The tax code shrinketh?

One of the book sets I have to update from time to time is the United States Code Service (USCS), which only the Civil District Attorney’s office keeps. Today I got to work and found on my desk a box of new USCS volumes. These particular volumes were six books on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, so I’m guessing it was the whole of our federal tax code. I was encouraged when I removed the 2008 volumes and replaced them with the new ones because the new volumes were noticeably thinner, and in fact, when I shelved the new ones there was still a gap large enough that an additional book could have fit there.

We’re less than two weeks from the inauguration of a President who has all but promised tax increases for some (i.e. people less likely to vote for Democrats), proposed a myriad of tax “credits” for others (i.e. transfers of wealth to favored groups of people, most of whom don’t pay income taxes to begin with, and who are statistically more likely to vote for Democrats), and whose economic policies seem influenced more by class warfare and some vacuous (and unconstitutional) idea of “fairness” than by an actual knowledge of basic economics. So if I can take some encouragement in anything I’ve seen at work this week, it’s that I removed six volumes of Internal Revenue Code and replaced them with six new volumes of significantly smaller breadth. Does that mean our tax code has shrunk significantly in the past year? I don’t know, but I can’t think of any other reason those six books would be so much smaller than they were the last time I shelved them, and any time our tax code shrinks rather than grows in a given year, that is a good thing, in my opinion.

TWSS of the week

From a conversation overheard at work today. The two parties will go unnamed, but they were talking about sandwiches and one had just brought up Subway’s roasted chicken breast subs and the sub-par texture of the chicken.

Person A: I’ll get it about once a month, and I’m never satisfied.
Person B: That’s what she said.

1911 City Codes, or Let’s See How Far We’ve Come

Days at the law library can be tedious and frustrating, with the latter usually depending on how busy it is that day, and on how many of the people visiting are actually sane. We all enjoy working with each other and have plenty of laughs and interesting conversations, though usually behind-the-scenes. So in that work environment we take our fun where we can get it. One source of entertainment and enlightenment is perusing some of the older (which invariably means smaller as well) law books that we have either on the shelves or lying around in the back hallway.

One such tome is the 1911 edition of the Dallas City Code, a book of city ordinances and regulations. I read parts of it during a very slow morning on Friday and found a few statutes from that time which paint an interesting picture of where our culture was 97 years ago, and just how far we’ve come since then. Here are a few examples.

Article 29 – Accosting a female in a public place
This made it unlawful for a male to make “any improper or indecent suggestions either by word or gesture or use any insulting words to any female” in a public place. Laws from this era were often aimed at one gender or another, and this was among several that specifically punished males for certain (vaguely defined) actions against females. I suppose Dallas didn’t have a problem with females accosting other females in public in those days. Violation of this article was punishable by a fine that could be as high as $100, which doesn’t sound like much until you consider that $100 in 1911 money was equivalent to well over $2,000 in today’s money. That’s a high price to pay for insulting a woman.

Article 34 – Accompanying a prostitute in a public place
This made it unlawful for a male to walk or ride in any public street or other public place “with a commonly reputed prostitute or lewd woman” (I think that was the polite way of saying “slut” during the Taft administration.) This was also punished by a maximum fine of $100, but it had a qualifier. Article 35 made it okay for a male to accompany a prostitute in public if he was “related to such prostitute or lewd woman within the third degree of relationship” or if it was shown to be necessary for him to accompany her for “some legal purpose or lawful business transaction.” You can insert your own joke there.

Article 38 – Disturbing a female in a public assembly
Unlike Article 29, this law applied to “any person” and not just to men, and it made it unlawful to engage in “rude or indecent behavior” or to use profane or obscene language to disturb any female for purposes of amusement, instruction, or recreation. I guess it wasn’t enough to ban the accosting of women and threaten people with the equivalent of a $2,000 fine, they had to go the extra mile and specifically ban people from disturbing females for amusement. I’m not sure how using profane or obscene language to disturb a female could be done under the guise of “instruction”, but obviously the people who ran Dallas in 1911 knew better than me.

Article 40 – Disturbing religious worship
This is pretty much the same law as the previous one, except it made it unlawful to make a disturbance in a church service. The maximum fine was the same as with the previous articles. A city ordinance that protects “religious worship” against disturbances? The ACLU would have had a field day with that.

Article 117 banned “playing ball in public parks”, which shows just how boring life was in 1911. You could go to Dallas’s public parks, but once you got there you couldn’t play cricket or even throw a ball around. The law actually makes specific mention of cricket, but not baseball or any other sport, it just outlaws playing any similar sports or games in the public parks.

Article 118 – Injuring the grass, vegetation and improvements in parks
This would probably be Al Gore’s favorite city ordinance from that time. If you thought going to a city park and not being allowed to throw a ball around was bad, this law was even more draconian. It said, “No person shall lie upon, or sit upon, or stand upon, or go upon, the grass, lawn or turf of any” public parks of the city of Dallas, “unless by direction of the authorities.” They didn’t go through the trouble of defining what “improper or indecent suggestions” or “rude or indecent behavior” were, but they made sure to cover all their bases in protecting the grass in the city’s public parks when they said people couldn’t “lie upon”, “sit upon”, “stand upon”, or “go upon” it without permission.

Article 203 – Playing ball, etc., in the city streets
This one shocked me when I read it, not because it banned playing ball, throwing stones, or using blow guns, air guns, and various other shooters in city streets, but because of one specific item it referenced. In one sentence it made it unlawful to throw stones, “or use a nigger-shooter or sling”, or discharge gravel or marbles with a shooter, etc. The city code normally sticks to legal terms and avoids nicknames and slang terms, so my jaw dropped when I read the sentence that mentioned what I later found out was a crude term for a sling shot, and what was most jarring to me was that they wrote “nigger-shooter” the same way they wrote “air gun” or “blow gun”, not within quotation marks (which would show that it was a slang term) but just as another term in that article, as if it was a normal and accepted term, and one that was well-known enough that anyone reading would know what item it meant. I was born 18 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon Johnson, and the world I’ve grown up in bears little to no resemblance to that which existed in 1964, much less 1911, so I’m always a little shocked to see that terms like this were included in something as official as the city code for a city as big as Dallas (which had a population of over 92,000 at the time).

Article 210 – Bananna peels, etc. [typo in the original]
This was one of the more amusing article headings, and it banned the throwing of “banana peelings, or fruit peelings of any kind, on any public sidewalk.” I somehow doubt this article is still a part of the city code, but if it is, I sincerely hope someone has corrected them on how to spell “banana” at some point in the last 97 years. Why they even bothered to specifically mention bananas when they could have skipped that part and just banned leaving any fruit peelings on public sidewalks is unknown to me. It is interesting that they didn’t ban throwing vegetable peelings onto city sidewalks, and for that matter, they didn’t ban throwing them onto city streets. This was possibly because people were a lot less likely to slip on them if they were thrown onto the street, and this was still an era where the streets would have been teeming with horses, which might have made a quick snack of any fruit peelings thrown into their path. (I actually researched this a little, and found a message board where somebody said their horses loved eating banana peels, but not so much the bananas themselves, so this actually kinda makes sense why it would only be illegal to throw them on the sidewalks but not the streets.)

Article 292 – Intoxicated driver
Yes, even in 1911 they had laws against driving while in a state of intoxication, though I don’t remember if it specified drivers of motor vehicles or horse-drawn carriages. The punishment for this was a little more severe and included the violator being arrested and jailed for a night, and his horse(s) being put in the city livery for a period of time.

Budgets, Death (Cab) and All His Friends, and the Implausibility Scale

The county I work for currently is facing a $34 million budget shortfall, which apparently means a few departments overspent their budgets, or whoever works in the budget department never learned how to balance a checkbook. After much deliberation, our esteemed Commissioner’s Court decided that the best immediate short term answer is to make everyone remove their personal refrigerators, heaters, and fans from their offices, and to turn off the power for all electronic devices at closing time. Left unstated was that they would also be turning the thermostats in the two county courts buildings a few degrees higher. I had a judge ask me today if they’d turned the temps up in the law library, because her office was noticeably warmer than it normally was. I didn’t notice much difference in my own work space, but my co-workers did. Apparently having everyone remove pull the plug on their mini-fridge and fan and making us work in offices that feel 80 degrees is going to save the county millions of dollars. Personally, I don’t buy it and it’s just the county commissioners trying to look like they’re doing something to solve the problem. Nobody is happy with it, and things will probably get worse and more draconian before they get better. I’ve half-seriously thought about buying a mini-fridge for my apartment, just to plug it in for a month and see what, if any difference it ends up making on my electric bill, because I don’t see how a few less personal mini-fridges or fans being used is going to save the county any tangible amount of money.

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I saw The Incredible Hulk on Saturday, and liked it better than the first Hulk movie. It was more action oriented, more interesting in a lot of ways, and had some great cameos (Stan Lee; Lou Ferrigno, who played the Hulk on TV for years; and even a certain other comic book character who has starred in his own movie recently).

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At this time tomorrow I will be watching Death Cab for Cutie live in concert. I’ve been a fan for nearly 4 years now and this will be my first time to see them. I’ll try to keep up with the setlist and post it afterwards, along with a picture if I get a good one. As long as they play “Title and Registration”, “Brothers on a Hotel Bed”, and “Marching Bands of Manhattan”, I think I’ll be happy.

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I’m four episodes shy of finishing season 4 of 24. I’ve had in mind something I want to write about that season, and the show in general, but I’ll wait until I’ve finished that season. I’ll just say that it’s alarming what the lifespan is of CTU agents assigned to either protect analysts in the field, serve as backup for Jack Bauer, or be the security detail for an agent doing investigative work. If the mortality rate for extras on that show was anything like that of real life counter-terrorist agents, no amount of money would be enough to get anyone to sign up for that line of work.

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Another blog I may end up writing later on has to do with a concept I’ve thought of in recent weeks. After watching the new Indiana Jones movie and the trailer for the upcoming Angelina Jolie-McAvoy actioner Wanted, I’ve decided that we need an Implausibility Scale to measure the sheer ridiculousness of the action sequences seen in movies today, and perhaps also for silly plot devices and plot twists. It would be similar to sportswriter Bill Simmons’ legendary Unintentional Comedy Scale, which he has said is topped by a YouTube video of William Shatner “singing” Rocket Man.

I had a few conversations about Indy IV last week and it says something about a movie when it features a crazy sequence where a kid swings on dozens of vines and glides quickly through a forest to land safely on a speeding vehicle, and that part isn’t even one of the 3 most implausible scenes in the movie. However one puts the Implausibility Scale list together, the sequence in Transporter 2 with the crane removing a bomb from the bottom of the hero’s flipped car has to rate at least a 105 out of 100, because such a thing is so ridiculous it doesn’t even happen in video games or comic books. I feel this is a good time to mention that Transporter 2 is among my favorite dumb action movies ever.

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Coldplay’s new album Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends is out tomorrow, but between that night’s Death Cab concert and Wednesday night’s Texas Rangers game that I’m going to with a couple of friends, it looks like I won’t be getting my hands on the album until Thursday at the earliest. I got X&Y the day it was released and that album reminds me of the year 2005 more than any other one does. I’m not quite as high on the new album now that I’ve heard parts of some of the songs on it, but it may grow on me after a while, as X&Y did. Personally, I think A Rush of Blood to the Head will always be my favorite set of songs from that band.

Major metropolitan daily newspaper gaffe of the day

This is one of the funniest ones I’ve seen in a long time. From today’s Dallas Morning News, page 1A, below the fold, a story about this weekend’s Republican state convention in Houston.

The 2nd paragraph reads as follows:
“For the first time in 15 years, Texas Republicans are on the defensive — consider Democratic leader Boyd Richie’s bold promise that his party would seize control of Harris County just as Dallas County did in 2006.”

Um, Dallas County seized control of Harris County in 2006??? I had no idea! So there’s been a secret war between Dallas County and a county 300 miles away, and nobody knew about it? Maybe that’s why Dallas County is $30+ million in the hole and trying to cut costs. It all makes perfect sense now. All I know is that my co-workers and I got a big kick out of that sentence.

I think the writer meant to say the Dems were promising to take control of Harris County (which is where Houston is) just as they did in Dallas County two years ago, when public dissatisfaction with Republicans spilled over into local races that had nothing to do with the national party and every single Republican judge in Dallas County who had a Democrat opponent lost in the 2006 election.

I know the Morning News has laid off or bought out a lot of their staff in the past couple of years, but seriously, do they not employ copy editors anymore? How did that sentence make it to print without being spotted? Morning News publishers, in case you’re reading this, I can do editing work and I’ll ask for very reasonable pay. Trust me, you could use the help.

crazies at the law library

I don’t doubt that government buildings and offices have a way of attracting some of the crazier elements of the citizenry, and from what I’ve seen this seems to also be true of libraries. Granted, the library I work at isn’t a normal public library where you go and check out books or have summer reading clubs for the kids or invite authors to discuss their latest tome. The law library is open to the public but is not a lending library, and most of the people who visit are either lawyers, various county employees, or people who need to make copies of various legal forms. What these forms are depend on which library they are visiting. One goes to the civil law library for forms relating to divorce, name change, suit affecting parent-child relationship (SAPCR), annulment, modification of child support, etc. One goes to the criminal law library for forms relating to occupational drivers licenses, or expunction and nondisclosure, which are two common procedures for clearing one’s criminal record.

So the law libraries, by nature, will attract lots of people with instability in their lives, or worse yet, their brains. We get plenty of those with the latter, for reasons I’ll never understand, some of whom come in and ask about the same thing each time, or who simply come to pretend they’re busy with something important and spend most of their time just trying to attract our attention. At the civil law library, we have nicknames for several of the regular crazies who have come in over the years. One of my co-workers even went through the trouble to make a roster of all the nicknames that staff members have come up with, almost all of which pre-date the 14 months I’ve worked there.

Thankfully most of these only visit the civil branch, where I am half my work day, but that is usually spent doing behind-the-scenes work and not working at the front desk, meaning I rarely have up close encounters with the crazier ones unless someone is sick and I have to fill in up front. I spend the other half of my work day at the criminal branch, and though appearances of crazies is rare there, it is certainly not unheard of.

My least favorite of those came by this afternoon. This was the third time I had seen him. The first time was several months back when I had to work a whole day solo at the criminal branch (it’s a small library and there are never more than two workers there at a time). This person was an old, ragged-looking man, probably in his 40s. The most distinctive thing about him was that he would laugh uncontrollably at absolutely nothing. He’d talk in words that made little sense, when they were discernible at all. 

The first time I saw him come into the criminal library he was carrying a mess of papers, sucking on a lollipop, and periodically chomping on an apple and splattering little bits of juice everywhere. He smelled awful, spoke nonsense, and laughed every few seconds, for reasons known only to him. He’d walk around the room, talk to himself, laugh at the air, walk some more, laugh some more, repeat. He asked me for help finding something, though I was never sure if it was a book or article he was after, he only said it was called “George W. Bush and the Bible”. Even if such a book exists, it’s not the kind that the law library would have, so I told him we didn’t have it and that I’d never heard of it. “Oh, it’s out. They’ve got it”, he said, “they”, meaning bookstores I guess. He got on the internet and printed out a page of something and came to get what he’d copied. When I told him copies were 20 cents per page, he pulled out a nickel and a few pennies from his pocket and asked if it would be enough. I figured anything that would get him out of there would be okay, and since I had some coin change of my own with me to cover the small difference, I told him he could take his copy.

That was disturbing and disgusting. It was the kind of encounter that makes you want to take a shower afterwards. After he left I called a co-worker at the civil branch, who was a lot more amused by my story than I was. I didn’t see the guy again for a few months. The next time he came was in the morning on another day when I happened to be spending a full day at the criminal branch. He came in the door and said, “Hey, I know you!” He was carrying a bunch of papers, several large paper envelopes that one usually gets at a post office, a Bible, and a small plastic basket that looked like the kind one would put their keys and cell phone into when going through the metal detectors inside the public entrance of the building. He retreated into one of the public telephone rooms and was there for a while, doing who knows what. I had a chance to walk over to the table where he’d left his stuff, and when I took a look at the Bible I saw that it had the name of a local hospital stamped on the inside of it. He eventually left without incident and without addressing me or anyone else in the library, but he left all the envelopes and the plastic basket, and when he hadn’t returned a few hours later I trashed them.

This afternoon when I was delivering a book to another office I saw him walking through the main lobby of the building, except by “saw”, I mean “heard his crazed laugh and knew immediately who it was”. I was hoping against hope that he had a legitimate reason for being in the building and wouldn’t find his way to the law library, but those hopes were dashed when I got back from my delivery run. Once again, he’d brought a bunch of large envelopes with him, and he was laughing at the air a lot. I was in my “office” (really just a room where I stash my stuff when I’m at that library, and where I process any books that I deal with) when he went into one of the phone rooms. I poked my head out and saw one of the public computers had a wikipedia page up, with an image I was sure I recognized, even from 40 feet away. I went to the computer to get a better look, and sure enough, the man had pulled up George W. Bush’s wikipedia page! Between the envelopes and his creepy fascination with George W. Bush and the Bible, he is nothing if not a creature of habit.

After he came out of the phone room he stood near one of the copy machines and talked (or pretended to talk) loudly on a cell phone, occasionally laughing. My co-worker Chris told him he needed to talk outside the library, and the man ignored him at first. Then Chris asked him if he was here to do legal research, which he undoubtedly was not. He left soon afterwards. Chris said asking that question might get him to leave sooner. After he left, I got some sanitizing wipes and wiped down the table he had sat at and the telephone in the phone room he’d gone into, as well as the door knobs. His presence had lent an odoriferous quality to that area of the library, so I also took a can of odor neutralizer and sprayed a couple times in the phone room. I was just thankful he didn’t bring an apple with him this time.

I would guess he is either insane or otherwise chemically imbalanced, though whether that is caused naturally or synthetically is anyone’s guess. I’m sure he’ll be back eventually, and I just hope it’s not when I’m there. As we say about some of the regular crazies who visit the civil branch, how miserable must one’s life be when, out of everything they could be doing with their day, they choose on at least a semi-regular basis to go to a government building and haunt the county law library and annoy the employees? Why us? Why can’t they go bother the purchasing department or the county auditor?

suggestion box

At the criminal law library, where I work afternoons, we have a suggestion/comment box up against a square pillar near the front desk. I rarely notice it because it’s not visible from the front desk and I don’t often find myself looking in its direction.

Yesterday afternoon I was pushing some chairs in closer to the tables they go with, and I happened to see the suggestion box. Realizing I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, I opened the lid and looked inside, not expecting to find anything, since I’d never heard of anything actually being left in it before. But inside was a small piece of paper that had been torn from a yellow legal pad. On it, to my great amusement, was written, “That younger guy was very nice and professional and he deserves a big raise!” Ok, just kidding on that one.

In all seriousness, it said, “get kid books.” Probably the work of a joking lawyer, or someone who came to the law library for a form of some kind, bringing their kids along, and had their kids get bored very quickly when they saw that we weren’t that kind of library.

Administrative Assistants Day

I’ve had some very slow afternoons at work the past couple of weeks. I’ve spent some of them filling out the daily sudoku puzzles in the local newspaper, some trying to read whatever book I have with me (I finally finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union last week), and just generally fighting off sleep in whatever way I can. I have a relative (a first cousin once removed) who works in the same building I do in the afternoons, so sometimes I’ll take a break and go upstairs and chat with her a bit. She works in the District Attorney’s office, a place to which I have to go at least once a week to deliver a weekly legal newsletter. I went upstairs to the DA’s office today and found their conference room strewn with plates of cookies, from which I was encouraged to help myself by one of the guys who works at the front desk. A sign outside the conference room informed people that it was “Administrative Assistant’s Week”, which I am told is celebrated the last full week of April, with the Wednesday of that week being Administrative Assistant’s Day.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the punctuation in that name. Is it a celebration for one assistant or many? I tried to search online for a proper format, and found references to it either written like that or without an apostrophe. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, since other holidays have names that seemingly can be either plural or possessive (i.e. Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Veterans Day) but are one or the other for reasons unknown to me. There was a genuine typo farther down the sign, where it announced that they would be celebrating the day from “2 o’clock – 4:30″. Just pick one way of writing the time and stick with it. I love government signmakers. The cookies were good by the way, though I’m almost certain they came from Target.

In other news, the manager at the law library was doing close-out at the end of the day and when he was taking the day’s money out of the public copy machines, he ran across a huge cockroach. He decided he didn’t need to check the coin box for any coin change that may have gone into it, so he ended up closing and locking the machine with the cockroach still inside. We were both scratching our heads at that one. How did a cockroach that big get into there? Why haven’t we seen other cockroaches if one that big managed to not only get into the building but also find its way into the law library and into a copy machine’s money taker? I called a co-worker at the civil law library about that and we both had a laugh about that, among other things. I expressed doubt that a cockroach could live long inside of there, since there shouldn’t be anything in there it could eat, to which my co-worker said he’d heard on a documentary that cockroaches can live for two weeks off of a single fingerprint. Weird! If that’s true then it’s the most interesting thing I’ve learned this week.

Just another day at your local government law library.