FeminismIsFree!

The $54 million pants suit unravels again

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A court Thursday rejected an appeal filed by a former administrative law judge who sued a dry cleaners for $54 million over a missing pair of pants.

The District of Columbia Court of Appeals “ruled resoundingly in favor of the Chung family and denied Mr. Roy Pearson’s appeal of the case completely,” said Christopher Manning, an attorney for the Chung family, who own Custom Cleaners.

“The D.C. Court of Appeals held that the trial court correctly ruled that Mr. Pearson’s claims had no merit whatsoever,” he added.

Pearson initially sought $67 million from the Chungs, calculating the amount by estimating years of legal violations, adding nearly $2 million in common law claims for fraud.

The saga began in May 2005, when Pearson took several pairs of pants to Custom Cleaners for alteration as he prepared to start his new job as an administrative law judge. He alleged that among them was a pair of pants from a blue and maroon suit. When he came to collect his clothing, he said, the Chungs tried to give him a pair of charcoal gray pants that were not his.

During a two-day trial, Pearson, who represented himself, said that when he took the pants to the cleaners, his financial situation was precarious: He had just been ordered to pay $12,000 in attorney’s fees to his ex-wife, and his credit cards were at their limit.

See? It is! Those gold-digging, frivolous, flighty women! Mr. Pearson had a very serious and legitimate reason for this lawsuit—

He claimed millions of dollars in attorney fees and millions more in punitive damages for what he called fraudulent advertising under the law. He also claimed that a sign in the store’s window promising “satisfaction guaranteed” was an unconditional warranty that required the defendants to honor any claim by any customer without limitation.

My dry cleaners have been gettin’ over for years. Next time I drop off a dress, I’m gonna demand that free massage that I assure you the lack of is one of the reasons I am not perfectly satisfied with my life at present. Seriously, all this writing has left me with chronic ach-y shoulders. If you’re going to advertise yourself as providing “services” with “satisfaction guaranteed,” seriously–!

Now, this part’s not very funny:

“The 3½ years this case has been pending and appealed have been very difficult for the Chungs,” he said. “They lost two of their dry cleaning stores and their realization of the American dream.”

He said the family wants to “quietly return to their one remaining small dry-cleaning store … to rebuild their lives.”

That really sucks.

Back to the farce–

Pearson may request that the appeal be heard again by the entire panel of D.C. Court of Appeals judges, Manning said. He also could petition to the U.S. Supreme Court for an appeal.

Pearson was taken off the bench in May 2007 while the lawsuit was pending and was not reappointed as an administrative law judge when his term expired.

He filed a federal lawsuit in May 2008 to get his government job back, accusing city government and others of an “unlawful demotion and subsequent termination.” That suit remains pending.

Fired, divorced–gee, what a shocker! Hopefully he doesn’t have any pets–we may soon be witnessing the first civil case against a domesticated animal for “mental stress.” Or maybe the first civil case filed by a domesticated animal for “mental stress.” Stay tuned!

From some dude named Garth George in New Zealand:

…men and women are different physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. It astounds me that in this age in which knowledge of the makeup of the human being is greater than at any time in history, we will not concede that men and women are genetically programmed for differing roles.*

(via)

Now, this sounds kinda familiar. What was that advice column thing I was cheerfully mocking the other day…oh yeah!

…women should never, ever pursue a man. Instead [wait] for the man to initiate and plan dates…If the woman is always the one calling, she will never know if he is really interested in her or if it’s just convenient for him. She may find herself questioning the relationship every step of the way. Men simply aren’t programmed to think like that and therefore are better suited to the chase…

New rule: Nobody is allowed to use the phrase “genetic programming” or any related phrases harking back to that concept and be taken remotely seriously unless he or she can, right now (no Googling!) define for me what a gene is, and no bullshit copouts like “the basic building blocks of life!” either–if your definition can be stretched to include any other scientific and/or philosophical or theological concepts besides genes, it ain’t one. You are also required to know the definition of any and all words used in the definition, and you are not allowed to use any part or variation of the word “gene” to define a gene.

Go!

::crickets chirping::

*He has somehow managed to link this to abortion; I read his article three times and still couldn’t figure out how he got from point A to point M or N. I wish better luck to anybody else that makes the attempt.

This is Slate’s series of articles, structured as back-and-forth letters between a group of conservative “thinkers,” that began the day after Election Day and ran through the following Friday. I found it rather fascinating, in the sense that giant, close-up pictures of bugs fascinate me.

Just in case you haven’t read it, and don’t have time to wade through all fourteen full-length pages of it, I have summarized the meat of each entry below:

Jim Manzi, chairman of an applied artificial-intelligence software company and contributing editor of National Review: It’s finally happened. The middle class has figured out that voting Republican is voting against their own economic interests. The Reagan mantra appears to be losing its hypnotic effect. We must find a new chant to bamboozle them with. Hey, I know–let’s resegregate public schools, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight and concentrate on recruiting the whitest foreign nationals we can find to fill our immigration quotas instead!

Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University: Barack Obama is Ronald Reagan reborn. Also, could we stop obsessing about abortion?

Ross Douthat, author of Grand New Party and a blogger for the Atlantic: No.

Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey and author of It’s My Party, Too: I refuse to believe that the middle class figured that out. Issues, schmissues– to all those people the election was just a popularity contest! and Barack Obama, unfortunately, is much hotter than Bush. All we have to do is make sure they don’t associate Bush with us from now on.

Tucker Carlson, author and commentator for MSNBC and The Daily Beast: I agree that it’s all a popularity contest, Christine–it’s not enough to dissociate ourselves from him, though, we need to find somebody even cooler than Obama to be our frontman. Also, we need to give the middle class a new strawman to hate–that was so effective during the Cold War. Our efforts to replace “Communists” with “Islamofascists” appears to have lost a lot of its oomph.

Ross Douthat: ABORTION, hello? Abortion!

Douglas Kmiec: Reagan was a god. I really think that Obama is his second coming.

Jim Manzi: You’re probably right, Christine; and Douglas, if you think a single damn one of us is going to do anything other than flatly oppose every last line of Obama’s liberal pinko agenda with our dying breaths, you’re quite mistaken.

Kathleen Parker, author and syndicated columnist who also blogs for the Washington Post: I agree with Christine too and I’ll go even further and say that the deciding popularity factor wasn’t even Bush’s lack of cool or Obama’s abundance of it, but McCain’s horrid, stupid, winking, redneck of a MILF vice-presidential candidate. And no, it’s not elitist of me to say so!

Douglas Kmiec: Ross, Obama is my hero. And I’m pro-choice. Here, let me kiss your ass vigorously to make it up to you in the most passive-aggressive way possible.

Tucker Carlson: Doug, you sound like a woman, and there is no worse insult I could possibly lob at you than that.

Ross Douthat: Well, I loved Sarah Palin because she at least was willing to call out abortion for the baby-murdering slut-enabling conspiracy that it is. But I agree with Tucker that we need to find a man who can compete with Obama for sheer coolness, though I must say that I personally thought Bill Clinton was cooler. McCain? L-O-S-E-R!

Christine Todd Whitman: Maybe if I address this post to everybody, Ross won’t realize I’m speaking directly to him?–look, the abortion bullshit is no longer a winning strategy. The only people who can’t get over it are the Jesus freaks, and clearly, they’re not a majority voting bloc, so screw them. Back to the important topic here–how do we repackage Reaganomics so that the middle class will buy it all over again? Honestly, I’m just praying that the Democrats screw up so badly that every last one of the middle class ends up completely bankrupt. They’ll come running back to us then!

Douglas Kmiec: God, I miss Reagan. Have I said that already?

Another offsite trip!–my company was building a new, very large scale manufacturing facility and so we were buying all kinds of goodies for it from a whole slew of outside companies. On this occasion, the company in question was going to show us their pride and joy, a software package that simulates mixing behavior inside various types of stirred tanks. So we watched the demo in the morning, then they brought some lunch in and we had time to ask various questions more pertinent to our specific applications. I was only peripherally involved in that specific project so I didn’t get deeply engaged–I made a few comments about comparability of results involving various mixer designs but other than that pretty much just munched pizza and listened to everybody else talk.

After lunch was over, the simulation engineer asked if we wanted a quick tour of the shop. We all agreed that would be interesting and informative and got to our feet, and as we were all milling around securing laptops and dumping pizza trash he said to me, very abruptly, “Don’t be scared if they holler at you.”

I froze in mid-motion, then peeked around to insure that he was, in fact, speaking to me; he was, judging from the peculiar paralyzed looks on the faces of our corporate engineer and project manager standing right behind me. So I returned my attention to him: small guy, mid to late twenties, skinny with a pot belly, black-framed glasses, earnest expression. “I’m sorry?” I said, totally confused.

“The guys,” he said, and essayed a smile. Note: We had all gone round the room with the standard introductions that morning, but aside from that, this guy had not once made eye contact with me, and had only spoken to me in direct response to my few earlier queries during lunch; I hadn’t even thought he’d really noticed my existence. “They’re not used to seeing anyone like you on the floor.”

Light dawned. I involuntarily glanced down at myself, half expecting to see my quite boring business casual ensemble of button-down shirt, slacks and loafers completely replaced with a red leather miniskirt, platform shoes and a corset, but no–a snort issued from someone behind me and I straightened back up to stare at him. “I’m sorry I shaved off my moustache this morning–I just wasn’t thinking,” I said cheerily. He turned red, which pleased me enough to add, “Maybe you should let those poor guys out of their cages at night, you know, so they can mix with the rest of humanity more often, see a few girls now and then!”

Suspense! Did he pass out from mortification and/or apologize for being a complete and unprofessional moron? Nope to either one. Though I am happy to report that he did not inflict any more conversation upon me for the rest of our sojourn there. And did any of those shop floor savages holler, hoot, whistle, catcall or make any other vocal incursions upon my person? No, in fact they did not. Til the next time, signing off!

–Lisa, the Perky Girl Engineer

I spent a day not too long ago offsite–my company hired an outside company to design and build a piece of equipment for our manufacturing plant and the outside company had asked us to come down to their fabrication shop and vet the design, see what we thought of the work in progress, etc. With me were another engineer from our manufacturing group (male), an engineer from the corporate office (male), and a machine operator from the plant (female). The morning went pretty smoothly; I was able to identify some potential functional issues in the design that in the still-early phases of manufacture weren’t going to be much of a problem for them to solve, so everyone was relatively happy by the time we all decided to break for lunch.

So, we’re all sitting around the table at the restaurant waiting for our food to show up, and one of the two guys from the outside company (they were the senior director of sales and the lead design engineer respectively, both male, the speaker in this instance was the sales director) was talking about how hard it was to get good welders in any quantity. “Kids these days, they just aren’t so interested in the trade schools!” (Yeah, he was in his fifties. At least.) “Our shop foreman, our lead welder, his dad actually teaches welding, but–”

“Actually,” said the other guy, “it’s his mother that teaches welding.”

Blank silence, coupled with wide-eyed stare, then… “Really?”

“Yeah,” said the other guy. “She’s probably one of the best welders in the area.”

“Really?” said the first guy. Pause. “Seriously?” (The other guy nods, looking deadpan.) “You’re kidding!” Longer pause. “That’s amazing!” Still staring bulge-eyed at the other guy, very much as if that guy had whipped a two-headed calf out of his pocket and plunked it down on the middle of the lunch table. “I really did not know that–”

Our two engineers were looking anywhere but at me. Our operator was looking sideways at me with narrowed eyes. So I perked up, beamed at the first guy and said brightly, “Yeah, the next thing you know, they’ll be driving and voting!”

I may let how this scene ended remain a mystery.

I’m having a hard time deciding if this is for real or not. I’m leaning toward “yes,” just because I can’t find any evidence anywhere else on the Web that it’s just a big ol’ joke, and also, the commenters on the article that was just making it so haaaaaaard for me to believe it was for real seem to be taking it seriously. That said–

BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

So anyway, this site is called wikiHow and its stated purpose is “to build the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. With your edits, we can create a free resource that helps millions of people by offering solutions to the problems of everyday life.” I started scanning today’s “Featured Articles” on the sidebar and found myself being offered instruction on such mundane topics as “Calculate How Much Money You Need To Retire,” “Understand Copyright Basics” and “Assist Children with Cultural Adjustment.” …alongside “Pass Time At An Airport” and “Fold a Dollar Bill To Make a Finger Ring” (is that some kinda fad I missed out on or something?) or “How To Trigger Green Traffic Lights.”

(Since you know you won’t be able to sleep tonight if I don’t share the secret on that last one–)

Attach neodymium magnets to the vehicle. While there is significant debate as to whether a magnet can be strong enough to alter the electromagnetic field which triggers the sensor, you may decide to give it a shot. You can buy a commercial magnet or make your own.*

* If you do make your own magnet trigger, be very careful when handling them as they’re very strong. Wear eye protection when handling them because they’re very brittle, and if they slam together or against any other surface, a piece of magnet can easily get into your eye.

(God knows we wouldn’t want that to happen!)

Excuse me.

(BWAHAHAHAHAHA!)

ANYWAY, the whole reason I stumbled across this website in the first place was a snippet on Pharyngula here. Given that I have occasionally wondered if anybody (aside from Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses) ever does make a concerted effort to convert atheists (as opposed to simply control them via legislation), how could I resist checking out an article so artfully entitled How To Persuade An Athiest to Become Christian?

Let’s find out!

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From Ampersand:

Longtime “Alas” community member Jake Squid sent me this. Jake’s workplace recently installed hand scanners, which replace the old punch-card system for workers checking in and out of work. (The advantage for the company is, you can’t ask a friend to scan your hand for you).

The company that manufactures the hand-scanning system gave Jake’s employer this letter, to reproduce and distribute to their employees. This is not a prank; this letter is real.

Words simply fail me.

(Hat tip: Pandagon)