Frauds

Incompetence doesn't just hurt you, it hurts those around you. Remember that when you get your degree, find a career, and call yourself a professional. Remember it when you've got a big office, a big salary, and a big ego. Or if you don't. Know matter where you end up, try not to be an incompetent, arrogant moron, because you'll just be making good people suffer.

For instance, the incompetence of the person who prepared my parents' taxes almost led them to commit tax fraud, and almost forced me into a position to have to commit tax fraud just to fill my taxes out correctly. You see, I was all up on getting my homestead credit and a cool $800 extra this year, until my dad told me he and mom were claiming me as a dependent. I was like "Nigga what?" Apparently since they paid the final portion of my tuition last year, their tax person told them they could claim me as a dependent and get a credit back on that money and more. All of which would disqualify me for receiving the homestead exemption.

It didn't sound right to me, but my tax grade was laughable, so I didn't question the wisdom of their tax lady. However, a hot tip from Kristin the Queen of Taxery said that bitch was trippin', and there was no way my parents could claim me as a dependent. So we hit up the Tax Code, and she was right - out of four conditions to be a "qualifying child," I missed on two. I called my dad, told him the tax lady was wrong, and she had better check herself before my parents get indicted for tax fraud.

Dad called her, she told him that as long as I was a full-time student, I could be claimed as a dependent. Hmm. Well, that's not what the statute says, but she's a professional, right? She's done this plenty of times before, right? She must know what she's doing. Maybe she knows an exception to the rule that we, lowly law students with our "statutes" don't know about.

So I got her number, and I called her. Naturally, she was a bit cranky, so I played as polite as I could. I explained my concerns, and pointed out the statute I was looking at. Turns out she was going off the same statute. Okay...so I read her the conditions I didn't meet. First, I didn't live in my parents' residence for at least half the year. She said as long as I'm a full time student, that doesn't matter. Okay...doesn't really say that anywhere, but oh well. Next, I must not have turned 24 by the end of the calendar year. I explained that I turned 24 in October. If I'm not mistaken, October is part of the calendar year. She never really gave me much explanation for that, just confirmed the fact that I was wrong. On the other hand, Kristin, who had heard the conversation, confirmed that this woman was full of shit. So there I was.

I told my dad, he said he'd probably just go with what they filed, and trust that she knew what she was doing. Which, according to the statute, is encouraging people to commit tax fraud. But then, I wanted my $800. Now, if my parents put that I was a dependent, on for my homestead thing, I checked that no one claimed me as a dependent, I would also be committing tax fraud because I knew otherwise. Even if I was the only one actually following the goddamn laws.

Luckily, my dad contacted a CPA friend, who told him that the tax lady was 100% wrong. So they have to amend, and I can do my thang.

Moral of the story: This is what happens when you "know what you're doing," and don't listen to reason.

And in case you were wondering, as applied to the tax lady, the Hand Formula for this would be "suck my balls, you incompetent biznatch."

Snack Court

Today, as part of my requirements at LDP, I went to observe Drug Court proceedings. For those of you not familiar, Drug Court is for (usually) first-time drug offenders that, rather than getting sentenced to jail time or a fine, go through a program to get clean. It's all very positive and encouraging, everyone's talking about the progress the offender has made, and what they have to do to stay clean, and the benefits of overcoming addition, etc.

My question is, do they have anything similar for snack addicts? I know snacking is bad for me; I know I snack when I'm nervous, or bored, or breathing. I snack constantly. I try to limit myself to less unhealthy snacks (hence my struggles with animal crackers instead of, say, deep fried, cream filled donuts), or non-chocolate candy, but it doesn't make much difference -- I end up eating such a large quantity that it negates any health differential.

So where the hell is my support group?

Fuck it. I'll be right back, I'ma get me some Skittles.

Infiltration

Is it weird that Lord of the Rings characters seem to be popping up in my everyday life? On my way home from work today, I spotted Saruman standing on the sidewalk on Gorham street. His hair was still shock white, and there was some graying in his beard; it looked like he had cut it a little in back, but it was definitely him. He was looking a little worse for the wear; gone were the stately white robes, replaced by the quasi-homeless army green jacket and brown pants. But I imagine that after getting kicked outta Dodge by the Ents and no longer being funded by Sarun & co., his financial prospects might not be looking so hot.

I guess it's not that strange to see him; after all, I've been learning sentencing from Gollum for the past 5 weeks. Good to see he didn't let the fires of Mt. Doom keep him down.

Guilty

Sorry about the lack of posts lately. I've been busy with a lot of things going on, but none of them seemed particularly post-worthy. There was one event that made me think.

So lately I've been working at LDP. Defense is obviously a change for me; I've never had to deal with clients, never had to deal with real people and their problems. Even working as a clerk for a guy who does a lot of defense work - he deals with the clients, I get the legal issues. A lot of the clients seem pretty shady, so its a relief to forget their role in the process and just deal with what the law is (and occasionally attempt to fabricate the law on their behalf).

LDP is different. Forget, for the moment, intake at the jails - not a pleasant experience, but there's nothing overly shattering going on. I speak to the inmates, ask them the most basic questions, and move on to the next. Though the scene isn't pretty, you never really have to engage with anything.

Client work is different. For instance, I had a client with final pre-trial on Wednesday. Obviously, I can't go much into details; suffice it to say, I thought it was a pretty clear cut case, and she would have to plead (the offer was pretty decent, all things considered). Then we found out she was currently homeless, either living with friends or in her car, and 5 mos. pregnant, and was about to lose her job based on a faulty drug test result. Plus she's got a heart condition, and had a pacemaker installed about a year ago. All at the tender age of 18. This makes me think about how lucky I've had it, and how as a DA, I'd be able to skip all of this unnecessary real life stuff. I get the file with its boilerplate information on a nameless defendant and a standard offense, and make an objective decision.

Just like life - I can go through every day in my cushy life without having to see the problems other people face. I've always had this public servant attitude in me, this vague notion of wanting to do great things so I could help people; actually helping real people has been something different. And I start to think maybe I'm not as good of a person as people generally assume. I don't know.

On the other hand, all apologies to Mr. Utah, but I do give money to homeless people on occasion. Not so much to the panhandlers, but I also get a lot that come up to me directly and ask for a dollar or two. They've always got some story why they need it, and I'm not sure I ever really believe them. But I think either way, they've got it worse off than me, and dropping a couple dollars won't hurt me. Maybe they can sense I'm a softie. Maybe they can just see it.

So when we spoke to the DA and got her to offer a much better deal, I felt pretty good. And when I called some shelters for this girl to stay at, I felt better. Speaking to people has never been my strong suit; when we spoke to this girl at the courthouse, my supervising attorney did most of the talking, so I just got to hear the sad story. But now, it was my turn to speak. So I called her, informed her of the places she could go to stay, places she could get hot meals. And when, in tears, she thanked me for all of my help, I felt.....

Guilty.

Restorative Justice

Never again. I'm reading an article for Sentencing with The Dick and Smithy about 'restorative justice,' and my eyes are starting to bleed from the stench of ganja wafting off the pages. The author describes restorative justice as "healing rather than hurting, moral learning, community participation and community caring, respectful dialogue, forgiveness, responsibility, apology, and making amends." Weird. I thought "restorative justice" referred to when criminals injure innocent people, and we "restore" that feeling of pain and victimization back to the offender through a series of vicious headbutts.

(And don't go thinking I'm some electric chair pimping reactionary jackass who just wants to lock people up. I recognize the difference between someone who commits a crime and a criminal, the type of offender who has suffered through hard circumstances and made poor choices, and the type that victimizes people without remorse. When I say "dangerous people," I mean actually dangerous people.)

I've gotta say, this class is majorly disappointing. I knew from the get-go there would be problems with the hippies in this class (including the soccer mom/social worker/huge pain in the ass lady, the "No person of color has ever done anything wrong, and police should not be able to stop a person of color unless that person subjectively wanted to be stopped" guy, and a chorus of "Punishing criminals is wrong" bleeding-heart nutjobs), but the reading material has been surprisingly bad. Dense psychology, naive philosophy, and now this schlock. Remington Almighty.

Apparently I'm going to have to make sure I'm at class from now on. I remember when Mr. Utah got laughed at in Prosser's Hippie Love Fest/Crim Pro class for recommending a sentence of 5 years in prison for a drug dealer who shot at a car because the passengers stole his drugs and took off without paying. Well, time to return the favor. From now on, they want to start talking about flower power and making amends to justify letting a dangerous person go free, they can expect to get laughed out of the room. Time to restore some real justice to the classroom.

Pan's Crapyrinth

Huh. Well, that sure sucked some balls. I’m referring, of course, to the subject of 2007's first movie review –

Pan’s Labyrinth.

Billed as a fairy tale/horror story, I can say with confidence that it was pretty damn horrific. Set in Spain after the rise of Generalissimo Francisco Franco and Facism, Pan’s Labrynth tells the story of a young girl (Ofelia) who goes with her pregnant mother to live with her adoptive father, the father of her baby brother, a powerful Captain in Franco’s army. The girl gets drawn into a labyrinth by a fairy and taken down into some otherworldly location, where she speaks to some grotesque-looking faun. He tells her she’s some reincarnated princess for this land below, and she can return if she completes three tasks. Meanwhile, the Spanish army people are fighting off resistance fighters, the Captain is a sadistic asshole, and having the baby may kill Ofelia’s mom.

Warning: Spoilers follow. Seriously, if you want to watch the movie, don’t read.

So what’s the problem? First, there appears to be gore for the sake of gore, which I really don’t care for. I complained about the second episode of Heroes for the same reason – it seemed like they were mutilating corpses willy nilly for the sake of shock value, like “Ooh, this villain is so scary/badass, he somehow nails people horizontally to a wall, or freezes them and rips the upper portion of their body off, for no apparent reason.” If there’s a purpose behind the gore, that’s one thing. If there’s symbolism, that’s another. But if it’s just gore, I’ll pass. Maybe the symbolism was that this girl is experiencing horrors, real horrors, absolutely terrible things, and the only way to portray them adequately was to make them as disgusting as possible. Fine. But then the Captain bashes some guy’s face in with a bottle. Okay. Then some chick sticks a knife into his mouth (?) and slashes out the side of his face. Ew. Not only ew, but stupid. If you’ve got that much leeway in slashing him, why not cut his throat and be done with him? No, she sticks the knife in his mouth and cuts his face, allowing him to survive, then come after her. Retard. Then, at the end, the resistance fighter shoots him through the cheek. What the fuck? Are we to assume his aim was bad, or just that he honestly thinks shooting people through the cheek is a good way to finish them off?

Then there’s the “fairy tale” portion. Absolute crap. The frog in the tree – I’m assuming that was symbolic for something. Maybe the Nazis/Facists getting fat and rich off the people, and stifling growth. Fine. But that’s not exactly a bold statement, since the Nazi’s don’t have much of a fanbase these days.

Then the feast and the monster with eyes in his hands. First of all, why, when the monster has eyes in his hands, does he have to hold his hands up by his head, where most creatures’ eyes are? Doesn’t that kill the advantage of having eyes on your hands – that you can look all sorts of different places, that you can look around corners, that you’ve got an expanded field of vision? No, let’s hold them up by our head to look ridiculous. I mean, come on. Is he intended to be scary? Bizarre, certainly. Mentally challenged, clearly. But scary? Eh. Then, the idiot girl who eats the grapes, after being warned repeatedly not to eat the food. The faun told her straight out, it was a matter of life and death. Eat the fruit, you’re likely to die. So she goes in there, gets what she needs, starts to leave. Looks at the feast, and thinks “Hey, let’s have a grape, even though everyone and they momma said not to.” The fairies fly in, warn her off, she swats them away, and starts eating grapes. Her excuse afterward? “I didn’t think anyone would notice.” Dumbass! What about the “life or death” concept? Forget the monster sitting dormant at the end of the table; didn’t it even cross your mind the food might be poisoned? And Kristin pointed this out - - it’s not like there was any real compulsion. She wasn’t starving. There was no enchantment on the food drawing her to it. She was just a retard. “I didn’t think anyone would notice.” Gah. I wish the monster would have killed you.

Then there’s the two-dimensional Captain, who is always either a) an imperious soldier, committed to his own supremacy, the idea of honor and duty, and dying like a soldier, or b) bat-shit crazy and sadistic, killing and torturing at will, generally an asshole to those around him. A villain should have some sort of depth, something that makes understand and sympathize with what they’re doing. The Captain, much like this movie, had no redeeming qualities.

And the fairy tale ending? The girl died, spilling her own blood, thus completing her final task. Then she was rewarded in her kingdom. But the fairy tale clearly didn’t exist in the real world, because the faun wasn’t there when the Captain found Ofelia in the Labyrinth, and then she died. Lovely.

Okay, so maybe there was more to the movie. It’s gotten rave reviews, and everyone who I know that’s seen it seemed to enjoy it. I can see how someone would appreciate the story, find it moving, find it heartbreaking, find it mystifying. To me, it was just depressing. That’s not the kind of movie I want to watch.

So from what I can tell, the moral of the story was life sucks, then you die, and if you endured enough pain and suffering in life while still doing good deeds, you will be rewarded in the afterlife. Which, for an alleged fairy tale, is pretty fucking dark.

At least the movie ended. So, I guess, in a way, the theme came true – we suffered through a disgusting, depressing, thoroughly disappointing movie, and the only reward we got came once it was over.

My grade: D
Recommendation: Only if you hate yourself, and either want to subject yourself to a terrible movie, or you want your life to seem better by comparison.

On Mediums

I might be alone on this one, but I think there's some value to watching a movie of a story before reading the book that the movie was based on. Now, I agree that most book versions are significantly better than the movie, for several reasons - the story is more developed, both plot and character-wise, books let you imagine what things look like for yourself, and they don't have to aim for sensationalism in order to sell, like movies do. Thus story isn't sacrficed for explosions. (Not that there's anything wrong with explosions, mind you. Personally, I found it awesome in XXX 2: State of the Union when random vehicles and buildings started exploding just because Ice Cube looked at them or walked past them. He's that badass.) And I can also see the distincting between sitting down for two hours and watching a movie that you already know what happens versus committing yourself to spending 10 or more hours reading a book when you already know what happens (for those of us who aren't speed readers, KH.)

But for my money, I like to be entertained both ways. This way, when I go to see movies like The Da Vinci Code, I can enjoy the movie for what it is, not complain about what it's lacking. I may have been the only person I know of who thought that movie was okay, primarily because I didn't have a superior version to compare it to. Now, if I wanted to, I could read the book, find out all the ways that the book is far superior, and be entertained by that too. Or Harry Potter, for example. I didn't catch on when the books first came out, but I did watch the movies. They weren't bad (except the second one), but the story didn't really excite me that much. Then Goblet of Fire came out, and that was awesome, even to people who'd read the books. So after much coaxing, I went back and read them. Sure enough, the books were generally better (except the second one, which was still craptastic), and provided a lot more depth and explanation to what I'd seen in the movies. And this should pretty much hold true to any series I try, because the books are almost always much better.

On the other hand, some movies could scare me off of the books completely. Take The Lost World for example. The first Jurassic Park movie was pretty cool, but the second one blew some serious goats. Thankfully I had already read the book, which I thought was excellent. But if I had seen the movie first, I never would have ventured into the words on paper version.

Other times, who knows. I saw Children of Men in the movies first, and I thought that was a stunning movie, pretty much incredible. I heard that the book was almost completely different. Like instead of becoming a desperate, violent society like in the movie, the world had become peaceful because humans realized that no one was being born to replace the dead, and humanity would soon reach the brink of extinction. Now maybe the movie picked a bleak, violent future because that would provide more action and tension. Or maybe the producers and director thought that would be more realistic. I'm not too sure I don't agree. The despair in the movie may have made it too dark of a picture for some, but I thought it was awesome. In fact, one moment in the movie actually reduced me to tears, which is not something that happens at the theater much anymore. (Not to give too much away for those who haven't seen it, but when everything stopped and the soldiers put down their weapons, if only for a second - - to me, that was moving.) So I don't know if I would have liked the book more, because it sounds like it would have been lacking some of what I found so compelling in the movie. Who knows.

Point is, I think it's time to start reading the Lord of the Rings.

Jailhouse Musings

My first day of intake and arraignment with the Legal Defense Program has come and gone, and it all went relatively smoothly. I wasn't looking forward to intake at the jail, considering a) it's a jail, b) I generally don't think highly of people in jail, and c) I don't like speaking to people. Plus, I had been warned the locals might start flinging feces at me. Not me personally, I suppose, but at people who come to speak with them. The locals are known for occasionally reeking of alcohol, vomit, urine, or feces, and usually at least from bad breath. Some LDP students have had unfortunate run-ins with people (including one girl whose interviewee decided jail was as good a place as any to masturbate, and did so right in front of her), but mine were all relatively decent. No feces flung at me, I can tell you that. My theory is, they start flinging shit, I start flinging shit.

Arraignments were also pretty solid. This marked my first day appearing in front of Dane County courts, and I looked appropriately fly. Nothing worth mentioning really happened, just standard appearances. The DA was extremely reasonable with all of his arguments and conditions, so I really didn't have to argue anything.

What really struck me about the proceedings was how much I would probably be better off in another field of work. As the court commissioner went through giving his orders and stating the conditions, I found myself thinking about how absurd I could make things. He orders the defendant not possess or consume any illegal substances as a bond condition. As defense counsel, I find myself wanting to argue "Your honor, I would ask that we limit that condition to any illegal substances other than cocaine. My client is an avid cocaine user; let's say we keep it to under a kilo. Deal?" I mean really, it's kind of a formality, since no one is allowed to use or possess those anyway. This just provides another opportunity for a bail jumping count, I suppose. But then the next condition - - no possession of any dangerous weapons. "Your honor, that's outrageous. My client has an extensive shoulder-mounted grenade launcher collection, and I really think it unnecessary to restrict his access to these items. How about we limit that to 'no ground-to-air weaponry' and call it a day?" One of the victims in a case was named "Triumph." I hear "I will order that you have no contact with Triumph..." and I'm finishing that sentence as "the Insult Comic Dog from Conan O'Brian." You don't want those two getting together, cahooting about all sorts of criminality. No siree.

Then I think about the other conditions one could throw down. No playing of the game Monopoly unless you are the thimble, and even then, you may not own more than two hotels on any green property. No possession of any fire-breathing squirrels. Refrain from humming any jaunty tunes. You are not to loiter in any area of the city where the mercury level is less than eight cubits. You are not to consume any McFlurrys, unless they are Oreo McFlurrys, and then you must have written authorization from Margaret Thatcher. No bats, vampire or otherwise.

Even still, I can do this job. So does the fact that I'm competent and approach it with a sense of humor mean I'm in the right field or the wrong one?

Mad Props

Okay, so I’ve got to give Erlanger some credit. Yeah, it’s corny, but rocking out on his “paper guitar” to “I’m My Own Grandpa” was hilarious. Someone even snapped a picture. He really tries to make this stuff interesting. Now, I’ve grown a bit jaded and cynical in my old age, especially over all things law school-related. And with how much time I’ve spent working on creating comedy sketches between SNL and Law Revue, it takes something pretty funny to make me laugh. Goddammit Howie, I've gotta give you props on that one.