f/k/a archives . . . real opinions & real haiku

Our frequent Honored Guest Pamela Miller Ness was very successful

in contests sponsored by the Haiku Poets of Northern California for

2004 — she scored a first place in the tanka genre, and 2nd place with

honored guest Michael Dylan Welch for their rengay sequence. 

rengay (defined here):

 

Idlers in the Gallery

    (by Pamela Miller Ness & Michael Dylan Welch)

 

 

overflowing

its cut-glass vase

La Farge’s magnolia     pmn

 

 

Homer’s croquet player

hides a ball with her skirt     mdw

 

 

strewn across

her studio table

Nell Braine’s turnips      pmn

 

 

 

 

the unused pencils

Jacob Lawrence grins

in his self-portrait          mdw

 

 

gathering hollyhocks

Frieseke’s woman in blue      pmn

 

 

to the porch born

the precise signature

on Blum’s two idlers      mdw

 

 

[each poem in the Idlers rengay is based on a painting

in the National Academy of Design, NYC.  Five of the

six can be seen here.]

 

 

tanka (defined here)

 

Dressing

for a meal I’ll eat

alone

I decide to let loose

my hair

 

bonus from Pamela Miller Ness:

 

 

storm watch

we talk

about getting old

 

 

 

• 
  
  by dagosan                                               

unseen bird

keeps repeating itself —

“you talkin’ to me?”

 

 

 

 

 

meeting the new

upstairs tenant

feet smaller than they sound

 

 

[May 22, 2005]

 

Scheherazade Fowler often says insightful things.  Yesterday, however, she — admittedly —

got “a little carried away” in a ranty piece called Legal Lies (May 21, 2005).  It’s Sherry’s

passionate plea that lawyers “recognize that our young people look up to the lawyers

who have come before them, and we owe it to them to tell the truth whenever possible.”   

Besides the basic wrongheadedness of many of her points, and the total failure to suggest

alternative solutions, I have two main problems with Sherry’s litany of complaints:

• 
  
  She assumes an infantile passivity and ignorance, along with a lack of both
  
  
  curiosity and reponsibility, on behalf of college and law students; that’s insulting
  
  
  to them and, if true, unacceptable in people who want to be attorneys for others;
  
  
  (see prior post, “Homework for Law School Appplicants;” and
  
  
• 
  
  
  

  She (mis)characterizes the attitudes of a portion of the legal profession (sometimes just

  
  

  one or two weblog writers) and then attributres them to the entire profession.

I would have ignored “Legal Lies” as just a little blowing off of steam by our charming

spinner of tales, but the enthusiastic response of her Commentors (e.g., here) seems to cry out for

rebuttal.. . . . 

 

— click here for the full story —

 

 

Back in April, a pretty CNN newsreader said viewers who’ve been having

trouble paying to fill their gas tank should stay tuned for some tips on how to

cope.   I did, and was a bit disappointed that the consumer segment offered

only one solution to higher gasoline prices — buy a new hybrid car.  That’s right: 

just rush out and purchase a new car that costs $3000 to $6000 more than

similar all-gasoline models. 

 

rising gas prices–

an attendant changing numbers

in a pouring rain

 

   Michael Dylan Welch 

      from Modern Haiku (Winter-Spring 2005)

 

   Somehow, I don’t think a new hybrid car is the solution for these folk

(wcco.com, “Low-Income Drivers Look for Help with High Gas Prices,” March 18, 2005). 

Even people who consider themselves middle-class Americans might find adding a

new Prius, much less the $50,000 Lexus hybrid SUV, impractical. (bankrate.com,

“Is a hybrid car right for you?“)  So, what can you do if gas prices are killing you?

 

 

      gridlock
         on the freeway–
the skywriting drifts

 

Michael Dylan Welch  from Open Window –

click here for orig. photo & poem

 

My former employer, the Federal Trade Commission, has come to the rescue, with 

a Consumer Alert — Good, Better, Best: How to Improve Gas Mileage  (May 19,

2005, press release).  Beyond buying an alternative fuel vehicle or hybrid car, the

FTC and American Automobile Association suggest a dozen ideas that can improve

your fuel efficiency noticeably.  Here are a few that you might want to keep in mind

(and me, too):

Drive more efficiently – stay within posted speed limits (Gas mileage 

decreases rapidly at speeds above 60 miles per hour); stop aggressive

driving and jackrabbit starts; use overdrive and cruise control; avoid

unnecessary idling. Combine errands; avoid packing items on the car

roof (can cut down efficincy 5%);  remove excess weight (no, not your

spouse) — 100 fewer pounds can save 2%.

 

Maintain your car – keep the engine tuned, tires properly inflated and

aligned, change the oil on schedule, and check and replace air filters regularly.

Replacing clogged filters can increase gas mileage up to 10 percent.

 

Use the proper octane level – if your engine isn’t knocking with regular

octane, there’s no benefit to go higher.  

update: As we stated in a post on June 14, 2005, “driving at 10 miles an hour above the 65 miles-per-hour limit increases fuel consumption by 15 percent.” (See NYT, “Unmentioned Energy Fix: A 55M.P.H. Speed Limit,” May 1, 2005) 

 

Walter Olson is relieved that “Menace of gasoline underpricing averted

again”  It seems that Maryland has been invoking a law, meant to prevent predatory

prices used to drive competitors out of the market, which prohibits selling gasoline

below cost.  I’d explain why this approach is not always a silly one, but it’s too nice

outside right now.

 

  The New York Times reports today that America’s “Love Affair with S.U.V.’s

Begins to Cool” (May 21, 2005).

 

“tinyredcheck”   Not really related — except that it might make the roads safer and reduce beer-

belly-drag ineffiency: The Harvard Gazette reports that “Kudzu Cuts Alcohol Consumption”

by about one-half. 

 

 Gary Bloom at EdmondsForum recently mentioned an Unintended Consequence of

hybrid cars — more roadkill:

[S]ince I already scolded SUVs for their psychopathic tendency to kill

humans, it’s only fair that I point out the danger of almost silent cars, which

hybrids are at slow speeds. Ever see a “Deaf Child in Neighborhood” sign?

Hybrids make us all, in effect, deaf. Drivers of hybrids are noting that silence

is not golden; they’re running over unwary animals and it could get worse.

 

 

spring breeze–
three ride the same horse
home

 

a penny’s worth of
cold water, the horse
drinks too

 

 

 

sound of a horse
gobbling grass…
fireflies flitting

 

 

Kobayashi ISSA,

translated by David G. Lanoue

 

 

 

moist breeeze

the novel’s soft cover

curls up

 

 

 

 

         dozing off–

     the soft drone

of mosquito flutter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                 tidepool

the many stars sink

          into the sand

 

 

by jim kacian, from Chincoteague

(Red Moon Press, 2000)

 

 

• 
  
  from dagosan:  

the widow’s

dead rosebush

so many thorns

 

 

[May 20, 2005]

I’m going to start presenting Wish I Said That excerpts from sources more

reputable, expert or elegant than I.  Many of the quotations will be from sources

not yet on the internet, and one goal of mine is to harness search engines to

help more people discover some of the best thinkers on the legal profession and

on the art and craft of haiku.  Our first WISTful posting features Lee Gurga on 

haiku and Sol Linowitz on lawyers. 

 

wisteria in bloom–
voices of pilgrims
voices of birds

 

       Kobayasgu ISSA,

           translated by David G. Lanoue

 

culled by haikuEsq:

 

    “Wouldn’t it be great if there were a kind of poetry that could be

written anywhere, anytime, by anyone?  A kind of poetry that children

could enjoy yet even accomplished poets needed years to master? 

A poetry with the simple aim of making us aware of life’s simple gifts

and everyday joys?  An antidote to irony, consumerism, and narcissism? 

A kind of poetry in which the best journals invited all excellent work, no

matter who the writer knew or did not know?

 

    “There is: haiku is that kind of poetry.”

Lee Gurga, from Haiku: A Poet’s Guide (Modern Haiku   

Press, 2003), from the introduction, “An Invitation to Haiku.”

 

cool evening . . .

mother takes me by the arm

from grave to grave

 

 

 

long auburn hair

her cheek

flecked with autumn

 

 

Randy Brooks from Haiku: A Poet’s Guide

 

  selected by ethicalEsq:

 

    “Where does the responsibility lie for safeguarding the integrity and reputation

of the bar?  Obviously, with the bar associations, which have long held themselves

out as far more than mere social organizations for those ‘called to the bar.’  . . Few

economic developments or government actions are harmful or helpful to all lawyers . . . 

But anything that harms the reputation of the bar harms all lawyers; anything that

helps the reputation of the bar helps all lawyers.”  [at 139]

 

    “The feeling that lawyers are not trustworthy is the most debilitating aspect of public

(and client) attitudes today, but most lawyers feel themselves directly affected by it

only on rare occasions.  Their own clients trust them — and should — and in their own

work they stay easily within the envelope of the rules.  But there is one area where few

lawyers can avoid discomfort when looking at their profession.  The rhetoric of the

profession has long insisted that our system is one of ‘justice for all,’ that our court must

not ‘ration justice,’ but the visible truth is that we are not living up to our professed beliefs.” 

[at 145]

  by Sol M. Linowitz, from The Betrayed Profession: Lawyering at the

End of the Twentieth Century, with Martin Mayer (Scribners, 1994), from Chapter 7,

The Job for the Bar Associations.

– Gurga and Linowitz with be back in this space soon.-

 

    Norm Pattis at Crime & Federalism thinks weblog pixels should be set in stone, once

posted.  Fedster, Kirby and I do some editing.  Let Norm know your opinion here.

 

  Whether you’re into Jack Russell [not Daniels] terriers or the intricacies of antitrust conspiracy

theory, check out yesterday’s 9th Circuit opinion in The Jack Russell Terrier Network of Northern

California v. American Kennel Club, Inc. (May 17, 2005), Case No. 02-17264 (via Fool in the Forest).

JRTCA would not allow any members to also be members of the American Kennel Club.  The 9th

Circuit saw no combination upon which to base the boycott claim.   I think the Court forgot — or

plaintiffs’ counsel forgot to allege — that the Terrier Association is per se a combination of its

members (competing breeders and sellers of JR terriers) and is therefore capable of engaging in

a boycott that violates the Sherman Act. 

 

 

• 
  
  by dagosan                                               

fuming

behind a school bus —

cotton clouds speed by

[May 19, 2005] 

                                                               

 

 

paper route
knocking a row of icicles
from the eave

first on the trail—
the pull of a spider’s strand
across my face

clouds of pollen
drifting through sunbeams—
a sparrow’s sudden fligh

visiting mother—
again she finds
my first grey hair

……….. by Michael Dylan Welch – collected at Terebess Asia Online (TAO)

• by dagosan

three pink tulips
in an unkempt yard –
trespassers

[May 18, 2005]

potluck

I’ve bookmarked the month-old Barchives weblog, which is run by Toby Brown and Lincoln Mead and promises to “examine various aspects of owning and operating a bar association.” (via Ernie) It looks like Toby Brown has a special interest in a topic near to your Editor’s heart — the intersection of pro bono, self-help and access to justice, and the need for more participation by bar associations. (Toby, take a look at our Access/Self-Help Page, and especially here, here, and there.) Maybe Barachives will get into our quacks-like-a-guild debate, too.

• Barchives links to the excellent Access to Justice project at Chicago-Kent Law School. I urge you to take a look at its remarkable test self-help system. A2J describes itself as working “to bring together the most advanced process design technologies and the power of the Internet to fundamentally reengineer civil court processes from a customer prospective, in which self-represented

  litigants seek access to judicial services, in a research project entitled ‘Meeting the Needs of Self-Represented Litigants: A Consumer-based Approach”.

From now on, even if being humorous, I hope Prof. Bainbridge will point to Warren Farrell’s book Why Men Earn More whenever he mentions the gender pay gap. Steve notes that kids spend only 81% on dads for Father’s Day than on moms for Mother’s Day. That’s an interesting contrast to the fact that childless, never-married men, according to Farrell’s stats, “earn only 85% of their female counterparts—even when both are college educate and work full-time.”

There’s a interesting op/ed piece in today’s NYT, (Matt Miller, “Waiting for CEOs to Go ‘Nuclear’,” May 18, 2005), proposing that CEOs of major corporations get together to figure out how to fix our health care system . While checking out the Annotated NYT to look for more on the topic, I discovered Stuart Buck’s reaction at The Buck Stops Here to an NYT article on attractive kids getting treated better by parents. Buck’s link to a rearch paper from 1998, by Jeff Biddle & Daniel Hammeresh amused me.

 

In “Beauty, Productivity, and Discrimination: Lawyers’ Looks and Lucre,” the authors claim to show that more attractive lawyers make more money than homely ones [admit it, we always thought so]. They also note that private sector lawyers are more attractive than government lawyers. [ditto] The authors say:

“results support a theory of dynamic sorting and the role of customer behavior. We cannot determine whether this is because clients discriminate or because better-looking lawyers are able to obtain greater pecuniary gains for their clients.”

Does that NYCLA Diversity Pact cover lookism? Will clients want uglies or beauties? Does law really need more Metrosexuals? More Cro-Magnons?

afterthoughts: For more, see: “Beauty and Success: To those that have, shall be given” (The Economist, Dec. 17, 2007) [“The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand”] (via The dark goddess of replevin speaks, Jan. 9, 2008; and here)

Evan Schaeffer got lots of comments on the issue of whether a weblog can be a negative marketing tool for a lawyer. Like all things weblog-related, the answer is “it depends.” Weblogs are so different from each other, and clients or referring lawyers have such different needs and tastes, that it seems useless to make general, off-the-cuff appraisals. I must confess that there are some weblogs where the Comments are so consistently nasty and/or immature, that it reflects poorly on the Editor. I think Volokh does a very good job of keeping comments civil and respectful (e.g., here).

p.s. Sarni is threatening me with a Stick (or is it a boomerang?), and I’m waiting anxiously. Meanwhile, I’m wondering why they don’t get homework in Primary School downunder.

empty sandals

on the beach

pull of the moon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

sept-

ember

 

 

into

the

rain-

filled

bucket

so

softly

hailstones

 

 

 

 

Carolyn Hall  from Haiku: A Poet’s Guide, by Lee Guruga.

“sept-” Mariposa 5 (2001, a reflection on Sept. 11); “into” – Acorn 5 (2000)

“empty sandals” The Heron’s Nest 3:5 (2001); A New Resonance 2: Emerging Voices

 

 

  I recently razzed MansfieldFox for taking the name Haiku in

vain.  The least the “Haiku Police” can do is suggest a very practical

yet enjoyable guide to understanding what makes a poem a haiku and

what makes for good haiku.  I unequivocally recommend poet-editor

Lee Gurga‘s Haiku: A Poet’s Guide (2003) for anyone wanting to

become a better haiku reader or a haiku poet.  I wish I would stop

spending so much time on the non-haiku side of my weblog and spend

more time absorbing and practicing Gurga’s advice. 

 

You can get a taste for Gurga’s writing and insights, at the Haiku World website,

which has posted a chapter from the book called “Writing and Revising Haiku.” 

As for folks who think haiku is about form rather than substance, Lee laments:

“Things have not changed appreciably since Harold Henderson

observed more than thirty years ago, “experience has proved

that beginners, unless they know at least something about Japanese

standards and conventions, are apt to produce poems that have no

relation whatever to haiku except in form.” . . .

 

“The number of people who are aware that haiku is not simply a

form has risen dramatically, but it sometimes seems that the number

of people who are not has risen even faster.”

Naturally, the Guide will help you understand the substance and spirit of “real”

haiku.

 

 

by dagosan:  

mid-May —

overnight the shade trees

stole the river view

 

                              [May 17, 2005]

Prof. Martin Grace doesn’t waste time — he’s already responded to

The Stick I handed him last Friday, offering an interesting peak at a Risk-geek’s reading

habits.  You’ve got to love a professor who can still recite Mr. Brown Can Moo.”

Can you?

 

Creatively dubbing the practice Rapunzelling, LawGirl has made some suggestions

for law firms that would probably make our Decloaking campaign and Kevin Heller‘s

decloaking offer unnecessary.  So, listen up firms, and treat your associates with

respect. (via Point of Law)  I wonder if RiskProf can recite Rapunzel, too.

 

Since I don’t listen to podcasts, I missed Evan Schaeffer’s announcement yesterday

about redoing his weblog.  Today, it is renamed Evan Schaeffer’s Legal Underground

[yeah! no brackets] and Evan explains more about why he is reconstructing the site.

For one thing, he notes that there was just too much weblog — and that important folk

might think he wasn’t devoting enough time to lawyering (I hope he doesn’t blame that

rascal Prof. Yabut).    Around here, all the guys hope Underground stays pretty much

the same — with Evan-the-polymath-host attracting guests who are interesting and amiable. 

Good luck to the new ESLU.

• 
  
  
  

  Thanks to the magic of Google, I just learned that ESLU is an

  
  

  insurer  f.k.a. Excess & Stop-Loss Underwriters, Inc..  It was

  
  

  involved in a res judicata decision that outraged the good

  
  

  people at SecretLaw.com.

Thanks to MyShingle (which has a great new look) for pointing to an interesting article

concerning one Western NY law firm, Cellino & Barnes, suing another firm, Moran & Kufta, 

for mentioning on its website that C&B was being investigated by the State grievance

committee, and linking to a news article on the topic.   (“Lawyer vs. Lawyer Over Website,”

ABA e-report, , May 13, 2005; Rochester D&C, May 4, 2005).  C&B is suing under a State

civil rights provision about using a person’s name in an advertisement without permission. 

Count me among observers who believe that the website section in question should not be

considered advertising, and that M&K has the constitutional right to discuss news about a

competitor.