Do you have that in Mauve?

My number came up for jury duty. I think I've actually gone downtown twice over the past 30 years. That's not an oppressive imposition and I'm happy to go. But this time, the trial I got called out for was projected to be a four week trial.
 
I requested a hardship exclusion, since four weeks out of the office would be pretty hard to work around - I don't have an employer to cover my salary while I'm sitting in judgement. I tried to sort out the level of effort to try and squeeze billable time around the court time and couldn't see it working.
 
What's weird, imho, is that they excused me all together. Rather than throwing me back in the pool for a shorter trial. If they had a nice two day trial, I could have worked that in.

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Surprisingly, perhaps, I share this enthusiasm.

In the late 1800s, the Brooklyn Bridge was built with no power tools, no heavy machinery, and only a basic, evolving understanding of how to make steel. It’s not these facts, but the stories surrounding the facts that inspire me when I take a good, long stare at a suspension bridge. But first…

Posted via email from Lee's posterous

Twitter

Twitter is a micro-blogging tool. Posts are limited to 140 characters each. You can see recent posts from me to the right, on this blog (so you only have to go to one place to check in.)  You can see the entire history here.

Google Street View comes to Bowling Green

For the longest time, Google Maps had fuzzy views of my hometown. I wondered if there was a secret government facility that the satellites weren't allowed to show. But that's in the past. In fact, Bowling Green has been photographed by the Google Street View minions.

I think all told I lived in four different residences in BG. But I only remember these two:

The first was 424 S. College Drive. This is the house that my sisters came to from the hospital after they were born. My dad and grandfather built the shed that you can see over the front car on the right. It's to their credit that it still stands 50 years later. And to the credit of the benign neglect of the current owners.


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In third grade we moved to 339 Sandridge. I lived there until we moved to California, the summer before my senior year, in 1973.  The back yard was as big as the front, if not more so, and there was only a woods behind that. You hardly felt cramped.

Across the street is what was then just an empty lot, but is now "Rainey Park" after the former owners. I played many a ball game in the lot. (The Raineys were David Pogue's grandparents. An older retired couple. I used to run letters to the mail box for Mrs. Rainey, for which she'd pay me 25 cents (in the late 60s!). After we moved to California, Mrs Rainey sent me a letter bragging on her grandson. I ran across the letter a few years ago and sent it to Pogue.)


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It does seem the quality of the photos of Bowling Green are reduced. Compare those with this picture of the current residence:

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The original story ideas behind the Indiana Jones series

Fun stuff!

There is a link now available to download the 125-page transcript (in the form of a .pdf document) of the original 1978 story conference between Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Lawrence Kasdan for a little film called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Here.

As Others See Us

Etiquette for teenagers as demonstrated by well-dressed youth of Webster Groves (Missouri) High School.

Frank Rich is always worth a visit

This week is no exception.

What such G.O.P. “stars” as Sanford and Jindal have in common, besides their callous neo-Hoover ideology, are their phony efforts to portray themselves as populist heroes. Their role model is W., that brush-clearing “rancher” by way of Andover, Yale and Harvard. Listening to Jindal talk Tuesday night about his immigrant father’s inability to pay for an obstetrician, you’d never guess that at the time his father was an engineer and his mother an L.S.U. doctoral candidate in nuclear physics. Sanford’s first political ad in 2002 told of how growing up on his “family’s farm” taught him “about hard work and responsibility.” That “farm,” the Charlotte Observer reported, was a historic plantation appraised at $1.5 million in the early 1980s. From that hardscrabble background, he struggled on to an internship at Goldman Sachs.