You know you’ve encountered your ur-Plaintiff when it alleges that the very act of arguing that your client has not committed racketeering itself constitutes racketeering. Yeah. This is a fun one.
Or, shorter von: I’m still not ready to do much more than ruminate on Cylons and draft nasty letters to opposing counsel. (The two activities are not entirely dissimilar.) I’d like to post on torture (bad idea!) and social security reform (good idea!), but I’ve got not time. So, consider this an open thread.
send these losers over here, von…we’ll take care of ’em…
so long as the topic is art or “why Bush is bad” that is…
😉
keep up the good fight!
Hey von… what’s the etymology of the “ur-” prefix you’re using? I looked it up, and it means something like “original, or primitive”, but that doesn’t sound quite right. But it looks familiar, so I’m guessing there is something geeky and perhaps RPG-ish to the useage. Or I could be completely off base. Its bugging me.
Neolith: I’m not von, so I don’t know what he had in mind, but I’d suggest ‘archetypal’ as the meaning: the form of which all other plaintiffs are mere shadowy derivatives.
Dear God. Racketeering Plantiff Prime!
Is The Aviator worth going to see if all you’re really interested in is Alan Alda?
The Aviator is a movie which I thought I would hate, been when forced to watch I enjoyed. But I don’t know what you want out of seeing Alan Alda, so I’m not sure if you will get it.
Some brilliant gentleman with a van full of gasoline containers managed to get pulled over and surrounded by DC Police on westbound Pennsylvania Ave NW snarling evening traffic. This may rival traffic jam that resulted from the farm tractor in the reflecting pool standoff.
I just like Alan Alda. It’s one of those random things.
OK, von, we all believe you. But are you this guy?
Hmm, Andrew. I think I’d be in a better mood if I had been accused of being a “rocketeer.”
I hate lawyers. And thus the ancient — well, circa 1993 — von-rule is confirmed: Eventually, we all become what we hate.
Bonus von rule (circa 1994):
If a given tavern contains a patron who simply must speak with you, then that is the patron to whom you simply must not speak. (I suspect that most of us have been on one or the other side of this one.)
If a given tavern contains a patron who simply must speak with you, then that is the patron to whom you simply must not speak.
I gotta ask: how did you meet your wife?
Since this is an open thread, I wanted to comment on one of the scariest comments Katherine has ever left:
As someone who has worked in the law for almost 15 years (most even before I was a lawyer), that statement scares the $@#@# out of me.
. I think I’d be in a better mood if I had been accused of being a “rocketeer.”
Rocka-who?
(Man will I be impressed and/or scared if someone identifies the source of that quote.)
Crap, Josh. You beat me to it. For those that think Jennifer Connelly is hot now, they should check out her earlier work, before she got too skinny.
that statement scares the $@#@# out of me.
errr, Sebastian, that statement comes towards the end of a 115 comment thread that was contentious enough to jump the firebreak and apparently burst out in several other threads and had you analogizing yourself to oppressed African-Americans (17 Jan 11:29pm). Now you want to use Katherine’s statement as a club to beat journalists with? In an open thread? I thought of making a comment in the thread about the Steve Martin movie but I thought that might be taken as simply an insult. Context, context, context.
I really do appreciate that you have different beliefs than me and that you are in the minority on the board and that tempers get up, but pulling a quote out of context from another thread to start up something in an open thread? Do you see why Katherine gets so frustrated with you?
That wasn’t an attack on Katherine. It was expressed dismay about journalists. Really, I attack people so often it is strange that you seem to call me out when I’m agreeing with them.
Neolith,
I think the ur prefix means “original,” or the ancestor of all, so the ur-plaintiff is not von’s opposing litigant, but was someone who lived thousands of years ago. It comes from the ancient city of Ur, which as I recall was the original home of the patriarch Abraham, whence God told him to go forth.
Disclaimer or boast, according to how it turns out: This is all off the top of my head, no Googling or anything.
“ur” is German meaning original or ancient – der Urwald = the primeval forest. Maybe it’s come into English through Urtext from philology.
Those of you who remember Armando from tacitus.org will be interested to note his post up at Kos – he just interviewed Sen. Boxer.
Well, my last word on this. I didn’t say you were simply attacking Katherine per se, though I can see how you might think I was. I was simply pointing out that the ‘scariest’ quote (and I don’t think that Katherine thinks that the observation she offered up was ‘scary’) was a continuation of what has been a rather heated discussion in an open thread. I don’t think that’s fair, but I admit hyper sensitivity to the form that rhetoric takes. Perhaps it is simply the old adage that one dislikes what one sees in themselves most, and that is most certainly true, but I honestly think that if step back and take a look at this, you might see that there is something there. I’d also note that if you are “attack[ing] people so often’, that might make it very hard to accept that you actually agree with someone when you are making an observation.
Sorry, just the historical linguistic police here. rilkefan is right about it being from German, and lest someone think that Ur might have been originally borrowed into German, that’s not possible, because ur is from Middle High German and it means ‘out of’ and it comes from Indo-European *ud-.
(full disclosure, I had to use Google for that)
Yeah. This is a fun one.
It could be worse. You could have the jury from hell.
rilkefan is right about it being from German
Yes, I think LJ is right on this one (I knew that German major would come in handy) – it does mean as a prefix ‘original’ Plus I have seen it in a number of German works before the language was codified in the 19th century; I don’t think it was borrowed.
I gotta ask: how did you meet your wife?
She and two good friends presented themselves drunk at my door and demanded to be driven down a country road late at night. (No, I’m not going to explain further.)
She and two good friends presented themselves drunk at my door and demanded to be driven down a country road late at night.
I love a romantic mystery.
(No, I’m not going to explain further.)
Don’t! It’s too good a story as is: a tiny fragment of romance/mystery out of the blogosphere.
OK, rilkefan and fledermaus and lj, it’s German. I was right about meaning, wrong about etymology. Disclaimer applies. Next time I’ll Google.
“…that statement scares the $@#@# out of me.”
I took the Sebastian’s comment to express the same feeling I get when people tell me how the private sector is so much more efficient than the government. I’ve never worked for the government, but I’ve worked for some large corporations. The thought that it’s even physically possible to be less efficient and more screwed up than my former employers is kind of scary. I think Sebastian was expressing a similar dismay that media professionals could be less conscientious than his compatriots in the legal profession. (Incidentally, the tone of his comment would seem to be less than complimentary towards his own profession as well.)
I second tonydismukes about (my limited experiences in) the private sector. The biggest employer was the worst: I decided that I would face social catastrophe if I did more than one and a half times as much work as the next most productive person, and moreover that since no one seemed to be expecting me to do even this much, I could hardly be said to be ripping them off, so 150% of nearest competitor it was. This normally took me about an hour. During the rest of the time (during the four months I worked there) I edited two books, taught myself a substantial amount of modern Greek, read a lot of novels, and also designed their first-ever software testing protocol (since I still felt sort of bad about this.) (Before that, ‘testing’ was just done more or less at random. Ha ha ha.) When I left, I was told that I had a guaranteed job there any time I wanted to return. Right.
Having worked in both the public and private sectors, my experience was that the private sector seems inefficient to me, and the public sector is even worse because it is harder to fire people and because the threat of bankruptcy rarely hangs over your head. The place I work now is actually very effecient. Everybody does all sorts of things.
Everybody does all sorts of things.
Yeah, I’ve been in private sector jobs like that. Sometimes the things we were doing were even the things we got paid for!
My most productive employer ever was a tiny non-profit, and the productivity was largely due to great management and a wonderful and committed group of employees willing to work for next to nothing because they believed in it. My least productive employer ever was the one mentioned above (Bank of America), but a close second was the very same small non-profit, after it was taken over by the Executive Director from hell, who caused all those great committed employees to leave. I lasted six months (longer than almost anyone else), but eventually followed. I have no idea what, if anything, this means.
But I do know that very early on in my employment history, I decided that a huge reason for various forms of employee bad behavior was being treated without respect. In restaurants, for instance, those who assumed that their employees were just waiting to slack off and/or eat them out of house and home tended to get what they expected, and those who didn’t, didn’t. And, in my experience, a lot of employers (especially in low-end jobs) treat their employees like potential malefactors just because they think it’s the hard-nosed and efficient way to be, whereas if I’m any judge, it’s plainly counterproductive. (Absent evidence that they are potential malefactors, at least.)