Frequent Citations

The Olympics Are Coming!

What more needs to be said?  So cool, and an unbelievable amount of work.

Ireneomania

I guess it doesn't happen that often that the Emerald City itself faces a direct hit from a hurricane.  It's hard for me to get too excited about it--we're on relatively high ground, in a solid building, we have a couple pounds of nuts and a dozen bottles of beer, I have a box full of transcripts to read if the power goes out (or even if it doesn't), and, you know, wind and rain happens. 

Still, it's a little bizarre to see the city go into disaster-preparation mode.  My firm actually told people not to come in this weekend.  (I'm pretty sure it's dipping down to freezing temperatures in hell.)  The National Guard is apparently on its way, and FEMA (possibly a disaster in and of itself, but I'm hopeful I can avoid its "help").  The grocery stores were shutting down this morning but not without extremely long lines and, by TFL's reports, stripped shelves.  There are very few cars on the road, now.

The sky has been grey and moody all day.  You can sense there's something nasty out there, lurking.  I think I'm going to go out for a walk.

Unmitigated Sadness

I have no words for Oslo.

O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee!

And Now, Arrests

It seems the Brits are well and truly riled up about their little phone hacking scandal, and have opted to start arresting people. 

I'm all for holding responsible people responsible for what they do and what they approve others to do.  It just strikes me as interesting that they wait for years and years and don't make a move until they discover that victims included people beyond politicians, royals, and celebrities.  Something about that doesn't sit quite right with me, but who am I to say, as I am not a Brit myself?

And our investigations are always so thoughtful and unbiased and diligent.

All Kinds Of Transparent

As media moguls go, Murdoch has been an entertaining fellow.  He appears ruthless and canny and has transformed much of our news media as he's taken control of everything from the most ridiculous British gossip rags to the Wall Street Journal--and exercised considerable editorial control every step of the way.

And this week we see his endless expansion program crash headlong into his editorial approach in spectacular fashion.  If you haven't been following this story, one of his UK Sunday papers (cue Joe Jackson, thank you) has been accused for many years of hacking people's cell phones.  But they were celebreties and politicians so, whatever, the public never seemed to get that riled up about it.  Until this week, when the public suddenly realized that News of the World reporters had hacked into--and deleted messages from--a missing girl's cell phone.  The activity on her phone led her parents to hope she was still alive; she was not. 

A torrent of justifiable (if long overdue) outrage began to pour down on Murdoch's empire, sparked by this utterly inhumane behavior.  Meanwhile, however, Murdoch has been trying to get a controlling interest in yet another broadcaster.  Takeover talks get spooked by bad news stories, so Murdoch had a real problem on his hands.

So Murdoch acted with, er, dispatch.  He canned the entire paper.  And before you think wow, way to punish horrendous unethical behavior by your staff and take responsibility for publishing trash, consider:

• the paper seems to have lost all its advertising overnight;
• Murdoch owns approximately 324,234,456,002 papers (in round numbers);
• he'll likely just move all the News of the World reporting over to a weekly paper (and presumably recoup all that lost advertising revenue);
• he really really really wanted to dampen this scandal before it ruined his chance to take over the next broadcaster on his list.

He's like an ongoing lesson in how to be a robber barron.  And he's running some of our most prestigious, notorious, and influential news organizations including Fox News.  (I leave the inferences to you, dear reader.)

File Under Obvious

Formeldehyde is a carcinogen?  Get out of town. /s

PSA for those of you who hadn't clued into that long ago, go check your shampoo.  Many have formeldehyde.  It does great things for your hair. 

Completely unrelated: here's a picture GirlChild took at Boy's graduation.  Kind of nifty, very Michigan.

Weather Should Never Be Newsworthy

I just want to state that as a rule. 

It was well over seventy when I left for work early this morning, and headed up over 90.  It was still crazy warm when I got out (early! home by 9!).

In other news: the bathroom in our still-unsold condo in Chicago has been destroyed by the upstairs tenant.  AGAIN.  Amazing how much damage a missing $30 part on a toilet can do.  And when I say destroyed, I mean destroyed.  Our resident expert (ahem) says it's going to be a gut rehab.

It's been a relatively quiet day on the TSIO-Fiasco-arama front, just some general musing on the odds of Pryor going to Canada (fair to middling) and when the entire compliance department is going to be fired for either gross incompetence or wholesale obstructionism, take your choice.  I've got no estimate on the latter question, but you know more heads are going to roll sooner or later.

More? You Shouldn't Have

So what's worse than going down in flames?  That stage was a few days ago, when the head coach was fired quit for the good of the university and stories were coming out about multiple tattoo parlors and dozens of players and oh, yeah, cars. 

But there's more! Like, hourly.

Now That School in Oho (TSIO) has some more explaining to do. Gee. Pryor has been fired quit "for the good of his team" and, perhaps, so he doesn't have to talk to those pesky people from the NCAA any more.  Because they might like to ask him about the cash and checks (!!!) he's been getting for signing memorabilia.

For years.

That's okay, though, because the good people at the NCAA can still ask the officials at TSIO who might know something about it, because they warned off the guy who was handing out the wads o' cash and checks (memo: signed crap from "amateur" athlete).

They warned him off last year.

And then there are all those emails and calls and texts TSIO just released, and even more intriguing all the ones it held back.  Turns out, Tressel texted more than your average 12-year-old girl with a hair crisis.

This is not a institution lacking in appropriate controls.  This is an institution gone wild.

It's more entertaining than a train wreck.  I'm powerless to stop watching even as I struggle to process it all.  But here's one thing to take cold comfort in: the last decade's record against Michigan is now 9-1*, and the asterisk keeps getting bigger every day.

Taxes My Patience

I finished doing our taxes.

Ouch.  BIG ouch.

Now I have a crushing headache and I want to curl up and weep for a while.  Instead I think I'll treat myself to watching an episode of something funny, and knitting a few rows on the current shawl, before I shower and head to work.

I tell you, when you owe more in student loans than you make in several years, the fact that you can't deduct any of it really starts to rankle.  Education is expensive in every conceivable way.

It's A Win!

Work has been something of a grind.  Long hours of tedious, difficult work.  Suboptimal work product out of some of my team.  A desk I can't even find.  Very little to stretch the mind.  Things had started to pick up lately, though, with a deposition here and an impossible research project there, a little something to break up the day.

Today, though, I came back from a little jaunt to look at docs and discovered that I had no concentration.  None.  Mounds of work to do, no ability to do it.  I might as well have put my head down and napped.  But I sat there doing not much and not billing and waiting for my witness prep session scheduled for six, and just before it was time for my witness to arrive I got an email that I've been waiting for since, oh, March?

The judge issued a decision today on the case I spent a year and half and a million hours on, and whoa nelly.  We won, and we won big.

:::happy dance:::

All of a sudden my focus snapped back.  It may be uncool to say this, but I'm thrilled.  It's so cool to finally get a (published!) decision and it's 100% in our client's favor.

Yay.