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Every couple of years whether I need to or not.

5/25/2020

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Okay let's face it. I don't post here very often. I was gonna say once a year whether I need to or not, but it looks to me like you have missed even that extremely easy to achieve goal. The last time I said anything was in February 2019. Obviously quite a bit has happened between February 2019 and May 2020. The main thing has happened is that we are now all avoiding the coronavirus. 

So far I have been social distancing and staying at home as much as possible. We have made special arrangements at our office to avoid any risk of spreading the disease. I am working from home most days.

When you read the news, everyone seems to be worried about dying of the coronavirus. But that's not the only bad thing that can happen. I've read several reports of people who were young, healthy, and got the coronavirus. Suffice it to say they didn't like it. It was extremely uncomfortable for a couple of weeks and greatly inconvenienced them and everyone they were around.

Another inconvenience associated with the coronavirus is the test. They take a very long Q-tip and stick it very far up your nose. I have seen many descriptions of this process. I think the lady who said that they stole her soul was is exaggerating a bit. But, only a bit.  I am going to have to have that test tomorrow. This is associated with another unpleasant medical test which I will not describe here. But I have to go in very early tomorrow morning and let them stick a Q-tip way up my nose. The good news is we will find out if I have somehow managed to get exposed to the coronavirus in spite of our rather heroic efforts to avoid it. Assuming I have not, I am going to have to self quarantine (as if I had not been doing that anyway) until early Thursday morning when Helena will take me to the doctor for this other unpleasant test.

I suspect I'm fine. If you don't see a post from me here for a couple of years please assume that the reason is that I just don't update this blog all that often. I could promise to do better, but there's absolutely no reason for me to make this promise. I honestly don't think anybody reads this except me, and I don't think I read it all that often.

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How to begin again.

2/27/2019

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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.
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Arkansas Advance Sheets

2/23/2018

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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.
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Time Toilets

10/27/2015

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​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.
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I really need to update this more often

10/3/2014

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Obviously I don't update this page enough for someone who claims to be a member of the First Immortal Generation.  My premise is that centuries down the road, if anyone is interested in me for any reason, he or she will be able to look at old Internet archives and find things I've posted.  


But if I don't post much, that's not going to be of much use.


The real reason I decided to post again is to provide a link to the Arkansas Advance Sheets Group.  The group is growing.  It is an excellent way to keep up on the law.


The other reason is that several months ago, I accidentally canceled the gerrysch.com page.  The page was no longer useful.  I had not updated it in years.  I had been paying for it every month, for no good reason.  I don't think anyone went to the site on purpose, and few stumbled onto it by accident.  


I meant to cancel an old law firm page.  The law firm of Eubanks, Baker, & Schulze was dissolved years ago.  We only kept the page because a few people still had our ebslawfirm.com email addresses.  The time had come to cancel it.  I asked the webmaster to go ahead and close down that page.  She misunderstood and closed down the gerrysch.com page.  It was probably my fault.  I had been talking about the need to close down the gerrysch.com page for a long time.  


But it's not gone.  It's still available on the "wayback machine," the Internet Archive.  I expect that it will be around longer than I will.

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Helena Won The Christmas Light Decoration Contest in Little Rock.

1/21/2014

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I haven't posted much here recently, but I really should have mentioned that Helena won the Little Rock Holiday Lights contest.  She did all the work this year decorating the house.  I was busy with work and other things.  But I was around to submit her entry to the contest.


We were pleased enough when we were named finalists.  Then we both went to work asking our Facebook and Twitter friends to vote.


Thanks to our friends, we won.  We win a bunch of valuable prizes, including:


  • A year's membership to the Zoo.
  • A year's membership to the Jim Daley Fitness and Aquatic Center
  • A truckload of mulch

Again we want to thank all of you who voted for us and helped us win this honor.

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Camping

10/16/2013

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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.  

There was far more than enough food.  The weather at Petit Jean was perfect for camping.  We had one early morning rainstorm, but otherwise there was absolutely nothing to complain about.  It was cool enough that there were no insects.

We plan to go with this group again next year.  This time it looks like we'v
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Research can drive you nuts

9/21/2012

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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.  

Frankly, this is almost always the right way to go.  I've had the privilege of talking to Judges about it, and one thing they are more than tired of is lawyers pointing the finger at each other about alleged mistakes.  If anyone is going to get upset at lawyers who make mistakes, it ought to be the ones in the robes.  Here, I'm not even comfortable calling it a mistake.

Jackson v. Flint Ink North American Corp
., 370 F.3d 791 (8th Cir. 2004) was overturned on request for rehearing.  On the petition for rehearing, the Court of Appeals, having had additional facts pointed out on rehearing, held that work environment faced by worker was objectively hostile, and thus was actionable arguably. Jackson v. Flint Ink North American Corp., 382 F.3d 869 (8th Cir. 2004).[1]

[1]There is some inconsistency in the treatment of this case in the reports.  West’s reports that rehearing on this case was denied on September 3, 2004.  Of course, West’s also published the decision on reconsideration (dated August 24, 2004).  Plaintiff's counsel suspects that it is due to this inconsistent treatment that some courts continue to cite this case as authority without noting its subsequent history.  See, e.g. Griffey v. Daviess/Dekalb County Regional Jail¸ Case No. 10-06099-CV-SJ-DGK  p. 10 (W.D. Mo. 2012); Bell v. Amercian Greetings Corp., 3:04CV00303-WRW, 2007 WL 473693 (E.D. Ark. Feb. 8, 2007), n.43;  aff'd sub nom. Bell v. Am. Greetings Corp., 279 F. App'x 415 (8th Cir. 2008); Carlson v. Leprino Foods Co., 522 F. Supp. 2d 883, 889 (W.D. Mich. 2007); Lindsey v. Cube Corp., 386 F. Supp. 2d 1037, 1040 (W.D. Ark. 2005); Brown v. Arkansas State Highway & Transp. Dept., 358 F. Supp. 2d 729, 734 (W.D. Ark. 2004) aff'd sub nom. Brown v. Arkansas State Highway & Trans. Dept., 166 F. App'x 885 (8th Cir. 2006).





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Cannady v. St Vincent's Infirmary et al.

9/14/2012

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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.

We are hoping for a swift and just resolution by the Arkansas Supreme Court.  We hope to be allowed to submit our claims to a jury.

The entire oral argument can be viewed on the Arkansas Supreme Court's webpage.  

  • KATV, Channel 7
  • Fox 16
  • Arkansas Democrat Gazette
  • Arkansas Business

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Working on a new Website

7/15/2012

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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
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    J.G. "Gerry" Schulze is an amateur linguist who practices law for a living.  For more information see his webpage, which has links to some of his other online activities.

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