Lawyers. All of this over a pair of pants:

“These are not my pants,” Pearson recalled telling Chung when she handed him a pair of gray pants with cuffs. “I have in my adult life, with one exception, never worn pants with cuffs.”

“And she said, ‘These are your pants.’ ”

Pearson paused. He struggled to breathe deeply. He could not continue. Pearson blurted a request for a break, stood up, turned around and walked out of the courtroom, tears dripping from his full and reddened eyes

This freak of nature is a JUDGE. America is fucked fifty ways to Sunday when this kind of thing goes on and the instigator is still holding a j-o-b. In an unfucked America, this dipstick would walk into his local bar, restaurant, liquor store, whatever, and everybody who could see him would say “These are your pants” while laughing maniacally. His barber would say, “Say, there, Roy…I think these are your pants.” His mama would go, “Roy, you know these are your pants…quit being a fool.” and then whip his ass with a switch for being a public fool and bringing shame on the family.

Personally, I’m going to start saying “These are not my pants” anytime I get caught out in a dumb lie. If I had any money, I’d take a little hand-held camera all over America and have random schmoes re-enact Roy’s courtroom weeping, and I’d be at Cannes, drinking Shiner with a Kra-Zee straw out of the belly-button out of a nekkid Italian super-model on a 300 foot yacht.

For what it’s worth, if Marc Fisher doesn’t win a Pulitzer for this column, he’s been wronged. Should probably sue if he don’t. I mean to tell you, that’s Royko-level goodness there, kids. It deserves a place in history.

…I’m going to be a grandfather again. I was only lightly armored against being a grampaw the first time around, and here comes #2, barely a year later. I’ll need a name here to suggest to Mini-Me for rapid rejection. It should be one I can use for the rest of El Kid’s life — Jonah is going to be Nathan, Jr. to me as long as I’m walking the earth. The difficult part is I don’t know if we’re talking bull or cow, so I reckon I should have one of each.

You know what this means, though? I’m definitely gonna have to buy a house for them down here in South Texas. I’m aleady semi-crazy about being away from Nathan, Jr., and another one wandering around loose is just too much for me to bear. I can’t trust their raising to Mom and Dad. That’s crazy talk. A kid needs a nutso grampaw…it worked out great for me.

It also means, being purely selfish here for a moment…more guns to buy that I can pass on! Wheeeee!

Someone please give this carpetbagger a book deal. I mean, lookie here — I’m a native Texan, and I’ve read dang near everything that passed before me about Sam Houston, but I’ve never seen anyone compare and contrast my home state’s favorite son to America’s favorite son. Again, lookie here — Sam Houston stamped this state hard, and it still echoes down to dorks like me who think this sounds like a perfectly wonderful way to live a life:

Born in 1793, Houston was just barely old enough to have served actively in the War of 1812. He seems on that account to have been representative of an earlier generation than that of Lincoln, a generation only a half-step removed from the founding fathers. He came to the notice of Andrew Jackson, and thereafter spent much of his life when not strolling up and down the corridors of power, loitering meaningfully in the vicinity. He served variously in the Army or state militia of Tennessee, as an Indian agent, in Congress and as elected governor of Tennessee. He was married three times, was an absolutely legendary drunk and lived with the Cherokee tribe for a number of years on at least two occasions. He was brave, impulsive and addicted to flamboyant gestures and attire, being talked with great difficulty out of wearing a green velvet suit to one of his inaugurations as the President of independent Texas.

Much, much more at the link. Sgt. Mom is doing a great job, and I swear, her proposed book would sell like $3 1-lb. chicken-frieds to Texans. Surely some moron in the trade can see this.

Or is regional fiction just deader than a doornail? Beats me…I hope not…I still love my Zane Grey memories, my Elmer Keeton memories, my McMurtry memories. I hope that’s still around for my grandkids. They deserve it.

All 3 of my non-geek readers are hating this phone talk, but since I’m involved in a project with phone-ish stuff, that’s just gonna have to be put up with.

Here, you will find me praising AAPL and the iPhone, if what is suggested here by Om Malik is really true.

GigaOM 5 ways iPhone will change the wireless biz «

A true web applications platform for the mobile

“We have been trying to come up with a solution to expand the capabilities of the iPhone so developers can write great apps for it, but keep the iPhone secure,” he said. “… And we’ve come up with a very innovative new way to create applications for mobile devices… it’s all based on the fact that we have the full Safari engine in the iPhone. And so you can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone, and these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services.” (Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC via Engadget.)

Charles Ying thinks that Apple just reinvented the mobile applications platform. “This isn’t mobile Flash, mobile Java, or even the mobile Web. It’s the real Web, the real deal,” he writes. (True web should also mean 3G and not pokey EDGE connections that the device currently offers, one major Achilles heel of this device.) The ease, with which developers can develop and deploy apps on both web and the phones, will put pressure on other companies (and OS vendors) to play catch-up or lose developer attention.

Note, though, that Om says the EDGE network is a “major Achilles heel.” A couple of readers have pooh-poohed that idea when I presented it, so I’m glad that a certified Web Genius agrees with me.

However, there’s no technical reason that true web apps can’t run on a phone. One aesthetic reason that it will be troublesome is screen real estate, even though a good coder can manage that. I just wonder how many good coders will bother. You have to take positive, proactive steps to be (smart)phone-friendly, and the payoff for taking those steps, so near as I can determine right now, is naught but good will. Good will is nice and all, but it doesn’t feed the bulldog.

That doesn’t have anything to do with Apple or anybody else, really. I don’t even want to get into the dang carriers, which treat their customers the same way AT&T treated their customers pre-DOJ-breakup. More value is locked up inside a Verizon or a Sprint than 99% of us are aware. It maketh me crazed, it do.