Last week, we alerted you that we here at Abnormal Use would be present at the DRI Product Liability Conference in Las Vegas. Well, in keeping with that recent tradition, we will also find ourselves at this week’s Hospitality Law Conference in Houston, Texas. Accordingly, if you’re in the Lone Star State for this seminar, please seek us out and introduce yourself.

Just like last week, our editor, Jim Dedman, will be live tweeting this conference. You can follow him either at his personal Twitter account, @JimDedman, or our firm’s official Twitter account, @GWBLawFirm. If you yourself are on Twitter, please check it out and send us a note. A bonus: Jim may still have some of snazzy promotional materials to distribute.

We look forward to seeing you there!

As we previously mentioned, we here at Abnormal Use are in Las Vegas this week for the DRI Products Liability Conference. Accordingly, we present you with the cover of Godzilla #9, published way, way back in 1978. As you can see, Godzilla is not too please with Las Vegas, and you know the city is in trouble when the comic book storyline is titled “Last Gamble in Las Vegas.

By the way, you can read up on the Products Liability Conference by searching the #DRIProducts hashtag on Twitter.

Spoiler Alert: Next week, we will be at the Hospitality Law Conference in Houston, Texas. If you see us, say hello!

Well, I guess we’re going to have to watch “Better Call Saul,” the “Breaking Bad” prequel spin-off featuring Walter White’s infamous attorney, Saul Goodman. Let us know your thoughts, if any, when and if you watch it.

We here at Abnormal Use have been writing about products liability cases for five years now. So, it may not surprise you, dear readers, that we will be attending the 2015 DRI Product Liability Conference this week in Las Vegas, Nevada. As you may suspect, we here at the blog and at Gallivan, White, & Boyd, P.A. are big fans of DRI and remain very active in that organization. So, our editor, Jim Dedman, will be at this week’s products liability conference. If you see him, please introduce yourself. He may even have with him some snazzy promotional materials we created in support of our blogging efforts. (Jim is also the vice chair for newsletters for the DRI Product Liability Committee.).

If Jim follows tradition, he will be live tweeting at least some portions of the conference. You can follow him either at his personal Twitter account, @JimDedman, or our firm’s official Twitter account, @GWBLawFirm. If you yourself are on Twitter (and surely you must be), please check it out and send us a note.

So, it’s Monday, and it’s Groundhog Day (again).

Perhaps we’re leaning on the holiday for an easy post today. But we here at Abnormal Use feel compelled to recognize the occasion.

We’ve not done many Groundhog Day posts in the past, but if you’re interested, you can see our earlier musings on the subject here. In fact, in that 2012 post, we noted:

Well, it’s Groundhog Day, again. We here at Abnormal Use are immense fans of the Bill Murray film by that name (and in fact, our editor even saw it at the theatre as part of a pre-release sneak preview!).  One thing we litigators can enjoy is the fact that each day presents a new challenge.  On Tuesday, it’s the deposition of a Plaintiff in a products case. On Wednesday, it’s a hearing on this, that, or the other. On Thursday, it’s a mediation.  On Friday, it’s something entirely different, maybe trial.  So, unlike Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, we can usually avoid the quotidian monotony depicted in the film and be thankful that every day is, usually, quite different from the one before.

See how we tied Groundhog Day to the perils of litigation? How about that? This is why we love blogging.

Be certain to have a festive day, and let’s hope it’s not six more weeks of winter.

Although we’ve previously written about Lou Reed’s Mistrial album, we were previously unfamiliar with this bootleg, Lou Reed On Trial . . . (which notes that it was “as recorded by his lawyer.”) You can read a bit more about this album over at Discogs (a valuable site for those obsessed with music and rare albums). It was recorded live in Philadelphia in 1989, apparently, and of course, he played the song “Mistrial” at the concert in question. Sadly, we here at Abnormal Use were never able to see Lou Reed live. Alas.

On a somewhat related music note, we missed the fortieth anniversary of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. A fantastic album, that. (Hat Tip: Ben Dungan).

Here’s an interesting article from Connectivity: “How to Live-Tweet a Conference.” As you’ll soon see, this may come in handy.

Well, since Google Fiber is apparently coming to North Carolina, we’ll have to start reading the Google Fiber Blog. (Hat Tip: Erik Mazzone).

Two weeks from today, on February 13, 2015, the Charlotte School of Law’s Law Review is sponsoring a symposium entitled “For Your Eyes Only: Where Privacy Ends and the Law Begins.” For more information on that event (including the ripped from the headlines program agenda), click here.

Our favorite tweet of the week is from our editor:

Were an expert to opine that there is no greater song than David Bowie’s “Heroes,” the proposed testimony would survive a Daubert challenge.

— Jim Dedman (@JimDedman) January 28, 2015

What is happening on the cover of Action Comics Annual #3, published not so long ago in 1991? Apparently, Superman ran for President of the United States and won! (We wonder if he had any primary opponents.). Well, for more information on the plot of this fateful issue, we once again turn to ComicVine:

Waverider decides Superman is too powerful not to look into his future again. This time he sees a future where Superman has run for President and won. While in office, he is able to bring peace to the world. upon announcing to his superhero colleagues that the world is going to disarm all nuclear weapons, starting with America, Guy Gardner calls him a traitor and attacks him. During the battle, Superman is able to take control of Guy Gardner’s power ring, and after taking Gardner into custody, the other Green Lanterns from Earth offer to let Superman keep the ring. Waverider watches as Superman turns it down citing power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Seeing this makes Waverider realize Superman would never become the Monarch, so he decides to never bother Superman again.

Deciding never to bother Superman again sounds like a good idea. We wonder how Superman achieved disarmament and whether it was the same approach he took in the 1987 film, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. See here for that method:

Ah, 1987. Those were the days.

In case you missed it, the City of Charlotte, North Carolina may be loosening its food truck regulations. For more on that story, see here.

Since this is a products liability blog, we must ask: Are any of you, our dear readers, planning to attend the DRI Product Liability Conference in Las Vegas next month?

Finally, here’s our favorite tweet of late (authored by South Carolina lawyer Kirsten Small):

Tip of the day: iPhones do not like coffee.

— Kirsten Small (@SCAppeals) January 16, 2015

Our fearless leader here at Gallivan, White, & Boyd, P.A. – Mills Gallivan himself – had an editorial published in The Post & Courier, Charleston’s newspaper, yesterday. The topic: Judiciary funding. Here are the first two paragraphs of the piece:

I have a lawyer friend who loves to avoid ownership by quipping, “Not my problem.” Sometimes he is right, but more often he is just hopeful that the problem will resolve itself without him having to get involved.

The issue of funding for the judiciary is one of those thorny problems that we all wish would go away. It is a problem which we lawyers see first-hand and understand, or of which we are at least cognizant.

“The Economics of Justice” is a new study by DRI, a professional association of 22,000 attorneys of the defense bar. It drives home the point that in most states the lack of funding for the judicial branch of government has reached a crisis stage. The study should be mandatory reading for everyone in America.

To read the rest of the editorial, please click here.

(By the way, Mills has contributed a number of pieces to Abnormal Use over the years, and you can find them here.).

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day, and we here at Abnormal Use and Gallivan, White, & Boyd, P.A. celebrate the legacy and leadership of Dr. King. In honor of this day, our offices are closed today. As for you, dear readers, what better way to honor Dr. King that to venture to your local cinema and see Selma?

If you’ve not seen the legal comedy, From The Hip, you need to do so immediately. A fun relic of the 1980’s, it was written, in part, by David E. Kelley, who would go on to create TV’s “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Legal.” Let’s just say that the protagonist, played by Judd Nelson, could not get away with most of his antics in a real courtroom.

Claims the writer Jesse Singal: “You’ll Be Less Stressed If You Check Your Email Less Frequently.” Is that supposed to be a good thing? How can one check email less frequently? Is that even possible? Why would one want to venture out into the world when one might risk missing an email?

Vinyl alert: If you’re in South Carolina tomorrow, you may want to visit the Greenville Record Fair.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t alert you to the fact that the Greenville County Bar Association has now joined Twitter. Behold:

New year, new outreach. The attorneys of the Greenville County (SC) Bar Association are pleased to be on Twitter. Follow along.

— Greenville Bar Assoc (@GvilleBarAssoc) January 10, 2015

Woe is me! We come here to praise Westlaw Classic, not to bury it! Thomson Reuters has slain the version of Westlaw that we all knew so well for so long. For several years now, Thomson Reuters has been encouraging its users to utilize its new Westlaw Next platform, a newer and less archaic version of Westlaw with search features more like those employed by Internet users. Yes, it’s handy, but it is not Westlaw Classic (which, we still refer to as Westlaw, just as we still refer to Coca-Cola Classic as Coke. Of course, by that analogy, Westlaw Next is the New Coke of legal research products, a jarring fact which requires further analysis).

More than a decade and a half ago, the more senior members of Abnormal Use first began to use Westlaw. Although its functionality may become somewhat dated, and although the utility of its successor might be easier for the modern user, we here at Abnormal Use cling to our older, more familiar software. Indeed, we will miss the research methodology we employed for so long. In this respect, we are not unlike the preverbal mumpsimus, the stubborn adherent to ways long ago superseded or otherwise discredited. But, in the end, as we age, we know that we know what we know, and on this issue, we know how to utilize Westlaw Classic quite well. But now it belongs to the ages.

As of this past weekend, Westlaw Classic is no more. In fact, as we logged into Westlaw Classic these past few months, Thompson Reuters prompted us with an ominous digital reminder that its days were numbered:

Thus, for some time, we knew the end was near, and we have not been this melancholy about an imminent demise since the last days of “Breaking Bad.”

What will we do? We suppose we must learn to adapt to Westlaw Next. But not before we mourn Westlaw Classic one last time.

Requiescat in pace, Westlaw Classic.