Friday Follies 1.0

Welcome to the first installment of a new feature which will appear occasionally, hopefully once or twice a month. It’s a compilation of things I’ve come across that struck me as inane, frivolous, asinine or any combination of similar adjectives. Many will be legal related, thanks in part to some already existing blogs that keep better track of things like this than I do, with a particular tip of the hat to Overlawyered. These will appear on Friday because that tends to be the best day of the work week. This will be my blog version of “fountain pop Friday” (if you don’t know what it is, you wouldn’t understand), of a good way to head in to the weekend.

Here’s the first entrants:

• A former New York City teacher’s aide is suing a grammar school student for running into her with an ice cream cone in the halls when he was eight years old. The suit claims students were specifically told not to run for ice cream and that eight-year-old Joseph didn’t follow the rules.
• A Texas state legislator had an interesting asinine idea in a discussion of voter identification legislation. “Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?,” Rep. Betty Brown, a Republican from Terrell, Tex., told a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans who testified on the bill.
• A Minnesota pet sitter accused of abuse for allowing a potbellied pig to triple its weight has received a year’s probation and must repay veterinary bills that could exceed $1,000.
• “A 78-year-old Monroe (Wisc.) woman who was banned from a city-owned senior center in Monroe after complaining about how a card game was being scored filed a federal lawsuit against the facility, alleging the center violated her free speech rights and that its code of conduct is vague and overly broad.”
• A Quebec father lost an appeal of a June 2008 court decision that said his grounding of his 12-year-old daughter was too severe for the wrongs he said his daughter committed.

“Ship of Fools,” Grateful Dead, From the Mars Hotel