captainsblog | ♫Another Opening, Another Snow....♫ (Reply)

The hippy-dippy weathermen are now 1-for-3 on Snowmageddons. The first, in early January, was barely a piffle and all traces were gone by the following week. Two weeks ago, we did done get dumped, and most of what did fall is still sticking around, mostly from it being cold as fuck ever since. We totally missed the Nor'easter that hit the east coast this past weekend, but just so we wouldn't feel left out, they started whining about another OMG BIG ONE due to hit last night and continue into tomorrow.

So far? Pretty, but mostly meh.

Yes, I walked the dog in this. By 10 this morning, maybe an inch had fallen atop the already-cleared paths, so hardly anything to get worked up about. Not that it stopped the panic machine from going on about it for three days; at least I got out of a 200 mile drive for a 3-minute court hearing which I otherwise would have had to make. As of this time yesterday, they were still telling me I had to show up in person, but then cooler heads prevailed and they sent a Teams link. So I was in half a suit at 8:30 this morning and blessedly out of it by 9.

Before that, though, there was another court hearing, among other things, to make me crazier than thinking about the weather.

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Sunday: ♫ We'rrrrre the AFC champion team from Cincinnnnnattttttiiiiii.....♫

I resolved not to watch any football after the Bills were knocked out of it, and I didn't. But while we were watching something or other Sunday afternoon, I started checking the score, and deja vu set right in.

Back and forth going into the fourth quarter.
Cincy goes ahead.
KC ties it on a last second field goal, then wins the toss to get the ball in overtime.

We saw this.

Except we didn't. Apparently they DID change the overtime rules, to allow the opposing team to play defense against the Chiefs. Mighty Mahomes was intercepted, and a few plays later, Cincinnati was in the Super Bowl for the first time this century.

Making it weirder was me starting to see a bunch of WKRP videos after the game. They weren't just because of the Cincy connection, but were because word finally got out that Howard Hesseman, that show's rock of a DJ "Johnny Fever," had died the day before. His character was part of many KRP moments over the years, but this was the moment I first thought of:

Watch on YouTube

I remembered a Buffalo connection to that episode, so I went to IMDB to check it out and found even more weird stuff about it, particularly its connections to WKBW, a Buffalo AM Top 40 blowtorch I listened to from Long Island in the 70s:

* It didn't confirm the connection I knew, so maybe I'll post it there: "Don Pesola," the caller who gets the impossible six songs on the first try, is the real name of longtime KB/WBEN voice "Sandy Beach," who would dump you in a second if you called him that on air.

* Buffalonian, and KB alum, Casey Piotrowski co-wrote this episode, supposedly based on an actual event at the station (as was the turkey drop, which hit the ground at Cheektowaga's Thruway Plaza).

* They changed the songs in syndication due to licensing issues, but the Shout Factory DVD version restores the Original Six.

* And they filmed two separate endings with two different actors playing "Pesola," one of whom went on to a long career playing villains and Mafiosi.

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* Monday: Fear and Loathing in Football

Speaking of villains: the NFL has become a hotbed of alleged evil over the past few days. The annual coaching carousel is in full swing, with nine of the 32 teams looking for new head coaches. One of the contenders for the open spots, who was fired from his job in Miami, was a finalist for the job with the New York Giants, who also fired theirs after the season. We learned last weekend that Brian Daboll, an assistant coach with the Bills the past few seasons, had gotten the Giants job. But then Brian Flores, the fired guy from Miami, posted this text exchange with his (and Daboll's) former boss in New England.

Why, you wonder, would the Giants interview Brian F after they'd already decided to hire Brian D? Because Brian F is Black, and the NFL has a rule that teams have to interview at least one minority candidate for any head coach or front office opening that comes up. At the moment, there is exactly one Black head coach among the 32 NFL teams (and one Latino), so this rule isn't working very well. Brian F was not happy about having his time wasted, so by early this week, he'd filed a lawsuit against the Giants and the NFL for discrimination. He also revealed in the suit that his previous employers in Miami weren't exactly a bunch of angels, either: the suit alleges that Miami's owner was offering him a $100,000 per game bonus at the end of 2019- not to win games, but to lose them. The Dolphins were already out of the playoffs and, by tanking games, they had a better chance of getting the first overall pick in the following year's draft of college players. A former head coach from Cleveland later reported that HIS team's owner made him a similar proposal. Nobody can quite point to whether this is illegal in and of itself, but it would certainly have affected the results of games for gambling purposes, and now that the NFL is deeply in bed with legal betting sites, it raises all kinds of ethical questions.

* Tuesday: I Ain't 'Fraid of No Ghosts. Judges, welllll,....

I had nothing scheduled on Monday, so I caught up on a bunch of things before devoting Tuesday to a Rochester drive for a hearing in a Chapter 11 case. A bunch of things in the case have been working their way up to being ready to file and schedule before the court, but they weren't quite ready to send out, and I was prepared to report that when the conference began at 1:00....

or didn't. At 11:05, the judge's law clerk called. I'd mis-scheduled the hearing on my calendar, and they were waiting for me, my client, and one other participant from the government. The judge pushed it back to 11:30, by which time I'd come to my senses, gotten my file out, and called in (minus a client, who was on her way to the office). The third participant still wasn't on the phone call, so he pushed it back again to 1, when I thought it was scheduled for in the first place. By then, the client was there, I'd confirmed what the third participant needed me to do after the hearing, and I expected something pretty quick and painless.

Nope. The judge was clearly pissed about us mixing up the time, even though he didn't have anything else scheduled that day and I wasn't the only one who'd missed the original time. I made my report, the third participant mentioned my need to get the papers filed that I was waiting for final responses for, and the judge then went into a rant about my "casual attitude" about the case. The things I was waiting to file have no deadline, and because this court is firmly stuck in the 20th century, everything has to be sent out, in paper and by mail, to close to 200 different participants. I was reminded, following the hearing by someone who was on the call for the client, that a few weeks before, the third participant had actually encouraged me to make all my motions at once to make things more efficient. So I knew I would have to spend all of the next day on this project. Which I did- with a lot of time and a lot of help, it all went in and the almost-200 notices all went out. Eleanor was helping me stuff envelopes after I got home, I'd already farmed the copying job out to Office Depot, and everything was in the mailboxes by the end of the day to be sure I could have it all heard by the earliest possible date.

This is the judge who, a couple of years ago, threw one of my cases out in a decision in which he made a footnoted reference to the original 1984 Ghostbusters movie. Other less lucky litigants have gotten references to Charles Dickens (multiple times), Alexander Barclay (originator of the "silk purse out of a sow's ear" quote), and a comparison of yet another poor soul's legal memorandum in a case to "putting scraps of paper, bits of string, a lucky bottle cap, and an old red yo-yo in a cigar box." But the Ghostbusters shoutout was most mindful for me on Tuesday, because the Next Generation sequel to the 1984 film finally came out on DVD on Tuesday. We watched it that night and we quite loved it. There's no mention of the all-female reboot from a few years back, which the sad-puppy bros all hated because OMG CAN'T HAVE GIRL GHOSTBUSTERS!, but this one? Does exactly the same thing and more with the original boys from the original film with one of their granddaughters proving that anyone can bust those ghosts.

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* Wednesday.

We stuffed envelopes. That was pretty much it.

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So now I'm going back into the world to get my other 300 pending cases back in some semblance of order.