now that I leave the city, everyone wants to make a visit. no respect, etc.
I object to the venue; it's in Lincoln Park which is way too fratty for this crowd. I say we move it to Jackson's, or somewhere thereabouts, located on 21st Street in Nashville, TN.
I do have a friend at Vanderbilt who I'll probably be visiting sometime fairly soon, so a Nashville meetup could happen.
howdy SB, all. Going to be a short visit, I'm afraid.
I'll stay long enough to say: Nashville meet-up! Woot!
it sounds good to me! i can speak for tommy as well and i'm almost certain armsmasher plans on making it too. here's me and tommy so we might be identified.
How does Flickr assign URLs? And what are you trying to say about Tom?
i don't know...how does flickr assign urls? and, um, i'm trying to say tommy is cute? i guess? if you're curious about my user account name, it's a name that journalism students at medill (where i'm a masters student) are called.
Also, if you're in or around the Twin Cities (John Emerson, are you there??), you can hang out with me. Hey! Why not make a road trip? It's only about 7 hours from Chicago....
Well don't I look like a jackass. I thought it was a fortuitous concatenation of arbitray letters. If I'd thought about it, I would have realized that FLickr builds the account name into the URL, since that's the way they are when I link to my pictures.
no problem, chopper - a lot of people are confused by the user account. until i explain that it's all about medill students being made fun of for being pompous idiots and everybody has a good laugh.
's OK, Chopper, you're not the first.
Excellent -- now I can recognize you two, and Armsmasher's picture was on his blog so I can spot him as well. Assuming that picture was of Armsmasher.
it was. he's the charming-looking fellow with the black frame glasses.
text, it's aawesoem to see you! I was thinking of you, when I replied to B about knowing that one's unfogged posse would provide backup, if necessary.
off topic but why can't i comment on old threads? i'm trying to respond to somebody who called me a bag-eyed ho unworthy of nick gillespie's love here.
Man, that guy looks like a douchebag. The girl is cute, though.
(In the last instance, on that one long-gone thread about the website of "hot girls with douchebags," didn't "douchebag" functionally mean "guys other than myself"?)
Ha! I just noticed that a couple of days ago myself. I'm on record that Gillespie is a snot-nose, and you're cute, so the hell with that Esther person commenting from a Catholic bookstore.
Also, whoever wrote that post was right about Oklahoma [shudder].
(I think the answer is that comments on old posts get held for moderation; obviously that one got opened back up last week; maybe it got closed again?)
Red Lion?! I wonder, have I ever been there? But kudos for, you know, actually choosing a place.
didn't "douchebag" functionally mean "guys other than myself"?
Nah, it meant "guys"; he acknowledges that he himself is a douchebag.
Matt, You misunderstand. By "myself" I meant myself. The exception that proves the rule is me.
I don't know why catherine thinks I'm not coming—of course I'll be there! And for the record, here is a cute picture of catherine and me.
And I met slolernr on Saturday, which makes two Unfogged meatups in one week. I am teh meatiest!
dude, that is not cute. i look like a lush unworthy of nick's love. which, let's face it, i am. damn you, esther.
w-lfs-n, you should come to chicago! though i guess there is an SF sort of meet up going on this coming weekend, right?
Until I have that rare gold-foil Ben w-lfs-n hologram, my collection will continue to bring me shame.
Fuck! I missed text.
How come smasher makes it to Chicago, but not to New York, twice?
Hey, I missed the second NYC meetup because you held it at around 2:45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Next time there's a proper weekend-day gathering, I'll be there.
it's possible tommy and i might be a bit late, but if so, not very much so. just fyi.
additionally: it might be that i arrive separately from tommy and kriston, and i don't know what anyone besides those two looks like, so if they're not there yet and you see me, holler.
Alright, Smasher and I are here, but nobody's grabbed us yet, and we're shy about asking everyone if they're from the internet. Besides, folks have seen pictures of us, so we feel like they're in a better position to initiate contact. We're going to drink beer and formulate a strategy.
I'm just leaving my hotel -- I should be able to spot 'Smasher by the glasses. If you someone with long brown hair in a grayish-brown suit loking confused, that's me.
We're going to drink beer and formulate a strategy.
Sounds like you've already formulated a strategy.
I guess they're just implementing it, then.
I totally recognized Smasher the moment I stepped in the bar. The glasses really do help.
I recognized Smasher's glasses, but was somewhat confused by his beard, which is new since the only picture I've seen. I did like the story about his having been personally encouraged to join the Army by Gen. Clark.
I had a great time: talked to Catherine about meeting people from the internet, and Silvana about trying to avoid law firm life. Was given a book on buying used pianos by IDP (Thanks!), who looks and sounds as though he should be hosting something informative on PBS. And had a fine time talking to Kotsko, Michael, Smasher and Tom about all sorts of stuff.
You forgot me. :-( It was a lot of fun. LB to her credit stayed until 10:30, despite having to try to wow her firm's partners at the mock trial today. (Good luck! Hope it's going well.)
everyone was seriously teh awesome. unfogged meet ups are the best! woo!
I concur in spades. Additionally fun was that due to having drank several beers at a good clip, I was primed and ready to get totally smashed and the next thing that I went to, so now I have a nice hangover as a souvenir of it all.
I think the waitress was very confused with us, my favorite interaction was something like:
Waitress: Sir, would you like another beer?
IDP: (looks at beer pensively for about 10 seconds) Ask me again.
Waitress: You mean now?
IDP: No.
For some reason the conjunction of Unfogged meetup and waitstaff is an unhappy one.
I had a great time, and enjoyed meeting everyone. Even when you've seen pictures, people are different in your mind after you've actually met them. It'll be interesting to see if that changes the interaction in this format.
That was a ridiculous exchange Silvana reported, but the waitress was really good; she remembered what I was drinking long after I'd forgotten. I ordered the house specialty, shepard's pie, and it was pretty good.
I've gotten that about looking and sounding like public television pretty much all my adult life; maybe it was an unconscious model when nobody else was. But cameras and microphones change impressions, so that I might not sound so much like that if I were actually doing it.
It's been years since I've ridden a bike home on dark streets in such a blasted condition--it beats driving for safety and comfort. When I passed Wein/ste/ins Funeral Home on Devon, there was a drunk, enamored of the name on the sign, shouting WINE STEEN! WINE STEEN! at the top of his voice.
Such was Frederick's devotion that he had more than an hour's train ride ahead of him when we broke up: back into the city on the Red Line, over to the Northwestern Station, out to Park Ridge on the Northwestern RR. whew!
LB: Please tell us how it went as soon as you can.
I'm used to it. I do the same routine when I go to that bar (the Red Lion) for Drinking Liberally on Wednesday nights. But there's another Drinking Liberally closer to me (in Skokie, I think) that I'm going to have to check out.
Hung jury. Four to one against us, but hung, so we were happy. We got slaughtered by a paralegal and a law student on the jury who came up with a dippy view of the law and convinced two others (we got to watch jury deliberations on video), but one juror held out for us.
It really went very well -- for all the terrible things I've been saying about my fellow associates, the program was excellent as training. I'm all pumped up to go find some pro-bono case that's going to trial.
In real life, of course, neither a paralegal nor a law student would ever make it onto a jury.
Yay for the holdout! Too bad s/he didn't swing all the other jurors, but we can't all be Henry Fonda.
That's not actually true, Ben. Judges are sometimes put onto juries. I'm a lawyer, and lawyers are often empaneled these days. I was called for a Grand about a year ago, and the Asst. State's Attorney doing the initial interviews said to me: "It's going to be months, can you afford this?" "No" "OK then." But not everybody gets off juries these days.
In real life, of course, neither a paralegal nor a law student would ever make it onto a jury.
It’s improbable, but it does happen. Indeed, lawyers sometimes serve on juries, as John Kerry did in 2005. I have also read accounts of judges serving on juries. I couldn’t find any on the Internets, though I did find a guide for judges serving on juries. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apostropher had a story about a judge who regurgitated a hippopotamus while serving on a jury.
When I had jury duty, an attorney was selected as an alternate. It was going to be a very short trial, though.
That guide is for English judges and juries, of course.
My assumption that a law student, lawyer or judge wouldn't get on a jury was based on the fact that such people would know that jury nullification is a-ok, but I guess that wouldn't come up in all cases.
Yeah, no one's going to nullify the law against home invasion.
But nullification doesn't mean necessarily that you proclaim the law invalid, just that you don't feel like abiding by it in a particular case, right? So someone might nullify the law against home invasion if, say, it was a racist all-white jury trying a klansman.
I got something from the court that I forgot to open and just remembered. Oh no.
A friend of mine got stuck with grand jury duty in MA; I don't think CA has it. It's 4 days a week 9-4 for either 3 or 4 months. He's a lawyer, but he's not practicing yet, because he just passed the MA bar. He passed a Southern State's bar first, but then he had to move here to be with his wife while she completes a medical fellowship. He had no good excuse and couldn't get out of it.
I know of a law professor in California who served on a criminal jury during the summer.
I'd love to serve on a high-profile jury as long as I wasn't sequestered. I'd love to be on one of the Enron juries.
I'm 37 and I've never been called for jury duty.
62: At that point, I might start taking it personally.
So, Kotsko -- care to explain what's so blonde about the way I post?
That's just my image of a high-powered lawyer.
He had no good excuse and couldn't get out of it.
While I was Googling looking for stuff to put into 52, I came across a supposedly true account of a lawyer who encountered one of his former clients in the hall of a courthouse carrying a copy of "Mein Kampf" under his arm. The lawyer asked him why on earth he was reading that. The guy said, "Would you pick someone for a jury who was carrying around "Mein Kampf?" The lawyer said, "No." The guy said, "So why are you asking me the question?"
61: How could California not have jury duty?
67: Of course California has jury duty; I didn't say that it didn't. What California does not have is grand juries. Prosecutors just swear something on their own say so to indict. Because they don't have grand juries, they can't have grand jury duty.
I've been called for jury duty in Cali.
I reckon it was a petit jury.
68: My misreading, apologies. That makes sense, because SCOTUS has not read the 14th Amendment as incorporating the grand jury clause of the 5th against the states.