TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (70)

This week's joy in the misery of others comes courtesy of Reuters (from Thursday, June 29; link good at time of posting):

Argentine tax officials hit a tax cheat where it hurts most on Wednesday, confiscating the man's plasma TV two days before Argentina plays Germany in the World Cup quarterfinals.

It was the latest move in a "shock" campaign by Santiago Montoya, the top tax man in Buenos Aires province, the country's biggest, to curb rampant tax evasion in Argentina.

Tax officials carted off the new big-screen television from a man who owes some 6,100 pesos ($2,000) in back taxes.

"We've taken the plasma as a guarantee against the debt he owes," said Juan Manuel Prada, a provincial tax official.

[Previous TGIS]

Dim Bulb Becomes Butt of Jokes

I'm not certain which is stranger -- that this fellow had a light bulb removed from his anus or that he claims "he didn't know the bulb was there":

Fateh Mohammad, a prison inmate in Pakistan, says he woke up last weekend with a glass lightbulb in his anus.

Wednesday night, doctors brought Mohammad's misery to an end after a one-and-a-half hour operation to remove the object.

"Thanks Allah, now I feel comfort. Today, I had my breakfast. I was just drinking water, nothing else," Mohammad, a grey-beared man in his mid-40s, told Reuters from a hospital bed in the southern central city of Multan.

. . . .

"I don't know who did this to me. Police or other prisoners."

The doctor treating Mohammad said he'd never encountered anything like it before, and doubted the felon's story that someone had drugged him and inserted the bulb while he was comatose.

Move over, Richard Gere.

Blawg Review Reaches Terminal Velocity

In medicine, "terminal" denotes a condition wherein one's condition tends rapidly and inexorably toward death; in air travel, "terminal" means the same thing. Nonetheless, Sheryl Schelin of The Airport Lawyer makes this week's Blawg Review no. 63 an enjoyable trip, highlighting the past week's best legal blogging, including some of my personal favorites. Despite a name which combines two concepts generally reviled by most people -- airports and lawyers -- The Airport Lawyer is consistently outstanding blog. The How Appealing blog hosts next week's Blawg Review.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (69)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Wall Street Journal (from Tuesday, June 20; subscription required):

Young men and teens wearing low-slung, baggy pants fairly regularly get tripped up in their getaways, a development that has given amused police officers and law-abiding citizens a welcome edge in the fight against crime.

James Green might have made a clean getaway when he stole seven DVDs from a Blockbuster store in Ferndale, Mich., last October. But he, too, was undone by his baggy pants.

Mr. Green, 30, rode away on a bicycle, with copies of "Donnie Brasco," "The Bourne Identity" and "Sin City." When a patrol car knocked over the bike, he fled on foot. As he ran, his trousers slipped down past his hips, and he tripped. He hitched up his pants and ran a few more yards before falling again.

Things got worse and worse for Mr. Green. He finally kicked off his pants and shoes and "ran into the yard of 1720 Beaufield," police officer Kenneth Jaklic said in a report of the incident. "I ran after [Mr. Green], yelling at him to stop." Instead, Mr. Green jumped over a fence behind a garage, and Mr. Jaklic immobilized him with two Taser darts in the back.

. . . .

Denny Fuhrman, a 58-year-old police officer in Lynnwood, Wash., was escorting a handcuffed suspect to his patrol car one afternoon in 2004 when the youngster twisted free and took off running.

As he bolted, the baggy blue jeans he was wearing fell down around his ankles, sending him tumbling onto the pavement of a busy street. "He was rolling around in traffic, looking like a fish out of water," recalls Mr. Fuhrman.

Mr. Fuhrman's suspect wiggled out of his trousers before getting up from the street and running toward a nearby mall, as the police officer radioed a description to his colleagues: "White male, running, no pants, in handcuffs," Mr. Fuhrman recalls saying. The young man was arrested at the entrance of a J.C. Penney store after Janice Lewis, a 61-year-old passerby, grabbed his shirt collar and held on to him until police arrived.

. . . .

Ill-fitting pants aren't suited for jumping, either, as Noah Donell Brown of Hendersonville, N.C., learned. The 24-year-old tried to leap over the counter of a Subway sandwich shop during a robbery attempt, but he stumbled and came crashing down in front of several startled store employees. Mr. Brown, armed with a gun, got up and fled into a nearby residential neighborhood as the police were notified.

Police didn't have to work hard to arrest him. As Mr. Brown tried to scale a picket fence in someone's backyard, he caught his pants, according to the police department. He was found dangling upside down, his pants at his ankles and tangled in the fence.

. . . .

Dwight Oliver showed up for a court hearing in Seminole County, Fla., wearing loose pants and tennis shoes without laces. While waiting for his case to be called, Mr. Oliver tried to flee. He lost his pants as he ran down the steps of the courthouse.

He was later found in gray boxer shorts in a library three blocks from the courthouse and was arrested after a scuffle with police officers. It turned out the charges he was scheduled to face in court that day were dropped. He was slapped with new charges of resisting arrest and sentenced to two and a half years in jail for the incident. He served 17 months and was released in April.

. . . .

Karl Franklin tried to run from police in Tallahassee, Fla., in pants that were on fire. According to a police report, the 30-year-old had stashed a lighted cigarette in his baggy pants and appeared to be preparing to urinate at a traffic intersection.

Seth Stoughton, a police officer at the time, approached Mr. Franklin and noticed the man's pocket was smoldering. Mr. Franklin, who could not be reached, started to run, but his pants dropped and tripped him up.

. . . .

When other officers arrived, they cut off the burning patch of cloth and arrested Mr. Franklin.

[Previous TGIS]

New World Muffin

The New World Man blog hosts the sixty-second edition of Blawg Review with the assistance of "aspiring blawgger" Muffin. It's my favorite issue thus far this year; I don't envy The Airport Lawyer, who has to follow this one next week.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (68)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of Reuters (from Thursday, June 15; link good at time of posting):

A 70-year-old German shoplifter who tried to bite his way out of the clutches of police might have had more success if he had remembered to put his teeth in.

Police went to arrest the man after he failed to pay a fine for shoplifting. But when the squad arrived, he tried to flee through the back door, a police spokesman in the western German town of Braunschweig said Thursday.

"It looks like he forgot to put his teeth in ... One of our police officers got bitten several times, but the man didn't leave anything but a wet patch," he said.

[Previous TGIS]

Unfortunately, Marty, I lack any "indicia of truthfulness".

Gosh, the MARTY SCHWIMMER name sure is distinctive of and designates a unitary source of quality legal services.

Perhaps Captain Copyright Should Be Demoted to Ensign Copyright?

Professor Volokh notes a severe case of copyright overreach by a Canadian copyright information website featuring a character named "Captain Copyright". Volokh dares the Captain to leap his fair use privileges in a single bound:

[Y]our "Links from Other Web Sites" policy is legally unenforceable, implicitly misstates the law in ways that may mislead lay readers (including children and schoolteachers who are visiting your site), and therefore casts doubt on the credibility of the "educational" material you post on your site.

Should you request or demand that I remove the link, I will categorically refuse, as I am entirely within my rights to do. Copyright law does not restrict my linking to your site, and because I never expressed agreement to the offered terms on your site, I am not contractually bound by your assertions of your supposed rights, either. I have absolutely no intention of complying with your requests.

What's more, Captain Copyright seems to be a blatant rip-off from an earlier Singaporean comic. First Batgirl comes out as a lesbian and now Captain Copyright is not just misinformed but is also a copyright infringer? It makes me nostalgic for the golden age of comics when we had such wholesome heroes as the Incredible Popeman and Nelson Mandela.

[Update]

God Emperor of Cambridge

Theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking has called for the human race to colonize the solar system to prevent its own extinction, should Earth be made uninhabitable through natural or man-made disaster:

Stephen Hawking has called for a new diaspora, telling a Hong Kong press conference that humanity must leave Earth and colonise the rest of the solar system if it is to avoid extinction.
The respected physicist warned of the increasing risk that some kind of natural or man made disaster - such as global warming, or a nuclear war - could destroy the Earth: "It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species," he said.

. . . .

He believes we could have a colony on the moon within 20 years, and an established base on Mars within 40, according to reports, but says that unless we travel to another star system, we "won't find anywhere as nice as Earth".

Hawking has a well-deserved reputation as a big thinker, but his plan here is decidedly low-rent compared with the similarly-motivated "Golden Path" described by science fiction author Frank Herbert (ascribed to his fictional Emperor Leto II) in his Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune novels thirty years ago. There, the God Emperor engineered the entirety of human civilization to cause a great scattering of the human race beyond the boundaries of the known universe. In all fairness, however, the God Emperor was both prescient and more than 3,500 years old, so perhaps I'm expecting too much of the merely-mortal 64-years-old Hawking.

Go west up, young man!

He Should Be Beaten Again for Filing This Suit

From the Associated Press:

Dana Buckman, 46, walked into an auto shop brandishing a semiautomatic pistol last summer, only to have it turned on him by two AutoZone employees, police said. The men beat Buckman with a metal pipe and held him with his own gun.

Buckman escaped and was arrested a week later.

He pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and was sentenced to 18 years in prison as a repeat violent felon.

Buckman claims the men chased him out of the store and continued to beat him. He is suing the auto shop and the men for the injuries he suffered and for emotional distress.

"In some respects, you wonder if a case like this even needs a defense. It speaks for itself," said lawyer Patrick B. Naylon, who represents AutoZone and the employees.

Blawg Review is in the Pink

The Blonde Justice blog hosts the sixty-first edition of Blawg Review and does justice to the major legal events of the past week. Much credit to the ladies behind this week's issue -- when you consider that the number of lawyer jokes out there are exceeded only by the number of blonde jokes, it takes some moxie to proudly claim both genres for yourself. Take some time at the site to peruse a better-than-average number of worthwhile posts and to pet Bijou the virtual dog over in the sidebar. Perhaps in a bid to provide equal time to blogs of each gender, we move next week from the girly-girl Blonde Justice to the New World Man blog.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (67)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Associated Press (from Wednesday, June 7; link good at time of posting):

Burglars who stole $30 worth of Skittles and Starburst candy from a Little League concession stand in this Minneapolis suburb left behind an incriminating piece of evidence.

Police found a cell phone inside the building.

According to court documents, sometime after the theft on Saturday night, the phone's owner called the phone and identified himself. Officers arranged to meet him and return the phone, and a witness identified the man as one of the burglars.

. . . .

When officers went to [his accomplice's] door, he chewing on some Skittles. Confiscated from the house were 20 bags of candy and another 20 packages were found in a backpack, the complaint said.

[Previous TGIS]

The Police Gave Us "Synchronicity" But Then Broke Up

Microsoft is determined not to repeat that same mistake and has announced that yet another feature -- simple computer-to-computer synchronization -- has been dropped from their forthcoming Windows Vista operating system:

Microsoft officials said they cut the feature due to quality concerns, but the functionality is still "something we plan to deliver to our customers in the future," according to a company spokeswoman.

. . . .

"From the beginning, we have made it clear that the top priority for Windows Vista is quality," the company spokeswoman said in an e-mailed statement. "While PC to PC synch is a great feature that improves productivity and collaboration we don't have it at the quality level our customers demand. As a result the decision was made to remove it from Windows Vista. This is part of the normal beta process as we constantly evaluate, improve and fine tune the features of Windows Vista.

It would be gratuitous to note at this point that my new Mac can do this already, so I won't mention that. For those who are still interested in Windows Vista, the public beta version is now available for download from Microsoft. For those of you who have come to believe that Microsoft's latest effort is a year (or more) late and a feature (or more) short, you can go elsewhere to find an OS which actually is ready for prime time.

Yeah, right.

Blogger's been flaky for a few days now. This morning, a message at the top of the Posting screen mentioned a "Scheduled outage at 8:23AM PST." I have no reason not to believe them -- I myself often schedule events for 23 minutes past the hour.

Try rounding-up next time, guys; plausibility is important in an excuse.

Rest in Pieces

The leader of the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, is a confirmed corpse.

It's difficult to appreciate the ebbs and flows of a major event like the Iraq War while it is still ongoing, and the battle against the insurgency there is undeniably still a brutal, daily fight. Nonetheless, historians some years hence will likely identify that the beginning of the end of the insurgency occurred well before today and that al-Zarqawi's killing was essentially a highly visible event during an inexorable decline for the insurgents and their supporters.

al-Zarqawi's death is a major step toward the end of the insurgency, but not because al-Zarqawi remained the key figure in that fruitless effort; many sources have reported that his control over the insurgency and its supporters was waning and that he had become a marginalized figure outside his faction. It's certainly fortuitous that his death occurred at a time when the will of a substantial portion of the American public to continue in Iraq was getting a bit shaky, but timing alone doesn't make this event important.

Ultimately, al-Zarqawi's killing will herald the end of the insurgency not because of al-Zarqawi's importance, but because his death resulted from cooperation between the Allies and moderate elements in Iraq and the broader region who were alienated by the bloody tactics of the insurgent forces. According to Time, Jordan played a crucial role in providing necessary intelligence to the operation:

In the end, the savagery of Musab al-Zarqawi may have earned him too many enemies.

. . . .

A well-placed intelligence source in Jordan told TIME that the CIA was tipped off after Jordanian intelligence learned of a meeting that Zarqawi planned to hold in the town of Baquba, north of Baghdad. His safe house was targeted in an air attack, and, says the same source, the Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq was killed in the bombing. A senior Jordanian official confirmed that "there was a Jordanian security role in this."

. . . .

[S]ome of the more nationalist leaders of the insurgency who had been quietly negotiating with the U.S. and Iraqi government had made no secret of their animosity toward Zarqawi and the al-Qaeda agenda. The announcement, just a day before Zarqawi's death, that the new Iraqi government would release some 2,500 Sunnis imprisoned for assisting the insurgency, suggests that rapprochement between the government and the Sunni nationalist element of the insurgency may be accelerating, which was bad news for Zarqawi.

"Bad news", indeed.

Hallelujah!

Striker Wayne Rooney has been cleared to rejoin the English National Team at the World Cup. Although his recovery in time for the tournament had seemed like a long shot, the gods have smiled upon him and upon England, which is, by the way, the official World Cup team of Infamy or Praise. Rooney is not fully-healed, but in this case, "good enough" is great news for England, which will play Rooney only if it must during the First Round against Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago, and Sweden:

Rooney's inclusion in the World Cup squad is a massive break for coach Sven-Goran Eriksson, but is still only another step on a difficult road to recovery for the country's greatest talent.

. . . .

If England start their campaign well, Eriksson can afford to bide his time and keep his powder dry until Rooney is well down the road with his rehabilitation.
If results are poor, the temptation to play his trump card, even a high-risk one, may prove too tempting to resist.

. . . .

For now, though, if England were searching for a morale-boost to lift an already buoyant squad, the return of Rooney to their World Cup hideaway fits the bill perfectly.

Ed. vs. Schwimmer

On the BBC America cable channel, the wife and I enjoy a wonderfully unreal reality program, Ed vs. Spencer. While they continue to coexist happily under the same roof, friends Ed and Spencer compete ruthlessly and publicly with one another. While it is neither as ferocious nor as morbidly entertaining as an Ed vs. Spencer smackdown, Blawg Review's own editor, Ed., has taken a very public stance against Marty Schwimmer's Blawg Review #60 (to which I linked yesterday) by posting an "Avignon" edition of Blawg Review #60. As his/her/its anonymity naturally precludes on-camera appearances by Ed., the Avignon edition will likely end this dustup between two blawgosphere luminaries; I for one doubt that Ed. vs. Schwimmer will continue for more than this one episode.

The Avignon edition was first noted by Blawgfather Kevin Heller at the Tech Law Advisor blog. For those not familiar with the term, "Avignon" refers to a situation where the current host's issue of a blog carnival is deemed to be such a departure from the carnival's norms that an alternative edition is published. Several Avignon editions of the long-running Carnival of the Vanities have been posted, but this is the first such edition of Blawg Review. I think it's warranted in this case and might have been appropriate also for the recent Blawg Review #48 hosted by the RethinkIP blog, which garnered its fair share of criticism.

Although it wasn't really appropriate for an entire issue of Blawg Review, I at least preferred Schwimmer's "you're all ignoring the single most important legal issue of the day" approach to the Rethinkers' "you all sucked this week" approach in No. 48. As I wrote yesterday, I don't really share Marty's frustration -- I think that the amount and level of discourse on War on Terror-related topics is appropriate, and that the variety of topics discussed is a strength rather than a weakness in the blawgosphere -- but I think his criticisms will probably prompt more worthwhile discussion on his preferred topics.

There are relatively few rules for hosts of Blawg Review to follow, and as a past host I can attest that Ed. applies those few rules pretty lightly; still, even lightly-applied rules must be enforced. I think it would do a disservice to the carnival's readership to send them unprepared to what is essentially one guy's diatribe. I agree with what Ed. appended to the Avignon edition:

Regular participants in Blawg Review make their submissions and recommendations expecting that the host will, within the bounds of individual creativity, prepare a Blawg Review. It is essential to our project that we live up to those expectations, and not use the privilege of hosting Blawg Review for some other presentation, however interesting that might be.

Links to both Schwimmer's Blawg Review #60 and Ed.'s Avignon edition are available on the main Blawg Review page, which is as it should be.

Somehow, I Already Knew This

The Movie Of Your Life Is A Black Comedy

In your life, things are so twisted that you just have to laugh. You may end up insane, but you'll have fun on the way to the asylum. Your best movie matches: Being John Malkovich, The Royal Tenenbaums, American Psycho

If Your Life Was a Movie, What Genre Would It Be?

Is a Manual of Style for Blawg Drafting Forthcoming?

Probably not, but a few months back I had the opportunity to peruse and use the ABA-published A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting and found it to be very worthwhile. The author of that volume, Ken Adams, now has a blog, AdamsDrafting. There are just a few entries thus far, but what's there is quite promising for those of us who draft contracts on a regular basis.

A Single-Minded Approach to Blawg Review

Marty Schwimmer hosts the sixtieth edition of Blawg Review at The Trademark Blog. As many regular readers of the carnival know, the ever-mysterious Blawg Review editor encourages each week's host(s) to make that week's edition his/her/their own -- to present it "without restrictions on personal creativity". Blawg Review #60 may be the most personal and idiosyncratic issue yet; as the host describes it:

[I]nstead of scouring law blogs for the best interesting legal tid-bits over the past week, I will apply a different set of criteria.

I will judge blogs on whether they answer the question that interests me the most as a lawyer:

Is this Administration acting lawfully?

While he singles out the excellent Volokh Conspiracy and Balkinization blogs for particular praise, Schwimmer concludes that most legal bloggers' answers to legal issues associated with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against terrorism more generally are disinterested shrugs:

As far as I can tell, there are virtually no practitioners writing regularly on these issues. Which is too bad, because a lot of this writing is by professors for professors and not easily accessible to a wide audience.

This is an opportunity for the blawgosphere to assume a leadership position. It can be more than a compendium of firm brochures. Practitioner blogs can provide cool-headed legal analysis of issues such as the Niger Documents, Plame Affair, Torture Memos, NSA issues and Signing Statements, to a broader audience than the prof blogs can reach.

I think he may be overstating the situation to make his point (consider, for example, practitioner Lyle Denniston's outstanding early analysis of the Hamdan decision at SCOTUSblog) and I tend to disagree with his assertion that discussion of these issues in academic blogs is not easily or widely-accessible (to mention just one recent example, Professor Orin Kerr's posts concerning the legality of the NSA wiretaps [see here and here] were appreciated for their timeliness and cogency far beyond the academic blawgosphere [Technorati links for both posts are here and here]). I also disagree with him that it's "poison for a practitioner to discuss politics"; many legal issues, and none more so than these which Schwimmer calls "more important than pretty much any other question", are intensely political in nature and discussions by politically-identified practitioners writing on political blogs (the three attorney-bloggers at the Power Line blog come to mind) can be quite informative despite their partisanship.

Still, Schwimmer's "call to arms" for the legal end of the blogosphere to take a more active part in discussing these prominent issues is a valid one. The fruits of that call to arms will certainly by reflected in Blawg Review in coming editions, but I for one hope that the focus will not be exclusively or even primarily on them; the breadth of topics addressed in legal blogging is a strength rather than a weakness.

The Blonde Justice blog hosts next week's edition.

[Update]

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (66)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Associated Press (from Thursday, June 1; link good at time of posting):

Milwaukee police say a woman stabbed her husband after he gave a male relative a bad haircut.

Police Captain Timothy Burkee says a 24-year-old man was cutting a relative's hair Tuesday night and apparently wasn't doing a great job.

Burkee says the haircutter's wife took offense for some reason and stabbed her husband in the chest with a knife.

. . . .

Police say the man who got the bad haircut wasn't involved in the fight.

[Previous TGIS]

Don't Tell "Viper" We're Shipping in 2008

Major kudos for my sister-in-law, Lynn, whose latest project, the "See Windows Vista" web site, is now available. The site is is hosted by none other than Tom Skerritt and is a visual treat to tide you over until Windows Vista is released in 2002 2004 2006 2007.

If I'd known "Viper" was on board with the Vista Cruiser, I might have . . . well let's face it, I probably still would have bought my new iMac. Still, I think those Apple folks owe Microsoft a big apology -- Captain Dallas of the Nostromo is a hell of a lot more manly than that dumpy "Windows" guy in the new Mac ads, and is there anyone who honestly thinks that Sheriff Jimmy Brock can't beat the snot out of the ads' amiable Mac slacker?

Sure, there is that whole launch date thing; Windows Vista may be better than sliced bread, but we can actually go to the store today and buy sliced bread. Proverbially speaking, an OS in the hand is better than two in Redmond. Perhaps "Viper" needs to move beyond the web site and take a more direct role in things at Microsoft -- "Windows Vista launch dates are written for your safety and for that of your team. They are not flexible, nor am I. Is that clear?"