« February 25, 2024 - March 02, 2024 | Main | March 10, 2024 - March 16, 2024 »
March 09, 2024
Badness in Depositions: "Stop me before I coach again."
An objection must be stated concisely in a nonargumentative and nonsuggestive manner.
--from Rule 30(c)(2), Fed. R. Civ. P.
Defending lawyers who testify are bad. And let he or she without sin cast the first stapler. In defending in a deposition, giving speeches and coaching your witness on the record is "bad" because it may be suggestive of the answer the witness should give. We could go on and on and on about this--but we'll just be quiet and let you read it.
(Does this guy ever shut up?)
Posted by JD Hull at 03:59 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2024
Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The Irish.
“There's no point in being Irish if you don't know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.”
--Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Assistant Secretary for Labor, a few days after November 22, 1963.
.jpg)
Posted by JD Hull at 12:59 AM | Comments (0)
March 07, 2024
Dan Hull’s Rum Diary: Growing up Hunter Thompson.
Kurtz. He got off the boat. He split from the whole goddamn program.
--Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now (1979)
Thompson had a way of keeping anyone unfriendly to the very idea of him beyond even mere curiosity. Just unaware. In that case, you were a nice person doing the best you could. You didn't "need it"--anymore than you needed to become good friends with Andy Warhol, Ralph Nader, Harry Dean Stanton, or Dr. John the Night Tripper, whoever they were.
--A Fan
Twenty years ago, when I was an associate in D.C. sweating everything, I worried a lot about something hanging in my office: a framed black, white and red "Hunter S. Thompson for Sheriff" election poster for a 1970 election in Aspen, Colorado.
The poster bore a Harvard Strike fist. Inside the fist there appeared to be what someone explained was a drawing of a plant which bad or crazy people chewed on to "get high". But I quickly realized that anyone who actually knew about Thompson and his books and articles on presidential politics, Las Vegas and the Kentucky Derby--the event in his hometown of Louisville was "decadent and depraved"--would likely like me for having it.
I was right. The poster meant nothing to most people who visited my office, and it even helped me make friends. In the 1970s and 1980s, people read and loved him or had never heard of him.
So you either "knew" HST--or you didn't.
He either delighted, or was too disturbing to explore. A talented and comical writer, he drank too much, really did like chemicals, hated Richard Nixon, upset people on the press entourage, freaked out editors, showed up drunk for "speeches", and arranged for Ed Muskie to be severely menaced on a train by one seriously funny outlaw rich kid named Peter Sheridan.
He liked weapons. He was once accused of firing a military rocket at a snowmobile. According to a friend of mine who worked for one of the TV news networks, Thompson once mysteriously and suddenly showed a handgun to Secret Service agents and reporters sitting in a booth in a famously silly Capitol Hill singles bar, mumbling "just in case there's a firefight..."
Even with that public life, Thompson had a way of keeping anyone unfriendly to the very idea of him beyond even mere curiosity. Just unaware. In that case, you were a nice person doing the best you could. You didn't "need it"--anymore than you needed to become good friends with Andy Warhol, Ralph Nader, Harry Dean Stanton, or Dr. John the Night Tripper, whoever they were.
Even after Thompson became a character in Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury, saw two movies based on his work, and died by his own hand in early 2005, most people didn't have a clue or want to. One exception in later years: "beer hippies" and GenX stoners finally discovered Thompson--"Gonzo, drugs, liberal stances, hey Hunter's my man"--and my guess is that he secretly looked down on them.
Well, anyone can be in his club at this point. But I needed it all along. He was an angry but fine writer, a humorist, an innovator--and a big hillbilly like me who grew up on the Mason-Dixon line and all along just wanted to fall in love. He still makes me laugh and cry.
Maybe there is no Heaven.
Or maybe this is all pure gibberish — a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow — to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested.
Original post: 11.29.2013
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
March 06, 2024
Romain Rolland on Creation
There is no joy except in creation. There are no living beings but those who create. All the rest are shadows, hovering over the earth, strangers to life. All the joys of life are the joys of creation: love, genius, action.
--Romain Rolland (1866-1944) in "Lightning Strikes Christophe"
Posted by JD Hull at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2024
Am rethinking 6-month employee performance reviews.
Posted by JD Hull at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)
March 04, 2024
Les Bouquinistes, part deux
More than a tower or a statue, or an artist's or soldier's name on a plaque or street post, the green bookstalls of Paris are the city's most apt and enduring mark. It's hard to say what's better: the hundreds of paintings and etchings of les bouquinistes in the last 400 years, the thousands of photos of them in the past 100, or one glimpse on any day you could almost take them for granted.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2024
We do love books: Les Bouquinistes.
Those now green Paris book stands lining the Seine go back. 500 years at least. You don't read? Go there alone. Any time of day. You'll meet women named Belle, Luz or Anelise. They'll make you see Jesus by the end of the week.
Below: Jean Henry Marlet, "Bouquiniste quai Voltaire 1821"
Posted by JD Hull at 11:59 PM | Comments (0)
Hermann the German
Hermann the German, or Arminius, was a leader of Roman Auxiliary Cavalry in the 9th Century AD. In the three-day battle known as the Varus Schlact, which took place in a dense forest, he switched sides, led the destruction of three Roman Legions (about 10,000 in number) and stopped Roman expansion into what is now Germany.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:05 PM
| Comments (0)
Balking at America
“Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity. These are not the kind of people who really need to get hung up in depressing political trips. They are not ready for it. Their boats are rocking so badly that all they want to do is get level long enough to think straight and avoid the next nightmare.”
--Thompson in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Posted by JD Hull at 07:03 PM | Comments (0)
Robert C. Townsend: Lawyers, Guns and Politics.
Lawyers take to politics like bears to honey. Other things being equal, try to pick lawyers who are active in politics. The best ones won't try or be able to "fix" things. But they're great antennae.
--Robert C. Townsend, former Avis CEO in chapter "Lawyers Can Be Liabilities", Up The Organization (1970)
Posted by JD Hull at 12:11 AM | Comments (0)