I spent part of the morning waiting in a hall in what used to be called the Criminal Courts Building, and is now called the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center. It has not been cleaned, and the elevators have not been repaired, since I worked in the building in 1989.

I arrived quite early, and waited for the courtroom to open. As I did so, an unkempt and morose-looking young man sitting on a nearby bench in the sparsely-populated hall was trying out ringtones on his phone. One by one. At full volume. From an apparently vast library.

I considered, and rejected, the possibility of approaching him. Prudent people do not approach odd strangers in criminal courthouses to complain about their conduct.

I also considered going and telling a guard that I had just been in the restroom and had observed the young man removing a shiv from some bodily orifice, and that he seemed twitchy and upset.

The better angels of my nature — one of which is entrenched sloth — won out.

The young man eventually chose a ringtone that sounded like an air raid siren, and tested it out several times.

I am given to understand that in an Objectivist society I would be allowed to have my servants shoot him. Pity.

Occasionally life gives you pop quizzes, which you fail.

This weekend, life's pop quiz was "Hey, Ken, since it's National Adoption Month, do you think you could model how to react positively and constructively to challenging or uncomfortable adoption-related social situations?"

My answer: KEN SMASH KEN SMASH KEN SMASH.

That wasn't the right answer. Not even partial credit.

Many timeson this blog, I've talked about the social challenge that adoptive parents face in responding to rude questions in public, and how uncomfortable those situations can make us. I've admitted fantasies about telling rude people off, but maintained that adoptive parents should generally opt for education or avoidance over confrontation in order to avoid conveying to our children that there is something upsetting or shameful about adoption. It's much better for our kids to say "Actually, that's personal" or "whyever do you ask" than to say "go screw yourself, you nosy twit", however viscerally satisfying the latter is.

Yeah, well. About that.

When it came to it, on a sunny November Saturday watching my son play soccer, I blew it.

Now, I was provoked. But like I said earlier today, provocation is not an excuse.

I was sitting there in the sun when a father watching a game on the next field started up with me. He was an aging jock type, Al Bundy in sweats and a smirk. "Is that your son?" Yes. "Really?" Yes. "I mean — that kid there. He's really your son?" [smirk] Uh-huh. "Yeah, that kid?" [smirk] "Because he's — you know." Huh. [More smirks.] Then, "Hey, I'm just askin'. Am I not being PC?" No, you're fine.

If I had left it at "no, you're fine," he would have lost interest at my lack of response and wandered off. But I added ". . . I mean, considering." And he picked up on it, and followed up, and asked what I meant, and it went downhill from there. I won't describe it at length, because it would defeat the purpose of advocating against smacking down rude people about adoption in public near our kids and in favor of either educating or avoiding. Suffice it to say: (1) I said he was fine, considering his capacities, and that I supported people like him being mainstreamed, and did they bring him on a bus from his group home, and so on [I was thinking of crazy people, but in retrospect it sounds like a joke about the mentally handicapped, which is embarrassing to me], (2) he blustered and threatened and got red in the face, (3) I said a number of things that were cutting and a number of things that were merely angry or incoherent, among them "that depends on the color of your ear," [very sure I said it, seemed very a propos at the time, no idea what it means], and (4) people started to notice and look concerned and there was the possibility of getting into a fistfight for the first time in decades, and (5) eventually something happened on his son's game and he cussed at me and pointed at me and threatened some more and went off to look after his son.

So. Not my brightest hour. The saving grace: Evan was on the field and didn't notice.

Did it feel good at the time, to confront him and cut at him and score points off of him? God, yes. It felt great. But I sure as Hell didn't impress any of the parents or kids in earshot about adoption being a normal, positive thing. I made them think of this adoptive parent as being angry and out of control. And I helped solidify in their mind the idea that cross-racial adoption is somehow upsetting and Other. Plus, had my son been there, and observed it, he would have picked up that there was something very upsetting, and maybe shameful, and controversial, about me being his father.

The guy was trying to get my goat. He got it. I'll try to do better next time. But I can't promise anything.

I'm not really a guy who thinks that the women of the world require special protection from hurt feelings, particularly special protection provided by me.

However . . .

The profession of law — and especially civil litigation — has well more than its share of middle-aged men with serious personality deficits that emerge when they deal with female lawyers, especially young female lawyers. Those personality deficits express themselves through bullying, shouting, sneering condescension, sniping, and a wide variety of other unprofessional and unpleasant behavior — all of it focused at young female attorneys with a vigor and emphasis that is highly noticeable even when said middle-aged men are assholes to everyone.

My young female associates can take care of themselves. They are smart and competent. They are adults.

However . . .

My name is on the door. It got there because I am, all humility aside, pretty good at what I do. Within my skill-set is the ability to humiliate sad-sack personality disordered middle-aged men who work out their inadequacy issues by bullying young female associates. That ability includes humiliating said sad-sacks on paper, humiliating them in front of clients, and humiliating them in front of judges, as well as making litigation as miserable and stomach-twisting experience for them. I have the ability to convey to opposing clients that they are going to get an less desirable settlement or result than they otherwise would because they chose a douchebag for a lawyer. I have the ability to do all of that without getting sanctioned, within the bounds of the law.

Women are not tender flowers needing special protection from meanies. I do not view my young female associates as inferior to young male associates in any way.

However . . .

There are limits to my enlightenment. If you make one of them cry, I am going to make you pay. Count on it.

Me: [Prolonged rant about opposing counsel's inability to understand simple rule of civil procedure]

Associate: "Serenity now," Ken.

Me: See, that just makes me MADDER. STUPID FOX NETWORK!

Crowd of Associates: [Perplexed and concerned silence]

Me: It's a geek thing. You wouldn't understand.

Crowd of Associates: [Darting confused glances at each other.]

Me: BACK TO WORK! BACK TO WORK!

Sometimes Dateline NBC and all of its crime-related spinoffs, 20/20, and other newsmagazines have interesting and informative true-crime stories. But I find them impossible to watch.

Why?

Because they appear to be scripted for the benefit of someone who has suffered mild brain damage resulting in grave short-term-memory deficits and a compulsive need to shop.

9:01:00 p.m. "This is a story about a woman who was murdered. Here's the story: there once was a woman. Up next, we'll tell you about how she met someone."

9:05:00 p.m. [Commercials]

9:10:00 p.m. "Earlier we established that there once was a woman. Let us remind you about this woman, and how she once, in fact, was. Then she met someone! Up next, the someone initially seemed nice."

9:15:00 p.m. [Commercials]

9:20:00 p.m. "This is extremely complicated, so for the love of God please try to bear with us if you can. There. once. was. this. woman. And … and this is the important part … she MET someone. Look how very nice that person was! Nice to the woman, that is. The woman who was. Up next, a suggestion that the person she met was not nice after all.

9:25:00 [Commercials]

9:30:00 "Look, we'd better just start over."

At this point I want to stand on the couch and scream GET TO THE FUCKING POINT. You can't even fast-forward with it, because the mindless review and rereveiew and rerereview and preview is interwoven with everything else.

Look, I understand that you need to fill up an hour — occasionally two — with a simple story of X meets Y, Y kills X, X is acquitted or convicted. Couldn't you maybe tell three or four of those stories per hour?

Why would you ask me that, or post a question about it, if you can Google it?

Is it really for the pleasure of my company?

Dear folks who use quotation marks inappropriately:

Don't make "me" come over "there" and "kick" you in the "nuts."

Many more "here."

Here's some free legal advice regarding plausible defense strategies:

If you are a well-known "professional wrestler" who "fights" under the name "Rampage Jackson," and you drive a big-ass truck that has your name and picture on it, like so:

Then there is probably not much of a point in fleeing the scene on foot when you run into somebody with the truck.

They're going to figure it out.

Sit down, have a smoke, look up your probation officer's phone number. Maybe call your agent. Just chill.

We're moving to newly-constructed space within our building, and since the construction plans and permits were filed, we've been deluged with cold calls from art consultants and moving specialists and IT firms and people with their hand out of every stripe.

And insurance agents. Lots and lots and lots of unsolicited insurance agents, trying to sell us new or different insurance.

Many of these are rude. My office is near where our office manager and head secretary sit, and I hear them dealing with these people, who have an issue taking no for an answer, and who like to insist that they must speak to a higher-up decision maker. I hate it when telemarketing vermin is rude to the people I work with, all of whom are marvelous and decent.

So a few minutes ago I hear our office manager — a terribly kind person — remonstrating with an insurance agent and saying something about not wanting to talk with them, and obviously getting nowhere.

There's a roaring in my ears and the blood-dimmed tide is loosed and obscures my vision and adrenaline surges and I stand up and walk out of my office and over to her desk and hold my hand out for the phone and say "May I?" She hands me the phone with a look of gratitude and says "please." I pick up the phone and take a deep breath and tell the person on the other end that this is Ken, as in the firm of Notken and Ken that she is calling, and I want to speak with a supervisor immediately. There is a long pause and she says "…okay" and then Kenny G comes on for a while.

I'm taking slow, deep breaths and meticulously plotting what I'm going to say next, which is going to be something like this: "You're going to take us off your calling list, and if we get a call again, I'm going to school your company in how we can sue you without cost for violations of the Telemarketing Rule from the Code of Federal Regulations, plus nine or ten state and federal statutes I'm going to figure out by then. PLUS I'm going to make a web page, optimize it for search engines so it pops up whenever anyone Googles your company's name, and populate it with discussions of how you (a) illegally harass people with rude unsolicited marketing of shitty products and (b) fellate diseased goats. FURTHERMORE . . . ."

At this point in my mental drafting of remarks to follow — which is internally drowning out Kenny G — my office manager says, "Uh, Ken . . . you know thats about MY insurance, right?"

"Huh?"

"Yeah, I got in an accident last night. It was totally the other lady's fault. But now her insurance company's being really rude about it."

Hmmmmm.

"Maybe you should handle that after all, then," I say, and she nods and gently takes the phone back from me and hangs it up and sits looking at me, hands folded.

"All right then. Carry on!" I say. I return to my office and close the door.

For the record, public humiliation causes the blood-dimmed tide to recede very quickly.

Roman Polanski is in the news again, thanks to the rather sympathetic treatment he got in the new HBO-run documentary "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired." Today the L.A. Times reported that the documentary's ending was changed after the debunking of one of the most explosive accusations – that a stardom-hungry judge offered him a deal with no jail time if the proceedings could be televised.

In the wake of the recent soft-focus camerawork on Polanski, The Smoking Gun does what it does best — it goes to the documents. Today they give us the grand jury testimony of the 13-year-old victim, whom Polanski photographed nude and supplied with alcohol and quaaludes before ignoring her refusals and raping her vaginally and anally. The testimony shows a straight-up case of the rape of a 13-year-old.

The documentary's central conceit — and Polanski's long-standing complaint — is that the judge who was to sentence him was a rogue and would have hammered him with a long sentence for self-promoting reasons. But this does not make Polanski even marginally more of a sympathetic figure. Polanski had the same rights and remedies available to any other defendant — a motion to disqualify the judge if he had evidence of genuine misconduct, an appeal, a habeas corpus motion. Facing a capricious judge does not make Polanski even a little bit unusual or special. What makes him unusual and special is that he had the resources to flee the country and live in luxury, and that he enjoyed continuing artistic and cultural adulation despite the fact that he had, even if you only focus on what he admitted to, screwed an under-the-influence 13-year-old.

Polanski is no hero. He's a child-rapist who used his wealth and power to evade justice. Bear that in mind as you see fawning discussions like this contemptible one by Tom Shales, which is almost French in its air of amusement and indifference about what Polanski did.

On his blog, Wil Wheaton describes an encounter with an inconsiderate asshole at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl:

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Because my alternative is to shut my head in a white-hot George Foreman Grill until the burn marks erase my increasing resemblance to Karl Rove.

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Really, seriously, just shut the fuck up.

The weekly scenario:

1. Potential client calls and explains cops/FBI/IRS/etc. are asking to interview him. He's not sure if he is in trouble. We discuss how we could help, what our strategy for dealing with the situation would be, our rates, etc. Potential client decides to think about it. We tell potential client, "Whatever you do, don't talk to the cops/FBI/IRS/etc. until you have hired somebody, even if it isn't us."

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I need to get a grip.

I was extremely irritable yesterday morning. I had to cancel Saturday afternoon plans and come into work and work until 2 in the morning because a client freaked out irrationally and demanded a project be done NOW. Said client then disappeared and didn't answer phone or emails, rendering the quick work moot.

Plus, I was preparing to fly to Texas for a deposition, getting there at 11 pm and returning to LA at 11 pm the next night.

Plus, I got up at 430 to take my Dad to the hostpial. Nothing serious.

So I go to court to cover two hearings and am parking and in a seriously bad mood.

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