September 14, 2009
To be honest, I've sort of been ignoring the budget impasse that's been plaguing our Pennsylvania state government. I've been through several of these before in other states (and I remember well a couple federal ones), and everything always turns out OK in the end. There's partisan bickering, a few services that don't affect me shut down temporarily, and every public television and radio station in the state starts freaking out. It's annoying, but the effects are usually limited,...
April 26, 2007
Please, please go read You Are What You Grow in the New York Times Magazine. Some of its contents will be familiar to anyone who's read the absorbing, eye-opening The Omnivore's Dilemma, but it's more specifically about the farm bill—which Pollan argues should be called the food bill instead. An excerpt:...
January 29, 2007
First, a point of clarification and further explanation. The jury questionnaires (there were two) that I filled out prior to the trial were standard ones; every person who shows up for jury duty in Philadelphia fills them out. There's one page of 16 questions for criminal trials, and a page of nine questions for civil trials. The procedure, which is different in every jurisdiction, goes something like this in Philadelphia:...
January 24, 2007
I reported for Jury Duty at the Criminal Justice Building this morning at 8:15am, my second time doing so since moving to Philadelphia in the fall of 2003. Last time I was juror #18 in a panel of 20 for a civil trial, but after a LOT of sitting around in the courtroom, eight jurors were chosen from among the first 16, and I was sent home....
March 20, 2006
Via Derek: Finally, a way to stick it to the neighbor who routinely parks his SUV-with-the-oversensitive-alarm illegally—such that it sticks out into traffic and is jostled by SEPTA buses rumbling by. I've been listening to this ridiculous alarm day after day and night after night for over two years now, and testy notes left under his windshield wipers have done nothing more than set the alarm off an additional time (when I said the alarm was sensitive, I wasn't...
December 15, 2005
Does the fact that I'm an idiot make it more likely or less likely that I'll be picked for a jury today? I ask because I'm leaving for the courthouse in 10 minutes, and I need to know whether to arrange for backup childcare....
December 13, 2005
From an editorial in today's New York Times about the Bush administration finally agreeing to send delegates to the climate change talks in Montreal, as long as any agreements made were non-binding:...
December 7, 2005
I've been thinking a lot lately about how Christians in this country seem to feel that they're under attack, and how to mitigate some of that feeling. I think it's important to maintain a secular government—and given that so many of the founding fathers were deeply religious it's all the more remarkable that we got a secular government at all—but that those of us who are not particularly religious sometimes take things too far when we insist on separation...
June 29, 2005
Same-Sex Marriage Advances In Canada House of Commons Approves Measure By Doug Struck Washington Post Foreign Service Wednesday, June 29, 2005; Page A01 OTTAWA, June 28 -- The House of Commons voted Tuesday to guarantee full marriage rights to same-sex couples, reaffirming Canada's sharp difference with the United States over the issue of gay rights and promising an alternative destination for American gay men and lesbians to be married. [more]...
March 1, 2005
I used to have a Law & Order trivia quiz on this this site called You've Been Called for Jury Duty (I took it down before the rm -r debacle because it was so old). The idea was to go through voir dire (i.e., the quiz) with the goal of gaining the jury, not avoiding it. The top 12 scorers got on the jury; there were anther 10-14 slots for alternates. The idea behind the quiz was to put...
November 2, 2004
My plan was to vote at around 10am this morning, after the people with day jobs had had a chance at it, but as I woke up at 6:20 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep, and the dryer repairman came at 7:55 and was done by 8:15, Al asked me if I wanted to go vote with him. I agreed, figuring that if the lines were too long, I would just come back later. The line *was*...