Fun with Numbers

These will be all over, and some of the numbers only arise through the court equivalent of random number generators. Or in one case, not so random....

Let's begin with the big one, coming in a little over a year:



I've been a 716 kinda guy for just over 40 years, since moving from 607, and 516 before that, back in 1981.  (See, I told you there would be numbers.)  At one time, those three digits identified almost all of Western and Central New York, before Ma Bell and its successors subdivided major chunks of it into 315, 607 before I arrived in Ithaca, and 585 after I left Rochester.  For most of that time, the digits had little social media significance beyond the telephone dial. But the arrival of mobile phones eventually brought the ability to "port" these OG area-coded numbers to your cellular account, so you could keep your old number and even move it to another part of the area or country. That's when they started to take on more social significance, more famously in other areas. There's a 1998 Seinfeld episode that plays on Elaine having to get a non-212 Manhattan phone number after they did an "overlay" of 646 on that island. One of the key pieces of evidence, that helped bring down one of the various criminals in the Crazy Eddie saga I just finished reading about, was a fabricated document from the company's Brooklyn headquarters, showing a 718 area code and a date from years before that split of the 212. But here, 716 has become intertwined with Buffalo- the generic one, as well as with the Bills (and Sabres, to a lesser extent). It's a point of pride and unity of a community that otherwise has many divisions.

And now there will be a new one:

The area code 716 has become synonymous with Western New York. But such widespread popularity has a drawback: We’re running out of 716 phone numbers.

The New York State Public Service Commission last week approved the creation of a new area code set to debut as early as spring 2024. Wednesday, the commission revealed the new digits that will soon precede local phone numbers: 624.

Existing 716 phone numbers will not be affected by the new area code – you’ll be able to keep all existing 716 numbers. This is simply a new prefix for numbers that come into existence at some point in 2024. All calls to 624 numbers will be considered local calls.

We've already been getting accustomed to ten-digit dialing since earlier this year, for a different reason: to accommodate calls to the national 911-style suicide hotline number of 988. Coming, though, is the need to double-check those ten digits for local calls. It's harder to do where you rarely have to keep track of those digits beyond your initial entry of them into contacts on your phone. I can barely remember my own numbers, much less any of clients or friends, but my sister's upstairs phone number in 1965? IVanhoe5-6291 still has its burn in my brain. (Plus, most of our whole block of the IVanhoe persuasion back then. There's a story about Exchange Envy in the book about East Meadow I just got, but I'll save that for a review of the work.)

The surprising thing for me is that we're running out of these numbers. Our population has resumed increasing, but I'd have thought that old 716 numbers would be going back into circulation  between the killing-off of landlines and the demise of fax machines.  I still have access to one of each of those on a burner and a virtual fax line, and if they become socially valuable due to this change, I can move them back into active use.

Plus, now we'll get two useless holidays out of the deal- 6/24 joining the already hyped 7/16 Day.  And I've already got one client working on securing a very key phone number starting with 624- another story someday to be told here.

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Our next numbers are 452564/2022 (no, that's not a hyperlink or a phone number:P) and  9:22-cv-81294.

I know, I know....



Yet this is not about That Former Guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue but the more recent former one. See, he likes to go shopping, and he tried in both of those cases- a federal one in Florida and a state one in New York- succeeding (so far) in one but getting his ass slapped in the other.

A lot of this is Nerd Prom for lawyers, so I'm going to cut the details:
 

( The deets )

These stories involve Trump, so you know it's a matter of sleazy and not just duplicate.

Return with us to those thrilling days of August, when a Florida federal judge ordered a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago. He was a federal magistrate appointed by routine pre-trial order by a federal District Judge appointed for life by somebody other than TFG.  That just wouldn't do. So when he decided to fight about it, he brought a separate civil case in the same court, different division. If they'd done it the way we now do it, the electronic filing system would have asked about related cases, and probably would have found the related case automatically using its big computer brainy thing.  So they did something I haven't done in any federal court since my kid was in middle school:

they filed it in paper at the courthouse itself.

 

When Donald Trump’s legal team filed their court paperwork protesting the Mar-a-Lago raid, a lawyer took the rare step of actually filing the paperwork in person. At a courthouse 44 miles from Mar-a-Lago. And they got a judge to oversee the case that was outside both West Palm Beach—where the raid took place—and the district where they filed.

 

Those incredible coincidences have led lawyers and legal experts to suggest that something may not be above board with how Trump’s team filed their lawsuit, which serendipitously ended up in the MAGA-friendly hands of Judge Aileen Cannon.

For one, Trump’s team blamed a “technical issue” with the court’s computer system. But The Daily Beast has discovered that the system was working just fine for dozens of other lawyers making hundreds of filings that day.

For another, lawyers typically file lawsuits at the district where an issue took place. Trump’s lawyers filed at a courthouse in a neighboring division.

And third, lawyers will mark a case as “related” when it deals with a similar matter. Trump’s legal team did not—despite the fact that another magistrate judge at the right courthouse had approved the FBI’s search warrant to recover those classified government documents from Mar-a-Lago.

So far, nobody from the DOJ, the court or anyone in the media I've seen beyond this one piece has picked up on this sleaze, which has gotten him exactly what he wanted: delay and unheard-of rulings in his favor from a judge he appointed (and was confirmed after he lost in 2020), now getting more delay in appeals to other judges, at least some of whom he also appointed.

In New York, not so much, though.  Because when he tried to do it in the NY state case brought against him by our Attorney General Tish James, he just got his ass handed to him.

You'll love why.

When the AG filed the case in Manhattan State Supreme Court, it went on "the wheel" to a regular state court judge.  Dear Former Leader apparently doesn't like the odds at the craps table he got put at, so his cadre of lawyers moved to transfer it to Manhattan's Commercial Division. Even I am not nerdy enough to understand, much less splain, the rules of what can and cannot be heard in that business-specific part of State Supreme- not here, and certainly not in Da Big Citty. What I DO understand, though, is why he didn't get to go shopping.

Stripped of all other layers, a plaintiff (that's us, the People of the State of New York) can request Commercial Division assignment with the initial filing for "judicial intervention." Tish didn't.

Out of fairness, defendants can also request the transfer to that division, but their time to do so is the "90-day period following service of the complaint."

TFG lost his transfer motion for being premature because he hasn't been formally served yet. And THAT's because the petulant little shit is evading process servers, as are his various minions named in the lawsuit.

Read it and weep, Cheeto.

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And our final number is three. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three.



Any two of these three can be caught fighting at any given moment. All three NEVER get along. Yet they unite in the common goal of keeping Mommy from her sewing.

And with that, I'm off for eleven hours of driving, concerting, and, yes, more fun with numbers....