Yearly Archives: 2007

Stupid Lawyers. Oxymoron?

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I recently stumbled upon a cool new web service called Stumble Upon (hat tip to Sean Coon for pointing it out) which is a little browser tool you can download and use for free. Here’s how it’s described by BBCWorld:

"Stumbleupon is a brilliant downloadable toolbar that beds into your browser and
gives you the chance to surf through thousands of excellent pages that have been
stumbled upon by other web-users"

So I was using my little new procrastinating tool and I found this page of funny quotes from courtroom transcripts.  Here’s a small sample, but then you really should check out the whole thing:

Lawyer:  "How far apart were the vehicles at the time of the
collision?"

and,

Lawyer:  "Were you alone or by yourself?"

and,

Lawyer:  "I show you Exhibit 3 and ask you if you recognize
that picture."

Witness:  "That’s me."

Lawyer:  "Were you present when that picture was taken?"

and,

Lawyer:  "Doctor, did you say he was shot in the woods?"

Witness:  "No, I said he was shot in the lumbar region."

and,

Lawyer:  "Were you acquainted with the deceased?"

Witness:  "Yes sir."

Lawyer:  "Before or after he died?"

and,

 

Lawyer:  "What is your relationship with the plaintiff?"

Witness:  "She is my daughter."

Lawyer:  "Was she your daughter on February 13, 1979?"
   

 

and finally,

Lawyer:  "Now, doctor, isn’t it true that when a person
dies in his sleep, in most cases he just passes quietly away and
doesn’t know anything about it until the next morning?"

Are We Living in the New Appalachia?

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Dana Blankenhorn has written an interesting piece called "The New Appalachia" in which he argues that the abject poverty we used to associate with Appalachia has shifted to the areas between the mountains and the coast.  From his post:

Appalachia had resisted all attempts to bring it prosperity. Places
last western Virginia, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee and western
North Carolina were as poor as they had ever been. There seemed to be
no solution.

But there was a solution, right around the corner. These are now
"the mountains," that fabled far-away magical land where lowlanders
dream of retiring to. This is now the east’s vacationland, an
alternative to the beach, where rafting and hiking and mountain biking
rule the summers, and skiing the winters. The resort and retirement
economies have transformed these areas into, if not greater prosperity
spheres, at least something resembling the rest of America.

But a new Appalachia has developed in our time. It’s the river
bottoms, the swamplands, the vast middle between the mountains and the
seacoast. Millions of people live there, in grinding lives of poverty
or of faded wealth. And it’s getting worse.

The farm economy that once sustained these areas has collapsed. The
factories that once dotted the landscape have moved overseas. Much of
the land now consists of tree farms, and the people who are left are
steadily losing ground.

The biggest difference between today’s Appalachia and yesterday’s is
more stark, however. It’s the color of the victims. (That’s the point of the chart at left, from the Knight Foundation.)  Because in the
South, the new Appalachia is often the "black belt," land share-cropped
for some generations, then lost to the trees.

This hit home because Winston-Salem and the Piedmont Triad are situated to the east of the mountains and have been hit hard by the meltdown of the furniture and textile industries.  My first inclination was to disagree with Dana’s assertion that this is a disproportionately black phenomenon since at least in this area the hit has been taken be people of all colors, but if you think of it in comparison to Appalachia, which was predominately white, then I guess it makes sense.

The good news here is that the local leadership has been very proactive in trying to convert the local economy from a manufacturing base to a more "intellectual" base of biotechnology and design services.  The success has been mixed but it looks promising for the future.  To me the question that remains is "Will the jobs be filled by re-trained locals or by outsiders who follow the jobs here?".

And Dana’s bigger point about the lowlands is a good one.  While the Piedmont seems to be on the upswing all you have to do is drive to the beach through literally hundreds of dying or dead small towns to realize that your seeing an economic wasteland of immense proportions.

Finally, let’s not forget that the evolution of Appalachia to the "fabled far-away magical land" has not come without some negative effects within the mountain communities.  For instance in this article in the Raleigh News & Observer we see that while local leaders in the western North Carolina mountains welcome the influx of tax dollars and service jobs that come with the development of luxury second-home communities local residents worry about how their going to pay the taxes on their suddenly soaring property valuations.  And of course some people aren’t going to be happy with the influx of carpetbaggers no matter how many jobs it creates.

For the most part, though, I agree with Dana’s post.

Where I’d Like to Position the Missionaries

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Something I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions since moving to Winston-Salem is that when I was in the DC area most people would ask me "What do you do?" when they met me but here they ask "What’s your church?".  And it’s not confined to parties or other social situations.  It happens at the grocery store, the barber shop, and just about any other public forum.  It’s also interesting to me that people here will unabashedly share their religious views with total strangers and will invoke religion in discussions of things like schools.  Let’s just say that school prayer is still a hot issue here.

It has never really bothered me that people profess their religion so publicly and it also doesn’t bother me when they ask where I go to church and then invite me to attend theirs.  The public square is as much theirs as it is mine and I’ve always felt that if it made me uncomfortable I could just ignore the question or brush them off.  Although I’ve never done it I’ve had in the back of my head a plan to say "I’ll come if you let me sacrifice a chicken on the altar like I do in my basement".

What does bug me is when members of various churches knock on my door and try to sell me on their church.  This is my sanctuary after all and I don’t like it being invaded.  I understand that most Christians believe it is a necessity to recruit (I don’t know where it is but there’s apparently a passage in the New Testament that invokes people to play Coach K and recruit for Jesus’ team), and as I said before I don’t mind if they use the public square to do it, but when I’m at home I want to be left alone. 

Quick side note: Whenever I hear people talk about the part of the Bible where they’re instructed to go out and recruit I always wonder why they assume it means for their particular church?  I mean if I’m Christian then I’m Christian, so what does it matter where I go to church?  Two words: collection plate.

A notable exception is the Mormons.  Yes this is very inconsistent but there’s a personal reason.  When I was a kid my family was Mormon and at an early age I was being prepared for the day that I would go on my mission.  I started saving money at around 8 years old, but when my parents got divorced we left the church so I never got much past saving $20 for the bike I was going to ride for God.  To this day I’m still on the books with the Mormons and they periodically send the boys in white shirts to my house to say hi.  It’s easy for me to see myself in their shoes so I’m inclined to be sympathetic.  And because they’re so young it’s also easy for me to steer them away from selling to talking basketball over a glass of water that they’re always thankful for, which means it’s almost always a pleasant 15 minutes.

The other churches tend to send little blue haired ladies who are not easily swayed from their topic.  They’re also stubborn and doctrinaire and exactly the kind of people I don’t much want to hang with, but because they’re little blue haired ladies I’m incapable of brushing them off. It would be too much like brushing off my grandmother.  I think if they sent someone younger I’d be able to invoke my chicken sacrifice ploy, but I just can’t do it with the blue hairs.

So I’ve started to think about how I can cut them off at the pass, as it were.  Some ideas include:

  • Putting a Buddha on the front porch.
  • Keeping a turban by the front door that I can don before opening the door.  They wouldn’t know a Sikh from a Shitzu, but they’d know that whatever I was I wasn’t Christian.  It’d probably scare ’em to death and I’m willing to bet they’d set a record for the 100 yard dash in the 80+ division.
  • Put a statue of the Virgin Mary on the front porch and a sign on the front door that says "We’re Catholic and One of Us Used to be Mormon".  This has the advantage of being true and thoroughly confusing.  What could they possibly say?

For the record we’ve been attending the Moravian church down the road for the last several months.  They’re great people, they never once knocked on our door and they spend an inordinate amount of time eating chicken pie and drinking coffee.  Exactly the kind of people I want to hang with.

In anticipation of those of you who I’m sure I’ve offended let me say this: I’ve spent a lot of time in various churches including Mormon, Presbytarian for a couple of months, Unitarian for one service, Baptist with some of my cousins, Lutheran High School for three years, Lutheran College for one year, Catholic for much of my adulthood, Methodist for several services and now Moravian.  There is much more similarity than difference between them, and almost all of the difference is in what I’ll call ceremony.  From what I can tell the doctrinal differences are more important to the church leaders than their congregations so where I choose to spend my time is based more on the people of the church than the doctrine.  That probably best explains my peturbation at being evangelized (I feel like a Verizon customer being cold-called by Cingular) and my inclination to be attracted to the Moravians’ honey-pot practice of "Food and Fellowship."

Cool NC State Parks Site

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Of the "web 2.0" developments I think that the coolest is the explosion of "mashups" that resulted from companies like Google opening up their API (whatever that is) and letting any Joe Citizen develop a widget or service incorporating its service.  A great example is this mashup of data on North Carolina state parks and Google Maps.  If you click on any of the bubbles it will pop up a window with a weather forecast from Yahoo, a link to pictures tagged with the name of the park on Flickr , and a link to the park’s own website.  Simple, but effective.

Orni…,uh, Ornithol…, Aw Heck, Just Call it Birdshit

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One of my lasting memories of childhood is my mother freaking out around birds.  Any birds, big or small, caused her to melt into a stuttering, jittery mess if they got within arms length of her.  Her condition resulted from a childhood run-in she had with a rabid chicken on some family member’s farm (I think that’s the story) and she’d never been able stand them after that.

When I was in college I was living in an apartment with a couple of guys, including my longtime roommate Fig (cool story: Fig moved to Winston-Salem two years before I did and we now see him and his family more than we ever used to in DC).  He worked at a pet store and then at the Fairfax County Animal Shelter and would often bring home the animals that were considered hopelessly ill and try to nurse them back to health.  One of those animals was a large, white thing that I think was a cockatoo. Whatever it was it had a condition that caused it to lose its feathers over time, resulting in a constantly decaying state of plumage and an attitude more surly than a 13 year old girl deprived of a cell phone (I know where of I speak).  It lived on a pedestal placed on our only table which was located at the central most point in our apartment. That meant you couldn’t go anywhere in the apartment without the thing hissing or trying to fling poop at you.  Thankfully it couldn’t go anywhere due to its bald state and you were safe if you stayed about a foot outside the perimeter of the table.

Needless to say once the bird from hell moved in Mom stopped visiting, but not until she’d stopped by before I could warn her about our new roommate.  She walked in, was hissed at, let out a kind of cry/whelp, blanched whiter than our bald bird, turned around and didn’t come back until it moved out. Note: "moved out" is a euphemism for "croaked".

All this is a long preface to the true topic of this post which is the amazing change Mom made a couple of years ago when she met her leading man, the estimable Dr. Bert Dickas, retired professor of geology and avid bird watcher.  In the years since they met she’s joined him on numerous birding expeditions and can now tell a pigeon from an emu.  She’s gone so far as to fly to a Caribbean destination with the express purpose of tromping through the jungle looking for exotic birds rather than basking on a beach.  Even more impressive is that he’s talked her into driving to destinations not on either of the coasts, heretofore known as "the other America", to watch migrating birds.  Never underestimate the power of love.

I thought of this after reading about the website of Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology. I’m sure Bert will find it interesting and maybe Mom might even take a look at it.  Me?  I’m going to see if they have anything on surly, balding cockatoos.

How to Insure You Spend the New Year on Your Back

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Want to make sure you don’t overdo it during the holidays?  Here’s a step-by-step procedure that worked for me this year:

  1. A couple of days after Christmas do something that tweaks your lower back.
  2. Spend two days lying on the floor with a heating pad.
  3. Recover just in time to travel to visit family for the weekend.
  4. Make sure someone in the family is contagious with a stomach bug.
  5. Catch the bug.
  6. Return home.
  7. 24 hours after returning notice a strange rumbling in your belly.
  8. Spend 48 hours counting the stripes in the wallpaper in your bathroom since you pretty much live there full time.
  9. Lose 8 pounds!
  10. Have your back tighten up just as you’re feeling better from the stomach bug and spend another night on the floor.

Happy new year!