The letter I can't send to my client

I have this insurance company client that hired me to represent its insureds in a number of cases over the past year. That's the good news.

The bad news? Where to begin?

First, I had to register with some third party -- a subsidiary of a major legal publisher and research company whose name rhymes with "Hexes" (I first wrote about this in the second half of this post) -- that, in the name of cost containment, interposes itself between me and my new insurance company client, requiring standardized billing, that it reviews first before passing it along to the client. And I'm expected to pay for the delay -- my $275 annual fee is again due.

This company I'm dealing with is not the only one to get euchred by this third party interloper; I've heard similar complaints from some of my old ex-partners. It's apparently an industry-wide scam.

And getting the bill approved is not just a matter of delay.

Oh, no, there is scrutiny, too.

Not on anything useful or substantive; rather, the bill will be rejected if two activities are combined in a single time entry. There must be two entries in that case. I once had a bill rejected because I put mileage and parking together on the same expense entry. Well, it was for the same court appearance, wasn't it?

But, fine, I am adaptable. I can live with anyone's rules as long as I understand them.

But, now, after bills are allegedly "approved," comes major, major delay.

I wrote a 'what gives?' email -- polite, conversational -- but pointing out that, in one case, my bill was "approved" in January. The end of May is nearly upon us. Several other bills are at least 60 days post "approval." I included a chart, complete with invoice numbers and dates to my contact. "Is there something else I need to do?" I asked.

My contact referred the matter to a subordinate who promptly emailed me that he was looking into it.

Ten more days went by.

I emailed the subordinate.

A few days later the subordinate responded that there was a "glitch" in the accounting system and they were looking into it.

That was a week ago. Messrs. MasterCard and Visa won't take those kinds of excuses from me... but I am obliged to take it from clients. Therefore, I did not, and could not, write this letter, though I badly wanted to....

Dear Mr. ------

Thank you for your email advising of the 'glitch' in your accounting system.

I don't believe it for a second.

In my experience, when corporate bills are allegedly approved and not thereafter paid, it's usually because someone has his or her fat fingers in the till. I'm not accusing you personally. But, with each passing day that these checks are not cut, it is increasingly likely that they are not cut because someone in your organization has diverted the funds with which these bills were supposed to be paid.

You have computers. You have this very sophisticated (you think) third party bill approval system that assigns invoice numbers. Your company pays, and I suspect it pays dearly, for this service. If there's a 'glitch' in your accounting system, you should be looking at your accountants or your own IT people, and maybe both because these 'glitches' are probably where money is being diverted from your vendors to someone else's pocket.

I am unwilling to play victim any longer.

Please cut my checks. I enclose a pen in case you don't have one available.

Mother's Day weekend with the Curmudgeon clan -- Part III (the case of the baseball tickets)

Bee, I promise, this is not really a sports post.

My friend Steve is in a Chicago White Sox season ticket plan with three other guys. The seats are in the outfield, but right down in front, so you can see everything that happens. They're good seats.

But Steve and his comrades split the tickets up before the beginning of the season, before all their respective schedules are set. Steve in particular has encountered problems with his schedule before because of the frequent travel he does on behalf of the charity he works for now that he's "retired."

One such conflict arose this past weekend. I'm not sure where he needed to go, but he did, and he offered me the tickets for Saturday night's game against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Orange County, California. There was only one condition: "See that they're used," he said. "I only ask that there be fannies in the seats. Then I don't feel bad."

That's not an unreasonable request, I agreed. "But I can't go," I told him. "Older Daughter is coming in; we have to pick up Youngest Son. It's just too complicated."

"Well, maybe one of the kids will want them," Steve suggested.

"Maybe."

"So ask. But get back to me, please. If no one at your house can use them I have to try and place them somewhere else."

This was last Wednesday, I think.

I thought of Olaf and Younger Daughter. Maybe they could get friends and go. Olaf graduated; he can have a night out now and again. It's a good thing.

And Younger Daughter thought so too when I mentioned it.

"I'll ask around," she said.

"So ask," I said. "But get back to me, please. I promised Uncle Steve I'd get back to him." (Steve is not actually related by blood or marriage. But the kids all call him Uncle. His wife, though also unrelated to them, is Aunt Charlotte.)

"Don't worry," she said.

I should have worried.

The first thing Younger Daughter did was ask her sister if she and Hank might want to go. But Hank has to sing in Indianapolis on Sundays -- still, he was interested, Older Daughter said. "We could head home straight from the park," Hank allegedly told her. "It's on the way." But they would have had to leave the dog in Indy -- the little bunnies might have survived! -- but, alas, as I mentioned previously, Cork had worn out his welcome at the home of Hank's parents (and they have their own golden retriever).

Then Older Daughter suggested that, if they could stay until the end of the game Saturday night if they went to the ballpark, they could stay in Chicago until the end of the game at our house. Hank was not buying.

All this is easy to relate, but it took time.

It was Friday already and Younger Daughter hadn't found a home for the tickets. In the meantime, she had her own colonoscopy to deal with. Olaf's asked some of his friends, she told me, but she hadn't heard anything yet. What about Youngest Son, she asked. We'd be picking him up on Saturday. Maybe he could get a group together for the night game. "So ask," I said. "But get back to me, please. This is not a nice thing we're doing here stringing along Uncle Steve like this."

Youngest Son texted back that he was interested, but he wasn't sure if he could get a group.

In the aftermath of her procedure, Younger Daughter was losing interest in going also. She was knocked down a peg by the whole process and wasn't feeling at all well.

And the next thing I knew it was Saturday morning. I asked again who was taking the tickets. I knew by now Older Daughter and Hank weren't going: We had the bunny-eating dog. But Younger Daughter wasn't sure whether she and her husband might yet go; it depended on how she felt. And she was waiting to hear from some people she'd asked.

"Look," I said, as I stormed out the door for South Janesville College, "I don't care who you get. I'm not going. Your mother is not going. But find some bodies for the seats, pick up the tickets from Uncle Steve, and remember to say thank you. Get this settled before I get home."

And when I got back home, all was settled and done -- and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I wound up at the Sox game Saturday night, along with Long Suffering Spouse and Youngest Son. (No, I didn't understand what happened either. Still don't.) Youngest Son who was apparently already sick by Saturday night -- he'd really be out of it on Sunday, much to the amusement of his brothers, when they came calling. "I haven't been to the ball game in a couple of years," said Long Suffering Spouse, and that was nice, I guess. She might have enjoyed the game more, though, if it weren't 48̊ at game time -- 46̊, according to the outfield scoreboard, before the game was through. And if the wind weren't howling the whole game.

Oh, and it might have helped if the White Sox had won.

But you can't have everything.

Mother's Day weekend with the Curmudgeon clan -- Part II (CSI: Curmudgeon-style)

Regular readers will recall that Older Daughter and her husband Hank are the proud owners of a golden retriever. I call him Cork.

In yesterday's installment I noted that my poor wife was less than thrilled that Cork was coming. She was even less thrilled when Older Daughter and Hank neglected to bring the dog's cage.

At our house the beast has slept each night in a rather large cage. It's a pain, presumably, to lug it to and from the car and to fold and unfold it upon arrival and departure. Still, it's a piece of home for the dog -- the kids used in their own house, and for the same purpose -- and it's worked well for us.

Lately, though, Hank and Older Daughter have discontinued use of the cage in their own home (Cork may have grown out of the rug-eating phase that cost them a chunk of their security deposit at their last apartment). They proposed that the dog sleep upstairs with the rest of the family. On recent visits, Hank and Older Daughter have decided against using the futon we bought for such visits and have camped out upstairs in the room that Youngest Son used to share with Middle Son. The room is equipped with a bunk bed. No, I don't ask questions.

Anyway, Long Suffering Spouse vetoed this idea -- she didn't relish tripping over the dog at night if she should have to make a comfort stop. The kids were miffed; they stayed downstairs with the dog on Friday night. I know I didn't mind.

Now, Cork, I hasten to add, is a lovely dog. He's bulked up a bit since his puppy days (he's around 2 now) and he probably weighs in at about 85 lbs. He still thinks he's a lap dog, of course. And, for all his shedding and slobbering, he really is very gentle with the Baby to Be Named Later. At one point on Saturday, he laid on the floor next to the baby as she played with toys and grabbed fist-fulls of fur from his side, all without so much as a whimper of protest.

Of course, by then, he was on his best behavior.

He had to be, because of what he'd done earlier in the day.

The Curmudgeon home comes with a fenced-in backyard, accessible from a sliding glass door in the den. There's very little that grows in our backyard, and very little of what does grow there is worth worrying about. So we ordinarily have no problems in letting Cork roam free in the backyard where he can sniff and dig and break off sticks to his heart's content. (He's neatly pruned a couple of bushes for us, inadvertently perhaps: He's killed a couple of others.)

And Cork was in the backyard for a fairly long time on Saturday morning. The weather wasn't terrible and the rest of us were able to eat our breakfasts without undue canine interference.

I was in the living room with Long Suffering Spouse, Older Daughter, Younger Daughter and the baby. Hank and Olaf were in the den, flipping between sports channels on TV. But then, out of the corner of his eye, Olaf spotted some extracurricular motion in the backyard. No, it wasn't Cork -- he's hard to miss -- it was something by the hose stretched out in the middle of the yard, something small. Is that a mouse? Olaf thought to himself.

Long Suffering Spouse, at the opposite end of the house, was instantly alert. If there's anything she hates, it's mice. As on Saturday morning, one need only think about a mouse in order to command her full attention. "Mouse? What mouse?" she demanded. "Where?"

"I don't know what it is," Olaf said. "It's very small, like a mouse, but it's not moving very fast at all. It's barely moving."

Hank had gone to the window by this point. "Maybe it's sick," he offered.

"Well, you better keep Cork away from it, whatever it is," commanded Older Daughter.

The young men went into the backyard, one to investigate the little creature, the other to try and round up the dog.

Soon, though, we had a report.

"It's a baby rabbit," Olaf advised us. Hank nodded solemnly. Cork, newly returned around the house, bounded around in case anyone had dropped any breakfast.

"It's still alive."

"Did Cork get it?"

"It doesn't look like it's been bitten."

Now Younger Daughter was out in the backyard with a box and Older Daughter was looking up rabbit rescue locations.

It turns out, however, that little baby, still-nursing rabbits (like this one) are notoriously hard to rescue. They have an annoying tendency to die instead. The rabbit rescue sites said the best thing that can be done is to return the little creature to its nest.

Now I've telescoped a really overlong exchange into this still-overlong explanation for the sake of moving the narrative along. The question now, however, was where was the nest? The kids combed the backyard (it's not that big, folks) for several minutes, but to no avail. Then Long Suffering Spouse took charge.

Rabbits, it's true, aren't mice. They're not even rodents. But my wife's critter-radar, if not infallible for rabbits as it certainly is for mice, is pretty darn good. She wasn't out in the yard for a minute before I was summoned.

"See," she told me, pointing a row of dug-up plants alongside the backyard toolshed, "that's where it was." Gray fur on the ground corroborated her hypothesis (I don't know how the rest of them missed it).

Pretty clearly, too, it was Cork who was responsible.

The ruined nest was empty, suggesting that Cork had probably eaten the other kits whole. Why he spared this one, at least temporarily, is not hard to figure: He wasn't through playing with it yet.

Dogs are wonderful, loyal companions. Even Cork. But they are related to wolves, you know. They make unconvincing vegans.

The baby rabbit was put back by the nest in the slim hopes that its mother might rescue it. Cork was restricted from the backyard during the remainder of the visit. When he was let out again, it was under supervision -- and, immediately, like the cliched criminal, he immediately returned to the scene of the crime. We shooed him away before he could do any further damage.

It probably didn't do the baby rabbit any good. It was gone the next day anyway.

Mother's Day weekend with the Curmudgeon clan -- Part I

Long Suffering Spouse and I made it to 7:00 a.m. Mass as usual yesterday.

As usual, we weren't there until 7:10.

What was unusual is that we were joined by Younger Daughter, Olaf and the Baby to Be Named Later. They made it by 7:15 or so, comfortably ahead of the drop-dead deadline the nuns used to tell us about. If you didn't make it to Mass before the beginning of the Offertory, the nuns told us, you had not fulfilled your Sunday obligation. It was only later that I made the connection between the passing of the basket and the deadline. But I wasn't always this cynical.

I'm sure Younger Daughter wanted to go to Mass to make her mother happy. And, this year, she and her mother could both step up at the end of Mass for a special blessing -- and they did. But I knew the real reason why they were there: The baby's gums had her awake before 6:00 a.m.

Youngest Son wasn't at Mass. I'd picked him up the day before. I was at his South Janesville College (that's what I call it) frat house only an hour or two later than I'd hoped. With all that extra time, much of Youngest Son's packing actually was done. In the time honored tradition of college students everywhere, he planned on coming home and going to sleep for about a week. There was a detour, however, which I'll explain in a future installment.

Long Suffering Spouse usually comes with me when we pick up the boy from school. On Saturday, she did not.

Older Daughter decided to visit Friday and Saturday. She and Hank and Cork the dog all arrived in time for dinner Friday evening.

I had tried to talk Older Daughter out of bringing the dog.

"But Mom loves the dog," Older Daughter protested. "Oh, yes, she does," I agreed -- remembering Long Suffering Spouse's exact words... Oh no, she's going to bring the dog, isn't she? He'll get hair everywhere, and we have to pick up everything. And he'll slobber all over the baby stuff. Oh, I like the dog, but can't they leave that it somewhere just this once?

As it turned out, they couldn't leave the dog with their in-laws as they've had to do on occasions when they've visited someone other than us: It seems that the last time Cork was at the in-laws' house, he destroyed their swimming pool cover skittering across it. The new pool cover was being delivered Saturday. The in-laws wanted it to remain intact for more than a day.

I should have been in better shape for this weekend's ordeal. After all, I took Friday off to babysit. Older Daughter had to see a GI-doc for a problem and she went to the same doctor who removed the better part of my colon six years hence. When she recounted the family history of colon cancer in our family (in which cancer does not just run, it fairly gallops), the doctor insisted she have a colonoscopy. That was Friday's entertainment.

Long Suffering Spouse was not happy about the test, either. "She's too young," she said. I wasn't much older than that when I had my first problem, I reminded her.

As it turned out, Younger Daughter did have one small polyp -- in an area of the colon where I eventually grew them by the bushel -- and if you thought Long Suffering Spouse was unhappy before the test, you should have seen her after. "I went through this with you," she told me, "but I never thought I'd have to go through this with my own children."

I wouldn't have guessed Younger Daughter would have a problem. If I had to make a guess, Oldest Son would be my most likely candidate. He drinks coffee by the gallon, just like I used to do; he works in a sedentary job, like I've done my whole life (he's a computer consultant, but it still involves sitting); and he eats junk food at odd hours, just like I used to before I got married. He's married now nearly three years, but Abby works long hours, too. Neither of them cook. Of course, he steadfastly refuses to be tested -- but I made a pitch to Abby this weekend. He may be in for a surprise. I hope so.

And Long Suffering Spouse had a miserable week at work, too.

No, it was good that Long Suffering Spouse did not make the road trip with me to South Janesville College. She wound up at the store instead with her daughters -- Younger Daughter was still pretty rocky from her test, but she did the best she could.

Hank and Older Daughter had to be back in Indianapolis for Sunday services -- Hank sings, you'll remember; that's his side job -- and if Long Suffering Spouse had come with me she'd have spent virtually no time at all with Older Daughter.

"Does that mean they'll be gone when I get back?" Youngest Son asked me as we started the homeward journey early Saturday afternoon. There was a hopeful note in his voice, which should not be taken as any sort of dislike of his sister. It's just that she had noted pictures of Youngest Son and a girl on Facebook in various poses at each other's respective spring formals (fraternities and sororities do these things, I'm told) and, in prior conversations, she had vowed to wheedle out of him information sufficient for her to decide whether this was a serious relationship.

Who wants to come home to an inquisition?

Hank and Older Daughter finally left Saturday night. Long Suffering Spouse and I weren't there. That's one of the tales I'll spin out of this vortex of activity this week. The other involves Cork, the dog.

But, for now, we'll conclude in the vestibule of the church after Mass. One of the ladies of the parish, an acquaintance of Abuela's, was among the many selling carnations to support the Parish Pro-Life Committee. Long Suffering Spouse directed me to buy a bouquet that she promptly gave to Younger Daughter. "So," said the lady to my wife, "what is your family doing for you this Mother's Day?"

"They're all coming to visit," said Long Suffering Spouse, muttering "I think" under her breath, just loud enough for me to hear. (At this point, we'd heard nothing from either Oldest Son or Middle Son about any possible visits.)

"And they'll want you to feed them, of course," said the lady. It was not a question.

"As usual," agreed Long Suffering Spouse.

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Mother's Day always falls on a Sunday, of course, and whoever is coming over, whenever they come, the laundry still must be done, the grass cut, and week's groceries procured. Long Suffering Spouse headed out to the store while I started the washer and the lawnmower. While I was finishing up the lawn, Long Suffering Spouse was unpacking the groceries and trying to pack Younger Daughter for a trip to her in-laws. When I came in, Long Suffering Spouse was wrapping a present for Younger Daughter's mother-in-law. "I must be doing something wrong," she said. "I had to go with her to the store to get this; now I have to wrap it, too." I looked at the mountain of stuff that had been prepared for the journey to the land of the in-laws (it was a family party with all the great-aunts and uncles in attendance) and I went outside to see how Olaf was doing packing the U-Haul trailer. "What U-Haul trailer?" he asked. "We have to fit this in the car somehow." And, somehow, they did....

Password protected -- for our amusement

How many passwords do you have to juggle? Six? Ten?

Simple passwords are too "weak" -- and a lot of sites will insist that you bulk up... passwords must have at least one capital letter, two numbers, a specialty character and anything else that we can think of to screw up your ability to recollect whatever we finally allow you to have. And don't think you can use the password from your most restrictive site as your password everywhere. That would be too easy. At least one of your sites will reject it as having too many characters... passwords must be between 8 and 14 characters long, except on Tuesdays in spring, when passwords must be between 6 and 12 characters long, or Thursdays after the Full Moon in any month having an 'm' in it....

Then there are the sites that make you change your password every 90 days -- because the Russian hackers are always watching you in particular (what makes you so special, anyway?) -- and don't even think of using the password you used to use, either. (The Russians almost got that one, you know.)

But, given the proliferation of passwords, the worst are sites that limit you to one or two tries -- and then make you wait... and wait... for an email. When you get the email, you can reset your password. Too bad you remembered that password in the meantime. Too bad, that is, for you.

W visas? What are they smoking in Washington these days?

I first heard about "W visas" on NPR this morning. Noodling around the Intertubes, I found this April 1 report on Slate attempting to explain the concept.

In a nutshell (and this truly is nuts) the idea is that employers who heretofore have relied on illegal immigrants as a substantial component of their workforce -- in the meat-packing industry, say -- will instead use workers who enter the country on these W visas. Unlike many other visa programs, this W visa will be geared specifically to the unskilled laborer, the guy who will supposedly take only 'jobs no American wants.'

This would be a great deal for the immigrant worker (we're not supposed to say 'guest workers') who would be in this country legally, with the opportunity to seek permanent resident status when the visa expires, and thus on a path to citizenship.

This would be a great idea -- if it weren't so obviously stupid.

Look: The statement that there are jobs that Americans won't take is a lame, transparently fraudulent lie. The truth is that restaurant chains and big box stores and meat packers don't want to hire Americans. They don't want to have to pay minimum wage. Thus, they hire illegals -- often through intermediaries, pretending to 'contract out' for certain services. However they hire them, our big businesses pay the illegals next to nothing -- and thereby squeeze out maximum profits. Why not? No one goes to jail for hiring illegals.

Does any sane person think that the MBA's who have perpetrated this fraud for decades are going to hire people with W visas and pay normal wages and benefits?

No, they're going to continue to hire illegals as long as they can find them, from wherever they can get them. And desperately poor people from Mexico and Central America are going to continue lining up for these jobs because $5 an hour or even $3 an hour is better than $1.50 a day back home. Every now and again, a bunch of poor slobs who wanted nothing more than to better their lives and the lives of their children will be rounded up and deported, just like now, while the greedy, selfish bastards who exploit them replace them without a backward glance -- or the least fear of meaningful legal sanction.

And if you think that immigration "reform" will result in meaningful penalties against the big businesses that benefit from illegal immigration, you're just as high as the lunatics in Washington.

The Right wants secure borders; the Left wants fair wages and an end to exploitation of immigrants. But they don't need "reform." They just need to enforce some of the laws they already have on the books: Put some MBA's in jail. Have a few Fortune 500 CEOs do the 'perp walk' on the evening news. It's already a crime to hire illegal workers and pay them less than minimum wage. Enforce these laws!

This would dry up demand for illegals -- illegal immigration would slow (maybe only the drug runners would have incentive to cross the border after this) -- and opportunities would open up for our kids to get jobs again. The busboy at your neighborhood restaurant might again be your neighbor's teenage son.

I bet most kids today would flunk this test

Chuckle Bros. comic by Brian and Ron Boychuk, obtained from GoComics.

Oh, sure, we old folks think this comic funny because, after all, who can't copy words when the words are written out right in front of you?

The answer, I'm sorry to say, is today's kids. I'm going by what I see from my wife's junior high classes, so perhaps your kids' or grandkids' school is different. But I don't think so. My wife teaches at a private (Catholic) grade school where the students are from middle class backgrounds. According to their standardized test scores, just like the children of fictional Lake Wobegon, the kids at my wife's school are all (or almost all) above average.

And today's kids seem incapable of copying a word when it's written right in front of them.  My wife has showed me test paper after test paper proving this.

Why?

Part of it, I believe, is that teaching methods seem to have changed: When we were kids, we were expected to copy stuff off the board. Accuracy was compulsory; sloppiness was a punishable offense. We were forced to do this time and again in the primary grades, and the teacher actually looked at what we copied. Neatness counted. And graded us very harshly if we didn't copy correctly.  Thus, we learned -- we were required to learn -- how to do this.

Today, rote copying (and -- oh, my gosh, memorizing) are looked on as primitive, wrong, even abusive.  Today's kids didn't learn how to copy accurately in the primary grades; and, thus, they can't do so when they reach junior high.

I don't know why this is the current trend; it seems awfully stupid to me.

Imagine an astronaut in a crisis scenario, trying to copy down critical instructions relayed by Mission Control. "Roger that, Houston," the astronaut would say, but the mushy jumble of characters on his or her note pad might not really match up with the information sent up from the ground.

Apollo 13 would have had a very different ending.

Oh, no, the 'modern' educator may say, in a patronizing tone, today's children have technology (when it works) and spell check will correct their spelling (but only if they get reasonably close to the correct spelling -- and spell check can't help a kid know when and how to use 'there' or 'their' or 'your' or 'you're'). And, as near as I can tell, 'modern' teachers say that kids today don't have to memorize anything because they can always look it up on their ever-present 'devices.' (But how do you 'look up' what you never knew? How do you even know you should be looking for it?)

As Blog of Days readers already know, this is Teacher Appreciation Week. It's an especially appropriate time to think about teachers and teaching -- especially good teachers and good teaching.  In that spirit, share this post with a teacher in your life. Am I being unfair to 'modern' teachers? Am I being unfair to today's kids? What do you think? What do the teachers in your life think?

Olaf graduates -- finally -- and Curmudgeon must begin thinking about his next great acting job

Olaf finally got his degree Saturday. "I don't have the diploma yet," he'd say if he saw this -- but his name was in the program and he walked across the stage with everyone else.

Well... maybe more staggered than walked.

Younger Daughter thought it would be good to celebrate the night before the graduation ceremony.

When I heard she was planning a party, I asked her where she planned to hold the event. My real question, of course, was "if the party's at my house, am I invited?"

In the event, Younger Daughter had a couple of friends meet them at the house, then they repaired to a gin mill on the Near North Side where many others gathered. Ethanol was consumed in copious quantities.

Olaf gets up at 4:30 a.m. for work and, although he doesn't always work Fridays, last Friday he did have to go in.

So he was dog tired before they headed out. And Younger Daughter's not sleeping soundly these days because the Granddaughter To Be Named Later is cutting her two front teeth (gosh, I hope we don't have to wait until Christmas for them) so she was dog tired before they went out.

Well.

I don't know what time they got home (Long Suffering Spouse and I got the baby down and went to sleep ourselves) but I do know that Olaf was sick as a dog on Saturday morning. Younger Daughter was worse.

The plan had been for them to drive down as a family to the graduation -- there's a whole 'nother set of grandparents, you know, and they were looking forward to holding the baby while their son walked across the stage -- but this plan had to be abandoned because of the glacial pace at which the kids were able to move.

Eventually, though, Olaf went in his car, with the new baby seat so the family could head out to his parents for a celebratory barbecue. The old car seat was put into my van so I could take Younger Daughter and the baby if ever they got ready.

I was beginning to wonder if that contingency might not occur -- but, eventually, Younger Daughter rallied sufficiently. She and the baby were there when her husband's name was called. The other grandparents got their carrying time. Everyone looks fine in the pictures. The baby didn't complain about her teeth either.

Long Suffering Spouse and I had a sense of accomplishment as we ushered them out of the house, finally. Not because we got them moving when they were in such a state, of course, but because Olaf had finally -- despite all the obstacles that his health and his teachers combined to throw in his path -- completed his degree. And, Friday, before they went out, Olaf happened to mention that his boss did mention that salary discussions might soon be in order.

Once Olaf gets on salary they ought to be able to put together a security deposit on an apartment -- maybe even, if interest rates hold, a down payment on a house somewhere. They may actually move out someday.

And that's when I'll have to do the best acting job of my career. Long Suffering Spouse -- whatever she may say now -- will be tremendously sad when they go. I will have to pretend to be unreservedly happy. Only you here can know any different.

Lego finds robots -- and redemption

You never know when that next wave of nostalgia will crash over you. Today it happened as I was reading an article in this month's Smithsonian, "How Lego Is Constructing the Next Generation of Engineers."

Remember Lego?

I loved Lego as a child. My parents would get me boxes of just plain bricks like this one (in addition to this standard 2 x 4 size, there were several other sizes too, 1 x 2, 2 x 2, 2 x 3, 2 x 8, 1 x 6....) but, with just these little rectangles I could build anything.

And I did. I built buildings to accompany the train setup, I built cities, I built ray-guns (I had a pretty good phaser design, if I do say so myself), I built control panels -- buttons on buttons -- to operate spaceships that would take me all around the Galaxy -- without ever leaving my parents' house.

I didn't play with Lego as often as the years went by, but (like the boy in Toy Story) I had occasional relapses for many years. Eventually, though, I went away to school and my mother gave my Lego collection (by then quite massive) to my aunt so that my 14-years-younger cousin could play with them. I thought I'd get them back for my own children, but that's not how it worked out: The whole box got sold in a garage sale at some point; I was not informed until well after the fact.

Still, by that time, I was married and looking forward to my own children and the chance to play with their Legos. We did fine with the Duplo blocks (Duplo being the giant Lego blocks that are made for little hands) and we built up quite a collection of these (which we absolutely refused to share so that my grandchildren will have them). But when the time came for my kids to graduate from Duplo to Lego, Lego wasn't the same.

Lego was very different.

When I was a kid, the idea behind Lego was that you could build anything you want. When my kids were little, the Lego philosophy had degenerated to 'you can build anything we want.'

There may always have been Lego models; I don't think so, though. I think somebody built the Empire State Building (I remember a huge Lego Empire State Building in the toy department at Marshall Fields one Christmas) or the Statue of Liberty from Legos without instructions. But, even if there were models, the big sellers were the boxes of bricks.

And those boxes of bricks didn't exist when my kids were little. I looked everywhere for them. There were only models. We have a green Lego Statue of Liberty in the dining room still, a little dusty, and with a few of the pieces missing after being jostled from time to time down through the years. My wife bought it for Oldest Son. I hated it. He loved it -- until he was done with it.

After he built it, what else was there to do with it? Admire it? For how long?

So we didn't get Lego Millennium Falcons or any of the other models.

Now I must admit to a certain prejudice against models. My father tried to interest me in model making -- a standard hobby for boys in the 20th Century -- and my father continued making lots of models, even later in life (a lot of them ones I hadn't already ruined). He had the fine motor skills and patience necessary to build models. He had hopes of capping off his model making career by building a ship in a bottle. He never quite got to it.

When I tried to make a model airplane, on the other hand, the wings wound up on the same side of the fuselage, or at least out of alignment, and I usually glued my fingers together. I was a disaster. If I was supposed to break off a plastic strut here, I inevitably broke it off there. There was no model so simple I couldn't screw it up. I learned to hate model making. (You lose a little skin off your fingers each time you pull the glue off.)

So my feelings about model making generally may have colored my feelings toward Lego models in particular. But, if so, I was not alone. As the Smithsonian article relates, Lego sales were in decline during the late 20th Century. By the early 2000s, Lego was on the verge of being bought out by Mattel.

I wasn't following Lego's decline; my kids were largely grown by this point and their Lego window had closed. But, if I had known of Lego's near demise, I might have smiled a smile of secret satisfaction.

And then Lego found robots. And schools, even middle schools, found Legos to teach basic engineering principles by having robot competitions. The latest entry in Lego's robot reboot is Mindstorms EV3:

Mindstorms EV3 is a jumble of parts (nearly 600 separate elements) that can be plugged together many ways. The toy, which clocks in at $350 and will be in stores this fall, comes with 3-D interactive building instructions for 17 different bots that walk, talk and stalk. And, this being Lego, enterprising kids are encouraged to hack away and turn the components into whatever they can dream up.

Well, it's not exactly a box of bricks from which one can make anything yet... but it sure sounds like a giant step in the right direction. And, this time, the blocks can move.

It gives me something to look for at Christmastime when the grandkids start coming along in more quantity....

Law Day: Respect the laws... or repeal them

May 1 is Law Day in the U.S.A. Whatever the paranoid Cold War origins of the observance (it was intended as a red-white-and-blue substitute for that Commie-tainted workers' holiday, May Day) it is a good opportunity for all of us to pause and reflect on how important, how vital our legal system is as the guardian of our American freedoms.

It is also an opportunity to stop and think about laws themselves -- and what they should be.

America breaks down irrevocably if, as a society, we lose respect for the law. In specific instances this has already happened.

It happened nearly 100 years ago when Prohibition was imposed. Many otherwise law-abiding people simply refused to obey this one: Speakeasies... and gangsters... flourished. People who publicly favored Prohibition did not obey the law either: Liquor flowed freely at the Harding White House. Many in the upper classes thought that Prohibition provided a good dose of discipline for the working class, but the 'better sort' did not need that discipline -- or to stop drinking. Eventually, Prohibition had to be abandoned.

The so-called "War on Drugs" hasn't yet been abandoned, although cracks are finally beginning to appear in places like Colorado. But for decades now, draconian penalties against everything from pot smoking to heroin use haven't halted drug usage -- and the children of middle and upper class families seem always to fare better when picked up on drug charges than poor or working class kids. One judge's nomination for the United States Supreme Court was derailed when it was revealed that he regularly smoked marijuana with students while a member of the Harvard Law School faculty. Both Barack Obama and George W. Bush acknowledged drug use that -- had they been caught and prosecuted -- would have effectively ended their political careers before they began. (Bill Clinton admitted smoking marijuana as well -- but denied that he inhaled. Mmm hmm.)

We now pass laws we don't intend to -- or can not -- enforce. My favorite example (probably because it impacted me directly at the time) was raising the drinking age to 21. (It was 19 in Illinois, 18 in many of the surrounding states.) I recall one legislator insisting that this wasn't meant to keep college kids from drinking; rather, it was to keep booze out of high schools. But... wait... most college kids don't turn 21 until they are juniors or seniors. Maybe the honorable gentleman had a bit of a load on when he made these remarks; maybe his remarks were symptomatic of the institutional hypocrisy that threatens to undermine respect for the law.

In my lifetime, attitudes have hardened against drunk drivers. The problem is that drunk drivers don't just kill themselves, they too often take innocent lives with them. Or, worse, they survive -- and wipe out whole families. So we pass increasingly harsh laws against drunk driving, lowering the blood alcohol content levels at which a driver is considered legally drunk and increasing fines and imposing longer, and often mandatory jail terms on persons convicted. We want to get drunks off the road, right? But people with money -- and people who have responsible jobs and families often have money -- and may be sympathetic to boot, especially if they didn't hurt anyone before they were pinched -- aren't convicted. Charges are thrown out on this technicality or that one, or plea deals to lesser charges are accepted -- and too many people who should have gotten help to control their alcohol problems go scot-free... until they T-bone the homecoming queen and her date on prom night. But anyone who suggests scaling penalties in a more reasonable way is committing political suicide -- one can't be seen as 'soft' on drunk driving.

Laws against cellphone usage while driving are taking the worst from the Prohibition and drunk driving playbooks: We pass absolute laws against cellphone usage in cars, but we have no intention of enforcing these laws. Stand on any street corner and watch the cars pass by. Even in cites or states with an absolute ban, it is rare to see someone drive by who is not on the phone. Clearly, many otherwise law-abiding people don't think the bans apply to them. Texting is worse than talking, but stupid people think that keeping the phone in their lap will keep them from being seen -- as they compose texts and weave all over the roadway. But outright bans and increasingly harsh penalties will not end this behavior.

Those terrible commercials one sees everywhere -- a severely injured person explaining his last text, shattered parents recalling their daughter's last text -- are more likely to build consensus over time than any number of laws. In the meantime... why not simplify the law and allow police the opportunity to charge erratic drivers with 'distracted driving' whether they talking are on their phone, texting, or entirely caught up in singing the new Taylor Swift song that's come on the radio?

We must work to repeal (or modify) laws that are widely ignored. Leaving laws on the books that we don't mean to follow, or that we enforce sporadically or selectively, undermines the rule of law in this country.

There may be no stauncher opponent of abortion in government than Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan. Yet Ryan recently said that pro-lifers should not lobby for more anti-abortion laws. He has, apparently, come to realize that merely passing an anti-abortion law, or even an anti-abortion constitutional amendment, will not deter determined women from seeking abortions. The goal should not be to make abortion illegal, he said, but rather to make it unthinkable. Change attitudes first, then worry about the law.

You may disagree with Rep. Ryan's objective, but he's got the right approach: Change minds, build consensus, then pass laws. In the long run, that approach furthers the rule of law far more than passing laws to make statements or score political points or show 'toughness' to the voters.

Payton Prep forfeits baseball game after parents refuse to let kids drive to Roseland on a Saturday night

Bee, I know you're going to think this is about sports, but it's not really. Nor is this really about race, but that's the way it's being reported here.

Walter Payton College Prep and Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep are two of the best, most prestigious high schools in Illinois. That's not my opinion; that's the verdict of the current U.S. News & World Report rankings. Payton checks in at #2, Brooks at #13. These are both Chicago Public Schools (indeed, seven of the top 20 in the state are CPS schools -- most of them, Payton and Brooks included, highly selective "magnet" schools).

Payton is located not far from the Loop, at 1034 N. Wells, in an area the Realtors call the Near North neighborhood, close to both the Gold Coast and River North neighborhoods. Brooks, on the other hand, is located at 250 E. 111th Street, about two miles east of I-57, in the Roseland neighborhood.

Roseland is increasingly in the news these days, and not in a good way. It is wracked by gang violence, shootings, drugs, and all manner of crime. You can get mugged near Payton on a Saturday night, too. Cabrini Green used to be just a couple of blocks away -- but that neighborhood is, objectively, far safer these days than Roseland.

The Brooks baseball team plays on its own field, on the school grounds. According to one account I saw, the field is literally locked away from its surrounding environs. Ninth Ward Ald. Anthony Beale, who happens to be an assistant coach on the Brooks team, says that Brooks has the nicest high school field in the City. Even if he is a Chicago alderman, on this point at least, I take him at his word. It looked pretty sweet on TV.

The story broke this way: Sunday morning it was reported that Payton forfeited its scheduled night game at Brooks because 'team parents' refused to let their kids venture into the Roseland neighborhood. The Payton coach was embarrassed. The Brooks coach was embarrassed -- and angry. Furious backtracking has been underway since.

We will probably never know exactly what happened. It seems, however, that a bus was supposed to take the team to and from the game -- which may or may not have been hastily arranged. It's been an awful spring around here, folks. Coaches can't reschedule all the rain-outs and freeze-outs and they are grasping at any opportunities they can to get their kids some playing time. It's quite possible that last-second bus arrangements might have fallen through.

Unless you've had kids who've played high school baseball you may not know what that means.

Let me tell you: Some parents would have been able to take their own kids and maybe a couple of others. But, on a Saturday night, in families with more than one kid, there may have been -- would likely have been -- conflicts. Who knows? Maybe some of the moms and dads had plans of their own. So that means that kids would be expected to get themselves there. To carpool. To drive to an unfamiliar, and dangerous, neighborhood, where kids can, and do, get killed because they looked like someone else. Or maybe just because they looked like they didn't belong.

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell, an African-American, wasn't happy about the situation, but, she wrote, "Given the steady stream of shootings and killings occurring on the South Side, I really can’t blame any parent for having concerns about a night game." She added:

I’m not proud to admit it, but I don’t travel certain streets at night when I have my grandson in the car.

Crime can happen anywhere. But by now, I have a good idea where I run the greatest risk.

Obviously, this is not something parents should have to worry about, but they do — especially when they are not familiar with the area.

Unfortunately, because of the increase in homicides that we experienced last year on the South Side, the entire area must seem like one big shooting gallery.

Mitchell writes that there were 13 shootings in Chicago this weekend, one resulting in a fatality, and most on the South and West Sides. "Although none of the shootings occurred in Roseland," she writes, "the entire South Side has been stigmatized by the gun violence."

I agree with Ms. Mitchell about the stigma that attaches to the entire South Side -- but the fact that none of this weekend's shootings were in Roseland is no more than a happy coincidence.

But at least Ms. Mitchell is trying not to see this controversy in terms of black and white. Simply calling this a black and white issue is overly simplistic, of course, and (although perhaps nut just because it is the simplest) it is the the one adopted by the media generally: Brooks is in an African-American community, therefore Payton parents must be bigots for refusing to let their kids go play. A picture of the Payton team, gathered around their coach during a game Monday at Taft (in a largely white neighborhood on the Northwest Side), on page 10 of this morning's Sun-Times, subtly reinforces this view. The kids sure look white, at least from a distance. I'll bet some of them are.

But there is no such thing as a lily-white Chicago Public High School, and certainly not a magnet school. Every race and nationality is represented at Payton. If Brooks is predominantly African-American, it is a function of its location in such an overwhelmingly African-American area -- but I'd bet there are white kids there from Mt. Greenwood and Beverly, too. That makes it a little harder to just cry bigotry.

Image from this morning's Chicago Sun-Times

I'll also bet that, even if there aren't a lot of African-American kids on the Payton squad, there probably are a lot of Hispanic players. A lot of high school baseball teams in this area are heavily, if not predominantly, Hispanic. And appearances can be deceiving: My kids are half Cuban. Middle Son's high school catcher, a 6'4" behemoth who looks more like a Viking than anything else, is half Dominican. The picture that accompanies the on-line version of the page 10 story I just referenced shows Mayor Emanuel making nice with the Brooks players. Some of the kids are surely African-American, but -- again -- I'd bet money that the Brooks squad is heavily Hispanic, too.

Moreover, although I'm sure Payton students are drawn from all over Chicago, I'd guess that the majority may be native to the North Side. It is a fact of Chicago life that North Siders are cheerfully ignorant of anything south of Roosevelt -- Soldier Field and McCormick Place occasionally excepted -- just as many South Siders, white and black alike, are ignorant of anything north of Oak Street (North Avenue, perhaps, for the adventurous). I am a rarity among my fellow Chicagoans. I was born on the South Side and I've lived on the North and Northwest Sides. There aren't that many of us. So it's neither surprising nor conclusive evidence of racism if Payton parents plead unfamiliarity with the far South Side.

Sixty-six years after Jackie Robinson, white Payton parents weren't refusing to let their kids play against African-Americans. Parents, white and Hispanic alike, weren't comfortable allowing their kids to go to an unfamiliar, dangerous neighborhood on a Saturday night. Especially when they'd have to drive themselves. Is that really racism? Or is it prudence?

(Those who think that having a bus available would have solved everything need to consult the very politically incorrect police blog, Second City Cop. In SCC's coverage of this story, in NEWSFLASH! South Side Isn't Safe and in today's post, More Payton vs. Brooks Controversy, it is noted that school buses are sometimes targeted by gangbangers with guns.)

However, as the linked Sun-Times story notes, the game will finally be played this Saturday night, weather permitting. We can assume that the 5th and 22nd Police Districts will be employing surge tactics along 111th Street: Mayor Emanuel will insist that there be no incidents. The kids will be happy to play, as kids are. It'll take some time, though, for the alleged grown-ups to work through all this.

The Curmudgeon blogging empire celebrates a blogaversary

Today is the first blogiversary of The Blog of Days. Unlike this blog, that blog has had at least one post every single day now for an entire year, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays included. Of course, holidays are included, that being the general idea of TBOD.

Of course, that blog, unlike this one, has a clear and consistent theme. Second Effort is a blog about anything -- and sometimes a blog about nothing. How come it worked so well for Seinfeld, but not for me?

Apparently regular posting pays off: If the increasing levels of anonymous spam are any indication, The Blog of Days seems on pace to surpass this one in terms of page views, possibly in just a few months. I'm hoping that there are some actual real readers there, too. There should be. Judging by the complaints I've heard over the years, TBOD has one distinct advantage over Second Effort. Unlike this blog, the entries on TBOD tend to be relatively short....

"Perfessor, can we have class outside today?" Curmudgeon reminisces

February, March, and (until now) April have been so miserable in Chicago -- cold, wet, gloomy -- culminating just a week or so ago in massive flooding -- that all memory of the unusually warm January we enjoyed in these parts has been erased.

Unless you're one of the unhappy people whose home was trashed by the overflowing Des Plaines River, today, however, almost makes up for what we've been through around here recently.

What a gorgeous morning in Chicago: The air is clear, the buildings downtown stand out against the sky in sharp 3-D relief (too often, recently, the skyline has looked like buildings simply painted on a gray mist-colored scrim). The forsythia have bet that this little Spring-let is the real deal; they are in full yellow bloom this morning. The lilac buds are beginning to swell. The grass has gone from brown to green overnight. There may even be places (one or two) in our yard that could already benefit from the lawnmower. I hung out a small load of laundry on the line to dry this morning before getting on the train to go to work.

And as I was standing in the backyard this morning, squinting into the rising Sun as I hung out my clothes, I couldn't help but think what my college self would have thought on a breathtaking morning like this. "Perfessor," I would say (no, I don't know where the mispronunciation comes from either), "can we have class outside today?" I might not have been the first to ask. And I certainly would not have been the only one pleading. Cabin fever is just as real at 20 as at 56.

And, because of that, sometimes our pleas actually worked, back in the day. We'd all troop outside and sit in the grass and listen to the professor try and keep his train of thought as the warmth of the long-delayed Spring began to settle into his or her bones, too. I can't remember a single specific occasion this morning; I know there can't have been many. I know we asked far more often than we received.

Youngest Son is the only one in college these days. But he can't really ask his professors to hold class outside today. He has finals beginning at the end of this week. A lot of colleges, even here in the frigid Midwest, have finals now.

When I was in undergrad, our academic year lingered into the second week of June one year. If we got out in May at all it was closer to Memorial Day than to the Workers' holiday. There was time enough for even the most tardy Spring to put in some sort of appearance before we were released from our academic confinement. There were opportunities to ask if we could hold class outside. There were sufficient opportunities to allow us to catch a professor in a weak moment and secure an hour of instruction in the sunshine.

Curmudgeon recognizes he is completely paranoid... but is that a real first step towards anything?

The end of the month is approaching and, with it, the never-ending cycle of new phone and rent and malpractice and other bills that must be paid at the office, and phone, electric, gas, cable, and (of course) charge card bills at home.

The bills arrive with distressing predictability and regularity. (OK, we seem to have lost last month's electric bill at home -- unless it's lost in my briefcase -- I'll look later -- but I'm pretty sure we got it, too.)

What doesn't come are checks.

In my mind's eye I see the mail sorting room from Miracle on 34th Street. Letters going to various offices in Chicago's Loop are cheerfully sorted, without much comment. One of the two guys at the end fishes out an envelope from the stream, only it's not a letter to Santa; it's a check for Curmudgeon. "Look," he tells his buddy, "here's another one. Don't these guys ever learn?"

His buddy pulls something from his back pocket, but it's not the newspaper with the story about Macy's Santa Claus on trial; it's an official-looking memo. "Yeah, he's still on the no-pay list."

"Dead letter office then?"

And instead of getting an inspiration to send the impounded envelops to the nice old man with whiskers at the courthouse, the other guy says, simply, "Yup."

I wake up in a sweat.

I know there's no such memo. At least in my more rational moments I know there's no such memo.

At least I'm pretty sure.

Most of the time.

The rest of the time I'm waiting for the mailman.

Getting nickled and dimed to death makes doing the right thing harder to do

I have an insurance company client that recently began sending me work.

This should be a good thing.

So far, though, it's been a decidedly mixed blessing.

I recently wrote about a vendor billing problem -- I didn't pick the vendor -- the client requires me to use it -- but the bills are totally out of whack.

After wringing my hands here, I wrote my corporate contact and laid the problem out. I haven't heard back. I fear I may have given offense. But I believe I did the right thing and I tried to do it in a positive way.

The vendor bills wouldn't be as much of a problem if the insurer were paying my bills. But it's not. The insurer requires me to 'post' bills through some Third Party Interloper that has somehow sold this insurer (and a number of others around the country, from what I'm hearing) a bill of goods about this somehow being a way to save money.

As Col. Potter used to say on M*A*S*H (mainly because the CBS censors wouldn't him use the actual barnyard epithet), "Horse hockey."

Quibbling over bills just breeds resentment between lawyer and client, just like sneezing uncontrollably in a crowded subway car breeds germs. And maybe even faster.

Look: If you think your lawyer is out to cheat you on his or her bill, maybe you should use another lawyer.

If you enter into the relationship with the assumption that your lawyer will cheat on your bill (else why would you need a Third Party Interloper?) you will actually encourage the lawyer to cheat. Or at least not to accord you the little courtesies and economies that we might otherwise cheerfully provide in an effort to build goodwill -- and more business.

Case in point: I got a new assignment from the insurer a week or so ago about a possible underinsured motorist claim. In Illinois, UIM coverage kicks in if -- but only if -- the party responsible for your injury has less liability coverage than you have in UIM coverage. In Illinois, UIM coverage does not 'stack.' Thus, if you carry UM (uninsured motorist) or UIM coverage with a $50,000 limit and the responsible driver has only a statutory minimum (in Illinois, $20,000 per person) policy, then you have up to $30,000 in additional UIM coverage in the event the responsible party's insurance is insufficient to cover your loss.

Still with me?

This coverage does not kick in automatically. The responsible party's insurer has to put its own policy on the table (or, sometimes, something pretty darn close thereto -- but let's not quibble here) before your insurer gets to decide whether to allow you to take the money or (much less often) advance you the money the other insurer is offering. Then, and only then, can you begin fighting with your own insurer over how much of the UIM limit should be awarded you.

The flip side here is that, if you carry $20,000 in UM/UIM coverage, you probably don't have UIM coverage at all... maybe if the responsible driver comes from a state (if there is one) where the statutory policy liability limit is less than $15,000.

Anyway, in comes this new assignment -- a supposed UIM claim. I spend the time to read the file provided and it becomes obvious that (a) the claim with the primary carrier has not yet been resolved and, therefore, the UIM claim is at least premature and (b) there isn't likely to be a UIM claim anyway because the insured's policy does not appear to be for more than the statutory minimum.

I 'wrote up' seven-tenths of an hour for reading the file; it took longer than that, of course, to acknowledge it through the third party interloper and set up a physical file and enter it into my system. I didn't call the adjuster immediately, but when I did I was prepared to explain why there was not much for me to do on this matter, and maybe nothing at all.

And, as it happens, when I did call, I promptly verified there was nothing to do: The responsible driver's carrier tendered its policy limit, that limit being in excess of the UIM coverage of our insured's policy, and our possible UIM claim vanished like a soap bubble in the breeze.

I congratulated the adjuster on her splendid victory and we had a nice chuckle and, in the ordinary course, I would close my file with no bill. Sure I wasted some time reading the file and doing the administrative tasks in setting the matter up. But I shouldn't resent that because I have hopes, or (in the ordinary course) I should have hopes, that this client will send in more and better business in the future.

Right now, I'm not so sure. This morning I opened up my email to find a notice from the Third Party Interloper advising, in a generic way, that another of my bills to this carrier has been rejected. I have to log into the Third Party Interloper's system to find out why.

And, next week, I am supposed to pay Third Party Interloper $275 for the continued privilege of allowing it to delay my billing.

And the icing on the cake is that the carrier has paid only two of my fee bills this year -- two very little bills. Many more than two remain open, although "approved" by the Third Party Interloper (albeit not without a struggle on several of them).

I will close this file without a bill -- I will have to figure out a way to let the Third Party Interloper system allow me to, of course. It will ask for all sorts of information that does not apply before it will allow me to "close" the matter insofar as it is concerned. I can look forward to wasting an hour or more on that thankless task.

But, still. The right thing to do is close this file without a bill. So I must do the right thing. But I don't have to be happy about it.

Very abbreiviated Frivolous Friday

For one thing I once again neglected to keep track of several good candidates for this occasional Friday feature. Indeed, this morning, when I tried to pull this together, I could only find a couple, such as this one, Monday's edition of Red & Rover, by Brian Basset.

I thought it was funny, anyway.

Wednesday's installment of Dan Piraro's Bizarro also struck me as funny. (Too little this week has been.)

But I admit I did wonder why this wasn't a comic that Mr. Piraro didn't schedule to appear on a Friday. The artist explains on his blog: "Because that's just what they'd be expecting!"

I should have been able to figure that out all by myself, shouldn't I?

Families should celebrate triumphs together

It comes as no shock to regular readers that Olaf has a difficult relationship with his family. Imagine choosing to live with your in-laws in marked preference to moving back with your own folks. (No, I wouldn't have been happy with either option either, if I'd been forced to make such a terrible choice back in the day -- but I'd have preferred we live with my own parents, just as I'm sure my wife would have preferred we live with her parents. It's probably the difference between the Devil you know and -- well, never mind.)

I touched on Olaf's issues a little when the Baby-to-be-named-later was born. I'm not a psychiatrist, nor do I play one on TV, but even I can tell that Olaf's issues with his parents predate his marriage and our granddaughter. Based on my limited exposure, Olaf's parents seem like nice-enough folks. Yes, they're over-the-top baby crazy (see the linked post) but that's not a terrible thing. I was more concerned that they seemed so out-of-sync with their son's health when we were trying (unsuccessfully) to get Olaf to graduate on time. But such things are none-of-my-never-mind.

Olaf's father was trained as an architect and has gravitated into art and, in particular, painting over the years. Recently he was given the honor of a gallery showing by some group out in one of the western suburbs. Even Olaf recognized that this was a Big Deal and that he would need to go.

But he approached the prospect of going to the opening like a criminal mounting the scaffold to be hanged. He didn't want to take his wife and daughter.

Long Suffering Spouse and I try not to interfere (much) in the day-to-day lives of our young tenants, but this was an exception. We told Younger Daughter on no uncertain terms that she would go with, and the baby would go, too.

"But Olaf's parents will just fuss over the baby, when the day should be about Olaf's dad," Younger Daughter protested. "And everyone will be in baby's face and it'll be a mess."

And, of course, the baby started teething in the run-up to the gallery show, which made the baby miserable and the kids even more apprehensive about taking her.

"Maybe we'll go in separate cars," Younger Daughter offered, at one point. "That way I can take the baby and leave if she becomes a problem."

But Long Suffering Spouse and I maintained a united front: You will go as a family. It will be fine.

The big day arrived. Olaf had fretted himself sick with worry over the event but (and this counts as an improvement, honestly) he'd not incapacitated himself. Still, he and Younger Daughter moved at a glacial pace. Olaf appeared finally ready to go. He sat down to watch the baseball game with Long Suffering Spouse and me in the den for a little while and his phone beeped. "What's that?" I asked. "Oh," he said, "I set an alarm to let me know the last possible second that we could leave and still have a chance of being there on time."

I excused myself and went upstairs, the better to hurry Younger Daughter along. She wasn't ready. She hadn't even dressed the baby. "Well, Olaf's not ready either," she said. I told her that he looked ready to me. "Well, the car's not packed," she harrumphed. "You and the baby should be ready regardless," I said.

Eventually, they got ready... and still more eventually they left. Long Suffering Spouse had one last piece of advice. "Take the stroller," she said. I guess the car seat locks into the stroller (I haven't paid attention). But the bottom line was that Long Suffering Spouse knew, even if the kids couldn't puzzle it out for themselves, that people wouldn't insist on carrying the baby as long as the kid seemed happy and content in the stroller. And that's how things worked out. Sure, people made a fuss over the baby -- but the baby was just there to celebrate her grandfather's big day. That's the way it's supposed to be.

Older Daughter called moments after the kids finally left. "She went with?" Older Daughter asked, incredulously. "I would not have gone," she declared. "She needs to show those in-laws a thing or two."

(Older Daughter has issues with her own in-laws. I can't imagine why....)

Long Suffering Spouse and I tried to explain it all again to Older Daughter: This was a big day for Olaf's dad. Olaf and his new family needed to be there to celebrate. There are enough sad occasions when extended families have to gather together -- and too darn few happy ones. There will still be rough patches in the relationships -- there are in most families I've ever heard of -- but there can be happy memories, too, and those will mean more in the long run than any lingering disputes.

Olaf and Younger Daughter were pleasantly surprised at how well things went at the show. And the baby was well-behaved. Long Suffering Spouse and I weren't surprised one little bit.

Curmudgeon gets out the proverbial scissors

I finally heard back from a bar publication about an article I'd submitted last fall. The editor had asked me to update an article I'd written for the magazine over 15 years ago -- and I did. Not surprisingly, I tracked the old article in terms of topics and length and wound up with something substantially similar but boasting fresh case citations, most of them cases handed down after the old article appeared.

When I did finally establish communication last week, the response was both promising -- and terrifying. Yes, we still want to publish your article, the email read, but it's too long. Your article is 3,900 words and our guidelines require articles no more than 2,500 words in length.

Oh.

This was my project for Saturday. I started first thing in the morning.

The good news was the article wasn't really 3,900 words long; according to the automatic word count, it was only 3,500. (I'd cut 400 words and I hadn't done anything yet!) And the next 500 came fairly easily, too. Some of the savings came from losing a paragraph, but most came from tightening up individual sentences, trying to say in four words something that I'd said in six. I went through the article line by line, carefully pruning. I will admit it was a better article at 3,000 words than it was at 3,500. I celebrated by having lunch.

But I still had to find 500 more words to cut.

The next 200 words went much more slowly. I changed a phrase here, cut out a word there. If I'd started the job with pruning shears I was using a small scissors at this point.

Still, after only a few more hours, I had excised 200 more words and not seriously altered the content of the article. But 2,800 was still too much and I had still over a page of text to lose.

Things really slowed down when I realized I was starting to rewrite quotes from cases. No, that won't do at all, I realized. I'd cut out only 100 more words by dinnertime. And this was after resolving to lose a bullet point in one of the sections. At this point, my scissors had become a scalpel.

I don't know if you've ever tried to cut something down that you've written. Regular readers here know this is entirely inconsistent with my usual approach. My typical blog posts grow like kudzu.

But I have had experience in making cuts before. Once, 20 years or so ago, in DuPage County, I learned the hard way that one of the local judges very strictly enforced a 10-page limit on briefs. Many Cook County judges, then and now, have a 15-page limit, and my brief in this case was no more than 12 or 13, tops. When the judge called me out, I pleaded ignorance (which was certainly true) and apologized. The judge tossed the brief back at me. "I read it," he said, "and you could have said this in eight pages easily." (Even 20 years ago I was smart enough to refrain from asking, since you've read it, why can't we just proceed to the merits? I rewrote the brief instead.)

In federal appellate practice, word limits are rigorously enforced -- and a lawyer may be fined or censured for fudging with margins or font sizes in an effort to try and conceal his or her verbosity. Someone once told me, though, not to stress over the limits. Instead, this person suggested I write whatever I felt needed saying without regard to the word limit -- keep the word limit out of mind completely -- and only then, after making all the points I felt appropriate, however I felt I needed to say them, try and figure out (if necessary) how to shoehorn those same arguments into the prescribed word limits. It turns out to be a good approach.

Here, though, I was trying to update an old article, conveying the same basic information, but with more contemporary citations. It was logical, then, that the new article should be as long as the old. The sorts of drastic cuts I was being asked to make threatened, in my view, to make the article less valuable. Ah, well, I rationalized, a byline is a byline. I began looking in earnest for those last 200 words.

Olaf and Younger Daughter, recent college graduates that they are, noted that I was doing the exact opposite of what college students usually do. Collegians are usually looking to pad their papers to achieve the required page length or word count. They watched in amusement for awhile, but then they disappeared. It was time to put the baby down for the night.

Long Suffering Spouse was in the den with me later in the day. She was grading papers. Periodically, she'd look up. "Aren't you done yet?" she'd ask. "You've been at this all day." I'd give her the current word count in response. "That's only 10 less than last time," she'd say. "Yes," I'd say, or, "Actually it's only six," depending on how things had gone between queries. I realized, finally, that one whole additional paragraph would have to go. I wanted to keep it; I thought it important, but it was increasingly obvious, as the night wore on, that it was the only way I'd ever get to the limit. I was like the high school wrestler trying to make weight. I'd sweated out all that I could; I'd used the enema (seriously, this is something high school wrestlers will do). At some point, the only thing left to remove is flesh and bone. Wrestlers have to admit defeat at this point, but, chanting the mantra, a byline is a byline, I pulled out a penknife and began sawing off my arm.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Long Suffering Spouse had already fallen asleep by the time I achieved my triumph: I was under 2,500 words by a dozen or more. I fired the article off to the magazine before remorse could take hold.

Then I woke up Long Suffering Spouse so we could go to bed.

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Come to think of it, it's Wednesday afternoon already and I still haven't heard back from the magazine. Gosh, I hate waiting.

That was not "terrorism" yesterday in Boston

It was a crime.

I don't care if right-wing loonies, left-wing loonies, al Qaeda or the Kim Jong Un Fan Club were behind yesterday's murderous attacks at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the perpetrators of that crime are not soldiers in a cause, they are murderers. They are criminals. Period. Full stop.

If terror may ever be a legitimate military tactic -- and there may have been times and places in history where terror may arguably have been justifiable -- and, mind you, I say only 'may' and 'arguably' -- terror can never be a legitimate tactic in our United States. Whatever grievances the bombers may have thought they had, there are many, many ways to air them in this country without blowing up women and children.

As long as we remember that -- and insist on the preservation of our freedoms and oppose the creeping expansion of the state trying to 'protect' us -- we'll be fine. And idiot bombers like those responsible for yesterday's atrocities will remain mere criminals.

All the talking heads filling air yesterday afternoon and evening speculating on which group might be behind yesterday's crime in Boston revealed far more of their own prejudices and biases than they revealed about any possible perpetrator. Al Qaeda was blamed. Republicans were blamed. The NRA was blamed. All theories floated, equally, on the basis of nothing.

But that kind of poisonous speculation bears equally poisonous fruit. A Saudi national was chased down by bystanders at the scene and turned over to the police because he ran away from the explosions. Why? What was he doing besides being there and being Saudi?

Please think for a moment. It took a special kind of courage to run toward the victims. That's why police and fire and paramedics and the doctors and nurses who stayed at or responded to the scene are heroic. I dare say that most ordinary people would run away. I dare say a lot of people in the area did their best to clear out when the bombs went off. Perhaps the Saudi was just one of these. If the Saudi had something to do with the murders yesterday, he must and should be held accountable. Maybe some sharp-eyed observer did see him do something suspicious. But if the Saudi national was chased and tackled and held simply because he appeared to be a swarthy-looking foreigner, that's indicative of a species of bigotry I think wholly un-American.

Here's what I think: A crime has been committed. The police (and the FBI) need time to gather evidence and clues.

Let them.

Meanwhile, mourn the dead, comfort the other victims and their families. Pray for them all. We'll find out soon enough (maybe even today) who did it and what their motive was. Because that's the only thing whatever "cause" the bomber or bombers may espouse is useful for at this point, as evidence of the criminal's or criminals' twisted motive. Let's give law enforcement some breathing room to make a good arrest, then let the criminal justice system work.

Criminal justice system. Because there was no "terrorism" yesterday in Boston. Only a crime.

Long Suffering Spouse sees red

And not just metaphorically, either, although that was true as well.

She'd taken something off her classroom wall Friday during homeroom period, intending to replace it with something else. But there was something already there: Some scurrilous graffiti had been scrawled on the wall in indelible red Sharpie.

She immediately called her students to account. "Which one of you did this?" she demanded.

Naturally, no one admitted anything.

"Why do you think it was one of us?" huffed one student. Most of the school population rotates through my wife's classroom in any given week, but, as my wife reminded the students, she is present at all times.

"Well, you're not here at recess," theorized another student.

Long Suffering Spouse considered the point about a nanosecond. "That's true," she said, and it was. Ordinarily, no one is in the classroom at lunch or recess -- and Long Suffering Spouse keeps the classroom door locked. But, when the weather is inclement, the kids spend recess in their homerooms after lunch. It's rained a lot in Chicago in recent days. If April showers bring May flowers, we can expect a riotous floral outbreak in these parts in just a couple of weeks. "So who would be here during recess?" my wife asked, answering her own question when all the kids started looking down at the floor: "Only you."

"Well, someone could have come in here during recess."

"And then you would have all seen that person do this, right?"

My wife looked out over a classroom of heads staring intently at the floor.

"That's fine," she said, "if no one wants to tell me now, we can stay here after school until someone wants to talk."

It was a sullen group that returned for afternoon announcements. Everyone else was going home for the weekend; my wife was going to follow through and hold her students hostage. Meanwhile, though, they had decided on some other possible ways to divert suspicion.

"That's probably been there for years," ventured one theorist. After all... permanent ink, right?

Wrong. "I cleaned this classroom over Easter Break," Long Suffering Spouse responded. "I changed all the wall decorations, as you know. If it had been here before, I would have known. This is new. Now, will someone tell me who did this so we can all go home?"

An uncomfortable silence followed.

Actually, "silence" is not exactly the right word. Eighteen junior high kids are never truly silent. They fidgeted. They muttered to one another. ("We're never getting out of here," my wife overheard one whisper to a friend, "she stays late every day." "I know," the other hissed back. "She's still here most days when I come back for basketball practice.")

Many of the kids tried to get away on the basis of preexisting arrangements. "My mom's waiting in the parking lot," one said. "She can wait awhile," my wife said.

"But I've got a dental appointment!" one said, and, suddenly, so did five or six others. "I guess you'll all be late then," my wife said.

Time passed. At Greenwich, the worthies at the Royal Observatory probably counted the passage of no more than 10 or 15 minutes, but to the sixth and seventh and eighth graders in my wife's homeroom, a lifetime at least had ebbed away.

Finally one spoke. "If I say I did it, will you let us go?"

Long Suffering Spouse regarded the volunteer. She seemed an unlikely candidate; my wife doubted her guilt. Long Suffering Spouse thought that the crude printing was likely a boy's -- but, in this post-literate age, where handwriting is increasingly a lost art, it's harder and harder to tell a boy's writing from a girl's. Girls' cursive no longer necessarily has big balloon letters, much less hearts instead of dots over 'i's. These days, everyone's handwriting looks like a doctor's after a three-martini lunch. "Of course," my wife told me later, "no matter how many times I tell them, half of these kids fail to put their names on their papers. I'm forced to learn how to recognize individual printing and handwriting just to get the kids' stuff graded properly."

No, my wife was pretty certain that the volunteer was not the guilty party. She probably knew who did it; most of the kids in the room probably did, but the unwritten Code of Silence seemed to protect the miscreant. No one would snitch... but my wife was hoping peer pressure would succeed in forcing the guilty party to acknowledge the offense. "But did you do it?" my wife asked the girl who'd volunteered to take the rap.

"No."

"Then, no, I won't let you all go."

The kids made no effort to conceal their groans. "What if we all clean desks and blackboards from now to the end of the year?" asked one.

"I thought you don't like collective punishments," my wife answered. Yes, the topic has come up before. "Why don't you just tell me who did this instead?"

Eventually, technology defeated my wife, leaving her madder than ever.

It seems one of the little darlings was doing more than just avoiding eye contact by staring at the floor. She also surreptitiously texted her mother from the cell phone concealed by her purse, asking her mother to have her paged to the Principal's office. Several of her classmates watched her, wondering if it would work.

It did.

The child was paged to the Principal's office, and off she went, ecstatic to be released.

The Code of Silence which protected the graffiti artist did not, apparently, apply to escape attempts: A number of the girl's classmates finked on her before the door was fully shut.

The spell was broken anyway. "This isn't over," my wife warned, as she released the rest of the group, just a couple of minutes later. "I will find out who did this and there will be consequences."

I got an earful of those consequences not much later: Long Suffering Spouse was fit to be tied. And she was angry all over again this morning. To my knowledge, however, the perpetrator still remains at large.

Remembering the "Great Chicago Flood"

In the course of preparing this week's posts for The Blog of Days, I couldn't help but notice that April 13 will mark the 21st anniversary of the Great Chicago Flood. April 13 also happened to be the date of the White Sox home opener that year. Oh yes, I remember it well -- and then I found a journal entry I'd made within a few days of the event. Here is that entry, cleaned up a bit, with many of the digressions removed, and with naming conventions conforming to those previously used here....

Our alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., as usual. As usual, it was closer to 6:30 a.m. before I could actually focus in on what the radio was saying.

The first alarm had been turned in at 5:57 a.m. from the Merchandise Mart. Unexplained basement flooding. The City was looking to turn off a 48" water main, underneath Lake Street, I think, in the hopes that this would stop the problem which, early on, was reported as having spread to Marshall Field's and other landmarks. Then, a few minutes later, fish were reported in some of the affected sub-basements. That's when it became apparent -- at least to me -- that the Chicago River had sprung a leak.

Although it was Opening Day, I had to be in the office in the morning, because I had an 11:00 a.m. motion in court. My plan was to take the train to work. Why fight traffic at the ball park when I could ride the CTA and then drink with impunity?

I scrapped this plan early on, however. I told Long Suffering Spouse that the subway would be effected by this problem. It was already understood that freight tunnels used in the first half of this century by the Chicago Tunnel Company were involved. I didn't know how that would affect the subways, or how the tunnels intersected, if at all. I just knew that the subway would go down as the waters came up. So I resolved to drive.

Ordinarily, on Opening Day, the key problem is what to wear. There are two criteria, usually, for me: What can I wear to both the office and the ballpark -- and how can I keep from freezing? The plan was to wear my heavy brown sportjacket and my Levis for old, fat people (which the company prefers to refer to as "Dockers") and risk being called Frazier throughout the game.

The weather forecast was cold, wet and miserable. The Frazier get-up would not be warm enough. My heaviest clothes were full suits. My warmest coats were for work as well. So I wore a Winter suit.

By the time these momentous decisions had been taken, the flood waters had knocked out several buildings in the Loop. The 10 S. LaSalle Building was one of the first to go out. The flood waters reached the electrical panels of that building (in a second sub-basement) causing a brief, smoky fire. The 222 N. LaSalle Street Building was also an early casualty. [There were a lot of law firms in that building -- and many of those lawyers had Sox tickets -- but their tickets were in the building. And they couldn't get in.]

I called Steve at home before I left. It sounded like I woke him up -- and I later confirmed that I had. (He had planned on taking the whole day off.) I told him about the flooding -- and City Hall was reporting severe problems of its own by this time -- and warned him about the subway, too, even though the radio was still saying the CTA was experiencing no service problems and was still in fact encouraging people to use public transit. Steve went back to bed muttering dark imprecations against me.

The drive in was not that bad, probably because the media's exhortations to use public transportation. But the morning, if I can use this term, was a washout. I listened more to the radio than I worked. I did go to court in time for my 11:00.

When I left for court, at 10:30, the subway was still open, but it had just been announced that power would be shut down and buildings evacuated in an area bounded by the River, Adams, Dearborn and Michigan at 11:00. I decided to walk [my office back then was about a mile north of the Daley Center].

City Hall and the State of Illinois Building were, I believe, already closed. The Daley Center, though right in the middle of all this, was still open and was apparently dry. The explanation offered for this was simple: Buildings build after about 1959 were not tied into the freight tunnel system, which in its heyday delivered coal to buildings and hauled ashes away. The tunnel openings had been sealed after the bankruptcy of the narrow gauge railroad that ran through it, but the brick and mortar walls that were typically erected for this purpose had been swept aside in the torrent of water that morning like toy blocks.

When I got to the Daley Center I asked the deputy who checked my ID if there had been any announcements about closing the courthouse down. She'd heard none, she said, but she thought it was crazy that they were still working when much of the Loop had already been abandoned.

The exodus in fact was well underway as I walked to the courthouse. Gold Coast residents (I assume) were strolling home, happy, for the most part, for the unexpected holiday. But I had to go to court. I didn't necessarily expect my opponent to be there. I knew his building was not open. But, if there's a chance the hearing would proceed, there was an obligation on my part to be there.

My opponent was there, although I didn't spot him immediately. I later found out that he had been in the courtroom since the door was unlocked. This was the only motion on his docket for the day. He had nowhere else to go.

The judge was running late, as she often did. I'd arrived about 10:55, and the judge started started the 11:00 call at about 11:10 -- and that wasn't too bad in that courtroom in those days. The problem was that the judge had gotten through only motion number 1 (we were motion no. 9) when the evacuation order came. (The Daley Center never lost power, but it was evacuated in case they had to cut power there suddenly. At this point, remember, the waters were still rising relentlessly.)

The judge made the announcement. She said that the elevators would stop running in an hour. I was sitting in the back of the room. I hollered out, "How will we know the difference?" and got a big laugh. (The elevators in the courthouse had been under repair for a year or more and are incredibly slow.) But the call was over for the day and everything was continued to her next available date -- May 29. [All this, according to my Journal, to get a decision on a motion taken under advisement on February 19.] Opposing counsel and I tried to ask her if she could make her decision available any time before that, but she was not interested in idle chit-chat. She wanted to get out of the building.

So now it was time to turn my attention back to Opening Day. My car was parked in front of the office. Steve was supposed to be on his way -- but I had found out, before leaving the courthouse, that the subways were now also shut down. The waters had arrived.

Steve called shortly after I got back. Long Suffering Spouse and Charlotte were looking at houses [without reading further I don't remember if they were looking for Steve and Charlotte, or whether Long Suffering Spouse was already looking for a new house for us.] Charlotte was willing to drive Steve downtown, or to the ballpark, but not real pleased about it. I told Steve to have her come down to our office.

He got there fairly quickly.

We left the office shortly he arrived. Having listened to the radio all morning, I thought I was prepared to make an intelligent approach to the ballpark. I knew traffic would be a mess and the radio confirmed that the Ryan was a zoo. So I took Lake Shore Drive to the Stevenson, got off at Damen (that's about 31st Street) and went South to 35th. This took maybe 15 minutes. Then I turned left -- and stopped.

It was no later than 12:45 when we got onto 35th Street. It was 2:47p.m. -- the fifth inning -- when we finally got to our Uecker seats, 24 rows high in the right field upper deck.

The only thing that the radio had said about traffic in the immediate vicinity of the ballpark was that there was plenty of parking. When we finally got to the lot by the old coal yard (West of the viaduct), we were waved off. The game had just started then. The police told us to keep moving East.

Police. Ordinarily, there's a cop on every block from Halsted East. On this Opening Day, there were no cops until the coal yard lot, not even by the police station a block West. All but a skeleton traffic patrol had apparently been pulled out and sent downtown.

So we moved East. Glaciers have moved faster. No parking at the site of the old park. We turned down Wentworth. And sat. And sat some more. Some idiots were honking horns. What good does that do anyone? We could all maybe melt away and he could ease into his God-given parking spot? No one melted away; we continued to sit.

There was no parking along the east side of the ballpark. Or along the south. Nor were there any helpful private lot owners waving people in. The City had cracked down on them, Steve told me. He was in a position to know.

So we snaked back through Bridgeport west of the ballpark, winding up on Canal heading back toward home. It was after 2:00. Where was the first legal street parking north of the ballpark? The parking expert with said we had to go North of 31st Street. In fact, we had to go North of 29th Street. We parked -- legally -- on the street at 28th and Canal. And then we walked back. I was damned if I would give up. I had entertained thoughts of going back to the office -- a mile north of the Loop, remember? -- but Steve had no office to go to even if he'd wanted to. His building had been among those evacuated. I did not want to sit in a gin mill watching the game.

So we walked a mile and a half to the park -- and another mile and half up the ramps and stairs. We stopped at the bathroom (and waited in a long line) and Steve bought three beers (one for both of us, and one for the gentleman were were supposed to meet at the park -- and he was there). Because it was so cold, there was no real wait for beer. We got our seats at 2:47. Even with all the Opening Day festivities, the game started by about 1:30. The record will reflect it was played in two hours and 18 minutes. It was over at 4:00 and I was home by 5:30. I had no interest in stopping along the way.

The Sox won 1-0. We had missed the run by the time we arrived.

The Subways (which, after all, run beneath the Chicago River) stayed closed for at least two weeks -- and I believe they did not reopen until sometime in May).