TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (156)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of CNN (from Thursday, February 28; link good at time of posting):

Two masked and machete-wielding men who barged into a club in Sydney, Australia, couldn't have picked a worse night for their robbery -- a monthly meeting of bikers.

The robbers chose the wrong night to burst into the club where the Southern Cross Cruiser Club have their monthly meeting.

About 50 burly bikers fought back with tables and chairs -- pretty much anything that wasn't bolted down. One would-be robber was tied up; the other in the hospital.

Police arrested both.

"These guys were absolutely dumb as bricks," Jerry Vancornewal, leader of the bikers, told CNN Thursday. "I can't believe they saw all the bikes parked up front and they were so stupid that they walked past in."

Vancornewal and his buddies were at the Regents Park Sporting and Community Club in Sydney when the two men wearing ski masks stormed in Wednesday night. They yelled at patrons to drop to the floor as they emptied cash registers at the bar.

Hearing the commotion from an adjacent room, Vancornewal and his pals with the Southern Cross Cruiser motorcycle club stomped through to the bar area to intervene.

"They (the robbers) thought they had the upper advantage with their knives and their machetes," Jim Webb, night supervisor of the club, told CNN. "They didn't expect to run into a bunch of guys carrying chairs and tables."

One of the would-be robbers crashed through a plate-glass door and jumped off a balcony.

"All he had to do was push the button and it automatically opened," Webb quipped.

New South Wales police said they arrested the 20-year-old man a short distance away.

The second man made a break for it through the club's service entrance, but the bikers tackled him near a neighbor's fence.

[Previous TGIS]

He's a Rules Guy

One of my favorite legal bloggers, Sun General Counsel Mike Dillon, suggests a number of ways that practicing in-house is different than in a firm. All are worth considering and, for those of us in-house already, internalizing; amongst the many highlights are these points:

• "You are a business person. Your business is providing legal services to your company. Constantly focus on how to deliver high quality legal services in the most efficient manner possible."
• "To be effective in-house, you need to collaborate and work as part of a team. Individuals don't scale because we are each limited by the hours in a day...."
• "You will know that you have achieved success when your client says: 'You don't act like an attorney'."
• "Understand how you are adding value to your department - your department to your company - your company to the world. This requires an in-depth knowledge of your company's business, competitors and markets."

At least in my own professional thinking, Dillon's rules are as useful at encapsulating the important concepts of in-house practice as the eight attributes of the go-to lawyer which I wrote about in 2006. Dillon mentioned that he's "interested in hearing whether these resonate with other in-house attorneys"; the answer is that they did with at least one.

I had the pleasure of meeting Mike a couple of years ago at a legal bloggers meet-up in Silicon Valley. For those of you who've not yet made the acquaintance of Sun's "Legal Thing", Rob LaGatta of the Real Lawyers Have Blogs site recently interviewed him about his blogging.

At least he didn't do anything unsavory to Matt Damon

Brett Trout continues Iowa's streak of Blawg Review greatness with this week's Blawg Review #148 at his BlawgIT blog (now master of its own domain!). It's a "stop and smell the roses" kind of vibe this week -- Trout notes that "lawyers do not spend as much time aimlessly meandering the web" and thus "most lawyers are woefully detached from the Zeitgeist embodied in the lowly Internet meme." The meme's the thing in #148 as such favorites as "Star Wars Kid" and "Leave Britney Alone!" provide some structure for the best of the past week's legal blogging. Highlights include a (not the) cyberlawyer's failed attempt to trademark "cyberlaw", things not to do after you pass the bar, and the revelation that excessive flatulence may not be a disability after all.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (155)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of WDSU (via The Consumerist) (from Tuesday, February 19; links good at time of posting):

A 37-year-old Mesa man who tried to buy a watch with two counterfeit $100 bills containing a watermark of Abraham Lincoln was arrested on forgery charges, police said.

Scott Martin fought with the owner of the store on Saturday after the shopkeeper confronted him about the counterfeit bills, a court document said.

The owner stunned Martin with a Taser, KPHO-TV in Phoenix reported.

When fire rescue personnel arrived, they cut off Martin's shirt to treat him, and three more counterfeit $100 bills fell out, the document said.

In addition, two more fake $100 bills and one counterfeit $20 bill were found under Martin's armpit, officers said.

[Previous TGIS]

Over time, we all get a little thicker around the middle

For many of us, a Milky Way here and there contributes to midsection growth; it's not often, though, that the Milky Way itself finds its girth doubled in size. Via Slashdot, the University of Sydney reports:

Astrophysicist Professor Bryan Gaensler led a team that has found that our galaxy - a flattened spiral about 100,000 light years across - is 12,000 light years thick, not the 6,000 light years that had been previously thought.

Proving not all science requires big, expensive apparatus, Professor Gaensler and colleagues, Dr Greg Madsen, Dr Shami Chatterjee and PhD student Ann Mao, downloaded data from the internet and analysed it in a spreadsheet.

"We were tossing around ideas about the size of the Galaxy, and thought we had better check the standard numbers that everyone uses. It took us just a few hours to calculate this for ourselves. We thought we had to be wrong, so we checked and rechecked and couldn't find any mistakes."

I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle

Though I was several days late to the starting mark, I'll take this opportunity to recommend Rush Nigut's Blawg Review #147, hosted this week at his Rush on Business blog. Nigut's theme is the [Des Moines, Iowa] Register's Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI), an annual seven-day ride across his home state of Iowa. He notes that "RAGBRAI is the longest, largest and oldest touring bicycle ride in the world." He further advises that "It's not a race. It's an experience." I've found that fact an inconvenient one of blog post titling purposes, however, and chosen to ignore it since Queen never recorded a song called "Bicycle Experience".

Highlights of this week's issue include the RICO implications of sham insurance medical exams, the intellectual property implications of the Naked Cowboy, and the legal implications of office romances. Nigut's fellow Iowan Brett Trout hosts next week's edition of the carnival of legal blogging at recently-relocated Blawg-IT blog.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (154)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of Reuters (from Thursday, February 12; link good at time of posting):

Police in central England are hunting for a badly scorched would-be copper power cable thief after finding a hacksaw embedded in an 11,000 volt power cable Saturday night.

The thief, who also left a lit blow torch at the scene, is expected to be badly charred, spiky haired and not exactly the brightest bulb in the socket.

"The sheer stupidity of cutting through power cables should be glaringly obvious to everyone," said Phil Wilson, customer operations manager with local power company Central Networks.

"At the very least putting the hacksaw through the cable would have created an almighty bang and the line would have burned for quite a few seconds, showering them with molten copper... We can only assume they left in a great hurry or they were injured and were dragged away by an accomplice."

[Previous TGIS]

Happy Valentine's Day!

My favorite scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is Marilyn Monroe's big musical number, "Expensive and inherently useless courtship gifts presented as tokens of one's ability to acquire and accumulate resources and the willingness to invest said resources in a woman and her children are said girl's best friend"; Dr. Helen Smith helpfully explains the psychological basis for that memorable scene just in time for Valentine's Day:

I never understood the whole concept of a woman wanting jewelry from a man, especially diamonds, until I read the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. In the book, two evolutionary psychologists explain why people do what they do. Why are diamonds a girl's best friend? The authors conclude that women have to discriminate between "dads" and "cads" among male suitors. In order to find the guy that will stay with her and help her with children, she looks for two qualities: "the ability to acquire and accumulate resources, and the willingness to invest them in her and her children."

A good way to screen for men who are both willing and able to invest is to demand an expensive gift--known as a courtship gift or nuptial gift in evolutionary biology. Not just any expensive gift will do. A Mercedes or house does not usually fill the bill--for these might have intrinsic value to the man if he likes European cars or is interested in real estate. A courtship gift, according to the book, must be costly and lack intrinsic value and be useless.

Ah, romance!

A long last, a candidate I'm pleased to support.

Via QuizLaw.

Two Posts Does Not A Regular Feature Make

Last week, I swore I wouldn't make Lost a regular topic of discussion around here, but that post generated some great e-mails and, frankly, the show's finally worth discussing again, so I'll take advantage with a second post. Here are a few points concerning "Confirmed Dead":

• If Miles is meant to be a true medium, I'm not super-enthusastic about it. The show's writers and producers dabbled with precognition and time travel with Desmond, but I think they've carried it off for a number of reasons. They've dealt with island mysticism on numerous occasions but have consistently come back later with rational explanations for those mysterious happenings (as was the case last week with Locke's explanation about how he survived his bullet wound). Even when there's been some real-world scenes dealing with the supernatural, as was the case with Claire's psychic, there's been an element of hucksterism (revealed to us if not the characters) which tempers the supernatural aspects. I would feel more comfortable with Miles if his flashback performance had included either less jabbering with the grandson's "spirit" (indicating that he really doesn't believe and is simply a charlatan) or a lot more (as if he was putting on a show for the grandmother, who might be listening while he searched for the money). Similarly, if his finding the money were less "directed" and more logical deduction, I'd feel better about the whole thing; I could even chalk his meditation over Naomi's body up to acting in such a way as to test the truthfulness of Jack's and Kate's statements (which would be what any good interrogator would do).
• Regarding Miles' flashback ghost busting, I don't think the grandmother was related to either Walt or Michael; I think it was just a job for Miles and she has no other connection to the characters.
• There's also been a lot of speculation that Michael is Ben's "man on the boat", suggesting that he's been lured back into Ben's service for a chance to return and help his fellow Losties and perhaps redeem himself. I think that's a long shot. If anything, I think it's more likely that Kelvin Inman would be the mysterious returnee; in finsing Miles, it looked like we were revisiting the area where Inman was "killed" by Desmond -- that could be some subtle foreshadowing. Notwithstanding, I think the most simple explanation is the most likely -- the recently absent Richard Alpert is the mole on the freighter.
  
• The collar Charlotte recovered from the polar bear skeleton had the Hydra station emblem on it, which seems to confirm that it resulted from Dharma's work on the island rather than something they were doing off-island.
• Charlotte's name adds yet another philosopher to the "John Locke", "Rousseau", etc. convention. Hers is a reference to C.S. Lewis, the Christian writer of the Narnia books. The writers made this even more explicit by making her middle name, "Staples", the same as Lewis'. As always, the significance of the reference is obscure at this point, but there probably is some significance.
• When Hurley slipped-up about Jacob's cabin, Ben's reaction was shocked while Locke's was more of a bemused "aha!" reaction. I think that with his connection now to the cabin, Hurley will become a target for manipulation by Ben and Locke as each tries to turn Hurley to his own ends.
• It was nice to see them circle back around to 815's pilot; considering that the pilot was a late addition to the pilot episode (he was added for the encounter with the smoke monster -- in the original plan, Jack was going to die there), it's interesting to see him used a plot point connecting the real 815 and the discovered one.
• Unless Abbadon's mission to the island is meant as a feint for something else, it's hard to disagree with Naomi's assessment that her group was not a coherent choice as a strike team. With her dead, what can possibly be salvaged from the mission itself? Somehow, I don't see the drunk, the anthropologist, the ghostbuster, and the head case getting Ben back to the freighter and eliminating the 815 survivors on their own (especially when they didn't even know about the survivors like Naomi did). Perhaps each of them has a connection to the old Dharma mission, but that's motive, not qualification. They're interesting, but seem pretty hapless.
• Abbadon's flashback scene with Naomi puts to rest the speculation that he was just a figment of Hurley's imagination. I didn't believe he was, so that scene merely reinforced for me what a tremendously creepy guy he is.
• In my opinion, the best moment of the episode was when Locke demanded an answer about the smoke monster. That Ben was unable to answer at that critical moment tells me that either Ben knows nothing at all about the nature of the smoke monster (perhaps the original Others do and haven't told him or Dharma knew the answer and Ben, as a "workman" like his father, wasn't told?) or the nature of the smoke monster is a secret of such critical importance that Ben prefers death to disclosure.

UPDATE: A friend reminds that the correct title of the episode was "Confirmed Dead" rather than "Declared Dead". I've corrected that in the post above. BTW, two posts and an update? Still not a regular feature, I swear!

Sliced Bread Has Nothing on Blawg Review #146

Patent guru Stephen Nipper hosts Blawg Review #146 at The Invent Blog. As Nipper notes, today is National Inventor's Day, designated on this day as it's noted inventor Thomas Edison's birthday. Personally, my favorite inventor is either Tesla or whomever invented pizza, but I digress.

While Nipper fails to answer the question everyone probably wanted answered this week -- what was the greatest invention before sliced bread? -- he does cover the best legal blogging of the past week. Highlights include a priceless discussion of credit card advertising and trademarks, standing up to patent trolls, and knowing when you work for a great firm.


Rush Nigut hosts Blawg Review #147 next week at his Rush on Business blog.

The Most Important Contract of All

My acquaintances and regular readers know how much I love contracts and contract law. Notwithstanding my career choice, my first love in the world of contracts was a study of the Social Contract, thanks to lectures during my undergraduate days given by Professor Terrence Cook. I was reminded of many of the concepts he so ably explained all those years ago by an outstanding podcasted discussion from BBC Radio 4's "In Our Time" program... er, "programme". If you have forty minutes or so, it's well worth a listen.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (153)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of Valleywag (from Wednesday, February 6; link good at time of posting):

Voce, a wireless service for hipsters with scraggly beards and ducktails who could nonetheless afford to buy Prada handsets and spend $118/mo. on service fees, has gone under. The company's COO learned of the shutdown when his Voce phone stopped working.

[Previous TGIS]

Never Say Never

A couple of days ago, I posted some wild theories about Lost. Yesterday, I consolidated my geekiness as much as I thought was humanly possible by eating my lunch -- alone, of course, as befits the truly geeky -- whilst simultaneously listening to a Doctor Who podcast and reading a Star Wars novel. I could never get more geeky than that, right?

Never say never.

I arrived home and the wife had set aside my mail, which included my new Xbox LIVE Diamond card. I have accepted now that I am a bottomless well of geekiness.

Well then, I say it's in for a penny, in for a pound. Or is that in for a ¢, in for a £? Here are a few financial tips I was pleased to find this morning, courtesy of the Wise Bread blog, by way of The Consumerist -- nine ways Star Wars can inspire you to save money. It's a good list overall, but I do have a few quibbles here and there, as with this tip -- to save money by building things yourself:

Anakin built his own droid and pod racer from scratch. Luke made his own lightsaber; probably because he couldn’t pop down to Jedi-Mart for an off-the-shelf number, but still, it’s a good lesson. My dad would build things for our home instead of buying them; we were never short of a coffee-table or shelf-system. It’s not ideal for everyone, but if you’re handy, get busy. You’ll save lots of cash.

Technically speaking, Luke didn't build his first lightsaber; it was Anakin Skywalker's and was recovered by Obi-Wan Kenobi and given to Luke in Episode IV. Moreover, his subsequent lightsabers (as well as those used by other Jedi in the novels following Return of the Jedi) were built by those Jedi not for reasons of expediency or frugality but as a necessary component of their Jedi training. It's a good list overall, but c'mon -- let's keep our Star Wars trivia straight here, people!

Lost is Found

I've no intention of starting a weekly Lost feature here -- there are any number of excellent recap, analysis, and theory blogs, podcasts, and fora already out there -- but I thought that I'd post a few points (in no particular order) from my discussions with a few people in the days since the start of the long-awaited fourth season. There are spoilers, of course, for those of you who've not seen the premiere episode, "Beginning of the End", so proceed with discretion:

• One thing I love about the show is the attention to detail. While some of the interconnections amongst the characters (shown in flashbacks over the past several years) can sometimes seem somewhat contrived, when little details are woven into the story unobtrusively, these are real treats. In the premiere, the opening car chase yielded a couple examples of details done well -- the chase was led by Hurley in the restored Camaro last seen in his flashbacks midway through Season Three in "Tricia Tanaka is Dead" and the end of the chase was captured on handycam by Randy, Hurley's boss (and later employee) at Mr. Cluck's Chicken Shack and Locke's soul-crushing supervisor at the (Hurley-owned) Tustin, California box company.
• All the speculation I've heard about the "Oceanic Six" includes Kate amongst them (along with Jack and Hurley), but I'm not sure about that. I had the impression that her whereabouts were known to Jack amongst very few in last season's finale. That would make sense, considering that she's still a fugitive on-island and still would be at the time of any rescue; it's entirely plausible that she's laying low and, with outside help, hiding from public recognition by not being "officially" rescued and recognized as one of the Oceanic Six. Bottom line, I think there are four of the Six still unknown rather than three.
• Depending on who's doing the rescuing and orchestrating the cover-up (of who's survived on- and off-island), Oceanic might really be unaware that more than six survived. Thus, unlike some, I'm not convinced that the Oceanic lawyer who visited Hurley is a complete fraud (i.e., not working for Oceanic in any capacity). If Oceanic is not a party to the conspiracy but got an inkling that something was not right, presumably they'd want to dig deeper, starting with the Oceanic Six.
• Regarding the cover-up, I take it as a given that there is one, even if it is only amongst the official survivors at the behest of some third party. We've seen enough groups in opposition (e.g., Penny Widmore versus her family, the Hanso groups versus (possibly) Widmore and/or Paik, Dharma versus the Others, etc.) to provide some credible off-island conflict to prompt a cover-up once some (but likely far fewer than all) survivors are "rescued" by one or another faction. Hurley's extreme caution over something as inconsequential as acknowledging that he met Ana Lucia and Jack's transparent concern that Hurley would "tell" their secrets points to a conspiracy of silence among those off-island about the then-current situation on-island.
• It was Christian Shepherd in Jacob's rocking chair. I have no idea whose eye that was; it was probably Jacob's, but was certainly not Locke's (different color) or Mikhail's (confirmed dead in the last official podcast).
• Hurley is now the second island resident (and first human!) other than Jack to see Christian on-island. Recall that in the final mini-episode before the start of this season, Christian had a heart-to-heart with Vincent the dog, telling him that Jack would waken soon and he (Vincent) needed to lead Jack back to the crash to help the survivors.
• I thought the vision of Charlie in the interrogation room was an odd one. It was obviously supposed to resonate with the viewers who saw his final moments, but in-story only Desmond saw Charlie that way. While it's probable that at some point Desmond described the scene to Hurley in some detail (and Hurley's mind ran with it from there), I found the scene distracting because of that discontinuity.

Veni Vidi Blawgi

Having spent last week enjoying a well-undeserved vacation and the past couple of days getting back up to speed with work and personal matters, I'm just now finishing the past couple of Blawg Reviews, Kevin Thompson's hobbit-centric Blawg Review #144 at his Cyberlaw Central blog and Dan Hull's Super Bowl-themed Blawg Review #145 at the What About Clients? blog. Both are outstanding, as one might expect with two legal blogging luminaries helming.

#144 is structured with tremendous artwork and prose from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and the Fellowship of the Ring series but does not focus on these gems to the best legal blogging of the penultimate week of January. Highlights include choice takes on the ongoing controversy surrounding one lawyer's attempt to trademark the seemingly-generic term "cyberlaw", a criminal lawyer out of his depth in a medical malpractice case, and contrasting approaches to massive financial frauds in the United States and France.

In #145, shellshocked Patriots fan Dan Hull gamely forges ahead to present a thoroughly entertaining review. I was particularly appreciative of this one because it so wonderfully guided me through a great week of legal blogging which passed me by the first time around as I spent several days with the family, blissfully sans computer. Highlights include becoming a culturally-literate and well-rounded listener, rubbing elbows with the notable names in the blawgosphere at the ALM LegalTech New York show, and contentiousness-bred professionalism.