Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Not for Lance. His hemoglobin unnaturally oxygenated, Lance was going to hop on his banana seat and literally ride off into the sunset. He was just going to take his ball and go home. And other jokes about his chosen profession and/or lack of testicles, plural.
Tomorrow, Lance Armstrong appears before our nation’s high priestess of contrition to blubber and wail. Lance Armstrong cheated in a sport that very few people in this country care about. I’ve written about this before. And before that. I have great difficulty ginning up the proper amount of outrage, schadenfreude, or whatever it is you’re supposed to feel when a world class athlete and jerk gets nailed like this.
It’s for this reason that the home stretch of this column will be written by a guest columnist. This writer was well-known for thriving in a sport that, like cycling, was similarly plagued by drug abuse and scandal.
The maglia nera, or black jersey, is a “prize” that was awarded to a cyclist in the Giro d’Italia from 1946 to 1951. The “winner” of the black jersey was the cyclist who finished last. The first man to “win” the black jersey was Luigi Malabrocca, who managed to double the amount of time it took him to finish the race when he won/lost his second black jersey.
“Especially noted are the struggles between Sante Carollo and Luigi Malabrocca, to see who could waste the most time,” according to the Wikipedia entry for the maglia nera. “Each tried to lose more time than the other by hiding in bars, barns, and behind hedges, or even by puncturing their own wheels.”
This is just great. The wiki entry also notes that one winner was lauded for finishing the race despite suffering a broken hand and having to push his bike uphill during mountain stages. The jersey, you see, was not just won by clowns, but also by sad clowns. The entirety of our pointless struggle seems to have been contained in this maglia nera.
And by our pointless struggle, I mean the legal profession….
* Sorry, I don’t like bike dudes; so many cyclists are rude, irresponsible, and annoying, to both pedestrians and drivers. If I were king, they’d go to prison; but I’m not, so we’ll have to settle for reeducation. [New York Times]
* What does Bruce Springsteen think of Obamacare? [Althouse]
* A few jurisdictions have laws against “attractiveness discrimination.” Try to guess which ones, then click on the link to see if you’re right. [What About Clients?]
* Larry Lessig and Ilya Shapiro debate the value of disclosure requirements in the campaign finance context. [Lean Forward / MSNBC]
Yesterday, we brought you news of a rather lengthy lawsuit that was filed by professional cyclist Lance Armstrong against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). The sports agency had accused Armstrong of doping during his time as a record-setting Tour de France champion, despite the fact that the athlete claimed to have been drug tested more than 500 times in his career, never once yielding a positive result.
Alas, it seems that Armstrong’s dreams of vilifying the USADA were quickly crushed, less than seven hours after his suit was filed. As we sarcastically noted in Morning Docket, perhaps we ought to look into judicial doping, because the suit was dismissed with a quickness we’ve never seen before. But in all seriousness, while a land speed record for benchslapping may have been achieved, it can only be attributed to Judge Sam Sparks’s incredibly quick wit and low tolerance for bullsh*t.
Let’s take a look at the Benchslap King’s Order in a case that managed to grab national media attention just as swiftly as Judge Sparks slapped it down….
Lance Armstrong has done many regrettable things in his career as a professional cyclist (e.g., dumping Kate Hudson, breaking up with Sheryl Crow, hooking up with an Olsen twin), but he remains consistent in his claims that he has never used performance-enhancing drugs.
That’s why Armstrong was absolutely enraged when the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) decided to formally charge him with doping at the end of June. If found guilty, the Livestrong legend could be stripped of all seven of his Tour de France titles, forced to turn over all of the money he won from 1999-2005, and banned from Olympic sports for life.
In response, Armstrong took to Twitter to criticize the USADA by linking to an Above the Law story, revealing the identity of Calvin Clark Griffith, one of the formerly anonymous members of his Review Board. If you recall, Griffith was accused of exposing himself to a law student, and entered an Alford plea in mid-June.
Today, Armstrong continued his assault upon the USADA by suing in federal court, with claims of the Agency’s various violations of his constitutional rights. Let’s take a look at the allegations….
On Friday evening, we briefly mentioned the tragic news of a bicyclist getting struck and killed in an apparent hit-and-run incident. An attorney from the San Francisco Bay Area was arrested, accused of being the responsible (or not-so-responsible) driver.
This is the kind of story that gives attorneys in general a bad reputation. It’s got everything: possible deceitfulness, apparent lack of ethics, and a fancy car. The vehicle in question wasn’t some junky scraper, but a brand-new Mercedes.
You can’t make this stuff up — unless you want to be accused of ripping off Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities (affiliate link)…
So, I finally caught Your Body On Drugs, the Discovery channel program narrated by Robin Williams in which scientists make people who are high on drugs perform various tasks. Frankly, I thought it would be a little bit better — like, American Gladiator, only with people on cocaine instead of steroids.
Anyway, there’s this part where the cokehead is saying cokehead things, and Robin Williams says something like “cocaine gives the users an inflated sense of self-confidence.” Then the cokehead puts together a bookshelf by balancing the wood in a general cube shape instead of actually screwing things in; it looks great but can’t actually hold any books. At the time, I thought, “Man, this is like going to UVA Law School.”
Oh, I kid, UVA Law students. But between the alleged criminal activity of current students, alleged tall tales told by former students, and all the popped collars, you gotta ask if a little humility might do the campus good?
A few weeks ago, I was drinking an Old Cuban with my roommate at my favorite bar, Grand Tavern. We were sitting on the back patio, when a group of men across from us started talking loudly about Above the Law. My ears perked up, and I began wondering if I might overhear something like this or this.
Fortunately for the gentlemen across the bar, I didn’t hear anything scandalous. Fortunately for me, I did hear them mention Brian Smith, a former associate at Nixon Peabody, who opened the doors to his new business, Huckleberry Bicycles, last Friday in San Francisco.
I met up with Smith last week, and we spoke about how he became a part of our growing club of lawyers not practicing law….
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The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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