Takeaways from things taken away....

[captainsblog]

Who you talkin' about?



First thing to be taken away, from me anyway, was a relatively nice beginning to Thursday. One of the much-delayed mailpieces finally arrived. New client meeting, done and dusted. A payment not expected until next week promised for (and timely delivered) yesterday. All good.  I even left early to run a simple errand: file eviction papers with a court where The Tenant Who's Never There was finally served late last week.

Unlike many filings in my world, this procedure's a little arcane. You do not file and pay electronically; you don't even file and pay in paper form first. No, you get a date and time for the hearing from the court, then you serve, and only after service do you file and pay. You don't have to go in person to get the date, but I did anyway, a couple of weeks ago before the multiple service attempts began. I showed them the papers- same ones I've been using for years (except in four courts in and near Rochester where they've gone Dumb Form, a term that will be explained below)- they gave me the date of this coming Tuesday, we made our three futile attempts required before you can post and mail the notice, so this trip was just to turn in the original papers, the proof of service, and the check.

Soon as the clerk sees them (not the same one who gave me the date on the previous trip), she says, I hate to tell you this, but....

But what? But me no but's. But I know, even before she tells me.  They've gone dumb.

They are not alone. It's a trend all over legal practice.
 

How about two?

Real estate "settlement statements" required by federal law on purchases and refinances used to be called "HUD-1's" or "RESPAs," after the agency and statute, respectively, that mandated their form. Their form was blinding black type of all math.



Within the past decade, they were superseded by the CD, or Closing Disclosure. It's intended to be plainer-English and easier to understand.



It's shorty and boxy and talks to you.  It's also as completely incomprehensible to the average buyer or borrower as the old HUD-1 was.

My most-of-my-day job, likewise.  Until 2015, this was the first page of the schedule you were required to file in a bankruptcy case to tell your creditors what you owned:



Since then, they've dumbed them down: now, the instructions are written at a third-grade level. On a previous page to the one below, you are told:  The bankruptcy forms use you and Debtor 1 to refer to a debtor filing alone. A married couple may file a bankruptcy case together—called a joint case—and in joint cases, these forms use you to ask for information from both debtors. For example, if a form asks, “Do you own a car,” the answer would be yes if either debtor owns a car. Be as complete and accurate as possible. If two married people are filing together, both are equally responsible for supplying correct information. If more space is needed, attach a separate sheet to this form. On the top of any additional pages, write your name and case number (if known). Answer every question.

Observation #1: there IS no question "Do you own a car." There is, however, this:



Observation #2: Not only do debtors not "answer every question" in practically any case, even something as fill-in-the-blank as this seems to challenge them. I've asked at least one trustee (the court officers charged with investigating whether there are any available assets to turn over to creditors) whether these simpler forms have made their jobs any easier or the disclosure of assets more likely. His answer was a blunt NO.

And now the Dumb has hit landlord-tenant court.

Until last year, in New York state courts there was no mandatory form for evicting a tenant for nonpayment or "holdover" (staying beyond the end of their lease). Professionals and stationers had devised their own, and all were fine as long as they provided the basic information: who the landlord was, what the grounds were, how much was being sought, and most importantly the date, time and place of the hearing before a judge. I'd used this form in this particular court at least a half dozen times. I showed them the form this time before service. Yet I had a nagging suspicion that they might be going on the Dumb List sometime soon. For last year, in the City of Rochester and three nearby town courts, the state court system tried out a "pilot" program of mandating a new form for the Notice of Petition. Not the guts of the written presentation, which can still be As You Like It, but for the telling the tenant(s) the when and where of the hearing.

Rochester City Court announced this weeks ahead, put up signs, had copies of the new form out and available.



Apparently, in the small number of days between my first and second visits to that clerk's office, the court system also made this type of form mandatory there as well. No signs in their office, no notice to attorneys through their electronic homepages, and nothing about it from the Bar Association committees that might educate- which meet rarely, remotely when they do now, and never over the holidays just when this apparently took effect.

Have to start all over again, they said. I thought about arguing about the unfairness of it all, but I know how those arguments usually go. I figured I'd better get back to the office for the redo. The form's gotta be on the state court website, right?

Well, it is. "Is," in the sense of  "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'” I only found it because I was specifically looking for it. And it's slightly different from the Rochester one, and seems to be limited only to courts in Erie and one other (downstate) county. So it's still apparently a pilot project, just with a different pilot (Joseph Hazelwood seems like a good guess).

I have filled it out for a date a week later, and I have a plan. Because the tenant knows none of this, and will likely show up in court for the date and time she was served for, I will, too- and will serve her at that moment with the new one with the new date.

Fool me once....

----

That wasn't quite taken away from me Thursday. Here are the things that were:

* A Bills game.  Not for the season still in progress, mind you; that season will continue at 3:00 tomorrow in Orchard Park, with an AFC championship game awaiting them the following Sunday if they win- most likely at a neutral site in Atlanta against Kansas City, or at home again if Jacksonville miraculously vanquishes the Chiefs tonight.  No, the loss is of one of the team's precious regular-season home games on the 2023 schedule. We don't know yet when, or against whom, but we do know it will be played in London.  The NFL has been trying to become a worldwide sport, and has been playing regular season games in London, Germany, Mexico and Canada over the past few decades. During Buffalo's uncelebrated drought period, the team's original owner gave up one home date a year to be played in Toronto's downtown domed stadium. He did it for the money and nothing else: loyal local fans hated the idea and largely boycotted it, and while that smaller Skydome did sell out every time, it was largely to corporate types and richer fans of the other team, or of no particular team. Our record there sucked, and the new owners pulled the plug on it as soon as they took over.  Now, though, the Bills have drawn the short straw and have to travel to Tottenham-Hotspur sometime during the 2023 season and play at 9:30 Eastern time against, possibly, Tom Brady.

Deflate me now.

* Another closing, another 18 shows. One of the big national cinema chains, Regal Entertainment, announced Thursday that it will not be renewing its lease on the biggest multiplex in our immediate area: the 18-screener (including an IMAX) that we've probably seen more films at in the past 20 years than anywhere else.  "Announced" is overstating it some; local newshounds found it on a list of non-renewed leases in the parent company's bankruptcy proceeding.  The first impression of many, including me, was to blame the rise of bigger home entertainment systems and streaming services for the loss of revenue, but this piece from today's paper here suggests that it's a bit more complicated than that:

This news continues the ever-changing landscape of local cinemas. The boom in multiplex and megaplex theaters during the 1980s and ‘90s allowed moviegoers to have a choice of up to 16 movies showing on as many screens. Single-screen theaters and art houses didn't stand a chance.

 

Fast forward 20 years when multiplexes began showing summer blockbusters on multiple screens to boost box-office numbers, a policy that quickly led to more movies being shown on multiple screens. Suddenly the choices were limited again and box-office numbers declined.

Streaming services including Netflix, HBO Max and Prime Video also cut into theater profits. That was amplified when the pandemic closed theaters nationwide in 2020 and studios released films to streaming services instead, a practice they continue. As theaters slowly reopened, studios delayed openings for many months – more than a year in the case of the Buffalo-made “A Quiet Place Part II” – leaving chains without enough first-run movies to fill screens. That year, Cinemark lost $3 billion. While numbers are improving, the national box office for 2022 was about $7.5 billion, still a 34% decrease from pre-Covid numbers in 2019.

So blame the blockbusters for being so fixated on their first-weekend grosses that they killed off the ability of smaller and nichier films to get a shot.  We see so many films now on DVD or on $4.00 rental through a streaming service that are so good and yet were so underpublicized when they first came out. All so Star Wars Side Story XXXVII: Baby Yoda Boogaloo could be seen in twice as many auditoriums on opening weekend.  Fortunately, there's still one local chain with indie offerings and lower-priced second-runs (they are also taking over the lease of one of the Regal multiplexes up in Niagara Falls), and the oldest remaining screen in this city, and several others in Rochester, are run as labors of love by film buffs (here) or as part of the public broadcasting network (there).

* And then David Crosby died. I was never his biggest fan, and heard enough tales from former bandmates of his to know he wasn't the easiest guy to get along with. But damn the man could sing, particularly in harmony.  Never saw him in any of his various musical incarnations, but we've got a house full of Byrds, and CSNthis and that, and "Wooden Ships," his and Stills's collaboration with Airplane's Paul Kantner and recorded by both groups and many others, remains one of my all time favorites by anybody.  My go-to streaming station played a lot of his catalog yesterday in his memory, most of them older and known by heart, but perhaps the finest memory of him from yesterday was the newest one. I'd never heard this version of this song until yesterday, the title track of his last album release in 2021, written by Joni and harmonized here with Sarah Jarosz:
 

Watch on YouTube

A time to be born, a time to die....