Day: April 28, 2008

If the Address is Legit You Must Acquit

“Your name has been selected by the Jury Commissioners for prospective jury service.”

I’m the sort of person who would normally be very glad to read that. I’ve never served as a juror, and while I do not overestimate the excitement of serving on a jury outside a Hollywood set, I do value the sense of civic duty.

Watch an episode of The West Wing called “In This White House” from early in the second season. It features a strong sense of civic duty, and contains one of twelve Aaron Sorkin moments that’s guaranteed to make me cry.

So I should have been glad to receive a notice about jury duty. Instead, I am just amused. See, the return address on the envelope begins:

“Chittenden County Clerk”

Some of you may not be sufficiently familiar with the geography, so I will introduce three facts:

  1. Boston is in Suffolk County
  2. “Suffolk” is not just another spelling of “Chittenden”
  3. Chittenden County is in Vermont

This leads us to three interesting conclusions.

First, it would be hard to serve on a jury in another state. Unless they have better teleconferencing hardware than I expect.

Second, I could apparently have voted in Vermont for the last two years, while also voting in Boston.

Third, Vermont is comfortable asking me to serve as a juror even though I haven’t paid them any taxes in the last two years. If they think I still live there, shouldn’t that have come to somebody’s attention by now?

Acting!

Rob Reiner: “Jack Nicholson himself – I’ll never forget this – when we did the courtroom scene, when Jack has that famous monologue (‘You can’t handle the truth!’) we did that scene from maybe 15 different angles before we got to him and Jack was off camera for all of these and he said he wanted to do his last. In other words, he wanted us to come around and shoot him after having shot everybody else because it would give him a chance to keep working at it.

“Now, in doing his off-camera performance for everybody else’s reaction he did it full out – every single time, full out.

“And I said, ‘Jack, save a little – save it for the time you’re gonna be on camera….’ And he says:

“‘Rob, you don’t understand. I’m an actor. I love to act, and this is a rare time when I’ve gotten really good material so I can act.'”

One Little, Two Little, Three Little Rows

[bobbojones@test parking] > select count(1) from mbta_passes;
+----------+
| count(1) |
+----------+
|   179399 |
+----------+
1 row in set (27.65 sec)

That’s just not cool.  It took 27.65 seconds to count the number of rows?  Using a small subset of test data?  On a test server that nobody else was using at the time of that query?  That is just not cool.