I'm Not an Attorney, But I Played One on TV

...and that lack of real-life experience isn't stopping Dylan McDermott, formerly attorney Bobby Donnell on The Practice, from serving as his own divorce lawyer.

I've Got a Secret

It occurs to me that it's really quite unethical to tell someone something -- and then AFTER the fact say that it's a secret and not to tell.

The person who does this essentially asks the receiver of the message to lie, and this without giving her the opportunity to refuse to hear the secret.

This has just happened to me, and while in the end, the person being kept out of the loop is eventually going to be told the secret, my job (my lie) is to remember that I didn't know it first, even though I did.

I don't like being asked to lie, and upon reflection, it occurs to me that this person, who shall remain even pseudonymously nameless, frequently says, "don't tell So and So" when little (usually dumb, insignificant) things happen that she'd rather he not know.

Am I right, or am I overly sensitive?

One Week Later

I was gone a week and a day. In that week:

My cat, Baby, decided that, with spoilsport me out of the way, the dining table is now his domain. I have no idea how I'm going to keep him off it.

Baby shedded about 1/4 of a cat's worth of fur.

My outdoor potted plants did not die, although the Weather Channel told me every day that it was very dry here.

Apparently we had quite a windstorm at least once because said potted plants are blown all over the place and I need to go out and find where my Sirius antenna went.

A mystery and why I'm really posting on this topic: my neighbors, whose mailbox has been in one position the 32 years they've occupied their home, have planted a second mailbox (apparently not a replacement) five feet away from the old one, and rather low to the ground.

I Don't Play Favorites

I just searched my own blog and can't believe I've never ranted about this:

SECURITY QUESTIONS.

I despise them to the core of my being (the one rare exception: the website that allows you to ask and answer your own questions). Why do I hate them?

They rarely ask answerable questions.

For instance, I had to set up three security questions to get into my bank account. I did NOT get to choose these questions. They were:

Favorite restaurant?
Favorite drink?
Favorite person?

I have no single, favorite restaurant, nor do I usually have an answer for the questions like them: favorite TV show? movie? song? actor? etc? etc? (I actually do have a favorite drink: diet Pepsi. But rarely do I have a single answer to a question like this.)

The third question is the worst. It reminds me of the old "philosophical" question: your child and your spouse are drowning. You can only save one. Which one will you save and why?

Cookies, I don't have a favorite person. The people in my life bring me joy in different ways. I'd like to think they feel the same way about me in relationship to the other people in their lives.

Today I had to set up a new charge card for online payment. I had to answer FIVE security questions. They gave me about 20 to choose from, but at least 15 of them were "favorite" questions. Several others were "it depends" questions: e.g., where did you meet your spouse? (Are you asking specifically where we were [in the hallway between the old building and the new], or generally [high school]? Am I going to remember which answer I gave or, more importantly, how I worded it?) I was barely able to find five answerable questions. I already keep a notebook with passwords. I'd hate to have to start another for answers to security questions.

And the bank account problem? I had to solve it just that way: make a decision -- not entirely true because these are not my "favorite" restaurant and person -- and write the answers down.

Which seems to me not so secure after all.

Bugging Out

I'm off to my daughter's in NC for about a week. She just happens to live in my daughter-in-law's hometown. DIL and her (and Marine Son's) son are there, so off I go for a family-fun-filled Mother's Day weekend, complete with a pig pickin'. (I don't quite know what that is, but I can guess, and I'll know for sure soon enough.)

I may or may not get to check in -- everyone have a great Mother's Day!

Bad Career Move

Big drug bust at San Diego State University today.

Ouch:

Those arrested included a student who was about to receive a criminal justice degree and another who was to receive a master's degree in homeland security.

This won't look good on the resumes.

Isn't It Ironic?

Regarding the report that Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds are engaged, CNN reminds us that Reynolds, who formerly -- and relatively recently -- was engaged to Alanis Morissette, "recently starred in 'Definitely, Maybe.'"

Scattergories Meme

Picked up at kona's place.

All questions must be answered by using a word that begins with the same letter as your name. I'm not willing to use my "real" name, so let's go with Bitty, shall we?

1. What is your name? Bitty
2. A four-letter word: both
3. A vehicle: bus
4. A city: Baltimore (near where I grew up)
5. A boy's name: Bobby
6. A girl's name: Barbara
7. Alcoholic drink: beer
8. An occupation: brain surgeon
9. Something you wear: bra
10. A celebrity: Brigitte Bardot
11. A food: bread
12. Something found in a bathroom: bathtub
13. Reason for being late: boredom (ok, so I had to stretch on this one, but if I'm not motivated to go wherever, it might take me a while to get there...)
14. Something you shout: BINGO!!!
15. An animal: badger
16. A body part: brain

More fun (and in a few instances, harder) than I expected.

If you like, have at it.

What I hope to be my one and only post about the sick-o who raped his daughter and imprisoned her and their children for DECADES

The man is pleading insanity. Well, yes. It is "insane" to do what he has done. But that doesn't mean it's unpunishable.

His lawyer, Attorney Rudolf Mayer said he believed 73-year-old Josef Fritzl had a mental disorder, The Associated Press reported.

Mayer said: "I believe that the trigger was a mental disorder, because I can't imagine that someone has sex with his own daughter without having a mental disorder," Mayer said in an interview broadcast late Sunday.

Since his attorney can't imagine it, it must be so.

But that’s not why I’m posting on this. One thing has been bothering me since the beginning. This man imprisoned his family and presumably no one knew of their existence in the cellar.

What would have happened had he died? He is, after all, in his 70s. Had he left papers behind instructing someone to rescue his family? Would his wife have finally gone to the cellar and, finding the strange locked door, asked someone to help her find out what was behind it? Or might she have been so afraid of his insistence that she never go there that she would have left it alone?

In other words, would Elizabeth and the children have simply starved to death, abandoned in their prison?

And if this thought occurs to me, I (having perhaps a little more imagination than Fritzl’s attorney) imagine that it had occurred to Elizabeth. And she had to live with that fear on top of all the others.

Life in that basement was a nightmare in so many more ways than one.

Grades are not Pizzas

A student sent me an e-mail today asking me what his final grade is. He asks, he says (and not nearly as grammatically correctly as I recreate it here), because he needs a 3.0, which he says means he needs a B plus in my class to keep his car insurance discount.

Friends, he has not done B plus work.

The time for students to get the grade they "need" is the 16 weeks of the semester, not final-grading weekend.

This e-mail is typical of the pressure we get from some students who have decided what grade they want or need in our classes and continually push us in that direction, sometimes subtly and sometimes not. Well, I NEED an A, they insist. Despite the fact that I give class instruction in what the elements of an A, B, C, etc. are and I have posted samples of A papers, they think that because writing is (in their eyes) not as cut and dried in its grading as in many classes, where they are often asked multiple-choice questions and are graded by a scantron machine, grades are negotiable, or worse: orderable, like a pepperoni pizza. No anchovies, please.

But grades are not pizzas and are earned, not ordered.