouse and I were joining the ranks of empty nesters.

I found out yesterday that Younger Daughter's room this year is only on the second floor of her dorm -- only one flight of stairs, a departure from our children's usual practice of lighting on the highest available perch -- but about a mile and a half from the one stairway which we were allowed to use. At least that's what it felt like.

Younger Daughter's plan for yesterday was to pack, then visit with her Abuela (grandmother) for a little while, then load the van and then take the van to school, unpack, and be at her job by 4:00pm when (she thought) she was supposed to start her shift.

Imagine, if you can, the precision timing that would have been involved in this enterprise. Younger Daughter was counting on her mother's assistance in unpacking the van at school; Long Suffering Spouse was to bring the van home. But Long Suffering Spouse can not leave her post before 3:15pm. It takes a half hour in optimal traffic conditions to reach Younger Daughter's nearby school. At best, then, Younger Daughter built in all of 15 minutes to unload, deposit her stuff in her room, and get to her job -- at a satellite campus of the college, a mile or so away.

Surprisingly, things did not work out according to this plan. The first problem arose when the school changed Younger Daughter's work hours -- moving up her start time to noon. Younger Daughter swears no one told her about this. She only found out when she decided that 15 minutes might not be enough time to accomplish all that needed to be accomplished and that she might be a minute or two late by the time she got to work. She called in -- and got called out.

And Younger Daughter's visit with Abuela took longer than planned. Not a single sock had been loaded in the van when Younger Daughter finally returned home, about 2:00pm. I was home, working (no Internet at the Undisclosed Location, remember?) and so I volunteered to use the other car to pick up Long Suffering Spouse at school. That gave Younger Daughter at least 10 more minutes to pack.

Long Suffering Spouse was ready to go at 3:15 -- and she was not entirely surprised to find that Younger Daughter was not.

But we were on the road shortly after 3:30. So, too, however, was an enormous freight train, coming from points unknown in the west, heading directly across our intended path at a rate of speed that was more than glacial, but less than a snail's.

Oh, yes, I was on this expedition. I had no intention of going. I was actually productive yesterday, working on a big project, and anticipating at least an hour or two of additional productivity while Long Suffering Spouse and Younger Daughter enjoyed their special bonding time. They figured things differently, however.

The good news is that, huffing and puffing, we emptied the van and filled Younger Daughter's tiny dorm room from floor to ceiling. I don't know where she'll fit in there, but that's not my problem. We dropped off Younger Daughter at work and by 5:15 or so and at that moment, technically, we might have been considered empty nesters. We arrived at the newly emptied nest about 5:45. Abuela called by 6:00.

It must be very lonely, Abuela said to her daughter, with only you and your husband at home. We haven't had much chance to notice, said Long Suffering Spouse in reply. And Younger Daughter will be home tomorrow. She has a dentist's appointment -- and she plans to pack and somehow squeeze still more stuff into her dorm room. Somehow.

Other than working: Curmudgeon does not know where to roost

2011-08-25T08:43:00.007-05:00

A frequent visitor to this blog, Dave, an Atlanta lawyer, calls his blog "Rather Than Working." The title suggests that, when the spirit moves him, he'd rather blog than work. Based on matters in the last couple of weeks, I could retitle my blog, "Other Than Working." This title would suggest that, whatever my preferences, I'm not actually working. I haven't gotten a darn thing done, business-wise, in a couple of weeks.

I've addressed some of the distractions with you in prior posts: My wife's house painting efforts (lots of links within links there) and taking Youngest Son to college, for example. I didn't mention the latest crash of my home computer, a week ago Wednesday. I've written about computer problems too many times. Suffice it to say, I talked to India and the Philippines for hours on end and got the thing running again. I haven't talked much about my work concerns, although two cases in particular are driving me to distraction -- and my relationship with my best client may be in jeopardy because, well, I keep losing things, like motions and appeals. You can't win 'em all -- sophisticated corporate clients understand this -- but they can't help but get a little touchy when it seems like you've lost the ability to win any.

If I'm out of the office attending to family matters, I'm not making money. If I'm repairing the computer, I'm not making money. If I'm in the office fretting about non-billable, file-related crises of one sort or another, I'm not making money. If I'm trying to figure out how to pay at least the minimums on all bills due when I have no money, I'm not making money. At the moment... I'm not making money.

And things really started to get interesting last week. Our phones went out last week. I don't mean "our" as in the royal "we," I mean everyone in my whole darned building. I think construction work a block or two away may have resulted in a cable being cut -- but I'll never know for sure. All I know is, last Thursday, having returned to work, freed from my painting obligations, the phones died. I was making office calls on Wells Street because I couldn't get a signal in my Undisclosed Location when a guy tapped me on the shoulder. "Do you work in this building?" he asked. I nodded. "And your phones are out?" I nodded again. "Well, whaddaya know? Mine too."

My suite-mate reported my main number and my fax number to the Almighty Telephone Company on his cell phone -- and, within a day, these were restored. But my main number has a rollover number, in case two clients should call at once. That line, not having been specifically reported, was not restored until Friday, hours after I discovered this and called it in.

Then, Tuesday, around noon, I was working in my office -- and the lights went out. My computer went out. Everything went out. The whole building lost power. We thought initially that it was related to a fire in a ComEd vault between City Hall and the Daley Center, but later reports said it was not. At least three Loop buildings lost all power in the event, however, and the ones identified were at seemingly random locations. Of course this knocked out my phones again -- and my cell phone was not fully charged. I was able to ascertain however that the trains were still running (although the vault fire would interrupt service later that afternoon) and I went home. The building manager called me at home Tuesday evening after dinner to advise that power was restored (though I found out it went out again later). The building manager cautioned, however, that elevator service had not yet been restored.

I had to go in yesterday, even if that meant climbing all the stairs. (That could well have been my doom: I tend to the three flights and you're out school of stair climbing.) But the elevators were working.

On the other hand, my Internet was out.

I spent the morning trying all the tricks I knew to get it back. These all failed. Our tenant found out that we weren't the only ones who were having Internet troubles -- but our tenant was not among these. Believe it our not, she has her Internet through the Almighty Telephone Company and it was working. Can you imagine how bad a service must be if it is bested by the Almighty Telephone Company's alternative? We think -- working hypothesis this -- that only those who subscribed to the service provided by the building were knocked out. But I'm not going downtown today to test this theory. I'll work from home today and brave the Undisclosed Location again tomorrow.

And maybe I'll even be able to work there, too.

American Bar Association looking for best legal blogs

2011-08-24T07:10:00.000-05:00

The American Bar Association is soliciting nominations for its annual list of the 100 best legal blogs (a/k/a "blawgs" -- as in law + blogs, get it?), said list to be published in an upcoming issue of the ABA Journal.

Per an email from the ABA Journal, the linked Blawg 100 Amici form may be used to nominate a blog "that you read regularly [and] that you think other lawyers should know about." Persons are encouraged to nominate more than one blog. But -- of course -- there is some fine print that must be taken into account:

[P]lease know that we disregard amici from:
Blawggers who nominate their own blawgs or blawgs to which they have previously contributed posts.
Wives and husbands who nominate their spouses’ blawgs.
Employees of law firms who nominate blawgs with their own firm’s branding.
Public relations professionals in the employ of lawyers or law firms who nominate their clients’ blawgs.
Pairs of blawggers who have clearly entered into a gentlemen’s agreement to nominate each other.

The Amici form asks for comments about the nominated blogs. There is a 500-character limit -- and this may pose the ultimate challenge for actual practicing lawyers. How can we hope to say much of anything in only 500 characters?

The ABA asks nominators to keep these criteria in mind:

We’re only interested in blawgs in which the author is recognizable as a lawyer or law student in the vast majority of his or her posts.
The blawg should be written with an audience of lawyers or law students—rather than potential clients or potential law students—in mind.
The majority of the blawg’s content should be unique to the blawg and not cross-posted or cut and pasted from other publications.
We are not interested in blawgs that more or less exist to promote the author’s products and services.

While Second Effort boasts a lot of original content, I don't know that I am "recognizable" as a lawyer in the majority of my posts. This blog aims for a general readership, rather than being 'pitched' specifically to lawyers or law students. But some of these have happened by anyway, from time to time. So I pass the information along.

Blawg nominations are due by September 9.

The Magic Book -- or -- A room with a view

2011-08-23T21:54:00.006-05:00

We took Youngest Son up to school yesterday at a place I'll call South Janesville College in North Rockton, Wisconsin. Don't bother looking either up in Wikipedia. Plausible deniability is one of the great traditions of serious anonymous blogging.

South Janesville College is situated near the Rock River in southern Wisconsin, convenient to the Interstate, which is certainly a tribute to the foresight of the college's founders. In the 1840's most folks did not make plans with the Interstate in mind.

The college is old and enrollment is small, particularly when compared to the powerhouse educational conglomerates of the Big 10 (which now has 12 schools -- and they wonder why Americans are failing at math!). Still, the school has a large campus, and it dominates the small town around it. At a place like SJC, the liberal arts still flourish. Quincy Adams Wagstaff might not look too out of place striding across the campus -- except for the cigar, of course. The serious scholars of SJC would no doubt be horrified at the death penalty, but they might be willing to overcome their horror were someone to light up a stogie in their midst. This is 2011, after all. We did not take the boy back in time.

I'm predisposed to like the place. In four years I hope I can say I that I did like the place. But Youngest Son, I fear, is off to a rocky start.

From the time he sent in an acceptance (and after I sent in $500 as a pledge of good faith), Youngest Son was deluged with mail from South Janesville College -- big envelopes, small envelopes, chatty postcards. He'd get phone calls and emails, too. Some of the SJC correspondence was addressed to Long Suffering Spouse and myself, but these were all solicitations to buy something or other and these were all promptly tossed. We relied on Youngest Son to tell us what we needed to know to get him properly prepared for the semester.

Now, as a rule, 18-year old males don't talk much to their parents, and our Youngest Son has proved no exception. He'd occasionally share bits of information from his college mailings -- bits as in bits and bytes, the teeny-tiny units of data that are regularly used by computer geeks. We knew that the phone calls were from his baseball coach, for example. But we did not know whether his dorm room would have a dresser or a closet or a desk or shelves or some combination of these dorm-room basics. Would the room be air conditioned? (We assumed not, given the age of most of the buildings on campus.) He did let us know when roommates were assigned, and he informed us that he'd opened channels of communication with said roommates -- both of whom, apparently, were (1) planning to play baseball also and (2) equally ignorant on the likely contents of their dorm room.

Recently, Long Suffering Spouse tried to wheedle information out of the boy concerning the academic calendar. We knew he moved in on August 22. The first day of class is next Monday; registration and orientation fills out this week. But was there a Fall Break? How many days did he have for Thanksgiving? When would he have to leave campus after first semester finals? My wife likes to know these things. She has, I think, good reasons for asking. Does she have to plan another day off? (She missed the first day of school yesterday.) She keeps the family calendar. She'd like to know what's ahead.

Long Suffering Spouse, in fact, had a host of questions for Youngest Son, and he was equally uncommunicative with regard to all of them. Nevertheless, somehow, Youngest Son packed, making piles of stuff in the living room. He even made it to Indianapolis, finally, to pick up the refrigerator that his sister was keeping for him.

The car was loaded Sunday night. Monday morning we tried to get out of the house before the height of the rush hour (in Chicago, rush hour traffic goes from as much as to the city). But the boy couldn't find his wallet. It was left in the other car when he and Younger Sister went to pick up a new pair of hair clippers from a 24-hour Walgreen's in the wee small hours of Monday morning. (Younger Daughter was giving her brother a haircut when the old clipper failed.)

Though the wallet crisis was successfully resolved, Long Suffering Spouse had to practically lead the boy out of the house, if only to stop his seemingly aimless wandering from room to room.

The four of us (yours truly, Long Suffering Spouse, Youngest Son, and Younger Daughter -- she wanted to see what SJC looked like) made it to North Rockton without incident and, after some confusion, found a legal place to park within arguable walking distance of Youngest Son's dorm.

Youngest Son's two roommates and their respective families also arrived at the same time. We got everything from the car into the dorm -- why are my kids always on the top floor? -- also without serious incident.

But conflict was predictable as all of these strangers converged on the dorm room and, in this case, the conflict involved a pair of shorts. A pair of short, form-fitting shorts worn by the mother of one of Youngest Son's new roommates.

America is an increasingly casual country, and it shows in what some people will wear in public. Our politicians are no longer obliged to wear ties, especially on the stump. (As recent events have shown, we still expect our politicians to wear shirts. And pants.) Even fancy restaurants will seat patrons without ties -- or even jackets. Americans have Casual Fridays all year round and Summer Casual all summer long. Even lawyers will come to work in 'business casual' on days when they will not appear in court. And stop at any grocery or Wal-Mart and you're likely to see people, usually women, parading about unselfconsciously in stretchy materials that leave little to the imagination.

When a female parades about in a form-fitting costume, all males are obliged to look. This is not because we are all dirty old men, or dirty old men in training, and certainly not because we are seeking to commit infidelity at the slightest opportunity. Rather, this is an illustration of evolution in action; it is an undeniable instinct that harkens to the earliest origins of the human race. If this were a PG-13 blog I might make some sort of snickering reference to how it's no accident that homo erectus was a direct ancestor of homo sapiens -- but I'll leave that sort of humor to prime-time television.

The usual male response to seeing a female in stretchy garb is shock, horror, and revulsion -- not because we are such prudes, you understand, but because, all too often, the person wearing the garment really shouldn't. It's like looking a train wreck: You know you should turn away, but you can't. The sight of rippling folds of flesh, held in place beneath the stretchy stuff like waves on a lake that froze on a windy day, burn the retinas of your eyes, and still you stare, unblinking, wondering what was she thinking going out like that?

On the other hand, the woman in the crowded dorm room at SJC actually could wear short tight shorts. Whether or not the occasion was appropriate for such a costume, her derriere was. She was tall, thin, tanned and had long legs that nicely complimented the aforementioned shorts. With a son starting college, she must have been in the neighborhood of 40 -- but it was obvious she lived in the good part of that neighborhood. Her hair was of that blond, brown, and every-shade-in-between variety that Younger Daughter could explain very easily -- there's a name for that -- but I don't know it. What I did know was that Long Suffering Spouse took an instant dislike to this woman. I thought that was what made the room seem chilly, but it turned out that it was actually air conditioned.

The room also turned out to have beds and dressers and bookshelves and desks and closets for each of the boys. But the beds seemed to be blocking all the available electrical outlets. Major furniture moving was in order and I was all for letting the boys work this out themselves -- but if that woman was staying, Long Suffering Spouse was not budging. Since that woman stayed, Long Suffering Spouse did, too.

Believe it or not, I removed myself to the lounge just down the hall from the boys' room and checked my messages at the office.

Later, Long Suffering Spouse would have conversation with Younger Daughter about that woman. At one point I overheard her harrumphing about how she did not see that woman's husband; she would bet that that woman was divorced. "Does she think she's going to find a new husband here?" Long Suffering Spouse asked. Younger Daughter must have interjected something at this point because Long Suffering Spouse responded, "I don't care how pretty she is." Younger Daughter must have said something else. "Creepy. Yes," said Long Suffering Spouse, "that's exactly the right word for it."

I managed to avoid becoming embroiled in that conversation.

But I'm not certain that I would have agreed that that woman was being creepy. And if she was trying to be provocative, it was probably in vain. Although there have been any number of recent references in popular culture to "cougars" and so forth, I suspect that, for most 18-year olds, anyone north of 35 would be unimaginably ancient. I concede that I enjoyed the view... but I was merely looking, not looking for trouble. My best guess is that that woman only dressed that way because it was warm out.

Eventually, though, enough furniture was moved that the ladies felt it possible to leave the kids to set up their room, and their schedules, on their own. Long Suffering Spouse, Younger Daughter and I made it home -- and it was when we were cleaning out the van from the trip that the discovery was made.

It was a small book, maybe 4" x 6" -- and no more than 30 pages long. It was entitled Everything You Need to Know Before Arriving at South Janesville College. Long Suffering Spouse remembered seeing that book before; she'd actually seen Youngest Son consult it before, on one of their few shopping expeditions. She knew, therefore, that it contained some useful information. She took it inside.

After dinner, Long Suffering Spouse began reading the book -- and I could see her becoming increasingly agitated with each turn of the page.

Every question she'd asked the boy in the last month was answered in this book. I know this because she read it aloud to me off and on all night long. She'd remember some other question she'd asked Youngest Son, then she'd remind me of her prior query, and then she'd read me the answer the boy could have given her -- had he looked at the book -- but did not. I think I was quite patient until she read me the part that says that Visa cards could not be used for tuition payments. I'm still mad about that. And even the magic answer book didn't explain why Visa would not be accepted. Or why college students don't read.

Who knew that simplifying your life could be so complicated?

2011-08-18T09:24:00.005-05:00

I've not mentioned my wife's house painting project for a while (prior mentions here, here, and here, if you're interested).

Long Suffering Spouse finished painting the house last Tuesday. And just in time, too: She's had school meetings this week; classes start Monday.

But what's the use of painting the house if you put the same dust-gathering piles of stuff right back where they were?

We tend to accumulate stuff. I'm certainly the worst offender. I had cancelled checks going back to 1980. The oldest were in a desk drawer. There was also a bag full of bank statements and cancelled checks that my wife had assembled when she couldn't stand looking at them stuffed into a bookshelf in the den. These probably went up to 2007 or 2008. The only reason we didn't have a pile of more recent cancelled checks was that, at some point, the bank stopped sending them.

I had books everywhere and magazines, too. I seldom threw out magazines. I mean, who ever threw out the National Geographic, right? And when I'd work up the intestinal fortitude to discard some other magazine, Long Suffering Spouse would say, "Wait! I want to see if there are pictures in there that I can use for class." Of course, that shouldn't have stopped me from throwing out the decades of back issues of the Wilson Quarterly -- not a lot of pictures that she'd want in there -- but the magazine is so good, I just couldn't bring myself to do it. So the shelves in the basement groaned under the weight of magazines and books and we also had bags and boxes of books and magazines piled up here, there and everywhere.

I had every t-shirt I'd gotten in college stuffed in a dresser drawer. I couldn't possibly wear them now, not even at home. I do not mean to imply that I am grossly obese, but I was a pretty skinny little runt 35 years ago and I have since thickened as males do when they leave behind their callow youth and embrace the full flower of maturity. But, darn it, I designed some of those shirts. On the other hand, the pants I wear every day that I can avoid wearing a suit were stacked up on a chair because there was no other place to put them. All the shoes I actually wear were in the middle of my bedroom floor because I couldn't bring myself to throw out the old shoes in the closet.

I had papers everywhere. Stuff I'd done. Stuff I was going to do. Manuals for appliances long since replaced.

There were piles of CD's everywhere, too -- old computer programs -- CD's or DVD's on which the kids might have recorded music or TV shows, or tried to. None of these CD's or DVD's were labeled; no one admitted to knowing what they were.

I didn't want to do it, but there was no choice: We had to simplify -- or we'd wind up like one of those hoarder families on a horrifying-reality TV show.

I inhaled deeply and threw out the shoes and the t-shirts. And still the world kept spinning. All those old checks got shredded. Out went the unknown discs. Out went the old computer programs. Out went boxes of 3.5 inch floppy discs -- and more than a few 5.25 inch floppies, too. I asked Oldest Son whether there might be a market for some of the educational games he and his siblings played as kids. He's got connections to eBay power-sellers; he would know. No, he told us, there's no market for Windows95 programs on 3.5 inch floppies that can't be loaded on any current computer -- so Reader Rabbit, Math Rabbit, and Treasure Mountain all went into the trash.

"Kids," I said at one point, "you don't know what a favor I'm doing for you. I'm saving you the cost of at least one dumpster after I'm dead."

Younger Daughter said her college library would take some of the old children's books that we'd resolved to discard (don't worry -- we saved Dr. Suess and the other really good stuff for the grandchildren yet unborn) and that helped us with the painful necessity of clearing shelf space. But no library would take the magazine collections -- not even the National Geographics. (I've got over a hundred years of the magazine on disc. That helps salve the wound somewhat. But it's just not the same.)

The school's recycling bins were happy. I was sad.

Sunday, I went through 10 years of homeowner and auto insurance policies and kept only the forms and endorsements actually in force -- a foot of paper reduced to a half-inch. But there are still piles of stuff that must be reviewed. I'm not looking forward to going through the mound of cords trying to figure out whether some, or any, of these actually are needed by any appliance we currently have. Eventually, I'll rearrange those bookshelves. Next year -- maybe -- we'll rebuild them so they don't sag so.

I know, on one level, we are so much better off for having undertaken this process. Still... I'm deathly afraid we're tossing out something that would have made our fortune on next season's Antiques Roadshow....

Second Effort

Historian Gingrich wants to go to the Moon

Honesty is a pretty good policy

I don't know why this doesn't dominate conversation either

Romney and Gingrich -- taxes and history

Today is National Peanut Butter Day

National Pie Day yesterday -- and I missed it

Yearbook controversy brings back memories of yearbook controversies past

Grand Avenue comic explains parent-teacher conferences

Curmudgeon should turn the TV off before falling asleep

Time to shake the blues with silliness -- starting tomorrow

How yesterday's snow (may have) made me lose my glasses today

Not riding up to South Janesville College; it may snow today in Chicago anyway

Curmudgeon outraged by apparent need to haggle -- about everything

Trying to be fair: On the TSA cupcake controversy

Curmudgeon stealing signal while waiting for the Almighty Telephone Company

Curmudgeon not the retiring type?

And people wonder why I'm technophobic: Curmudgeon's Internet goes down again

When do the holidays end? An unscientific survey

Curmudgeon's blogging year in review

Political cartoon art -- and a little American Gothic fun

Curmudgeon is techno-busted

Closed for the Holiday

Some assembly required? *Shudder*

Curmudgeon explains payroll tax stalemate

Youngest Son shows up, takes keys, leaves dishes

Curmudgeon household so busy that...

Zombie-slaying Crusader Curmudgeon rides again!

A matter of concern? When colleagues 'disappear'

Seasonal sidebar updated

Newt Gingrich needs a map -- and, no, this post is not political

Choosing your battles wisely in this so-called 'War' on Christmas

Banking: The Game

Back online at the Undisclosed Location... but how?

It's my sixth Blogiversary today

When can we go? Kepler Space Telescope finds potentially habitable planet

Curmudgeon and Long Suffering Spouse go see a movie

Was any of this going on at your Thanksgiving gathering?

Focus... or lack thereof... at Second Effort

Birds do it, bees do it...

Singing along with the Curmudgeon

Conversation in a courthouse hallway

Thanksgivings 2011, Curmudgeon style

Commercial air travel a real turkey

Update on the spamming front

Everything I need to know I get from the comics, part 4,791

Long Suffering Spouse doesn't think this is funny

Thanksgiving 1 and Thanksgiving 2

This is a test... this is only a test

Christmas season not too long... just too early

A kind word about Thomson-West -- and another opportunity to bash the phone company

Ken Levine explains what a curmudgeon is

Yet another illustration of why the Federal Government is in trouble: student loan edition

Curmudgeon's latest theory on social networking

Best line of the night award

Halloweens past linger on in Curmudgeon's basement

Curmudgeon goes back to school

Parent-teacher conferences, now -- and then

Post No. 1500: Not yet an overnight sensation

Vigilant parenting and potentially creepy social network connections

Bank reform -- Curmudgeon style

For one brief shining moment....

A one-day jury trial -- part last

A one-day jury trial -- part three

We interrupt this discussion of Curmudgeon's recent trial --

A one-day jury trial -- part two

Another day, another jury?

About that football post....

Fearless MLB playoff predictions

On the occasion of Mr. Buehrle's departure?

Curmudgeon wasn't the only one miffed at missing out on a MacArthur Grant

Reading a successful visit to the eye doctor's office

There's a mouse in the house

All the experts are wrong (again)

The large law firm and the ant hill compared

The Internet returns to the Undisclosed Location!

Curmudgeon turns down some business

Old as the Dickens -- or -- Curmudgeon learns to read

Resting from our labors on Labor Day

Reuters says two of the ugliest public sculptures located right here in Chicago

Some assembly required? Shudder