Judge Wants New Lawyer for Man Accused of Stabbing His Attorney

A lawyer who was stabbed by his client during jury selection in the man's rape trial will be asked to step down from the case.

John Courtney was representing Che Sosa yesterday when Sosa allegedly stabbed him with a sharp, makeshift weapon made out of plexiglass.

• How'd you like to be his next assigned counsel?
• Will the jury pool be called as witnesses at the next trial?
• Will the jury pool for that trial get a show too?
• Absent the judge asking for a new lawyer for the man, do you think the old lawyer would have made that motion in open court?

Heh.

American 757: You picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel

An American Airlines 757 lost a wheel leaving Sea-Tac Airport Wednesday morning and landed safely about four hours later at Dallas-Fort Worth.

Sea-Tac spokesman Bob Parker said the tower noticed a ring on a runway threshold at about 7:30 a.m. Crews determined it was part of a wheel. Later, airport officials heard that an American Airlines jet had lost a wheel.

A search found the rest of the wheel behind a sign, next to a runway, Parker said.

The airport notified the Federal Aviation Administration, which called the situation a maintenance issue for American, he said.

American Airlines spokesman John Hotard in Fort Worth said there was no indication in the cockpit that the wheel had fallen off. The plane was rolling to the gate just before noon when the pilot was notified by someone on the ground that one of the dual nose wheels was missing, he said.

Maybe the mechanic missed lugnut day at tire college.
(Apologies to Ron White.)

I'm amazed that the wheel was lost, then found, then reported to the FAA, but somehow no one bothered to tell the command pilot of all this until after he landed.

Sounds like a communication issue for the FAA.

I know, I know, weather does not equal climate.

But still, this headline is fantastic:

HOUSE HEARING ON 'WARMING OF THE PLANET' CANCELED AFTER ICE STORM

The Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to inclement weather. The hearing is entitled “Climate Change: Are Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Human Activities Contributing to a Warming of the Planet?”

We Must All Stop ManBearPig.

The Instapundit's discussion of the "most powerful consumer blender" reminded me of Blendtec's Will It Blend?

Honestly, a 750 watt mixer is just about halfway to being the "most powerful consumer blender on the market."

The Blendtec mixers have 1,500 watt motors, allowing them to blend such unsafe things as magnets, toy cars, and hockey pucks.

Buy Blendtec Blenders @ Amazon

From an article about weird stuff recovered by the New York City Transit's lost property unit comes this quote.

Owners have six months to claim lost articles. Unclaimed items are auctioned or, in the case of Bibles, given to charity.

Why, I wonder, are bibles given special treatment. Is there no market for them, or is considered bad to sell a secondhand bible?

What do they do with lost Korans?

If they treat them differently, will the NYCLU to be suing over this?

Discontinued by Comedy Central, but available from me on ebay -- Towelie Beach Towel.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but there is something very odd about a non-unionized company like Burger King running ads touting the work of a fictional "stacker's union" composed of tiny people building (up to) 1000 calorie hamburger sandwiches with scaled down heavy equipment.

I'm pretty strongly anti-union, but it seems crass to suggest that your product is made using even fictional union labor when it most clearly is not made using union labor.

On the off chance some subjects of the Burger King are unionized, like truckers or meat cutters, I'm still pretty sure the employees behind the counter are almost never union.

Do you have a burning desire to own a prop or piece of wardrobe from a superbowl commercial?

Careerbuilder is selling a bunch of stuff from its superbowl commercials this year.

My favorite by far is the YEKNOM Industries sign. Other highlights includes a suit made of Post Its and a Tighty Whities outfit.

End User License Agreements (EULA's), a pandemic of idiocy.

If you wanted to really be careful about this stuff, you'd prohibit every employee at your office from clicking on any link, installing any program, creating accounts, or signing for parcels. You wouldn't even let employees make a run to Best Buy for some CD blanks -- have you seen the fine print on their credit-card slips?

...

Anybody who bothered to read a clickwrap or shrinkwrap agreement would never install any software, click on any link on the Web, open an account with anyone, or even shop at many retail stores. The terms of these agreements are onerous and ridiculous. We go along with the gag because we think nobody's paying any attention. But somebody's going to start paying attention soon, and when they do, the results will be disastrous for the electronic economy.

When I took contract law we were taught that ridiculous terms like these were simply unenforcable, but in today's environment I just don't know. Cory may be on to something here, and like submarine patents, these stupid agreements may be the next great region of legal exploration.

QsOTD

"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head."
-- Sally Kempton

"Language creates spooks that get into our heads and hypnotize us."
-- Robert Anton Wilson

Magical Sales Forecasting

Magical Sales Forecasting depends on two laws: the law of similarity (an effect resembles its cause), and the law of contagion (things which were once in physical contact maintain a connection even after physical contact has been broken).

These two laws govern the operation of "sympathetic magic", the idea that the manipulation of effigies or similar symbols or tokens can cause changes to occur in the thing the symbol represented. The use of voodoo dolls is a typical example of sympathetic magic, as is the use of excel spreadsheets treating sales forecasts as reality.

Typically, management uses magic to attempt to explain things that the sales department has not yet explained, or to attempt to control things that no seller can.

(Paraphrased from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magical_thinking.)

A great pun from a DA who apparently gets it in this story about a guy who was shrink wrapped by his alleged victims to hold him for the police.

"We are," said Washington County District Attorney Todd Martens, "just wrapping up our review."

Get your very own LED illuminated poster, capable of shutting down entire cities*.

"Boston liberals recoil at the idea that the city overreacted to these ads. The city had to act based on the information it possessed. But on the other hand, Boston liberals refuse to apply the same logic to President Bush's actions in Iraq."
-- Freeper Zook

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* Offer valid only in Boston, MA.