Adventures in Jury Town

These are just some random pictures I took while on jury duty. We had an hour and a half for lunch every day so I would wander the streets of San Diego looking for odd bits of city life to photograph with my phone. I'm not a very good photographer so I didn't get many good shots, but here are a few.

Apparently six year-olds are totally into graf writing these days, as evidenced by this tag I found on a city corner. It's even funnier than normal in this context, which is quite a feat.

Pirates thrive in San Diego. But on the flip side, rampant ninja prejudice is a huge problem in our fair city.

MJ has been reduced to using public transportation to get around. How bad do things have to get before the government steps in and rescues our nation's floundering degenerate billionaire icons? Don't they know that the solution to all our economic problems is giving Americans juicy celebrity gossip to take our minds off the impending collapse? And they can't do crazy, gossip worthy things if they're poor like the rest of us.

This is an artist's rendering of the 3G PenciL Phone rumored to be announced by Apple sometime next month. Many people complained about the lack of a stylus for the popular iPhone. This is Apple's answer. [WARNING: Sharpening voids warranty]


This is the bus route I took to get downtown everyday. Luckily this was the express route or they would have stopped at EVERY stop and not just the 1400 shown on this map.
This is a picture of inside the courtroom taken on jury selection day. After taking this picture, I found a posting outside stating that it was a crime to record or photograph inside the courtroom. Oops. But what good is having a spy camera on your phone if you can't take super secret photos? Just nobody tell on me, ok. I've had my fill of judges and juries for a while.

mixed media - ink and pasty white skin

I am on jury duty. But I'm not allowed to talk (or blog) about the case. So I'll just tell you how I feel about jury duty in general.

First, the pay is great. Alice asked me how much I was getting paid and when I told her $15 she was ecstatic.

"$15 an hour! That's more than you make now!"

"No. $15 a day."

But even with the great pay, I'm honestly not in it for the money. I am totally in it for the glory.

I've seen a few episodes of Miami Ink and it seems to be popular to get important things or events in your life memorialized in a tattoo. For instance, if your days in the navy really made you who you are, you might get an anchor tattooed on your bicep. Or if you are an ice salesman you might get 'Mr. Cool Ice' tattooed on your chest, back and arms along with a skeleton doing a cute little pose to lighten things up. My point is, when something significant happens in your life, the first thing you should do is run out and get a tattoo before you have time to talk yourself out of it.

In that spirit, I inked (don't worry, Mom, it's just ball point pen) a rough draft of what I might get after this life changing jury duty. No, I did not start this while in the courtroom, even though I am sitting in the very back of the room where no one can really see me except the judge and she's always looking at her computer. No, I did not gum up my pen with my scraggly leg hairs and pasty skin oils and have to ask the bailiff for another one. No, I did not gum that one up as well and have to find yet another pen during a break. And no, I did not have to go into the bathroom to put the finishing touches on and get a good picture of this awesome artwork. None of those things happened.

Alice will tell you how she disapproves of drawing on one's legs in public, right up there with picking your nose. She just doesn't understand the significance of being an alternate juror. I'm sure a lot of people will not understand my 'art', but that's something all artists ahead of their time have to deal with. I am ready to proudly display to the entire world my commitment to being the best juror number 13 I can be. At least until I take a shower or the case is over, whichever comes first.

Camp Life - Like Thug Life, but slightly more gentle

Last weekend I convinced someone else's kid to get into a car with me and drove far out into the desert with him. I planned ahead and had a shovel, a large tarp, and snacks to help keep my energy up. What was going on last weekend? You guessed it, our ward's annual Father and Son camp out! Seeing as how I don't have a son of my own, I adopted a kid for the weekend and pretended like I belonged. I'll do just about anything for s'more s'mores (Modestmuse, I know you feelin' me). Over the years I've learned that if you act like you belong, people don't question you. Just like the time I went to the bus station and pretended I was waiting for my bus when really I was just looking for a cool place to rest for a little while. I just kept looking at my watch impatiently and waving around a ticket stub I found in the trash can and nobody even gave me a second glance. Works perfect every time.

But back to the camp out. As all mothers know, young boys thrive on violence. And this camp out is the one time a year when, free of the over-protective mothering of the women folk, the men and boys can finally release the aggression that has been slowly building for the twelve months since last year's camp out. The activities at this year's camp out consisted of hitting each other with giant padded sticks (the technical term is 'boffers') a la LARPing, shooting each other with airsoft BB guns, and catapulting ballistic water balloons at each other at near the speed of sound. (Even the little woodland creatures enjoy LARPing as evidenced by this picture.) Surprisingly, the bishop had no problem with any of these activities. The one father who got smashed in the face with an ICBB (inter-campground ballistic balloon) from 200 yards didn't look to thrilled, but that's the chance you take when you go on an all guy camp out. He plans on summoning his Shield of Perpetual Impenetrability next year and calling down a mighty reckoning on his foes.

Besides violence, men also like to destroy things and construct things. I managed to combine these two activities into a fireside demonstration while simultaneously teaching a lesson about the refiners fire. We melted pennies over the campfire and cast the liquid zinc into a coin mold. Destruction, construction, and fire. The divine male trifecta.

Except for the one missing finger that turned out to be just a hot dog, there were no serious injuries. God bless the Father and Son camp out, and I'm sure He does or there would have been more calls to 911. And we all came home filthy, which is the only sure indication to our wives and mothers that we had a good time.

My little stingray of sunshine

It seems this blog is turning into a 'Faces o' Death' blog, what with all our near death experiences. This time it was my turn to almost die. I almost went the same way as the dearly departed and sorely missed Crocodile Hunter, Steve Irwin. I too was stabbed by a fierce, man-eating stingray. Ok, maybe not man-eating, but certainly man-stabbing. And that man was me.

I was out surfing early Tuesday morning when I accidentally stepped on something squishy and skittish. I knew it was a stingray the instant I stepped on it, but apparently he wasn't aware I was dropping in for a visit. He thought I was steppin', which technically I was, but not the way the kids mean it. I tried to 'step off' (both the regular meaning and the 'kids these days' meaning) but I was not fast enough. So he shivved me. Or is it shanked me? I can never remember which one is the verb and which one is the noun. I guess you only learn those all important details in the Big Time House.

Anyway, he stung me right in the bottom, middle of my left foot. If any of you don't know what a stingray barb looks like, they are quite long, sharp and filled with poisonous poison. Luckily this little guy's...I mean this huge monster's barb did not break off inside my foot, which often happens.

So I hobbled back to the shore and checked the life guard stand for help. But lifeguards are apparently not early risers. It's probably safe to say that early morning beach goers are more likely to still have their natural inhibitions and common sense in tact than the late night variety. So I drove myself home with the radio blasting so I couldn't hear myself crying like a little girl.

I had learned that the best treatment for a stingray sting is to soak the punctured limb in water as hot as is tolerable. So I jumped in the bathtub after efficiently spreading blood and sand all over the carpet. Alice and google confirmed the treatment schedule and also found out that the venom is likely to ooze out of the wound and form a jelly like blob. I checked my foot. Yep, jelly blob confirmed. About the size of a quarter and all mixed with sand.

I continued to soak myself in scalding water for two hours. I tried getting out after one hour but my foot immediately started to throb so I got back in the tub. At the end of two hours I finally removed my wet suit and it looked like my feet were sun burned. There was a distinct red line where the wet suit had been. And they remained bright pink until the following day. Nothing like a first degree scalding to take your mind off the pain of stingray venom eating you from the inside out. But I think the severely hot water did the trick because it didn't hurt much after that. It did split open and bleed every time I tried to walk on it the rest of the day, but it's not our carpet so I wasn't too worried.

During this time, I made Alice call our lifeguard friend, call our med school friend, call the doctor/hospital four times, schedule and then cancel a doctor's appointment, reschedule and recancel the same appointment, and read me the entire wikipedia entry on stingrays. All while I chillaxed in the tub with a virgin daiquiri. And she never complained once. She really is a trooper.

In my efforts to capture the moment on film/silicon, I found that what hot rodders paint on their cars is not so much like flames, but more like blood draining in a bathtub. Makes you wonder what they have in those spacious classic trunks of theirs.



Still, I think my new/old volvo would look pretty sweet 'blooded' out. All in all, this has garnered me much sympathy and given me a cool story to tell people I meet on the street or at the grocery store. And so my near tragedy has become the little stingray of sunshine in an otherwise pleasantly sunny and mild San Diego week.

On the Wii-ngs of Chickens

I found out something new about Alice. She has chicken wings. She's not a Hooter's hostess in her spare time, she really has chicken wings. Or that's how she describes them.

On Saturday night we were engaged in a vicious battle for the title of Wii boxing champion at our friends the Weeds' house. Alice had bravely challenged Becca, another friend of ours who was there. Becca is a certified quasi semi-professional amateur aerobic boxing tae bo enthusiast aficionado. But I had been training Alice, and as Mick/Matthew would say, she was 'gonna eat lightning and crap thunda'.

They squared up with the wiimotes in one hand and the wii nun chucks in the other. They danced out to the center of the ring and the furious fists immediately started flying. Bruce Lee looked like a sloth on quaaludes compared to these girls' blazing blows. They were each taking heavy hits to the head and body, but Becca's little Mii did not seem to be hurt at all.

"I see three of her out there" Alice confessed.

"Hit the one in the middle!"

The battle raged on with both pugilists pulling no punches. But Alice was growing tired. I knew I had to say something to keep her in this fight.

"You hurt her! You see? You see? She's not a machine, she's a man...er, a woman. You're gonna have to go through hell, worse than any nightmare you've ever dreamed. But when it's over, I know you'll be the one standing. You know what you have to do. Do it."

She steeled her resolve. "To beat me, she will have to kill me."

Her hands were like magic bullets that were magically attracted to Becca's head by some sort of magic boxing spell. Watching her fight was like...magic.

But Becca just wasn't going down. What was wrong? They had been brutally beating each other for what seemed like an eternity and neither one showed signs of injury.

And then the Wii ref separated the girls. The practice round that all new wii boxers go through the first time they fight was over. The real fight was about to start.

Alice: "What!?!?!? That was just practice?!?! I'm already dead tired! I can't fight anymore."

Corbin: "Going in one more round when you don't think you can - that's what makes all the difference in your life. All your strength, all your power, all your love. Everything you've got. Right now!"

Alice: "Cut me."

What happened next will go down in the history books as one of the greatest historical fights in history. I don't remember who won so you'll have to wait until said history book comes out so you can read about it.

The next day, Alice was still feeling the pain of the brawl.

Alice: "My chicken wings are sore."
Corbin: "Your what?"
Alice: "My chicken wings. You know these muscles on my side and back. Under my arms."
Corbin: "You mean your latissimus dorsi?"
Alice: "No, my chicken wings."
Corbin: "Oh. Do you want some hot rice for your chicken wings?"
Alice: "Yeah, that would be nice."

The End.