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February 03, 2007
"Do You Run a Belief Tank?"
Well, do you? From Chuck Newton's Spare Room Tycoon, see this one and think about the Kool-Aid you bottle and sell to yourself, your employees and your clients. Bravo. I'd love to see Chuck expand on this one. The question, put in WAC?'s more pedestrian way, is: are we really thinking through the solutions we offer to our clients? Or just "mailing it in"--like the unhappy and unimaginative mechanics so many of us have become? Can we make it habit to regularly challenge our assumptions, our procedures, our ways of doing business?
Do we ask: "Are we sure that really works?"
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Reuters: "Chewbacca arrested for head-butting in California"
WAC? loves both journalists and the Japanese--but prefers this headline: "Preez, to take picture [crick, crick] of American movie star, Chewie":
“Nobody tells this Wookiee what to do,” “Chewie” from the “Star Wars” movies said before slamming his head into the guide’s forehead, the Los Angeles Times newspaper reported.
Our careers--clients, lawyers, writers, politicians, Wookiees--have ups and own. But Chewie, say it ain't so.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)
February 01, 2007
...and up to Hell's Kitchen.
So I go to NYC and have two meetings in Midtown Manhattan--and then I have an attack of dreaded W-L balance, which is for slackers and people under 35. I lie down in my hotel for a while, hoping the feeling will go away. It doesn't. So I escape The Business of Law, take a cab to America's First Hood and, as James would say, "do the walk" in Hell's Kitchen:
Near Times Square, but still worlds away, Hell's Kitchen was for 150 years an uneasy mix of poor and working class Irish along with Everyone Else. It got yuppie-fied 15 years ago but still has the strong feel of the "old neighborhood". It's on the west side of Midtown: 34th Street to 57th Street, from 8th Avenue to the Hudson River. Like the equally notorious but now cemented-over and gone Five Points to the south, another Irish Hood with a gritty past, HK means poverty and crime to most of us--or maybe we remember "West Side Story". True, Mafia enforcer Mad Dog Coll was from Hell's Kitchen and killed here in the 1920s and 30s like hundreds of other mobsters for generations. (Remember the brutal "Westies" of just 30 years ago?) But Robert De Niro and Alicia Keys grew up here, too. The Actors' Studio is on West 44th Street. For years, the Studio and cheap housing had drawn actors to HK.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)
January 31, 2007
Down to The Old Ebbitt...
Last night I was "stuck" in Washington DC, one of the few consistently interesting and civilized cities in the U.S. DC is my birthplace. I spent most of my career there, and I still have an office off Eye Street. So I left my hotel in the West End and went to the Old Ebbitt Grill on 15th Street near the White House to eat:
Twenty years ago, after quite a fight, they demolished the original Old Ebbitt, and the adjoining building, in which British soldiers, after setting a few fires in 1812, drank and gloated. And for generations after that (no fires, usually) at various times so did my dad, I, my best friend's mom, my DC friends, Peter Pan Georgetown grads with nicknames like "Baseball Bill" and "Cowboy", Dustin Hoffman, Carl Bernstein, Bill Murray, White House aides, reporters and lots of the usual serious DC werewolves with too much ambition and gall for polite company. The new Old Ebbitt is an ultra-slick and large but darkly-wooded palace--where I'm told I had a party just before I was briefly married in 1982. If you are in DC, just go there. The waitresses are still wonderful in their suspenders and red bow-ties. (If you abuse them in any way, make sure you tip $100.) You will hear some real "DC" conversations at the OEG--especially at the three long wooden bars there. And some wonderful, grandiose swearing--a dying American art form mercifully kept alive in the Beltway. Confidence, lots of it, is required at all times.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)
January 29, 2007
Legal London
In 2004 I was lucky enough have dinner with a friend, ex-California judge and lawyer-turned-barrister at Gray's Inn. Among the West's most enduring institutions and traditions, the Inns of Court make Yale's Skull and Bones seem like Chuck E. Cheese, Mattress Discounters or the downtown Pittsburgh "Y". They lie in the true heart of London, a city of uninterrupted commerce, vitality and ideas for nearly 2000 years. See this interesting glimpse (in 2 posts) of life as a member of the Inns of Court here and especially here at Tim Kevan's The Barrister Blog.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)
January 28, 2007
Blawg Review #93: The Iluminati
BR #93 is by Kevin Thompson at Cyberlaw Central. Blawg Review continues to amaze and establish itself as Lawdom's Increasingly Global Weekly Review.
Posted by JD Hull at 03:14 AM | Comments (0)
Father Drinan (1920-2008)
Robert F. Drinan - Lawyer, Congressman, Irishman, Priest. He served as a Representative from Massachusetts 1971-1981.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:41 AM | Comments (0)
Getting through culture clash
See "Working Globally" at Michelle Golden's Golden Practices.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
That Genarlow Dude
Free Genarlow Wilson. And file this under I Like To Watch--and Film It, Too. See this interesting post about a high school kid who got 10 years in a Georgia slammer for filming girls having sex with him and his buddies, and related links, at That Lawyer Dude.
Posted by JD Hull at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)