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A proposal to socialize the legal profession:

Whereas it is unconscionable that Citizens granted financial privilege by Society enjoy more expansive access to legal representation than those of lower station;

Whereas a single malignant prosecution may cast a well-lived and productive life into ruin;

Whereas the noble career of navigating legal waters has suffered damage of reputation by those seeking profit rather than the greater Good;

Whereas Citizens of and visitors to this Country are entitled to equal representation under the Law, such guarantees not being subject to the tides of fortune and circumstance but to the currents of Fairness and Justice;

The above being true and evident, we hold that the Profession of Practicing Law shall not be subverted by profiteers, and that its services not be reserved to the wealthy but instead made available to our Citizens and other eligible parties; this mandate necessitating that such services be provided by agents of the Government of the Country and not entrusted to private enterprises.

Our honorable brethren of this Profession and their guilds and unions will undoubtedly ally themselves with these ends, they appreciating the fairness of dispensation of service and financial stability granted and guaranteed by such arrangements. To those of baser motivations who would see the Rights of the People as means to personal gain and not the worthy goal of our Society, we say this: the time has come to sacrifice in the name of Justice, and the People shall have what is theirs by Right.

I read a nice newspaper story a while ago about Abe's Detailing in Norfolk, NE. When I wanted to have Jen's minivan detailed as a present, I thought I'd give Abe's a try and made an appointment for the $45.99 "express detail". When we picked it up later, the van looked nice, but they wanted to charge us for the $159.99 "presidential detail" that they performed instead.

I told the employee that I'd ordered the cheaper package. He said I must have talked to his brother and that his brother wrote it down wrong, and still wanted me to pay the full price for the wrong job.

I will never darken the doorsteps of Abe's Detailing in Norfolk again. If you choose to do so, I highly recommend you get a written estimate in advance.

It snowed!I went outside today and played! bet I would have stayed out there if it had snowed more and if my feet didn't freeze, I would have stayed there longer!

You know dad's blogs about Ramoda?Well I know something he forgot!About half the people working there smoked!I sat down at a table to eat my muffin, and I smelled smoke.I look over my shoulder,and what do I see?some people that worked there smoking!Ewww....And I hope everyone that DOES work there sees this!

I was at grandma's house last weekend, and there was a power outage.Turns out, it was a squirrel chewing on the power lines, and got electrocuted.We found out when my Uncle Brian came in saying,"There's a dead squirrel that was chewing on the power lines."When I heard that I fell on the floor laughing!That squirrel is nuts!Or at least was nuts...

Tom Cruise's new likely flop, "Valkyrie", is now scheduled for release on December 25. I was just thinking the other day that nothing says "Christmas" like a feel-good movie about Nazis.

While waiting for Jen to return from a conference, I thought about calling her to get her estimated time of arrival, or her ETA. I realized she might be might be pretty far away still and thought I better ask for an estimate of the accuracy of the estimate, or meta-estimate: her META. Hey, neat! META can be a recursive acronym for "meta-ETA", so it also references the nature of the acronym itself, sort of making META a meta-acronym, which truly makes it both meta and META.

Grandma and Grandpa got here yesterday!My camera is working again to!I took a picture of a mirror,and when I saw the picture I saw me and my camera flashing!Anyways,I am very exited!They're staying 2 weeks!

There is a new time management application for BlackBerry phones called FCmobilelife. Just as a warning, potential users should know that FCmobilelife was written by SCO, a bankrupt company famous for suing AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler, customers who were moving away from SCO's software to something else.

Now, I won't directly tell anyone to avoid FCmobilelife, mainly because I think SCO is a collective of lawsuit-happy cretins and I don't want them coming after me, but would urge users to be extremely careful about building business relationships with its developers.

As of mid-August, I can't watch the local ABC affiliate TV channel over my satellite dish because they tried to jack up the rates they charge Dish Network for carrying their channel. Never mind that their advertisers pay them by the number of viewers, regardless of whether that's by antenna, cable, or satellite. Dish Network could almost get away with asking KCAU to pay them for the task of handling all the transmission details. Anyway, here's a letter I wrote to KCAU's president:

We took a trip to Grandma's house on Thursday last week, and on Saturday we went to the lake.A couple hours before we left we went boating.It took a long time for me and my friend to get off the tube. And when I did get off the tube I asked the boat driver if we could stop the boat and swim fora while. When we left the lake it was a long drive back to grandma's house, and I almost fell asleep!I had half a hamburger and went to bed.

This is kind of a hard review to write. Short take on the music: it's brilliant. If you like Irish folk or punk, you'll like "The Meanest of Times". However, I just can't get past the awful recording quality, and by awful, I mean truly, utterly terrible.

As though the music industry didn't have enough problems to deal with, such as the string of lawsuits against its customers, the major labels have been busy with something called the "loudness war". The thinking is that the louder music is played, the better most people will think it sounds. In an effort to make their CDs sounds better than their competitors', the companies are recording music as loudly as possible. There's nothing inherently bad about turning up the volume, but they try to squeeze out a few extra decibels by smoothing out the sound so that even the quietest sounds can blow out your speakers.

In Nebraska, petitioners are gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would remove all gender and race consideration from government hiring. This is a fairly polarizing issue and emotions run pretty high on both sides.

This morning I heard a radio ad attacking the petition, not because it was a bad idea or unjust or for any other debatable reason, but because the petition circulators might be convicted murderers. The ad said that if you sign, then you might be subject to identity theft, robbery, or worse.

Really. They said that. Never mind that all of the information you'd put on a petition is available in the phone book, or to anyone you've ever written a check to or used a credit card with.

Hi! You're the guy who sat behind me at my 8-year-old daughter's teeball practice. I thought you'd want to know that you were talking loudly enough for everyone to hear you, including the coaches. I mean, we could all tell that's why you were bitching so loudly the whole time, and I figured you'd be happy that you were heard.

Now, I'm sure you're an expert in the game. You definitely sounded like it from 30 feet away! Still, I thought perhaps you might appreciate a few clarifications:

There are few joys in life like using something that is the perfect expression of its intent. Each trade has its representative tools, and their common trait is quality, even if it's not obvious to the casual observer, and often counterintuitive. The best tools in a category are almost always the least flashy, and rarely the ones a new practitioner would choose.