Douglas Whaley

                                                       . One of the great pleasures of retiring is that I no longer have to attend faculty meetings, as I did regularly for 34 years.   Meetings of any sort are usually awful, but I'm alive to tell you that a collection of law professors gathered in one room to discuss anything is hell on earth.   Like all lawyers, law professors can verbally litigate sentences just uttered, and, also being teachers, then expound for interminable periods on their own point of view.   It's so boring that mice have moved out of the building rather than ever experience this again.   Indeed, an exterminating service should consider scheduling law school faculty meetings at one contaminated house after another and make a fortune. At one meeting back in the 1970s we were all seated around tables forming a large square (so we could see each other clearly and not risk missing any of the bomfoggery).   To avoid injury from falling asleep and

                                                                      . Mama Cat and Owner The Whaley Family line has always featured two unfortunate traits: (1) optimism when it's not justified (and, indeed, is contradicted by all available facts), and (2) ignoring important symptoms even if doing so will likely lead to major trouble.   This all was on exhibit Tuesday, July 5, 2011. Readers of this blog may remember a prior post entitled   "Report on Old Doug: Health, Theater, eBook, and More" (June 28, 2011) in which I described various topics.   One of these was my enthusiasm for attending a writers' conference in New York City entitled "ThrillerFest," held July 6-10 of this year—and at which I hoped to pitch my self-published novel "Imaginary Friend" (it's an atheist thriller, currently available on Amazon and Kindle) to the country's leading agents.   I had arranged (1) a plane flight leaving that Tuesday at 2 p.m., (2) a fiv

                                              . Since I graduated from law school in 1968 I've always had some sort of legal practice which varied from extensive in the early years, to these days when I'm retired and mostly just doing consulting work for a hefty fee.   In this period I've written a lot of letters threatening legal action on behalf of my client (or, on the rare occasion, myself—see Related Posts below).   In the classroom I've passed on my advice on how to create an effective letter, and now I offer it to you, blog reader. A letter threatening legal action almost always discombobulates a recipient who is not him/herself routinely involved in legal actions.   I tell my law students that in their coming practices they will often receive such letters (or nowadays even emails), and they will calmly evaluate what to do about them depending on the legal issues involved and the wisdom of litigating them.   But the non-legal recipient of such a letter i