26 January 2008

Tort Reform



Even on Saturday I know when it is time to get in the shower and get my sorry butt in gear when the men start the engines on the earthmovers, and the back-up signals on the big dump-trucks starting beeping.

The pit is getting fairly deep on the north side of what used to be Buckingham Village 1. Now it is a big red pit, over which will rise a massive new building with subsidized apartments.

In exchange, the developers have been given a free hand to add new single-family row houses closer to the lights of Ballston and the Metro.

That is not the only thing happening. There was an sad pile of trash from the last evictees out in front of the sad four-story brick apartment building that has no Buckingham historic pedigree. Plywood is on the windows now, and it will soon be gone and turn into row-houses or another pit with an apartment building on top of it.

Steve, the proprietor of the Buckingham Herald TribLog (http://buckinghamheraldtrib.blogspot.com) alerted me to the new development with his outstanding micro-journalism. I drove by to see it while it was still standing. With all the changes that are now in progress, Buckingham is not going to look much like it does now.

Steve says the developer has the right for “at will” development, which means something upscale, which will be just across from the new row houses that are going in on what used to be Buckingham Village 2.

The crazy thing about this is the change in the density and the number of cars that are coming toward us. Big Pink is OK; I normally flee out onto Route 50 to escape the neighborhood, but I am filled with trepidation about the traffic; particularly as the rich squeeze the poor in this direction.

Buckingham was built as a low-density self-contained park. The roads are narrow and stately, with abrupt formal curbs and the sidewalk right alongside. They ended at the back of the neighborhood. Long ago they made sense and comported with the faux colonial architecture. Now, the pedestrians in their hooded sweats walk feet from the whizzing cars, and the curbs lurk with the chance of clipping a wheel, and hurtling the cars end over end into the buildings.

No longer. The traffic hurtles down George Mason and into the Buckingham choke-point helter-skelter. If you add a few hundred shiny new cars to the mix, it is going to get interesting. I get the feeling that Big Pink and our park-like grounds are going to be an International-style island in a current of fast-moving steel and rubber.

In some places it is. The old roads were never designed to handle what is roaring across them. Just north of the Route 50 overpass on Glebe Road the new McDonalds is nearing completion, and the workmen have installed the sign and the lights are left on all night.

Location is everything, and I don't know how the restaurant and the Kentucky Fried Chicken place have survived all these years. It is impossible to turn left from northbound traffic, and slowing to turn right going south is enough to have some eager-beaver drive up your tailpipe.

In the seven years I have lived here I never ventured into the old Mickey-D's that stood on the spot. It was too hard to get too by car, and too far to stroll. The replacement is the new chunky design intended to put Starbucks out of business, more restaurant-style, with cappuccino and everything.

I was thinking about Mickey D's coffee this morning, since I got a copy of the Stella Awards in the e-mail, and naturally got incensed.

You know the Stellas, or have been living underground. They are like the Darwin Awards, in that they convey the sad state of our American Civilization. The Darwins celebrate the stupidest things our fellow citizens have done to kill themselves, thus theoretically removing themselves from the gene pool.

The Stellas are named after Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico. She gained her fame as the granny who successfully sued Mickey-D's after being burned by a cup of take-out coffee. It was a long time ago, and she would be 95 now if she is still alive.

The Darwin Awards actually feature a couple stories that are true, while except for Mrs. Liebeck herself, the Stellas do not.

The Stella Awards celebrate wacky legal outcomes. You know the type; mostly stupid criminal tales in which the law-breaker is hurt or inconvenienced in the course of his or her crime, and then rewarded handsomely by a trial jury of moronic peers. All of them are calculated to incense the reader on the state of the legal system, and upon examination, all of them are patently false, made up of whole cloth.

I wondered what the point was, outside of harmless creative fiction writing, and did a little digging. All of us hate lawyers, though of course they are necessary evils. Apparently the propaganda of the Stellas is part of the ongoing battle between Big Business and the Tort Lawyers, best typified by crusading tort lawyer John Edwards of North Carolina, who made his millions off juries who felt the pain of parents whose children were allegedly hurt by incompetent doctors.

It is almost foolproof, going after those deep-pockets bastards.

The point of the Stellas appears to be limiting the amount of damages that can be recovered in civil suits; the Stellas support that contention, so I assume Big Business is behind it all so they can continue to do business and pay off the people they hurt without crippling themselves.

The interesting thing is the story of Stella herself, who is the poster oldster for the frivolous damages suit.

See, in mocking the woman who burned herself while tugging at the plastic top of a cup of coffee stuck between her legs, the attack dogs ignore the real point. Mrs Liebeck actually did burn herself, and badly, in the worst possible place. She was not driving, which is how the story is usually told, just riding with her grandson. What's more, the temperature of the coffee was deliberate company policy.

You know the story already, since you have experienced it. You get a cup of McDonald's coffee with an Egg McMuffin. The stuff is so scalding hot that the sandwich is long gone before you can sip the coffee. In the trial, McDonald's had to reveal that there were more than 700 claims by people burned by its coffee between 1982 and 1992. Some involved third-degree burns almost identical to Stella's.

Starbucks is hot when you get it, too, but McDonalds policy was to hold its coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees Fahrenheit. The stuff we brew at home is normally 135 to 140 degrees. Poor Stella. At 180 degrees, it takes as little as two seconds to burn, and Stella was wearing sweatpants that trapped the liquid right next to the skin.

Too much information, I know, and maybe you should not have coffee in a moving car, but how the hell else would you get where you are going?

Anyway, we already knew that McDonald's coffee was too hot, and Mickey D's did, too. Apparently they have quietly cooled it down a little, and in a bold stroke, actually improved the quality of the beans to go head-to-head with it's most ubiquitous breakfast competitor.

That is the point to the new restaurant north of Route 50, and I am going check it out when it opens and see just how hot the premium coffee is these days.

I'll do it on foot, though, so that if I spill, it will only scorch the earth and not my flesh. There would be no point in suing the company, anyway, since it has become a cliché joke, and besides, even if successful, tort reform would limit the damages to the cost of my lawyer and new pair of jeans.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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