too bad you can't sue corporations from a sail boat in the caribbean. otherwise, it sounds like an intriguing retirement.

Sounds pretty good to me. I have to say, one of the things I didn't expect to like so much about being a lawyer, and doing the work I do, is the sheer pleasure of costing money and time and annoyance to people I sincerely dislike and who deserve to have their lives made difficult, because they are genuinely bad people, work for genuinely bad organizations, or are merely garden-variety assholes.

I didn't think myself such a sort of person, but I guess I am.

It would be a little cooler if he planned to be unjustly forced out of his job as the Shogun's executioner as a lawyer, to walk the assassin's litigant's road, seeking revenge on the treacherous Yagyu clan corporations.

Who is the cub in this analogy?

This sounds like the end-stage fantasy counterpart of the common pre-law fantasy of promising yourself you're going to law school to become a public interest or labor lawyer.

the sheer pleasure of costing money and time and annoyance to people

Sadly, this seems also to be a significant perk for that much larger group of lawyers who make live expensive and difficult for people who aren't genuinely bad at all.

This sounds like the end-stage fantasy counterpart of the common pre-law fantasy of promising yourself you're going to law school to become a public interest or labor lawyer.

Exactly right. In fact, this plan was proposed after several minutes of me berating him for being hopelessly bourgeois when he was talking about remodeling his kitchen.

r several minutes of me berating him for being hopelessly bourgeois

Is there a Persian word for chutzpah?

My friends are sophisticated enough to understand that not only the blameless can lay blame.

The specific practices I would like to go after (class action on behalf of shareholders of all corporations with these provisions) are any and all greenmail and poison pill defenses. Greenmail in particular strikes me as really just blackmail and extortion by people in positions of power barely disguised.

For me this is literally a "What do you tell the children?" feature of our corporatized world. Utterly undermines any semblance of thought that corporations have an internal "rule of law".

Two views of castigation:

Jesus: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Ogged: "Everybody got their rocks? Start throwing!"

(I admit the second has a certain attractiveness.)

Corporations probably do have an internal rule of law, which only occasionally aligns with the laws of their host nations.

4: Good question. I nominate Emerson.

My record of factual accuracy when opining on matters of legal ethics is, uh, spotty, but isn't it manifestly unethical to file nuisance suits?

Apart from the formal ethics of the matter, there is the issue of tying up the taxpayer-financed courts with frivolous suits.

How about he works pro bono for a legal aid society, or for one of the many advocacy organizations that does important work in litigation and policy?

(I admit the second has a certain attractiveness.)

Indeed. It's really the only way for a group of bougie friends to keep each other in check, otherwise you have to shut up as your friends go completely around the bend and buy eight-burner gas grills.

How about he works pro bono for a legal aid society, or for one of the many advocacy organizations that does important work in litigation and policy?

How about we roll you off a pier?

otherwise you have to shut up as your friends go completely around the bend and buy eight-burner gas grills.

No that is when you pull out the "authentic" argument and make the argument that gas is no substitute for real charcoal.

several minutes of me berating him

Cut short because you were running late on getting to French Laundry.

And yes, I am piling on. We're just compensating for last night when your brilliant in-joke comment was underappreciated.

We're just compensating for last night when your brilliant in-joke comment was underappreciated.

Link?

Here. Responding to 102 in that thread. I complain at 121.

I didn't think myself such a sort of person, but I guess I am.

I suspect that we all are. Isn't the entire point of rule by law to at least channel those impulses into litigation rather than literal stone-throwing?

You call a lot of fouls in pick-up games, don't you?

I consider myself hopefully bourgeois. As Rudyard Kipling writes:

Now the ancient and immemorial fairy-tales of France and of England are of a charming simplicity. There is always a young man who goes out into the world to seek his fortune. On the road he is kind to a beggar, an old woman, or, perhaps a cat. This, though he knows it not, is a good investment. Very soon, he falls into the hands of giants or sorcerers. He is cast into prison, or compelled to perform impossible tasks. At that moment, the beggar, the old woman, or the cat whom he had befriended, comes to his rescue, tells him the magic word, that opens the prison door and achieves the impossible task; or gives him the magic sword which destroys the giants at one blow. In consequence, the youth possesses himself of all their treasure and, equally, he marries a Princess--that Princess which exists always in the dreams of youth. He becomes the Head of a Kingdom, and, in due course, the head of a family.

You perceive, do you not, that our national fairy-tales reflect the inmost desires of the Briton and the Gaul? Thus:--

There was a young man, who through lucky investments, became a wealthy rentier, consolidated his social position by a desirable alliance, and founded a family. You may say that the ideal is bourgeois, but on the pursuit of that ideal, as our youth has pursued it eternally, is based an enormous proportion of the progress and the continuity of our civilisation

22: That seems a little obscured.

This could be the perfectly noble retirement plan, with one added element: "I'm going to sue corporations... from the offices of my dog rescue operation."

"I will be a pro bono lawyer for dogs that have been injured by corporations."

13: Apart from the formal ethics of the matter, there is the issue of tying up the taxpayer-financed courts with frivolous suits.

Hear, hear! Forget about the taxpayer finances, even, and think of the law clerks who have to read all that crap. Won't someone please think of the law clerks?

Your friend sounds like an asshole. Why is this guy practicing law?

All lawyers are like this, anon.

otherwise you have to shut up as your friends go completely around the bend and buy eight-burner gas grills

Hey, those are very practical.

I guess this thread is as good a place as any to share an idea I had for a first novel. Not *my* first novel, mind you, because I have no aspirations to be a novelist, but it could be just the ticket for a lawyer with literary aspirations. Anyone wants to pick this up and run with it, be my guest.

The plot begins with a bright young associate in a soul-crushing NYC corporate law firm. The indignities mount, until one day, there is one too many (the precise details of the scene are left to the imagination of the author), and the associate quits on the spot, with no idea what she will do next.

So far, so clichéed.

Our heroine reconnects with an old mentor from Law School (Some backstory can be filled in during the scene where the two of them reminisce over glasses of single malt scotch in a quiet bar. Is there a sexual history between the two? That's left ambiguous). After the conversation with the mentor (either he makes a direct recommendation, or else says something that causes her to have the idea on her own; probably the latter), the protagonist applies for a job with a small, not-so-well-known, but highly reputed advocacy organization. A few intervening scenes provide character development and comic relief (she shows up for the first round job interview wearing her NYC corporate wardrobe, and gets disapproving stares from the dressed-down staffers. So, after much agonizing over her wardrobe, she shows up to the final round wearing jeans and a fisherman's sweater, only to find the executive director and three members of the foundation's board all dressed in tailored suits).

Our protagonist gets the job, and experiences immense relief and satisfaction as she begins working on behalf of some noble cause (I'm thinking either representing asylum-seekers some other helpless, sympathetic group).

Now, at this point, the novel could still be Scott Turow or John Grisham. But no! Our novel has literary pretensions! So the subsequent developments are more Oprah's book club; I'm thinking of a cross between Tom Wolfe and Sue Miller.

The central conflict of the book is the growing realization of our protagonist that her organization, while utterly well-intentioned in its mission, treats its "clientele" as crassly as the evils forces she is fighting. The Executive Director, a former management consultant with top tier law degree, has the ambition to make his organization as prominent as some more well-known group (ACLU, perhaps?). To get there, he knows that successful landmark litigation is much more important than winning individual judgements or relief for the many thousands of clients his organization advocates for.

Our protagonist, who rapidly advances to a position of greater responsibility in the organization (leading to lots of jealous backbiting by the same staffers who mocked her Blahnik shoes in the earlier scene), is assigned the task of vetting candidates to become the plaintiffs for a particular test case that the organization wants to try. The Executive Director is convinced that winning this point of law in the courts will put his organization on the map (and mark his own success). For that, he needs the most sympathetic plaintiff and the best set of facts he can find. So the organization energetically recruits potential plaintiffs, leads them to believe it can help them, and then leaves most of them with barely more than a few xeroxed sheets of advice.

Our protagonist is particularly afflicted with guilt about one particular case (details left to the discretion of the author). This person (Mr. Ng?) is deemed unacceptable for the test case because of some stain in his background. (Suggestion: he is a Vietnamese immigrant who was convicted of a sex offense after engaging in the peculiar cultural practice once described by Jim Webb). Our protagonist can't bear to leave him defenseless. In one particularly poignant moment, he is trying to make sense of the xeroxed advice sheet, and asks her for directions to somewhere, and she realizes that he has misunderstood the instruction "For more information, go to www.something.com".

Our protagonist reveals her misgivings to the Executive Director as they eat Chinese takeout in the office late one night (their many late nights together have already led to vicious gossip in the office, all of it utterly unsubstantiated, for we have since learned that she is in fact infatuated with her former mentor, and he with her). She says she wants to go back to working on legal services for the organization's neediest clients. He explains to her how test case litigation has grown from its roots in the NAACP, how the model has been adopted, refined, and perfected by all kinds of progressive organizations, how the other side has struck back with its own litigation factories, many of them much better financed, and that they have no choice but to play the game to win. And besides, wouldn't it be the ultimate satisfaction for her to help argue this case victoriously, to show those bastards back at her old law firm who told her she didn't have what it takes that she could change history?

The next day, she is returning the BMW she had on lease from her corporate law days and runs into one of her former colleagues picking up an 8-series convertible. His snide remarks to her about her new job cause infuriate her and cause her to go back to the Exec Director and say she wants to continue.

In the next chapter, the landmark lawsuit is filed, and quickly (in narrative time) escalates through the appeals process. As a Federal appellate court hearing looms, the evil defendants begin digging up dirt on our heroine, and come across evidence of her sexual affair with her old mentor. Meanwhile, the poor Mr. Ng (the needy client) is in desperate straights.

I haven't resolved the rest of the plot. But I think you've got more than enough to work with here.

22: To be fair, the giant-killing and princess-winning do sound pretty sweet.

Yeah, say what you want about lawyers, but disparaging eight-burner gas grills seems a little over the top.

The Way
W. H. Auden

Fresh addenda are published every day
To the encyclopedia of the Way.

Linguistic notes and scientific explanations,
And texts for schools with modernised spelling and illustrations.

Now everyone knows the hero must choose the old horse,
Abstain from liquor and sexual intercourse

And look out for a stranded fish to be kind to:
Now everyone thinks he could find, had he a mind to,

The way through the waste to the chapel in the rock
For a vision of the Triple Rainbow or the Astral Clock.

Forgetting his information comes mostly from married men
Who liked fishing and a flutter on the horses now and then.

And how reliable can any truth be that is got
By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?

Eight-burner gas grills in a private home are fucking ridiculous.

baa, are you telling us that you think the American Dream is a fairy tale?

re: 34

What if you want to do hot-knives, while preparing a 6 course tasting menu for your guests?

Eight-burner gas grills in a private home are fucking ridiculous.

You're just jealous.

36: Then you use your regular two-burner stove top for the knives, and you open six different bags of fucking Doritos, you pretentious wanker.

your regular two-burner stove top

Do you live in a tent or something?

34: What else are you going to cook the koi on?

Oh right, I meant four-burner. Although I have, in fact, lived in houses with only two working burners and somehow--miraculously, I know--survived.

What if you want to do hot-knives, while preparing a 6 course tasting menu for your guests?

On my first trip to London as an impecunious backpacker, I stayed at a seriously skeevy hostel in a converted row-house in Earl's Court. This was the kind of place where you were hard-pressed to say whether the fire inspector, the health department, or the immigration authorities were a bigger threat to their livelihood.

There were big signs in every room warning "Anyone found using drugs will be ejected--The Management". I walked down to the basement "kitchen" (a hotplate) to cook up some ramen noodles and found an unsavory character doing hashish on hot knives. I told him nervously, "You'd better watch out, if the manager finds you he'll throw you out."

He looked up at me scornfully and said "I *am* the manager, mate."

re: 38

You know, of course, that I've never cooked a 6 course tasting menu in my life. And have never owned a cooker of my own at all.

My cooking knives went missing once in a shared flat I was in, and I spent weeks looking for them, until one of my less organized flat-mates finally admitted he'd been hot-knifing with them and was scared to tell me in case I hurt him.

Although I have, in fact, lived in houses with only two working burners and somehow--miraculously, I know--survived.

I cooked a six-course tasting menu using kerosene-soaked rags back when I was in Sarajevo, under sniper fire the whole time, and Susan Sontag said it was the best food she'd ever eaten.

Mmm, Koi Six Ways.

re: 44

I remember the Leibowitz photograph of that! Chiaroscuro lighting that echoed Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus?

As a student, I spent half an academic year cooking over a Trangia camp stove on a table. Which had to be concealed on leaving the room for fear the landlady would detect forbidden cookery.

Of course, had she found it, she would also have detected other things like "fire risk" and "storage of inflammable liquids"...and maybe hot knives, come to think of it.

The same thing went for the waste water, which had to be stashed in a large saucepan before being disposed of.

Yeah, my freshman year I cooked in a hot pot in my room. You can actually make a lot of different things in a hot pot, and you can use pencils as chopsticks to eat directly *from* the hot pot, obviating the need for plates or cutlery.

Growing up we had a two burner cooker. We had these 'split' pans you could use to effectively cook two things on one burner. Each pan was semi-circular at the base.

Hey, but you didn't use methylated spirit to heat the fucker.

No, we rendered the fat from Englishmen unwise enough to step inside our hill-top encampment.

47-49: At moments like these, the blanket prohibition on Monty Python references seriously impedes my ability to respond appropriately.

Ah, WTF: Luuuxury!

The Brits on this thread are reminding me of the time my junior year when I cooked an entire fucking Thanksgiving dinner in a 12-person (if memory serves) college flat at Sussex. Did you know that American marshmallows and British marshmallows are actually quite different, and that the traditional yams and marshmallows dish, made with British marshmallows, is even more disgusting and inedible than the regular American version? Neither did I, until it was too late.

I've got 5 burners, and there have been a couple of times when I've needed a 6th (sadly, no hot knives!). But I don't think I have enough arms for 8. (One of the times was when I was cooking a big Indian meal, all with Evian, because C had chosen that moment to turn off the water and do something to the bath. That was probably the bourgeois highpoint of my life.)

Yeah, well, I once cooked an entire turducken using only a magnifying glass and sunlight.

My 9 year old said to me last night that she wanted to cook us a nice meal with a candle.

I think the first meal PK ever made for us was sandwiches of parsley (stems and all) and butter on white bread.

This was actually on a day when I was just too wiped to make dinner, so we ate it and called it a day.

Where's the Yorkshiremen-style joke in that, B?

But - aw, bless him.

Everything in my apartment is tiny. I am taller than my fridge, and the stove/oven is the tiniest four burner thing I've ever seen. My sister joked that I would graduate to a grown-up fridge when I was older.

I think an eight-burner range would only be useful maybe once per year and be a waste of space the rest of the time.

On an Outward Bound trip, I once cooked a four course meal on self-generated methane. The trick was the order of consumption.

and be a waste of space the rest of the time.

Yes, but this obviated by having an 8,000 sq ft house, you see.

Since 2004, I cook all my meals with my burning anger.

58: I think the Yorkshire joke is the one he gets to tell when he grows up--"when I was a lad of just five years old! I made dinner for my *entire family* with naught but parsley, butter, and stale bread."

As always, I'm the straight woman; it's just that the punch line'll have to wait fifteen years or more.

(And I know, isn't that sweet? He's since graduated to being able to scramble eggs.)

Did you know that American marshmallows and British marshmallows are actually quite different, and that the traditional yams and marshmallows dish, made with British marshmallows, is even more disgusting and inedible than the regular American version?

There are British marshmallows? I thought they were your fault.

61: Oh, right.

I am taller than my fridge

Lots of unfortunate Brits have short fridges. Please send donations.

63 - scrambled eggs are very good. I love it when one of the older ones gets up and decides everyone's having scrambled eggs for breakfast and I can just go back to the computer. Erm, doing something useful.

My 9 year old said to me last night that she wanted to cook us a nice meal with a candle.

...just like those fascinating young men down the pub car park who cook with candles and Bic lighters using--you'll never believe this bit, Mum--bottle caps and spoons!

A few days ago, I had some hand-crafted vanilla marshmallows in gourmet hot chocolate. I wanted to play the bourgeois game too.

66: In part I think my sister's joke was inspired by the fact that my mother, after all the kids moved out, purchased a new fridge roughly the size of Montana.

I confess to lusting after one of those eight-burners, but the kind configured with four burners, a griddle and a grill. Said lust is diminished by a) lack of money to buy one, b) the large amount of electricity they use in addition to the gas, and c) the experience of obscenely wealthy acquaintances who bought the Wolf version, which is supposed to be the shit but turned out to be continuously under repair until they got rid of it and found something more reasonable.

There are British marshmallows?

They were actually pink, even.

The friend who went shopping with me was very dubious, but I chalked it up to the standard British "what, savory with sweet?!?" hangup and told him he was going to eat a proper American Thanksgiving dinner and like it, dammit.

You'd think I would have learned not to be such an ugly American, but nope. Years later I went to Canada and insisted that my colleagues from New Zealand come over for Tgiving dinner in November, dammit, on the *proper* day. (They had to be the Kiwis, not only because I refused to make any Canadian friends, but because if I *had* befriended Canadians, I would have known better than to flaunt the superiority of American Thanksgiving, so I suppose I'd learned a little bit.)

My own absurd dream is of an Aga. Just a "little" one will do!

People should only be allowed to buy fancy stoves if they've prepared at least one meal that tested the limit of their current stove. This is actually a good rule for all purchases. I lusted after a dSLR until I thought "I don't even take pictures." So I bought a last year's model point-n-shoot that I use every now and again and am perfectly happy with.

From the underwhelming response to 30, I can conclude that my embryonic novel is destined neither for best-sellerdom nor for a National Book Award.

Or perhaps I can conclude merely that comments in excess of 500 words are summarily ignored.

Or all of the above.

30: Knecht, I think you've got too much time on your hands. Will your next confession to Fleur be about the hours you spend dreaming up plots for stories you'll never write?

From the underwhelming response to 30, I can conclude that my embryonic novel is destined neither for best-sellerdom nor for a National Book Award.

Or perhaps I can conclude merely that comments in excess of 500 words are summarily ignored.

Or all of the above.

People should only be allowed to buy fancy stoves if they've prepared at least one meal more than two meals a year for more than three years running that tested the limit of their current stove.

rfts, a friend of mine has a La Cornue, a little one. (She's a professional chef who bought the thing with an inheritance, so good for her.) Good Lord, that thing is awesome.

Knecht, I think you've got too much time on your hands.

Alas, today I have been both relatively busy and relatively productive. Managed to squeeze in some commenting on the side.

53: B, I spent a semester at Sussex in one of those flats!

I wonder if we stayed in the same one. East Slope, I think mine was called.

Jesus: "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."

Blasphemous joke:

The adultress is about to be stoned by the villagers. Jesus says his line "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Just then, from the back of the crowd comes a large rock, which hits the adultress right between the eyes. Jesus turns, and says, "Mother, sometimes you make me sooo angry".

If by blasphemous, you mean, awesome!

this is not that far off from my job. Does he want to do some pro bono work going after the military industrial complex?

81: That sounds familiar. Mine was in the last block of flats before the big open field on the far end of campus. When were you there? I was there in the fall of 1987.

85: Yeah, I think we were in the same block. I was there 88-89.

Getting back to the post, I'm seriously considering a new job that, as far as I can tell, more or less amounts to ogged's friend's fantasy. I'm not sure how I feel about that ("that" being the fact that while many of these cases are very worthwhile and necessary, an unfortunate aspect of our current system is that many (most? probably depends on where you work...) of these sort of cases are frivolous. Extortion, really--and I fear the legal fees that might result would feel less like a fair compensation for forwarding justice and more like blood money.) But I tell myself it's still better than working for the other side.

Landers! You're alive, apparently.

It would appear that way, yes.

Take the fucking job, Brock. Extortion, my ass: the fact is that we, the American people, have opted for a system that relies on after-the-fact lawsuits rather than preemptive legislation. We have done so, ostensibly, because it's Better for the Free Market that way.

If the free market has to pay a little protection money as a result, well, tough shit. The free market can damn well support decent regulations against fucking people over if it doesn't like it.

Brock!

Re: Expensive stoves. Don't English people claim that you can heat an entire house with an Aga?

this is kind of like my retirement fantasy, but instead of the word "corporations", substitute the words "Damion Frye"

67 - our second-nearest park is a bit of a drug haven. I'm not bothered by the ones smoking joints (though part of me does think they should have the decency to try and hide it a bit!), but the day we went there and there were people doing burny things with tin foil and producing very strange smells, I did feel rather uncomfortable.

91 - yes, because it heats the water for your central heating (I think), not just because you turn it up high and hope for the best.

Don't English people claim that you can heat an entire house with an Aga?

That's what I've heard, but I suspect that 'heat an entire house' means something in British English other than what we over here take it to mean. British English has, like, 30 goddamn words for 'sweater.'

I assume that people who own Agas don't live anywhere with the concept of "summer".

lots of jealous backbiting by the same staffers who mocked her Blahnik shoes

I'm with the staffers. I'm sure they're the real heroes.

Brock!

In Brock's honor, I've decided to add characters to the novel in 30 based loosely on Brock and Witt. Brock is going to be the one decent associate at the evil corporate law firm where our protagonist is suffering in the first chapter. Naturally, he will end up on the other side of the landmark case from our heroine. Also, he has a crush on the heroine, although he is married with young children, and also a devout Catholic.

The character based on Witt is a tireless paralegal working for the advocacy organization that our heroine joins. She is as smart as all the lawyers, but she never attended law school because she spent her 20's helping her mother run the family floral business, which closed after one of its immigrant employees was arrested on suspicion of abetting terrorism in a grand-standing FBI raid carried live on television.

Coming soon: the character based on a composite of Di Kotimy and Will.

I'm with the staffers. I'm sure they're the real heroes.

In truth, it was the mentor's fault. In the conversation where she asked for job-seeking advice, he half-ironically told her that the most important thing was to wear her best shoes, because she always wore her favorite scruffy Belgian peasant shoes to class back when she was a law student.

It's irony, ya see.

94: There may be Agas that do that, but all Aga stoves are warm all the time by design. That's why my La Cornue-owning friend opted against one.

Do any normal people even own Manolos? The only people I know who own them are freaks.

The only people I know who know people who own Manolos are freaks.

Do any normal people even own Manolos? The only people I know who own them are freaks.

OK, OK! She borrowed them from her sister, who is married to an investment banker and goes shopping with her friends for fun. The sister never liked the shoes anyway, because she's not really the gold-digging bitch everyone assumes she is, and she gave the shoes to our heroine for some swanky event the heroine had to attend with the partners from the evil corporate law firm. Jeeez!

Hey, Brock!

102: I know you're downer with the gente than I am, B. And perhaps I am something of a freak after all. Hmm.

Okay Knecht. as long as she doesn't actually enjoy them.

Coming soon: the character based on a composite of Di Kotimy and Will.

I know this is just blatant trolling to draw me out of my semi-commenting-retirement. And I was getting shit done today, too!

105: My current shoes are the most awesomely hilarious pair of platform flip-flops with orange, fuscia, and yellow platforms. I got 'em for $5. I heart them, in all their tacky glory.

Hi BG, Knecht, Cala. Sorry to hear I've been thought dead.

| |
Chicagoland commenters: I'll be in town this Thursday evening. Anyone up for meeting for a drink? I'll be staying near the Magnificent Mile.
|>

Brock, take the job. Read stuff stuff like this to remind yourself that they've all got it coming.

Back to La Cornue, I am amused/delighted/horrified/charmed by this:

The machine-concealer
This piece of furniture was developed in order to enable you to integrate a standard-sized domestic appliance (60 or 45 cm wide), without upsetting the harmony of your La Cornue kitchen. Behind a La Cornue door, you may discretely conceal a washing machine, a dishwasher or a refrigerator.

I did not know that. The Emerson girls kept thing hopping, all right.

I don't know whether lewdness was taken more seriously than infaniticide, or whether infanticide was regarded as a form of lewdness, but as I recall lewdness was the capital crime.

Real message:
111: When a little girl died here recently after a year in the hospital, the civil defendants in her death saved a whole lot of money, because 50 or 60 years of pain and suffering were taken off the table.

In Taiwan it was said that truck drivers routinely backed up over accident victims, because the death benefit was cheaper than lifelong care.

From the link in 111:

"They also have a fiduciary duty to the plan and the entire group of employees that are covered by it."

"Our fiduciary duty to your coworkers requires that we FUCK YOU OVER." How can people say such things??

114: other than the deliberately backing over part, about which I have no evidence, that's generally true in the US as well.

because the death benefit was cheaper than lifelong care.

I have heard from a real-life railroad lawyer that the old Pullman cars had the pillows in the sleeping berths positioned so that passengers would sleep with their heads pointed toward the front of the train for the same reason. No idea if that's true, though.

Don't English people claim that you can heat an entire house with an Aga?

Not if they're sane and born after about 1920. You can heat an entire house with central heating. Alternatively, with expensive electric heaters in every room, but it doesn't work so well. We certainly have a radiator in each room, and the entrance lobby. But we do time it to go off between 10:30 and 6:00 at night and while we're out at work, while a lot of people run it 24/7.

Subrogation is abused, but the concept isn't nuts. Evil as Wal-Mart is, it's pretty insane to be running a health care and disability benefits system that depends heavily on employer-provided health insurance and tort recoveries to cover the long-term care of people who have been disabled in accidents.

Sadly, this seems also to be a significant perk for that much larger group of lawyers who make live expensive and difficult for people who aren't genuinely bad at all.

Having recently played the part of The Forces of Evil in a drama of this nature, I heartily agree. It's good for citizen groups to keep an eye on what institutions are up to, but it gets ugly fast when they get drunk on their own self-righteousness and decide that little details like having a clue about what they're talking about are just a distraction from their mission.

110: I wish I could! Alas, my current schedule allows, at best, a window btw 4 and 5 Thurs. eve.

(Also, totally waiting to hear how 30 turns out -- what happens to the associate who decides one day to just chuck it? I must know!)

121: Too bad. My flight doesn't arrive half past six.

122: Haven't figured that out yet. But I've got a feeling that the Will/Di composite will play some critical role in the denouement. Like, it turns out that the crucial legal precendent for the case the protagonist is arguing is an obscure bit of divorce law that the protagonist's friend and law-school classmate, an ex-evangelical divorce lawyer with a precocious eight-year old and an autistic 15-year-old, is familiar with. Or better yet, the self-same friend coincidentally once represented the ex-wife of the head evil-doer in a bitter divorce proceeding, and the friend risks disbarment by leaking the sealed court records to the protagonist, in order that the protagonist learns a scandalous secret about her adversary, and is able to fight back against his attempt to blackmail her. [That last bit was a little more John Grisham than Sue Miller, it's true. Sigh.]

KR, the plot seems really good, but busy. Have you considered farming out the filling-in to someone who can write and illustrate teenage love graphic novels?

The original post, plus the novel idea made me think of Milberg Weiss for some reason.

I wonder if there's an explanation for dropping Scruggs' name in this article which is not about him and doesn't really explain his case either.

And: I'm sure people will disagree with me on this, but please, please ditch the mentor relationship. The ongoing one, the past one, all of it.

family floral business

Oh no! My super-secret background in ikebana has been revealed!

If you don't want to wait for KR to find someone to write the book, I highly recommend the interview with Connie Rice in the April issue of The Sun. No, not that Connie Rice. Her cousin, a lawyer who built a career on suing over police brutality and then turned around and started problem-solving with the LAPD:

[Q.] What changed your attitude?

[A.] The problem for us was that the victims of the dog bites [of the police canine unit] were gangbangers or delinquents, and the officer would come into court with the dog and throw a ball up in the air, and the dog would catch it and then sit there looking cute. Once a jury saw that, it would be all over. So we transformed the case into a statistical one: We showed the bite rate -- the percentage of times, when the dogs were deployed, that the suspect was bitten. The judge...saw an 80 percent bite rate and a 47 percent hospitalization rate and he said to the police, "You'd better settle." The cops were bristling. They said. "We want to fix this ourselves. Give us the money for retraining and we'll change it."

[W]e told the city to give them the money. And do you know what? Within six months the bite rate was 5 percent. They got rid of the sadists and revamped the whole canine unit.... Fifteen years later the bite rate is still below 10 percent. So when they want to change, and the change is on their terms and in their interest, cops can turn things around.

After that I asked myself, How can I get rid of the mentality of brutality? Of course one of the first lessons I learned was that they don't call it "brutality." They call it "good policing." My language shut down the debate.

Every word is worth it. Unfortunately, it's not online yet. Grrr.

127: I kind of like it if the mentor is a total sleazeball, maybe the young associate finally comes to that conclusion over the single malt scotch mentioned in 30. So when he makes some snarky, demeaning remark about idealistic schmucks who represent asylum seekers, that's what sets her on her fateful journey, a quest to regain the dignity of which she only just realizes he had utterly robbed her.

Have you considered farming out the filling-in to someone who can write and illustrate teenage love graphic novels?

Hmmmm. Is the Sweet Valley High series still around? I'd have to bend and twist the plot a bit to get it to work in a high school context, but if the money is right...

Alternatively, you don't suppose there's already a well-developed outsourcing sector in India devoted to this sort of thing?

127 and 129: Both comments are sound advice. Maybe we should just write this puppy as a wiki.

128: when I read "They said. 'We want to fix this ourselves. Give us the money for retraining and we'll change it,'" I thought the next line was going to be about how the police revamped the procedures for collecting statistics so that the denominator in bites per deployment would be artificially inflated. I was happy read that the actual outcome was more positive.

131.1: Grand idea! It'll be like that novel that Dave Barry & friends in South Florida wrote, except better.

131.2: Dude, all due respect, you are a cynic. I said the interview was about a woman who changed. You think she changed because the police were just as sleazy and corrupt as she thought they were?

You think she changed because the police were just as sleazy and corrupt as she thought they were?

I seem to be at the point of Lincoln Steffens autobiography where he reveals what he's already hinted at: he likes the corrupt bastards more than the other reformers. That's so far more on a personal level than a systematic one - he basically calls a political boss he's friends with a traitor to his people for putting his own interests above the public interest - but it will be interesting to see how he goes from there to socialism.

he likes the corrupt bastards more than the other reformers

The meta-message of a lot of social change writing, starting with Twenty Years at Hull-House. The skill set of activists is not necessarily compatible with cozy interpersonal relationships.

Dude, all due respect, you are a cynic.

What can I say? I overcompensated

134: I think it's deeper than just on a personal level in Steffens' case. He's starting to question his own ideas about ethics and reform.

By the way, he casts Philadelphia as a nearly hopeless case where the (reform-minded) people are broken and dispirited; it's the Philadelphia boss he castigates. There's a great, and disturbingly familiar - if you think of the Bush administration - conversation where he asks the Philadelphia powers why, if other cities' bosses thought they could get away with only one big scam involving public franchises, they tried - and succeeded - in pulling five at once, and the answer is: we figured the press/reformers would be hounding us with only one thing to investigate so we went for five, figuring that they couldn't handle all the information on that scale, and they couldn't, and gave up.

131.1 Maybe we should just write this puppy as a wiki.

Naked Came the Stanger, a wiki before its time!

.. and the Stranger was naked too.

Following JP's link I get to the aforementioned Dave Barry et al. book, Naked Came the Manatee. Funny; I'd never heard of the original that inspired it.

38

36: Then you use your regular two-burner stove top for the knives, and you open six different bags of fucking Doritos, you pretentious wanker.

Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 03-25-08 10:53 AM
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39

your regular two-burner stove top

Do you live in a tent or something?

Posted by: Gonerill | Link to this comment | 03-25-08 10:54 AM

I nearly peed my pants