Lawyerly UL heard today
TeaLady
gleefully related to me the story of the lawyer who insured his cigar
collection against theft, fire, etc. Told to him by a buddy who is a
lawyer as a True Tale of Caution and Greed. Seemed to be a bit
different than story I am familiar with, thought I'd share it to see
if any one has heard this variation :
Lawyer proceeds to smoke cigars, files claim for insurance monies.
Insurance company refuses. Lawsuit happens. Court determines that as
the insurance policy did not exclude policy holder from immolating
cigars, money must be paid out. Insurance pays up, then has lawyer
arrested for arson. Lawyer loses criminal case and spends 26 months
in jail. Spends entire insurance pay-out trying to avoid jail.
TeaLady, who is not a very good re-teller of stories, sorry.
MerrryRock
Jami JoAnne
Or just go to www.snopes2.com where I've seen it mentioned but haven't read it
yet.
~Jami JoAnne Russell~
I think my Betta Fish is insane.
http://members.internettrash.com/users/gambitsjami/jami.html
Jami JoAnne
>Merry Rock had checked before posting snarky, uninformative follow-ups,
>they'd have noticed the difference.
And if YOU had bothered to notice that I admited that I NEVER read the one at
Snopes yet then YOU would see you have no reason to be bitchy about me. I just
was thinking of saving TeaLady some time. Instead of spending all that time on
Google one could just go straight to Snopes instead and find it a lot quicker.
Lars Eighner
<fvzS7.222$MH1.26...@newssvr10.news.prodigy.com>, the lovely and
talented TeaLady broadcast on alt.folklore.urban:
> Slow day in the FD today, the guys had time to gossip with me. One
> gleefully related to me the story of the lawyer who insured his cigar
> collection against theft, fire, etc. Told to him by a buddy who is a
> lawyer as a True Tale of Caution and Greed. Seemed to be a bit
This set me to wondering about ULs that professionals tell one
another - or at least tell neophytes.
Medicine seems to have a few. William Nolen told a number of these
(as solemn truth) in _The Making of a Surgeon_, including the
evergreen "shit shake." Some of these are the chain-of-disasters
sort: some minor thing goes wrong and everything done to try to fix
things only makes things worse in some spectacular way. A pretty
good example is the obstructed bowel misdiagnosed as an abcess which
culminates in a shit shower. There is one about the reconstructive
surgeon - the punchline is the question posed to a patient: "Tell
me, were you circumcized before the accident?" And there are a few,
like the chocolate-highway gerbil and the stomach pump for semen,
for which it is hard to tell whether they were medical legends that
escaped to the general public or general ULs which have been absorbed
and refined to become medical legends. The gerbil certainly became -
or originated as - a medical legend; I've heard one nurse tell it in
all seriousness to another nurse as something that supposedly
happened in the ER of the hospital in which they worked.
Do other professions have their own legends? I'm somewhat suspicious
of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
--
Lars Eighner -finger for geek code- eig...@io.com http://www.io.com/~eighner/
Half of the babies in Mexico are born without penises. --Tom Bernard
R H Draney
>There is one about the reconstructive
>surgeon - the punchline is the question posed to a patient: "Tell
>me, were you circumcized before the accident?" And there are a few,
>like the chocolate-highway gerbil and the stomach pump for semen,
>for which it is hard to tell whether they were medical legends that
>escaped to the general public or general ULs which have been absorbed
>and refined to become medical legends.
This morning before I managed to get the TV shut off, Sally Jesse
Raphael had the girl with the giant hairball from the childhood habit
of chewing on her ponytails....
>Do other professions have their own legends? I'm somewhat suspicious
>of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
>that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
Absolutely...engineers have the one about the fully operational
computer found bricked up in a utility closet with no door, that's
somehow been running traffic lights (or whatever) for twenty years
without human intervention....
Programmers have the one about the minus sign (or was it a
comma/decimal point mixup) that caused a space probe to go
missing...and the salami-slicing thing....
My grandfather used to ride with the Mounted Patrol in New Mexico, and
he swore that "foreign exchange student puts on cruise control and
goes in back to fix himself a drink" actually happened to one of his
buddies...guess you'd call that a "law enforcement profession"
legend?...r
--
"Aaaahhhh!!!! Sugarplums!!!! Get 'em offa me!!!! AAAAAHHHH!!!!"
Rick Tyler
>another - or at least tell neophytes.
>
>Do other professions have their own legends? I'm somewhat suspicious
>of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
>that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
I've heard an ULish story regarding Naval ships a few times.
Apparently, so the stories go, Navy ships are a bewildering array of
compartments that make up a 3-dimensional maze. An enterprising young
officer, assigned to some such job as damage control or general
wrong-headedness, notices a volume of space that appears to exist, but
has no entry.
Convinced that he can reclaim some space for the ship/his own
space/his dope-raising space/a bordello/other, he gets a cutting torch
and makes an opening into the lost space. He finds a fully equipped
machine shop -- unused since the ship was built 10/20/40 years
earlier. The plans for the ship called for the machine shop, but not
for any hatches into the space.
I've read this at least once, and heard it from Navy folks two or
three times. One person swears this happened on a ship he served on
circa 1970 -- although he didn't see it personally.
-- Rick "It's always a machine shop, at least" Tyler
-------------------------------------------------------
"Ignorant voracity -- a wingless vulture -- can soar
only into the depths of ignominy." Patrick O'Brian
Alan Barclay
Computers certainly do. The salami slice, the coffee cup holder,
and the 'put it back in the box' are all passed around.
SOCCERNUMB
>> >Try Googling " cigar arson '
>>
>> Or just go to www.snopes2.com where I've seen it mentioned but haven't read
>it
>> yet.
>
>As Tea Lady noted in her original post, the basic cigar arson story
>isn't new. However, her version has a kewl nudie tail. The version
>archived at TAFKAC
>(<http://www.urbanlegends.com/legal/cigar_fire_insurance_more.html>), a
>post by Martin Gilbert, ends with the arson conviction. It has no
>mention of the "arsonist" spending the entire insurance payout on an
>attempt to avoid jail. The version at snopes
>(<http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/cigarson.htm>) likewise ends
>with the arson conviction, and has no mention of how the insurance
>payout was spent.
>
>Given that Tea Lady mentioned that her version had new details, one
>might assume that she'd actually checked the archives; perhaps she
>should have made this explicit, but no matter. If either Jami JoAnne or
>Merry Rock had checked before posting snarky, uninformative follow-ups,
>they'd have noticed the difference.
>
>Alice "did I say it was Nicely, Nicely week?" Faber
I think she was explicit enough in her indication that she was telling "the"
story, and that she was providing new details. I don't know anything of Merry
Rock, and her response did seem a bit abrupt. JamiJo seemed to be sincerely
trying to provide information and to let people know that she was aware of the
existence of the tale in Snopes. In both cases, the responses were
informative, to the point that they did provide information. That information
was not particularly useful to Tea Lady if she had already seen the references
to which they directed her, but would at least provide information to followup
readers.
SOCCER"now *this* post was pretty un-informative"NUMB
SOCCERNUMB
>> Jami JoAnne
>> And if YOU had bothered to notice that I admited that I NEVER read the one
>at
>> Snopes yet then YOU would see you have no reason to be bitchy about me. I
>just
>> was thinking of saving TeaLady some time. Instead of spending all that time
>on
>> Google one could just go straight to Snopes instead and find it a lot
>quicker.
>
>Well, it all depends what you're looking for. If the question is:
>"Here's a story that set my ULometer all atingle. Has anyone heard
>this?" than a pointer to Snopes provides an answer, *provided* that
>there is a version of the story at Snopes. However, that's not what Tea
>Lady appeared to be asking. Her question was "Here's what seems to be a
>new version of an old story. Has anyone heard *this* variant before?"
>In this case, a pointer to the canonical version is anti-Gricean, and
>comes across as the opposite of helpful.
>
>Alice "*why* am I bothering?" Faber
Alice, you are, in Jami Jo's eyes, doing that for which you accuse her. She
was trying to be helpful based upon what she saw. She provided a link to
something she had admittedly not yet read, and so did not know it to be the
canonical version or a newer variant. She was providing additional information
to that given by someone who *was* a bit abrupt. She was trying to be a
helpful poster, and got her hand slapped for it, just as Tea Lady was trying to
be a purposeful poster and appeared to get a slight tongue-lashing.
This is why I say that the immediate response teams providing behavior
modification in here are counter-productive. Do you think (and I'm not saying
this for any purpose other than to ask you to look at the results of these
kinds of posts) that your post came across to Jami Jo as helpful or the
opposite of helpful?
>Alice "*why* am I bothering?" Faber
In the hope of providing a higher quality newsgroup. Just remember that many
others have the same purpose, and have been similarly misinterpreted.
SOCCERNUMB
Alk
> On Sat, 15 Dec 2001 05:11:38 GMT, Lars Eighner <eig...@io.com> wrote:
>>
>>This set me to wondering about ULs that professionals tell one
> Convinced that he can reclaim some space for the ship/his own
> space/his dope-raising space/a bordello/other, he gets a cutting torch
> and makes an opening into the lost space. He finds a fully equipped
> machine shop -- unused since the ship was built 10/20/40 years
> earlier. The plans for the ship called for the machine shop, but not
> for any hatches into the space.
And here is the computer variant of this story, as seen on
http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012:
Server 54, Where Are You?
April 9, 2001 (4:28 p.m. EST)
TechWeb News
The University of North Carolina has finally found a network server that,
although missing for four years, hasn't missed a packet in all that time.
Try as they might, university administrators couldn't find the server.
Working with Novell Inc. (stock: NOVL), IT workers tracked it down by
meticulously following cable until they literally ran into a wall. The
server had been mistakenly sealed behind drywall by maintenance workers.
Jobbydude
"R H Draney" <dado...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:3c1ae659....@news.earthlink.net...
> Programmers have the one about the minus sign (or was it a
> comma/decimal point mixup) that caused a space probe to go
> missing...and the salami-slicing thing....
I've heard one like this twice before - once on an RAF base and also from a
school teacher. It says that someone put a minus sign instead of a plus in the
programming of a fighter jet's inertial guidance system. The result of this bug
was that the jet would roll 180 degrees until it was flying upside down whenever
it passed over the equator...
--jobby
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>Do other professions have their own legends?
Oh, yeah.
>I'm somewhat suspicious
>of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
>that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
M3 T00.
I think just about every profession does have its legends, and they're
more common the more disastrous errors in that particular profession could
be. I also think there's a particular bounty in skilled professions that
encounter their unskilled equivalents (I'm thinking of electricians
running into homemade wiring, things of that sort), because there's a
ready-made demarcation zone that the story exists to emphasize.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
R H Draney
wrote:
That's one version...the other explanation is the
"comma-to-dot"...since my first programming language was Fortran, I
know full well that:
DO 100 I=1,3
and
DO 100 I=1.3
are two completely different but valid statements...the first says to
do everything between this line and statement number 100 three times,
varying the value of the integer variable I each time...the second
sets the value of the floating-point variable DO100I (spaces are not
significant in Fortran) to the value 1.3, and doesn't repeat
*anything*...Fortran also does not require variables to be explicitly
declared, so it's quite all right to set the value of a variable
that's used nowhere else in the program...depending on what the next
few lines do with the variable I, and what the consequences are of not
repeating them, the implications of such a typo are relatively
obvious....r
Lee Ayrton
On or about Sat, 15 Dec 2001, Rick Tyler of rht...@attbi.com wrote:
> I've heard an ULish story regarding Naval ships a few times.
> Apparently, so the stories go, Navy ships are a bewildering array of
> compartments that make up a 3-dimensional maze. An enterprising young
> officer, assigned to some such job as damage control or general
> wrong-headedness, notices a volume of space that appears to exist, but
> has no entry.
>
> Convinced that he can reclaim some space for the ship/his own
> space/his dope-raising space/a bordello/other, he gets a cutting torch
> and makes an opening into the lost space. He finds a fully equipped
> machine shop -- unused since the ship was built 10/20/40 years
> earlier. The plans for the ship called for the machine shop, but not
> for any hatches into the space.
[snip]
The general story of "things hidden during construction" seems to begin
with Brunel's iron "Great Eastern" liner (nee "Leviathan"), at the time
the largest thing afloat at some 689' long. Launched in 1858 she was a
hybred design with 6 masts for sail and steam-powered paddlewheels and a
screw. Never successful as a passenger liner she was converted to a
cable-layer and laid the transatlantic telegraph cables. Sold for scrap
in 1888 she spent 1889 to 1891 at the breakers. At that time, legend
holds, a skeleton was found walled up in her double hull. Snopes has a
brief version at:
http://www.snopes.com/titanic/trapped.htm
A second rumor source is at:
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1473.htm
I've also heard "this probably isn't true but it illustrates wartime
building speeds" version about "lost compartments" in various types of
assembly-line built WWII vessels.
But wait, it gets better: One "emarts" posted a version to AFU
substantially the same as yours, with doubts but without debunking, in
1994. The thread (without resolution) follows:
16. Google Groups: View Thread
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&frame=right&rnum=1&thl=0,1670966661,1670867960,1668208721,1668196757,1668082138,1667874141,1666250417,1668146064,1667830687,1667742085,1666748343&seekm=34936f32.30893615%40news.bctel.ca#link1
And in a marvelous bit of signalacious thread drift, alt.folklore.military
gracefully leaps from "missing machine shop" aboard a USN carrier to a 16"
battleship gun barrel walled up in a supply ship to the classic "military
scouts pick place for shore battery, find one already there" in this
thread (a good, quick read):
15. Google Groups: View Thread
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&frame=right&th=e288e7bafb1ac637&seekm=2svdt7%24kdd%40xanth.cs.odu.edu#link1
And of course there is a red-headed cousin, the "Server found behind
drywall" thread from alt.folklore.computers -- but beware, that thread is
444 entries long and puts even AFU's best OT posters well behind the pack.
Lee "Poe has an early claim, too" Ayrton
Mitch Barrie
Draney) wrote:
# This morning before I managed to get the TV shut off, Sally Jesse
# Raphael had the girl with the giant hairball from the childhood habit
# of chewing on her ponytails....
Boy, to think what I am missing by not having a television.
Mitch
TeaLady
"Jami JoAnne" <gambit...@aol.comNOTMALE> wrote in message
news:20011215000650...@mb-ma.aol.com...
Alice, bless her and her intelligence, read my post and said...
> >If either Jami JoAnne or
> >Merry Rock had checked before posting snarky, uninformative
follow-ups,
> >they'd have noticed the difference.
>
And JamiJo, who can't even do attributes right, followed up with..
> And if YOU had bothered to notice that I admited that I NEVER read
the one at
> Snopes yet then YOU would see you have no reason to be bitchy about
me. I just
> was thinking of saving TeaLady some time. Instead of spending all
that time on
> Google one could just go straight to Snopes instead and find it a
lot quicker.
> ~Jami JoAnne Russell~
> I think my Betta Fish is insane.
> http://members.internettrash.com/users/gambitsjami/jami.html
And so I have been brought to my knees and have lost all sense of
compassion.
Jami, I wasn't asking if it was UL. I was noting a new twist on an
old story. One I hadn't heard. One that I did not find in the
archive.
And I don't appreciate snark from snotty little brain dead sac of
oozing putrescence found under a rock that had imploded from shame for
giving shelter to the egg of some un-name-able form of cellular slime
creeping along whatever backwater alley it was that belched forth into
our universe the unimaginative trolling ogre twerp me generation
wannabe spawn of even lesser forms of life that you are.
I do not like being lectured to by clueless twits. I do not like
clueless twits who, in the guise of being helpful, throw out
"pointers" and preen and pat themselves for being so smart and so
wonderful, when all they are doing is showing off how incredibly
asinine they are. I don't like you, JamiJo, and am now placing you
back in the killfile I let you loose from as I am not interested in
your drivel, your bawling, your pitiful attempts to shock, your even
more pitiful attempts to enlighten, or anything else you may do or
say. My last nerve has been imploded by your "I know better than you
and every one else even if I didn't bother to read or understand your
post and am just pointing to a place that I haven't even been 'cause
I am not interested in anything anyone says but me, me, me."
And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape. Or kill
himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
at and listen to all day.
Tea - Damn, I should have waited until New Year's to quit smoking,
this is killing my tolerance levels - Lady
Dan Evans
> On Sat, 15 Dec 2001 05:11:38 GMT, Lars Eighner <eig...@io.com> wrote:
> >Do other professions have their own legends?
Well, since you *asked.*
I don't see this anecdote in any of the archives, and it's supposed to
be
true:
Law partner is working on important legal brief, and comes to routine
argument about jurisdiction, standard of proof, or something else and,
instead of writing it all out, just writes "(cite usual crap here)"
and gives draft to associate to finish. Newbie associate doesn't
notice (or doesn't understand) instruction, so that's how it goes to
the judge.
> >I'm somewhat suspicious
> >of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
> >that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
You're doubting the voracity of lawyers?
I believe I've read one such story (or was told one such story) as
part of a law course on "how to know when to stop asking questions on
cross-examination." "A" is being prosecuted for biting off the ear of
"B" during a bar fight and a witness has testified that he was there
and A did it. A's lawyer cross-examines the witness somewhat as
follows:
Lawyer: During the fight, weren't there a lot of other people
standing about, watching?
Witness: Yes, there were.
Lawyer: And didn't those people sometimes block your view of the
fight?
Witness: Yes, they did.
Lawyer: And weren't A and B rolling about on the floor?
Witness: Yes, they were.
Lawyer: So you didn't see everything that happened, isn't that
correct?
Witness: Yes, that's correct.
Lawyer: In fact, isn't it true that you didn't actually see my client
bite the ear off of B?
Witness: Well yes, that's true.
Lawyer [asking one too many questions]: Then why did you say my
client bit off his ear?
Witness: Because I saw him spit it out.
Dan "was I supposed to bring cites?" Evans
Larry Palletti
wrote:
Oooof. Waiter, I'll have whatever she's drinking.
After that one, there's nothing for me but to roast up another load of
Sumatra Mandheling -- and maybe start a fresh batch of beer.
Congrats. Here, have some of my viripotent cannabis alternative for
blissful regressions of vexatious depressions. And a Salem.
--
Larry Palletti East Point/Atlanta, Georgia
www.palletti.com www.booksonscreen.com
Opinionated, but lovable
"Stupid people scare me."
-- Miss Russell worries about her place in the pecking order
Rick Tyler
>
>And so I have been brought to my knees and have lost all sense of
>compassion.
>
>And I don't appreciate snark from snotty little brain dead sac of
>oozing putrescence found under a rock that had imploded from shame for
>giving shelter to the egg of some un-name-able form of cellular slime
>creeping along whatever backwater alley it was that belched forth into
>our universe the unimaginative trolling ogre twerp me generation
>wannabe spawn of even lesser forms of life that you are.
>
<snip>
Are you Madeleine's American cousin, perchance?
-- Rick "Sorry, in advance" Tyler
Chris Clarke
"TeaLady" <spres...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape.
I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!
--
Chris Clarke | Editor, Faultline Magazine
www.faultline.org | California Environmental News and Information
Joe Littrell
>Rick Tyler wrote:
>> On Sat, 15 Dec 2001 05:11:38 GMT, Lars Eighner <eig...@io.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>This set me to wondering about ULs that professionals tell one
>> Convinced that he can reclaim some space for the ship/his own
>> space/his dope-raising space/a bordello/other, he gets a cutting torch
>> and makes an opening into the lost space. He finds a fully equipped
>> machine shop -- unused since the ship was built 10/20/40 years
>> earlier. The plans for the ship called for the machine shop, but not
>> for any hatches into the space.
>
>And here is the computer variant of this story, as seen on
>http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20010409S0012:
>
>Server 54, Where Are You?
http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/2001-05/sunflash.20010521.3.html
Charles A Lieberman
<slrna1lmtu.16...@dumpster.io.com>
>Do other professions have their own legends? I'm somewhat suspicious
>of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
>that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
The jumper who gets shot is in my Criminal Law casebook, er, somewhere.
(Dressler 2nd Edition)
--
Charles A. Lieberman | "Trying to fit reality to that statement is like
Brooklyn, NY, USA | trying to write a natural history of leprechauns"
cali...@bigfoot.com | --Ian York
Dan Evans
> And I don't appreciate snark from snotty little brain dead sac of
> oozing putrescence found under a rock that had imploded from shame for
> giving shelter to the egg of some un-name-able form of cellular slime
> creeping along whatever backwater alley it was that belched forth into
> our universe the unimaginative trolling ogre twerp me generation
> wannabe spawn of even lesser forms of life that you are.
Which reminds me.
Is it true that police officers are trained to fire off the entire
clip once they start to shoot?
I've heard it said on cop shows, but was wondering if there was any
basis in fact.
Dan "whole nine yards" Evans
deacon b.
>And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape. Or kill
>himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
>at and listen to all day.
Awfully long for a sig.
Shame, innit?
deke
--
Ambition is a poor excuse for
not having enough sense to be lazy.
deacon b.
Barclay) posted something that included:
Don't forget "Put the diskette in the drive and close the door."
deacon "OK. Clop, clop, clop. Bang! Clop, clop, clop. What do I do
next?" b.
Tony Sweeney
> "Jami JoAnne" <gambit...@aol.comNOTMALE> wrote in message
> news:20011215000650...@mb-ma.aol.com...
[blether deleted]
>
>>~Jami JoAnne Russell~
>>I think my Betta Fish is insane.
>>http://members.internettrash.com/users/gambitsjami/jami.html
>>
>
> And so I have been brought to my knees and have lost all sense of
> compassion.
>
> Jami, I wasn't asking if it was UL. I was noting a new twist on an
> old story. One I hadn't heard. One that I did not find in the
> archive.
>
[superlative flame deleted]
>
> And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape. Or kill
> himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
> at and listen to all day.
>
Mine.
--
"And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape. Or kill
himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
at and listen to all day." -- Tealady does remote piscine psychiatric
diagnosis on AFU.
Rick Tyler
<deke...@BLOCK.generous.net> wrote:
>On Sat, 15 Dec 2001 19:22:43 GMT, "TeaLady" <spres...@yahoo.com>
>posted something that included:
>
>>And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape. Or kill
>>himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
>>at and listen to all day.
>
>Awfully long for a sig.
Not really.
-- Rick "Edit freely" Tyler
"That damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape."
-- TeaLady to JamiJo
Graham
> space/his dope-raising space/a bordello/other, he gets a cutting torch
> and makes an opening into the lost space. He finds a fully equipped
> machine shop -- unused since the ship was built 10/20/40 years
> earlier. The plans for the ship called for the machine shop, but not
> for any hatches into the space.
>
I once owned a book entitled "Funny Peculiar" (I'm sorry I cannot
remember the author) which contained strange/funny news items, one was
from Angola (or Mozambique) in the early 1960's and involved the
discovery of a 'missing', fully equipped maternity ward during work to
construct a new maternity ward for the hospital. It seems the original
contractors sealed up the 'hidden' ward by mistake.
Graham "You think people would notice..." Donald
Dan Fingerman
news:3c1ae659....@news.earthlink.net:
> Programmers have the one about the minus sign (or was it a
> comma/decimal point mixup) that caused a space probe to go
> missing...
This makes me wonder if a NASA contractor's failure to convert from
English to metric units (which caused a Mars probe to crash a year or
two ago) will reach legendary status eventually. It made big headlines
in the USA at the time, but I can imagine someone 30 years from now
questioning whether it really happened.
--
DTM :<|
See What I Mean?
<deke...@BLOCK.generous.net> wrote:
>On 15 Dec 2001 05:51:08 GMT, gor...@elaine.furryape.com (Alan
>Barclay) posted something that included:
>
>>In article <slrna1lmtu.16...@dumpster.io.com>,
>>Lars Eighner <eig...@io.com> wrote:
>>>Do other professions have their own legends?
>>
>>Computers certainly do. The salami slice, the coffee cup holder,
>>and the 'put it back in the box' are all passed around.
>
>Don't forget "Put the diskette in the drive and close the door."
>
>deacon "OK. Clop, clop, clop. Bang! Clop, clop, clop. What do I do
>next?" b.
I have that sort of fun with the network support people all the time.
Lorrill Buyens
instead:
>And I don't appreciate snark from snotty little brain dead sac of
>oozing putrescence found under a rock that had imploded from shame for
>giving shelter to the egg of some un-name-able form of cellular slime
>creeping along whatever backwater alley it was that belched forth into
>our universe the unimaginative trolling ogre twerp me generation
>wannabe spawn of even lesser forms of life that you are.
Nuts, it's way too long for a sig.
--
Lorrill Buyens
"A load of steaming horse shit could indeed keep a human afloat, for
a tall enough and broad enough load of steaming horse shit."
- Timothy McDaniel, defining waste-product dynamics in AFU
Lara Hopkins
> This morning before I managed to get the TV shut off, Sally Jesse
For photographic evidence, taken on the National Museum of Medicine[1]
tour of AFUDC2001:
http://www.iinet.net.au/~waawa/odyssey/bezoar.jpg
Lara "So either this guy is abducting children and boiling them, or..."
Hopkins
[1] http://natmedmuse.afip.org/index1.html
--
Lastly, that that us serf of lesson: a little critical spirit with
respect to information is undoubtedly not useless.
- Verily it is by Babelfish that we come at wisdom
XF©JRH
John Schmitt
>That's one version...the other explanation is the
>"comma-to-dot"...since my first programming language was Fortran, I
>know full well that:
Oh. Fortran. What a marvellous language for scoring own-goals. I still feel the
stinging embarassment of receiving an inch-thick sheaf of fan-fold, when all I
wanted to do was print a times table in the familiar square format. In Fortran,
the carriage control (Hollerith) characters were all punctuation marks, and I
do believe I confused a colon with a semi-colon. Hence, instead of a tab
character, I was page-feeding. This was in the days of Hollerith cards and
coding sheets, when men were men and the only gates in computing were binary
ones.
John "own-goal scoring hotshot" Schmitt
* Season's Greetings to all our readers. Eat, Drink, Be Merry.
*** Remember, a turkey is not just for Christmas. It lasts into
***** the third week of January.
H Disclaimers Apply. Bah, Humbug!
Paul Tomblin
>Convinced that he can reclaim some space for the ship/his own
>space/his dope-raising space/a bordello/other, he gets a cutting torch
>and makes an opening into the lost space. He finds a fully equipped
>machine shop -- unused since the ship was built 10/20/40 years
>earlier. The plans for the ship called for the machine shop, but not
>for any hatches into the space.
I'm waiting for the story where he cuts into the "lost space", only to
find that the room is very much in use and has an entry that he didn't
count on in his mental map of the space, and he gets tossed in the brig
for cutting a hole in government property without authorization.
--
Paul Tomblin <ptom...@xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody
"What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that
gives everything its value." - Thomas Paine.
Robert Warinner
: I've heard one like this twice before - once on an RAF base and also from a
: school teacher. It says that someone put a minus sign instead of a plus in the
: programming of a fighter jet's inertial guidance system. The result of this bug
: was that the jet would roll 180 degrees until it was flying upside down whenever
: it passed over the equator...
Bob O'Bob claimed it was the F-16:
http://www.urbanlegends.com/products/f-16_flip.html
The forgotten detail, that the bug was discovered in simulation, not during
flight, does lend some voracity to what could be legendary.
I dug around for a bit and all I could find was references to RISKS (FOAF
reported, RISKS has vectored a few ULs over the years) and various software
engineering courses (unsourced).
Anybody got a more authoritative cite?
Andrew "citeless" Warinner
wari...@xnet.com
http://home.xnet.com/~warinner
Urban Legend Zeitgeist: http://www.urbanlegends.com/ulz/
TeaLady
"Rick Tyler" <rht...@attbi.com> wrote in message
news:8ehn1u4of3i4g3qq4...@4ax.com...snipt
> >
> <snip>
>
> Are you Madeleine's American cousin, perchance?
>
> -- Rick "Sorry, in advance" Tyler
No need to apologize. I am flattered, and flustered. Was not
expecting to be noticed. I see (in other posts) that some of my
wordage has been added to .sigs even. Wow.
TeaLady, peeking out from her corner in alarm. (Well, consternation.)
Lisa Cech
> Clop, clop, clop. Bang! Clop, clop, clop.
What does an Amish drive-by shooting have to do with this thread?
Lisa "sorry" Cech
Steve Smith
>
> In a previous article, Rick Tyler <rht...@attbi.com> said:
> >Convinced that he can reclaim some space for the ship/his own
> >space/his dope-raising space/a bordello/other, he gets a cutting torch
> >and makes an opening into the lost space. He finds a fully equipped
> >machine shop -- unused since the ship was built 10/20/40 years
> >earlier. The plans for the ship called for the machine shop, but not
> >for any hatches into the space.
>
> I'm waiting for the story where he cuts into the "lost space", only to
> find that the room is very much in use and has an entry that he didn't
> count on in his mental map of the space, and he gets tossed in the brig
> for cutting a hole in government property without authorization.
Like, say, a boiler? YEE-HAH! An air vent would be more likely, but
boring.
A similar story I heard from a bunch of Navy guys concerned a WWII
destroyer with a built-in still. Engine rooms on steam powered ships
have a bewildering maze of pipes, and this ship had a few extra pipes in
the engine room that formed a still.
Seems unlikely -- the pipes had to be added at the shipyard when it was
being built. The workers who added the pipes wouldn't have gotten any
use out of it, and the sailors who could have used it couldn't have
added the pipes.
The way it got found out was completely typical for military ULs. A
drunk- with- power junior officer insisted that the engine room crew
unambiguously identify each and every pipe in the engine rooms for him.
Took a long time and a lot of effort, but when they were done, there
were still a few pipes unaccounted for ....
Then there are the stories about high-pressure steam leaks. Ecch.
--
Steve Smith s...@aginc.net
Agincourt Computing http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."
JRM
>
> Is it true that police officers are trained to fire off the entire
> clip once they start to shoot?
>
> I've heard it said on cop shows, but was wondering if there was any
> basis in fact.
>
BANG!
"I give up, officer."
BANG!BANG!BANG!
Let's hope not.
Vic Meisner
> oozing putrescence found under a rock that had imploded from shame for
> giving shelter to the egg of some un-name-able form of cellular slime
> creeping along whatever backwater alley it was that belched forth into
> our universe the unimaginative trolling ogre twerp me generation
> wannabe spawn of even lesser forms of life that you are.
>
> himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
> at and listen to all day.
Damn! How long does someone have to be here to get a hat?
Vic "What with all that heat escaping her head..." Meisner
Nathan Tenny
Alan Barclay <gor...@elaine.furryape.com> wrote:
>In article <slrna1lmtu.16...@dumpster.io.com>,
>Lars Eighner <eig...@io.com> wrote:
>>Do other professions have their own legends?
>
>Computers certainly do. The salami slice, the coffee cup holder,
>and the 'put it back in the box' are all passed around.
I dunno if I'd think of those as computer-*profession* ULs. Funny Tech
Support Stories are, I think, mostly passed around among (1) tech-support
people, who understandably need them; and (2) nonprofessional users of
computers, for whom I think the motivation has to do with reassuring
themselves of their competence compared to *those* people.
The ULs of the software profession (heaven knows what the hardware people
talk about) strike me as being less ULish; things like the well-known "The
Story Of Mel, A Real Programmer", or the "magic switch" story from the
Jargon File, or "always mount a scratch monkey".
Those stories tend to travel with a *lot* of detail, and within a profession
in which detail is important, so they're resistant to mutation---though
Mel turned into free verse somewhere in the mills of folklore, and the
scratch monkey has at least drifted enough from its origins to be difficult
to verify. On the other hand, compared to "stock" ULs, they tend to have
complex plots and (often) rather detailed morals, though the latter are
sometimes nonexistent (Grace Hopper's moth) or a joke (scratch monkey).
NT
--
Nathan Tenny | A foolish consistency
Qualcomm, Inc., San Diego, CA | recapitulates phylogeny.
<nten...@qualcomm.com> |
Simon Slavin
gndona...@yahoo.com.au (Graham) wrote:
> I once owned a book entitled "Funny Peculiar" (I'm sorry I cannot
> remember the author)
Oh, but we can, Donald. It was Denys Parsons. We also know
the authors of all the other books you've ever read and where
your children go to school. Fear us. ON YOUR KNEES, BOY !
BOW BEFORE YOUR MASTERS ! BWAHAHAHAHA !
Simon.
--
http://www.hearsay.demon.co.uk | I have a hunch that [] the unknown sequences
No junk email please. | of DNA [will decode into] copyright notices
| and patent protections. -- Donald E. Knuth
The French Was There.
Dan Fingerman
news:slrna1lmtu.16...@dumpster.io.com:
> Do other professions have their own legends? I'm somewhat suspicious
> of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
> that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
Below is a snippet of funny trial transcript that I didn't believe the
first time I read it in a magazine. I saw it again a few weeks ago
when I happened to read the case it came from. This one happens to be
true.
Quoting from: Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 85; 55 S.Ct. 629,
633.
<QUOTE>
FN* The defendant (petitioner) was on the stand; cross-examination by
the United States attorney:
Q. The man who didn't have his pants on and was running around the
apartment, he wasn't there?
A. No, Mr. Singer. Mr. Godby told me about this, he told me, as long
as you ask me about it, if you want it, I will tell you, he told me 'If
you give this man's name out, I will give you the works.'
Q. Give me the works?
A. No, Mr. Godby told me that.
Q. You are going to give me the works?
A. Mr. Singer, you are a gentleman, I have got nothing against you.
You are doing your duty.
Mr. Wegman: You are not going to give Mr. Singer the works. Apparently
Mr. Singer misunderstood you. Who made that statement?
The Witness: Mr. Godby says that.
Q. Wait a minute. Are you going to give me the works?
A. Mr. Singer, you are absolutely a gentleman, in my opinion, you are
doing your duty here.
Q. Thank you very much. But I am only asking you are you going to
give me the works?
A. I do not give anybody such things, I never said it.
Q. All right. Then do not make the statement.
Mr. Wegman: The witness said that Mr. Godby said that.
The Court: The jury heard what was said. It is not for you or me to
interpret the testimony.
Q. I asked you whether the man who was running around this apartment,
was he there in the Secret Service office on the morning that you were
arrested?
A. I didn't see him.
Q. I wasn't in that apartment, was I?
A. No, Mr. Singer.
Q. I didn't pull the gun on you and stick you up against the wall?
A. No.
Q. I wasn't up in this apartment at any time, as far as you know, was
I?
A. As far as I know, you weren't.
Q. You might have an idea that I may have been there?
A. No, I should say not.
Q. I just want to get that part of it straight.
Q. Was I in that apartment that night?
A. No, but Mr. Godby--
Q. Was Mr. Godby in that apartment?
A. No, but he has been there.
Q. Do you include as those who may have been there the Court and all
the jurymen and your own counsel?
A. Mr. Singer, you ask me a question. May I answer it?
Mr. Wegman: I object to the question.
The Witness: Are you serious about that?
The Court: I am not going to stop him because the question includes the
Court. I will let him answer it.
Mr. Singer: I would like to have an answer to it.
The Witness: Mr. Singer, you asked me the question before--
The Court: You answer this question. (Question repeated by the
reporter.)
A. I should say not; that is ridiculous.
Q. Now Mr. Berger, do you remember yesterday when the court recessed
for a few minutes and you saw me out in the hall; do you remember that?
A. I do, Mr. Singer.
Q. You talked to me out in the hall?
A. I talked to you?
Q. Yes.
A. No.
Q. You say you didn't say to me out in the hall yesterday, 'You wait
until I take the stand and I will take care of you'? You didn't say
that yesterday?
A. No; I didn't, Mr. Singer; you are lying.
Q. I am lying, you are right. You didn't say that at all?
A. No.
Q. You didn't speak to me out in the hall?
A. I never did speak to you outside since this case started, except
the day I was in your office, when you questioned me.
Q. I said yesterday.
A. No, Mr. Singer.
Q. Do you mean that seriously?
A. I said no.
Q. That never happened?
A. No, Mr. Singer, it did not.
Q. You did not say that to me?
A. I did not.
Q. Of course, I have just made that up?
A. What do you want me to answer you?
Q. I want you to tell me I am lying, is that so?
(No effort was later made to prove that any such statement had ever
been made.)
Q. Did she say she was going to meet me for anything except business
purposes?
A. No.
Q. If she was to meet me?
A. Just told me that you gave her your home telephone number and told
her to call you up after nine o'clock in the evening if she found out
anything about the case that you could help me with, that is what she
told me.
Q. Even if that is so, what is wrong about that, that you have been
squawking about all morning.'
</QUOTE>
Dan "the lawyer got sanctioned" Fingerman
--
DTM :<|
Lon Stowell
If you file your head to a point, and wear a sunshade brim,
most can't tell the difference from a distance.
Brian Yeoh
> "TeaLady" <spres...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
<snip well appreciated smackdown>
> > And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape. Or kill
> > himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
> > at and listen to all day.
> Damn! How long does someone have to be here to get a hat?
There are no hats.
Brian "truly" Yeoh
--
"[...] your honor hath bene wrongfullie enformed, in sayinge he was cutt
in maney peeces, after his deathe -- for if he had bene cutt in many peces
, he could not a lived till the next morninge [...] -- which shewes he was
not cutt in verie many peeces!"
-- John Carey, defends himself from murder charges [The Steel Bonnets]
JG
> On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Vic Meisner wrote:
>
> > "TeaLady" <spres...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> <snip well appreciated smackdown>
> > > And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape. Or kill
> > > himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
> > > at and listen to all day.
> > Damn! How long does someone have to be here to get a hat?
>
> There are no hats.
>
> Brian "truly" Yeoh
And there is no spoon, but there is a spoons.
JLG
--
It's vital to remember who you really are. It's very important.
It isn't a good idea to rely on other people to do it for you, you see.
They always get it wrong. Terry Pratchett, Sourcery, 1988.
John Francis
Nathan Tenny <nten...@qualcomm.com> wrote:
>
> [. . . ] and the scratch monkey has at least drifted
> enough from its origins to be difficult to verify.
Try http://www.mv.com/ipusers/arcade/monkey.htm
I've heard the story directly from Eric.
Joseph Michael Bay
>I once owned a book entitled "Funny Peculiar" (I'm sorry I cannot
>remember the author) which contained strange/funny news items, one was
>from Angola (or Mozambique) in the early 1960's and involved the
>discovery of a 'missing', fully equipped maternity ward during work to
>construct a new maternity ward for the hospital. It seems the original
>contractors sealed up the 'hidden' ward by mistake.
>Graham "You think people would notice..." Donald
You left out that it was full of pissed-off adults
in too-tight footy pajamas and little hats.
--
Joseph M. Bay Lamont Sanford Junior University
Putting the "harm" in molecular pharmacology since 1998
When crime is outlawed, only outlaws will commit crimes.
LEGALIZE http://www.stanford.edu/~jmbay CRIME
R H Draney
wrote:
>gndona...@yahoo.com.au (Graham) writes:
>
>>I once owned a book entitled "Funny Peculiar" (I'm sorry I cannot
>>remember the author) which contained strange/funny news items, one was
>>from Angola (or Mozambique) in the early 1960's and involved the
>>discovery of a 'missing', fully equipped maternity ward during work to
>>construct a new maternity ward for the hospital. It seems the original
>>contractors sealed up the 'hidden' ward by mistake.
>
>You left out that it was full of pissed-off adults
>in too-tight footy pajamas and little hats.
It's a mark of the time I've spent here in afu that I first read this
as an allusion to either the spider in the beehive or the snake in the
K-mart jacket ULs....r
--
Fred and Betty have eyes with whites; Barney and Wilma
have only black dots. Does the series take place at a
major turning point in cartoon evolution? And are these
technically "mixed marriages"?
Nina Neudorfer
"Simon Slavin" <sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost>
gndona...@yahoo.com.au (Graham) wrote:
>
> > I once owned a book entitled "Funny Peculiar" (I'm sorry I cannot
> > remember the author)
>
> the authors of all the other books you've ever read and where
> your children go to school. Fear us. ON YOUR KNEES, BOY !
> BOW BEFORE YOUR MASTERS ! BWAHAHAHAHA !
>
Ah-ha! Is it Opposites Day?
--
Nina "I'm tall, blonde, and have smaller boobs than KD"
~~~~~~~
I do have an accent I use down south -- a cheeky
Cockney one which I don't do very well -- which
includes an idiolect in which /every/ girl is called 'Love'.
-----Simon Slavin tries in vain to hide his infatuation for Yours Truly,
on alt.folklore.urban .
R H Draney
<Nin...@mindspring.com> wrote:
>+ACI-Simon Slavin+ACI- +ADw-slavins+AEA-hearsay.demon.co.uk+AEA-localhost+AD4-
>gndonald2001+AEA-yahoo.com.au (Graham) wrote:
>+AD4-
>+AD4- +AD4- I once owned a book entitled +ACI-Funny Peculiar+ACI- (I'm sorry I cannot
>+AD4- +AD4- remember the author)
>+AD4-
>+AD4- Oh, but we can, Donald. It was Denys Parsons. We also know
>+AD4- the authors of all the other books you've ever read and where
>+AD4- your children go to school. Fear us. ON YOUR KNEES, BOY +ACE-
>+AD4- BOW BEFORE YOUR MASTERS +ACE- BWAHAHAHAHA +ACE-
>+AD4-
> Why, Simon+ACE- This is sooo out of character for you...
>
>Ah-ha+ACE- Is it Opposites Day?
>
>--
>Nina +ACI-I'm tall, blonde, and have smaller boobs than KD+ACI-
>+AH4AfgB+AH4AfgB+AH4-
I don't know what character set "utf-7" is, but it's really
annoying....r
--
"According to von Steinmetz, the eminent
physiologist, there is ever-present a group
of white phagocytes...."
JoAnne Schmitz
>In article <9vtjem$5...@qualcomm.com>,
>Nathan Tenny <nten...@qualcomm.com> wrote:
>>
>> [. . . ] and the scratch monkey has at least drifted
>> enough from its origins to be difficult to verify.
>
>Try http://www.mv.com/ipusers/arcade/monkey.htm
======
So five monkeys were fitted with caps intended to sense brain waves, and the
caps were attached to various A-to-D and D-to-A converters (which were US Army
surplus from 1956) which were in turn connected to the VAX. This connection was
piggybacked on a disk drive (pre-RL02), which contained a disk and was mounted
read-only — the read-only button was pressed and taped over with a warning not
to remove it. In normal operation, software would read data from that drive and
write it to a regular disk. The room containing the monkeys was several stories
removed from the computer room.
After some time, the VAX crashed. It was on a service contract, and Digital was
called. Laura Creighton was not called although she was on the short list of
people who were supposed to be called in case of problem. The Digital Field
Service engineer came in, removed the disk from the drive, figured it was then
okay to remove the tape and make the drive writeable, and proceeded to put a
scratch disk into the drive and run diagnostics which wrote to that drive.
Well, diagnostics for disk drives are designed to shake up the equipment. But
monkey brains are not designed to handle the electrical signals they received.
You can imagine the convulsions that resulted. Two of the monkeys were stunned,
and three died. The Digital engineer needed to be calmed down; he was going to
call the Humane Society. This became known as the Great Dead Monkey Project, and
it leads of course to the aphorism I use as my motto: You should not conduct
tests while valuable monkeys are connected, so "Always mount a scratch monkey."
=======
I can't tell precisely what the setup is from this description. Guess number 1
is that the disk isn't really being read. The disk drive is just a passthrough
so that digital data can be read as if it were from a disk. Nothing relevant is
on the disk in the disk drive, because if it was write-protected, nothing could
write to it, hence brain waves wouldn't be written to it. Guess number 2 is
that they trick the hardware and physically write the brainwave data to the disk
though the read-only switch is set. It's not clear which is being described
here; either is plausible to me not knowing the specifics of the disk drive but
having dealt with computer device control for years.
But either way, that leaves me with a problem.
The A/D converters mentioned would convert the analog voltages of the monkeys'
brainwaves into digital form so that the computer could read them through the
disk drive interface as if it were disk data, or so that some additional piece
of hardware could write it to the disk for later pickup by the computer. In
either case, the transfer is one-way -- the analog voltage drives the digital
output, otherwise two conflicting voltages/values would just sit staring at each
other forever. The only way to get the data back out to the caps is with D/A
converters.
So: Who put in the D/A converters, and why? The only reason to have these in
the device would be to convert digital output data into analog voltages and
apply the voltages to electrodes on the brainwave caps. If you don't want to
electrically stimulate the monkeys' brains, either you don't put in the D/A
converters, or you disable those connections if they were part of the Army
surplus brain hats.
>I've heard the story directly from Eric.
Perhaps you could ask him why they were intending on sending voltages back to
the monkeys, or did not protect them from accidentally doing so if the brain
hats had this capability but they didn't want to use it.
Other versions of the story do not include this camel to be swallowed, because
they say that it was supposed to be a two-way connection, but they do suggest
that someone was doing PMs [1] while the monkey was hooked up to the apparatus.
Unless the monkey is continually hooked up, there seems little chance that
someone would choose to PM a machine while an experiment is in progress. It's
possible, I guess.
JoAnne "monkey conspiracy theory" Schmitz
[1] Preventive Maintenance, which generally includes extensively testing all of
a device's capabilities to make sure it's not ready to fail or failing already
in some small and not-yet-noticeable way.
Nina Neudorfer
> annoying....r
> --
it remedied. Please let me know if it happens again.
--
Nina "Thanks to those who informed me privately"
Anton Sherwood
> > Is it true that police officers are trained to fire off the entire
> > clip once they start to shoot?
While we're up, here's a related yarn, heard in September from an
ex-Marine who was teaching pistol technique:
The standard procedure for clearing a malfunction used to be "tap rack
bang", i.e.: whack the magazine to make sure it is properly seated; work
the slide to eject a stuck shell and load a new cartridge from the
magazine; and take the aborted shot.
One fine day a member of "a certain large police force in California"
was shooting at a suspect in a hallway, and his weapon jammed. While he
was clearing it, a LOL stuck a head out of her apartment to see what the
commotion was. The cop saw her but could not overcome his programming:
tap, rack, bang through the white-haired head.
So now the rule is more like "tap rack reassess".
(I don't know why working the slide of a pistol is called "racking".)
--
Anton Sherwood -- http://www.ogre.nu/
<relurk>
See What I Mean?
The more fundamental problem is: If the read-only button was taped
down, that would set the system up to upload data from disks to
monkey brains? What harm would come to the monkeys from writing
data to those drives?
In article <vdl92uc94j33sfevm...@4ax.com>, JoAnne Schmitz
Nick Spalding
> On Sat, 22 Dec 2001 01:29:15 -0500, "Nina Neudorfer "
> <Nin...@mindspring.com> wrote:
among other things
> >Ah-ha+ACE- Is it Opposites Day?
> >
> >--
> >Nina +ACI-I'm tall, blonde, and have smaller boobs than KD+ACI-
> >+AH4AfgB+AH4AfgB+AH4-
>
> I don't know what character set "utf-7" is, but it's really
> annoying....r
Upgrade to Agent and you wouldn't even know it was happening.
--
Nick Spalding
R H Draney
wrote:
Are you suggesting that not knowing what's happening is a *good*
thing?...r
--
"I may not know much about art, but I know what
they tell me I'm supposed to like."
Maggie Newman
>
>Do other professions have their own legends? I'm somewhat suspicious
>of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
>that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
>
similar to a lawyer legend, I suspect, and it goes a little something
like this: employee gets fired for running a bookmaking
operation out of his locker. He grieves it, and the grievance goes
all the way to an arbitrator. Under questioning from the union
lawyer, the grievant denies that he himself gambled or that he
encouraged or enabled others to do so. Maintains the same denial
under cross-questioning from the company attorney, who then asks
how he got along with his co-workers. Just fine, says the grievant.
They treated you well? Oh sure, says the grievant. No complaints.
What about Joe, asks the lawyer. He treat you right? Oh yeah,
says the grievant. When he won, he'd always tip me.
Maggie "I got a million of 'em" Newman
Bob Beck
> Do other professions have their own legends? I'm somewhat suspicious
> of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
> that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
Here's one from the environmental consulting game: Junior engineer,
investigating soil and groundwater contamination around a gas station,
meets drilling crew on street in front. Crew asks if there are any
underground utilities in street. Engineer says not to worry about it, all
locations shown on this plan here. Drillers start on first borehole. Three
feet down, auger strikes gas main. Underground explosion causes
considerable stretch of street to lift a few inches before subsiding.
Drilling foreman walks over to junior, takes plan from him, studies it,
turns it 180 degrees to correct orientation, sighs, hands it back.
Bob "wasn't me, I swear it" Beck
Charles Wm. Dimmick
> Here's one from the environmental consulting game: Junior engineer,
> investigating soil and groundwater contamination around a gas station,
> meets drilling crew on street in front. Crew asks if there are any
> underground utilities in street. Engineer says not to worry about it, all
> locations shown on this plan here. Drillers start on first borehole. Three
> feet down, auger strikes gas main. Underground explosion causes
> considerable stretch of street to lift a few inches before subsiding.
>
> Drilling foreman walks over to junior, takes plan from him, studies it,
> turns it 180 degrees to correct orientation, sighs, hands it back.
Could happen, I suppose, but first thing we always did was to have
representatives from each of the possible utilities come out and mark
the approximate location of any of their respective pipes, etc. Not
that we then assumed we had them all marked, but it greatly cut the
risk of hitting something, and if we did we could shift some of the
blame back on the utility concerned. If really uncertain, we would
have someone run a ground-penetrating radar over the suspect site.
Charles Wm. "call before you dig" dimmick
--
"And some rin up hill and down dale, knapping the
chucky stanes to pieces wi' hammers, like sae mony
road-makers run daft -- they say it is to see how
the warld was made!"
Glenn Kurtzrock
>
>> Do other professions have their own legends? I'm somewhat suspicious
>> of some of the "true trial transcript" excerpts of alleged testimony
>> that sometimes appear in lawyer magazines.
>
You'd be surprised at what shows up in trial transcripts. A lot of
the time it's not really stupidity, it's just a need to get certain
legal elements onto the record. For example, I read a transcript of a
hearing I did recently where I was asking a police officer about an
injury he sustained when arresting someone, and to sustain the charge
of assault he had to testify that he suffered substantial pain, but
it's tough to get that out smoothly, so the transcript looked
something like this:
Officer: At that time we both feel to the ground, and my hand got
trapped underneath both our bodies and was crushed against the
concrete curb with all of our weight landing on it.
Me: How did that feel?
Officer: It hurt.
Me: How much?
Officer: A lot.
A lot of people don't realize that the formalized question and answer
of direct examination, or even cross-examination, while it looks
ridiculous, is necessary to either get all of the necessary elements
onto the record, or is necessary to avoid objections.
Although I must admit I do enjoy reading those trial transcripts that
make the rounds as well.
Simon Slavin
> >Try http://www.mv.com/ipusers/arcade/monkey.htm
>
> I can't tell precisely what the setup is from this description.
Nor me. It would be a very strange way of doing anything I can
imagine anyone having wanted to do.
> But either way, that leaves me with a problem.
And me with far more. It's basically very silly. Why would
anyone be trying to feed voltages into monkeybrains when they
weren't there to see how the monkeys reacted ? There would be
people in white lab coats all over that place -- if only to see
that the very valuable monkeys and equipment didn't get damaged
somehow.
The version of this story I find far more believable is the one
about 'Mabel the swimming wonder monkey' (q.Google) which can
be found in The Jargon File (q.Google). Eric Raymond claims to
have recieved corrections to an earlier definition of 'scratch
monkey' from one of the people involved.
Mitch Barrie
wrote:
# A lot of people don't realize that the formalized question and answer
# of direct examination, or even cross-examination, while it looks
# ridiculous, is necessary to either get all of the necessary elements
# onto the record, or is necessary to avoid objections.
I think it's fair to say that a lot of people know a lot less
than they think about the practice of the law and the activities
inside courtrooms. The law is, in fact, a rich vein of UL
material.
Mitch
Larry Palletti
It can be a real minefield in there. It shocked me at first to learn
how much of a trial was settled in chambers, or in quiet pretrial
conferences with the judge and the opposing attorneys.
It's really critical to get all the stuff, even the little (seemingly
inconsequential) testimony, on the record. The appellate courts don't
listen to witnesses; they read the trial record. If it ain't there, it
didn't happen.
--
Larry Palletti East Point/Atlanta, Georgia
www.palletti.com www.booksonscreen.com
Opinionated, but lovable
"Stupid people scare me."
-- Miss Russell ponders her place in the pecking order
Lee Rudolph
>It's really critical to get all the stuff, even the little (seemingly
>inconsequential) testimony, on the record. The appellate courts don't
>listen to witnesses; they read the trial record. If it ain't there, it
>didn't happen.
And, conversely, if it *is* in there, then it *did* happen; or
so the Old Gringo tells us.
INADMISSIBLE, adj. Not competent to be considered. Said of certain
kinds of testimony which juries are supposed to be unfit to be
entrusted with, and which judges, therefore, rule out, even of
proceedings before themselves alone. Hearsay evidence is inadmissible
because the person quoted was unsworn and is not before the court for
examination; yet most momentous actions, military, political,
commercial and of every other kind, are daily undertaken on hearsay
evidence. There is no religion in the world that has any other basis
than hearsay evidence. Revelation is hearsay evidence; that the
Scriptures are the word of God we have only the testimony of men long
dead whose identity is not clearly established and who are not known
to have been sworn in any sense. Under the rules of evidence as they
now exist in this country, no single assertion in the Bible has in its
support any evidence admissible in a court of law. It cannot be
proved that the battle of Blenheim ever was fought, that there was
such as person as Julius Caesar, such an empire as Assyria.
But as records of courts of justice are admissible, it can easily
be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were
a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which
certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a
flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it
were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was
ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery
for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human
testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.
And a merry bah, humbug to you all.
Lee "only 298 shopping days till the next Feast of St. Ambrose!" Rudolph
Chris Clarke
lrud...@panix.com (Lee Rudolph) wrote:
> Lee "only 298 shopping days till the next Feast of St. Ambrose!" Rudolph
I really hate that the Feast of St. Ambrose has gotten so commercialized.
--
Chris Clarke | Editor, Faultline Magazine
www.faultline.org | California Environmental News and Information
Charles Wm. Dimmick
> A lot of people don't realize that the formalized question and answer
> of direct examination, or even cross-examination, while it looks
> ridiculous, is necessary to either get all of the necessary elements
> onto the record, or is necessary to avoid objections.
As a commissioner on a local land-use agency I have several times
heard lawyers object that I was "leading the witness" when I
questioned either applicant's experts or those of the opposition.
The problem is that any decision we reach on an application must
be based on evidence presented at the public hearing, and if we
are aware of facts that will likely influence our decision, and
neither the applicant nor the opposition has introduced those
facts, we must get them on the record somehow.
Then there was the delightful evening I had many years ago
in another town when I was appearing as an expert witness for
a developer, and the opposition had brought in a high-profile
big-city lawyer. From the very first question on cross-
examination I could tell where he was leading and realized
that he was "barking up the wrong tree". So I very pleasantly
and cooperatively let him lead me through his structure of
questions and answers, until he got to the killer question,
where he was sure he had found a big hole in my testimony.
But he had overlooked a basic fact, probably because he
knew nothing about ground-water geology, and my answer
made his whole careful line of questioning useless.
Moral: a lawyer should never ask a question of a witness
unless he/she is already certain of the answer.
Charles Wm. Dimmick
Charles Wm. Dimmick
>
> In article <a07oq7$rhj$1...@panix2.panix.com>,
> lrud...@panix.com (Lee Rudolph) wrote:
>
> > Lee "only 298 shopping days till the next Feast of St. Ambrose!" Rudolph
>
> I really hate that the Feast of St. Ambrose has gotten so commercialized.
Ambrose does happen to be one of my favorite saints. A fine example
of how no good deed goes unpunished. All he did was try to maintain
public order during an election and so they made him a bishop.
CWD
Rick Tyler
<la...@palletti.com> wrote:
>
>It's really critical to get all the stuff, even the little (seemingly
>inconsequential) testimony, on the record. The appellate courts don't
>listen to witnesses; they read the trial record. If it ain't there, it
>didn't happen.
I've had to testify in two criminal trials.(1) I've served on the
jury for a civil case. This, obviously, makes me an expert.
I was impressed with the incredible detail of the questioning and the
testimony. Watching the attornies question their expert witnesses in
the civil trial was especially entertaining.
"My client is paying you to testify, isn't he?"
"You would testify for anyone who paid you, wouldn't you?"
"You haven't had a chance to examine Ms. Plaintiff in person have
you?"
(Paraphrased) "There isn't any particular reason to believe anything
you say, is there, you lying whore?"
And these questions were by the attorney who hired the expert witness.
I guess the idea is to drag out all the bad things about the witness
yourself before it comes out in cross examination.
ObTrial: When I was testifying the defense attorney objected when I
said that "It looked like it had been stepped on." The judge
overruled the snotty little son of a bitch, saying, "He [that is, me]
said that it *appeared* to have been stepped on." Hah.
-- Rick "Perry Mason" Tyler
(1) As the victim, not the accused, thank you very much.
-----------------------------------------------------------
"That damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape."
-- TeaLady to JamiJo
Lorrill Buyens
Newman) ordered a alt.folklore.urban pizza with extra cheese, but got
this instead:
A vaguely similar "trip the witness" tale appears in Francis L.
Wellman's _The Art of Cross-Examination_ (The Macmillan
Company; 1911):
An amusing incident, leading to the exposure of a manifest
fraud, occurred recently in another of the many damage suits
brought against the Metropolitan Street Railway and growing
out of a collision between two of the company's electric cars.
The plaintiff, a laboring man, had been thrown to the street
pavement from the platform of the car by the force of the
collision, and had dislocated his shoulder. He had testified in
his own behalf that he had been permanently injured in so far
as he had not been able to follow his usual employment for the
reason that he could not raise his arm above a point parallel
with his shoulder. Upon cross-examination the attorney for the
railroad asked the witness a few sympathetic questions about
his sufferings, and upon getting on a friendly basis with him
asked him "to be good enough to show the jury the extreme
limit to which he could raise his arm since the accident." The
plaintiff slowly and with considerable difficulty raised his arm to
the parallel of his shoulder. "Now, using the same arm, show
the jury how high you could get it up before the accident,"
quietly continued the attorney; whereupon the witness extended
his arm to its full height above his head, amid peals of laughter
from the court and jury.
Lorrill "Planes, trains and lawsuits" Buyens
--
Lorrill Buyens
"A load of steaming horse shit could indeed keep a human afloat,
for a tall enough and broad enough load of steaming horse shit."
- Timothy McDaniel, defining waste-product dynamics in AFU
Charles Wm. Dimmick
> I was impressed with the incredible detail of the questioning and the
> testimony. Watching the attornies question their expert witnesses in
> the civil trial was especially entertaining.
>
> "My client is paying you to testify, isn't he?"
Read our book "The Geologist as Expert Witness". [American Institute of
Professonal Geologists, Westminster, Colorado]
L. "You are being paid for your testimony, aren't you?"
W. "No, I am being paid for my time."
L. "And how much are you being paid?"
W. "....an hour" [be sure to answer this question honestly and
without hesitation]
L. "Isn't that an awful lot of money for your time?"
W. "Perhaps, but that is what my time is worth."
> "You would testify for anyone who paid you, wouldn't you?"
"If I could do so without compromising my ethics, yes."
> And these questions were by the attorney who hired the expert witness.
> I guess the idea is to drag out all the bad things about the witness
> yourself before it comes out in cross examination.
>
> ObTrial: When I was testifying the defense attorney objected when I
> said that "It looked like it had been stepped on." The judge
> overruled the snotty little son of a bitch, saying, "He [that is, me]
> said that it *appeared* to have been stepped on." Hah.
I had an instance where the judge interrupted both lawyers and
took over the questioning himself, saying that the way _they_ were
going at it they would never get to the part _he_ wanted answers
to [this was a non-jury civil trial].
Charles Wm. Dimmick
deacon b.
<cdim...@snet.net> posted something that included:
>Could happen, I suppose, but first thing we always did was to have
>representatives from each of the possible utilities come out and mark
>the approximate location of any of their respective pipes, etc. Not
>that we then assumed we had them all marked, but it greatly cut the
>risk of hitting something, and if we did we could shift some of the
>blame back on the utility concerned. If really uncertain, we would
>have someone run a ground-penetrating radar over the suspect site.
Back in the 1960s, the place where I worked had a clogged sewer. They
asked the town engineer if he had any plans that would indicate where
the connections were. He came over with some plans that showed that
the 1880 connection with the city sewer in the alley was *directly*
behind the washroom - the *only* plumbing in the building. They'd
already snaked the pipe, and knew how far it was to obstruction, so he
marked an X with a piece of chalk there.
He then pulled out another sheet, that showed the original
construction plans for the building when it was rebuilt after a fire
in 1910. It showed the sewer pipe as going *parallel* with the alley,
and then angling back. They calculated the position of the obstruction
and put another X there with chalk.
Then he grabbed a coat hanger, and cut it up into two "ell" pieces,
and tried "witching" for the pipe. He couldn't get anything near
either of the first two locations, but found an indication about 5
feet the *other* direction. They broke up the concrete floor and dug
there, and found the broken tile that obstructed the line.
I never gave much credence to water witching - as a general rule, you
could drill *anywhere* and find water at 80 feet - but since then,
I've seen a *lot* of people witching successfully for water and sewer
lines, and even power lines and buried telephone and TV cable. My dad
and my sister could do it; none of us boys could.
Is this heard of in citified areas, or is this primarily a rural
practice?
deke
--
Ambition is a poor excuse for
not having enough sense to be lazy.
deacon b.
something that included:
>>It's really critical to get all the stuff, even the little (seemingly
>>inconsequential) testimony, on the record. The appellate courts don't
>>listen to witnesses; they read the trial record. If it ain't there, it
>>didn't happen.
>And, conversely, if it *is* in there, then it *did* happen; or
>so the Old Gringo tells us.
Seems to me that it would be a lot cheaper for a Black Hat to buy one
court reporter than a dozen jurors....
Ron Saarna
"deacon b." <deke...@BLOCK.generous.net> wrote in message
news:19pf2ucuf1r82f02h...@4ax.com...
> I never gave much credence to water witching - as a general rule, you
> could drill *anywhere* and find water at 80 feet - but since then,
> I've seen a *lot* of people witching successfully for water and sewer
> lines, and even power lines and buried telephone and TV cable. My dad
> and my sister could do it; none of us boys could.
>
> Is this heard of in citified areas, or is this primarily a rural
> practice?
I am not sure about a rural/urban breakdown, but it is certainly not unknown
to us city folk. James Randi had a wonderful article about testing dowsing
claimants in Germany. It is a two-parter and can be found at these two
links:
http://www.randi.org/pdf/swift1-1.pdf
http://www.randi.org/pdf/swift1-2.pdf
with follow-up material, and a general article about dowsing at:
http://www.randi.org/pdf/swift2-34.pdf
This might just make your Christmas. If you can round up one of these
succesful witchers, you would be eligible for $1million upon succesful
completion of the double-blind tests. It would be worth the travel and time
even if you just took a 25% cut from your dowser.
Ron "I can see your future" Saarna
Charles Wm. Dimmick
> Back in the 1960s, the place where I worked had a clogged sewer. They
> asked the town engineer if he had any plans that would indicate where
> the connections were. He came over with some plans that showed that
> the 1880 connection with the city sewer in the alley was *directly*
> behind the washroom - the *only* plumbing in the building. They'd
> already snaked the pipe, and knew how far it was to obstruction, so he
> marked an X with a piece of chalk there.
>
> He then pulled out another sheet, that showed the original
> construction plans for the building when it was rebuilt after a fire
> in 1910. It showed the sewer pipe as going *parallel* with the alley,
> and then angling back. They calculated the position of the obstruction
> and put another X there with chalk.
>
> Then he grabbed a coat hanger, and cut it up into two "ell" pieces,
> and tried "witching" for the pipe. He couldn't get anything near
> either of the first two locations, but found an indication about 5
> feet the *other* direction. They broke up the concrete floor and dug
> there, and found the broken tile that obstructed the line.
>
> I never gave much credence to water witching - as a general rule, you
> could drill *anywhere* and find water at 80 feet - but since then,
> I've seen a *lot* of people witching successfully for water and sewer
> lines, and even power lines and buried telephone and TV cable. My dad
> and my sister could do it; none of us boys could.
Being in the water-finding business, among many other pursuits, I
could not be unaware of the practices you mention. I have been
observing witchers for 40 years, and also carried out a few experiments
of my own. Bottom line is that some witchers _can_ find water, or pipes,
or whatever, but for reasons totally unrelated to any esoteric or
supernatural or esp explanations. In any carefully designed experiment
where the dowsers have absolutely no clue to where the maguffy is
located, their success ratio is no greater than chance. But when
they have any foreknowledge or clue as to the more likely location of
the maguffy, their success is remarkable. This is _not_ fraud on their
part. They truly believe that the two wands [I used bent welding rod
in my experiments] cross and/or swing apart on their own, with no
human input.
Experiment one: I got a bunch of volunteer students. I showed them
how to hold the bent rods, loosely so that their curled fingers
provided vertical pivots within which the short ends of the bent
rods could swing freely. They should start with both rods pointing
forwards, parallel to each other and to the floor. I then told them
there was a pipe running under the floor, crossing the path they
were to walk ["inadvertently" giving them a clue as to where the
pipe was]. _Every_ student found that his/her wands would react
when crossing that part of the floor. Generally with the more
credulous students the wands would cross each other, while with
those students who thought the whole thing was a fake the wands
would fly apart at that point. Afterwards I explained to the
students that there was NO pipe at the spot where the wands
crossed; this was merely a demonstration as to how unconscious
thoughts in your head would make the wands appear to move of their
own volition. Some students, however, continued to believe the
wands, rather than me, stating that they could _feel_ the wands
twisting in their hands as they got to the designated spot.
Experiment two: I began carring a pair of wands in my vehicle.
Some of my consulting work consists of locating suitable well
sites in parts of western Connecticut where dry wells or
totally inadequate wells [of the one quart per minute variety]
happen to be rather common. I determine suitable sites by use
of air photos, mapping of rock outcrops and their fracture
patterns, and alignment of large trees, which often follow the
fracture patterns in the underlying bedrock. All the useful
water is found in these fractures in this type of geological
setting, and the best wells are located at or near the
intersection of two or more fractures. When indicating to
landowners where was a likely place to find water I would
sometimes encounter a client who thought he should perhaps
bring in a dowser to verify my choice of site. I would then
haul out the wands from the back of my vehicle, hand them to
the client, and suggest he walk them over the site.
Invariably the wands would cross at the indicated site.
What I think is happening with the successful dowser is
that he/she is picking up unconsciously the same geological
clues that I use in my work, and using these clues to pick
a good well site, honestly believing that it is the wands
that are doing the selecting.
Charles Wm. Dimmick
Glenn Kurtzrock
wrote:
>(Paraphrased) "There isn't any particular reason to believe anything
>you say, is there, you lying whore?"
>
>And these questions were by the attorney who hired the expert witness.
>I guess the idea is to drag out all the bad things about the witness
>yourself before it comes out in cross examination.
>
That's exactly it, it's called stealing the other guys thunder. Since
I get to go first, I brnig out ALL the bad stuff on direct examination
so it doesn't look like I'm trying to hide anything. In fact I
usually bring out that stuff on jury selection with questions like:
"Would everyone agree that whether a person has been previously
convicted of a crime has nothign to do with whether they are able to
witness a crime?"
"The reason I ask is that one of our witnesses has been convicted of a
crime. Is there anyone here who will not be able to give that person
your full attention, and be fair and impartial when deliberating this
case?"
There's more to it than that, but that's the basic gist. If a jury
thinks you're trying to hide something, you lose.
Glenn Kurtzrock
<cdim...@snet.net> wrote:
>Then there was the delightful evening I had many years ago
>in another town when I was appearing as an expert witness for
>a developer, and the opposition had brought in a high-profile
>big-city lawyer. From the very first question on cross-
>examination I could tell where he was leading and realized
>that he was "barking up the wrong tree". So I very pleasantly
>and cooperatively let him lead me through his structure of
>questions and answers, until he got to the killer question,
>where he was sure he had found a big hole in my testimony.
>But he had overlooked a basic fact, probably because he
>knew nothing about ground-water geology, and my answer
>made his whole careful line of questioning useless.
I love watching that happen. Except when it happens to me.
>Moral: a lawyer should never ask a question of a witness
>unless he/she is already certain of the answer.
If that is the only thing you knew about cross-examination, you'd be
better than most of the trial lawyers out there. That is the MOST
important rule of cross-examination, bar none.
Also, while Vincent Bugliosi disagrees, never ask an opposing witness
"why?"
Charles Wm. Dimmick
> >Moral: a lawyer should never ask a question of a witness
> >unless he/she is already certain of the answer.
>
> If that is the only thing you knew about cross-examination, you'd be
> better than most of the trial lawyers out there. That is the MOST
> important rule of cross-examination, bar none.
I have one more important rule, for the expert witness:
Never let your ego get in the way of your main reason for being
there. [It's a rule I have to keep reminding myself of.]
Oh, and no matter what, when under oath, never, ever say
anything that is not true [slanting the truth is OK, as long as
it is still true].
Rick Tyler
wrote:
>
>Also, while Vincent Bugliosi disagrees, never ask an opposing witness
>"why?"
I remember thinking, "why is George going out with a sawed-off shotgun
at 9:00 in the morning?"
-- Rick "Paraphrase r us" Tyler
-------------------------------------------------------
"Ignorant voracity -- a wingless vulture -- can soar
only into the depths of ignominy." Patrick O'Brian
Thomas Prufer
wrote:
>"Would everyone agree that whether a person has been previously
>convicted of a crime has nothign to do with whether they are able to
>witness a crime?"
>"The reason I ask is that one of our witnesses has been convicted of a
>crime. Is there anyone here who will not be able to give that person
>your full attention, and be fair and impartial when deliberating this
>case?"
So you end up with a jury of people who aren't capable of wangling
their way out of jury duty when handed a straight line like *that*?
Or with a jury of those civic-minded enough to think that being a
juror is part and parcel of being a citizen, and wouldn't ever look
for a way out when asked to serve?
Thomas "and what about perjury?" Prufer
P.S.: Merry Christmas.
D.E. Franks
news:b9hh2ucsb8hgjur84...@4ax.com:
Uh, yea. I was on a jury at a murder trial recently and voir dire could
be summarized with "Do you think you can be fair and impartial?" and
"Can you really, really, really, truly not afford two weeks away from
work?" Although a good portion of people raised concerns about work,
the only person in the pool who was dismissed because of hardship was a
dairy farmer.
It worked (very roughly) something like this:
"Do any of you know any police officers here?"
(hands go up)
"Would this affect your judgment?"
(hands go down)
"Have any of you read about this case in the paper?"
(hands go up)
"Would this affect your judgment?"
(hands go down)
etc.
It was very obvious to all but the most stupid that all you would have
had to say was "I can't be impartial." So it isn't a question of being
smart enough to get out of jury duty at all. Most jury trials last less
than a half of a day, so make the effort, take the time and enjoy it.
Juries would be well served by critical thinkers such as those found on
AFU.
-Dave
Charles Wm. Dimmick
> It worked (very roughly) something like this:
>
> "Do any of you know any police officers here?"
> (hands go up)
> "Would this affect your judgment?"
> (hands go down)
> "Have any of you read about this case in the paper?"
> (hands go up)
> "Would this affect your judgment?"
> (hands go down)
> etc.
>
> It was very obvious to all but the most stupid that all you would have
> had to say was "I can't be impartial." So it isn't a question of being
> smart enough to get out of jury duty at all. Most jury trials last less
> than a half of a day, so make the effort, take the time and enjoy it.
> Juries would be well served by critical thinkers such as those found on
> AFU.
And yet they have never wanted me on a jury. I fill out those forms
before showing up, being as honest as I can be, and they usually tell
me not to bother showing up. The two times I got as far as being in
the pool at the court house went something like this:
Time one: Q. Who is your employer? A. The State of Texas
Dismissed!
Time two: Q. Do you know anyone involved in the case?
A. I know both lawyers and the judge.
Dismissed!.
Charles Wm. "forty years eligible, never served" Dimmick
Tony Sweeney
I, on the other hand, have been called twice in six years, and have been
obliged to demur on both occasions, for the same reason (non-resident
alien).
Tony "Dismissed!" Sweeney
--
"And that damn fish isn't insane, he is trying to escape. Or kill
himself. Which isn't all that inexplicable, given who he has to look
at and listen to all day." -- Tealady does piscine psychiatric diagnosis
on AFU.
Glenn Kurtzrock
wrote:
>So you end up with a jury of people who aren't capable of wangling
>their way out of jury duty when handed a straight line like *that*?
>
>Or with a jury of those civic-minded enough to think that being a
>juror is part and parcel of being a citizen, and wouldn't ever look
>for a way out when asked to serve?
>
I've found that anyone who wants to get out of jury duty is easily
able to. The point of asking the question is two-fold. One, to let
the jury know way up front about any bad parts of my case, which
steals the other sides thunder and shows that I have nothing to hide.
Two, there are some people who will honestly say that they would have
a problem with a witness like that, and I get to bounce them for
cause. Or if it's not necessarily a witness problem, I want to know
if any juror has any problems with any part of my case, so I can get
rid of them. Regardless of what goes on in the movies and on TV,
people tend to take things a lot more seriously when they're sitting
in the box in front of a judge, after swearing to answer all questions
truthfully. And when they actually get selected, they tend to try to
reach a fair result, no matter how minor the case may seem.
Songbyrd11
>>Moral: a lawyer should never ask a question of a witness
>>unless he/she is already certain of the answer.
>
>If that is the only thing you knew about cross-examination, you'd be
>better than most of the trial lawyers out there. That is the MOST
>important rule of cross-examination, bar none.
Gerry Spence would disagree with you. I took a class from him and to him there
is only one way to cross-examine. You lay out the story that you want the jury
to hear and then break it into small parts. Then you ask the statement as a
question, saying, isn't it true that......
Then you keep going no matter what they say.
"Isn't true you grabbed your wife by the hair? (no)
"and isn't it true after you grabbed her by the hair, you slapped her? (no)
Song---it works for him
TMOliver
> I never gave much credence to water witching - as a general
> rule, you could drill *anywhere* and find water at 80 feet -
> but since then, I've seen a *lot* of people witching
> successfully for water and sewer lines, and even power lines
> and buried telephone and TV cable. My dad and my sister could
> do it; none of us boys could.
>
> Is this heard of in citified areas, or is this primarily a
> rural practice?
>
some folks seem a lot better at it than others. Finding buried
pipe, especially the iron or steel varieties, is blatantly crude,
apparently accomplishable by even the insensitive, 'though I've
never been able to pulll it off. A lot of folks seem to have built
in "Magnetic Anomaly Detectors" like the one's that naval aviation
used to buy to protrude like stingers from the tale cones of
maritime patrol/ASW aircraft. I've always thought the willow wands
and forled sticks were "for effect" with the real talent internal.
TMO
TMO
mag...@rahul.net
songb...@aol.com (Songbyrd11) created
And where was he asking a question that he wasn't certain of the
answer? Looks to me like he expected the witness to say no, and
didn't care (expecting the witness to lie, perhaps).
jc
Thomas Prufer
wrote:
> Regardless of what goes on in the movies and on TV,
>people tend to take things a lot more seriously when they're sitting
>in the box in front of a judge, after swearing to answer all questions
>truthfully. And when they actually get selected, they tend to try to
>reach a fair result, no matter how minor the case may seem.
Actually, I'm glad to hear it. I've never been called, nor do I expect
to be, being a nonresident...
Thomas Prufer
Glenn Kurtzrock
>Gerry Spence would disagree with you. I took a class from him and to him there
>is only one way to cross-examine. You lay out the story that you want the jury
>to hear and then break it into small parts. Then you ask the statement as a
>question, saying, isn't it true that......
>
>Then you keep going no matter what they say.
>
>"Isn't true you grabbed your wife by the hair? (no)
>"and isn't it true after you grabbed her by the hair, you slapped her? (no)
>
>Song---it works for him
That isn't really a contradiction of what I said. What you're
describing is called a "no set", where you lay out your theory of the
case, knowing that the witness will disagree. I tend to finish off my
cross-examinations with a no set. Even though the witness is
disagreeing with me, that doesn't mean I'm not asking a question I
don't know the answer to. I can guarantee that Gerry Spence would
never ask a question of a witness that he didn't already know the
answer to. There are just way too many possible answers a witness can
give, and if you don't know the answer ahead of time, they will
absolutely say the worst possible thing for your case. If you know
what the right answer is, the best thing that can happen is for the
witness to lie on the stand, because then you can prove them wrong. I
had a witness once who was testifying on behalf of his corporation in
a case involving violations of the fire ordinance. He testified that
he was unaware that he was supposed to fix certain violations. I got
him to repeat that several times, and then I showed him original
documents dated before the date of incident involved in this case,
which stated that he needed to fix these violations, and they were
signed by him. The judge came back with a guilty verdict in about 5
minutes.
Songbyrd11
Song
Vic Meisner
news:Xns9183471351...@207.126.101.100...
Or if you absolutely CAN'T take the time to do said civic duty, repeat the
following sentence to the judge or either attorney: "I'm jes' dyin' t'get on
this jury. I kin spot a guilty person a mile away!"
Vic "Either that or, 'When we find 'em guilty, kin I pull th' switch?'"
Meisner
Lee Ayrton
On or about Mon, 24 Dec 2001, deacon b. of deke...@BLOCK.generous.net wrote:
[snip of groundwork for story]
>
> Then he grabbed a coat hanger, and cut it up into two "ell" pieces,
> and tried "witching" for the pipe. He couldn't get anything near
> either of the first two locations, but found an indication about 5
> feet the *other* direction. They broke up the concrete floor and dug
> there, and found the broken tile that obstructed the line.
>
> I never gave much credence to water witching - as a general rule, you
> could drill *anywhere* and find water at 80 feet - but since then,
> I've seen a *lot* of people witching successfully for water and sewer
> lines, and even power lines and buried telephone and TV cable. My dad
> and my sister could do it; none of us boys could.
>
> Is this heard of in citified areas, or is this primarily a rural
> practice?
I've only seen it in rural settings, or practiced by those with rural
backgrounds. I've seen land surveyors look for buried boundary
markers by dowsing. Since the advent of professional-grade, relatively
inexpensive "metal detectors" it has fallen far out of fashion.
I even did a bit of dowsing in my youth, but never with metal implements.
A nicely "Y" shaped bit of live wood say, 3' long from a sapling served
well. We were never particular about the kind of tree it came from but it
needed to be live. One held the ends of the legs in fists held palm-up,
and put tension on the wood by twisting the fists at the wrists towards
the body. The tension was important as it made the wood more likely to dip
towards the sought-for object.
But I'm quite sure that my experience with dowsing is the same as
Charles': The dowser is picking up on subtle clues. The wand is
indicating nothing more that the belief of the dowser.
Lee "Dowsing for dollars" Ayrton
Marc Reeve
The stick had, at the tip of the Y, a hollow into which one was supposed
to rub a sample of the substance to be dowsed for. This was supposed to
sensitize the stick to the vibrations of that substance, or some other
tomfoolery.
Marc "having decent accuracy in dowsing for donuts" Reeve
--
Marc Reeve cmr...@armory.com Embrace Spamfuscation
"Men do not use their penis to push the supermarket trolley. They do not use it
to greet each other, apart from perhaps after a large amount of alcohol and a
vindaloo on a Friday night."
Lee Rudolph
>But I'm quite sure that my experience with dowsing is the same as
>Charles': The dowser is picking up on subtle clues.
It would be interesting, however, to know through which sensory
channel(s): is the dowser "smelling water", seeing stuff (as I
believe Charles suggested), possibly hearing something relevant,
or what? Are there credible reports of effective dowsing by blind
people, for instance, or water-witching by a Dumb Chum who H4S N0
N053?
Lee "the ineluctable modality of the snot-green aquifer" Rudolph
N Jill Marsh
>Lee Ayrton <lay...@sea.ntplx.net> writes:
>
>>But I'm quite sure that my experience with dowsing is the same as
>>Charles': The dowser is picking up on subtle clues.
>
>It would be interesting, however, to know through which sensory
>channel(s): is the dowser "smelling water", seeing stuff (as I
>believe Charles suggested), possibly hearing something relevant,
>or what? Are there credible reports of effective dowsing by blind
>people, for instance, or water-witching by a Dumb Chum who H4S N0
>N053?
I have missed quite a bit of this thread, but that shall not stop me
from throwing in a Personal Anecdote.
My grandfather was a well-known local water dowser. He had vision,
and a nose. He always claimed (well, when he wasn't playing on the
"majickal water witch" schtick) that the stick helped a dowser focus
on important external cues, like changes in air humidity/temperature,
different textures of plants on the ground, etc, and that anyone with
a sufficient amount of observational ability could be taught to dowse
successfully.
Not to mention, if you ended up having to dig really deep for the
water in the spot where the dowser had indicated the water was, then
that just meant that the water must be sitting really deep around
those parts, right?
nj"prophesies fulfilled on demand"m
"my boots are scattered on the floor
I walk around in shoes"
Maggie Newman
>
>>Moral: a lawyer should never ask a question of a witness
>>unless he/she is already certain of the answer.
>
>If that is the only thing you knew about cross-examination, you'd be
>better than most of the trial lawyers out there. That is the MOST
>important rule of cross-examination, bar none.
>
I would have thought most of us had learned that one at the
metaphorical knee of Atticus Finch, years ago.
Maggie "required reading in my town" Newman
deacon b.
something that included:
>Lee Ayrton <lay...@sea.ntplx.net> writes:
>
>>But I'm quite sure that my experience with dowsing is the same as
>>Charles': The dowser is picking up on subtle clues.
>
>It would be interesting, however, to know through which sensory
>channel(s): is the dowser "smelling water", seeing stuff (as I
>believe Charles suggested), possibly hearing something relevant,
>or what? Are there credible reports of effective dowsing by blind
>people, for instance, or water-witching by a Dumb Chum who H4S N0
>N053?
Well, my report, with started this radiaesthesia subthread, was of
dowsing a sewer line buried 6-8 feet deep, underneath a six-inch
concrete floor that had been poured half a century earlier. The
location was neither the logical location nor the mapped location, but
a third location altogether.
There may have been clues to the location, but furrfu, I still can't
figure out what they might possibly have been.
See What I Mean?
<deke...@BLOCK.generous.net> wrote:
And there's always lucky guesses. If you wanted to know if water witching
works, you would need to do a controlled study.
Joe Thompson
> There may have been clues to the location, but furrfu, I still can't
> figure out what they might possibly have been.
Cracks, stains or other irregularities in the concrete? Pipes leak, and
even through six feet of earth I'd expect there to be enough leakage to
affect concrete (possibly even to affect how it cures after pouring).
-- Joe
--
Joe Thompson | http://www.orion-com.com/~kensey/
sp...@orion-com.com | PGP key: Finger joe-...@mindspring.com
Yeah, it's crazy, but I just ate a giant pixy stick, and I'm excited
because my new computer is coming today. -- Apreche on Slashdot