OK… OK… I’ll stop all these expenses based Charon after a glass pics soon… but I just could not resist this… or the appalling pun in the title. My friend @Sobk13 on twitter with whom I play Scrabble online  will groan and threaten excommunication with this latest one. It has been a day for bizarre interviews. First we had Stephen Fry telling us that the  expenses fiddling didn’t matter ( below ), then we had Lord Foulkes, the Eversheds consultant, asking the BBC news presenter how much she earned and revealing that he couldn’t count when he discovered that she earned £92,000 and gasped  that ” she was being paid nearly twice as much an MP – to come on and talk nonsense”. MPs earn a basic £62k.  I was rather surprised that Lord Foulkes could not count because he was certainly able to do so when the Times reported in January that he was being paid to “effect introductions” for one of the largest law firms in the world ( Eversheds ) And finally, my favourite expense claim interview: About Douglas Hogg  apparently claiming expenses to dredge his moat. Douglas Hogg stridently denied this as he strode down the street followed by a BBC reporter who was almost running to keep up.  Wonderfully surreal.  The film interview is cut with footage of Douglas Hogg’s moat; the camera operator lovingly panning in from the helicopter above Hogg’s estate, lingering on the moat,  as Hogg explained his position – agreed, of course, by  The Commons Fees Office.

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It’s a moat point…

Polly Toynbee has delivered her judgment: I have no idea whether it will be her final pronouncement on the matter because she does have a tendency to reflect on matters over the course of a parliament, or even a day,  and… maybe it is me… but I do enjoy her changes of mind on matters political.   I fear, however, that the Affaire politique de Brown is over… and this is her final pronouncement. I have, it has to be said, been drinking English white wine – sharp, astringent, fruity, 11.5 % (did not do the business for me) – and this may have clouded my otherwise peccable political nose.  Peccable is, of course a word. Sir Walter Scott told me – and he knew a thing or two. Adj. 1. peccable – liable to sin; “a frail and peccable mortal”- Sir Walter Scott 11.30 pm: You have to laugh… Guido Fawkes latest post tonight… +++ Hogg Claimed for Moat Dredging +++

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Peccable political palaver puts PM under pressure….

Lawcast 133: Scott Greenfield, a US criminal defense lawyer on wholesale stealing of blog content from bloggers Today I am talking to Scott Greenfield, a new York criminal defense lawyer and author of the Simple Justice blog. I read his blog most days… it isn’t all about criminal law, it is eclectic, giving a small snapshot as many blogs do about law and life in our times. If there is controversy to be had on the web, Scott is a master of the genre and like a Canadian Mountie…  always gets his man… In a blog post last week entitled USLaw.com: The Verdict Is In Scott wrote as follows… and I quote… “ When I questioned why USLaw.com used my posts, in their entirety, on its website, it caused quite a ruckus.  It seems that the proprietor of USLaw.com, a fellow who uses the name Gregory Chase, though I have good reason to believe it’s a fake, reacted quite poorly.  I was absolutely wrong, he informed me, and I was damaging his business.  He was going to “embarrass” me and tossed slander out (I know, but he apparently isn’t aware of the distinction between slander and libel).” Listen to the podcast *** Podcast version for iTunes

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Lawcast 133: Scott Greenfield, a US criminal defense lawyer on wholesale stealing of blog content from bloggers

BBC – Ministers defend expenses claims

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MP expenses… what a Carry On…

I unashamedly modify my friend The Fat Bigot Opines’ “There’s a goat, let’s scape it”. . for the title of my latest post.  It seems that I may be losing the plot. Many years ago, until I was about 35, I was fairly fit.  A couple of years ago I had an unpleasant illness which I survived and,  fed up with the advice of doctors and pills,  I decided three weeks ago to dispense with both and  that loads of fruit, vegetables and a lot of strength training was needed.  So… I developed a taste for doing press ups while taking a cigarette outside on the top floor of a building.  This graduated to push ups, squats, calf lifts, abs and with a 5Kg dumbell purchased a week ago,  the repertoire increased to all the things one can do with a dumbell.  My muscles grew, the fat started to burn off and now… I have two 20kg dumbells…delivered this very morning by Mr Amazon who was not happy about lugging 100lbs worth of weights up several flights of stairs.   He muttered about lifts when he arrived at my door.  I smiled and said that the lack of a lift (or elevator for my american friends) was a bore, thanked him and waved goodbye.  He looked a bit pale. I am a 30aday Dan…  so each time I smoke, alternating days for upper body and lower body, I do  sets of eight to ten  exercises with reps varying from 20-50 depending on the exercise. I noticed that my stomach was getting bigger.  The thought dawned on me that I should burn off the fat on the waist before doing abdominal crunches! So that is what I shall do. Unfortunately, gentlemen drinkers will know that men put weight on around their gut and it is the last fat to get burned off.  Gentlemen drinkers will only know this, of course, if they have a taste for exercise.  Not all do. I do not exclude women, of course, but I am advised by a very fit woman friend of mine that with women the thighs and the bum is the most difficult to keep under control.  This conjured up images in my mind which I shall not dwell on in this serious law blog. I have also noticed that I appear to have started walking like an australopithicene.  I am told that when the muscles get used to the assault I am putting them through I shall start to walk normally again provided I don’t overdo the thigh exercises. I won’t. I have a rowing machine arriving - a cheap one - to get a bit of cardio done and I’m toying with the idea of getting a bike so that I can exercise and smoke as I go to interesting places on the bike… or even to collect my supplies of cigarettes.  As I  am now a wine reveiwer,  and I am receiving a fair number of bottles to review,  I am in exccelent spirits… so… I am going for the burn… possibly, literally…

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Smokedo: There’s a plot… let’s go and lose it.

News is up on Insite Law. Chinese ordered to smoke more to boost economy Telegraph: Local government officials in China have been ordered to smoke nearly a quarter of a million packs of cigarettes in a move to boost the local economy during the global financial crisis. VOTE IN THE POLL PLEASE: If you have the time/inclination, please scroll down and cast your vote in the Poll on whether you think it is a good idea or a bad idea to merge the Inner temple and Middle Temple libraries….

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6th May: News up on Insite Law

I was looking at my Insite Law Netvibe page for political blogs and decided to visit Boris’s blog.  I just could not resist taking a ‘Snip’ - foie gras delivered to your door said the advert… love it!  Happy Birthday Mayor Boris … indeed. Curiously…  the advert seems to have disappeared when I looked next… perhaps it is on a javascript cycle?

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Happy Birthday Boris…

News up on Insite Law - also major update to Law reports, Profession, Blogs Gordon Brown warned over meltdown of trust after expenses U-turn Loyalist Blunkett joins critics of prime minister over ’self-inflicted wounds’ Guardian: Gordon Brown was warned last night by a loyalist former cabinet minister to fill the void in government policy, avoid self-inflicted wounds and recognise there had been a “catastrophic meltdown of trust” in politics. Police ‘terror searches’ treble BBC: Police stopped and searched three times as many people under anti-terrorism powers in 2007/8 compared to the year before, Home Office figures reveal. Some 124,687 stops and searches were conducted in England and Wales under anti-terror laws, but only 73 - 0.058% - ended in arrests for terror offences. More law news….1st May… US education provider floats £300m BPP acquisition Legal Week reports: ” The parent company of top UK law school BPP looks set to be taken over after a US education provider made a preliminary approach for the company worth £303.5m.” I give a rather sardonic view and plan to write about this in more detail over the next two days….

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1st May: News up on Insite Law

While law and a bit of the red stuff are, shall we say,  interests of mine -  the two together do not always give pleasure.  I was tipped off  by  Thirstforwine (a fellow Twitterer) about the rather absurd behaviour of  Ernst & Julio Gallo who threatened to sue a small Seattle wine and food retailer for importing pasta called ‘Gallo’.  The fact that Gallo is pasta,  and not even people with suspiciously long arms  would confuse pasta with wine, was of little interest to E & J Gallo .  They hired an attorney.  The attorney told The Spanish Table to cease and desist or be sued. I enter a caveat here. I am assuming that the report upon which I draw accurately represents the events that happened - a not unreasonable assumption as the story is still, at the time of writing, online and the online source is a Wine magazine/blog. The retailers, the report states , were shocked that the first contact was through a lawyer and made the entirely reasonable point that had someone from E & J Gallo (and I want you to remember that name) contacted them to discuss their concerns they would have been open to discussion. Rather than face a costly legal fight, the retailers wrote to the attorney asking whether the pasta should be given away to a food bank or be destroyed. E & J Gallo , it seems, wanted more than their pound of pasta.  They wanted name, rank and serial number of the importers of the Gallo pasta…. Ok… I exaggerate… they wanted to know the identity of  the importer of the GALLO pasta. The retailers declined to do so. At this point the reports states “ The Gallo attorney would no longer communicate with them at all, only with their attorney, in essence, forcing them to hire one. They say that they were given an April 16 th deadline to hire an attorney and cease pasta sales, however, Gallo officially filed suit ahead of their own deadline on April 14 th .” While I fully understand and accept that brand owners wish to protect their brands, there is a whiff of the unpleasant about this matter.  Big organisations playing “the heavy” with small organisations is never particularly edifying and less so when  they use oppressive legal tactics and then resile from their own stated plan of action. However, be that as it may…  and whatever the merits in law in that US state may be - my own view, as a wine drinker’  is that E & J Gallo behaved oppressively.  A quick bit of research on Google revealed that Gallo is a fairly common name in Italy, there is a hotel called Gallo, it is a romance language also and there are several types of Gallo pasta. I have drunk wines from  Ernst & Julio Gallo . I would be grateful if you would keep this information to yourselves - lest people  point me out to their families in the street and say ‘”There he is… the man who drank an Ernst & Julio Gallo wine.”   They are not to my taste, although they do… do the business. I am toying now, as I drink a glass of an excellent Rioja - not, of course, produced by E & J Gallo -  about manufacturing suppositories and importing them into the USA.  I shall call them GALL-O .  This, of course, is an acronym for Greased Anal Liquid Laxative - Optimised. Optimised for easy insertion. Perhaps The Spanish Table, the retailer, would like some to send to the attorney when they return his papers?

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Law and wine… not always a pleasure….

While the Swineflu is, undoubtedly, serious - there does seem to be an element of panic creeping into the news..  Here is the perfect remedy.  I use it all the time - especially good for that morning after lift to put a spring in your step and give you that feeling you could eat an entire pig. I am following the matter most carefully and sensibly on Twitter.

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H M Chief Medical Officer may not advise… but I do…