Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
DECEMBER 27, 2019 – Several years ago I wrote a novel “based on a true story,” entitled Björn (featured in the photo above). Based on a screenplay I’d written previously, it’s about love, loss, rift and reconciliation. Yesterday, as I transferred 40 gigs of files from one cloud-based server to another, a folder labeled, “Björn …
DECEMBER 1, 2019 – Yesterday evening while my poor wife coughed at home, I ventured to Pantages Theater in Minneapolis for Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Christmas. It was a brilliant show: Rich Dworsky at the piano, with the Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band; Tim Russell and Sue Scott as “the voices”; Fred Newman at sound …
OCTOBER 18, 2019 – As a guy who’s golfed only 36 holes his entire life, I’ve sure spent a lot of time on golf courses. During middle school, our cross-country running workouts and meets took place exclusively on golf courses. The summer between college and law school, I worked nights at a municipal golf course, …
JUNE 2, 2019 – I immediately called my client at home in southern France. He’d been expecting me to call after the hearing. “How’d it go? Did we . . .” “Can you hear me?” I said, repeatedly. Bad connection. I tried ringing again but the call wouldn’t go through. To improve the signal, I …
JUNE 1, 2019 – Once we’d settled in, the judge took his seat behind his commanding desk and asked us one by one to identify ourselves and our clients—none of whom was present. My guy was the only individual party in the case. The other parties were giant corporations, and I’d wanted to position my …
MAY 31, 2019 – The case revolved around an arcane issue, and the resulting briefs were sufficiently dense to put any judge fast asleep. They had been a laborious undertaking for all of us lawyers involved—briefs in support of cross-motions for “summary judgment.” When the time for the hearing arrived—9:00 on a Monday morning in …
MAY 14, 2019 – Yesterday afternoon I spent two-and-a-half hours holed up in a conference room with another lawyer, an accountant, and a business guy. Our goal was to agree on a number as we pored over financials, struggling to find the source of a discrepancy. By the meeting’s end, we agreed only that we …
MAY 11, 2019 – In earlier times, I was more intense. Each day I’d crawl into the cage, jump on the wheel, and make it go round and round. I was sure the wheel drove a generator, because a little light bulb inside the cage blinked as soon as the wheel began to turn and …