It all started in gym class, the basis of so many things in life: Dodgeball.  All the kids line up while two team captains build their teams by selecting the fastest, most agile athletes.  For the kids who get picked first, it’s great.  For those still in line at the end…it’s an exercise in humility…especially for the fat kids, for they always get picked last.

My one saving grace was that I wasn’t fat kid.  But I was skinny as a beanpole.  A light breeze would send me flying down the street.  I never got PICKED LAST…but I was well aware that I was usually still standing in line towards the end of the picking…RIGHT BEFORE THE FAT KIDS.

But I knew strategy. I may not have been the best bladder-ball thrower, or catcher or dodger. But I knew EXACTLY WHO WAS.  Anytime there was a time out, our team captain would inevitably pull me aside and ask, “what should we do?”

I’d survey the opposite team, determine which of their surviving players posed the most danger, point at him and say, “Take out THAT guy.”

Today I’m serving my third time as a Juror in Orange County for the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court.  As I sit here in the waiting room, I’m reminded of the previous two times I’ve sat in this same waiting area.  The same blind guy is still serving coffee.  Now they have WIFI (yay…I can blog!).

In 2003 I was summoned and served, showing up 8am. Around 4pm they herded 20 of us into a court room. The Judge arrived and he gave us an overview regarding a case about a grandmother who was pressing charges against her granddaughter for stealing her car.

I don’t know about you, but IF YOUR OWN GRANDMOM is pressing charges against you, you’ve got some SERIOUS PROBLEMS.  I was all ready to serve my duty (and really ready to send this grandma’s car-stealing girl to jail), but I never got the chance.

The lawyers started asking questions of the potential Jury Pool. “Do you have Grandchildren?” “Have you ever had a family dispute?” “Have you ever BORROWED A CAR?”

They posed these questions to 19 people.

I wasn’t one of them.

The lawyers skipped over me, time and time again.  They were going from person to person, asking the same 3 or 4 questions over and over…and each time they came to me, they just skipped to the next person.  It was literally like I wasn’t there.

Maybe they sensed I wanted to be a juror too much. Maybe I was too young, too old, too white…not white enough…too male, too smart looking…whatever it was, they summarily dismissed me without so much as a peep and sent me packing.

As I congregated in the elevator with my fellow dismiss-ees I mumbled, “She was probably guilty”.

An uncomfortable laugh followed.

In 2006, again I was summoned, and again I showed up to perform my civic duty.  That time I never even made it up to the courtroom.  They just dismissed me from the waiting area after I sat around for 5 hours.

Now it’s 2010.  In the time it’s taken me to write this post, they’ve called three groups of people up to court rooms…well over half of the potential pool of jurors that arrived at the courthouse with me this morning.  It’s been two hours, and I’m starting to get the sinking feeling I used to get in gym class….

I never get picked.

“We are not at liberty to fly media, journalists, photographers, or scientists,” the company said in a letter it sent on Tuesday to Sen. David Vitter (R-La.). “We strongly feel that the reason for this massive [temporary flight restriction] is that BP wants to control their exposure to the press.”

Photographers Say BP Restricts Access to Oil Spill – Newsweek.

BP had ultimate authority over drilling decisions, the Deepwater Horizon’s chief mechanic, Doug Brown said in sworn testimony Wednesday.

The BP company man at a meeting stood up and said, “This is how it’s going to be.”

The BP official, a “company man” in industry parlance, would have been the top decision-maker on the rig, although his role may have been complicated by having a number of higher-ranking BP officials on hand to celebrate the Deepwater Horizon’s safety record.

A BP employee named Donald Vidrine, who’s been identified as one of the company men, was on the original witness list for the multi-day hearings, but is no longer scheduled to testify due to an undisclosed medical condition.

The other BP employee on the witness list is Robert Kaluza, who did appear but pleaded the Fifth.

BP refused to identify what role Kaluza and Vidrine had on the Deepwater Horizon.

Michael Williams, a Transocean employee who was chief electronics technician on the rig, said there was “confusion” between those high-ranking officials in an 11 a.m. meeting on the day of the rig blast, according to a sworn statement.

According to Mr. Williams’s account, Transocean’s rig manager, Jimmy Wayne Harrell, was discussing the plans for the next few hours’ work, including taking out the drilling mud and running a test to make sure gas wasn’t seeping into the well. Mr. Harrell explained in the meeting that he had received the plans from BP.

Then, according to Mr. Williams’s statement, the top-ranked BP employee assigned to the rig, Donald Vidrine, disagreed and said “that was not the correct procedure.”

Last month, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the regulator in charge of the futures markets, approved the applications of the Cantor Futures Exchange and Media Derivatives (MDEX), to serve as contract markets to trade futures in the media market.

Now the CFTC is holding hearings to discuss whether the commission should approve Cantor’s and MDEX’s first contracts involving futures and options based on the opening weekend revenues for the film “Takers,” a movie about bank robbers starring the hip-hop music star Tip Harris (T.I.), and Hayden Christensen (whiny Darth Vader).

These “synthetic contracts” allow traders to bet on the amount of money the movie would make. If the movie makes more or less money than the initial revenue level set by the contract, one side would collect money and the other would lose money. These would be so-called synthetic contracts, meaning that the traders would not own the revenues they were betting on, so they would be purely speculative.

This is all I have to say about this whole idea:

Movie Time at the C.F.T.C. Draws Heated Debate – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com.

“We didn’t truly know the dangers of the market, because it was a dark market,” says Brooksley Born, the head of an obscure federal regulatory agency — the Commodity Futures Trading Commission — who not only warned of the potential for economic meltdown in the late 1990s, but also tried to convince the country’s key economic powerbrokers to take actions that could have helped avert the crisis.

“They were totally opposed to it,” Born says. “That puzzled me. What was it that was in this market that had to be hidden?”

Now, with many of the same men who shut down Born in key positions in the Obama administration, The Warning reveals the complicated politics that led to this crisis and what it may say about current attempts to prevent the next one.

FRONTLINE: the warning: watch the full program online | PBS.

Santa Clara County, California became the first in the nation to ban toys from fast food kids’ meals high in calories, fat, salt and sugar (more than 485 calories).

County supervisor Ken Yeager said Tuesday that the ordinance “prevents restaurants from preying on children’s love of toys to peddle high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium kids’ meals,” and would help fight childhood obesity.

Perhaps Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution is working!

I’d rather see parents taking responsibility for their kids’ food rather than politicians passing laws, but whatever it takes!

Toys banned in some California fast food restaurants – CNN.com.

Two prominent atheists are planning a “legal ambush” to have Pope Benedict XVI arrested for “crimes against humanity” during a 4-day September state visit to Britain.

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and author Christopher Hitchens — with help from human rights lawyers — plan to employ the same legal principle (universal jurisdiction) that British authorities used to arrest the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998.

(Meanwhile, more than 10,000 people have signed a petition protesting the cost of the pope’s visits.)

Do Dawkins and Hitchens have a case, or are they just using the abuse scandal to bash religion?

According to the 1998 Guinness Book of World Records, “Happy Birthday to You” is the most recognized song in the English language.

The melody comes from the song “Good Morning to All” which was written and composed by sisters Patty and Mildred Hill in 1893 and published in Song Stories for the Kindergarten by the Summy Company as a greeting song for teachers to sing to their students.  Mildred wrote the melody, and Patty the lyrics.

“Happy Birthday to You” first appeared in print in 1912 using the melody of “Good Morning to All” with different lyrics. Its popularity continued to grow through the 1930’s, with no author identified for the new lyrics, nor credit given for the melody from “Good Morning to You”.

In 1935 “Happy Birthday to You” was copyrighted as a work for hire by Preston Ware Orem for the Summy Company, the publisher of “Good Morning to All”.

The song’s current owner, Warner Music Group continues to insist that one cannot sing the “Happy Birthday to You” lyrics for profit without paying royalties: in 2008, Warner collected about $5000 per day ($2 million per year) in royalties for the song. This includes use in film, television, radio, anywhere open to the public, or even among a group where a substantial number of those in attendance are not family or friend to whoever is performing the song.

Professor Robert Brauneis cited problems with the song’s authorship and the notice and renewal of the copyright, and concluded “It is almost certainly no longer under copyright.

In European Union (EU) countries the copyright will expire December 31, 2016, while in the United States, the song is currently set to pass in to the public domain in 2030.

Patty and Mildred Hill were posthumously inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame on June 12, 1996.  The Hill Foundation continues to receive royalties on public performances of the song to this day, estimated to be about about $1 million a year.

more: Happy Birthday to You – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A lot of debate is raging across the country on Health Care Reform.  But for me, the true litmus test for whether or not the current proposed legislation is a win for the Insurance companies is to watch their stocks.

In the past month the stock prices of the top 4 health insurers (WellPoint, Aetna, UnitedHealth and CIGNA) rose an average of 2.8%.

This could mean two things:  1) The current proposed legislation is a win for the Insurance companies, or 2) Investors don’t think the legislation will pass.

With most odds makers betting on legislation passing, it just looks like this is a win for the Insurers.

WellPoint, Inc. – Google Finance.

A new report estimates that currently 68 adults under age 65 die every day because they don’t have adequate health insurance coverage.

That’s over 2000 Americans every month, almost as many as were killed on 9/11.

9/11 is happening every month.

(but only if you’re under 65)

Because those over 65 qualify for our wildly popular single-payer socialized-medicine program, Medicare.

Sure, you can challenge the numbers, but let’s say it’s greatly exaggerated. What if it’s half that?

What if it’s only a quarter?

Hell, what if only ONE American under the age of 65 dies each month from lack of health insurance? Is that acceptable?

NO FUCKING WAY.

I encourage you to share this with your friends, neighbors, followers, parents, uncles, aunts, pundits, naysayers, doom-and-gloomers, eternal optimists, Senators and Representatives.

9/11. Every Single Month.

Deaths Rising for Lack of Insurance, Study Finds – Prescriptions Blog – NYTimes.com.