Lawyers

One person with whom I occasionally exchange emails is a lawyer who lives somewhere in California. I 'met' him when I came across a web site he operated, called Why I Like Obama, which I thought was both thoughtful and non-provocative. So long as you were starting out from somewhere around the middle of the range, you could read what he said and get food for thought. (People starting further right likely would just skip the site entirely). We don't write much, but I always enjoy hearing from him. He's bright and interesting, and I value his thoughts.

This is contrary to my normal view of lawyers, which can be encapsulated by this squib from an article in the Washington Post about a couple who'd invested in a dry cleaning business: "(They) eventually had a falling out with the California entrepreneur, so they hired attorneys to get them out of the agreements...." It's like a possibly apocryphal quote I heard years ago, where a businessman tells his lawyer "Your job isn't to tell me what I can't do; your job is to tell me how to do the things that you say I can't do." Or like the definitely apocryphal comment from a Star Trek novel, Doctor's Orders, where McCoy muses that Klingons are not inherently untrustworthy; they will keep their word until the situation changes -- then all bets are off. I suppose the dry-cleaning people were Klingons, in that they were willing to keep to their agreement until the point where they were no longer willing to do so. (I know, it's also possible that they signed something they shouldn't - people do that all the time- and that they simply reached a point where it was intolerable. It's possible.) Generally, though, my view is that lawyers are slippery people who are not to be trusted. I know two -- the fellow I mentioned, and a neighbor here -- and both seems honest, reasonable, and forthright. So you would think that I'd extrapolate from that. But I don't. Odd, huh?

Speaking of lawyers: I learned years ago that a well-known actor had gone to my college. I never felt any particular affinity to what he was in as a result, but it was an interesting bit of trivia. Well, today I was looking at an article about Sotomayer which showed her talking to some teen-age girls in a large room. Gee, I thought, that outfit the girls are wearing sort of looks like the outfit they wore at my high school. Catholic high schools tend to have a similarity that way, and the styles never change. Then I looked a bit more closely at the picture. In fact, that room kind of looks like our gym.... So I read the caption.

Yup. How about that?