This is, perhaps, the most ridiculous thing Robert has ever seen.

Actually, this one is funny.

Orioles beat Phillies, 7-2

The Orioles really pitched well tonight, and they took the championship away from the rag-tag underdog Phillies. A team that was in last place at one point during the season took themselves all the way to the championship final. But it was not meant to be.  The sadness ended quickly after the appearance of second-place TROPHIES.  Woo Hoo!

This term the US Supreme Court heard the case of Murphy v. Smith. This is a fun case because it demonstrates how tedious, and one might say small, much of the work of that court really is.  On one day, the Supreme Court decides on fundamental constitutional issues that define the structure of our political system and society, on the next day, in a different case, it parses through the text of an obscure statute trying to figure out what some completely messed up wording written by Congress in the middle of the night was supposed to mean, in order to settle a case in which the parties are fighting over a few thousand dollars. The issues are always important to the parties, but the work of interpreting statutes could often, it seems, be done by a court with less prominence.

In the Murphy case, the court was tasked with making sense of 42 U. S. C. §1997e(d)(2). That federal code section deals with how attorneys fees are paid in lawsuits brought by prisoners. When a prisoner wins a lawsuit against the government, because, for example, he was beaten by a prison guard, he can win a damage award and an award for his attorney’s fees.  Congress decided that despite that award, a prisoner should be required to pay some of his own attorneys fees, and that some of his damage award should be used to pay his attorneys fees.  The statute that Congress wrote uses wording that, when one focuses on it, is totally unclear.

To wit:

“a portion of the [prisoner’s] judgment (not to exceed 25 percent) shall be applied to satisfy the amount of attorney’s fees awarded against the defendant.”

The central question is whether the judge who is deciding upon how much of a plaintiff’s damages award to use for plaintiff’s attorney’s fee is entitled to use his/her discretion in setting that amount, OR, whether, alternatively, s/he must use as much of the damages award as needed to cover the attorneys fees, but never more than 25% of the damages award.

The oral argument is worth a listen because it demonstrates how hard working and serious the justices are, even on minor matters.

Spoiler: Neil Gorsuch wrote in his opinion that the rule is the latter.

The opinion demonstrates how judges go through language with a fine tooth comb, so to speak, in order to determine meaning.  It is also one of those opinions in which the judge strives to add flair to an altogether minor and laborious subject.

The Supreme Court today issued its opinion in Masterpiece Cakeshop. It ruled in favor of the cakeshop owner.  But the court did not really get to the heart of the constitutional matter. May a cakemaker be punished for refusing to make a custom wedding cake for a gay couple if doing so is inconsistent with his firmly held religious beliefs?  We still don’t know. The court ruled merely that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had not treated this particular cakemaker’s religious claims respectfully enough in its proceedings. So, we will need to await a future case, it seems.

Here’s the write up on Scotus Blog.

A “view” from the courtroom: Justice Kennedy’s Master-pièce de résistance

“Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
John Wooden

“Don’t let what you can do interfere with what you want to do.”
Robert Pierce

All-Star tryouts yesterday. Serious stuff.

Robert finds is very difficult to understand why there are so many different racket sports.

In order of glamour:

Honorable mention to miniten, a racket sport developed by nudists in the 1930’s.  Try as he might, Robert could not find a video. Although he found some interesting stuff while searching.

From wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_complements

In mathematics and computing, the method of complements is a technique used to subtract one number from another using only addition of positive numbers. This method was commonly used in mechanical calculators and is still used in modern computers.

The nines’ complement of a number is formed by replacing each digit with nine minus that digit. To subtract a decimal number y (the subtrahend) from another number x (the minuend) two methods may be used:

Decimal example

The nines’ complement of a decimal digit is the number that must be added to it to produce 9; the complement of 3 is 6, the complement of 7 is 2, and so on, see table. To form the nines’ complement of a larger number, each digit is replaced by its nines’ complement.

Consider the following subtraction problem:

  873  (x, the minuend)
- 218  (y, the subtrahend)

First method

We compute the nines’ complement of the minuend, 873. Add that to the subtrahend 218, then calculate the nines’ complement of the result.

  126  (nines' complement of x)
+ 218  (y, the subtrahend)

=

  344

Now calculate the nines’ complement of the result

  344 (result)
  655 (nine's complement of result, the correct answer)

Cadie Writing-Second Grade

Ronald Reagan Bio-Rory

What’s on Rory’s mind?