TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (230)

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

Two Swedes expecting the golden beaches of the Italian island of Capri got a shock when tourist officials told them they were 650 km (400 miles) off course in the northern town of Carpi, after mistyping the name in their GPS.

"It's hard to understand how they managed it. I mean, Capri is an island," said Giovanni Medici, a spokesman for Carpi regional government, told Reuters Tuesday. "It's the first time something like this has happened."

The middle-aged couple, who were not identified, only discovered their error when they asked staff in the local tourist office Saturday how to drive to the island's famous "Blue Grotto."

"They were surprised, but not angry," Medici said. "They got back in the car and started driving south."

The picturesque island of Capri, famed as a romantic holiday destination, lies in the Gulf of Naples in southern Italy and has been a resort since Roman times.

Carpi is a busy industrial town in the province of Emilia Romagna, at the other end of Italy.

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TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (229)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of The Telegraph (from Monday, July 20; link good at time of posting):

Bosses at Knowsley Safari Park are warning motorists to beware of the baboons, after the animals learned how to open rooftop luggage and began stealing items such as underwear after helping themselves to the contents.

The monkeys - who are known for tearing off the odd windscreen wiper or wing mirror - have been causing havoc at the park after learning how to crack open the rooftop luggage boxes of visitors passing through their jungle enclosure.

Dozens have been targeting cars carrying the boxes before pouncing and leaving the unsuspecting families to watch helplessly as the monkeys tear open their cases and scamper off with their clothes and underwear.

. . . .

Safari Park General Manager, David Ross, said, “When the first luggage box was broken into we didn’t really take an awful lot of notice - we just thought it was a one-off incident with a faulty box or lock.

“However, when the problem kept happening, it quickly became clear that the baboons had acquired an unfortunate new skill.

. . . .

“Let’s face it, nobody wants to see a baboon running up a tree with their underwear.

“For this reason, we now issue a warning to all visitors with luggage boxes as a matter of course.

[Previous TGIS]

Unsilent Partners (3)

This week at Unsilent Partners, Mike Semple Piggot and I will address topics involving the Supreme Court of the United States and the brand-spanking-new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom. My essay, focusing on the SCOTUS nomination and confirmation process, is available now. Mike has posted a podcast with Carl Gardner in which they discuss the UK Supreme Court and other legal topics; his response essay will be posted over the weekend and a podcast with Lord Falconer, discussing both last weeks topic, assisted suicide, and this week's topic, will be available early next week. Please take a moment to read, listen, and comment.

Let's Get Complex

Life is complex; litigation is complex; this week at least, Blawg Review is complex. If you've not yet taken a look at Blawg Review #221, hosted this week by H. Scott Leviant at The Complex Litigator blog. Leviant is generous in his praise for the carnival's recent hosts and his effort acquits him quite well, measuring up to those hosts' high standards. This is a beautifully-written and highly readable Blawg Review and one of my favorites this year. Highlights include addressing France's hamster issues, arguing the Constitutionality of punitive damages in class action suits, and considering the Arab-Israeli Conflict as a real estate transaction. Next week's edition will be hosted by Duncan Bucknell at his IP Think Tank blog.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (228)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of the Associated Press (from Thursday, July 16; link good at time of posting):

Lincoln [Nebraska] police arrested a man who they said made up a story about being robbed to explain why he was walking around a city park naked. Police spokeswoman Katie Flood said the man was arrested and jailed Wednesday night on suspicion of indecent exposure and making a false statement to police.

Police found the man naked in a southwest Lincoln city park on Monday. He told police a man with a gun tried to rob him, but he did not have any money, so the robber took his clothes.

Flood said the man really took off his clothes because he was hot. He walked around naked for about an hour, but afterward, he couldn't find his clothes.

[Previous TGIS]

Unsilent Partners (2)

Mike Semple Piggot has the lead essay at this week's Unsilent Partners; my response will be posted tomorrow morning. This time around, our topic is assisted suicide, prompted by Lord Falconer's recent proposal to amend the UK's suicide laws to prevent prosecution of those who accompany friends and relatives who've chosen to end their lives abroad. Although Falconer's amendment was defeated in the House of Lords, the topic will remain front-and-center, owing to the suicides of Sir Edward Downes and his wife at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland this week. We'll address existing laws in the UK and US and add our own thoughts about this difficult issue. Shortly, at his Charon QC site, Mike will interview Lord Falconer about his efforts. As always, your comments are very welcome at the Unsilent Partners site or via e-mail to either Mike (mike at unsilentpartners dot com) or myself (colin at unsilentpartners dot com).

UPDATE: My response is now posted, appended to Mike's earlier essay. Comment away!

There's No School Like Old School

Walter Olson's decade-old Overlawyered blog is, by most accounts, the original legal blog and is thus the forebear of not just Blawg Review but each and every blog collected in its weekly posts. It's fitting, then, to have Olson host Blawg Review #220 this week, marking his second go-around with hosting duties. This edition of the carnival of legal blogging is wide-ranging and highly-readable. Amongst the topics addressed are mobility during patriotic musical interludes at Yankee Stadium, unpersuasive administration spin on Judge Sotomayor's past professional practice, and Papal concern about intellectual property restrictions. H. Scott Leviant will host Blawg Review #221 at The Complex Litigator next Monday.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (227)

This week's joy in the misfortune of others comes courtesy of Yahoo! Rivals.com (from Wednesday, July 8; link good at time of posting):

It was assumed he was called "King James" because he reigns on the basketball court. But maybe LeBron James earned that nickname due to his tyrannical ways (in dealing with embarrassment).

On Monday, Jordan Crawford, a sophomore at Xavier (by way of Indiana), reportedly dunked on LeBron during a pick-up game at the LeBron James Skills Academy. Gary Parrish of CBSSports.com wrote that one high school player said, "it was bad" . . . .

LeBron must have agreed, because he had Nike officials confiscate the two videos that were taken of the dunk. (Parrish blames Nike, but reading between the lines it seems like the censorship was orchestrated by LeBron himself.)

. . . .

The Crawford dunk would have been a temporary embarrassment for LeBron. Let's say the video was put on YouTube. It blows up for a bit, dominates blogs for 36 hours, everyone has a good chuckle and then it's forgotten about.

But by censoring the tape, LeBron turns the dunk into a legend. On video, it's just a dunk. Without video, the jam can reach mythic proportions. Because nobody can see it, the story of the dunk will grow in stature with each telling. Today, it was a simple two-handed slam. In a few days, it will be a 360-degree windmill. By the time Crawford makes his Xavier debut in October, he will have jumped off LeBron's shoulders, flipped in the air, slammed the ball home with his left pinkie and then handed LeBron $3.99 for his dry cleaning.

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Gmail Finally Walks Down the Aisle

Back in April 2005, I wrote a post called "Always a Beta, Never a Bride" which described the semi-permanent "beta" labels Google associates with many of its products. Gmail was a notable example, having been in beta at that point for a year (since April 2004).

Well folks, it's a beta no more, as of this morning. It's been widely discussed by technology blogs that Google is making this change to Gmail and to its other Google Apps products to make them more palatable to businesses. Okey-doke. Whatever. I'm just happy that I lived long enough to see this day.

Oddly, the Gmail product team has created a setting whereby users can revert the logo back to its old beta appearance. I suspect, however, that the only users who are that nostalgic for Gmail in beta are on the Gmail product team. Regardless, congratulations to them; I was a happy Gmail user when it was in beta and I'll continue to be a happy Gmail user from this point onward (without the beta logo setting, thanks very much).

Unsilent Partners

I'm pleased that Mike Semple Piggot, of Charon QC and Insite Law Magazine fame, has agreed to work together with me on a new project, Unsilent Partners. At Unsilent Partners, he and I will discuss legal, current, and other topics of interest to US and UK audiences, usually focusing on one topic per week.

The first entry is now up. In it, I discuss the 150-year sentence imposed on fallen financier Bernard Madoff:

It might be best to start this response with a few numbers. Convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff is a spry seventy-one years young. He has just been sentenced to 150 years in a federal prison. Although our federal prisons do not offer parole as such, Señor Swindle is eligible for a sentence reduction of fifteen percent if he behaves himself. Essentially, if he doesn't riot, shiv anyone, or mix colors and whites in the prison laundry, he'll save himself twenty-three years in the funhouse. Thus, if he's patient, he'll be a free man sometime around his 198th birthday.

Will he make it out in time to celebrate his bicentennial? According to the CIA's World Factbook, the average life expectancy for an adult American man is approximately 75.65 years. Many pessimists have seized on this tidbit of information and concluded that Madoff's sentence means that he will never live to be released from prison. It's not like the CIA has ever been wrong about anything before, right? It should be noted, however, that these life expectancy statistics are for an average man and, as Judge Denny Chin noted in his sentencing remarks, Madoff is an extraordinary person. Let's dig a bit deeper and consider survival probability statistics as well. According to these numbers, it seems that as an American man aged seventy-one years, Madoff has a 46.7% chance of seeing his eightieth birthday and a 16.0% chance of making it to ninety. Most importantly, though, he has a 1.5% chance of living beyond 100 years old. Scoff if you will, but I think a 1.5% chance of making it to one's 198th birthday is nothing to sneeze at.

Assuming for purposes of our discussion that Judge Chin does not share my optimistic nature and expects that Madoff will not survive his sentence, what might have prompted his decision?

Please click through for, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. Mike will soon post his response and we both look forward to seeing your comments.

UPDATE: Mike's response is appended to my essay. He raises some good questions and I'll respond in the next day or so. Add your comments or feel free to e-mail either Mike (mikesp at unsilentpartners dot com) or me (colin at unsilentpartners dot com) with your thoughts.

Everything Old Is News Again

From the beginning, Blawg Review has encouraged its hosts to showcase their own professional and personal interests, to give some color and flavor to their posts. Some of the more notable and memorable posts in Blawg Review's long (by blogging standards) history have been idiosyncratic ones, personal in the most charming sense. So it is with this week's Blawg Review #219, hosted by Cathy Gellis at her Statements of Interest blog.

I had the pleasure of meeting Cathy several years ago at one of Professor Eric Goldman's meet-ups of Bay Area legal bloggers; at subsequent meet-ups and on Twitter, we've had a chance to talk some more and strengthen that casual acquaintance. One thing you learn very quickly about Cathy is that she is moderately fond of Huey Lewis and the News. As the continuum of Huey Lewis knowledge amongst my other friends runs from "Who?" to "I think I remember him," to "I once owned one of his cassettes," I can say without much fear of contradiction that she's by far the most dedicated Huey Lewis fan I know. She may be the most dedicated Huey Lewis fan he knows.

That dedication is on display in this week's lengthy Blawg Review, along with the best legal blogging of the past week. Highlights include posts from News namesakes (Bill, Sean, Mario, Chris, and Johnny, but it seems that there are no legal bloggers named Huey), posts about maintaining eligibility for Medicaid and dealing with the unpleasantness that is health coverage, and a post contemplating that life may be better after a big law firm lay-off.

Tune in next week when Walter Olson will host Blawg Review #220 at his venerable Overlawyered blog and detail his abiding love for 80s hair bands.

TGIS: Thank God It's Schadenfreude! (226)

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

The sheriff of Oregon's most populous county has flunked his police certification course.

A passing score is an average of 75 on three written tests; Multnomah County Sheriff Bob Skipper got a 66, said Eriks Gabliks, deputy director of the state agency that certifies police officers.

Skipper, 70, will get another shot at the course in late August. If he fails a second time, he'll have to go through a 16-week cadet training program he had been trying to avoid.

. . . .

Skipper tried to get a waiver allowing him to take shorter refresher courses. When that failed, it appeared Skipper would have to head to the Salem academy to become perhaps the oldest police cadet in state history.

But the state Legislature rescued him last month, with an amendment narrowly tailored to Skipper's qualifications. The amendment allows the certification of a sheriff who has served at least 25 years as a police officer in Oregon, retired from law enforcement under honorable conditions, held state executive-level certification, served as elected sheriff for at least four years and is elected in a county where the sheriff's chief role is as an administrator.

But that waiver only applies if Skipper passes the written tests. Skipper said Wednesday he did not adequately prepare. "It's just a matter of me dropping the ball," he told The Oregonian.

Gabliks said about 40 people take the course each year, and Skipper is one of only a handful of people he can remember failing.

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