Miscellaneous

Posted on January 10, 2011

I think the best thing I saw while

Posted on January 06, 2011
I think the best thing I saw while the World Junior Hockey Championship was in town was the two guys walking up Chippewa at lunch time the other day. They were both wearing red Team Canada sweaters, and one of them was carrying a "two-four" of Labatts cans...

When UB President John Simpson

Posted on January 05, 2011
When UB President John Simpson announced he was stepping down at the beginning of the fall term it seemed to have caught most people utterly flat-footed. He-- or maybe he and his lieutenant, Scott Nostaja, or maybe Simpson, Nostaja and Jeremy M. Jacobs, Chairman of the UB Council, had a plan, sort of, but it was a half-baked plan, and they backed away from it...

Starting out you have to have a

Posted on January 04, 2011
Starting out you have to have a smart guy.  Sometimes it is a smart guy who is aware of a specific menace that is unknown to the rest of the world-- Nils Caulder, Professor X.  Sometimes its just a guy who is smart-- Reed Richards, for example, or Brainiac 5...

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"Forbidden Planet" is one of those

Posted on January 03, 2011
"Forbidden Planet" is one of those movies that'll stop me scrolling no matter where in the story I'm picking it up, and so it was last night-- we came in after the cook had negotiated the manufacture of the bourbon with Robbie the Robot, but before Robbie delivered...

David Paterson goes out the way

Posted on January 03, 2011
David Paterson goes out the way he came in: saying the right things and doing the right things. He couldn't have known what he was wandering into: what he thought he was getting was a seat in the US Senate, and by the way, if Elliot Spitzer had that in mind at the time, doesn't that speak rather well of Spitzer? What Paterson ended up with, of course, was a very different thing...

As it happens Chuck Berry has been

Posted on January 02, 2011
As it happens Chuck Berry has been on my mind lately-- along with Miles Davis, who I think was actually from East St. Louis, on the other side of the river, in Illinois-- Berry is a St. Louis native, and we'll be journeying there for the wedding of my first born...

A quiet New Years Eve in, watching

Posted on January 01, 2011
A quiet New Years Eve in, watching movies, one of which was Salt, Angelina Jolie's thriller about a Russian mole in the CIA.  It's not easy to pick a movie that A and I will both watch: her threshold for cinematic violence is pretty low, and I won't watch anything with Hugh Grant, so that narrows the field pretty quickly...

One of the points of doing Outside

Posted on December 31, 2010
One of the points of doing Outside Counsel-- now in its tenth year-- is to say things that other people haven't said.  Here's a list of some things that I'm glad I said this year:On Geoffrey Stokes On Why the Statler would be wrong for UB Law On The politics of judicial appointmentsOn Clerical sexual abuse On Gun nuts On OTB On Juan-Carlos Formell and Johnny's Dream ClubOn 64 ounces of sardines On Funerals On The ambiguities of historyAlso, although I've flogged this piece several times before, my article in Afterimage on the prosecution of my friend Lawrence Brose is something I'm proud to have written...

Only 27th? Somebody isn't holding

Posted on December 30, 2010
Only 27th? Somebody isn't holding up their end.

I'm coming around to the idea that

Posted on December 30, 2010
I'm coming around to the idea that the Hall of Fame should be more inclusive. As Joe Posnanski puts it, I think I'm a Big Hall of Fame guy.  I also think that if I got a ballot I'd be inclined to use all ten votes. On this year's ticket I'd go for Tim Raines, Robby Alomar, Dave Parker, Dale Murphy, Edgar Martinez, Alan Trammell, Bert Blyleven, Jeff, Bagwell, and Harold Baines...

The last few times I've roasted

Posted on December 29, 2010
The last few times I've roasted a duck I've poured boiling water over the bird to tighten the skin and blanch out some of the fat.  This technique, which amounts to parboiling the duck, then roasting it, seems at first to be unnecessarily elaborate, but I expect it is not...

Outside Counsel is sorry to learn

Posted on December 28, 2010
Outside Counsel is sorry to learn of the death of the Hon. Steven W. Fisher, a class act and a good judge. He regularly showed up on the short list for Court of Appeals consideration, and had a reputation as an upright jurist, not all that common a thing in Brooklyn and Queens.

Christopher Hitchens is on again

Posted on December 28, 2010
Christopher Hitchens is on again about Henry Kissinger.  Nothing he says is wrong, and I'd welcome the war crimes trial of the guy, but I'm caught up in a thought experiment: if one were to rank the greatest American monsters would Kissinger be worse than Dick Cheney?  We can't turn to Hitch for his opinion, but I think his defense of the Iraq invasion may be in the background of his decision to dredge up the Kissinger stuff at this late date...

New York's rules with respect to

Posted on December 23, 2010
New York's rules with respect to nonparty depositions continue to vex.  As Outside Counsel previously reported, the Second Department has held that notwithstanding the amendment to the statute "special circumstances" must be shown when seeking to depose a non-party...

Best Albums with Nude Covers and

Posted on December 22, 2010
Best Albums with Nude Covers and the Stories Behind Them. Not as comprehensive as it ought to be.

I remain vexed at the extension

Posted on December 22, 2010
I remain vexed at the extension of the Bush tax rates, but there really is no denying that Obama has gotten a lot out of this Congress.  Health Care reform, the end of DADT, START, financial regulatory reform, the stimulus package-- these were each big lifts, and it is not like he had a lot of people lining up to help out by taking on some of the leadership...

Perhaps it is something in the

Posted on December 21, 2010
Perhaps it is something in the air at this time of year.  The judge at my court appearance the other day was in an expansive mood.  He's a pleasure to appear before any time, but when he feels like talking he's even better.  This time he had a story about trying a white collar criminal case with one of the local legends of the bar, Harold Boreanaz...

Back when I worked for Birch Bayh

Posted on December 20, 2010
Back when I worked for Birch Bayh Richard Lugar was regarded as an arch-conservative nemesis. Lugar had been mayor of Indianapolis, and had run against Bayh before running a second time two years later by unseating Vance Hartke. Nowadays Lugar is about as close as it gets to a moderate Senate Republican, arguably more liberal than the other Indiana senator, Birch's son Evan...

I've been thinking about Christmas

Posted on December 16, 2010
I've been thinking about Christmas reform.  Let's face it, as merry as it is, the holiday could stand some improving.  I know people love tradition, but let's face it, as Justice Holmes said, the worst reason to do something is just because it was done that way in the time of William the Conqueror...

This year's Rock'n'Roll HOF inductees:

Posted on December 15, 2010
This year's Rock'n'Roll HOF inductees: Tom Waits,  Neil Diamond, Alice Cooper, Dr. John, and Darlene Love.Nominees that didn't make it into the Hall this year: the Beastie Boys, Donna Summer, LL Cool J, Chic, Laura Nyro, Donna Summer, Donovan, Joe Tex, Bon Jovi, J...

I got to do a little food writing

Posted on December 14, 2010
I got to do a little food writing for Spree this year.  It's an interesting challenge to do well because it is easy to lapse into cliche. I found that the upside was that it made me concentrate on what I was eating.  Here's what I had to say about Oliver's.

If the Health Care Reform legislation

Posted on December 13, 2010
If the Health Care Reform legislation is unconstitutional because Congress can't tell me what to do can we go back and just nationalize it the way they do everywhere else in the world?

I've always wanted to go to a party

Posted on December 13, 2010
I've always wanted to go to a party like this, even though it sounds absolutely horrible:"The space was probably a hundred feet on either side - 'major real estate, of course', as Sontag proudly explained to me. (She loved using Vanity Fair-ish clichés...

I did not know that the Saratoga

Posted on December 09, 2010
I did not know that the Saratoga Race Course is the oldest sporting venue of any kind in the United States, and I'm not sure I would have guessed it, although it makes a certain kind of sense. I suppose I might have guessed Churchill Downs.  In any event, the Spa is endangered because it depends on revenues from New York City's OTB, and OTB is over...

Walter Dellinger gets it right

Posted on December 07, 2010
Walter Dellinger gets it right on why the standing argument in the Proposition 8 appeal is more than merely a technical issue: it's because "no one has a legal interest in denying someone else's happiness."  It's also because of another "technical" issue, the rule of comity...

Joe Posnanski writes that for years

Posted on December 06, 2010
Joe Posnanski writes that for years Ron Santo was the Greatest Living Player Not In The Hall of Fame. I'm not sure who takes over now, but it got me thinking about the other people who are the greatest outsiders.  Can we agree that Peter O'Toole, for example, is the Greatest Living Movie Actor Without An Academy Award? (Cary Grant never won one either-- he got an honorary award after he retired, and he was only nominated twice, in 1941 for  Penny Serenade, and in 1944 for None But The Lonely Heart...

Around this time last year the

Posted on December 04, 2010
Around this time last year the ignition lock in the steering column of the old Volvo broke.  It was made of some sort of metal, and it failed after having been turned-- who knows? -- thousands and thousands of times. It was an expensive repair...

http://nymag.com/news/features

Posted on December 03, 2010
http://nymag.com/news/features/69791/

Well, let's try crowd-sourcing

Posted on December 02, 2010
Well, let's try crowd-sourcing the problem.  I use a Yahoo! calendar, on a free Yahoo! account, and all of a sudden it has stopped syncing with my iPhone. When I connect to my laptop I get an error message in iTunes that says "iTunes could not sync with Yahoo Address Book because the Yahoo! ID or password was incorrect...

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