Solicitors

Local ADT Vendor
123 Main Street
Quartz Hill CA 93536

Dear Local Vendor:

On the evening of June 28, 2010, at 9:00 p.m. and after dark, two young men wearing ADT golf shirts rang the doorbell of my home, and began a sales pitch with a question containing scare words and loaded terms about home invasions, burglaries, and medical emergencies. Perhaps your salesmen did not know this, but they woke up my wife who had already gone to sleep, and disturbed my peace.

The salesman apparently did not listen to or did not care about my response, because he immediately launched into a fast-talking sales pitch concerning a free installation as long as I agreed to advertise your company on my front lawn. He gave the distinct impression of being unwilling to take “no” for an answer. Having encountered people trained in hard sell techniques before, I knew that unless I interrupted him and firmly ended the sales call, I would be standing there all night listening to a sales pitch while insects flew into my house through the open door or asked to invite two total strangers into my home after dark – the very opposite sort of feeling that a “security” company ought to be engendering in its customers. I therefore stated unequivocally that I was uninterested in his product and closed the door.

A moment later, I heard through the door one of them taunting me with the phrase “Good luck!” Perhaps your salesman felt insulted and believed himself to be returning rude treatment in kind. While I have little concern for the salesman's opinion of me one way or the other, perhaps this is not the sort of thing you want people representing your company to be doing. I might add that if your salesman lacks the emotional steel to handle someone closing a door in his face while refusing to buy his product without having to vent his hurt feelings, chances are good that he is in the wrong line of work.

In fact, my greatest security concern about home security is burglary perpetrated by people who case out my home while posing as door-to-door salesmen. The fact that these two men came after dark, unannounced, and seemed interested in entering my house while I was apparently alone, only enhanced my concerns. The fact that a “hard sales” pitch was used, engineered to simultaneously manipulate my emotions and deny me the effective opportunity to make my own decisions, added insult to the irritation. This has left me with a lingering distaste for the entire experience, one which I intend to share with my professional colleagues.

I make it a practice to never, ever, buy anything from any company that uses door-to-door solicitation or “hard sales” techniques. These salesman did both. Therefore, I will not do business with your company, now or in the future. In the event that we decide to purchase a home security system in the future, we will contact one of your competitors -- directly.

I thought you might like to know the foregoing so that you could understand how you had lost at least one customer and possibly more.

Sincerely,
/s/
Transplanted Lawyer

Here's a reason people hate cops

So I'm appearing this morning in court here in Stinking Bakersfield.  No one at all is in line for the security screen behind me. There are two security guards and a Kern County sheriff's deputy. I put my case file, phone, pens, wallet, and keys through the X-ray and go through the metal detector.  Which beeps, as I knew it would, since I am wearing suspenders.
"I'm sorry sir, but you'll have to take off your suspenders. " says the security guard.
"Kind of a pain to do that, don't you think?" I say back.
"What? You just unsnap them."
"No, mine are the button kind." I show him. "Can't you use the wand?"
"You'll have to ask the deputy. He's got the wand."
So I turn to the deputy.  "It's just suspenders. Can you wand me?"
"I'm not going to wand you just because you don't want to take off your suspenders," says the deputy, who then resumed his bored pacing.
So, I had to undo my suspenders right there in the entrance to the courthouse.  As I struggled out of them, a family of four was made to wait behind me while I reached around my ass to undo the buttons there.
Five people were inconvenienced and one of them ass humiliated and almost made late to court, because one cop couldn't be bothered to use a tool HE WAS ALREADY HOLDING IN HIS HAND and which would have taken ten seconds to do.
I handled the appearance and lunch with the clients afterwards fine. But I was a seething cauldron of rage underneath it all, let me tell you.
Sent from my phone.

Photographic Discipline

I saw myself in a photograph yesterday. This led to my decision to eat three-quarters of a salad for lunch today, and to tell myself quite falsely that I didn't really want the pasta quattro formaggi. This exercise of discipline was mitigated somewhat by my request to have anchovies on the salad. I probably didn't need an entire gram of sodium on top of the Caesar dressing.

Still, I suppose that looking at photographs of myself more often will prod me to make at least better dietary choices, even if it is not so much fun from a self-esteem point of view.

Divorce Court

While waiting to get called back at my doctor's office I was treated to some afternoon television:  Divorce Court. 

Man, was it bad. The judge was mugging for the camera whenever the shot was on her, and the bailiff wasn't much better. Everything was exaggerated to almost comic levels. The "litigants " were ill behaved and had deeply unappealing things to say. Domestic violence (at a somewhat petty level, on the order of pushing and shoving) came out in "testimony" about disputes over money, and neither party seemed able to restrain themselves from interrupting the other. They both looked like liars and there was no way to figure out which of them (if either) was telling anything with a passing resemblance to the truth. The judge did what I would have done -- she said "A pox on both your houses and get the hell out of here."

Now, I realize that a daytime TV show has as much resemblance to real court as a pickup truck resembles chop suey. It's the amazingly low quality of the programming that struck me. How can people watch this dreck at all? And if this is what they think real courts are like, it's no wonder they act like kindergartners when they show up for the real thing.

As for the show itself, let me sum up by saying that I felt noticeably stupider for having watched it than I had felt before.

Amazing Intertube Rumor Goodness

Come on.  No one should have believed, even for a second, that 55-year-old Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts was going to resign.  While a Democrat is in the White House.  What a silly rumor.

Even if you had, you would have had to have considered the source of this "scoop" -- radaronline.com, a celebrity gossip website that gossips mainly about semi-celebrities of the level of Jon and Kate Gosselin, Levi Johnston, and "contestants" on the Bachelor.  Radaronline appears to tailor its content at an audience that has little patience for the rarefied intellectual content of People Magazine.

But it turns out that a law professor at Georgetown Law School, Peter Tague, was making a point about how it often turns out that police act on false tips from unreliable informants.  So Prof. Tague began his class this morning at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time, by telling his class that he had it on very good authority that Chief Justice Roberts was having health issues and would step down.  And then by 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, Tague let his students in on the gag -- he'd said something he knew wasn't true because he wanted to see if anyone would believe him.

Well, in the half hour between when Tague created the rumor and when he revealed it to be totally untrue, some of his students immediately began to twitter and blog about it. Radaronline.com picked this up very quickly, and was widely mocked for it even before the news of the falsity of the rumor spread (somewhat more slowly, it seems, than the original rumor itself).

So what we have here is a rather nice example of the power of rumor and news -- it spreads nearly instantly in today's ultra-wired, ultra-communicative environment.  There is functionally no fact-checking going on before somebody republishes a story because the rewards for breaking a story are so high that many are willing to set caution aside in the competitive rush to be The First.  As a result, a substantial part of the electronic media is working with no filters and no critical thinking going on at all.

Such are the perils of free speech and instant media, I suppose -- but it would be nice if people would, you know, think every once in a while.  Props to David Lat at Above the Law for tracing the rumor all the way back to its source.

The Prayerful Crossword (Updated)

What is the deal with the daily crossword puzzle in the Fish Wrapper?  It has had a smattering of clues and answers recently that reflect the author's religious biases.  It's as though the editor is consciously favoring religious players:

September 18, 45-Across:  You won't find one in a foxhole.  "ATHEIST".  (Bool-shit.)

October 14, 22-Down:  Lord's Prayer words following "Thy will be done".  "ONEARTH".  (This would be tough for Jewish or Muslim players, too.)

October 20, 3-Down:  Ancestors in Darwin's theory.  "APEMAN".  (No, they're not.)

October 26, 17-Across:  Hymn whose title follows the line, "When I die, Hallelujiah, by and by".  "ILLFLYAWAY".  (Having never heard that hymn, I had a great deal of difficulty with this clue.)

October 27, 3-Down:  "Now ___ me down..." "ILAY".  (A further gripe here -- Christian parents of many stripes morbidly force their children to recite, which will either terrify them into not being able to sleep or to inure them to reciting the words of a prayer without really thinking about what they're saying, neither of which sound like what they really want.)

Point is, the authors are drawing on Christianity prayer and thinking to put together their clues.  October 20 didn't have to misrepresent evolution, to get "APEMAN" you could have referenced Tarzan or Planet of the Apes.  And September 18's clue is downright offensive to the many non-theistic members of the military who serve honorably and bravely.

UPDATES:  October 29, 10-Down:  "Heavenly Altar."  "ARA".  (Turns out this word has pagan roots.  But I don't worship Zeus, either.)

November 1, 22-Across: "___ Mater (Hymn)"  "STABAT".

My Ongoing Gripe About Online Yellow Pages

I know perfectly well that there is an Eye Exam 2000 in the mall in Palmdale, and that's where I want to go to get my eyes checked out this weekend because I have had this sore on my eye for about four weeks now. So I figure I'll call them up, make an appointment, and go.

Now, Eye Exam 2000 couldn't possibly have a frickin' website to tell me what their frickin' phone number is so I can make a frickin' appointment to go see them and give them my frickin' money. Oh, no. A Google search points me to an Eye Exam 2000 franchise in frickin' Sun Valley, Idaho. They must be using the "Maneuver X" method of web presence advertising -- make your customer go on a frickin' internet-wide scavenger hunt armed only with clues left in rhyming riddles written in archaic languages in order to find the remotest shred of information that you even frickin' exist, and that way once your customer does find you, you'll have the most loyal frickin' customer in the whole frickin' world.

You may only get one customer this way as opposed to many customers, but hey, every sales approach has its downside.

So I go to yellowpages.com and look for optometrists in Palmdale, California. Bear in mind that while the Antelope Valley certainly isn't as big a metropole as Los Angeles, I nevertheless do live in a community of more than 400,000 people within a ten-mile radius, with its own minor-league baseball team, and more to the point, not one but two branches of the particular business I'm looking for. This is suburbia, exurbia at worst. It's not the Australian outback.

The results of my search for optometrists in Palmdale, presented in the order given are as follows:

A generic link to the website for Pearle Vision Express. No address.
A generic to the website for Sears Optical. No address. (I happen to know that the Sears in the mall in Palmdale has no branch of Sears Optical.)
Optometrist #1, 28089 Smyth Dr Valencia, CA 91355.
Optometrist #2, 1032 N Hollywood Way Burbank, CA 91505.
Optometrist #3, 622 W DUARTE RD Arcadia, CA 91007.
Optometrist #4, 924 N Citrus Ave Covina, CA 91722.
Optometrist #5, 14147 Pipeline Ave Chino, CA 91710.
Optometrist #6, 1301 7th St Wasco, CA 93280.
(end page 1 of 1).

No hits at all in Palmdale. The nearest hit is more than forty miles away.

This is effin' useless. CostCo has an optometrist whose number I found in under two seconds, and I'll bet they're cheaper than the place in the mall anyway, as are the contact lenses they will sell me.

Eye Exam 2000, the difficulty I encountered in getting your phone number on the web has now cost you my business, which is going elsewhere.

Slip Day

I've been reasonably good about controlling portions and trying to do at least moderate physical exercise pretty much every day. Social events being what they are I've not done so well at reducing alcohol intake, but that hardly seems like something to complain about.

Maybe it had something to do with being startled awake by nightmares, which feels vaguely childish and humiliating. I don't remember what was so scary but apparently I cried out in my sleep loudly enough to wake up both dogs and both cats, and I had absolutely no desire to go back to sleep afterwards even though it was quarter after four in the morning.

Or, it might have had something to do with waiting around for two and a half hours to deal with an utterly meritless ex parte this morning by a pro per defendant -- who read his fourteen-page brief out loud as his oral argument, obviously not even understanding what he was saying.

And, it didn't help knowing that this dude is so rock stupid he's going to follow through on his threat to sue me despite having been sanctioned by the Court for the frivolity of his antics. Well, he'll find that is going to work out very badly for him if he does it. CCP § 425.16 -- I've never lost a motion yet, and I've never been awarded less than $20,000 in fees paid by my opponents for the privilege of having sued my client and lose right out of the starting gate.

Maybe it was waiting around for two hours while the understaffed file room in the courthouse retrieved documents from a new case for me on another matter. And missing lunch while I was doing it.

Maybe it was seeing a motion with an opposition filing deadline of tomorrow that was never calendared and realizing that only by the skin of my teeth had I avoided blowing another deadline in Kern County.

And, it's almost certainly related to knowing that there was enough work at the office that needed to be done today, that I wasn't going to be able to go home until after dark.

But whatever it was, by the time I got out to actually get some food (making myself late for a meeting with a prosepctive client in the process) I was in no mood for a disciplined meal consisting of raw vegetables and light soup. That would be a double cheeseburger, please, with onion rings.

I guess you could call it "slipping."

POSTSCRIPT, 9:30 PM: Four fingers of eighteen-year-old single-malt Scotch from Trader Joe's later (thirty bucks for that, are you reading this, Reynolds?) it is a little bit easier to relax.

Living The Dream

I ran into a buddy today at the courthouse. I asked him how he was doing, and he said, "Living the dream!" That was encouraging and uplifting. It made me feel happy for my friend and reminded me that he and I became lawyers to do what we're doing and it's a lot of fun to do. And, as I learned this weekend, it beats the hell out of chainsawing trees for a living.

Then today I had dinner with a very old friend, a guy I'd not really seen for nearly ten years. He asked how I was doing and I said "Things are pretty good." (I was more positive about the more specific "How's married life?" since I happen to enjoy my marriage a lot.) Upon driving home afterwards, I contemplated that my response to essentially the same question I'd asked my courthouse buddy was a good deal less enthusiastic.

I guess I'm not really living my dream, or I'd have had the same enthusiastic response my courthouse buddy gave me. I thought I was living the dream back when I first passed the bar and did Constitutional litigation. That dream turned out to have a big dark side. Then I thought I was living the dream when I had my own law firm. That dream turned out to have huge burdens associated with it. I might have been living the dream out in Tennessee, if there had only been enough steady income to keep us supported.

And for now, maintaining our current standard of living seems like enough of a challenge. Certainly, things are pleasant enough as it is -- a good job, challenging cases, a nice home, enough money to stay afloat. Don't get me wrong, Readers, I'm not complaining, not by the remotest stretch. But I can't really say if I'm living the dream or not; I don't know what that dream might be right now anyway. But I'm pretty sure this isn't really it.

To make it worse, I did a Google image search for "living the dream" and found out it's a Jonas Brothers song and a European soccer movie. Soccer, huh? Makes me think of David Beckham. He's living the dream.

Frustrating Debate

There are several problems I have with this so-called "debate."

First, it becomes obvious pretty early on that Hitchens and Blackwell are talking about two totally different things. Hitchens' point, which is 100% correct, is that the First Amendment, among a variety of other legal and historical documents and other traditions, prohibit the establishment of religion, even a generalized religion like Christianity or "Judeo-Christianity."* Blackwell, however, is talking about a more generalized social background, and he is more correct than not within the boundaries of his claim -- a claim that the Christian religion has informed and continues to inform the morals of a very large number of Americans -- including those Americans who, while not sharing the spiritual faith of Christianity, nevertheless look to Christian teachings as a source of moral guidance (which, with some exceptions, are generally a pretty good source of morals). Why is the moderator too dim to realize this and interject some, you know, moderation into the discussion to prevent them from unproductively talking past one another?

Second, Blackwell's debating style strikes me as unfair. He begins, almost right off the bat, by chastising Hitchens for interrupting him and not allowing him to make his point. So Hitchens backs off and gives Blackwell some time to finish his point. And then Blackwell proceeds to run off the mouth for nearly six solid minutes -- having established the rule that no one can interrupt anyone else (and enforcing that rule to his own advantage again) he proceeds to monopolize the conversation. It's not really a debate if you're the only one talking. Again, the moderator did nothing to control this.

Finally, Hitchens was obviously stone-cold sober. He didn't use the word "fuck" even one time. This is totally out of character for him and denies the viewing audience a taste of his real personality.


* The phrase "Judeo-Christian" irritates me today. Judaism and Christianity are different religions. Judaism is not "Christianity without the Messiah"; they are simply not the same thing. In the two thousand years since Christianity broke away from Judaism both religions have evolved and changed and gone through powerful and divergent experiences. Christianity became the official doctrine of multiple global hegemons, and Judaism became the cultural scapegoat of Europe. And, any attempt to amalgamate the two as coming from the same historical, cultural, and spiritual tradition requires including Islam as well, since all three religions trace back to the teachings and traditions of the patriarch Abraham. I don't notice any "Christian Nation" advocates making any attempt whatsoever to include Muslims in this tradition which they esteem so highly.

I've Had It

The word, people, is "probably."

P - R - O - B - A - B - L - Y

It means "favored by the laws of probability," or in simpler terms, "more likely than not."

The word has two "B"s in it. And only one "L."

It is neither spelled nor pronounced "prolly." Please never say this word out loud.

Argh!

Look It Up

Paul Campos at LGM bemoans people who, despite having Google at their fingertips, are seemingly unable to use that tool. This reminds me of something that happened at work a while back.

We tried to hire paralegals using skills testing. We plopped applicants down in front of a computer and gave them a skills test -- 1) paste a paragraph of text e-mail from an attorney into a complaint while preserving the formatting; 2) rename a .pdf file from something like "fax01193933.pdf" to something like "letter from Smith to Jones.pdf"; and 3) find a piece of information, such as the straight-line distance from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

Out of about twenty people who all claimed to have superior computer skills, only one was able to see that the e-mail was written in a different font than the complaint. This one also knew how to rename a file, but did not know how to do it in the way that any one had thought. None even bothered to open up a web browser to even search for the requested information.

The other lawyers and I sat around, flabbergasted at so many apparently qualified people unable to complete what seemed to the rest of us to be such simple tasks. When I complained to The Wife about this, she suggested that maybe the reason no one bothered to look up the information on the internet was that it might have felt like "cheating." A good thought, but I don't think that was what was going on, and Prof. Campos' experience dovetails into my cynicism.

Here's my question to you Readers: We plopped our applicants down in front of computers and tasked them with this instruction: "Find the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco." No one, including people with college degrees, was able to accomplish this task. Now had our instruction on the skills test been "Use the internet to find the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco," would we have got any better results than we did?

Sometimes Ignoring A Comments Thread Is The Wiser Choice Of Action

I thought to comment on an American plane shooting down an Iranian drone over Iraq. But then I read the comments thread on the article. After about twelve comments, I felt a whole lot dumber than I felt when I started. As is so often the case with such web-based phenomena, XKCD got there first:
I'm glad that when someone chooses to comment here, they generally have something intelligent to say. I'd much rather have fewer, but better, comments than a lot of comments that are as totally brainless as this article in Wired got.

I'm Going To Say This One Time

Do not set your webpage to autostart any audio of any kind at any volume.

EVER!

Capisce?

Invasion Of The Mealworms

We've seen dozens of creepy little tan-colored worm looking things in the house. Our best guess is that they are mealworms. We have no idea how they got in the house. The pets, of course, are all oblivious to them. Rather than deal with an obviously an intolerable situation, we have summoned the experts to distribute poison.

The exterminator will be here Tuesday. In the meantime, we've evacuated all the non-canned food from the cupboards into the fridge and freezer, where we are instructed that it must sit for three days to let any of the nasty little things in them die. The exterminator told me today that mealworms, like most bugs, do not tolerate cold well and will die when exposed to prolonged cold temperatures. If they are mealworms, though, they're pretty hardy and will survive being at refrigerator temperatures for up to 72 hours. Who knew?

So Tuesday, we get to inspect all the chilled flour and pasta before re-stocking it in the pantry where it belongs. Turns out, you have a lot more room in your refrigerator than you think when you take everything out, get rid of the old stuff you forget about and will never use, and re-stock it with things that have flat surfaces.

In the meantime, it's a lot of runs out for take-out burritos because we can't be sure what food has mealworms in it or not until after the cool-them-out treatment is done.

Softened Water

A lot of places that I have traveled, especially east of the Mississippi, have a fetish about softening their water. Is the manganese content of water here in lovely Waukesha really so high that this is necessary?

I hate softened water. It feels slick and soapy. You can never tell when you've got the soap off of your hands.

If your water is not softened, that means that once a year, you've got to scrub down your shower with Lime-A-Way. Is that so hard?

For My Fellow Passenger

This is a special shout-out to the guy who sat in seat 32B on United Flight 132 from San Francisco to Chicago O'Hare on September 17, 2008. You know who you are. Thanks to United Airlines' policy of overbooking every flight, our flight was overbooked. That means that there's going to be someone sitting behind you who has to live with your behavior.

I know that you said you "had" to have you seat fully reclined for the whole flight so you could read "Hot Rod" magazine. After all, it's a cramped ride. Two things to keep in mind.

All those people working on their laptop computers? I wasn't one of them. Your seat reclined to the point that I had to hold the computer at a ridiculous angle, balancing it on my nipples and the ever-shifting back of your seat. Since a laptop computer requires that the monitor be opened to at least a right angle, and preferably an oblique angle, for the screen to be visible, you denied me the ability to get any work done. In my case, that would have been writing a final exam for my business law class, but that's hardly the point.

All those people reading books? Nope, not me, either. Your insistence on fully-reclining the seat required me to go through the entire flight with your seat back in my face. This left me a small triangle of personal space with about two inches between my nose and the back of your head.

That movie you watched? I hope you enjoyed it. I did not have the opportunity to watch a movie, myself. Since your seat back was all the way down, I couldn't see a thing on my monitor.

Oh, and ease the seat back next time. When you threw it back with all your force, to its fully-reclined position, the instant you heard a "beep" after takeoff, you managed to bounce the magazine I was reading on its spine with enough power that it bonked me in the nose.

But all I really wanted was as much space as nearly every other passenger on the airplane had to actually do something during the flight. I say "nearly" every other passenger because somehow, my wife (who was sitting across the aisle and not next to me, thanks for that, United) also got the only other guy on the 140-seat flight who managed to find the "11" setting on the recline button.

Me, I would have appreciated a glance back, like I gave to the passenger behind me, to see if everything was good. I wasn't going to tell you not to recline. Just leave me enough room to open up the laptop.

If I seemed a little bit cranky, well, blame United Airlines for that. I had originally tried to book a flight that left my home town at 9:00 a.m. But they rescheduled it for 6:00 a.m. which meant my wife and I had to get up at three in the morning, and that's a little earlier than we're used to. They get to change the time of the flight because they own the plane and I don't. (If I wanted to reschedule the flight, I would have to pay $700 in fees.) Now, that's not on you, but it is the sort of thing you have to be prepared to deal with on an airplane flight.

And the way you deal with that is to have the courtesy to not throw your seat back into someone else's face for two and a half hours.

Weepy Wife

The Wife asked me the other day "Do you like that I'm not all weepy, that I don't break down and cry all the time? Because it seems like a lot of women at work and a lot of my friends break down and cry at the least little thing."

"Yes! Oh, yes, yes, yes. I hate it when women cry. There's nothing the man can do but stand there and look stupid while she cries and the whole thing is a huge waste of time, energy, and emotion."

I related to her a story about a girlfriend I had who broke down in tears on me because I'd left the front door to my apartment unlocked while I was doing a load of laundry down the hall. She had come over to visit me that afternoon and found the front door to my place open, and I spent the next forty-five minutes trying to figure out why she was crying tears of rage and fear the entire time.

"Well, the women say they feel better after they cry."

"Yeah; people feel better after they vomit, too. That doesn't mean it's the sort of thing you should be doing routinely." This made The Wife laugh. She wondered how her friends found the energy to cry so much; she finds it exhausting to do, as do I, and the crying doesn't seem to do much of anything.

Then she asked me, "Why haven't you ever mentioned this before?"

"I was afraid you'd start to get all weepy on me when you realized how helpless it made me!" The Wife absolutely exploded in laughter at this. But it was kind of the truth. When a woman cries, there is nothing the man can do that can make it better. If he asks what's wrong, that's bad because he should already know. Trying to fix the problem (assuming he knows what it is, which he often doesn't) won't help because the woman would rather have emotional validation than a solution. Holding her may not work because chances are good that she'd angry at him or upset with him so the last thing she wants is emotional intimacy with him. So it's a complete no-win situation for the man.

One of the things I like best about The Wife is that she doesn't get all weepy all the time. If I want to experience a woman being all weepy, I'll play a Sarah McLachlan CD. Otherwise, there are surely better things I have to do than stand around impotently while The Wife cries about some triviality. Fortunately for me, she has better things to do than cry impotently about some triviality, also.

Ladies, I advise you to keep the crying in check. Gentlemen, I advise you to thank the ladies in your life for keeping the crying in check. It's worth it.

Apostrophes

I spend a lot of my day reading over evidence. Letters, memos, e-mail, things like that. So I see how a wide range of people write, in settings both formal and candid. And for some reason, a large number of people seem to actively resist the correct use of apostrophes.

Misapostrophication is a sin of language, it irritates me like head lice, and it needs to be stamped out. Apostrophes are not that difficult. ("Apostrophes" are punctuation marks, not the name of a Greek philosopher.) Here are the rules, and there are only two of them.

Rule One: Possessives and Plurals

This rule applies only to nouns. Remember the schoolhouse rock song: “A noun is a person, place or thing.”

A plural is the word you use when there is more than one of something. Plurals do not use apostrophes. Generally, you will add the letter “s” to the regular form of a word to indicate that it is plural. “Lawyer” becomes “Lawyers.” “Airplane” becomes “Airplanes.” “Hallucinogen” becomes “Hallucinogens.” There are a large number of unusual forms of plural words – “Person” becomes “People,” for instance, or “Ox” becomes “Oxen.” But mostly, just add an “s,” don’t use the apostrophe, and you’re good to go with a plural. Generally, non-"s" type plurals are animals of one kind or another.

A possessive is something that belongs to something else. “The blue car is Omar’s.” That sentence identifies the car (the blue car) and it attributes ownership (to Omar). To show that one noun in a sentence owns another noun, add the “s” with an apostrophe.

When ownership becomes collective or if the singular form of a word naturally ends in an "s", you switch the "s" and the apostrophe. Assume that our subject is a pack of wild hyenas. “The hyenas’ laughter could be heard miles away.” Notice how the singular – “hyena” – becomes pluralized. Because we’re talking about more than one hyena, the word is “hyenas.” Collectively, the hyenas are the ones whose laughter we are discussing; it’s not just the laughter of a single hyena but rather the laughter of all of them together. So you put the apostrophe after the “s” in that case, indicating the use of a plural possessive.

Same thing if the singular form of the word ends in "s," usually in the case of someone's name -- for instance, "I do not find Prince Charles' wife very attractive." Note the apostrophe after the "s" in "Charles."

Got it? Good. Go on.

Rule Two: Contractions

This rule generally applies only to verbs and nouns used together.

When you have a verb and a noun that you wish to use informally, you can contract them together to create a shorter, easier-to-say word. This is written by smashing the two words together, and using the apostrophe to show what parts of the separate words have been deleted. Thus: “They have” = “They’ve”. “Let us” = “Let’s”. “It is” = “It’s”. “Do not” = “Don’t”.

Simple as that.

Example:

Now let’s see these rules in action. Consider this famous exchange from the Joseph Heller novel, Catch-22:

“What the hell kind of a name is Major Major?”

“Well, it’s Major Major’s name, sir.”

Here, two apostrophes are used in ex-PFC Wintergreen’s response to Colonel Cathcart’s question. “It’s” is a contraction for “it is”. “Major Major’s” indicates that Major Major owns the name. Expand the sentence and it becomes:

“Well, it is the name of Major Major, sir.”

There now, don't you see? It’s as simple as that.

The apostrophe -- a short, vertical line that sometimes curves depending on the font you've selected. Use it well. Use it correctly.

Scenes From The Courthouse

You get a lot of "special" people who show up at the courthouse.

Take this guy. He needed a place to park. The guy who could have parked in the spot next to him did not have that need. Never mind that the parking lot fills up to overflow capacity every day, and today I had to drive across the street, in the desert, to park my car to make it to my hearing on time. That doesn't matter. This guy is special. His doors swing really wide, you know. So he needs two parking spaces, and that means he deserves two parking spaces. Congratulations, you're special, holder of California license plate number 5LUJ579!

As Mr. 5LUJ579 demonstrates, special people are entitled to special treatment and the rules don't apply to them. Never mind that the court is all about the rules applying to everyone. These people are "special" because they have needs that apparently no one else does and which apparently justify all sorts of wrongful conduct.

They need a place to live, and so their need apparently excuses them from the obligation to pay their rent. That's not to say I'm unsympathetic to people who are down and out on their luck; I've been there myself. But at a certain point, a landlord has to pull the plug and can no longer afford to support someone else's problem. The appropriate response to that is resignation, not resentment.

They need money. So it's okay to shake down people for all manner of imagined wrongs and slights. I was sued in small claims court recently for "embezzlement" by someone I evicted over a year ago. She could not defend the lawsuit because she was in prison at the time. She, um, hadn't paid the rent, what with being in prison and all. So now, having been released and found her apartment re-rented to another person and her stuff gone, of course she sues the lawyer who handled the eviction for -- embezzlement. I won, but I had to take good time out of my day to go and defend myself, which is a cost to my firm.

Now, they're not "special" as in they are wonderful snowflakes, beautiful to behold, unique in their creation, and whose existence is delightful to contemplate. Indeed, in terms of physical beauty an attractive specimen is relatively rare, at least in the courthouse. Well-groomed is about all you can hope for.

Courthouse "customers" are only like snowflakes in their tedious awfulness when placed together in great numbers and close proximity to one another -- at that point, snowflakes become accumulated snow, which is both a great inconvenience and often a hazard.

Which is why I don't mind the weapons screen all that much -- even though every day there seems to be someone in line right ahead of me who has never been through a metal detector in their lives before, who doesn't realize that she is supposed to put her purse and other possessions in a plastic caddy to go through the x-ray machine, and when she does she doesn't realize that if she doesn't put the caddy on the conveyor belt it's never going through the screener, and who needs five trips through the metal detector to remove her earrings, then her belt, then her audaciously gaudy bling-bling rings, and then her shoes and finally who needs to wait while the security guard methodically examines every key and cigarette in her purse while my briefcase (preloaded with every metal object on my person) languishes in the bowels of the x-ray machine and I am rendered late for an appearance. That's what I mean by "special."

Nor are the courthouse's "customers" "special" in the euphemistic sense of possessing developmental impediments, although in that sense one might be getting closer. Consider the guys who I overheard in the hallway comparing notes on how frequently one could smoke pot before a court-ordered drug test and complaining that they weren't really carrying to sell, it was to pass out at a party. (In case you didn't know, that sort of thing is "sale," as the term is legally defined.)

Overhearing this conversation, I briefly wondered why they're getting tested for marijuana use at all since the stuff is for all intents and purposes legal in California. It must mean that these guys weren't smart enough to figure out how to get the medical scrip that would give them a pass, which means they're really not very smart at all, which in turn may well be related to the frequent pot use. That's special, too.

The regular staff who works at the courthouse are really good people. They must have patience longer than the Colorado River. The judges and most of the attorneys I work with are generally pleasant, smart, and reasonable. And like them, most days, I can handle all of the "specialness" to be found in this most special of all places to work.

But working in a court, can be kind of like working with the public in a retail setting. Only you've put a filter on the kind of people who show up -- you're filtering for the sorts of people who have (in 1 courtroom out of 22) violated traffic laws; (3/22) serious marital difficulties and custody disputes; and (1/22) don't pay their rent. You're also filtering for people who have managed to get disinterested law enforcement authorities to accuse them of and prosecute them for things like (2/22) domestic violence requiring both criminal prosecution and civil restraining orders, (3/22) petty theft, vandalism, or other low-level crimes of idiocy; (3/22) drug crimes; or (4/22) violent felonies like murder, ADW, and rape.

Special people, in other words.

You may notice that this is only eighteen courtrooms. That's because 4 of the 22 courtrooms in the local courthouse are vacant, owing to the fact that the county doesn't have enough money to build them out or staff them with judges, clerks, court reporters, and bailiffs. There are apparently too many strains on the budget subsidizing the rents of people who have no business renting 4,000-square foot McMansions with no jobs, and paying AFDC to "foster parents" who think that adopting more children is the best way available to generate a personal stream of income.

I've a friend who works in the dependency court -- that's where you go when the county wants to take your children away from you. That's got to be the most "special" category of judicial service consumer of all. I can't even imagine how she can do it, day in and day out. Because today, even the regular court was just a little too special for me.