Isaac Laquedem

Why your lawyer will raise his or her fees on Monday

A California man, Irwin S. Trester, has been charged with the unlawful practice of law, after the state discovered that he had been practicing in California for the past 30 years despite having failed the bar examination four times.  He had a license from another state but had never qualified in California.

A deputy district attorney quotes one of Mr. Trester's clients as saying that he suspected Mr. Trester was not an attorney because his fees were too low.

Chesterfield County practices whichcraft

The Board of Supervisors of Chesterfield County, Virginia begins each session with an invocation from a local member of the clergy.  Its panel of clergy apparently included only Christians until a practitioner of another faith complained.  The county then added rabbis and an imam to its panel of clergy, but did not add the woman who complained that her own faith wasn't included.

Why not?  She is a Wiccan, described as a leader in a religious group called Reclaiming Tradition of Wicca and a member of another Wiccan group, called Broom Riders Association.  She wanted to give pantheistic invocations at the county meetings.  A panel of the Fourth Circuit (a federal court) ruled that the county could select which denominations to include on its clergy panel and did not have to admit all comers.  Here's the full story.

A radical proposal for the Trail Blazers

As the Trail Blazers go gently into the darkness of the off-season, it's time to turn our thoughts to the qualities they should look for in a coach for the fall. 

The players have talent.  They don't need a coach to teach them basketball skills.  They do need a coach who will get them to play as a team instead as a collection of prima donna ("primo don" in the masculine?) individuals, and who will insist that they show up to work on time and stay out of trouble of one kind and another.  They can look outside the supply of retired players and former coaches and hire someone without a lot of basketball experience.  (The organization can always hire assistant coaches who know the difference between field goals and free throws, but good motivators are hard to find.)  They need someone to push the team to excel, who won't take any lame excuses from the players.

They need one tough mother.

Isaac finally opens the four bags of telephone books

I thought I should open the four bags of telephone books before the Laquedemitasse found an inventive use for them.  Here's what they contain:

Bag 1:  (a) Qwest Dex "Community Edition" for Clackamas County, good through February 2006.  (b)  Qwest Dex "Community Edition" for the Greater Westside, which despite its name includes listings for points as far east as Gresham and Sandy, and is also labeled as good through February 2006, and also features a refrigerator magnet glued to the front, advertising a plumbing contractor.  The White Pages (residential listings) are the same in both volumes.

Bag 2:  (a) Verizon SuperPages, with business listings for Portland and Vancouver metropolitan area, dated February 2005, and a raffle number for free Blazers tickets.  (b) Verizon SuperPages, "Washington County and Portland West Hills," which despite its name includes residential listings for portions of Clackamas County also, as well as a skimpy Yellow Pages section.

Bag 3:  The same two books as Bag 1, except that book (b) in this bag doesn't have the refrigerator magnet, plus (c) "Portland A-Z" Yellow Pages, labeled as good through December 2005, and (d) three envelopes of "Money-saving offers," which include some flyers of no special interest, a sample of 8-hour Tylenol acetaminophen tablets (which I think I'll need after going through this stack of books), and two free AOL 9.0 discs.  Interestingly, one AOL disc offers 1099 hours free for 50 days and the other more generously offers 1175 hours free for 50 days.  (For reference, 50 days equals 1200 hours.)  I'm not distressed at not getting a refrigerator magnet in this bag, as we have only one refrigerator in the house.

Bag 4:  The same two books as Bag 2, but with a different raffle number for the free Blazers tickets.

After comparing the books in this 18-inch tall stack, I've decided that all but two will become fodder for the recycler.  The Qwest A-Z Yellow Pages and the Greater Westside white pages can survive until the next barrage of bookbags hits home -- which at the rate they've been arriving, could be as early as next month.

Trash collection and charter reform

One side effect of consuming Cointreau at midnight is a certain tendency to free-associate.  So it is that a question that Shelley of The Menagerie posed at lunch today (a prize for my knack at formulating queries to Google and deriving Jane Austen as the answer) sparked an association of ideas this evening.

Shelley asked me why (as she put it) Portland's garbage collection system is so screwed up.  I thought about it and said (summarizing) that most of the system is the way it is because the City and Metro didn't want to mess too much with the modus vivendi that the garbage haulers had worked out among themselves years before.

This brought to mind the new website sponsored by b!X to discuss rewriting Portland's charter, to which he's invited me to contribute.  Like the garbage system, Portland's charter grew by accretion rather than by design.  More precisely, the charter was the result of design, but over the years bits and pieces have been attached, like barnacles on a ship, and today's charter is not all that efficient.  (I'm not persuaded that cities should be efficient at making decisions; sometimes inaction is the best policy.)

The guts of a garbage collection system are simple.  I put refuse in a container, and from time to time someone comes and takes the container's contents away so that I never see the contents again.  But the devil is in the details (not, as I had once thought, in Queens), and the refinements aren't simple.  Who, exactly, is going to take the garbage away?  Do I get to choose who takes my garbage away?  What commission does the hauler have to give the government to get permission to take my garbage away?  Where does the garbage go?  How much work should I have to do to sort my garbage before it's taken away?  And how much should we change the system that grew up, unplanned, before the government got involved?

So it is with the City charter.  We have the last remaining big-city commission government -- that is, a city council where the councilors are assigned to administer specific bureaux at the discretion of the mayor, a remnant of the time nearly a century ago when our elected officials were expected to be administrators and not just makers of policy.  Let's say we want to remake the system.  What happens if we collectively decide that we don't need a city council?  The fact is that we have a city council and five councilors already, and any revamping of the city charter is likely to preserve those positions.  (Thirty years ago, when the city and county explored consolidation as an efficiency measure, the idea proposed to the voters was that the ten city councilors and county commissioners would be replaced by eleven councilors of the consolidated organization -- no obvious efficiency there.)  It seems to me that the first question the city has to deal with in giving an assignment to a charter review committee is to say whether the committee starts with a blank slate -- anything goes -- or whether the committee merely gets to propose changes to today's basic system.

I'd like to see all ideas up for debate, even ideas as wild as electing the mayor in the same manner that the church elects the Pope.  Let's not rule anything out.

Telephone companies and the Tokyo book trade

In the last ten days Laquedem Manor has received four sets of telephone books from four different companies.  Three sets (and maybe all four) will find their way to the recycling bin this weekend.

In looking through these compendia, I was struck by the fact that two of the volumes include white pages (residential listings) bound together with the yellow pages (commercial advertising), in both cases in a yellow cover looking like a yellow pages volume.  We have gone several years without receiving a white pages volume.  I discovered on our shelf of telephone books the white pages for 2001-02.  We have been happily using that book for years without noticing or caring that it's outdated, rather like Jean Giraudoux's Mad Woman of Chaillot, who read the same issue of the newspaper every day.

I'm told that in Tokyo the telephone company brings around the new volumes -- eight or ten of them, because the city is so large -- once or twice a year, and most households don't keep them.  Instead, they give the unwanted books to the paper recyclers who follow close behind the telephone book deliverers, and the recyclers give the householders toilet paper in exchange.  Mrs. Laquedem and I can buy our own toilet paper, but we wouldn't say no to a recycler who offered us shoeboxes.

The next pope?

Today the cardinals of the Roman Catholic church begin their conclave to elect a new pope.  Though I have no expertise in the workings of the church, I'm willing to guess whom they will choose.  I think that they will look outside Italy and elect as pope someone whom they believe can strengthen the church in his home country.  They will stick with Europe, however, and not look too far afield.  They will look for a man who is already old, not wanting another 25+ year pontificate, and will choose someone fairly conservative on doctrine.

The two most prominent cardinals who fit this profile are Jean-Marie Lustiger, age 78, Archbishop Emeritus of Paris and a cardinal since 1983, and Joseph Ratzinger, also age 78, most recently in the Curia.  He is third in seniority in the College of Cardinals, having been appointed in 1977.  (Cardinal Ratzinger is one of only three Cardinal Electors who was not appointed by John Paul II.)  I predict that one of them will be elected.

A complete list of Cardinal Electors, and a lot of other information, is at a website called CatholicHierarchy.org.  I found it especially interesting to see which future popes and cardinals had consecrated, or had been consecrated by, other future popes and cardinals.

Speak of the devil and he will hear about it shortly

So Ambrose Bierce could have advised Shelley (of The Menagerie) when she ended her answers to a five-question meme a few hours ago with this daring sentence:

I tag Rozanne, Mellow-Drama, Isaac (although he appears to be meme-proof), and the Mad Poet.

How can I resist answering?

1.  You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451.  Which book do you want to be saved?

-- The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas pere, in the original French.  It's a good adventure story, it's long, and I need to practice my French more often, so by reading it I could combine civil disobedience with self-education.

2.  Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

-- Yes, but not one that any reader of this blog is likely to have heard of.  Quite some time ago I was madly enamored of a fictional character in a work of non-fiction.  Her name is Kate Crandall and she appears in John J. Tarrant's book How to Negotiate a Raise, which I first read shortly after it appeared in 1976.

3.  What is the last book you purchased?

-- Like Shelley, I hardly ever buy only one book at a time.  On my last trip or two to a bookstore (the trips blend together), I bought Amos Oz's memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness, a mystery by Robert van Gulik called The Emperor's Pearl, and four Batman graphic novels.

4.  What are you currently reading?

-- It's rare for me to "be reading" a book because I read most books from start to finish in one sitting, so I'm rarely partway through a book.  At the moment the only two that I'm partway through (or more exactly, still working on) are Elementary Theory of Numbers, by William J. LeVeque, and De Re Metallica, by Georgius Agricola, as translated by Herbert Clark Hoover and Lou Henry Hoover.

5.  What five books would you take to a deserted island?

-- The Count of Monte Cristo (see above) for escapism, The Oxford English Dictionary (with the magnifying glass, please) for education, a P.G. Wodehouse omnibus for amusement, and any two volumes from Will and Ariel Durant's history of civilization.  If I'm stranded on the island and not just visiting then in place of the Durant volumes I would substitute Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything and a field guide to edible and poisonous plants.

Skinflint terrorists worry the Feds

Fareless Square is the portion of downtown Portland and the Lloyd District in which bus and MAX passengers can ride without paying.  TriMet had four main goals when it created Fareless Square, one of which was to reduce the number of short car trips in the city center.

The Oregonian reported on Thursday that TriMet is thinking about eliminating Fareless Square, and one of the reasons was that the Department of Homeland Security doesn't like it.  TriMet's general manager said that the Department of Homeland Security has expressed safety concerns about Fareless Square, and Doug Roberts, a member of TriMet's budget committee, said that DHS was "aghast" at Fareless Square because of the train bombing in Madrid last year, resulting from two bombs in backpacks.  DHS's idea may be that terrorists won't target public transportation if they have to buy tickets.

If that's what DHS is thinking, it might consider that the 19 hijackers of September 11 bought first-class or business-class air tickets.  At least two of the tickets cost more than $2000.  And if $2000 for an air ticket doesn't discourage a terrorist, $1.50 for a bus ticket won't either.  The future of Fareless Square is a question that the Department of Homeland Security should leave to TriMet.

A reading for Tax Day

Following long-established tradition dating back to 2004, we interrupt our support for the social welfare state to honor Tax Day by providing an inspirational reading apposite to this day.  As with last year's celebration, this reading comes from A.P. Herbert:

Save, save, they say, and put away

What you would like to spend today.

Don’t drink, or smoke, or go abroad

And all the parties will applaud.

But when the money’s in your banks

Expect no more the nation’s thanks.

Your earnings now have changed their name,

They’re capital, a cause for shame.

While any yield they may bring

Is dividend, a filthy thing.

But selling won’t remove the stain.

You make a beastly capital gain.

You should be like the State, you fool,

And make a capital loss the rule.

Give some away to poorer men?

Oh no, you're dodging taxes then.

In short, the patriots who save

Remain in error till the grave.

So die as quickly as you can

And pay death duties like a man.

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Our customary jovial support for the welfare state will return tomorrow.