captainsblog | Hoop Dreams and Assorted Nightmares

I finished reading Book The Third of the year on Sunday. It was a hard read at the end, given the subject matter:

I'd gotten thinking about the weird days of the ABA when visiting the Nassau Coliseum last month, where banners still hang from the rafters for the Nets' two championship seasons and honoring their most famed player, Julius Erving. (At some point, the Coliseum removed the banners for two other legendary Nets from their ABA days that still hang in Brooklyn; neither arena ever gave that distinction or a formal number retirement to another ex-Net, Wendell Ladner, who died in a plane crash while still on the roster. He gets a good section of this book for his assorted crazinesses, including this:

Reading about his plane crash was unfortunate, coming on the day of Kobe Bryant's passing and that of eight others including his youngest daughter in yet another aviation accident. I'm happier than ever that I keep most all of my travel on the ground these days.

My Goodreads review of the whole book, mentioning several of its stranger stories, is here. One story I didn't mention in there is from legendary sportcaster Bob Costas, who got his first pro gig doing play-by-play for one of the ABA's soon-to-fold teams. The team he was working for, in St. Louis, had just seen a big final-minute lead disappear in their first home game. So when they seemed comfortably ahead in the closing moments of their second, Costas proclaimed, on 50,000 watt KMOX: “It would seem that the Spirits have this one well in hand, but you can bet that the last thing coach Bob MacKinnon wants to see is a repeat of Friday night’s blow job.”

Somehow, he got in no trouble for it, and for years, people would tell him about having heard it on their car radios and almost driven off the road.

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Much of my travel this week involved keeping up on our means of transport. Eleanor's car was due for inspection on the anniversary of its arrival here, and mine began its regular nag as it counted down the last few hundred miles before its scheduled 10,000-mile service. We made Wednesday the day for all of this, dropping hers off the night before and picking mine up, after a midday switch, pretty late Wednesday night. Both were easy and reasonably priced, but mine was the last one out that afternoon when I went up there to pay, and they forgot to reset the nag screen. The last thing I wanted was to make a fifth trip in three days to get them to do it, so I scoured the Interwebs, found the secret sauce, pressed the magic combination of reset buttons, et voila!

Good to go for another 10K:)

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Work was relatively quiet this week- just a couple of quick traffic court appearances on Thursday. The first would've been even quicker if I'd known for sure when it was; the client had given me the date but not the time, and in multiple calls to the court, they couldn't find her file. I made the safe guess that it was 9 a.m., and was right; I also found out why they couldn't find her: everything was filed under her first rather than last name.

Right after that, I got word that the client on one of my goofy collection cases had decided to fire me in favor of the bigger-firm lawyer they picked when they fired me last year on another of their goofy collection cases. As with that one, I harbor no grudge and am happy to pass on the aggravation of dealing with document demands that are measured by the box rather than the page.

Next week will make up for the relative peace and quiet: I now have seven different hearings in five different places in three different towns between Tuesday and Friday mornings. At least the cars are both street legal for that:)

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I almost got scammed early this week; while out on one errand or another, an email came through from a coworker. They got me through two rounds of responses before I realized the email address was fake and they were trying to get me to buy online gift cards. Once I realized, I put a quick end to it:

I've heard from or at least about other people who've had the same thing pulled on them; one got as far as ordering the gift cards before their credit card declined the purchase.

Speaking of illegal things, we finally got word on what caused the hasty demise of the commercial judge in Rochester who I wrote about earlier this month. The allegations turned out to be much less lurid than some had suspected: no #metoo problems, no financial improprieties, just a judge being a mean asshole with members of the court's staff and threatening to fire them if they didn't do every bit of his bidding. Oddly, I'd have thought those were requirements for judicial office rather than grounds for removal. The book on it is now essentially closed, the state having secured an agreement from him never to run for judicial office again. None of which will stop him from getting a cushy big-firm corner office to rub elbows with his former fellow robe-wearers (or from any number of politicians appointing him to the bench).

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Eleanor's doing pretty well with the stormtrooper boot. We're getting as many medical yuks as we can these days, so when this showed up on the front of a local magazine featuring "Buffalo's Best Doctors,"

my first and only thought was Good God, I hope he's not a proctologist.

But then, there's evidence that pain has been part of medical procedures for most of history:

And it'll get even worse when Og gets the bill because Ralph is out-of-network!

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Finally, this picture came up from a year ago today on my Facebook:

I'd captioned it at the time, Catroy was here- and today, as she's doing amazingly well two months after her diagnosis, I captioned it, And she still is ♥