Speaking of podcasts, I heard this one on the From the Pages of the Washington Post podcast the other day: Wearing Down the Judicial System With a Pair of Pants:
Don’t look for Roy Pearson to be out shopping for new suit pants this weekend. At the end of the $54 million pants suit in D.C. Superior Court yesterday, Judge Judith Bartnoff said she wouldn’t issue a decision until next week but nonetheless gave a strong hint of her direction.
After listening to Pearson argue for hour upon hour that he was somehow protecting the interests of all Washingtonians by using the D.C. consumer protection law to punish Custom Cleaners for allegedly losing a pair of his pants, Bartnoff said: “This is a very important statute to protect consumers. It’s also very important that statutes like this are not misused.”
Trying to get inside the head of Pearson — a D.C. administrative law judge who launched his long, twisted legal odyssey after bringing pants in to be let out — is tricky business.
This is a man who, despite his soft voice and polite demeanor, told the court yesterday that “there is no case in the District of Columbia or in the United States that comes anywhere close to the outrageousness of the behavior of the defendants in this case.”
The Chung family, owner of Custom Cleaners, is accused of the terrible crime of not only misplacing Pearson’s pants — either for a few days, as the Chungs contend, or permanently, as Pearson claims — but also posting a “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign and then refusing Pearson’s demand for vast sums of money.
He brought in several pairs of pants to be let out, allegedly got one wrong one back (he’s apparently not a cuffs guy), and is now suing for $54 million. Amazingly, this case has gone on for years now.
Did Pearson have a case? When the defense finally revealed the pants it says Pearson brought in for a $10.50 alteration, it wasn’t clear whether they matched the jacket Pearson displayed the previous day. One thing was certain: The pants bore the same ticket number as Pearson’s receipt.
In a bout of bad judgment, CNN no longer puts dates on its articles, but I just stumbled across this article about Grammar Girl there. (It looks like it went up in January.) I’ve been listening to her podcast for a month or two now, and have found it invaluable.
She recently weighed in on a dispute over apostrophes that divided the U.S. Supreme Court. Grammar wasn’t the issue in the 5-4 decision, but Justice Clarence Thomas referred to “Kansas’ statute” in the majority opinion, while Justice David Souter wrote about “Kansas’s statute” in the minority.
Fogarty said both men were correct, but that she preferred leaving off the extra s.
“Justice Thomas’ name ends with an s, so you might guess that he is more familiar with the issue,” she told her audience.
The dirty secret of the Hesperia Star is that Peter and I really aren’t grammarians in the way that Mrs. Nyrop back at South Lakes High School would no doubt like me to be. Instead, we’ve internalized grammatical rules through lots of reading and lots of writing. Grammar Girl, though, makes learning the actual rules pretty painless. Her use of “Lay Down Sally” to explain lay/lie was particularly inspired and one of my favorite episodes.
She’s definitely worth a listen even for casual writers.
Like a lot of people, I’m finding buying Blizzcon tickets to be a LITTLE frustrating — mystery errors with multiple credit cards, captcha inputs that seem to be out of synch with the verification software.
I hope Blizzard gets this resolved before the tickets are all gone …
UPDATE: My Windows XP box at home didn’t work, but my Mac OS 10.4.9 box at work got through fine. Weird.
Well, it was almost too good to be true: The new Liz Phair track on the, ahem, Nancy Drew soundtrack, is only available as an album from iTunes, which will make me one of the few buyers who is not a 12-year-old girl.
On the other hand, Storm Large’s album is available now from CD Baby, meaning I can at least get my Amazonian Portlander seductress fix.
We now have four — count ’em, four — interns at the Hesperia Star this summer. Starting with this week’s issue, you’ll see bylines from the new interns, photo credits and more. Frankly, it’s depressing how good at this these high school kids are, given that it’s taken me this long to be barely better than them.
In addition to producing more stories, Peter and I are also looking forward to the addition of more points of view to the paper, which will hopefully include coverage of summer sports and stuff that’s of interest to people under 30. (Quick way to know you’re old: When one of the interns has never looked up a phone number without the Internet and has to be told what number to dial for information. I’ll be off measuring myself for a casket, thanks.)
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