Updates. Including about updates....

It was a relatively quiet week workwise, for no particular reason.  The slew of bankruptcies I finished filing in June and July have mostly been put to bed, with a bunch of them reaching their terminus in the past couple of days and only one new one getting filed this month.  What cases I did have were combinations of successful and, shall we say, interesting.  This one's probably the best example of the latter:

Monday's tale of woe, intrigue and possible bigamy was followed later in the week by Some Debtor calling me up and calling me a fargin' icehole.  Okay, he may have used the more conventional term.  I stumbled on to a potential asset of his, years after taking judgment against him and more or less giving up on collecting it. His new lawyer in the new case brushed me off, and eventually palmed me back off on his client, who told a completely different sob story than his lawyer had about why he didn't owe my client anything.  And he was gonna go to his bank and get all the checks he gave Some Guy Steve to PROVE it. And what bank is that, Jim?  So he just told me. Monologuing. It never goes well for villains.  By day's end, I'd sent papers out to my marshal to take my judgment out of his account. And Some Guy Steve? OF COURSE I'd once consulted with him about a case and he turned out to be as much a piece of work as the rest of the people in this story.

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These came in between assorted fights with various pieces of technology. My mobile phone is not set to update apps automatically; I like to see what-all they're up to when they're forcing new things down its i-throat.  But a bunch I often use all seemed to be sluggish or otherwise in need of it, so I gave in and hit the "update all" button sometime over the weekend. The most immediate effect of THAT was almost getting a parking ticket due to the city's mobile app having completely redesigned itself. I'd also been wrangling with the mobile scheduler/tracker for my gym; this was a whole newly designed app, not just an update of the earlier one (two earlier ones, actually, each with partial functionality) but supposedly the Best New Thing Ever- and it would carry over all your data from the previous one! Except it wouldn't; despite telling you to use your login from the old one, when you did that, it kept saying You are not allowed to access another member's resources. "Another member" being, you know, me. Eventually, Eddy in tech support got around that and for the first time ever, I could book a class at another franchised location in advance! Yay! 

Giddy with success, I then discovered that my phone (an older small iPhone model, neither a 5 nor a 6 but an in-between SE) was eligible for the latest Apple software update.  This took the better part of a day and a half to download and install, freezing up my work computer the whole time it was doing it. But now that it's on, it seems to be okay, even improved in some ways (its privacy settings are supposed to be much improved).

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Word from the outside world has been Mostly Weird all week.  Ukrainegate looks like it may be the straw that finally broke Pelosi's spineless back, and the actual direct quotes that they're admitting to are damning in and of themselves:




But the other story of the week of note was that Placido Domingo got booted off the Met Opera stage on account of the recent revelations of sexual harassment being leveled against him.  Noting that it was the Scottish Opera that done did him in, my thoughts went back to the second season of Slings and Arrows, where they encountered all kinds of curseworthy things during their attempt at the source play.  Two of the troupe's older members start each season's episode with a barroom ballad about its material. It didn't take much editing for me to turn it into a new song about the opera:

 Call him out for preying on the powerless or weak
But it all came down when he took a role
Whose name one dare not speak

They say that the play’s
Got a terrible curse
But accused of a metoo crime is worse
So sorry, he won't play Mackers

He could’ve played Faust
And gone straight to hell
Or done Don Jose, but the snitch had to tell
So sorry, he can’t do Mackers

Any soul that plays the role
Cannot be weak or wussy
So they went with a dude who sure knew how to
Grab them by the….
(I think I’ll leave this last word out just to be on the safe side)

So give him Walküre
Or maybe Samson
Otello or Tosca
To play in prison
He’d play them all for free
But you’d be crackers
To take on Mackers
You see, I'm skittish about the Scottish tragedy!

The original is at the end of this clip:

"Slings & Arrows - "The Scotsman"" (Watch on YouTube)

On to more trivial matters:

The guy whose brother I went to law school with? (Eleanor told me he met his other brother this week, who I believe is also a local lawyer.) Anyway, I watched the other night as He Lost On Jeopardy! (oooooh-oo-oooh-ooooh!)  He was quite gracious about it, seemed genuinely congratulatory of both other players who literally gave him a run for his money during the game, and there was even a clue about our dog!




In my own Trivial Pursuit, I'm coming into the final week of the online competition I've done since last year.  I almost didn't sign up for the current round of Learned League. After the first couple of weeks, I wished I hadn't. I was Dead. Fargin. Last. 0-9, and I wasn't even close in any of them. The questions were evil; I'd KNOW what answer they were looking for, from figuring out a clue in the question, but I just wouldn't remember the exact name, or I'd guess wrong between two choices.

But then a funny thing happened on the way to my disgrace. (That play was an answer a couple of weeks ago, one of few early on that I actually knew). Since that starting streak, I've gone 12-0-1, and way more of the questions have been in my wheelhouse than in those first nine. My only goal among these freakin geniuses is to finish at least .500, which I am now guaranteed of doing with just three matches left even if I lose them all.

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That takes us to yesterday and last night. The latter was much better, and I'll give both their own post.