July 20, 2012
Scraps
I think I need to declare the death of this blog. The jury is still out on starting another one; input welcome. My tendency to become obsessed with blog analytics suggests this might be a bad idea, but I am tempted. I leave with a few scraps that I found in this blog account as drafts of started posts:
Mourning the Subjunctive
Driving home amidst the annual Christmas commercialism, I noticed a billboard that read, “If only Santa knew it was this easy.” *Sigh* It should read, “If only Santa knew it were this easy.” This is because conditional sentences (“if” sentences) should employ the subjunctive tense.
Sad Camel, Happy Movie
Perhaps fitting with my penchant for reading all the magazines that arrive in the mail, I like to watch the previews that come before the movies on DVDs. Often, the random selections end up on our Netflix queue, which has been ebbing and flowing with movies for over a year now. One of the more eclectic titles landed on our porch this past weekend: The Story of the Weeping Camel. We might have found this title on the preview to Millions, but I am not sure exactly how it came to our list. [I never finished the review, and my memory of the movie is now reduced to some funny images of camels and odd music.]
The Comma and the Second Amendment
I found this posting recently [4 years ago! the link still works!] chronicling the interpretations of commas in the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms).
And there was a post titled “Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop,” which was probably going to be a book review of this title that I read with my now-dissolved book club. [I remember that book. He dies at the end. (Sorry for the spoiler.)]
So there are some random thoughts from the past. If I were writing a new blog post, it would probably be about how the chickens refused to go to bed last night without a snack.
July 19, 2012
A post script
A dear friend just started a private blog and I had to log into WordPress to view it, which entailed visiting Write Bailiwick for the first time in years. It makes me consider starting a new blog. Some days I miss writing. I miss the craft and the small joys of finding the right words, especially the right verbs. (I am proud, though, that my new place of work regularly uses the term “bailiwick” in division of labor discussions, which I think originated with me.)
As I look over the old posts, I realize a new blog would be very different. For example, I didn’t own chickens in 2008 and I probably never thought I would own chickens. Chicken stories are probably more amusing than random words and legal musings. The tone of the older posts also lacks authenticity and maturity: qualities that I still lack, but at least am more consciously working towards. My role model would be here.
Of course, there are plenty of reasons not to start a blog. I don’t need something else tugging me towards the internet. I don’t have a name for the blog. (“Aiming for Purgatory”? A bit dour. “One Farmer’s Wife”? Taken.) It would need photographs and I don’t get along well with my camera.
If anyone is reading out here in cyberspace, what do you think?
March 20, 2008
Signing Off . . . At Least for the Time Being . . .
My extraordinarily ordinary life has experienced a few changes, as you might have guessed from the dearth of posts lately. (No worries, all is fine, just a few alterations in daytime routines.) At the moment, my priorities and allocations of time do not have room for posting. If I get more efficient, perhaps I will return to the blogosphere. Until then, you can join me in encouraging my Dear Husband to start a blog, which would undoubtedly be much cooler than these humble pages!
Thanks for reading and sharing this space with me for the past few months.
March 7, 2008
Feddie’s Back!
Feddie’s Southern Appeal has happily returned to the blogosphere. (I’ll amend the blogroll soon!)
Meanwhile, our family has been visited by the flu, but I hope to return to blogging soon.
February 29, 2008
Natural Born Presidents
Hillary Clinton was born in Chicago, Illinois.
Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Mike Huckabee was born in Hope, Arkansas. (Oddly, the same place where Bill Clinton was born nine years earlier.)
John McCain was born in Coco Solo, in the Panama Canal Zone, Panama.
Article II, section 1 of the United States Constitution requires that “[n]o person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.”
Is a person born outside of the fifty states, in a United States military installation within a foreign country, a natural born citizen?
This article reports on the issue, concluding that most likely a birth in a military installation makes the child a natural born citizen. Notably, Theodore Olson is in the process of preparing a legal analysis for Senator McCain. The issue is one that surely fascinates academics, but realistically, I do not know how such a case would move forward. Someone would have to have standing to sue McCain. Who would that be? Any citizen? It would probably be politically risky for his opponent to bring the case. It would make a case for the case books, though!
February 26, 2008
Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!
My Little One just devours books (hopefully after the teething passes, we will work on reading them too), and one that we often choose is Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Thinks You Can Think! (I admit I read this several times before realizing that Dr. Seuss thinks thinks, not things.) I thought I would share a few of the recent Google searches that brought readers to this modest blog. Oh the thinks you can think on the web!
“merry xmas in algonquin words” (Um, did I write about that?)
“oedipus the king bailiwick” (I wonder what this person was really looking for!)
“what does the word crapulous mean” (At least the blog may have helped somebody out there with this post.)
“work crapulous?” (Obviously, there must be a shortage of blogging on crapulous.)
and
“moose skullduggery” (I think that one was my dear husband trying to find a googlewhack for my blog. A googlewhack is a two-word search on google, without quotation marks, that yields a single hit.)
February 25, 2008
Prayers for Bar Examinees
This Tuesday and Wednesday (and Thursday in a few jurisdictions), gaggles of stressed law school graduates will be attempting to hurdle the bar exam of states across the country. Please offer prayers for them today (as the anxiety before the test sometimes seems worse than the test itself!), especially through the intercession of St. Thomas More and St. Joseph Cupertino (patron saint of test takers, because he was asked the only question he knew the answer to in his examination for the priesthood), and for the Children of the Sacred Heart out there, we implore the intercession of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne and St. Madeline Sophie Barat!
The country may not need more lawyers, but a few more good ones are worth the prayers. I have three friends taking the bar in three different states and I wish them each a smooth, successful examination!
Courage and Confidence!
Incidentally, the term “bar” exam refers to the bar or railing separating the area around the judge in a courtroom. See here (near the bottom of the page).
February 22, 2008
A Word Without Context: kerfuffle
Well, dear readers, it seems I have a favorite word that I cannot find in a court opinion, at least on the free resources! (I feel as if I should get extra credit for such a discovery, like we would get for successfully stumping our third grade science teacher with scientific questions.) In the last five years in state and federal courts and in Supreme Court cases from 1781, no judge (not even Judge Selya!) has employed the delightful word “kerfuffle.” A kerfuffle is a sort of disturbance, of which factual recitations would seem to provide plenty of opportunities for use (“After observing the kerfuffle in the parking lot, the officers approached the defendant . . . .”). Any clerks out there with limitless Lexis or Westlaw abilities care to extend the search? This word has been a favorite since I learned it from a friend’s page-a-day calendar a few years back. I thought kerfuffle would surely have wound its way into an opinion in the last few years. Let this post effectively throw down the gauntlet to the lurking clerking readers out there!
February 20, 2008
A Sentence Out of Context
I read this sentence last night and thought it worth sharing. If I am reading carefully, I try to be alert for well-tuned sentences, which are fun to collect even though more cumbersome than words.
I have a passion for writing on clean single-lined foolscap; a smear, a tea-mark on a page makes it unusable, and a fantastic notion took me that I must keep my paper locked up in case of an unsavory visitor.
Graham Greene, The End of the Affair. I suspect a few others out there might be reading this one too these days . . . . Foolscap, by the way, refers to paper that is 8 1/2 by 13 1/2 inches. More information on it can be found here.
February 19, 2008
Word in Context: insouciance
Here is a short one from Judge Posner: “The parties, illustrating lawyers’ typical insouciance about quantification, have not told us what the retired pilots’ unsecured claims are likely to be worth.” In re UAL Corp., 468 F.3d 456 (7th Cir. 2006). Insouciance means characterized by a nonchalant or cheerful lack of concern.
As an aside, I challenge our readers to begin using “chalant” as a word; if one can be nonchalant, one should certainly be able to be chalant.
The Write Bailiwick 