Lawhawk and I just put together bios so you have a sense of who we are. Contrary to popular opinion, neither of us works (or worked) for a circus, nor is either of us imaginary. That said, you may be shocked at the truth. For Lawhawk, whose real name is Vern Fleeglegass, is actually a Chinese astronaut and I, real name: Max Bunkhouse, am a porn star. At least, that's what I got out of reading the bios. Anyway, they're on the right (as you would expect) in the sidebar.
46 comments:
great job on the bio's guys!!
Nice!
You know, uh, over at Threedonia, in the "Cast" section, they have bios of many of their regular posters. Just sayin'.
Nice quote, by the way. I assume your second choice was Dr. Evil's "The details of my life are quite inconsequential." :-)
Both lawyers! Cripes! I better keep the lawyer jokes and critisms down to a minimum. Probably find out that my name will be legally changed to Dirk Diggler.
Lawrence Hawk...you couldn't have been anything but a lawyer, even if you wanted to.
it's always slightly eerie to see certain parallels that may (or may not) have something to do with the similarities in world view. In your case, Andrew, having been originally from upstate New York myself, and having graduated with a B.S. in Business Administration with an emphasis in marketing as well as management, I had been accepted at various law schools and might have pursued that career were it not for the Crohn's Disease.
Hawk, I didn't know you had worked with the Trans boys. About 1995, Gerry Isom and his two lieutenants Dick Wratten and Bill Palgutt came over to run our shop at Cigna after CG wanted a divorce from INA. Don't know if you dealings with those bous or not? Always a small world n'est pas?
Thanks Jed. It wasn't easy coming up with a believable past. ;-)
Scott, Maybe eventually at the film site.
I like that Dr. Evil quote too. But I like the Kerim Bey line more -- it's one of my favorite lines from a James Bond film.
Dirk, Don't worry, I can't stand lawyers.
Tam, Some people are destined for evil. ;-)
Vern Fleeglegass and Max Bunkhouse--I love you guys! :-)
Jed, That's interesting. It's funny how people end up making choices -- the almost randomness of it. I probably should have planned to be a lawyer from the get-go, at least according to everyone I know. They were surprised I decided to head to engineering school. I'm glad I did though because the technical background of having taken actual math and science courses has served me very well -- most lawyers are liberal arts majors and simply don't have a clue about science or math (or even business or economics).
Where in upstate NY if you don't mind? I went to school at Rensselaer in Troy (by Albany) -- a school for people who got wait-listed at MIT. It was quite an experience being surrounded by some of the brightest people on the planet and it was stunning to compare that to what I found later at UC Boulder, which is full of below-average dope smokers.
One of my roommates at RPI was so brilliant it was scary. One day in a nuclear physics class, he suddenly blurted out "oh, so Einstein was wrong. . ." And he was right, Einstein was wrong. That's how brilliant this guy was, though strangely, he could also watch a whole football game and not tell you who was winning. Sometimes genius is pretty close to insanity.
Thanks Writer X, it's all true! ;-)
Andrew - Binghamton. My Dad was born there, but also lived up in Adams below Watertown. For years, we made the trek up to the Adirondacks for a week in the summer. However, my Dad was an ad man and we moved to the Philly suburbs in the early 50's.
Ah. Troy was my first time in the Northeast and I took advantage of it because we would go to all of the away hockey games. Since RPI played in the ECAC, that meant seeing all of the Ivys plus Army and a couple more.
My sister went to Penn (Wharton), so I've spent a bit of time in Philly visiting.
Then the next time out to the East Coast was for DC.
(By the way, I also lived in Tennessee for a year -- Germantown, outside of Memphis in the early 1980s.)
Wait, so you two aren't actually figments of my imagination? I've been hoodwinked! Anyway, interesting bios, even if I am a little disgruntled to find out you both are filthy Yankees by birth. Bleh.
A year in Germantown, huh Andrew? I've been through there once or twice recently; nice town, but it's a little too close to Memphis for me (if you know what I mean, and I think you do).
T_Rav, Whoa! Hold the phone... I'm no Yankee!! I was born in Virginia buddy and grew up in Tampa and then Colorado.
NY was just for college.
Yeah, I know what you mean about Memphis. It was not a very nice city when we were there. That was 20+ years ago, so I don't know how it's changed, but at the time it was incredibly dirty, falling apart and beset by massive racial tension.
T-Rav, Plus I have a certificate of live birth from Kenya... just in case I ever want to run for office there! ;-)
Andrew, What was your neatest case? If we can ask?
Ed, I can't disclose client names or anything like that, so I need to be somewhat vague. And your question is actually a hard one because so many of the cases I've had have been so different.
One of the interesting things about what I've done is that you get to learn a whole bunch about the world. For example, if your client builds radar systems, then you need to learn everything there is to know about radar systems or you can't represent them effectively. So I've learned a ton about a great many things like tanks, sonar, radar, food services, cardiology, hospital administration, web gear, etc. I had one client for whom I had to learn about how they stretch bones after the growth plate has been shattered.
I would say the most interesting case involved a leaking sonar system or a wrongful death/medical malpractice case I had. The most frustrating was trying to get a kid out of jail who had been wrongfully convicted -- the only innocent criminal I ever met. The most painful was a three week marathon negotiation over $15 million in telecommunications gear where both sides wanted the deal to happen, but the lawyer for the other side (who had veto power) didn't. That guy fought we me over every single sentence in a 120 page contract.
Being a civil lititgator is the sort of thing that forces you to learn a wild variety of things and and ends up giving you a million stories.
Tennessee: I don't know about Andrew, but mine kind of happened on its own. I wanted to be a history professor, then (yes, you've probably already figured this one out) a political organizer. Fortunately, marriage settled me down (even if it ultimately didn't work out).
Kosh: In my waiting room at the law office, I had a scrapbook with my own collection of lawyer cartoons and jokes. Many of them still decorate the walls of the guest bedroom. Between thee and me, I never much liked my fellow attorneys. LOL
Andrew, that makes me feel better. If I had to deal with a New Yorker and a Chicago native, that would have been difficult :-)
While I can't speak for Memphis 20 years ago, I suspect it's no better today. I got a hint of the situation from a professor of mine who teaches a gun safety course in Germantown. He told me once that the main hospital in Memphis is one of three in the country that the U.S. Army uses to give their medics combat training, due to the nature of the wounds that come in. Yeesh. Midtown is still pretty nice, though.
Tam: I think fate intervened. All kids secretly rummage through their parents' things for collectibles. When I was about five or six, I commandeered my dad's briefcase. When the other kids took their stuff to school in their zipper notebooks and book bags, I carried that briefcase until it finally wore out.
Tennessee: The names sound familiar, but I don't specifically remember them. I completely forgot to mention in the bio that I also worked for about six months for The Equitable while I was studying for the Bar. I was writing the partnership and small corporation insurance contracts for California businesses. Small group medical insurance was a bit of a novelty at the time. The company had district managers and district sales reps, and the running joke around the office was that when I passed the bar, I would be the district attorney. Who says insurance people don't have a sense of humor?
WriterX: I had to change my name. Couldn't spell Fleeglegass. Hawk was easier. LOL
T_Rav, That was true in the 1990s already -- the army used Memphis to teach surgeons about combat wounds. But nothing compares to Baltimore. Baltimore is like Stalingrad circa 1943.
What really killed me in Memphis were the schools. We moved to Germantown for 1 year when my dad left the military, with the intent of returning to Colorado the following year. I was in eighth grade at the time. The first thing I discovered was that my school was entirely white -- there was no integration. And they were highly insular. That was really strange since Colorado really didn't have racial problems or class problems at the time, everyone just kind of mixed without thinking about it.
Then I discovered that their eighth grade curriculum was what I had learned in sixth grade in Colorado -- and that's no exaggeration. They were literally two years behind. When I got back to Colorado, I had to double up the math, English and science classes for one year just to get caught up again with my classmates.
By the way, T_Rav, the most racist city I've ever come across was Boston.
T-Rav: Yes, I admit it, I'm a Yankee. But I did visit Birmingham and Selma, Alabama and Oxford, Mississippi in 1964 and 1965, if you can call what we were doing there a "visit." Over the years I have developed a fondness for most things Southern, and have compartmentalized my feelings about the opposition we faced during the Civil Rights era.
I had a producer in Memphis who had a classic car program and I would go to that city to visit him--sort of remember having dinner at the testaurant from "The Firm." Other than that, my closest relationship is watching Memphis Blues on t.v. (a rather adult and interesting cop show.) Memphis is a world away from Knoxville in both miles and temperament.
Andrew: Apparently you haven't spent a lot of time in San Francisco. When I first arrived there in 1962, the population was 13% black. While talking about civil rights and equality, the city was slowly but surely "relocating" the black population. Today, the black population is closer to 9%, and is isolated largely in the Bayview-Hunter's Point section on the fringe of the City. That area is now in the sights of a huge redevelopment project which will reduce the black population even more.
And what's wrong with us liberal arts majors? We get science by osmosis. One of my roomies at Cal was a physics major. I remember the day he ruefully carved into the table at the Bear's Lair: "E is not equal to MC2--Oh My God!" My first Cal girlfriend was the daughter of a Cal physics professor. When we'd weekend at her family's ranch in Santa Rosa, the regular guests included Glenn Seaborg and Edward Teller. So there! LOL
Lawhawk, We have our own San Francisco here -- it's called Boulder. It's rich, 100% white and 100% far-left liberal. They work hard to keep blacks and the dirty poor from their fair city. Then they lecture the rest of us for sins they assume we have. That's another city that needs a wall... or a plague.
I've actually found that liberal arts majors need a lot of remedial work before they become good attorneys. Few have ever seen a balance sheet or other financial documents and they have even less knowledge of business -- which is where most legal work lies.
And here's a funny story. We had a meeting with a couple engineers, who gave a truly excellent presentation on why a gas turbine engine was best for the M1 tank. The meeting lasted six hours. About ten minutes in, I realized that none of the lawyers (all liberal arts or pre-law types) had the slightest clue what the engineers were talking about. They didn't even get the basics, much less the finer points about how the turbine works. After a while, it became a Q&A between the engineers and me (the only associate in the room), as the partners sat there trying to look like they knew what was going on.
When the engineers left, I had to give a briefing on what they'd said! LOL!
Jed, I was in Knoxville on a case in 2002. People were really, really friendly.
The place I'd like to see, but haven't gotten the chance, is Nashville. I am intrigued.
Andrew: The hot-tub capital of the world, Marin County, is even worse than San Francisco. Located just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge, the residents vote heavily left-Democrat. But every time Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) proposes to run a tube under the Bay to Marin, the locals defeat the measure by huge margins. Most often heard reason: "It would make it too easy for undesirables to commute to Marin. They already have the Bridges (Golden Gate and Richmond-San Rafael) so why ruin Marin with a BART tunnel?" Barbara Boxer is, of course, from Marin County.
Although I partially agree with your comments about liberal arts majors versus science majors in the legal profession, still I also have to partially disagree. Some law schools discourage science majors because the sciences encourage thinking in terms of single solutions to problems. That seems overly-doctrinaire to me, but I can see how it would particularly apply to accountants and mathematicians. I've run into a few of those, and with a little creative "thinking outside the 2 + 2 = 4 box" they were easy to confuse. Over all, I think "independent and creative thinking" is the essential ingredient for a good trial attorney, regardless of his or her undergraduate background.
Andrew: In deference to your point of view, I should also add that liberal arts when I was in college was a very different animal from what it has turned into. There used to be specific disciplines, requiring analytical thinking and an ability to defend a position then turn around and defend the diametrically opposite position (great training for law). With "write your own curriculum" and one-sided political views dominating the liberal arts today, I can see why you would take your position. The sciences continue (then and now) to search for truth. The liberal arts now tell you what the truth is and squelch any opposition.
Andrew, that sounds about right. I've never been to Baltimore, so I can't comment on that, and I was only Boston for a few days once, but I did do a research project on the busing riots of the '70s, so I definitely understand your comment. I don't know who was worse in that case, the poor Irish inner-city dwellers or the middle-class suburbanites who refused to take on any black students themselves.
Incidentally, Memphis has been plagued with a similar issue for the past year. The city decided to dissolve its school charter and thus force Shelby County to take on its thousands of failing students and faculty. Naturally, when the county objected to this shock to its system, city leaders cried racism, and so that's been a fun few months for all concerned.
LawHawk, no hard feelings if you don't have any :-) And it would probably give some of your old unreconstructed radical colleagues pleasure to know that Oxford has now been thoroughly Yankeefied and is probably the most liberal spot in the entire state.
Lawhawk, I think the problem is that the word "liberal" has changed in college -- from meaning "classic education" to "politically liberal." Few of the liberal arts majors I've met have any ability to think creatively or in a structured environment. They just "know" things.
In terms of the black and white yes/no thinking, that's actually the easiest way to spot a good lawyer versus a bad lawyer. Bad lawyers say yes/no. Good lawyers know that there is always more to it, and there is always a way to make something happen or to approximate the substance of it.
In fact, the thing that always made me shake my head the most with young lawyers was how their answers were always black and white -- "yes/no." I always made them take a deeper look and then they would come back and say, "ok, it's more complicated than I thought." Yeah, no crap.
T_Rav, Sounds like a mess. I would say that I'm sure they'll work it out, but I doubt it.
Baltimore is a real treat. I've never felt like I would be killed in any American city, except Baltimore. A friend of mine moved about 2 blocks from Camden yards. His car was broken into so often he learned to leave it unlocked so they wouldn't break the windows. A crackhead stole plastic lawn chairs out of his kitchen, while he was home. And he called me one day to give me a play by play as a black store owner was pistol-whipping a black woman who tried to steal cigarette from his store as five other black customers stood by cheering him on. Good times.
Many of the buildings are burned out. Drug sales are open and obvious in the streets. There are parts of town Dominoes will not let it's drivers deliver and where ambulances wait for a police escort. It's paradise.
T-Rav: I don't know whether to cheer or cry over the fate of Oxford. It sounds like it went from the frying-pan to the fire. Definitely no hard feelings. In fact, I'm considering buying a second flagpole and hoisting the Confederate Battle Flag over my hacienda in Caliente next to Old Glory.
Andrew: Another thing that was different then was that we undergrads had to take a minimum of 12 units of hard sciences and/or business-related courses in lower division before we could move on to upper division liberal arts classes. I took physics, genetics and astronomy courses, along with accounting, which is why I can balance a checkbook and liberals can't. On the other hand, the Business School almost kicked me out because I kept screwing up their computers by entering bad Fortran. It's the reason I waited until 1980 before buying my first office computer. What--no Fortran? LOL
Lawhawk, Today they offer special math and science classes for non-math/science majors. It's basically an incredibly simplistic version of the real claim and it doesn't teach you much more than you would learn in high school.
That's the thing I'm happy about with my engineering experience, I've done the real physics, math and chemistry classes (plus some specialty stuff like mechanics, fluid mechanics, computer organization and logic design, and materials engineering). I am a firm believer that all of the required courses should be the hard courses because otherwise you are just wasting your time.
Andrew: That is a big difference from what I experienced. We poor liberal arts majors were thrown into the exact same courses as the science majors. In fact, at Cal, there was no hard distinction between the disciplines. My degree came from the College of Letters and Science.
On the other hand, I come from an era in which college for everyone was not even close to a sure thing. High school was tough, and it was almost impossible to get into a top-tier school if your high school courses weren't designated "college prep." I suspect my high school chemistry and physics courses strongly resemble the "introduction to xxxx" courses offered for today's college liberal arts majors.
I can still do chemistry "unknowns" using either the mole-mole or proportion methods, and we did that in our junior year in high school. The physics courses I took at Cal (a top-tier Nobel prize winning school) were not "intro" courses, since we were expected already to have a working knowledge of both practical and theoretical physics. And we had to do it all with slide rules (now I am dating myself).
Another factor may also be involved. I come from the generation which was shocked into reality by Sputnik and the space race. Science, mathematics and engineering became both desirable and necessary majors. The entire college population was pushed into taking more and more hard science courses so that we could keep up with and pull ahead of the Soviet Union. I specifically remember that in my freshman year, the number of engineering majors had literally doubled in just three years.
I work in and around Boulder. It isn't 100% liberal, just dominated by them. John Caldera lives in Boulder. The biggest problem most of the residents here, besides being too progressive, is that they actually believe the rest of the world really gives a rat's patootie what they think.
Kosh, I had no idea they let non-liberals anywhere near Boulder? I thought they specifically had zoning against conservative thought!
And you're right about them thinking everyone else cares what they say. We're constantly hearing things out of Boulder about how El Paso County needs to change. We ignore them.
P.S. When I was at CU Boulder, they used to brag that they hadn't hired a non-leftist professor in something like 15 years.
I'm not sure how I ended up on his post. The more I look around the crazier it gets....it's fun though.
....now where did that rabbit go ?
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