This whole Tim Horton's thing is just crazy. If you're Canadian, I'm sure you've heard the story. 10-year-old Quebec girl pulls discarded coffee cup from garbage, intending to roll up the rim to see if it's a winning cup. Has trouble with the rolling part, so she recruits a 12-year-old playmate to help her. Voila! She wins an SUV. Only now the parents of the older girl are insisting they should be sharing the prize. Lawyers have been retained.
My instinct on this, having nothing to do with my employment in the legal field, is that the 10-year old should get the car. Actually, there is an age restriction on this, so the car should go to her parents. If I have a 6/49 ticket and ask you to read me the numbers, are you entitled to a share of my winning ticket? Of course not, and that in essence is what the 12-year-old contributed to the victory. She assisted the girl with the winning cup. Arguably, her role is greater because of her physical action; however, the girl could just as easily have carried the dirty cup home to have her parents do it, and none of this would have ever happened.
Adding to the madness is that the teacher who discarded the cup has now retained a lawyer as well, seeking a share of the prize. Said lawyer has gone so far as to write Tim Horton's demanding that the SUV not be delivered until DNA testing is completed on the cup. This is just greed at its ugliest. About all that teacher has a right to do is to beat himself over the head for stupidly throwing away a cup worth over $30,000. This seems really simple to me. If you throw something away, you are making a statement that it has no value to you. If someone else chooses to retrieve that item and find value in it, how can you suddenly come back and claim it. If your car engine dies so that you abandon your vehicle by the side of the road, and then another guy comes along and fixes it, can you suddenly ask for your car back? (A weak analogy, I know.) If that 10-year old had never picked the cup out of the garbage, the teacher would never have known his loss. Was he intending all along to go back and pick up the cup? Would that make a difference? Not to me.
The law is shaped by the things you do and the things you fail to do. It is rarely guided by your intentions to do or not do things. If you intend to kill your wife, but don't - hey, no crime. You're a bad person, but the law doesn't care because you didn't act on it. Likewise, if you do not intend to kill her but do so accidentally, you will still be caught up in the legal system's web until cleared or after serving time. The little girl who retrieved the cup is the only person in this pathetic exercise who acted in accordance with her intentions. Give her the damned vehicle.
* * * * *
Four movies since Friday. Holy crap! The NCAA men's basketball tournament starts this Thursday, so I probably won't watch much other than that over the next few weeks. Here are my capsule comments:
Miracle: Kurt Russell was a great Herb Brooks. But it's a pretty stilted film, manipulative as all hell and jingoistic to the extreme. And I really hate it when a movie plays fast and loose with history. The U.S. gold medal win in 1980 was a great story. Why play games with the facts for dramatic reasons? The truth had drama to spare.
Welcome to Mooseport: Ray Romano is too goofy to be a movie star - he has only one expression that rings true, being a sort of mesmerized goofiness that makes you root for him, even when behaving badly. But this was perfect for this movie, and I really enjoyed it. Gene Hackman is okay as the retired U.S. President. But the real strengths are the supporting players, mainly Rip Torn and Fred Savage as members of Hackman's election team. The final scene between Torn and Romano is priceless.
Monster: Crude and dirty, and possibly brilliant. Charlize Theron is amazing and almost unrecognizable as serial killer Aileen Wuornos. What's fascinating is how this film makes clear that Wuornos started as a victim, defending herself from assault and certain death, but quickly became a predator, enjoying the thrill of killing men, until in the end regret overwhelmed her, but not enough to stop the killing. Then, facing death, she lashed out at the world as if it somehow wasn't her fault. Powerful stuff, and very depressing, but with a strong love story involving Theron and Christina Ricci's characters at the centre.
Monster-in-Law: Weird, huh, how I saw these last two consecutively? Better than I expected, especially Wanda Sykes, who had all the good lines as Jane Fonda's assistant/friend. But Fonda was dreadful, embarrassing really, and JLo and Michael Vartan just dull. Adam Scott is good as JLo's gay friend, and I laughed more than I am willing to admit at Sykes, who has never done anything but annoy me previously. Director Robert Luketic has a good touch for light comedy, as demonstrated previously in Legally Blonde and Win A Date with Tad Hamilton!.
Bring on the roundball!
My instinct on this, having nothing to do with my employment in the legal field, is that the 10-year old should get the car. Actually, there is an age restriction on this, so the car should go to her parents. If I have a 6/49 ticket and ask you to read me the numbers, are you entitled to a share of my winning ticket? Of course not, and that in essence is what the 12-year-old contributed to the victory. She assisted the girl with the winning cup. Arguably, her role is greater because of her physical action; however, the girl could just as easily have carried the dirty cup home to have her parents do it, and none of this would have ever happened.
Adding to the madness is that the teacher who discarded the cup has now retained a lawyer as well, seeking a share of the prize. Said lawyer has gone so far as to write Tim Horton's demanding that the SUV not be delivered until DNA testing is completed on the cup. This is just greed at its ugliest. About all that teacher has a right to do is to beat himself over the head for stupidly throwing away a cup worth over $30,000. This seems really simple to me. If you throw something away, you are making a statement that it has no value to you. If someone else chooses to retrieve that item and find value in it, how can you suddenly come back and claim it. If your car engine dies so that you abandon your vehicle by the side of the road, and then another guy comes along and fixes it, can you suddenly ask for your car back? (A weak analogy, I know.) If that 10-year old had never picked the cup out of the garbage, the teacher would never have known his loss. Was he intending all along to go back and pick up the cup? Would that make a difference? Not to me.
The law is shaped by the things you do and the things you fail to do. It is rarely guided by your intentions to do or not do things. If you intend to kill your wife, but don't - hey, no crime. You're a bad person, but the law doesn't care because you didn't act on it. Likewise, if you do not intend to kill her but do so accidentally, you will still be caught up in the legal system's web until cleared or after serving time. The little girl who retrieved the cup is the only person in this pathetic exercise who acted in accordance with her intentions. Give her the damned vehicle.
* * * * *
Four movies since Friday. Holy crap! The NCAA men's basketball tournament starts this Thursday, so I probably won't watch much other than that over the next few weeks. Here are my capsule comments:
Miracle: Kurt Russell was a great Herb Brooks. But it's a pretty stilted film, manipulative as all hell and jingoistic to the extreme. And I really hate it when a movie plays fast and loose with history. The U.S. gold medal win in 1980 was a great story. Why play games with the facts for dramatic reasons? The truth had drama to spare.
Welcome to Mooseport: Ray Romano is too goofy to be a movie star - he has only one expression that rings true, being a sort of mesmerized goofiness that makes you root for him, even when behaving badly. But this was perfect for this movie, and I really enjoyed it. Gene Hackman is okay as the retired U.S. President. But the real strengths are the supporting players, mainly Rip Torn and Fred Savage as members of Hackman's election team. The final scene between Torn and Romano is priceless.
Monster: Crude and dirty, and possibly brilliant. Charlize Theron is amazing and almost unrecognizable as serial killer Aileen Wuornos. What's fascinating is how this film makes clear that Wuornos started as a victim, defending herself from assault and certain death, but quickly became a predator, enjoying the thrill of killing men, until in the end regret overwhelmed her, but not enough to stop the killing. Then, facing death, she lashed out at the world as if it somehow wasn't her fault. Powerful stuff, and very depressing, but with a strong love story involving Theron and Christina Ricci's characters at the centre.
Monster-in-Law: Weird, huh, how I saw these last two consecutively? Better than I expected, especially Wanda Sykes, who had all the good lines as Jane Fonda's assistant/friend. But Fonda was dreadful, embarrassing really, and JLo and Michael Vartan just dull. Adam Scott is good as JLo's gay friend, and I laughed more than I am willing to admit at Sykes, who has never done anything but annoy me previously. Director Robert Luketic has a good touch for light comedy, as demonstrated previously in Legally Blonde and Win A Date with Tad Hamilton!.
Bring on the roundball!
posted by George @ 12:57 p.m.
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