Blog Posts


Wants: Carlyle and Carlyle, Two Down, Four To Go

I broke down the other day and bought two volumes of a six volume set I have simply not been able to find in any bookshop or on line. I have been looking for years, and the volumes simply seem to have vanished.
I found volumes three and four Carlyle and Carlyel's "A History of Medieval...

Chatter, Chatter. What's The Matter?

Is the Internet killing meaningful communication?
Today's New York Times book review contains an essay written by Ben Yagoda on John Freeman's The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. One line from the review leaped out at me: Email "is an instantaneous, demanding,...

My Blog, My Editorial Decisions

I have an anonymous reader who in recent days has posted dozens of times. I stopped publishing him or her when it became apparent the person pressed some sort of existential rewind button and was sending messages with the same theme over and over again. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what...

Fairy Tales: East of the Sun and West of the Moon

Where is home, and whence our destination? The questions are basic. We conceive for ourselves beginnings and ends, but our goals remain forever contingent upon forces beyond our control. We owe a death at the moment of birth. Our hopes and dreams, it seems, repose east of the sun and west of the...

TLC: Refunds Possible?

R. Rex Parris wrote last night. If I do not believe I am a better lawyer as a result of TLC, I should call him and he will try to get me a refund. All else is mere noise, and I should stop my bitching.
The life the of the law is experience, not logic, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. taught. Hence,...

TLC: The Final Word

When I walked off the ranch ten years ago it was because I found the benefits associated with attending Trial Lawyers College events as a staff member to be outweighed by all the baggage associated with attendance: People wanted things I did not understand and I was spending far more time...

Book Banning In Cheshire?

I am glad I do not live in Cheshire, Connecticut. Townsfolk there want to control what residents can and cannot find on the shelves of the town’s library shelves. The fact that one member of the library board, Marilyn Bartoli, leads the book-banning effort calls into question why she is on a...

TLC: Another Source

Snarkdom has found its way into the comments section of this blog as regards the Trial Lawyers College and Gerry Spence. We have a new anonymous writer obsessed with me. It is to the point that when I pass gas the poor fellow, or gal, gets an ear ache. In TLC-speak, the writer has given up his...

The Imageless Mirror

"In the end, man is an event which cannot judge itself, but, for better or worse, is left to the judgment of others."
C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections

The Appeal of Ted Bundy

Who really thinks these days about Ted Bundy? I hadn't done so for many years. Sure, I knew he was a serial killer. But I cannot say I view him as a rock star. From 1973 to 1978, he killed as many as 100 women, confessing, before his execution by the State of Florida, to 30 murders. He was a bad,...

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