IMO, back then and now, lawyer Vince Courtney got outfoxed* by a layperson.**
But You Make The Call:
I don’t know, if I were a certain attorney, I’d let sleeping dogs lie.
But that’s just me…
*I can explain to you how “street mediation” works, you know, when conducted by peace officers in this kind of situation. Could this lawyer have been arrested? I don’t know. But he seemed afraid of something.
**I mean, he just pushed and pushed until he got the most he could possibly get, and he got it all recorded, and then posted it for tout le monde to see. That’s called advocacy.
Anyway, if you go down to Chinatown, I don’t know, maybe around Grant Ave. and Washington, and you start punching the Falun types, well, you just end up in Community Court and then be forced to write insincere apology notes, and to attend Anger Management courses, and to keep away from Grant Ave. and Washington.
“Yongyao Wu (right) assaults Falun Gong practitioner Derek Wang in San Francisco’s Chinatown on June 10. Wu was found guilty by a Neighborhood Court on Aug. 13. (Courtesy of anonymous bystander)”
Click to expand
So, I sort of knew about this sitch, but I didn’t know how things turned out.
Obviously, not every shooting that occurs in the 415 during the last weekend in June is a “Pride Shooting.” Obviously.
Anyway, take a look at both sides of this issue and decide which one you’re on.
Now, do I think that the San Francisco Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration Committee, Inc. has been run poorly?
Yep.
Does it benefit in me in any way shape or form to say that?
Nope.
Do I think that the people behind Pride should be looking within instead of lashing out?
Mmmm…
“Dear Mr. Wilton:
I am General Counsel for the San Francisco Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration Committee, Inc. (“SF Pride”), the producer of San Francisco Pride and the owner of the trademark “SF Pride, among other valuable marks.
The YouTube video that you filmed and display athttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOfz0zxDdNc falsely states that there was a “shooting at Pride 2011″. The police and the media have all confirmed and made affirmative public statements that the shooting that happened on Saturday evening, June 25th WAS NOT AT SF PRIDE and was not connected the Pride Festival.
Your YouTube posting falsely claims in the title and in the introductory splash page at 0:01-0:06. In fact, the shooting was NOT on the SF Pride festival grounds and was not related to SF Pride, or the Pride Festival, or any LGBT issue or concern.
You did not, for example, title your video “shooting in front of Apple iPad advertisement.” Nothing in the video has any connection with SF Pride or the Pride festivities. You simply chose to sensationalize your posting by wrongly associating a violent tragedy with the safe and peaceful, SF Pride. Your advertising harms SF Pride by that false association. It harms SF Pride’s ability to attract attendees and sponsors for future events by creating the false impression that the event and festival were the site of a violent shooting.
Your video constitutes false advertising from an attorney, trade libel, and constitutes tortious interference with SF Pride’s prospective economic advantage by associated its safe event with this tragic and entirely unrelated incident.
According to YouTube, over 3,200 have viewed this outrageous misrepresentation already. Specifically:
SF Pride demands that you at once do the following or we will take all other necessary and appropriate legal action:
1. Take down the above referenced video.
2. Replace it with an affirmative public apology to SF Pride for wrongly associating it with violence, and clarifying that the shooting on Market Street had nothing to do with the SF Pride festival, and was blocks away from it;
3. Pay SF Pride $10,000 in damages and costs. Any delay will certainly see this amount increase.
Very Sincerely, Brooke Oliver Outside General Counsel, San Francisco Pride”
“I owe you an apology. Not for prosecuting you for allegedly taking a $2,500 necklace that wasn’t yours – I know, I know, you think the entire universe is a swag display case – or for those previous drunk-driving arrests. I hope there are no hard feelings; I gotta do what I gotta do, though I do appreciate your showing up for your day in court in that white dress last week. Wow. “What I must apologize for is the fact that you’re being compared to me these days. You may deserve a bad rap, along with your growing rap sheet, but such comparisons between your troubles as a famous actress and pop singer and mine – as a 162-year-old state – are malicious, and terribly unfair.
“To you.
“Last year, the Wall Street Journal, in describing my well-known maladies, called California “the Lindsay Lohan of states.” The newspaper explained that you and I are each like “the prima donna who once showed some talent but is now too wasted to do anything with it.” Unfortunately for you, this metaphor caught fire on the Internet and spread to media outlets, from the Atlantic Monthly to your hometown Los Angeles Times.
(I think I’m satisfied with that headline.) All right there’s this guy, let’s call him Manatease, who functions as our Department of Recreation and Park‘s number one social gadfly - I bump into him from time to time. And there’s this other guy who now runs the RPD - I think I might have been at his law school* the same time he was, a year or two apart maybe. O.K. then.
Apparently, one of them was haranguing the other in or around RPD HQ last week and that somehow led to an incident betwixt Manatease and a lawyer for the gardener’s union. Now, that’s not on tape, but the rest of it, including a humiliating apology, was recorded by some kind of beltcam or something.
I’ll tell you, I don’t share Manatease’s world-view, really. I mean I agree with some of his positions (like the advisability of charging foreigners $7 to get into Strybing Arboretum, coming soon) and disagree with others (like the idea of using park property to make a few bucks off of Peter Pan) [UPDATE: Well, I suppose I could have phrased this in a different way - I object neither to the general concept nor to this particular execution of using Sue Bierman Park, aka Ferry Park, aka Fairy Park, to put on Peter Pan].
But it’s Mantease’s right to “disrupt” the plans of RPD, correct?
A skinned knee perhaps but the quick brown red fox lives to fight another day. This is what the foxes of the San Francisco Botanical Garden looked like back in the day, back before I decided to never again step foot in the joint. As seen in the New World Cloud Forest:
I think the YouTube clip speaks for itself, but stay tuned for all the deets (from Manatease’s point of view, anyway), after the jump.
*Back in the day when it was a dirt-cheap** top-20 law school. (It’s neither of those things now….)
**For CA residents, that is - the price of tuition was less than ten percent of what USC’s was, back in the day. Those days are over, never to return. Oh well.
No matter, on to Oprah. Next stop, Larry King!(Srsly.)
Of course, last year the North Koreans wanted Barack Obama to swing on by Pyongyang for what turned out to be the inevitable pick-up / photo-op. And, of course, Al Gore didn’t rate, seeing as how the people of NK wouldn’t really be all that impressed by him. So, there was this visit by Bill Clinton, which, who knows, maybe it led to or will lead to something good.
But I don’t think it has yet and, most likely, it never will. So, you two didn’t pull a Homer, after all, right?
And actually, in exchange for nothing, the current North Korean government got something it really, really wanted, something that allows it to, if ever so slightly more, maintain its grip on power.
Do people generally think this train wreck was a Good Thing?
“I was doing a scene where my ex-military boyfriend gets in a fight, and it was scripted that I just stand there … I just got involved. I pulled one actor off of another and they loved it. They said, ‘Keep doing it.’ We did it 12 times and I didn’t realize on the first take I broke my finger.”
Take a look for yourself to see dude just drive off the Bay Bridge due to a moment’s inattention in last night’s episode of NBC’s Trauma serial. (Do you think you’d survive after falling so far inside a Jeep Cherokee Classic? I don’t think it’d be possible, but maybe the breast implants inside the car softened the jolt or something.)
“The problem started at 9 p.m., with the previously sorta-canceled “Trauma” (1.4/3) returning from the grave as a Nielsen zombie. It hit its lowest rating yet, falling 22 percent from its fall average and 13 percent from its last original. It wouldn’t be shocking if NBC decided to quickly replace “Trauma” in the timeslot. That’s because “Trauma” tainted “L&O,” which managed a third-place 1.5/4 at 10 p.m. — down 25 percent from last week, when NBC aired a double dose of the drama from 9-11 p.m. Worse, “L&O” was actually off 6 percent from what “The Jay Leno Show” had been averaging at 10 p.m. Mondays.
“NBC — which actually did quite well last week, given the fact that it had to fill 5 hours of primetime post-Jay– does not want to see any negative Leno-to-scripted comparisons at 10 p.m. Period.”
Not saying I would or could do a better job, but maybe the whole concept of shooting this kind of old-school TV show on location on the Streets of San Francisco was a bad idea? Is that possible?
On It Goes. How much longer will this Great San Francisco Nielsen Zombie last?
“I’m going to wear a powder blue fucking suit, and a white shirt and a red tie and a fucking breast cancer pin…”
Comes now the fight loser “Michael” (who appears to be on a first-name-only basis with DJ “JV“):
“First of all, I’d like to aPOlogize to AC Transit…”
It goes on and on, Black History Month, 5150, bygones, veterans, arthritis, murder, parole, apologies, brothers, stolen money, leaking, ass kicking, Strike Force(?) Showtime TV, 10,000 kids, cocaine - it goes on and on.
Can’t remember which morning-zoo / dawg-pound joint this screengrab came from. Oh yes, it was from WILD 94.9 FM:
