Month: June 2006

This week I had the privilege of serving as a jury member. I took a small notebook with me and recorded my thoughts through both days, as time allowed1. Below you will find a copy of those notes I took to read or ignore as you choose. No real attempt has been made to make the notes any better than they were originally written.

~~~~~~~~~~

Slept poorly, slow to awaken.
Rush to courthouse for jury duty. Hallways packed and warm.
Waited in courtroom in chairs of oak & iron. Old, lovely and totally uncomfortable.
Surrounded by young pups to old farts. By ladies of brown hair to blue.

Ate a granola bar on the drive in, carrying a second one in my pocket.
Drank some tea, but left bottle in the car.
Still we wait…

Hats removed from heads upon request. People go quiet.
A sense of beginning flows over the room. But is lost as the court assistant leaves.
A man, looking grumpy, leaves for second time. A cellphone rings when it should be turned off.
The doors close and the murmuring gets louder. People start to quiet again.
Expectation, boredom, sleepiness & muffled laughter sweep the room.
And still we wait…

I look around the room and wonder what kind of person would have all these people as their peers?
What could they be accused of?
And still we wait…

Housekeeping is done.
To clerk of court must report to get proof of attendance.
Educational video is watched.
The video’s attempts at humor failed.
Brains leaked from ears as video bored us to tears.
Some slackers walked in late.
And still we wait…

The video completed.
A break was announced.
And still we wait…

Break concluded.
Lawyers at their desk.
Perhaps now we will progress.

In truth the break runs long.
And still we wait…

A man with white hair sets a laptop on the judge’s bench.
Is he the decider of fates or an IT flunky like me?
A pool of potential jurors gets taken across the hall.
And still we wait…

The lawyers get called behind closed doors.
Yet a man waits across the fence where they say.
Casually dressed, I like his shirt.
Defendant, plaintiff, which is he?
I know not.
And still we wait…

Pages rustle, laptops beep, people babble.
And still we wait…

More names get called and the herd thins.
But still we wait…

Both lawyers finally return
But still we wait…

A book of haiku
waits at home wishing
it were here.

But still we wait…

Glasses removed for cleaning
Room all a blur
From poor eyesight & action not
And still we wait…

Lawyers conferring
whispers unheard
Doors a closing
And still we wait…

White haired man returns
In robes, a judge he is.
Waiting is done for now.

Into jury box, I go.
Questions are asked and answered.
Recommended Woodchuck Hard Cider I do.
Questions on alcohol use are frequent, as the case deals with OWI2.
Then a break we take.
And still we wait…

Back in we go.
Strike one, strike two…. strike eight.
Into the the final 13 for me.

Opening statements are made.
Prosecutor’s are long and dry.
Defender’s are short and sweet.

Now it’s time to eat!

Quizno’s my lunch did cook.
Then I bought some comic books.

And now we have to wait
Till we return to decide
One man’s fate.

Prosecutor shows videos and questions witness.
Defender tries to discredit both.
State rests and court adjourns.

~~~~~~~~~~

Day 2

Defender calls defendant to the stand.
Claims it’s all lies and the videos were faked.

Prosecutor calls the actor from the videos to the stand.
Voices were not a match, though their builds were vaguely similar.
Both sides done presenting.
Now with the judge they are blathering.
And we wait…

~~~~~~~~~~

There was more to tell, but that’s all I recorded in my notebook. In the end, well… that’s all a matter of public record. Go look it up. I will only admit to the follow:

  • I got a nice lunch on the court’s dime the second day
  • Now I don’t have to serve at the county courthouse for a couple of years.
  • It was nice to be out my office.

1 I used the official notepad for taking notes on the case, which the court kept to be destroyed after my service was completed.
2 As in operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol.

Just so some other poor slob doesn’t have to be the last person on the Internet to post a link to it….

Those crazy cats at EepyBird.com took 101 liters of Diet Coke & 523 Mentos and rather than throwing some sort of god-awful party with it; they came up with a much more original idea. With those humble ingredients, they recreated the famous Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas, NV. Oh and as a quick warning to anybody tempted to drink the leftovers of such an experment; DON’T. From the reactions of the EepyBird guys, I’d say it makes motor oil taste good. 🙂

I had been considering righting up my feeling regarding this insane proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to steal the rights of a subset of American citizens. However I was catching up on the news in the blogsphere when I stumbled upon Mr. Scalzi’s discussion of the subject:

Why aren’t people asking the marriage bigots flat out what they have against marriage? Against married couples? And by what right are they able to say that couples who are already legally married should have their marriages declared null and void? This proposed amendment breaks up marriages. God damn it, people should be hollering this at the top their lungs every time one of those marriage bigots gets all sanctimonious about what marriage means. People ought to be getting these marriage bigots into a corner and getting them to admit that they need to destroy legal, loving marriages in order to accomplish their goals. We ought to be getting these marriage bigots admitting that they have to strip away rights these Americans already have to do what they want to do.

I highly recommend you read Mr. Scalzi’s post in full.

Update: The comment thread on Mr. Scalzi’s post is rather long. I hadn’t completed reading it yet, when I posted this article. Heck, I’m still working my way through it. However the reason for this update is one of Mr. Scalzi’s replies to a comment was so dead on that I simply must quote him again.

As I’ve said a number of times in the past, the most “activist” judicial ruling I can think of in recent times was Bush v. Gore, and I think it was wildly poorly decided. However, you don’t see me hopping up and down like a frog on a plate, bitching about that damned activist Judge Scalia, because in my opinion, regardless of whether I like the ruling or not, the judiciary was doing its proper role. So, basically, if I have to live with a piece of crap ruling like Bush v. Gore, my sympathy for boo-hoo conservates bitching about “activist judges” is around about zero.

X-Men: The Last Stand (Original Motion Picture)

X-Men: The Last Stand
My rating: 2.75 out of 5.

Yesterday, the wife and I headed out to watch a matinee of X-Men: The Last Stand. I was planning on writing up a review of it for MovieComment1. But when I got over to the site I found; I found he’d already written his own review. And not surprisingly2, we have completely different opinions on both the current X-Men movie and the prior ones.

Brett Ratner was selected as the director for X-men: The Last Stand as Bryan Singer was busy working on Superman Returns. Unfortunately, this means the 3 part of the X-men series attempts to focus on the action/battle sequences rather than the character development which made the movies interesting. Mr. Ratner even went so far as to make the battles flow as much like a comic book battle as he could. This was a horrible mistake as the differences in the two mediums do not allow the flow of a comic book battle to work well on the screen. In a comic book, the audience accepts that the artist cannot draw every detail of a battle and they fill in all of the details they need/want with their imagination. With movies, we have a long history of war movies which show that the filmmaker can show significantly more detail. So when we have multiple scenes in the middle of battles where nothing is happening; it’s just boring (e.g. dozens of mutants supposedly leaping to the attack and all we get is them leaping over the rubble).

Additionally, I have to take issue with MovieComment’s claim that Storm looks especially good in the action sequences. Her *quote* flying *quote* scenes are without argument the worst special effects in the movie. I haven’t seen wire work that awful since John Cleese played Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and at least he was intended to look stupid swinging around on that rope. Then there’s the whole “wheee! I can spin!” crap they came up with for Storm. For crying out loud, this character is theoretically supposed to be the human mutant equivalent of Mother Nature and they’ve got her spinning around like a f’ing top! Still some of the other actions sequences weren’t too bad. Pretty much, any of them focusing on Wolverine were good. The bit with Kitty Pryde (aka Shadowcat) and the Juggernaut was really good (the end of that sequence was particularly funny).

The addition of other characters to the team in this film was both good and bad. Good in that they picked Shadowcat and Colossus3. Bad in that they did not really do anything with their characters and they failed to continue developing some of the other characters from the previous movies. Most notably, Rogue’s storyline was pretty much dropped and converted into a weird, teenage angsty thing which didn’t play well on the screen.

Speaking of bits which didn’t play well on the screen, the climax of the movie with Jean Grey/Phoenix and Wolverine blew serious chunks. To anybody who liked this scene, I apologize but Famke Janssen’s performance just did not pull off the seriousness of the moment. Maybe with a better director she could have done it, but I guess we’ll never know. Hmm, maybe they can do some sort of director’s cut but bring back Bryan Singer to do it so we could get a decent movie. That could be very interesting. Overall, I’m glad I went to see the film (for the new characters) but I’m extremely glad we went to maintee and used some coupons we had. If I had to pay the full, evening ticket price; I would have been seriously pissed off.

Oh yeah, if you’re reading this review prior to watching the movie; stay in your seat until after the credits. There’s one more scene after the credits are over which you don’t want to miss.

1 A movie/dvd review site run by a friend of mine.
2 He has consistently stated he believes Dumb and Dumber is not only a good movie, but one of the funniest he’s ever seen. While I find that movie to be an abhorrent piece of utter excrement.
3 My particular favorites.

Even though I run multiple plugins to block comment spam; some still makes it into my moderation queue. Mostly it’s annoying and boring, but this bit cracked me up.

Your site is very cognitive. I think you will have good future.

If you don’t also find this amusing, then I probably just need more caffeine this morning. 🙂

Update 2006-09-13: Oddly enough, this post is suddenly get hit with all kinds of comment spam that actually makes it past my filters and into the comment moderation queue. As such, I’m here by closing comments on this post.