Just another day or two of reduced posting before I should be back to my normal pace. In the meantime, let me call your attention to the New York Times obit for our friend Ken Spears. It contains a lot of things I didn't even know about him.
Years ago, I worked for a man who was being sued…and he could have made the whole suit go away by paying $100,000 to the guy suing him but he decided to fight it. It wasn't a matter of principle. He just kept talking to lawyers who told him they could make it cost-effective to fight: Pay the attorney $10,000 and he'd win or at least and get the settlement price down to $25,000 or thirty.
So he paid the lawyer and he didn't win. And he paid another lawyer who said he could win and that lawyer didn't win either. And then there was another lawyer who said he could win and that guy didn't win either. The man being sued wound up paying the whole danged $100,000 plus court fees and penalties and (of course) the lawyer fees and his outta-pocket costs easily topped $200,000.
I think a version of this is now happening with the outgoing (no matter what he does) President of the United States. But maybe he considers the loss of money and respect from most of America an acceptable trade-off for keeping his base thinking he didn't lose and that he got cheated…and admiring him as a fighter to the end.
And he may also have been wrong when he said that we wouldn't hear any more about "COVID, COVID, COVID" the day after Election Day. For some reason, I still see occasional mentions of it in the news.