Amicus Curiae

I had my first* run-in with the law yesterday when I had to go report to jury duty at Suffolk County Superior Court. Unlike Liz who recently got to sit on a cool criminal case involving illegal machine guns, I was being considered for a civil case involving some oldish guy who fell in the parking lot of a bar in 2005. Booooo-ring. "Do you feel there are too many frivolous personal injury lawsuits" was one of the questions they asked everyone to consider in order to determine who was impartial. I was thinking that if a lawsuit is truly frivolous, isn't one too many? In any case, I had a high enough number that I was never even subjected to the thumbs up or down process from the judge or attorneys. The plaintiff's counsel was the stereotypical slimy lawyer, all cheap suit and jowls and thin mustache and thinning, slicked-back hair.

The day wasn't a total waste, however. They had a nice display in waiting room showing famous cases that had taken place in MA. I knew about Lizzie Borden, the "Trial of the Century" which took place in New Bedford in 1893. According to wikipedia, Lizzie was acquitted based on the fact that no murder weapon was found and no blood evidence was noted just a few minutes after the second murder. But in truth, she was convicted of delivering 39 and 40 whacks, respectively, but since the 40th and 41st were determined to have caused the deaths of her father and mother, respectively, she was acquitted. Interestingly, there was substantial fingerprint evidence at the scene which would have removed any doubt as to Liz's innocence or guilt, but the judge didn't believe fingerprint evidence was reliable.

I didn't know that the Sacco and Vanzetti crime/trial was held in Dedham, MA, otherwise known as the city where we go to Costco. It was a pretty interesting trial; I'd forgotten most of the ins and outs of the case that we learned about in school.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacco_and_Vanzetti

After my long, three hour day watching the sausage of justice get made I met Liz for a really good steak sandwich that had blue cheese baked right into the bread. Now there's a precedent I can get behind.

* Not including:
Speeding, disfiguring card board cutouts for the purpose of scaring the crap out of Anoka cinema employees after hours (never charged, also acquitted on the secondary charge of accessory to school jeans ruining), failure to affix a tag to a legally obtained deer (convicted), suing a landlord for damage deposit (successfully), answering the door when the cops show up at parties (apparently not a crime if you're not a jerk to them), accessory to driving a mini-van into a fireworks storage facility (I was acquitted but my co-defendant was not. I believe that one went all the way to the Kansas supreme court), parking sticker fraud, misrepresenting a fraternity as a debate club for the purpose of fooling an innkeeper, and being in a dorm room in which alcohol was present (the last three were handled by the Gustavus Judiciary Board and I and my co-defendants were exonerated on all counts).

Schussssssssss

We headed up to New Hampshire last weekend to ski the now tripod-free White Mountains. It was a pretty drive and took just over two hours to reach northern N.H. Our neighbors said "Wow, you guys are going way up there" when we told them where we were going. I think Minnesotans and east coasters have different ideas about what constitutes a long distance due to the large disparity in state sizes. We stayed in Lincoln which was about a 10 minute drive from Cannon Mountain where we skied.

We got up there too late to ski on Friday so we explored the area a bit. We were right by "The Old Man of the Mountain" which used to look like this:

but now looks like this:

Stupid erosion.

We found it funny that the image on N.H. license plates and highway signs is of something that no longer exists. We decided that their license plate slogan "Live Free or Die" is only slightly less negative than D.C.'s "Taxation Without Representation." We also saw an indian head:

and hiked to a "basin" over packed and melting snow trails in our street shoes. It was slippery. The basin turned out to be similar to a pothole, cool rounded shapes that get eroded out of rock by the long term swirling of smaller rocks.

That night we ate dinner at a local brew pub. The beer was decent but not awesome, same for the food. We sat at the bar which was pretty busy by the time we left. There had been two cougar-aged women hovering behind us for ~the last half hour we were there. I hadn't really noticed them but Liz said one of them was standing so close to her that she could feel her cougary booze and antelope meat scented breath on her neck. When we stood up to leave one of them said something like "You two go have fun by yourselves back in your hotel room." I said "You two have fun sitting on these bar stools." Only later did Liz explain to me that she was implying that we sat too long on said stools and/or they had more of a right to them than we did. So, philosophical question: if you are trying to be a smart ass but you are so bad at it that your target doesn't even realize you were trying to be, are you still an A-hole? Only a tree falling in an earless woods knows for sure.

I didn't take it too hard since if there's one thing I learned from Blue Crush, Dances With Wolves, Hostel, Doc Hollywood, and the Karate Kid Part 2, it's that locals don't like outsiders--especially city slicker outsiders--and if you want to gain their respect and get the town hottie to fall for you you must do so through:

1. Sports feats, possibly in head to head competition against the mean town champion who's skill level closely matches your own and is also vying for the affections of the aforementioned town hottie (chances are good, however, that he/she is actually a nice person and was only lashing out because he/she felt threatened by you. Alternately, their change of heart might be a ploy to get you to let your guard down so they can stick some sort of Oriental fan knife in your guts)

2. Killing buffaloes.

3. Walking pigs.

Also, if you don't somehow gain their respect they'll torture you to death. Also, sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind and fall in love with NFL quarterback Jerry O'Connell.

Wait, where was I? Oh yes, skiing. I've been out west a handful of times, gone to the Porcupines in MI, and done most of the places in MN, but I didn't know what to expect from the east coast. Basically, I was impressed. It wasn't Whistler in size or height but it was better than MI and of course better than any place in MN. It had runs I was afraid to go down. Liz, skiing for her first time in 20 years (and she only went down the bunny hill once on that trip), did pretty well after an initial slow motion crash into a snow fence. By the end of the day she was turning quite well and doing hockey-style stops. More importantly, she had fun so we'll hopefully have a new winter activity to enjoy as a family. Here's video proof that she actually did it. We posted the video in 3/4 speed so you can actually see her technique.

kreusening

So Chris Choukalas, S.F. based former Gustie M.D., mentioned kreusening on Facebook the other day and it reminded me of the conversation we had on the subject a few years ago. We were in STL or Chicago where somebody or other was drinking an Old Style and I don't think any of us recalled having noticed the can's reassurance that the product had been "Fully Kreuzened." In any case nobody there knew what it meant and we wondered whether, it being Old Style, kreusening was just some B.S. thing that every beer does or if we should be outraged that other breweries were offering incompletely kreuzened beer. I've been on a few brewery tours and I've never heard the process mentioned, but either way I kind of spaced on calling my congressmen to demand legislation requiring that it be completed once started. Chris' status update on it reminded me again so I did a little wikipediaing.

Turns out kreusening is the same thing as bottle conditioning, adding a little active wort to the finished product which allows the fermentation process to continue after bottling and supposedly cleans up the flavor of the beer by reducing levels of diacetyl and acetaldehyde. I've never been on the G. Heileman tour so I don't know what what they mean by "fully." Kinda makes you wonder what Old Style would taste like normal. Apparently worse than mediocre.

On the home front, we had a new addition to our back yard menagerie. An opossum. Big one. It walked outside our office window the other evening and went under our deck. I went out and bravely confronted it and which apparently caused it to die of terror. I didn't want to examine the body too closely due to the fact that they can carry rabies, so I left it for the raccoons, confident that the problem was solved.