Buzzfeed had a “funniest pictures on the internet” post yesterday, and while several were laugh-out-loud funny (including a gross photo of a dog that puked at the exact moment its owner snapped a selfie), this one struck me as particularly hilarious:
Gotta admit it’s an elegant solution to the problem of the lost Barbie head!
Got any funny stuff to share? I could use some laughs, to be honest. It’s shaping up to be a crappy weekend. I have to work because I received a jury summons and must appear at the county courthouse at 8:00 AM on Monday, so my schedule will be FUBAR for the rest of the week if I don’t get Monday’s stuff done this weekend.
I’ll be completely screwed if I’m selected as a juror. I’m self-employed, so I don’t get PTO for jury duty. And guess what the county reimbursement rate is? The princely sum of $15! For the entire day!
Chances are good I’ll be excused rather than seated on a jury since I know at least one person from all of the big law firms in town, scads of nurses and doctors, and every lesbian cop in town. These connections have saved me from empanelment every time I’ve been summoned in the past, so hopefully my luck holds.
Anyhoo. Open thread!
Corner Stone
The “these connections” part is doing a helluva lotta work there.
Ben Cisco
Dad insisted that me and my little brother learn how to do laundry, cook, etc. When my brother griped about it, Dad came back with this:
Not exactly what we would call an enlightened take, but it was the 60s…anyway, I always found it to be funny.
w3ski
I had jury duty once. I sat quietly and read a gun magazine in the waiting area. They dismissed me almost first thing. Didn’t even have to read the magazine. Just carried it openly.
Good Luck. Besides they don’t want free thinking people in a jury anyway.
w3ski
bemused
I have a couple of old troll dolls with no hair that I will repurpose by planting small succulents in their heads. First I have to remove the old glue that held the hair on but I don’t know what to use that won’t damage the rubbery body.
CarolDuhart2
And they wonder why we get such crappy juries. $15 barely pays parking. I know that people should do their civic duty, but just who could afford that if they aren’t working for an employer who re-imburses them? Or retired and not very knowledgeable or sympathetic towards a younger defendant? No wonder we have mass incarceration at the very least.
CarolDuhart2
@Ben Cisco: I would have added something to the effect that even if you do, it might not be right away or she may not do all that good a job.
Hungry Joe
San Diego pays jurors $5 a day. I recently collected $10 on a two-day prostitution trial. I considered nullification — folding my arms and voting Not Guilty to protest a ridiculous law — but the court system is gummed up enough as it is, and I decided that my higher duty to the community was to get this thing over with and stop wasting the court’s time. We were in the jury room for maybe 40 minutes, and probably 25 minutes of that was fumbling around on procedural stuff. Twelve quick guilty votes (the defense had nuthin’; no way this should have gone to trial) and everybody went home. I was feeling bad about it until a lawyer friend told me the defendant probably got 25 hours of picking up trash on the freeway.
JPL
Last time I had jury duty, we had an snow storm, and it took me over six hours from the train station to get home. The next morning, I discovered I was the lucky one.
JMG
I had the all-time perfect get-out-of-jury duty card. I was a newspaper reporter, then columnist. My last call was last year after I’d been retired for a few years and it still worked! Judge told me he was a fan of my work. Defense threw me out then and there.
Villago Delenda Est
My “Summer Job” between my freshman and sophomore year of college was jury duty. At the time, the system was you were on the potential roster for a month, with an option for two. I opted for two. I sat on a number of civil and criminal cases. One was an incredibly boring food stamp fraud case that was all about the paperwork, that resulted in a mistrial because the bailiff allowed some police report into the jury room that hadn’t been entered into evidence, and it was a report that was highly prejudicial to the defendant. That one burned up two entire weeks.
Keith P.
I hear Suzie Greene in my head yelling “WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THE HEAD, YOU SICK, FOUR-EYED FUCK!?!?”
dexwood
@Ben Cisco:
When I was a boy, it was my mother who insisted I learn as much as possible about household duties – cleaning, cooking, shopping, laundry, sewing, etc. She said it was her job to see that I not be “a burden upon some poor woman” once I left home. This was the late 50s/early 60s.
Ben Cisco
@CarolDuhart2: Good point.
Hawes
Buy and wear a t shirt that reads “Fuck the police”
BellyCat
We landed in the parking lot of O’Reilly Auto Parts (thankfully) on the TX / LA border.
Second (and major blowout) in two days. :-/
Today is National Drop Your Axle Day. Gotta figure out the issue or buy a frickin’ new RV!
Big Ole Hound
I have always just said the “police always lie” and have been immediately dismissed 4 or 5 times.
ruemara
Had an intense bout of weariness yesterday and was planning to return to my less comfy apartment today. But since my host thinks it’s ok for me to stay another week since I’m still moving like a sloth when feeling good and moving like a drunk sloth when not, I’m slowly trying to organise my laundry and tidy my bathroom. I’m glad. I’m not doing much and I take forever to do it.
Can’t wait to dive in to some filmmaking and voter registration work this summer though.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
You’ll probably still lose half of Monday, Betty. I was a civvy on LE for 13 years. Last time I was summoned for JD, I knew the deputy DA, the superior court judge, the arresting officer. I was asked if I could be impartial. I said I could certainly try. The defense attorney finally struck my name (utterly understandably) from the list. Still, it was about an hour after lunch break before it happened.
CarolDuhart2
$50 a day for jury isn’t all that exorbitant. It would at least pay for parking, a sitter, and lunch.
My jury duty lasted one day. Open and shut. Carrying while on probation. Unanimous-was caught carrying. Went back for a couple more years.
I wouldn’t have been seen even near a gun, but he wasn’t all that smart.
MomSense
We watched Little Miss Sunshine last night. That is a fantastic movie. It’s certainly touching in places but also hilariously funny.
schrodingers_cat
Kangana Ranuat in Tanu Weds Manu, playing the curly haired wild child totally hamming it up to an old Hindi movie tune, always cracks me up.
She is such a chameleon hard to believe that it she is the same person who played the shrinking violet in Queen.
Kajra Mohabbatwala
Kajra==Kajal,Kohl
Mohhabat ==romantic love
MomSense
@ruemara:
Good. I’m glad you are going to accept help so you can recover. I don’t know what kind of surgery you had but I do know from experience that pushing yourself too soon after can cause a big setback. Please be gentle with yourself and heal.
japa21
Been called for Jury duty 6 times, chosen twice. The first time was back when Cook County was one week or one trial. It was December and I was a manager for Marshall Fields, so not a good time to be gone a week. We were impaneled and then sent off for lunch. When we got back the bailiff informed us that, thanks to the work of the judge (who undoubtedly expected us to vote for him next time around) not only was the case settled but, out of the generosity of his heart, and it being Christmas time, we were excused from having to do duty for the rest of the week. Actually, since we had already been chosen, we met the one case requirement, but most of my fellow jurors didn’t realize that.
The second time it was for a DUI and elevated BAL case. At that time, I was a substance abuse counselor (why yes, I have had a varied career) and I figured that I would definitely be excused. My guess is that the defense figured I would have sympathy for the defendant and the prosecution felt I would show tough love. Anyway, ended up being a three day trial with about 3 hours of testimony. My fellow jurors, for some reason, made me foreman. Anyway, we found her guilty of DUI and not guilty of elevated BAL due to a technicality.
Afterwards, the judge talked with us and explained that the defendant had two DUIs in Florida and this meant she would lose her license, but they couldn’t let us know that during the trial.
Just realized, that wasn’t you, was it, Betty?
donnah
I travel a lot to teach fine rug hooking (yes, it’s a real thing) and a few weeks ago I got my summons for jury duty. I used to be called often and served once, but after a while I didn’t hear from them. So I filled out the form with my request to be excused, as I will be teaching in Seattle that week.
I called to confirm that they had received my request and she checked it out, then said my duty was “deferred”. So either they’ll turn right around and put me on a new list, or I’ll get dumped back into the lottery.
I don’t mind the idea of serving on a jury, but at this point of my life, I just can’t spare the time.
CaseyL
I’m one of those weirdos that desperately wants to serve on a jury because it’s a civic responsibility and the law fascinates me. Also, as someone once noted, if all the thoughtful, educated, intelligent people get excused from jury duty, who does that leave?
I’ve been on two juries. One criminal, one civil.
The criminal case was a homicide – in Miami, in the 1980s, so of course it was a drug case, too. Really interesting stuff. We did convict one of the defendants, but acquitted the other – a classic case of “he’s probably guilty but the Prosecution did such a lousy job there is a reasonable doubt.”
The State asked for the death penalty, and the sentencing was a separate hearing. We decided against. What was interesting about that was, a couple of the guys who’d been making offhand remarks about “frying the bastard,” when push came to shove, couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be the ones to decide to kill someone. I should note that the jurors were terrific – despite the occasional joke, everyone took things very seriously. We had some very thoughtful discussions, esp. when we go to the penalty phase.
All in all, it was a rewarding experience.
The civil case, unfortunately, I had to be excused from after being empaneled, when I came down with the flu.
Olivia
Cute fix for the Barbie but if the head was available but wouldn’t stay on, I would have put rivets or screws through the neck a la Frankenstein. Then we could work on the hair.
glaukopis
Idling in the waiting room for ComicCon tickets this year.
Another Scott
@CarolDuhart2: Good points.
A colleague at work was on a grand jury for something like 6 weeks. Very, very few people who work for a living could tolerate that.
My (possibly garbled) understanding is that “a jury of one’s peers” used to (e.g. back in the 1700s) mean people who actually knew of the defendant. That way a town couldn’t throw some visitor in the stocks when they knew nothing about him, his character, his history, etc. How it morphed into “people who know absolutely nothing about a case and the issues” is something that is a bit of a mystery to me, and I think is dangerous for the actual determination of the truth and justice.
I’ve been called for jury duty 3 times, IIRC. Once I spent a few days waiting to be called from the gathering room with no result. Once I got called up to the court room for an “aggravated malicious wounding” case (the guy was facing up to 25 years, IIRC) but I was leaving on my honeymoon the next day, so the judge excused me. And once I was on a 3 day civil case involving a traffic accident with a fatality. The black plaintiff family won with a substantial award (and we were an all-white jury – something that concerned the judge during voir dire (I heard their discussion at the bench)).
We all need to participate if we’re able. Justice demands it.
Cheers,
Scott.
glaukopis
I once worked at a local university that paid for the time off but the city allowed us to put off eligibility until summer. Got called then and was sitting in the jury box along with 6 others from the university. All of us were removed for one reason or another.
Corner Stone
Mmmmm…Padma Lakshmi…
Corner Stone
@japa21: Rude!
ruemara
@glaukopis: Dammit, where was my notification? Fucking Comic Con!
Edited to reflect it’s returning. I have to wait until normal. double fuck Comic Con.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“Why no, I don’t believe I will just go away quietly. I’d like what you’re doing to get more attention, Mr Perjuring Attorney General”
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: He understands that it would be an honor to be fired by Trump.
Jilli Brown
If you make it to voir dire, just be obnoxiously opinionated/borderline trumpish, you’ll be dismissed in a heartbeat. Advice from lawyer friends.
Mnemosyne
Since now I get 10 paid days of jury duty, I actually don’t try to get out of it since somebody has to serve and I would hate for it to be all morons. But when I was working as a temp, I usually did everything possible to not have to do it since it was money out of my pocket.
Elmo
I spent part of my trial lawyer career in a ski town as a plaintiffs injury specialist. The law in CA is VERY unfriendly to ski accident cases, but from time to time you get one worth pursuing.
We ended up taking a skiing case to trial and we couldn’t get it moved, so here we are trying to pick a jury in an isolated town of 5000 souls that would not exist but for the ski area. The ski area founder, Dave McCoy, was still running the joint practically as a family business and is a local icon.
We started with 150 people in the pool. It wasn’t enough. The judge sent the bailiff out into the street to dragoon people. No good – they all either worked for the ski area or their livelihoods were tied to it. So finally the judge sent the bailiff over to the offices of the Town government, reasoning that those ppl didn’t have private business dependent on the Mountain and – bonus – the Town would pay them even on jury duty.
Even so, we ended up having to stipulate to an 11 person jury to avoid a mistrial.
germy
Well, he’s gone now.
glaukopis
Preview night sold out at ComicCon…
geg6
I get called for jury duty every 2years and never get picked.
And we only get $9 a day here.
J R in WV
@BellyCat:
Have you had the alignment of the wheels checked out? You mention the tires being borderline able to deal with your assumed trailer weight, perhaps you should use a truck stop scale to weigh your trailer? Or just assume it is heavier than you calculated and get some Class 5 truck tires for the trailer.
Looks like you’re getting lots of damage in your wheel wells… probably should be stopping sooner and changing those puppies out as they still contain a little air, rather than driving on a dead flat tire shredding into the trailer at speed.
We had an RV trailer we used as a bunk house while building a camp in AZ. While it was parked in the yard it acquired some damage, and I decided that pulling it around the mountains and desert would tear such a fragile creature to pieces pretty quickly, and sold it as soon as the camp building was habitable.
Now it I was going to travel I would start by finding a used horse trailer with living quarters – they have to be constructed to haul 3/4 ton animals safely, not so fragile as RVs are. You do neeed a bigger puller vehicle, but since there aren’t horses in back, not so much. Turn the stall area into useful space, perhaps a kennel for the dogs, etc. Storage for the hobbies, camping gear, fishing gear, telescope/camera/etc. Books!
Mnemosyne
Also, too, apparently in the old days, the Giant Evil Corporation would dock your jury duty pay for that sweet $15 per day check.
Now they’re like, Fuckit, buy yourself a nice lunch while you’re downtown.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: I love Preet! (Preet also means love)
glaukopis
Alas. Out of luck on ComicCon this session. Maybe in the general….
Ruckus
@Elmo:
I haven’t been there in decades but used to have a very good buddy whose dad ran the parking at the lodge in the winter and drove an ore truck at a tungsten mine in the summer. Lots of good memories from there.
Elmo
@Ruckus: The tungsten mines down in Rovana? Wow. I’m not sure those are still operating.
Chet Murthy
I once served on a grand jury in NYC in the late 90s. Holey moley, these oh-so-liberal NYC types were islamophobic as all-get-out. Old guy (pakistani) running bodega gets robbed, ends up in the hospital with chest pains, and they believe the young (black) alleged perp that it was a misunderstanding, even though old guy’s assistant backs up the story. No indictment. If there’s one bigotry it was OK to show back then even in NYC, it was bigotry against Muslims. I asked the ADAs multiple times to re-present the case, with more details, hoping these bigots would understand that they were denying this victim his day in court.
Eventually, I decided I couldn’t be in the same room with ’em, told the ADA I’d show up but just sit in another room for the day. I got excused.
Jury of my peers. Yeah right.
My understanding is, a good way to ensure you’re never picked, is to insist that you would never take someone’s word for -anything-. So expert witnesses? Sorry, gotta (a) look up their pedigrees on the Internet, (b) read their papers or (b’) if you’re not sufficiently skilled in their area, consult other experts in that area, and then (c) have other experts interrogate the work and results of the expert witness. In short, use the scientific method. Completely at odds with “can you make a judgment based solely on how believable the witness is on the stand”.
Lordy, it’s a miracle our justice system even works, with such idiocy at its heart.
And that doesn’t even get to the worse thing, which is that Guinevere was faithful b/c Launcelot beat Gawain.
Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho
This is kinda funny. It appears that no animals were injured during the filming, though one was righteously pissed off. Worth a minute of watching – great subtitles.
Ruckus
Get called up most every yr, as in CA you are eligible every 12 months. Once a group of us had to go to a separate courtroom and swear in front of a judge why we couldn’t serve. Mine was that I owned a retail business for my “livelihood” and was the sole person working there. Never got called again in that county. Last yr they assigned me to a court 35 miles away, got that changed and got called up the week of christmas at a court that I can walk to in under 10 minutes. Spent 3 hrs waiting for them to call out 35 names of the 60 or so of us that had showed up. The rest of us got to leave and wait for another 12 months. Have served on one jury, in OH, as first alternate, doc who was a resident had been writing scrips for steroids for himself, the oversight board had caught him on camera and had pharmacists testify. We saw only a bit of the evidence, after the jury convicted him, in about 1/2 hr, the judge told us how much more evidence there was but they didn’t show it as it would be overly prejudicial.
Ruckus
@Elmo:
I’d bet they aren’t, this was 50 yrs ago.
His son and I drove around in his old VW bug. And quite a few of those 36 hp had left the stable so we couldn’t actually drive to the mine itself. The road to the mine head was all switchbacks, carved into the mountain. The dump trucks were too big to make the corners so they alternated going forward and backwards up and down the road. Going down fully loaded, backing all the way to the end of a cut, then forwards for the next cut and so on, about 5-6 thousand feet was an extremely hazardous way to make a living.
J R in WV
Last tie I was on jury duty, they paid $40/day plus a reasonable mileage from your house to the courthouse and back. I worked then, and got paid for days on jury duty, which is the responsible thing for employers to do.
Some folks were so hot to get out of their civic duty, if I had been in court I would have been happy to get them out of the jury pool, they were no way going to be objective and thoughtful. They just would lower the average levels of responsibility and IQ.
But the juries I was on were pretty much hard working, thoughtful people, from the guy working for a paving crew laying asphalt all summer to the nurses, social workers, and coal miners I served with. I got to be foreman once, and then the next jury I was on soon thereafter, which had some folks I had been on the first jury with tried to select me again… I said once was my share, someone else needed to volunteer.
But everyone on a jury has the ability to participate as much as they want to. Or not. Some only participated when we took a vote, others talked about the issues brought up in the trial. We didn’t talk about the cases in the jury room, where we went while the lawyers argued about stuff with the judge.
Grand jury was the worst, most stressful day long experience. They ran at least a couple of dozen cases past us, all we were doing was deciding if there was enough evidence to hold a trial. Lots of minor drug cases… if I was a cop I would be embarrassed to bring someone to court for a single pot plant off in the rural weeds when there are people running meth labs all over the place.
The worst cases were the child sexual abuse cases. One guy was a repeat offender with lots of stuff on his computer, including his own very young daughter. There was a stack of output photos an inch thick, no one looked at very much of it, it was hard to see any of it.
One young man would walk up to any young mentally handicapped girl, take her by the hand and lead her into the bushes and rape her, then walk off leaving her to get back if she could.
These youngsters were not capable of giving consent, they didn’t even know what was happening, and should have had minders looking after them, except that’s expensive. He was going away for a long time. The town cop did a good job gathering proof with that predator. Hoping he’s still in prison. Some folks there is no rehabbing them, this guy was one of those.
Gretchen
I was on a jury once. It seemed like the only people who were excused was an obviously disabled woman and people who had police officers in their family. I don’t know if this is usual or because the defense was trying to say that his client was framed by the police. It was really interesting. The judge talked to us afterward. She said that most jurors start with their arms folded and not wanting to be there, and end up being interested and into it. The burglars were not very bright. They kicked in a door, leaving a distinctive shoe print, and then decided to sort their spoils on a road in a part of town where all the police live. They attracted the attention of two officers, one who was driving home for lunch, and another on his way to the gym.
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
We see civic duty the same way. Do I like being on a jury? No. Is it necessary? You betcha. Same with voting, can it be a pain in the ass? Yes, that’s possible, I stood in the rain for 3 of the 4 hours I waited to vote in 2004, because Ken Blackwell is a fucking asshole. I was asked the other day by a fellow employee, do I vote for mayor, etc. Every fucking time was my answer. You want to be a citizen, I don’t think you should have to serve in the military but at the very least you should vote and serve on juries when called, unless it is an actual hardship, and not a “I don’t want to be bothered,” issue. People who immigrate here have to work to become citizens and most of them take it pretty seriously, a lot more seriously than a lot of people who were born here. A lot of countries don’t have birthright citizenship and I think that is wrong, but having that doesn’t seem to make a lot of people much in the way of citizens either.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Elmo:
They aren’t. I had a contract with the County briefly to do preliminary environmental work for a redevelopment of the old company town, but the deal fell through. I did get to be “snowed in” for a very pleasant couple of days while I was working on it – Mammoth airport was closed but it was lovely down in Bishop, where I was staying, so I had the perfect excuse to do nothing and get paid for it. On the flip side, “nothing” is about all there is to do in Bishop. The little village of Rovana is pretty drab but the setting is spectacular.
I’m beginning to think there’s no more than 2 degrees of
Kevin Baconseparation between any two BJers.?BillinGlendaleCA
I used to get called every two years. One of the last times I served, we went into the courtroom and the judge’s nameplate said “Judge Wapner”. Before dismissing us for the day, the judge noticed that we had been looking at his nameplate and yes he was “The People’s Court Judge Wapner’s*” son.
*He passed away a week or so ago at 97.
?BillinGlendaleCA
One other time, I was on a civil trial and the judge was a retired judge in his 80’s. At one point in the trial, his ear fell off. So as instructed, if we had a question, one of the jurors raised his hand and said “Judge, your ear fell off”. Court was adjourned for the day and the next day the judge started the proceeding by asking us how we liked his new ear.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Was this trial in “Brazil”? I mean the movie.
Mnemosyne
Well, since Bill is re-telling stories we’ve heard before ?:
The one trial where I ended up on an actual jury, I was the second alternate. It was a law student who had forgotten that she had a knife in her bag at the Pasadena courthouse when she went there to do some research. I knew the prosecutor was going to lose the case when he argued that she must have brought the knife on purpose for some nefarious but unnamed reason because women always know what they have in their purses.
The expressions on the faces of the jury members — including mine — should have clued him in to drop the case at that point but, no, we had to go all the way through to the acquittal. Even the cop who testified that had arrested her seemed to be embarrassed about the whole thing.
(It had to go to trial because even a misdemeanor plea would have ruined her future law career, especially since she wanted to go into juvenile law. When your character witnesses include the head of Loyola Law School, you’re probably going to win.)
Chet Murthy
@Ruckus: I get your point, and agree. But …. really? I’m supposed to decide on a man’s liberty or life based on how -convincing- the witnesses are? Really? That’s …. some primo bullshit, there. Lemme get a crew of Alec-Baldwin-in-Glengarry-Glenross clones for witnesses, and I’ll convict the Virgin Mary, is that it?
IANAL, but I don’t get the jury system. Or more precisely, I don’t understand how anybody trained in the scientific method, with even a smidgen of an understanding of how we arrive at scientific consensus, can possibly look on with anything other than dismay.
If you’re saying it’s the only way for the median American (shockingly, IQ 100) to be able to decide on guilt-or-innocence, I’ll buy that. But this crap of -I’m- supposed to judge things by how convincing some dork is on the witness stand? “Don’t piss on me and tell me it’s raining, Mr. Attorney.”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: Burbank. It does begin with a “B”.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne:
Come on, the case where the judge’s ear fell off is a classic. It’s been 20 years and I still chuckle about it. The whole trial was a shit show lasting about 3 weeks with appeals of the judge’s decisions and delays before the plaintiff attorney showed up late one day and the judge granted the defense a summery judgement. We even had to evacuate the courthouse at one point due to a bomb threat.
Another Scott
@Alternative Fax, a hip hop artist from Idaho: Years ago a possum decided to try to climb into some corrugated black plastic drainage pipe our back yard and got stuck. It didn’t end well for him… :-/
Glad kitty made it out!
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Chet Murthy:
I didn’t say it is a great system. It is the one we have. It also can work pretty good if everyone does their job. And yes it is your duty as a citizen to make those kinds of decisions. Otherwise it’s left up to someone like the cops, who a lot of think all of us are assholes and our only thing in life is to figure out our next fuck up. It’s our system, it doesn’t belong to some special group, it belongs to all of us. You aren’t asked much of being a citizen, vote every so often, serve on a jury once in a while, don’t kill anyone, act reasonably responsibly. Most of us can do this without assistance, a fair number can not or have the money to purchase their way out of that last one, and sometimes out of the next to the last one as well.
So is the system flawed? Absolutely. Come up with one that is better, then we can talk. Until then do your duty as a citizen to the best of your ability. It isn’t a fucking lot to ask of us to have a society that at least comes close to being civil. Some times.
Steve in the ATL
@Elmo: don’t leave us hanging! What was the verdict? Or did it settle during trial?
Steve in the ATL
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice:
For the record, i know a woman who was in a Kevin Bacon movie, so I’m two degrees from him.
Not sure how the math works for imaginary internet friends.
Chet Murthy
@Ruckus: Again, in the -abstract- I agree with you. The rest of this note is going to sound a little …. unhinged, but it’s only b/c I feel somewhat strongly about this subject. It’s also going to sound really, really elitist, but what the heck — most of you are pretty well-educated folk too:
You’re telling me I should get myself likkered-up every morning before going to jury duty, take along a bottle so I can maintain the buzz, and feel free to drop off during testiimony, right? B/c I need to be operating at the intellectual level of my “peers” — those guys I went to high school with, who couldn’t memorize the preamble to the constitution in 9th grade history, right?
[In the below, “you” is “the generic you”, not you in particular]
Because that’s what it comes down to. Do you think when somebody forwards me a link from ScienceDaily (or, for that matter, FTFNYT) about some miracle science breakthru, I just -believe- it? “After all, it was published in the NYT, it must be true!” Or when I see some “press-release-as-journalism” at the BBC site about some miracle drug, do you think I just take it at face value?
Because I don’t. As a friend once told me, unless it’s a terminal illness, he figured, he won’t use any drug that hasn’t passed its patent lifetime. B/c that way, he’ll know that the long-term effects (good and bad) have been studied in a generation of test-subjects. And the economic incentives for lying about those effects have dissipated (since no patent). In short, he doesn’t take anybody at their word on something that matters to them a lot.
The one time I was in the voir dire line for a rape trial, it was -clear- that the attorneys were looking for people who could suspend all use of their critical faculties during the trial. Well, maybe other than reading faces.
Chet Murthy
@Ruckus: Oh, heck, I think I found a better way of putting it. But edit window closed.
The current system defines my job as a citizen juror to be:
(1) don’t think like a scientist
(2) don’t use any skill or tool developed after the year 1800
(3) and for sure, rely only on the tools and methods developed to discern truth-tellers from liars, of fakirs and con-men thru the ages
And I’m sure that that’s better than “if she weighs less than a duck, she’s a witch”. So it’s a great way of being able to harness the (sadly more limited than one might wish for) mental faculties of our fellow citizens, to administer justice.
If there’s ONE THING that being a scientist teaches, it is that “convincingness of presentation means nothing”. Interrogating the data directly is everything. And in the absence of that, one must (a) ascertain the truthfulness of the witness by querying his community of peers in detail, and (b) look to reproduction of experimental results. Otherwise, you’re just shooting in the dark.
In the rape case, they dismissed a juror b/c he was a genetic researcher (postdoc, istr), and hence, would be unable to judge the facts as presented in the courtroom without recourse to outside information. Of all the ridiculous notions.
ETA: and we’re not allowed to ask questions? We’re supposed to trust these attorneys who know NOTHING about specialized branches of human knowledge, to know how to interrogate these supposed experts? Attorneys who think that convincingness is an adequate criterion for witness veracity? That again is ludicrous.
Shell
Ive been called four times. My advice for a first time jury member. Bring a good book or some good games while you’re cooling your heels in the waiting room. Time has never gone so slow. And bring a sandwich. In case theres no good place close to grab some lunch. Definitely avoid the court house cafeteria; its always a madhouse.
Mnemosyne
@Shell:
Also, check the courthouse’s rules before you go. Pasadena did not allow Kindles or other eBooks, but they did allow paper books. Crochet hooks, but no knitting needles. Etc.
Ruckus
@Chet Murthy:
Where do you get this stuff? I’ve been called in 2 different states and 2 widely separated parts of CA and I’ve never seen this level of paranoia that you show. I have been told in one instance that I could not take notes because those always seem to leak out and affect the trial, and in the same courthouse been given pen and paper to take notes. That’s judicial preference. I was once on special call for a capital case and while it would have affected my life I’d still have done the work.
It’s like taxes, it’s the cost of living in a civil society. That said society is or can be dramatically flawed is absolutely true. So is everything else we do. So can your scientific method, if not practiced reasonably. But I’ve never understood why we should just give the fuck up and hide our heads in the sand because shit is fucked up and shit. You fucking work to make it better, you do your best to fix the issues, be that voting out a judge who is an asshole or voting for someone to write better laws. You don’t give the fuck up because not giving the fuck up is all there is. It really is that simple
BTW where is your better system that I asked for? You don’t like this one, you are so scientific, come up with something better. I used to own a mfg business and we had certain ways of doing most processes, because they worked and I could identify how many weeks/months it would take to build a project. Some employees would tell me they had a better way and I should just let them do it. I said, no, you tell me the process and we will discus it. If your way is better I’m all for it and will give you credit for coming up with a better process. But until you can explain it and we can discuss it we will do it the way that the person responsible wants it done. Or you can start your own company and do things however you want. You know how many people took me up on my offer? One. One fucking person took the time to explain how to to a task better and faster. From that day on we used his method. In another life I had a job in professional sports. I’d get phone calls all the time about how to do something different and better. But we had a process and that required someone to send in a written request. In eleven yrs in that job you know how many letters I got? Not one fucking scrap of paper. Out of maybe hundreds of verbal requests for rule changes or procedures not one fucking person could be bothered to send me a written request. Not one fucking scrap of paper.
You make progress by showing up, by putting in the effort, by being part of the process and part of the solution, not whinging about how hard it is or how much effort you wasted. Post your alternative. You don’t even need to have a piece of paper, just some electrons. Until then man the fuck up and be a citizen.
Chet Murthy
@Ruckus:
Uh, perhaps you can correct me on this, but as a juror, you’re not allowed to go do your own Internet research, in order to test the validity of what’s presented in court, eh?
Look: I’m not saying that we should burn this system down. Sure, it works fine for the “normals”. Good on ’em. I’m saying that at least in the one instance I saw (and having discussed with others, it seems the standard case) the standard methods that a disciplined researcher uses, to figure out the truth about a proposition, aren’t permitted in the jury box. The jury box is there to see the evidence as presented, and judge ONLY FROM THAT (and their prior experience). Sure, it’s acceptable for the vast majority who stop learning anything new after high school (or at a stretch, college). Unacceptable for those who spend their entire lives learning new things, and learning them deeply.
That is, unless we’re supposed to, as I said, get ourselves likkered-up so we can pass for “normals”.
Chet Murthy
@Ruckus: I -do- get your point, for “normals”. Normal people believe things like anti-vax idiocy, climate denialism, and all manner of other foolishness. To allow them to dig around on the Internet in the middle of a trial would only produce chaos.
The system is designed to make efficient use of 100 IQ individuals. And good on ’em. For me, I’d rather not -see- a minute of testimony, but only read it, and have recourse to videotapes and evidence for reference. B/c, as I said, I know better than to think “convincingness” is related to “truthfulness”. It’s all good that normals don’t think this way. After all, most of ’em would jump in front of a train if they got a positive AIDS test result. We don’t want ’em thinking too much.
Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@Steve in the ATL:
Ha! I went to college with an actor whose Bacon number is two. I suppose that makes mine 3, but I think technically the criterion is someone who performed with Bacon in a movie, and my performance with actor/classmate was limited to rolling my eyes at his pompous horseshit in philosophy seminars, so it doesn’t really count.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Ben Cisco: The one thing I told my boss is that his parents utterly failed him in teaching him life skills. I guess they figured he was going to be a lawyer and could pay someone to do everything but in this economic climate he can’t. He can’t cook, he can’t clean, he doesn’t even know how to do his own laundry. It’s pathetic when he comes into the office in the morning and says “well I am down to my last clean pair of underwear”. Always teach your kids life skills!
SiubhanDuinne
@Steve in the ATL:
My brother was on the sound effects team for one of KB’s movies (I forget which). Honestly, though, I’m not sure if they ever even met, so I’m either a mere 2° separated or as far removed as mathematically possible before you start to meet yourself coming around from the other direction.
Ruckus
@Ben Cisco:
Mom basically had the same take. Also teaching us to clean, cook, do our own laundry got her out of having to do it, which in her case was probably the main reason. Although for the last few decades of her life she did just fine on her own. And it was nice to know how to at least cook a few things so that not starving is a viable proposition. Of course my sister and I went on to learn how to cook pretty well but that basic stuff was necessary first. When I did move in with someone it amazed me that she didn’t actually know how to boil water. Her mother didn’t want her children to know, she wanted them to marry someone wealthy enough to have a cook and a maid. Not one of the four of them did.
RobNYNY1957
@Steve in the ATL: I have three degrees to Adolf Hitler (I dated his translator’s grandson), two degrees to Benito Mussolini (Prime Minister Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando’s grandson lived in my building), and four degrees to Josef Stalin (his daughter Svetlana Peters moved to Wisconsin).
Nuflattop
If you want to get out of jury duty, bring up “the doctrine of jury nullification” as often as possible. You will FLY out of there.
BellyCat
@J R in WV: The plot appears to be much more complicated than at first, second, and third glance. Lots of variables and just about all of them wrong. Chief culprit is new shock top mount rubbing tire, but a few other compounding issues.
Spent the day under the trailer and am in the process of replacing all the bushings in the leaf springs (once I find some!) and other assorted fun stuff (which I will try to post when/if I get time). Then will confirm proper alignment. At least it was only raining all day instead of snowing. :-)
Believe it or not, I pulled over as soon as the tire blew. There is no steel guard around the wheel well (why? I have no clue unless this was Airstream’s way of drumming up repair business), thus the steel cords shredded the shell, both fore and aft of the wheel. Tire dealers seem to think that I’m running the highest load tire available (E rating) for a 15″ rim), but I suspect there HAS to be something out there, perhaps bias-ply.
I actually did weigh the trailer. Exactly 5K lbs. Tires are rated for 2850 at 80 psi, which I’m running. Close, but should be ok?
I like the horse trailer idea for a nice toy box. :-)
Aleta
This brings back memories of many of the trips I took as a kid, a Greenbrier pulling a popup camping trailer, two canoes on top, campsites all the way and breakdowns every 2-3 days. Anyway, hope you can dry off, hot food, get some rest and then tomorrow goes smooth.
Singing Truth to Power
@bemused: A razor blade?
Steve in the ATL
@RobNYNY1957:
I want to party with you!
Or, maybe, avoid you at all costs..,.