Juror No. 2: Excused Yesterday concluded my first ever jury duty experience. I'd been sent a notice for it in the past, but never had to report. This time was different. Not only did I have to report, I was assigned a case and made it into the jury box! Unfortunately, the prosecuting (district) attorney didn't like me, so I was excused.Most people want to be excused; hell, most people don't even want to show up. I was in this boat for most of the experience, until I realised who the defending attorney was: Mark Geragos - hi-priced defender of the stars. And while the defendant in this case wasn't particularly famous, Mark, for me, was close enough. It would have been really interesting to see how he worked; almost like watching Kobe Bryant or Tiger Woods. While I wasn't in the court room for very long, I was there long enough to get a sense of how things would go. Geragos was good: eloquent, charismatic, charming. Just in jury questioning the stark difference between the Geragos and the DA was apparent. You could tell that if the DA didn't have all of his ducks in a row, he didn't stand a chance. And it's unfortunate, because it made me realise that in a lot of ways our criminal justice system is really a game. Proving reasonable doubt to 12 people is tough, especially when they're using their intuition to decipher truth. To top it off, they have to operate within the rule-box of the judge; it's not unfathomable to see how a guilty person could go free. But alas, such conclusions are speculatory at best, as I never even made it to the trial. Labels: celebrities, insight
TV Star by Association This came through my inbox this morning:The TV show "Greek" will be on campus filming next Tuesday, April 29. One of the locations they will be using is the patio area on the south side of Jorgensen.Not only does my office have a window facing the south side patio, it's the closest office to it.
Live from YouTube Just to show you how crazy my sister is, and because embedding YouTube video's is the thing to do, I present to you the Harlem Quartet (again):Labels: missy
Al Gore's Impact I've posed this question to a few people recently and figured I'd blog about it to get a few more opinion: how would Al Gore's impact to society have compared had he been president? The first thing most say is that we wouldn't have been in Iraq. Huge, possibly, a bigger impact than he has had, I'm not sure. That he's made environmental conservation cool, in a way that no president could, may have a much larger impact than anything he would, or would not, have done.That's my take. Feel free to add your own two-cents. Labels: global warming, politics
On line or In line? When I first moved to the east coast from Michigan, tolerating some of their sayings took some time. For example, soda rather than pop. Soda is the clear bubbly stuff you add to drinks; hence, soda water. With soda already being a drink itself, you can't apply it to all carbonated beverages like east coasters want to do. See the official Pop versus Soda page for more.One of the big ones that always struck me as odd was on line versus in line. My new east coast friends, mostly the ones from New York, would say something like this: "I stood on the line all day." Being on a line has never made any sense to me. I've really given it a try to. Being "on" a line implies that the line goes up rather than out; like sitting on a chair. Unfortunately, if you twist your sense of dimensionality a bit, the saying does kind of make sense. Thus, I could never really argue it (at least not as strongly as pop/soda). Today, however, I stumbled upon this little nugget of goodness: clarity on my on/in line question: As for real physical lines, the British and New Yorkers wait "on line" (in queues), but most Americans wait "in line."So there you go, I'm not crazy.
Movie recipes I think Hollywood really has a movie recipe book. A couple recent examples:
Labels: movies
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