Saturday, September 24, 2011

Random Thoughts

-- Today is the anniversary of my admission to the bar.  I swore my attorney oath before the state supreme court and federal district bench thirteen years ago today.  And I've been swearing ever since.

-- Would that Catholics were as zealous for their Faith as the Communists are for their anti-faith.  Yes, that use of the present tense is deliberate. Are we really to believe that Communist zealots ceased to believe and abandoned their mission to go out and conquer the world just because the Soviet Union collapsed?

-- I don't have television at home, so I haven't seen the latest shows until recently when I went to stay for a few days with some relatives who never miss Big Brother.  In the particular episode I saw, the contestants had to crawl on their bellies through a huge pool of highly viscous doughnut glaze, sprinkles and marshmallows; grab a doughnut; crawl back through the glaze; slide the doughnut onto a vertical pole; and then keep repeating the process until time was up.  The one with the most doughnuts on the stick won.  By the time it was all over, the pool of glaze was gray and filthy, and the contestants were covered in slime.  All this was so that they could be in a position to decide who stays in the house.  Everyone lived in dread of being voted out of the house.  I think I would have lived in dread of having to stay in.

 -- One of the best features of the Traditional Latin Mass is its silence.  The entire canon of the Mass, except the words Nobis quoque peccatoribus, is recited in silence.  Silence marks a boundary between our noisy, overcrowded, high-velocity earthly life and the supernatural plane on which the Mass takes place.  In the Novus Ordo, we are not allowed to have silence.  We are not allowed to rise above the din of everyday existence.

-- Earlier this week, a few hours before the state of Georgia put Troy Davis to death for murdering a police officer, the state of Texas executed Lawrence Russell Brewer, a white supremacist who murdered a black man by dragging him to death behind his pickup truck. Why was there no noisy public outcry over Brewer's execution like there was of Davis'?  Surely, if the death penalty is wrong for a black man who protested his innocence up until the moment of his death, it is equally wrong for a murdering white supremacist.

-- Would that there were some way of driving tattoos out of style.  Would that there were some way of causing multiple piercings and ear tunnels to cease to be cool.  Would that people would quit showing up to court with pink and green hair.  Would that the overweight would ditch the revealing clothing.  Perhaps, for the sake of the common good, Newt Gingrich could be persuaded to tattoo Mount Rushmore across his chest, get a couple of great big ear tunnels and a couple of upper lip piercings, like a vampire's fangs, dye his hair with Jello, and don a mesh shirt. 

-- There is nothing like watching news coverage of a story relating to one's professional line to find out just how lazy the media can be.  Before the local newspeople report on a high-profile criminal case, what would it take for them to pick up the phone, call any lawyer, and find out the correct legal terminology for describing what is going on in court?  When a person is charged by complaint with a felony in the state of Idaho, he does not get a "preliminary trial," but a preliminary hearing.  And when he is charged with an enhancement under what is popularly known as the "three strikes" law, he is accused of being a persistent violator, not a "perpetual offender."  Why do we repose so much trust and reliance on people who regularly commit these totally avoidable and inexcusable gaffes?

-- The flaming space junk of death that was expected to crash-land on earth yesterday has apparently landed in the Pacific Ocean, though it's impossible to say for sure where.  NASA calculated the odds of anyone being hurt by the debris at 3,200 to one.  Meanwhile, the odds of winning even $100.00 in the Powerball lottery are 13,644.24 to one.

-- Apparently, this is an enormous weekend for college football.  Sadly, I can't bring myself to care, except to the extent of avoiding the area around Boise State University.  I once had a colleague seat himself in my office and solemnly lecture me on why I should care about Bronco football.  This tactic did not succeed in convincing me.

-- Call me crazy, call me infantile, call me retrograde: I do like a Shirley Temple, even at my age.  In the early years of my legal career, when the colleagues would gather at a favorite local tavern after a hard day in court, my drink of choice was a Shirley Temple with extra cherries.

-- Cats do snore.   

5 comments:

  1. Congratulations, Miss Moore, on your anniversary. Judging by what I have
    read on this blog over the last couple of years, I would love to see you in action when doing a cross examination.

    Random comments:

    (1) Big Brother, i.e. "Reality TV" - another sign of the decline of Western Civilization.

    (2) Tatoos... body piercing, et cetera - another sign of neopaganism in modern society.

    (3) Shirley Temple: I won't call you infantile or retrograde if you won't call me the
    same because I like, and am mesmerized by, 1970s/1980s Bollywood films.

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  2. Thanks, TH2! And it's a deal on the Bollywood films.

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  3. Imagine the suffering of the poor souls in Ohio who have to listen to the incessant OSU football coverage as if the people who are the biggest fans have ever set foot in a university classroom. You can't even mention the state of Michigan in any context without some idiot correcting you that you are supposed to call it "that state up north," etc. College sports used to be for the students but now it is business. If I hear that football song one more time I'm gonna scream. I almost was assaulted by two rednecks at Kroger when I wore a Dartmouth shirt. They came right up to me and laughed and asked about their football team. I said at least it was a real school. And a few other things. They quickly walked away, no longer acting threatening. They weren't counting on me being a real college graduate.

    I gave up my TV recently, my mom's was broken so I gave her mine. I do miss American Loggers. And Axe Men. When I was in the kitchen I could always tell when it came on: bleep, bleep, what the bleep are you doing with the bleep bleep...

    I didn't know about ear tunnels but my checkout girl at the market this week had them. Ick. Kind of spoiled my appetite.

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  4. I neglected to mention that Ear Tunnel Girl was checkout at the same store where at Easter time when I apologized for shopping on Easter Sunday the stock clerk girl told me that she happily offended her future mother-in-law, a devout Catholic, by telling her that Jesus was a zombie because he came back from the dead. I wondered what kind of marriage she will have, deliberately offending her future mother-in-law by slamming her faith. Sick, just sick. I just walked away from that one.

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  5. Ear tunnels are indeed a bad omen for Western Civilization.

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