unbillable hours

For Veteran's Day

Aside from the fact that one of my favorite things about Veteran's Day is Fed.R.Civ.P. 6(a) (on the calculation of time), I thought I'd give a little praise to some of our British allies.  Much is made here about our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen that are fighting, but it is worth giving thanks to those who have joined our cause.  My view is that there is no one better to do this than Rudyard Kipling, who writes of war and warriors with honesty and without a blind eye to war's horrors.  So, here's The Veterans.

I received the gift of two books from a close friend and his family during my recent illness. One of these, a compendium of legal quotations, has been particularly fun to leaf through for aphorisms to use in my upcoming appellate brief. I thought I'd share two with you, just to show the occasional beauty of legal writing:

"There is in many, if not in all men, a constant inward struggle between the principles of good and evil; and because a man has grossly fallen, and at the time of his fall added the guilt of hypocrisy to another sort of immorality, it is not necessary, therefore, to believe that his whole life has been false, or that all the good which he ever professed was insincere or unreal."

Roundell Palmer, Lord Chancellor, First Earl of Selborne, Symington v. Symington, L.R. 2 Sc. & D. 428 (1875).

"Justice is not a cloistered virtue: she must be allowed to suffer the scrutiny and respectful, even though outspoken, comments of ordinary men."

James Richard Atkin, First Baron of Aberdovey, Ambard v. Attorney General for Trinidad, A.C. 322, 335 (1936).

Both cited in Elizabeth Frost-Knappman & David S. Shrager, A Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Quotations (Barnes & Noble, 1998).

Should have had a frozen dinner instead

"This morning Mom and I had to resolve our stove problem. Wednesday night I was heating up a frozen pizza when the oven alarms beeped to say that the baking program had been cancelled and the self cleaning mode was starting up. It fired up to an amazing heat and then died taking the pizza with it.

This is why the BoSox won. The oven broke the curse. Remember - Ted Williams wanted to be cremated but he wound up frozen. The pizza was supposed to be frozen but wound up cremated. "

Soylent Content (Your source for all things related to Little Women)

This may be the funniest quote I've heard all week (not counting "does your job often require you to hang out in prisons?").

"Look, any fair-minded boy with a professionally bonded smile on his face and a Carpenters song in his head can be an optimist. Being a pessimist - now that requires faith in one's convictions, a negative capability that would make Keats stand on tiptoes and above all else, creativity." Dave Itzkoff, Lads: A Memoir of Manhood, quoted in David Carr, This Lad's Life: Write, Ogle. Rewrite, Ogle. Drink, Ogle. Repeat., N.Y. Times (Sept. 14, 2004) (link).

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt

Pops on Grooming

- - My old anthropology teacher once said that small talk and light banter probably replaced lice picking as social interaction as humans came to have less and less hair than our other hominid cousins. A few months ago it struck me that all those Quizilla/ "Which Character from Mildred Pierce Are You?" memes are just that - virtual banter/sublimated lice picking.

Pops, Hiatus Ahoy, The Two Hour Lunch (Sept. 12, 2004).