It really is remarkable how many of these feature leftover pizza. (3 Good Things From 3/16/10)

Sweetie complained yesterday that she's never one of my 3 Good Things, which I think is inaccurate, but to rectify the situation, my 3 Good Things from yesterday are all Sweetie-based. And partially pizza-based, as well.

1. My lunch included leftover pizza. On Monday night, Sweetie made pizzas, and before she even served the pizza for dinner, she'd already packed up some as my lunch for Tuesday, so not only did I get pizza on Monday night, but I had it to look forward to on Tuesday, and, also, Sweetie's action gave me this little thought to ponder: Is it truly "leftover" pizza if you took it right out of the oven and packed it into a lunch?

Yeah. Think about that one for a while.

2. Sweetie brought me my favorite dessert, cheeseburgers. After dinner, Sweetie went to work out, while I focused on more important things like "teaching Mr F to play Pac-Man" and "Not, technically, knowing that while I taught Mr F to play Pac-Man, Mr Bunches was downstairs in the laundry room turning off the hot water heater and running a load of laundry."

That last one is true: While I taught Mr F the intricacies of Pac-Man ("Don't worry about eating the cherries") Mr Bunches was down in the laundry room. We discovered later that he'd taken the clean laundry out of the dryer and thrown it on the floor, that he'd turned off the hot water heater... and that he'd loaded a set of clothes into the washer and started the washer.

Here's a confession: I don't know how to run our washer. But Mr Bunches does.

Anyway, while I was doing all that, Sweetie was working out at the health club, and when she returned, she'd brought me home a couple of McDonald's cheeseburgers for dessert, so I got to relax and watch The Heffalump Movie with the Babies! and eat cheeseburgers.

3. Sweetie didn't get too mad when she discovered, this morning, that the hot water heater was off and she had no hot water for a bath. That's technically from this morning, but it would've happened last night if we'd discovered it then, so I'm counting it.


101 Down, 10,613 to go: Today's song is from the Avenue Q soundtrack, a soundtrack I got after one day setting my Pandora to showtunes, and hearing the whole thing. I've never seen the musical, but I bet I'd love it. It's What Do You Do With A B.A. In English/It Sucks To Be Me

March Group Joins Twitter and Facebook

This is a sponsored guest post written by March Group on behalf of March Group. Post powered by Sponzai.

March Group is a leading mergers and acquisitions firm headquartered in Florida with offices in United Kingdom, Australia and several other locations around the world. Since 1986 the March Group has built a dynamic network of business relationships with buyers and investors around the globe. In an effort to further educate existing and potential clients the March Group has joined the social networks of Facebook, Twitter and the blogging world.

In any of these forums you can find some great information on the process of buying, selling or investing in a business. With 24 years of experience under their belt the March Group has plenty to share for those unfamiliar with the mergers and acquisition process. Just last month the March Group posted an article about negotiating the sale of a business. In this article they explain how collecting a list of potential buyers and dealing with the various financial considerations can be a challenge, unless you’re working with a financial expert like the March Group.

If you interested in keeping up to date with the March Group’s daily developments then their Facebook or Twitter page would be a great place to start. Not only will you find daily updates on the company but they also keep their followers up to date on current events related to their business. Recently on the March Group Facebook page most of their posts have been about articles analyzing the state of the economy. Their Twitter page has been more focused on sharing the latest March Group merger and acquisition news.

In any case, whether you’re an existing or potential client, you will find the March Group Facebook or Twitter page of high interest. With the daily updates and useful information being posted it is well worth the visit to see what the March Group is up to on a day-to-day basis. The March Group encourages you to visit their social profiles and take advantage of the inside information they’re sharing with the public.

One Percent: Day Nineteen: Today its some sexy superheroes!

If Dennis Kucinich coming around to vote for ObamaCare doesn't get you to read up on the proposed health care reform, maybe a bevy of sexy superheroes will lure you into reading that the health care reform bill proposed will provide $40 billion in tax credits for small businesses to help pay for health insurance.

The bill would not require any employer to provide insurance, but would help pay the costs of those that do, and would impose surcharges on some employers if that employer opts not to provide coverage and the taxpayers end up paying the costs. (About that latter: a company that doesn't provide health insurance, and whose employees end up being taxpayer-funded liabilities, would have to pay a relatively nominal amount to defray the taxpayer costs.)

So remember, when lying foolish child-hating Republicans like Michele Bachmann tell you the health care reform will kill small businesses, well... they're lying, foolish child-hating Republicans who have sold their souls to insurance companies.

I hereby apologize to Sweetie. (Quote of the Day 42)

I didn't know whether to jump or duck.

-- Sweetie, in response to a joke I made a long time ago.

The joke was this: We were walking along, at night, outside the park where our wedding reception was held. There was a plane up overhead, a jet, and Sweetie looked up at it and said "Isn't that plane kind of low?"

I looked up and said "Yeah, it is. In fact, it's coming right at us!"

And Sweetie got scared and screamed and huddled at me and then got mad and said I wasn't funny and that she'd believed me. That's when she said the quote, which I've always thought was a funny one, and have always chuckled about, because who gets hit by an airplane, right?

Then I heard the news today.

I was going to put in one from Friday, but I can't remember back that far. ([more than] 3 Good Things From The Last Couple Days.)

It's actually, like the title says, more than three good things. And I didn't even mention, as one of them, that I taught Mr Bunches to say "Bust it" like it's said at the beginning of Bust A Move.


1. Saturday: I got to watch three episodes of Lost in the afternoon, getting almost done with season 3. And Charlie [SPOILER ALERT IN CASE YOU'RE FURTHER BEHIND THAN I AM] hasn't died yet.

2. Sunday: Bubbles with Mr F and Mr Bunches. Mr F and Mr Bunches got reintroduced to bubbles -- you know, those cheap little plastic wand soap-and-water bubbles -- last week, and on Sunday, I spent an enjoyable 40 minutes just blowing bubbles for them while they popped them and jumped around. (I don't get the reaction to my bubbles that Sweetie does: When she blows bubbles, Mr Bunches says "Wow!")

And also, on Sunday, I got to take the first walk of the year with Mr F and Mr Bunches, as we took a late-evening walk to get some candy bars after dinner, holding hands and looking at cars and otherwise enjoying the first really nice night of 2010.

3. Monday: Ketchup-and-french fry potato chips. These are totally a real thing, and I bought them yesterday on my drive home from depositions in Milwaukee. I opted to not go to McDonald's for lunch/dinner -- I hadn't eaten lunch, but it was 6 p.m. -- and instead stopped at a gas station to get my usual road-trip Honey BBQ Fritos, but they didn't have those, and the bags of Cheesburger Doritos they did have felt skimpy -- I've noticed that Doritos are holding the line at 99 cents per snack bag, but have been reducing the number of chips you get for that price, so to them I say: "Doritos, just give in and sell us a full-size bag for more than $0.99." I got, instead, the Ketchup & French Fry chips that I'd never tried before, and I can report that they are exactly like eating a french fry with ketchup. Exactly. I'm not making that up and I'm not paid to say it: It's somehow the exact same experience as eating a ketchup-covered-fry, but with a crunch thrown in.

It's a beautiful world we live in.

And, it's 100 Down, 10,614 to go: To celebrate the 100th song from my iPod, I picked a barnburner that I first heard over the weekend, and which was so great that I picked up Mr Bunches and danced with him to the song like we were in a mosh pit: It's There Goes My Love, by The Blue Van:

One Percent, Day Eighteen: Check Out This Shirtless Guy In A Towel!

The countdown continues to the big vote on whether you'll be afforded a basic right, or whether Republicans will guarantee that kids continue to die. Before you decide where to cast your lot, consider that the President's plan includes a lot of things you don't know about, including that It would prevent lifetime caps on insurance coverage and ban pre-existing condition exclusions.

So if the health care reform bill passes, all insurance companies will be on a level playing field: each will have to cover all conditions you have, and cannot cap coverage -- so that you will have the ability to shop your insurance around, and won't have to pay whatever your current company charges for fear of not getting something covered in the future. In other words, if you hurt your knee, and your insurance company ups your premiums because of it, you'll have the option to go to a different company and pay less for your coverage.

And if you get diagnosed with a serious or life-long condition, your insurance company won't be able to tell you "we're not going to pay anymore."

Remember: all other insurers cover "pre-existing conditions." Insurers cover drivers regardless of how many accidents they've been in -- they just charge more. And there's no cap on how much your insurer can charge you, so why should they get to cap how much you charge them?

By the way: the picture has nothing to do with this post. I'm just hoping that someone will read the post because of it.

Final Score: Sports Zero, Lawyers 1,000,000 (and counting) (Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!)

The NCAA Mens' Basketball Tournament -- which would be commonly referred to as "March Madness" -- starts this week.

The Tournament would be commonly referred to as "March Madness" if doing so wouldn't end up with you being sued into oblivion faster than you can say "J.K. Rowling didn't need the profits from that encyclopedia." "March Madness," after all, is a trademark of the NCAA, which got the right to use the phrase as a trademark after CBS stole the phrase from the Illinois High School Association (IHSA).

That's a true story: The IHSA used the phrase March Madness as far back as 1939, only to have a CBS reporter from Chicago then apply March Madness to the NCAA Mens' Tournament, only to then have the IHSA sue over the use of the phrase in a video game -- and lose, because the IHSA hadn't bothered to protect the phrase for about 16 years, so it was available for the NCAA Tournament to use, and license, leading to a cooperative agreement between IHSA and the NCAA whereby they agreed to share the name, and they later agreed to sue some people who tried to use the website url marchmadness.com, which is why, today, if you type the phrase "http://www.marchmadness.com" into your web browser, you'll be magically transported to NCAA.com.

And which is also why it's great to be a lawyer: even though my job would be entirely irrelevant, and entirely useless, if everyone just agreed to not use lawyers, as long as one person uses a lawyer, everyone else will need to use one, too, and I am therefore guaranteed job security for all eternity, or until I retire, whichever comes first.

So I'm not using the phrase March Madness to describe The Best Postseason Sporting Event. And I am vigorously defending my copyright on Sticky Waffle Sandwiches, which I see is under attack from my archnemesis... well, one of my archnemeses, as I have many, Dunkin' Donuts.

You may recall that briefly over the summer I toyed with a feature called Mourning Gnus, and as part of that I periodically updated everyone on how I, Thinking The Lions, was the number one destination for people who did a Google search for Sticky Waffle Sandwiches. (If you don't remember that, click here and you'll get all the posts that mentioned this all-important issue.)

I did that back in May and June, after Sweetie packed me a lunch that included... you guessed it... a sticky waffle sandwich.

Then, I found out that Dunkin' Donuts, which has become one of my archnemeses by doing this, has introduced a sticky waffle sandwich on their menu -- they don't call it a sticky sandwich but you know it's sticky; it's a waffle, how could it not be? -- thereby copying me and, more importantly, robbing me of the right to make billions off of Sweetie's invention of this major breakthrough in breakfastry.

Breakfastry: that's a word I just coined and it's my word. Remember that, Dunkin' Donuts.

I should sue Dunkin' Donuts within an inch of its corporate life, the way J.K. Rowling sues anyone who says anything that even remotely sounds like Harry Potter -- because a failure to vigorously protect my trademark will cede the right to use it to Dunkin' Donuts, and eventually, when you type Sticky Waffle Sandwiches into Google, you'll be redirected to the NCAA site. I know how things work.

I should also vigorously defend my trademark in Sticky Waffle Sandwiches because doing so helps guarantee that I'll have more than enough work for my lifetime, keeping me busy in the way that only lawyers can be kept busy: by creating a system of complicated rules that only we can navigate, and then making you pay us to navigate those rules.

Lawyers, as a whole, are an entirely unnecessary occupation. Lawyers are one of those rare groups of people who, if you eliminated them entirely from the earth -- if you snapped your fingers and suddenly there were no more lawyers period -- the world wouldn't be any worse off in any significant respect. If lawyers stopped lawyering today, people would still have disputes and would still need to settle them -- and they would settle them, by filing lawsuits and going to court and otherwise doing the things they do now to settle disputes (having Jerry Seinfeld and his buddies make fun of them on TV), but they'd do it without lawyers, and if everyone realized that, I'd have to go find another career.

Like, say, something in the sitting on a tropical island for a year and telling what that's like category of jobs. (That's a real job, by the way. Aren't you sorry you didn't major in that? I am.)

Things That Are Jobs:

1.

2.

3.

Luckily for me, people keep on doing stuff that lets me sue them, and, if you're wondering how this all relates to sports, beyond the little I'm-not-going-to-refer-to-it-as-March-Madness- intro, rest assured, it does: Because in the world of sports, there are winners, there are losers, there are losers that we pretend are winners because we want to claim that that US "won" the Olympics so we pretend a silver medal is okay to get, and then there are the lawyers, who always win.

Lawyers have had dramatic, readily-apparent impacts on sports, and then they have had not-so-dramatic, not-so-apparent, but equally (if not more so) important impacts on sports. And sometimes it's not so clear which is which.

Take the Casey Martin lawsuit. Back at the turn of the century, lawyers used the Americans With Disabilities Act to get Casey Martin the right to use a golf cart on tour. That lawsuit was met with outcries both for and against, with people announcing it would be the end of golf, and people announcing it was a new day in the world, a day when anyone could dream of playing a professional sport even if they were completely unable, physically, to do so.

And the earth-shattering result of Martin's court-ordered and Congressionally-mandated permissive use of a golf cart on the PGA Tour was... nothing much. Martin finished in 179th place on his only year on the PGA Tour, having to then go back to Q-School to qualify for the tour again, and not doing so. (Q-School is the qualifying event for those who hope to get onto the PGA Tour, a series of tournaments a player must go through to get on the tour.)

In the end, all that lawyering was for nothing. The PGA spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending that case, and in the end, the result was that all the golfers who would have finished at 179th or lower were pushed one slot back -- meaning all the bad golfers were a little tiny bit worse off, and the effect on the golf world was nil.

That's one reason why I so frequently say that lawyers, as a whole, are not necessary to the functioning of society -- not necessary so long as everyone would agree not to use them. If one person uses a lawyer, everyone else has to or they're at a disadvantage. The Casey Martin case shows that all that lawyering was unnecessary, and counterproductive: Not only would Martin and the PGA have resolved their differences even without teams of lawyers making their arguments for them, but the end result was a tempest in a teapot, with Martin winning the chance to play on the Tour using a cart, but never having much impact on golf anyway.

That doesn't stop lawyers from changing the games you play, and the games you watch, in greater or lesser degrees. Consider how lawyers affected the outcome of the NFL's last two seasons, through maneuvering involving the Giant Williamses of Minnesota.



Defensive linemen Kevin Williams and Pat Williams -- no relation to each other, apparently -- tested positive for banned substances in training camp in 2008. The Giant Williamses said that the substance (bumetanide), which can be used to mask steroids, was used by them not for that, but to meet their weigh-in goals and get a $400,000 bonus.

The Williamses acknowledged taking bumetanide, via an over-the-counter weight loss product they took the night before the weigh in. (They say.) The NFL acknowledged that bumetanide, which is on the NFL's banned substances list, isn't on the weight-loss product's label.

So the NFL suspended the Giant Williamses for four games.

Remember -- that positive test was in 2008. The media announced recently that the Giant Williamses might, soon, serve the four-game suspension that the NFL imposed.

In 2008.

What happened was, as you'd guessed, the lawyers rolled in. The Giant Williamses had a lawyer who claimed that the NFL violated Minnesota's state law requiring notice of a positive drug test within three days of the test. Note how the Giant Williamses do not dispute they failed the test, or that the test was improperly administered: They simply said that the NFL didn't tell them soon enough that they'd failed.

That claim, plus some others about inconsistent punishments, has been enough to let the Giant Williamses play in the 2008 and 2009 season, reaching overtime in the 2009 NFC Championship Game, all the while without ever serving that four-game suspension.

That four-game suspension is important if you are, say, a Packer fan. The Packers finished one game behind the Vikings in 2009, heading to a loss in Arizona in the wild-card round instead of relaxing at home singing Pants On The Ground like the Vikings did in the recently-concluded playoffs. Had the Giant Williamses been suspended for four games, the season might have gone differently for the Packers and the situation may have been reversed -- sending Minnesota to Arizona... and Minnesota had lost badly to Arizona on the road in the regular season.

Minnesota also made the playoffs in 2008 as a wild-card, so lawyers helped shape the NFL's postseason for two years running -- helping put Minnesota in and keeping the Packers out of the NFC Championship this past year.

Lawyers don't just destroy, no matter what you might think; it's not true that all law schools have a secret shrine to Shiva. (Only the accredited law schools do.) Lawyers can also make you rich off your football career even if you never actually had a football career per se: a lawyer can make your virtual football career generate real money.

Or, that's the hope of several litigious college students who decided they ought to get something out of the fact that kids everywhere are able to make them (virtually) go for it on 4th-and-57, as I always make my teams do whenever I play video-game football, which I don't do anymore because video-game football got way too complicated for me. As someone who began his video-game football career playing that little Mattel hand-held football game where you were represented by a little red LED, and you had to get past 3 or 4 other little red LEDs, I have no ability or patience for a game in which there are 11 different buttons on one controller, each of which has to be pressed in order to get your player to do something. The last time I played Madden against The Boy, I was mostly a spectator to what the computer had my team do, with my input being limited to never punting.

(I read somewhere, but can't find it, an article that said that John Madden made the game designers put in a feature that punished players who "go for it" on 4th-and-57 and other ridiculous downs and distances. Aside from the fact that, statistically speaking, punting is for suckers and never punting can help you win championships, what business is it of Madden's how I run my virtual team? If he wants to wuss out as a coach, fine, but to make the computer punish me for being gutsy, and to take away the what-if aspect of playing a video game, seems stupid, to me. What's next? Will Madden punish players who opt to play as a losing team, like the Raiders? "You should have picked Dallas," the game will say, and will short-circuit.)



College students who play an NCAA-run sport have to sign a paper that says they won't profit off their likeness or sports career. That's a rule that's only enforced against teams that aren't USC or Ohio State, and people who aren't Tim Tebow (since Tebow was allowed to participate in a commercial on national TV during the Super Bowl, a commercial that even if he didn't get paid for it no doubt helped his profile and will, in the long run, earn him some money.)

But nobody, it turns out, signs a paper saying that everyone else in the world can't profit off of a college student's career and likeness, "everyone else in the world" including video-game makers, who have been putting players into their videogames for years and making billions off of them.

Videogame makers using NCAA teams do not use the players' names, but that hardly matters. Consider a few examples:

The quarterback for the University of Florida in NCAA Football 2009 is, like real-life Tim Tebow, a 6'3" lefty who wears number 15 and is from Florida. (Why a player in a video game has to have a hometown is beyond me, but the NCAA Video Number 15 is from Brandon, Florida, while Tebow is from Jacksonville, Florida.)

The 2005 NCAA Football game had an Arizona player who wore number 9, played quarterback, and was the same height, weight, and even skin tone and hair color as the real-life Arizona State QB at the time, Sam Keller. (Like Real Tebow and Virtual Tebow, Keller and Fake Keller shared the same home state, too.)

(It makes me wonder how long it'll be before we get a back story on Mario and Luigi, who are, so far as I know, sadly without any origins whatsoever.)

Deciding that something had to be done about it, and "something" in America almost always meaning sue, Keller and others have now filed lawsuits against the NCAA for using their likenesses without compensating them -- joining such luminaries as Woody Allen, who also claimed once that his likeness was used without his permission on a billboard put up by American Apparel.

The college guys have something to sue for: The NFL Players Association is paid about $35 million a year for licensing players' images to the video games, and a past lawsuit by NFL players against Madden's game maker netted more than $26 million in a settlement. If you're, say, Ed O'Bannon, that's big bucks.

O'Bannon was a UCLA basketball player who was drafted into the NBA but didn't last long there. After some time playing basketball overseas, O'Bannon finished his bachelor's degree and now works as a car salesman and coaches a Henderson, Nevada high school team.

O'Bannon is the lead plaintiff in a suit against the NCAA seeking compensation for using his likeness -- there are other suits going besides his -- and may gain a lot of money as a result of you using O'Bannon to dunk on your son's videogame counterparts.

(O'Bannon, and the others, are simply examples of the reasoning behind my proposal that college athletes just be paid, already.)

All of which serves as just a few examples of the reason why I'm glad to be a lawyer, and even more glad that society, for some reason, continues to tolerate lawyers and lets us exist instead of forcing us to go get real jobs: because as a lawyer, I have the kind of job that lets me spend Sunday mornings writing about how my job isn't all that demanding, or necessary. I have the kind of job that lets me make money off of people making money off of other people -- people like the NCAA, who make tons of money off of college athletes, and then pay tons of that money to lawyers to keep from having to pay any of that money to the athletes.

And I have the kind of job could let me have an impact on sports without going through this:

One Percent, Day Seventeen:

What's this about? Click here.

For a couple of days, not long ago, the media was all abuzz about the skyrocketing cost of health insurance premiums. Now that they've gone back to covering Jennifer Aniston, it would seem that the crisis is over... only it's not. Health insurance premiums will continue to rise, and will continue to outstrip your ability to pay them (unless you get annual 39% raises).

The bill Obama wants to pass will require that health insurers submit proposed rate increases to a state or federal authority for approval.

The bill doesn't say they can't raise rates -- just that the increases must be approved, by the state. We already regulate rates charged by utilities, and banks face regulations on how much interest they can charge and how much cash they have to keep on hand, and require minimum markups on consumer goods. Why not regulate how much your health insurer can raise your premium in a single year?

Glasses glasses bobassess bananafana momasses... or something like that.

If you've never had to wear glasses, you probably don't appreciate just how necessary they are to those who DO need them. As a former glasses wearer myself, I understand that a pair of glasses isn't just a fashion accessory -- it's a necessity.

But society treats eyeglasses as something else, as some sort of accoutrement that people can opt out of. Glasses are sold in their own stores, like purses or socks or purses full of socks, and they're "designed" by people and otherwise treated like haute couture rather than medical need. And because of that, eyeglasses are expensive. Too expensive, if you ask me.

Zenni Optical thinks glasses are too expensive, too, and unlike me, they don't just talk about it, they DO something about it. That something, in this case, being "sell them for $8 or so per pair."

Zenni Optical sells glasses for as little as $8 per pair -- getting fashionable and well-made frames for that low price by designing them on their own, having them made overseas, and not having expensive mall-based stores or fancy advertising budgets. As a result, Zenni is able to sell you glasses (including progressive lens, tinted, sunglasses and more) that look great and cost about what you'll spend on lunch tomorrow. (Today being Sunday, I assume you'll eat at home, so lunch will be cheaper.)

It's not just me that thinks it's great that glasses can be bought at super-low prices. Check out the review in the Brooklyn Examiner (Find it at http://www.examiner.com/x-28795-Brooklyn-Liberal-Examiner~y2009m11d13-Cheap-eyeglasses-are-a-reality-Check-out-Erics-review-of-Zenni-Optical) and you'll see that others are agreeing with me, too.

It's the first-ever SUPERHUNK! (Sweetie's Hunk of the Week, 53)

When I first asked Sweetie about this week's Hunk, I accidentally called him a SuperHunk. But it turns out that he IS. You'll see why.

Today's hunk -- hunk 53 but the first SuperHunk -- is Linus Roache:


No, wait, that's not right. Let me try again: Linus Roache!





You Don't Know Him Without You Have: Seen Law & Order. That's one of the first -- but not the best -- things that makes Linus...


I'll try to stop doing that, but it's funny.

To me.

Being on Law & Order -- not guest-starring or anything like that, actually being on the show as a regular, is the first thing that makes Linus Roache:



There. See? I said I'd stop doing this:



And I'll really try.

Being on Law & Order makes Linus Roache the first-ever SuperHunk, because, as I explained in one of these not long ago, Law & Order is actually our society's universal clock, counting down to the end of time, when our existence will come to an end. Forget the Mayans and their broken-pyramid thing or whatever everyone's talking about in 2012 (which is actually going to happen in 2011 because there was no year zero): The Law & Order Clock is what actually determines the length of human existence: Once every person everywhere has appeared in an episode of Law & Order, our existence will come to an end, and the squirrels will get their chance.

Beware! Their time is coming!

Which means two things for you: First, that the existence of many different versions of all the Law & Orders means that the end of the universe is approaching faster than ever as more and more people appear on more and more Law & Orders, and second, that Linus Roache:


Sorry. I know I promised to stop, but I'm not going to miss a chance to suck up to the future rulers of the Universe?

Anyway, the second thing is that being in Law & Order makes Linus Roache one of the Secret Overlords of the Universe -- a position that I just now revealed/made-up, one of the people who helps determine when the Universe will end. Yes, Linus Roache:



(Gotcha! You thought I was going to do this:





Or this:




But I didn't! I did this:




I have completely forgotten where I was. And I'm pretty sure that pirate isn't actually a squirrel. I think it's a woodchuck. How'd they get involved in this?

Let's move on.

Thing That Makes You Go Hmmmm About Him: Aside from his position as Secret Overlord of The Universe... oh, yeah. That's what I was talking about... aside from that position, Linus Roache:



(See? I'm done with the jokey pictures.)

Linus Roache has other remarkable things about him, things that make him the first-ever SuperHunk.

Probably. But I can't imagine what they are, and his biographies are very limited. There's not much information about him out there. It seems as though the only truly remarkable thing that Linus Roache:



Has ever done is be on Law & Order -- But a hidden anonymous history is about what you'd expect, from a guy who is secretly helping determine just how much time humanity has left, isn't it? The guys in the Star Chamber never publicize themselves much. Linus is probably already on the squirrels' payroll.

He certainly isn't supporting himself on what he earned in such roles as "Samuel Taylor Coleridge," playing a poet most famous for not actually finishing the poem he wrote.

How's that for a career to shoot for? I'd like to have a job doing something where, say, I never actually complete the thing I was supposed to do but nevertheless have my name live on forever... is there any career other than poet where that's possible?

Not in bridge-building, that's for sure. Or maybe it would.

This is Samuel Taylor Coleridge, by the way:




And while he does look a little like a squirrel, he doesn't look a whole lot like Linus Roache:



Which means that if you, or, more importantly, I, had simply had the foresight to set our caps, career-wise, on "Poet Who Doesn't Finish His One Poem," then, without ever having to finish even one thing, you -- or, more importantly, I-- would have been rich (probably) and been, eventually, played in a movie by a SuperHunk:



Reason I Assumed Sweetie Likes Him: This time, I didn't even recognize the hunk... excuse me... SuperHunk... even though, as the star of Law & Order he's on our TV screen 23.2 hours a day, and frequently (probably) shows up in Sweetie's dreams... something I'm not jealous about because of the...

Actual Reason Sweetie Likes Him: "Because he's smart and sexy... and he reminds me of you!"

THAT is why he's a SuperHunk. Linus Roache:



Reminds Sweetie of me:


You can totally see the resemblance. Which means that while Samuel Taylor Coleridge gets to have Linus Roache play him in movies, Linus Roache gets to have me play him in...

... um. Well, I'm not going to finish that. You get the point: Linus Roache is a SuperHunk because he's like me, or I'm like a SuperHunk-- it doesn't matter who's first (I am.)

And I'm pretty sure Sweetie's not just saying that to butter me up or anything, because it's not even payday and I'd already planned to give her a day off from Mr F and Mr Bunches by taking them somewhere.

So, the...

Point I'd Like To Make About Sweetie's Actual Reason For Liking Him is that Sweetie is awesome. Or drunk. But I'm going to go with awesome.

And also, there is a shortage of photos of Linus Roache shirtless. While you can find lots of this:



You can't find anything with him shirtless. So to finish up this post, you'll have to settle for this:

Right now, the only gold I have is my gold library card... and that's not really a gold card. I just put some gold construction paper on it.

Here's a great way to begin funding -- or continue funding -- your retirement: A gold IRA.

I bet you didn't even know you could put gold coins into an IRA -- but it's true. The US allows you go hold some bullion and proof coins (gold and silver) in retirement plans. A complete list is available at Regal Gold Coins (regalgoldcoins.com), and it's not a bad idea to go to that site and read up on it, because you can also buy gold coins right through them.

And Regal can not only sell you the gold to put in your IRA, but can help manage it -- their retirement account specialists have been doing this for 25 years, and the gold is held a their Delaware depository, so you'll know it's safe.

Gold can be a great investment -- like any investment, it can go down as well as up, but lately gold has been going up. And holding it in an IRA lets you enjoy tax-free growth (until you take it out). So $10,000 worth of gold bought in the 70s would be worth more than $500,000 in your IRA today -- $590,000, to be exact. That's an increase of... well, a lot, over 40 years, which means that if you could get the same return NOW on your $10,000 investment, you'd want to begin right away -- especially you young people, who need to put down your Guitar Hero controllers and go get saving for retirement.

Investing in things like the st gaudens gold you can get online can be a unique, fun, and remunerative way to begin that saving process -- more interesting and possibly more rewarding than just putting money into a savings account. Get some investment advice and read up on it (I'm just a blogger, after all, not a gold expert) so that you'll know what I'm coming to understand: Buying gold (online, even) and investing in it can be profitable if you do it right -- profitable and easy, considering that Regal Gold Coins will even ship the stuff to you.

One Percent, Day Sixteen: "These stories are wrong. They are heartbreaking."

What's One Percent about? Click here.

Their child was born with severe hemophilia. They had health insurance -- but the insurance company upped their premiums to over $12,000 per year, with a $10,000 deductible, and then they found out they have a lifetime cap -- so there was a limit to the care their child would get.

Oh, and the medication their son gets, once a day, costs $1,000 a day -- they were paying $25,000 per year and then got hit with an $$80,000 bill. Listen to their whole story:




They HAD health insurance. Fat lot of good it did them. I hate Republicans.

Some people might invite others over to enjoy this, too. Not me. I'm keeping it all to myself.

This might be the year -- the year I finish the 1-year-but-really-it's-6-now project of turning our yard into a perennial garden that never needs mowing but instead just exists and is both beautiful and easy to maintain.

I've got the plants, I got rid of the old haunted shed (haunted by raccoons, mostly), I've got little garden statuary to put out, the next-door neighbor kids who used to trample through our yard are grown up and moved away, and the only thing remaining is to get me one of them fancy patio furniture sets.

I've got to do that because what's the point of having a beautiful, amazing backyard if you can't go sit out in it, have lunch around it while the butterflies flap slowly around and the kids play and the cats laze and I drink lemonade?

There's no point in having a great yard but not being able to enjoy it. And I intend to enjoy our yard, sitting out there and relaxing on Saturday afternoons (while you're all mowing your lawns like suckers). I can sit at my patio table, or in a reclining patio chair, the baseball game -- any baseball game, it doesn't matter -- on the radio, a diet Coke and my Kindle there, the Babies! throwing things at other things, and just enjoy the pleasant breeze, the flowers and trees I've planted, and the fact that my yard will have become an extension of my house -- a room with no walls or ceiling where I can sit and enjoy life.

You can't do that on a clump of grass. There has to be a table. Some chairs. Maybe even an umbrella. And then... relaxation.

If you can read this, you're seconds away from an accident. (Commutations)

The other day, when I walked out to my car after work, I saw that the car next to mine had this bumper sticker on it:

I liked that, because I could read it, and because I thought it was clever, and also because, as a lawyer, it meant more work for me in the future, since, while it was a clever bumper sticker that promoted people learning music, it also was a bumper sticker that could only be read from about a foot away. Here's what it looked like from a safe following distance:




So I drove home picturing people trying to speed up and get close enough to see what that bumper sticker said, only to then get into an accident because they were following too closely.

Who would do that? you might ask: Who would tailgate just to read a bumper sticker?

Me -- I've done that tons of times. I just haven't gotten into an accident.

Yet.

I'd cheat a priest to get to Sweetie. (3 Good Things From 3/10/10)

We went grocery shopping last night, I and the Babies!, and I could only stare and long to buy cheeseburger Pringles. But it's Thursday, which is almost Friday, and I've got money in my pocket, and I get to leave early today, and I've also got my 3 Good Things from yesterday, cheering me up today...

1. The fog was pretty cool. Ordinarily, a foggy day isn't really that great, because the fog is too far away to be anything but a blur on the horizon -- but when it's really foggy, like it was yesterday and last night, I enjoy it: it makes me feel like when you're on an airplane, flying through the clouds. It's great when weather is interesting without being dangerous, and fog isn't dangerous (unless you drive too fast, or unless it lets in all sorts of monsters that you'll have to fight in a grocery store.)

2. I meant it as a compliment. Sweetie, after reading my post yesterday, was reminiscing a bit last night about all the other people who have remembered her, over the years -- literally, over the years. Sweetie indelibly imprints herself on people's minds, to the point where years later, they recognize her. I'm not making that up: we were in Minneapolis once, on a weekend getaway, and a guy who Sweetie had taught to swim when she was a lifeguard recognized her, about 15 years after he'd last seen her. We ran into a guy at church once, a guy who'd grown up in her hometown, and this guy reminded Sweetie not only that he'd grown up in her town, but that he'd seen her, about four years ago, in a grocery store (so now people are remembering when they happened to run into Sweetie years ago, too).

When I teased her about how much she enjoyed having that effect, Sweetie said "You make me sound conceited," and I said she was, but in a good way. I then maintained that it's not bad to be conceited if you're conceited for a good reason. I don't think Sweetie saw it that way, but, in my defense, when I made the comment, I was trying to wrestle pants onto Mr F so that we could go grocery shopping, and that was using up a lot of my mind- and muscle-power.

3. I already had the S'mores. Once we went grocery shopping, Mr F and Mr Bunches were, for the most part, very cooperative and mild-mannered, until near the end when we hit the snack food aisle, where we always pick up some S'more crackers - -they're Mr Bunches' favorites (he mispronounces the name as Spores). Mr F was riding in the cart and playing with his Holly Hobby dolls (which he'd brought along in lieu of the dinosaurs, this time) and Mr Bunches was distracted, walking along and looking at the other side of the aisle, as I put the Spores into the cart. We then advanced down the aisle, until Mr Bunches realized we'd passed the Spores, and, thinking that I'd skipped them, he laid down in protest and refused to go on, forcing me to pick him up and carry him to the cart to show him that we had the snacks.


99 Down, 10,615 to go: I woke up this morning humming this song, for some reason. It's one I haven't listened to in a while but I like the background chorus, and I like the line "I'd cheat a priest just to get to you." It's Little Miss Pipe Dream by The Wombats:

One Percent, Day Fifteen: Does your grandma have an extra $2,000 to spare?

Click here for an explanation behind these posts.

In the face of polls showing the health care bill isn't as popular as people thought -- what polls are those, I wonder? I haven't seen any-- Obama is pointing out that people don't know what's in the bill. Which is why I'm still explaining it, step by step.

Another thing Obama's plan would do is this: It'll Close The Medicare Drug Payment Gap. Commonly called the "donut hole," the gap is in the Medicare drug benefit, which pays for the first $2,830 in subscriptions, but then stops paying for prescriptions until the senior on Medicare hits $4,550 in out-of-pocket costs.

So if your grandma needs more than $2,830 in prescriptions per year, current law requires that she'll begin paying out of pocket at that point -- and will continue until she shells out enough to hit the next phase.

What that means in practical terms is that if you're not very sick, Medicare will pay your all costs. If you're very sick, Medicare will pay some of your costs -- but only after you pay some.

Helluva way to run a system, isn't it? Who would be against plugging that hole?

It's always the right time to give this as a gift. (MAN, I love puns.)

The nice thing about watches is that you can give them to just about anyone, for anything. What else can you say that about, in terms of present-giving?

You can't give a book or CD or DVD to someone without worrying whether they have it already, or whether they'll like it, or whether it might offend them. Giving clothes is tough, because you may not be exactly clear on the size, and what if your tastes aren't the same as theirs? (Not everyone likes funny ties, I've found.)

Gift certificates? Too impersonal. Jewelry? Too emotional -- you don't give jewelry to acquaintances, or friends, or your dad.

But a watch: It's the right size, it's useful, it's decorative, and it doesn't over- or under-sell the occasion. Take the watch shown here: a Man's Fossil Watch I found on Blue Dial (bluedial.com). They've got all kinds of watches there -- mens, womens, kids, the popular Seiko Kinetic Watches, but the one that caught my eye was this Fossil Watch. It's perfect for just about any man -- businessmen could wear this to the office, guys who actually work for a living could have it on a job site and not be embarrassed... Dads who have a birthday coming up in April, say, and whose sons have to buy them a present and otherwise have no idea what to get them.

Why Don't You Get A Job (From The Cheesecake Truck To The End Of The Line, 12)

Just before I got married to Sweetie, I made a mixtape to take on our honeymoon road trip to New York. The other day, I found that tape and decided to tell the story of our honeymoon through the songs on that tape. This is part 12; click here for the Table of Contents.




"Well I guess it ain't easy doing nothing at all..."


You may wonder how the song Why Don't You Get A Job ends up on a supposed-to-be-romantic mixtape intended to be played as Sweetie and I drove from Madison, Wisconsin, to New York City and back.

There's a good reason: It's because that was the song for a summer one year.

Every summer, I have a song that somehow ends up defining my summer in one way or another. In the summer of 2009, it was Mary's Market,




A song that picked me out for that summer because it had a wistful, timeless quality that made me forget how often I was sitting in traffic on my way to or from the office, instead of wading through a river with the Babies!, or walking through the park with Sweetie, or just relaxing on the couch while the sun set and the cardinals jumped around the lilac bushes outside our dining room.

Earlier summer songs include Tubthumping, by Chumbawamba, and the song Underdog, by Spoon, a song I listened to incessantly one summer while preparing for what was, and still is, the biggest trial of my life, a trial I won, thankfully, because if you link a song that you love to something that becomes disappointing, you're going to hate that song thereafter.

(I know that because it's happened to me on other occasions: There's one song that I listened to over and over while getting ready for a trial I lost, and I can't stand to listen to that song anymore, even years later.)

On the other hand, if you take a song that otherwise doesn't have anything to do with anything in your life, and doesn't mean much of anything to you, period, and link it with something fun in your life, that song will then take on its own personal meaning for you and become imbued with sentiment, and some songs that made it onto the mixtape for my honeymoon, including Why Don't You Get A Job, are those kinds of songs.

Why Don't You Get A Job was released in November, but it ended up being a big hit on the radio just in time for me to start to like it in the summer after it came out. This was just after Sweetie and I had first started dating. I had grown to like the song because I heard it on the radio -- I'm always a few months behind on things like that, and having started liking it, I ultimately got The Offspring's album, with that song on it, in time for the summer, the result being that I listened to that tape all the time, heading to or from work at my law practice, a practice I'd started up only the year before and which was not doing all that well, although it was doing well enough that I was able to support myself and pay my rent, sometimes doing both in the same month.

(I think, looking back, that I must have gotten the cassette itself from Sweetie, since at that time I was very very poor. I was still living off of some savings I'd had from when a drunk driver hit me and broke my neck, ultimately ending up with me getting a small settlement that I hoarded carefully, and at the time I was working in a startup law practice that had, as its primary business model, not getting paid. My budget in those days barely allowed for groceries, and certainly didn't allow for luxuries like cassette tapes. Back then, I tended to bootleg my songs off of the radio, leaving a blank cassette in the stereo as I listened while studying or hanging out, and when a song came on, I'd hit record and get that song. Mixtapes from that stage of my life -- I still have most of them -- have a lot of DJ intros to songs, or songs that start 3 or 4 seconds into them. So the fact that I had the album itself tells me that in all likelihood, Sweetie bought that tape for me.)

The album itself wasn't great: It had two good songs on it, one of which was Why Don't You Get A Job, which I liked because it was funny and vaguely reggae-ish in nature. I'm not generally a fan of reggae music; as far as I'm concerned, a little bit of reggae goes a long way, and about 1 minute into a reggae song I'm already bored with it. (I shouldn't even, really, distinguish between one reggae song and another, since each reggae song sounds exactly like all other reggae songs, the beats and instruments and music and singing and choruses all blending seamlessly into each other in a tiresome, bland, boring way. So I should just say the reggae song bores me.)

But I liked Why Don't You Get A Job because it wasn't quite reggae, so I listened to it a lot and sang along with it and enjoyed it, and that song became associated with that summer, the summer of '99, a summer in which what I was doing, mostly, was trying to get my law practice going, trying to keep going for planning my wedding to Sweetie (she was doing the planning; I was doing the "trying to keep costs down without wrecking the entire process"), and playing softball on a team I'd set up, a co-ed softball team that turned out to be more of a headache than I ever could have imagined.

I'd wanted to play softball because I thought it could be a fun thing for Sweetie and I to do, and using my new law practice, I could pay for the uniforms -- shirts that said Pagel Law Office and had a little shark symbol on them -- and write it off as an advertising expense.

I unfortunately was not entirely clear on what writing things off really meant, resulting in a rather large tax liability when I would file my taxes for the first full year of running my office. But, luckily, I also did not pay the full load for the shirts, as I got contributions from teammates to cover the cost of the team and the shirts. It ended up costing me about $50, total, for the whole thing.

$50 and my sanity, for a big part of the summer, as the team that I'd put together was filled with a lot of boyfriends who'd talked their girlfriends into playing, girlfriends who weren't actually all that motivated to play softball. The guys on the team, too, were not exactly gung-ho about showing up, since games were on Fridays and many times the guys wanted to keep their options open: if something better was going on, they wanted to be able to go do that, but if they had nothing better to do they'd come play softball.

The trouble was, I had to set up a roster and be ready to play, and we had 15 people for a 10-person team. So I told people, up front, that if they would commit to being there on a Friday, they'd be a starter. If they weren't sure they could make it, they'd be a backup. That policy immediately got me about 10 phone calls per week, leaving messages that said, more or less: "I'm not sure I can make it Friday. I'm pretty sure I can make it but not 100% sure, but since I think I'm going to make it, don't make me a backup on the roster because if you do then I may not come, but if I'm a starter I'll probably come."

That's what happens when you put lawyers on a sports team.

To fill in the gaps and make sure I had people to play, I also invited my brothers, who lived in Milwaukee, to be on the team. They agreed to be on the team -- but both were unable to drive, regularly, at the time, since both were habitually in trouble with the law, in more- and less-serious ways, but ways that regardless of their seriousness inevitably involved having their drivers' licenses suspended and being prohibited from driving. That never stopped them from driving... except on Friday nights, when they'd opt to obey the law (or that law, anyway) and ask me to come pick them up and bring them to the game, in Madison, and then take them back home.

It's a sign of just what a sucker/nice guy I was, and just how much I needed people to field a softball team, and just how little real work I had to do at the time, that I inevitably agreed to drive to Milwaukee, pick up one or both of my brothers, bring them to the game in Madison, and then drive them back home.

That was how I spent my summer: trying to find a way to get paid for doing my job, wrangling softball rosters, driving to Milwaukee and back a lot, and, in between times, spending as much time as possible with Sweetie, including time on the softball field, where Sweetie played catcher and where she made one of the most phenomenal plays anyone ever made in a softball game -- especially in one of our softball games, where "good plays" were scarce and losses were frequent. (We lost one game 35-6, after having jumped out to a 6-0 lead.)

Sweetie, in the phenomenal play, was at home plate, and a long ball was hit out to the outfield, deep center field. That wasn't anything unusual: Long balls were always being hit out there, because our pitcher, Jeff, wasn't a very good pitcher at all. He wanted to play pitcher, and I didn't want to discourage people or have them quit the team, so I let him play pitcher, a position Jeff played with a glove on one hand, a cigarette in his mouth, and a beer on the mound.

On this particular long ball, Jason was playing centerfield. Jason was the only real athlete on our team, or one of two, maybe, but he was the best on our team. Jason was like a major leaguer, as far as we were concerned, and he played centerfield because he could, in that position, really play the entire outfield.

(I played first base, because I was left-handed, and sometimes I played right field, a position I'm not really suited to play because I don't have a strong or accurate throwing arm, and because I have lazy eye, which means I don't really have very good depth perception which means I have a lot of trouble fielding fly balls. But I had to play somewhere, and Sweetie had taken catcher.)

On this particular long ball to center, there was a runner on second, and as the ball flew out and Jason got under it, we realized that Jason would easily make the catch. (Jason easily made every catch). Once he did make the catch, the runner took off, tagging up and heading for home. Jason reared back with his major-league throw and hurled the ball at Sweetie, who by then was standing on home plate (as I'd taught her), holding up her glove, in the way of the runner who was rounding third.

The runner tore home and the ball rocketed into Sweetie, who had every reason to have dropped it or stepped off the plate or otherwise blown the play. We were down by 20 points, or more, at that time, so it didn't really matter, anyway -- but Sweetie stood firm, and the ball hit her glove at Warp 9, just as the runner got home and ran into Sweetie, who tagged him out and saved the run and didn't drop the ball. We all cheered, not because we'd lose by one less run but because it was an amazing play. It would have been a great play for anyone -- but Sweetie had never played baseball of any sort before this summer, and this was one of the first few games, making it extra great.

That play, and Sweetie herself, were so memorable that years later, when Sweetie accompanied me to Chicago to watch me argue a case, she was remembered for it. We were walking down a busy street in Chicago, my mind on my case and Sweetie's mind on whatever it was she thinks about when I'm distracted, which is all the time, when I heard someone call her name. A guy came walking up to us, a guy I didn't recognize at all, and he didn't say anything to me, but talked to Sweetie, who said "Jason!" and reminded me who this guy was -- about six years after the softball team disbanded. This guy, Jason, didn't look as though he remembered me at all -- but he'd picked Sweetie out of a crowd, in Chicago, during rush hour.

That's what I choose to remember about the song Why Don't You Get A Job: not the fact that I was too poor to buy the album, not the fact that I was constantly hassled by friends and family who made it unreasonably difficult to simply get together and play softball, not the fact that we lost almost every game and lost badly. Not even the fact that ultimately my business venture folded ignominiously and I never got that tax writeoff.

Instead, I listen to that song and I remember standing in right field, watching Sweetie take her place at home plate, and hold her glove up, and that ball zoom in there faster than I could barely follow, holding my breath as the runner and the ball arrived and Sweetie grabbed the ball, made the catch, tagged the runner out, and got a hearty round of cheers from the team, a small celebration of a small victory that meant nothing in the game but meant everything to Sweetie and to me because of that.

That's why I put that song on the tape to listen to as we drove on our honeymoon: because it reminded me that even amidst all the troubles of life, Sweetie was a bright spot, standing tough and hanging in there.

For me.