The law cares whether it’s a person and whether it is an alive person.

In Virginia, if you get charged with a traffic offense and are found guilty you then need to pay the court costs and fines associated with that. In addition to your license suspension. Here’s where it gets REALLY fucked up though, if I’m paraphrasing my fiancé (who is a public defender) correctly:

Yes, but these are only debtors’ prisons in PRACTICE — not in reality — and unfortunately our system doesn’t do a good job of taking note of consequences — what it cares about is what you’re trying to do at the outset. Hence our terrible disparate impact line of cases when it comes to equal protection — if I remember…

This is actually a pretty typical Indian English usage. It’s like a random archaic thing — there are lots of them — see, for example, “out of station” for not being at work; “preponing” meetings instead of shifting them forward in time; a “visiting card” instead of a “business card,” because apparently Indians still…

Sigh. I don’t blame them exactly. They’re super-Christian, and I’m Indian and Hindu. Honestly, I’ll do what I can to keep them from pitching a fit about doing a Hindu ceremony followed by a Christian one, and if that means no Kohl’s . . . eh.

Why?

And Mary Shelley’s step-sister Claire Clairmont was the mother of one of Lord Byron’s illegitimate daughters! It’s kind of an amazing clan.

Seriously . . . who ARE you?

It IS arbitrary, especially when people ACTUALLY design the same cut and charge 150% more because they happen to use white satin instead of grey.

But they never seem to come in NOT WHITE . . . wedding dress shopping was an absolute nightmare for me, because I desperately (for religious reasons) wanted a dress that was (1) not white and (2) had some kind of sleeve that wasn’t just a damn spaghetti strap. Eventually the ONE I found ended up being a sleeveless…

I think it’s really important to “excavate” some of the Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment-era feminists, and Gordon’s totally right that we’ve COMPLETELY lost track of some of them precisely because of the Victorian-era backslide into social conservatism that followed the revolutions of the Enlightenment.

I don’t understand the broiler thing but I’ve been cursed my whole life (since I got my dutch oven) with ovens that run hot, so baking bread in the Dutch oven at 450 with the stainless steel handle makes me feel like I’m not about to burn my house down.

We have 105mbps with Xfinity, and it costs us MORE to just get Internet than to get Internet + Sub-par Cable.

I figure the way it goes is that if you KNOW a dude’s a sleazebag, as a prosecutor you pretty much need to figure out: (1) whether his sleazebaggery rises to the level of a criminal offense; and (2) when it does, what you think the appropriate penalty should be for that level of offense; (3) what law on the books…

This. Even if you make allowances for the fact that “it’s the entertainment world and actors are WACKYYYY.” It’s a *workplace*. When I used to work in the theatre an actor who dropped trou would be in deepshit. Or at least, I hope they would have been. Now that I work at the big lawyers’ association I work for . . .…

http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-4th-circuit…

I mean, his disbarment was affirmed by the federal appeals circuit (obviously the guy’s been rolling in cash for years). Seems like it’s all public record.

Oh, my god. That is amazing. I can’t believe that.

Sadly, my recollection is that it wasn’t the brawl which got him disbarred but rather the fact that he’d done some SUPREMELY unethical things when he was the elected Commonwealth’s Attorney. The Va. Supreme Court actually reinstated his Bar Membership a few years after the fact, as I recall.

Well he wasn’t being charged with stat rape, because the Virginia stat rape rule doesn’t apply. The special prosecutor was basically alleging that IF Ms. Pride was 17 at the time, then Mr. Morrissey would have needed to be under 20 in order to be able to have sex with her legally under the contributing to the…

I just want to second this. I think it can be really easy to say, “well, if there’s that much pressure to have a big wedding by those people just cut them off,” and people have suggested to me that I should cut off ties with my mom and dad over their insistence on throwing us a massive expensive wedding.