I think I may have underestimated the Pepsi Cola people. This would, after all, be an easy thing to do. About all we see of Pepsi is that red-white-and-blue beachball logo, and it's hard to take them seriously as an evil empire when all they seem to want us to do is join the Pepsi generation and think young. Frankly, I think we've long since passed the point of diminishing returns on getting me to think young, and I doubt I would be successful if I tried somehow to switch generations, so I'm afraid I haven't paid them a lot of attention.

Too bad. Turns out they are some kind of corporate Hannibal Lecter and I've fallen right into their evil clutches.

Yesterday I received word, via the magical powers of Al Gore's internet machine, that Pepsi is part of a vast, international Zionist conspiracy. The worldwide web treated me to a diatribe by an Egyptian cleric who maintained on his television show (picture Jimmy Swaggert with an Old Testament beard and a turban) that the letters P-E-P-S-I were an acronym for "Pay Every Penny to Save Israel." According to him, every time I drink a Pepsi, I'm really investing in missiles for Israel.

This was, of course, remarkable news to me, since I was pretty sure Pepsi pre-dated Israel by at least fifty years, and if the company was that prescient, I would have expected their stock to be selling for more than $54 a share.

But it was on the internet. It had to be true. At least that's my understanding of the law.

And it appears to be the understanding of a disturbing number of people who have my email address. I find that I know people who do not accept as authoritative the Koran, the Pentateuch, the New Testament, Joseph Smith's golden tablets, the sworn testimony of the Attorney General, or the pronouncements of the United States Supreme Court, but will forward to me every half-baked crackpot idea they find on the internet as if they had personally seen it graven in stone and handed to Moses.

Thanks to these people, I have learned that Barack Obama is not a United States citizen, that Hillary Clinton bore three children out of wedlock, that the walls of my colon are plastered with at least ten pounds of gunk, and that Elvis Presley is alive and being held for ransom in the rec room of a Croatian family in Secaucus, New Jersey. I have learned that the mainstream media hates U. S. soldiers, that stem cell research was started by Adolph Hitler and that the Virgin Mary is flitting all around the world to make guest appearances on cheese sandwiches and garage doors.

And now, thanks to the worldwide web and some half-wit imam in Sharm el-Sheikh, I've learned the truth about the sneaky folks at Pepsico.¹

The problem is that I don't have time to act on all these problems. There's just too much to do. As Edmund Burke so poignantly noted, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to get too caught up in fantasy baseball."²

So it's important that I channel my efforts. If I try to combat all the evil plots and horrible conspiracies that show up in my email,³ my efforts will be diluted into ineffectuality - just as the Tripartite Commission intends!⁴

So, having conducted my own triage process to try to figure out which ones were most pressing, and having concluded that Dick Cheney can't save the world all by himself, I had bought a bus ticket for Secaucus⁵ and prepared an email of resignation to send to Justice Ming Chin.6 I was gonna rescue Elvis.

But then I received an email from Blaise Curet. Blaise is a nice guy, but he's an infidel as far as the internet is concerned. He insists on checking things with snopes.com⁷ and doing his own research. Blaise is hopelessly mired in the twentieth century.

So when he forwarded to me the story of Janine Sugawara and her heroic battle against Pepsico, he did not understand its significance. He did not realize how completely it corroborated the Egyptian holy man's clarion call. He had no idea it would cause me to forward my bus ticket and the Elvis email to Geraldo Rivera and go after Pepsico instead.

Janine Sugawara, like many brave Americans, fights daily against special interests.⁸ But, like the rest of us, she finds herself overwhelmed by their greater resources - resources they have gathered through unspecified nefarious means, the secrets of which have been handed down from the ancient Hebrews to Edmund Burke to the Masons to . . . uh . . . well, to the special interests.

One of the secrets they used against Janine was tricking her into eating Captain Crunch with Crunchberries breakfast cereal. After four years of eating Captain Crunch with Crunchberries breakfast cereal, Janine somehow developed the extraordinary insight that "crunchberries" were not berries at all! They weren't even fruit! They were sugar-saturated cereal just like everything else in the box.

As you might imagine, Janine was - to use the legal term - freaking blown away. Her trust in her fellow man, like her teeth, was completely eroded. She could not believe that Pepsico, a company she had trusted because their beachball logo seemed to be smiling at her, could deceive her this way. So, of course, she sued.

She alleged Pepsico, in its zeal to collect thousandths of dollars for Israel, had misled her. Until her phenomenal powers of observation uncovered the true non-fruit nature of the crunchberries and foiled them, Pepsico was stealing her fractions of centimes and funneling them to the Middle East.

According to the opinion in Sugawara v. Pepsico 2009 US Dist LEXIS 43127, ⁹ the lawsuit boiled down to this, "The Crunchberries are pieces of cereal in bright fruit colors, shaped to resemble berries. While close inspection reveals that the Crunchberries on the [box] are not really berries, Plaintiff contends that the colorful Crunchberries, combined with use of the word "berry" in the product name, convey the message that Cap'n Crunch is not all sugar and starch, but contains redeeming fruit. This message is allegedly supplemented and reinforced by additional marketing that represents that, ‘Crunchberries is a combination of crunch biscuits and colorful red, purple, teal, and green berries'."

A winner, right? Colored Sugar Pops passed off as redeeming fruit! The attorney who drew up this lawsuit, clearly knew what he was doing.¹⁰ He had Pepsico by their corporate . . . er . . . berries.

But he filed the suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California. This was, of course, a tragic error. The Eastern District of California is part of the Ninth Circuit, a court whose domination by the international communist conspiracy has been well-documented in scores of emails. Everyone knows the Ninth Circuit is in Pepsico's Zionist pocket.¹¹

Sure enough. The case was assigned to Judge Morrison C. England, Jr. Think about it, folks: The man's last name is England! Edmund Burke was from England. And his first name, Morrison, is a Scottish name. Burke's Hebrew madrasah? Where was it? Scotland!!! The poor woman never had a chance.

Judge England threw her out of court. Oh sure, he cloaked his evil bias in bogus legalese, suggesting that reasonable consumers should know what berries look and taste like and that had she read the ingredients on the box, she would have seen it contained neither berries nor any other kind of fruit. He seemed to insinuate that four years was an unusual amount of time for someone to be unable to identify a berry. But anyone who ventures into the tubes of the internet - as any concerned patriot ought to do - knows the real reason she lost.

I would call filing in the Eastern District a rookie mistake, but Janine is not a rookie. A few years ago she dragged Pepsico - kicking and screaming - into the sunlight over their fraudulent marketing of Froot Loops, a product which, as she revealed to an astonished America, contains NO FRUIT.

She lost that lawsuit, too.

God bless her and her lawyer for continuing to get up off the canvas and keep fighting.¹² I look for more big things from them. I'm pretty sure Mountain Dew is not really dew, mountainous or otherwise. And if you're drinking Pepsi's Sierra Mist, well, you should get in touch with Ms. Sugawara right away, because you're clearly a member of the defrauded class.

Let's hope she and her courageous lawyer try a less closed-minded court next time. What circuit is Secaucus in? According to the internet, there's a dynamite false imprisonment suit there, just begging to be filed.

BEDS NOTES

1 I've also learned, thanks to the imam, that a penny is "one-thousandth of a dollar." This is why the godless minions of Pepsico have been so successful: They have mastered the zero, an Arabic invention that has apparently not quite caught on in some parts of the Middle East. 

2 Burke's prescience got him a job on the original Pepsico Board of Directors. Historians were baffled by his commitment to the survival of Israel until they found out he had been educated for three years in a hitherto unknown Hebrew madrasah in Scotland. If you doubt this, just google, "Burke Scotland schooled with Obama." 

3 Did you know that no Jews died in the 9/11 attacks? Or that the plane that crashed into the Pentagon was in fact NOT one of the hijacked airliners, but a small jet of a type typically used by the CIA? 

4 It's also important to remember that sometimes, as Senator Ted Stevens explained so well, the tubes that make up the internet get clogged up with advertising and important emails sent to him by his staff sometimes get delayed for several days until Roto-Rooter can get the internet up and running again. So when you try to figure out which conspiracy to fight against, always check to make sure you're dealing with new matter. The Hitler/stem cell email, for example, was sent to me in 1944, and only arrived two weeks ago. 
5 Did you know you could buy bus tickets on the internet? Be careful to re-read footnote 4, however, so you realize your ticket may not arrive as quickly as you'd hoped. 

6 Yes, I realize that ordinarily my resignation should go to Chief Justice Ron George, but I received a disturbing email the other day indicating that during his Princeton years he once visited Secaucus and was friendly with an unusual number of Croatians, so I decided to send it to Justice Chin instead. I wrote it in code to make sure the Chief would not get wind of my plans to rescue The King. 

7 I've forwarded to Blaise an email I just received explaining that snopes is actually British rhyming slang for popes and is part of a Papist conspiracy to turn all Mormon temples into IKEA outlets. 

8 Special interests. Noun. Anyone who does not back your candidate in an election. Antonym: The American Way.

9 Once again, if you want the truth, you go to the internet.

10Although he inexplicably failed to name Gordy Berry and Halle Berry as codefendants.

11 After we invaded Iraq, and therefore had to delete it from the Axis of Evil because, in the immortal words of Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us," President Bush proposed replacing it with the Ninth Circuit. Fortunately Condoleezza Rice convinced him that if we lumped North Korea in with the Ninth Circuit, North Korea would almost certainly declare war. Just another fact the mainstream press failed to report because of their liberal bias. If you don't believe me, google Axis of evil, Rice, Ninth Circuit.

12 I have not included the name of her lawyer, though it's set out in the court's opinion. I've read that lawyers who file cases against Pepsico have a peculiar habit of turning up missing shortly after mysterious black cars bearing CIA or NSA license plates are seen parked in front of their homes. That is, of course, what happened to Judge Crater, a brave Prohibition era opponent of the Pepsico/Zionist cabal's scheme to distribute bourbon disguised as soda under the brand name "Cap'n Pepsiberry."

I have gone gently into the good night of geezerhood. I'm not sure exactly when it happened. At some point, apparently while my attention was diverted, I went from being "The Kid"¹ to being "Acting PJ." That's like going to bed Warren Zevon and waking up The Werewolf of London.

It's not like the age thing snuck up on me. Two years ago, my birthday breakfast was served under a banner my wife had hung in the kitchen: 59, Gateway to the Wild Embellishment Years.

And a plaque I won in high school is on a wall in my chambers.² It's dated. Every time I walk past it, I am reminded of my membership in the Class of '65. I should know how old I am.

But I was somehow still unprepared to find myself blurting out medical information to virtual strangers: "Yeah, got an arthritic right hip that makes it difficult to walk the course anymore" or "Chondromalacia in the left knee; little too much weekend warrioring."

I was still surprised to hear myself muttering "Dipstick!" under my breath while a Nobel Prize-winning economist held forth on television. And I was not ready for the realization that my youngest, a junior at UCLA, no longer regards me as a major obstacle to her future happiness³ as much as a quaint memento of her childhood.

These sure signs of advancing age seemed to spring fully-developed, like Athena from the head of Zeus⁴. They just suddenly appeared, fully armored and intimidating as hell. Scary stuff.

I'm still fighting, but it's pretty much Custer standing next to the flag, pointlessly firing a six-shooter at a thousand Sioux and Cheyenne. I know as soon as I stop to reload, I'm going to be toast. I'm going to find myself eating dinner at 4:30, watching re-runs of Matlock, and yelling at kids to get off my lawn.

But even though I know all that, there is a part of me that takes great pleasure in the fact I have reached an age at which I have greater confidence in my ability to identify idiocy.⁵ This, I believe will be a great comfort to me when my children file the conservatorship petition. I'll be able to wave my walker at them and shout, "You idiots! I'm not crazy, you are. . . . and get off my lawn."

I mention this because another sure sign has manifested itself this morning. I find myself completely bumfuzzled by the morning paper. The newspaper, which, like me, treads further down the path of the buffalo every day, is so far over my head this morning that I can't even hear its engines.⁶ And I think this may be an appropriate time to employ my newfound idiot-detection confidence.

If I read it correctly, Bob Dylan is being threatened with a lawsuit because the portable toilet on his sprawling Malibu estate is wafting noisome⁷ odors onto the property of his neighbors. Apparently you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows if you live next door to Dylan.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which I hope will be one of the last buffalo shot by the internet, Dylan has a porta-potty on his property that - at least according to his neighbors - is not doing a good job of containing sewage gases. They insist they've been sickened by them.

Dylan is not commenting.⁸ Nor is his New York lawyer.⁹ So I hasten to point out that we do not have both sides of the story. I hasten to point this out because I suspect Dylan has libel lawyers on speed dial.

And his neighbors are probably not dining on free cheese, either. Certainly they have a bigger budget than I. Their response to the odors was to install five industrial strength fans to try to blow the fumes back toward Dylan. Unfortunately, they are due east of the Dylan estate and even King Kong fans are no match for the prevailing westerlies.

So when self-help failed¹⁰, they asked the city to do something about it. But when the city's code enforcement officer showed up, Dylan's security guards refused to let him in. They told him he was trespassing. They threatened to sue the city. So he left. Took his badge and went home.

Instead of demanding access, the city had the City Manager drive by. Sure, that oughta do it.

Here's how the City Manager handled the matter: "I drove by one time and couldn't locate the porta-potty or smell anything. I called the rental company on her behalf to find out what chemicals they use and forwarded that information to her."

What more could he do? The National Guard is deployed in Iraq: there just weren't any troops available.

The city has an ordinance requiring that temporary toilets connected to authorized construction projects must be removed upon completion of the project, but Dylan's position appears to be that this is not a temporary toilet. It's permanent.¹¹ It's for his employees. Check and mate.

Dylan's neighbors consider this preferential treatment. The city denies that, and, of course, it is certainly unprecedented for entertainment bigwigs to be treated any differently by government officials than the rest of us, so I'm pretty sure they're as on top of this as they could legally be. As I understand it, their official response was, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright."

But in that regard, I do feel obliged to point out one small point in the Times story that concerns me. The guard shack where the code enforcement officer was turned away was built in 1989. At that time, Los Angeles County building inspectors discovered it was not accessible to the handicapped. But they allowed Dylan to bypass the accessibility requirement "by promising, in writing, that he ‘would not hire any handicapped persons' to work in it."

Excuse me? Did I read that correctly? You can avoid the requirements of the ADA just by promising - in writing - that you will, in the future, discriminate against the handicapped?

"Tell you what, instead of making my Burger King accessible to the handicapped, I simply will not allow them in." That works? "Instead of putting a ramp up behind the judge's bench, we'll just agree that no handicapped persons will be appointed judges." That works?

Apparently it works in Los Angeles.

But I try not to get too worked up about these things. At my age, it's not safe. So rather than continue with the Dylan story, which involved a lot of civil law I didn't want to research unless it came before me, I decided to read a story about criminal law. I'm an old prosecutorial horse. I figured I'd understand the criminal law story a lot better.

It said a woman had been arrested for stealing breasts. Say what?

Well, I guess that's not exactly what it said. But let me put it this way: If you obtained a car through false pretenses, you would be accused of stealing that car, right? Penal Code §487 explicitly covers theft by false pretenses.

Well, according to my newspaper, this woman is "accused of using a false identity to get breast implants and liposuction." In other words, they say she obtained them through false pretenses. So in plain language, the allegation is that she stole breasts.

I think this is a new crime. It's certainly one I've never heard of before.

And I therefore take great pride in announcing that the seminal case in this regard - Patient Zero, if you will - has been filed in my county, more specifically in Surf City, USA: Huntington Beach. Huzzah.

Obviously, I cannot comment on the merits of the case. This is good news for me because I know absolutely nothing about the merits of the case.

What's more, I am apparently hopelessly out of step with modern criminal conduct. In my day, you changed your appearance so you could change your identity. Now, as I understand it, that's been reversed. This woman is charged with having changed her identity so she could change her appearance.

Needless to say, if that rather pedestrian aspect of the crime confuses me, I have no chance with the much more exotic concept of felonious body improvement. Trust me, folks, if there is anyone on the planet who should be willing to lie, cheat or steal to get a better body, it's me. Yet this particular crime - fraught as it is with surgically inserting goo into one part of the body and surgically sucking goo out of another part - simply eludes me.

But I don't really need to comment on the case. I need only express my complete and utter confabulamentation¹² that I have reached an age where even basic breast crimes are beyond my ken. I mean, I expect to have difficulty with computer crimes. I expect to have problems when a negligence case involves some colossally complicated principles of medical technology or an alleged investment fraud requires understanding of derivative securities.

But breasts? I really thought I understood breasts. I would have thought I knew all the illegal things you could do with breasts. You get to my age and find out there is breast crime you never even imagined, it's hugely disconcerting.

So I'm just going to put the newspaper down and resolve to try again tomorrow. Right now, I think it's time for my nap.

1 I was the youngest member of my law school class.
2 Yeah, I know that's a little sad, but it's in an out-of-the-way-spot; I'm the only one who ever sees it. There have been so few athletic triumphs in my life that I don't want to take the chance of forgetting one.
3 The proper role of all fathers of daughters.
4 No, I was not there to see that.
5 Still another sure sign of geezerhood.
6 Apparently my figurative ears are giving out as quickly as my real ones.
7 This word does not mean what you think. Neither does "bemused," which describes me a whole lot better than "amused" these days. Digression: another sure sign.
8 If he did, he wouldn't be Dylan, now would he?
9 The Times thought the lawyer's residence was significant, and they know more about journalism than I do, so I thought I better put it in, too.
10 Talking it out with Dylan failed. When a guy writes things like "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," he figures to be difficult to negotiate with.
11 "Temporary Like Achilles."
12 A portmanteau word: lamentations caused by my increasing inability to distinguish fact from fancy.

I was a trial judge for ten years without ever being assigned to Family Law. Turns out all you have to do is deny a coupla divorces and the Presiding Judge decides you're not cut out for that assignment.  Go figure. 

Seemed to me you shouldn't need a judge to grant divorces if there wasn't an option to deny them.  I assured him that if he assigned me a few more I was confident my grants would eventually exceed my denials, but he seemed not to be reassured.  PJ's are hard to figure sometimes.

It's probably just as well.  I think maybe I'm not cut out for that kind of work.  I think you have to have a better head for money matters than I have (and fewer ex-wives).

But those of you concerned about my ability to handle them at the appellate level -- those of you who think maybe a guy who thinks exit orders are the signs on the freeway that say "Right lane must exit" maybe shouldn't be grading the papers of the Family Law judges¹ --  will be reassured by the Florida case of Craissati v. Craissati.  Judging from the handling of that case, I'm precisely the guy to be deciding family law appeals.

Here's the headline that focused my attention on Craissati v. Craissati:  Ex-wife's Alimony Cut Off Because She Has Cellmate.

"That," I thought, "is the kind of divorce case the PJ should have assigned to me - one that involves criminal law, too."  I was a prosecutor for fifteen years; send me the divorce cases that involve cellmates.

But it turns out to be harder than it looks.²  I guess I should have known.  It's a Florida case.  Nothing is easy in Florida.

Not even in Palm Beach Gardens.  Silly me; I would have thought everything is easy in Palm Beach Gardens.  Certainly it should be.  These people are richer than God.  And their money is older.

Palm Beach Gardens is the kind of place that wouldn't be satisfied banning leaf blowers; they would want to do away with deciduous trees and all those unsightly leaves. 

All you need to know about the quality of life in Palm Beach Gardens is that when they surveyed their residents about "what things are most important to you as a resident of Palm Beach Gardens, the three answers that got the highest vote totals were "streetscape aesthetics and maintenance," "street cleaning and repair," and "appearance/ maintenance of parks."  Education, fire services, police protection, and youth programs were not in the top tier.³

Now that's a sweet deal.  When the biggest problems in your life have to do with "streetscape aesthetics," you have definitely "moved on up town."

So I'm betting when the Craissatis got around to splitting the sheets, the thread count probably looked like a zip code.  I'm sure the documents were signed with Mont Blancs.

As part of their marital settlement agreement, Andrew Craissati, an investment banker, agreed to pay the erstwhile Mrs. Craissati the rather modest sum of $2,000 per month in alimony for eight years or until "the death of either party, remarriage, or cohabitation [by Patricia] with another person other than the parties' child . . . for three consecutive months or more."

Four years later, in 2005, Patricia was convicted of driving under the influence causing serious bodily injury and leaving the scene of the crime.  She was sentenced to nine years in Hillsborough Correctional Institute, in Riverview, Florida.⁴

Shortly thereafter, Andrew went back to court and pointed out that Patricia was in violation of the marital settlement agreement.  She had, after all, been cohabiting for more than three months with another person:  HER CELLMATE.

Honest.  He argued that she had forfeited her spousal support by cohabiting with her cellmate!

Since you are familiar with the quality of work turned in by the vast majority of trial court judges, you will not be surprised to hear that the trial court judge got this one exactly right.  He said being thrown in jail was not the kind of cohabitation the parties could have had in mind.  He said it might well be that Patricia - since she was now being provided room and board by the Great and Sovereign State of Florida - needed less support than had been originally set, and he was willing to hold a hearing to determine whether that was the case.  But he was not going to wipe out the support obligation entirely.

Andrew was not satisfied with that perfectly reasonable result.  He didn't just want fire and police protection and education, he wanted streetscape aesthetics and maintenance; he wanted pristine parks; he wanted trees that didn't drop their leaves every fall.  He appealed.

Justice Larry Klein, of the Fourth District Court of Appeal of the State of Florida, wrote a perfectly lovely opinion in which he agreed with the trial court:  re-compute the spousal support based on Patricia's new circumstances, but don't count against her the fact she was not put into solitary confinement in the Graybar Hotel.  Short, concise, reasonable.

If only it had been the majority opinion.

That's right, two justices of the Florida Court of Appeal held that cohabitation is cohabitation.  Doesn't matter whether you chose to cohabit or had it forced upon you by the Department of Corrections. 

Doesn't matter whether you're living with a band of guerillas who kidnapped you and are holding you in the mountains east of Havana; doesn't matter if you're comatose in a semi-private hospital room; doesn't matter if you've joined the army and are living in a barracks; doesn't matter if you've gone back to school and are living in a dorm.  You forfeit your support.

Cohabitation is cohabitation. Word definition is easier than thought.

This did not convince Justice Klein⁵, and it doesn't convince me.  But two votes is all Andrew needed, and he got them.

The majority, in an opinion whose erudition took up all of two pages,⁶ explained that its decision was based almost entirely on the fact trial counsel for Patricia had conceded that her living with another person was "cohabitation."  Hard to argue with that.  The agreement says "cohabitation" and she admitted that what she was doing fit the word used in the agreement.

Brilliant.  So if you asked a vendor for a hot dog and he gave you a terrier in a trenchcoat, the Fourth District would feel the contract was perfectly executed.  No wonder they only needed three paragraphs of legal analysis:  this is a slam dunk.

What's more, in one of those three paragraphs they pointed out that "driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol is a voluntary act which is known to possibly result in incarceration," so they saw nothing problematic in the result they had reached.  Patricia should have known when she committed the offense that she might be incarcerated, so she has no basis now for complaining about being thrown in the pokey. 

Of course, as Justice Klein pointed out, it wasn't the incarceration that constituted cohabitation under their ruling, it was the "mere happenstance that she must share her cell with another person."

So the mistake Patricia made was not getting herself  thrown into solitary confinement every ninety days.  Had she only stabbed someone occasionally or poisoned a prison guard, she'd be collecting her check every month, no questions asked. 

Anything that got her put into administrative segregation⁷ would have solved her problem.  But was she willing to make that one little sacrifice?  Was she willing to take the one simple step that would have saved her husband and the Florida judicial system all this agida?  Noooooooooooooo.

Selfish birch. 

Certainly we can't have our courts rewarding someone for such a complete lack of foresight and cooperative spirit.  She's lucky they didn't take away her tv privileges.⁸

So I probably would have gotten that one wrong, but the reasoning is so close to the kind of thing I usually come up with that I'm sure you'll agree it proves my fitness to handle Family Law appeals.⁹

I hope it doesn't sound like I'm being too critical of the Craissati majority.  These are, after all, difficult cases.  Take, for example, the case of Calbi v. Calbi, in New Jersey.¹⁰

Calbi is another spousal support issue.  New Jersey has a rule that an alimony order¹¹ can be terminated only if it can be shown the receiving party no longer needs it, or the receiving party has done something so egregious, "so violative of social norms" that it would "confound notions of simple justice" to require support.

In Calbi, the ex-husband had a somewhat better case for stopping his alimony payments than did Andrew Craissati:  Calbi's ex had killed one of the children.

That's right.  Mrs. Calbi, in a drunken rage, kicked her fifteen-year-old son to death.  As you might imagine, that made it harder for dad to sign the alimony check every month.  He tried to get his support obligation terminated on the ground it would "confound notions of simple justice" to force him to keep paying to support the woman who had beaten his child to death.

You wanna take a minute to make your own call on this one?  Does making this guy keep writing that check confound your notions of simple justice?  Does mine.

But the New Jersey Superior Court (appellate department) said "no."  They said mom "had no evil intent," had received a lenient sentence recommendation from the prosecutor (impliedly recognizing she wasn't really a bad person), was already being punished by the criminal courts, and would have to carry around the guilt from this act forever.  She shouldn't also have to support herself.¹²

The New Jersey state legislature was on this like a duck on a june bug.  Bills were introduced in both houses to provide that if you beat your child to death, your ex- doesn't have to keep supporting you.  I rather hope one of them passes; then maybe I can get my paper re-graded.

Because as it is, I got both of these wrong.  I would have continued support payments in Florida and stopped them in New Jersey.  I am - proudly - 0 for 2.

1. Hellooooo, Orange County family law judges.

2. Much like marriage.

3. "Getting rid of the 55 trashy renters who have somehow infiltrated our enclave" did not appear on the survey or I'm sure it would have been right up there with streetscape aesthetics. Can you imagine a city with only 55 renters?

4. Which has to be the most idyllic prison name in America.  Hillsborough . . . Riverview . . . Villa Park . . . Shady Canyon . . . .  They all sound like great places to live, right?

5. Justice Klein authored the chapter on appeals in the Florida Dissolution of Marriage Manual.  He also wrote the chapter on appeals in a text called Florida Proceedings after Dissolution of Marriage.  I can't tell you anything about the author of the majority opinion because the court does not claim her on its website.  But I'm pretty sure she's a judge because my own research has indicated that most states require that in their courts of appeal.

6. It would have been shorter, but the consarned statement of facts required a page and a half.

7. in case you are not a denizen of the criminal law, "ad seg" is what Andy Griffith would have called "solitary confinement" and James Cagney would have called "The Hole."

8. Apparently no truth to the rumor the court, in a separate ruling, ordered that she not be allowed to watch the television series Prison Break "or any movies dealing with that subject matter."

9. See what I mean about the kind of reasoning I usually come up with?

10. Calbi v. Calbi (2007) 396 N. J. Super. 532.  Honest, I don't make these things up.

11. Both New Jersey and Florida still use the term "alimony."  You will look in vain for a reference to spousal support in these cases.

12. My favorite part of this opinion was their directive that if dad could show that the death of his son had so decimated him that he could no longer earn a living - a possibility I, as a father, could completely understand - he could still get his support reduced on that basis.  Economics they could handle; it was compassion they had difficulty with

The National Judicial College is located in Reno, Nevada.  I don't know why.  I always assumed that's where the founders' wagon train ran out of food and water.

Whatever the reason for the location, it's problematic.  Say what you will about Reno, it is geographically undesirable for the vast majority of judges.  The vast majority of judges, like the vast majority of everything else, is not in northern Nevada.

They have, what, nine judges in northern Nevada?  Everybody else in America has to hop a plane, rent a car, hire a stagecoach, whatever, to get to Reno.  Putting the National Judicial College in Reno was like putting the Mexican embassy in Milwaukee.

So they've always had to work very hard to get judges to attend their programs - a problem made especially exasperating by the fact California, which has more judges than gas stations, and is right across Donner Summit from the College¹, has never taken full advantage of their proximity.  California has enough judges to run its own continuing education programs, so the NJC has never been able to tap into the judicial mother lode that runs along the Sierras, just the other side of Truckee.

Years ago, in an attempt to showcase their wares to the California bench, the NJC offered California four scholarships for a Fourth Amendment course.  I was selected for one of them.  Chief Justice Malcolm Lucas phrased the letter informing me of my choice with characteristic elegance and dignity, but the bottom line, it seemed to me, was that he considered me one of the four judges in California most in need of education.²

So I polished up my blackjack technique, re-read the Fourth Amendment, and hightailed it off to Reno.  It was August.  It was like spending a week in a hairdryer. 

Reno in August is the world's largest outdoor convection oven.  Nobody missed a class; we were all afraid if we left the building before sundown, we'd combust.

I'm told it's not always that way.  Apparently I was unfortunate enough to be there when the city was passing unusually close to the sun.  Sure enough, my newspaper this morning predicts a high of 19 and a low of 6 for that part of Nevada.  It appears that Reno, like Mercury, has both hot and cold days.

But despite the climate and the rather ego-bruising circumstances of my excommunication to the Great Basin, I had a good time in Reno.  I enjoyed the classes, learned as much as I am ever capable of learning, and met some very nice people. 

I was not invited back, but I've become accustomed to that.  I think I might have offended them when I suggested modern technology had made the trip over Donner Summit safer, and an escape could now be safely made.

Since then, most of my education has been in-state.  The California Center for Judicial Education and Research (CJER) has struggled like a woman³ to raise my consciousness, expand my horizons, and elevate my intellect.  Or any combination thereof.

There seems to be some difference of opinion about their success.⁴

So I was pretty excited to receive an email from something called The Ark Group, announcing a seminar on "Knowledge Retention Strategies for the Government Sector."  I mean, that's exactly what I need, right?  A knowledge retention strategy. 

I've been on the bench for 21 years and no one has ever provided me with a knowledge retention strategy.  It's a wonder I haven't driven us off a cliff.

The seminar sounded great.  It was in Washington D. C., which recent events have proven to be pretty much the font of all wisdom, and its objective was "Shaping the future of innovation and organizational viability through the seamless transfer and management of experience-based knowledge within the public sector," something I have hungered for as long as I've been in government service. 

Colleagues will tell you I have often complained about the number of seams that mar the transfer and management of experience-based knowledge within our courts.  And I have long been an outspoken advocate of a more cogent strategy for shaping the future of innovation and organizational viability - also I've been an outspoken proponent of hiring a staff urologist for the Court of Appeal, but that's rather clearly just a natural concomitant of the first two.  So this seminar was perfect for me.

I don't really know anything about The Ark Group, except they know a lot of big words.  And they agree with me that I need a knowledge retention strategy.  And they're in Washington, D. C.  Applying the same logic I used to account for the NJC's location in Reno, I can only assume the Ark Group was in Washington when the flood waters receded⁵, and have not yet figured out that it's safe to leave.

They've gathered together some really impressive-sounding people for this seminar.  They have the "Chief Knowledge Management Officer, Federal Transit Administration," the "Chief Learning Officer, HCO/Learning Center, US Government Accountability Office," the "Risk & Knowledge Management Officer, Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters," and the "Director, Knowledge Management Center of Excellence, U. S, Air Force Materiel Command."

And that's just for openers.  They have CKO's and CLO's and Chief This and That's from some very important branches of government.  The piece de resistance is the "Chief Knowledge Officer, U. S. Secret Service," a guy who knows a lot of stuff but usually keeps it secret.  This is presumably the person who will be charged with remembering to have Iraqi journalists remove their shoes before Presidential press conferences.  This is somebody I gotta meet!

I didn't even know there were such positions.  I've never been a part of an organization that had a Chief Knowledge Officer or a Chief Learning Officer or a Directorate of Remembering Things or any of the wonderful titles attending this conference. It would take me a week just to think up a title that cool.

So you can imagine my dismay when I learned that the state would not pay to fly me to the Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center⁶ in Washington D. C., for one of the fourteen seats miraculously still remaining⁷ when the email was sent to me.⁸  I was devastated.  My hopes of parlaying this symposium into a position as Chief Knowledge Muckety-Muck for the California Court of Appeal or Grand Poobah in Charge of Not Forgetting Stuff were dashed with one stroke of the key.⁹

It appears they went on without me.  Unimaginable to me, but it seems to be so.  I haven't been this unhappy about missing an event since I had chicken pox the week Lady & The Tramp was released.  It's a disappointment I'll just have to soldier through - although if Malcolm Lucas were still the Chief . . . .

Oh somewhere in this favored land, the sun is shining bright, the band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light.  And somewhere men are laughing and somewhere children shout, but there is no joy at my house, I'll remain a forgetful lout.¹⁰

1. Donner Summit is where the NJC founders who pressed on past Reno ended up.

2. It's been twenty years and I've yet to develop an effective rebuttal to that conclusion, so the present Chief Justice probably shares it.  I doubt it's been sheer good fortune that has resulted in every one of my requests for education funding being approved.

3. I had originally written "manfully" but many of the continuing education courses I've attended have dealt with gender bias, so I knew better this time.

4. I think they've done just fine; everyone else disagrees.  I didn't say opinion was evenly split, I said it was divided.

5. I guess we can call off the search of Mt. Ararat.

6. Still another reason I wanted to go:  I'm up for election in 2010.  In my county, if you can juxtapose the words "Ronald" and "Reagan" in your ballot statement, you can be elected by acclamation.  This was my chance.

7. It said so right on the email:  14 seats remaining.

8. I'm a little disheartened that I was apparently not in the first wave of recipients of this invitation, but having griped about being in the first wave of recipients of the Malcolm Lucas invitation, I guess I don't really have much of a case for having my feelings hurt.

9. I'm sorry, that just doesn't have the same ring to it as "one stroke of the pen."  The 21st century leaves a lot to be desired in terms of imagery.

10. Yeah, well Ernest Thayer was born rich and writing humor for the San Francisco Examiner was his only job when he wrote "Casey at the Bat."  He had time to make all the lines scan perfectly; I don't.