It's been a long time since I put anything on this page. It looks like about a year and what I put there a year ago was not very much. There are several reasons for this. The first reason is that I'm not sure I have anything all that interesting to say, let alone to distribute to everybody who may want to look at my webpage someday.

But there is at least one development in my life that I should probably mention. I am now German again. Years ago I took the ancestry DNA test. Like the man in their advertisement, I was surprised by the results. I know that most of my ancestry is indeed from the British Isles, but I believed that at least a portion of it, a portion equivalent to the German surname that I had, would be German. I was surprised to learn that approximately the percentage that I expected to be German was in fact reported to me as Eastern European.

Recently I got an update from ancestry.com. With the addition of new data, they have recalculated my ancestry. The portion that they had attributed to Eastern European is now German.

​Both children had DNA tests. They, of course, showed quite a bit of German. But that only made sense because Helena also has quite a bit of German ancestry.

I recommend regularly updating ourselves on developments in our profession.  For lawyers in the central Arkansas area, one way to do this is through the weekly Arkansas Advance Sheets meeting.  For more information, see our web page.

​According to the Urban Dictionary, a "time toilet" is Something that distracts you from your work for long periods of time. "I was clearing out my inbox when I clicked on a link a friend sent me about baseball, six hours later I was still clicking links looking at asian midgets having anal sex with goats! What a time-toilet"
Well, Asian midgets aren't my time toilet, but I'm not sure mine are much more admirable.  Here's what I've been doing recently.

• Computer games.   For some reason I've started playing Civilization V and Tropico.  Civilization V is a game in which you can "take over the world."  I'm not very good at it.  I play it at kindergarten level and still screw it up.  I don't lose that much anymore, but I can create such a clusterfuck that it becomes tedious to get out of. Yet I've usually become so angry at some other world leader that I feel compelled to finish the game just to kick his/her ass.  Tropico allows you to be the dictator of a small island nation.  It's mostly a building game, or at least can be played that way.  I've wasted a remarkable amount of time on those two games over the last year.  Unfortunately, I know roughly how much time I've wasted.  My kids turned me onto Steam.  You can buy games on Steam and not have to worry about keeping up with disks and codes.  The drawback--it tells you how much you've played the game.  Actually, it tells you how long the computer has been on the game.  I have a bad habit of leaving the game and going to something else, but it credits me with being in the game as long as the game is up on my computer.  I own several games on Steam, but the two I mentioned are about the only ones I've played recently.
• Scribd.  It's wonderful.  Netflix for books.  It was also Netflix for audiobooks until last month,but the audiobook publishers figured out that it was killing their sales and for all practical purposes shut that down.  (You can now listen to one book a month) But since I'm not a big audiobook fan anyway I didn't lose much.  The content is truly astounding.  Complete?  Not hardly.  But astounding.  I get more for my nine bucks a month than I get from a lot of other 
• Texture (Next issue).  More expensive and not really as good as Scribd.  It's about fifteen dollars a month, and it is slower and clunkier than Scribd.  It's a subscription to hundreds of magazines.  The reason I signed up for it was that a number of magazines that I was subscribing to on the Kindle were also available on Texture.  I saved money.  One of the disadvantages is that it doesn't seem to work on the Kindle, so I have to read magazines from a computer screen.  One of the disadvantages is that many of the magazines take advantage of the advantages of computer screens over print, but it seems like different publishers use different gimmicks.  The touch and feel of Time is different from that of Wired.
• Questia.  Years ago I bought a lifetime membership on Questia.  It's basically for academic online books.  It's a very good source, but like just about all sources like it, the very best and recent references aren't available.  But it makes up for that with older and still very good references.  If you're like me and can get interested in dozens of weird, bizarre, or unusual topics, it can be a remarkable time waster.  For instance, I've been perusing a book on Cantonese grammar.1. Virginia Yip and Stephen Matthews, Basic Cantonese: A Grammar and Workbook (London: Routledge, 2000), 83,http://www.questia.com/read/102845175/basic-cantonese-a-grammar-and-workbook.  I realize I'll never learn Cantonese.  Hell, I haven't learned much Mandarin, and I have spent hundreds of hours on that.  I'm an eternal beginner.  One of the great things about Questia is that it is designed to allow you to use it for academic research, meaning that the pages are clearly numbered, and if you want to drop something into an academic paper, it will allow you to do so.  It generates cites in MLA, APA, or Chicago formats, with advice on how to insert quotes in your paper following the rules.
• Kindle.  The original time toilet because it does so much.  There are books, newspapers, magazines, and now with Amazon Prime movies and music.  There are games (fortunately not as good as the Computer games above).  There are also some software programs such as a good Chinese dictionary available for Kindle.  The Kindle was the first electronic book I could actually use comfortably.  I recommend it, so long as you don't go crazy and fill up your library.
• Exercise.  Helena and I had been walking regularly until I came down with erythema nodosum on the bottom of my right foot and both legs.  I couldn't walk far without a lot of pain.  But I could ride a bicycle.  She got me a stationary bicycle and now she's encouraging me to ride it at least 30 minutes a day.  I can watch TV or Netflix or YouTube while exercising.  I've tried reading, but that's harder.  I also still have some old Great Courses that I listen to sometimes.  The erythema nodosum seems to have finally subsided (for the most part--enough that it's no longer painful) but I'm still riding the bicycle.

I still have a huge collection of old fashioned print books, but I don't read them very often.  I'm seriously thinking of getting rid of a bunch of them, but every time I try I end up going through a couple hundred and putting three in the discard pile.

I need some time toilet paper.

I don't think there are many pictures, maybe a couple, but Helena did get me to go camping last weekend.  We went with a lot of her friends from Boy Scouts.  It was an adult camporee.  We stayed in a tent, but those who planned ahead got to stay in cabins.  

A defendant cited Jackson, infra, for the proposition that my client didn't suffer a hostile work environment.  Those are always tough cases, but the defendant here pretty much hung its hat on Jackson.  West's Keycite shows that the case was substantially modified on reconsideration.  It was no longer good law for the point the defendant cited it for.  At first I was wondering how the hell they missed that the case was no longer good law, but when I followed up I noticed that in the F.3d it says (incorrectly) that rehearing was denied.  The Keycite shows it cited by many courts without acknowledging the subsequent history.  I decided it was better not to act too outraged about the defendant relying on a case that was no longer good law and instead to be very gentle about it.  

I had the privilege of arguing on behalf of Patricia Cannady, personal representative of Anne Pressly, in our claim against St. Vincent's Infirmary and others arising out of the unwarranted intrusion on her seclusion while in the hospital.  There have been several news reports about the argument.

I am impressed with Weebly (which is where I am hosting this website).  It's fairly inexpensive, but most importantly, it's easy t use.  I have told myself for a couple of decades that I need to learn how to program, and for at least a decade that I need to learn some HTML, but I really haven't managed to do it.

These Weebly websites allow me to put together a site with very little effort.  Using this technology, I created a webpage for our Advance Sheets group.  It's arkadvancesheets.weebly.com.  I can create up to ten websites if I want them.  Granted, most people don't need ten websites.  I certainly don't.  But I am enjoying being able to manage my website in this manner.

This isn't an excuse for not learning how to program or write HTML.

Gerry

The Arkansas Supreme Court has set oral arguments in Cannady v. St. Vincent's Infirmary for September 13, 2012.  I will be participating on behalf of the plaintiff. The Arkansas Supreme Court assumed jurisdiction of this case because of the importance of the issues involved.  The question is whether family members of a deceased person have any rights to bring a lawsuit against people who invaded the deceased person's privacy before death.  We are optimistic that the Court will rule in our favor, but whatever the outcome, this case will be important in determining the extent of the right to privacy under Arkansas law.