So, fed up of having sand kicked in your face? Want to set yourself apart from the herd? Want to make yourself more attractive to the opposite sex? Why not apply for Silk? Here is Ruthie’s easy step by step guide…
1. Start being extra nice to all your professional contacts. You’ll need them for references (10 required).
2. Dig a big hole.
3. Throw money in (3k to be precise)
4. Fill in a long form, send off your references.
5. Wait
6a. Failure, whoops, better luck next time. Start again from the top next year.
6b. Success!! Now..continue
7. Dig a big hole
8. Throw money in (3.5k)
9. Buy fancy clothes (700 quid)
10. Organise party and other sundries (2k)
11. Change your email address from joebloggs@mail.co.uk to joebloggsqc@mail.co.uk
11. Wait
12. Hope that the premium you can charge for doing work as a silk makes up for the value of all the work you can no longer do.
For further information check out the website or send 50 quid in non sequential notes in a brown envelope to Ruthie marked “Get me Silk”. You may still not get silk, but Ruthie promise to invest the money back into the blog. Or a new snowboard.
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What a strange post! Heavens, it’s almost as if one of your numerous lovers were applying for silk and you had become suddenly interested in a process with no direct relevance to you.
Surprised that Dan hasn’t been on to discuss Silk stockings!. Good post though!
Ruthie… how are you? Looking forward to the conference.… have a very long speech prepared.…Can I bring one of my film crews to record it… (Not my speech)
Seriously… might be interesting for other bloggers?? Of course, anonymity (for those who seek it) can be guaranteed. I can film them in the dark… with a bright light behind them…Crime Watch style
Geeklawyer: do you mean to tell me you have not applied this year?
I have never applied. They keep writing and phoning me begging me to apply but as an ardent republican I refuse to attach the ignoble deferential prefix “Queen’s” to my name.
One of the traditions of the English Legal System (I use it in the widest sense…not as a description of our legal system) — but it has to be said, our tolerance as a people — is such… that anyone who wishes to dress up in silk (stockings, dressing gowns, England football strip., gowns worn by ‘Silks’.. or, indeed, any other form of silk may do so without contravening the law of our sceptred isle — so long as they do not park on the pavement in a vehicle and attract the attention of ‘Mr Dull’ — empowered to issue PCN’s (Parking control notices).
The fact that I was almost given a ‘PCN’ by a man in his late fifties with a ponytail, with a power crazed expression, this very morning — and felt tempted to ask why he was doing such a job — is neither here nor there.
I believe in freedom… if becoming a silk or wearing silk is your idea of pleasure — make it so.
GEEKLAWYER… now you are asking us to count… we are not chartered gorillas.… lawyers do not count… why are you making us add 5 + 10 so that we can post on your blog. I am seeking advice…
Ruthie… do you know any lawyers (male, obviously) who wear ‘Silk garments under their suits.’
For the avoidance of doubt — I do not know of any lawyers who do wear silk under their suits — I must get out more.
Christ… now I have to add 5 + 6… if I continue to post on this blog I will soon be qualified to be a member of CIMA or some other accounting related professional body.
5 + 6 = 11 — but what if you believe in string theory? (Over to you, Geeklawyer)
Do you think Geeklawyer is enjoying watching those who wish to comment struggle with elementary mathematics ?
To Geeklawyer: OK smartarse, what is the fourth root of 3021?
To Charon: I’m making good money from refraining to disclose the names of senior members of the bar who wear sexy silk undies..
To Mary: now I now what Geeklawyer is referring to when he talks about his “little tiddler”
@geeklawyer: I’ve always found that Akismet plus Bad Behaiour (http://www.bad-behavior.ioerror.us/) does the trick — no spam gets through. Spam Karma, IMHO, isn’t so great — which is perhaps why you need the mathematical-based stuff which so befuddles Charon QC.
Does this mean you’ve upgraded to WP 2.1? Any good? I am stuck on 2.0.4, for fear of breaking all the hacks (and I can’t remember how to replicate any of them).
WP2.1 is pretty good its faster because they have optimised the database lookups. They have also altered the layout of various admin panels to make them slightly easier. The thing I like is auto-saving stories: I occasionally lost stories due to accidental deletion but WP2.1 auto-save rescues me from this risk. Its a worthy upgrade. Whenever I modify a file I now preserve a copy elsewhere on the file-system, then if I upgrade or change themes I copy it back, this usually works YMMV.
Spam karma works fine for me. I’ve not seen an Akismet Spam-karma shootout so I have no idea which is better. Most of the spam gets dumped into a moderation page rather than hitting the front page but that still annoys me and the Captchas or maths buttons seem to kill it stone dead, though trackback crap still hits the junk pile. Trouble is I don’t want to kill trackback as it is useful on very rare occasions.
Sounds interesting — I may, at some point in the not very near future, give the upgrade a go.
Having said that, the auto-save feature is slightly redundant for me, as I use Windows Live Writer to post all items to conflictoflaws.net.
By the way, I meant Spam Karma or Bad Behaviour PLUS Akismet. The combination of two out of the three should mean you don’t have to resort to other methods. Akismet has blocked 1034 spams on conflictoflaws.net so far this month, AND Bad Behaviour has blocked 433 “access attempts” in the last 7 days. In other words, they are not mutually exclusive. I have also not yet had a single false-positive, although the site does not attract half as many comments as yours (hey, it’s a slightly esoteric subject, I admit.)
Martin, I’m such a lamer, than when you mentioned giving the upgrade a go I assumed you were applying for Silk!!!
I’ve just checked out your website, and and was both impressed and mystified as to why you find this site interesting. I can only attribute the levels of interest and comments to my pink leathers; its certainly not our deep intellectual insight…although I’m sure Geeklawyer would beg to differ…
Ruthie in leathers is, of course, the primary reason for subscribing to your RSS feed.
Perhaps you could, when publishing a new post, add a different photo of Ruthie in various guises. Said guise could be voted for by the readers of the site on something like a monthly basis. You could make millions, Rodney, millions!
Thanks for the nice words about the site, Ruthie. I may have to hire you out in order to get discussion flowing over there, although I’m not sure, given the subscribers (which include a Law Lord and a Lord Justice of Appeal), that you would be an entirely appropriate “marketing tool” (didn’t mean to reduce to an object there).
And geeklawyer, if conflicts floats your boat, then come to the conference in June! It’s got 14 CPD hours…
I’m actually with Geeklawyer on this one; bizarrely I find private international law fascinating, although if you try and steal me for your blog, Geeklawyer will be round with the boys..
If you read the blog regularly you will know that, according to Geeklawyer my “numerous” lovers include a High Court Judge, a QC and a “minor junior”. It would be nice to add a Law Lord to the list, just to get a full set so to speak…
As for a monthly picture of Ruthie..er well I’m flattered at the suggestion, but I don’t think Geeklawyers ego would cope, and until I can make more money from selling autographed photos than doing law, I have to do some work occassionally. Don’t worry about “reducing me to an object”: as you observe, this blog gets more comments than yours.…
If only my love life were one tenth as exciting as Geeklawyer implies it to be, I could sell my life story to the News of the Screws and retire to a private Caribbean Island.
Anyway sorry to disappoint you Martin. You’ll just have to make do with a few comments on the side
Martin: a quick question. PhD in law. Why?
(Please answer in less than 2000 words and be sure to clearly indicate your reasoning.)
The short answer: why not?
The slightly less short answer: after several vac schemes in magic circle firms, I realised that I would rather have a small badger gnaw my right leg off over a period of several years than go through the pain and suffering of working as a solicitor there. So, I turned down the offer of a training contract and, in order to spend some time figuring out what I’d like to do, went and did an LLM. And I quite liked it. I thought that the academic life might be quite a nice one, so I went after a PhD scholarship (PhDs are generally a pre-requisite if you want to be an academic, you know). And here I am.
Reasoning? Pah.
Ruthie: for a PhD you get examined by viva voca on your written thesis. 2000 words would generally be regarded as a poor thesis. Or a stunningly brilliant one.
but you’d look so snazzy in silk
Mary: there is usually no wearing of silk involved — at least not on anything other than formal occasions.
For the benefit of foreigners and the merely ignorant, “Silk” refers to the Silk gown that is worn by QC’s in court. Whether the lawyers concerned choose to wear any other Silk garments under their suits is entirely a matter for them…
oops
Oh well, it makes a change from Ruthie being wrong.
Dearest Ruthie, I knew about the “silks” being for QC’s. I do watch Rumpole of the Bailey here in the Colonies… much to Geeklawyer’s delight and damnation (as he wishes to watch it as well).
As I believe only Barristers (??? correct me if I’m wrong) can become QC’s, why can’t Geeklawyer — him being a Barrister and all the fun stuff.
Oh dear. I should lock this thread right now.
To Mary: since solicitors were allowed to become solicitor-advocates and appear in the higher courts they have also been allowed to become QC’s. Only a handful have made it, mostly from city law firms.
Why is Geeklawyer not a QC? Mmm, could be that he is just not clever enough. Actually thats probably not true, he’s just too lazy and doesn’t like being bossed around by solicitors…
As for my numerous lovers…well I’d trade them all tomorrow for a faithful househusband. So Geeklawyer: if you can’t become a QC, how is your cooking?
well, he does fish well.… he can capture things the size of guppies.
I rather enjoyed fishing. Pity it was such a small fish though: a Marlin would have been nice. But I doubt if there are many Marlins in Lithuanian lakes.
Charon,
It is an anti spam device. Previously I used a system providing pictures of numbers you had to type in; for various reasons this system was broken when I upgraded the blogging software and I removed it. Having done so the torrent of spam comments recommenced and I had to pick another system to use. This system was easy to use and seemed undemanding: it only does very primitive arithmetic and you will not be asked to calculate the fourth root of 3021 or a Laplace transform, so relax.
Even though they have dumbed down the requirement to pass all the examinations at more or less one sitting at each stage of the Accounting Qualification process (even at my own ICAEW which gives the much superior ACA) I fear that even now they ability of being able to do “sums” is not sufficient to pass into the estemed roll of Chartered Accountant, though there are many members who would fail the “sums” test.
Worse there are those who do not realise why, when according to Douglas Adams, the answer to The Meaning of Life is 42, when they read “The Question”, to the answer of the meaning of life, do not understand why it is 6 x 9 and, that it not being a misprint, is a beautiful joke.
I’m a bit sad: I find private international law interesting. Oop, perhaps I shouldn’t admit that in a public forum …
I never beg its demeaning but I suspect you are right: most readers are only interested in you wearing leather. I think an enhanced photo page may be needed
Why just a Law Lord? Add a CA judge and you’d have a royal flush. And that would still give you only 5 six lovers to juggle at the same time — dead easy for someone with your experience of cheating on the people you’re cheating with; they always believe they’re the only one
However cheating on lovers is one thing, if you start cheating on my blog I will kneecap you not the other blog owner. If anyone is going to pimp you out it’ll be me …
I spend much of my time at the Bollo doing Laplace transforms… but… I do sympathise about the spam. i wasn’t getting much spam (because I have akismet doing the business on my blog) so i spent a few hours at the weekend writing spam to my own blog — weird stuff…thanking me for providing a ‘nice’ site and then providing links to all matter of abominations.…
I will cope with the basic arithmetic…
Ruthie…
All I can say to Geeklawyer and his Laplace transforms is this…
On Jan 18, 2007, Jaroslaw Wroblewski, with help with the network at the Mathematical Institute of Wroclaw, became the first person to find an AP24. For k from 0 to 23, 468395662504823 + 45872132836530k is a prime number. The Prime Arithmetic Progression site by Jens Kruse Andersen has more information.
On that note… I am going to my futon to reflect, consider and, perchance, to dream
Please don’t tell anyone that I prefer going ‘Commando’
There is no integer answer as obviously 8 to the power 4 is 4096 as any maths student knows.
Less well known (i.e I had to work it out) 7 to the power 4 is the same as 49 squared which is 1960 plus 441 = 2401.
Now as the curve of y=x^2 is roughly exponential finding 3021 which is 620 bigger than 7^4 and 1095 smaller than 8^4 then it is likely to be slightly less than half way, trying 7.4 and 7.42 quickly leads to 7.41375 as a good approximation at 3021.007
Now for the Spam protection sum of 2+6 and I can share this simple experimental maths with no one as the only (two) maths I’ve noticed lawyers to be excited about is the size of the fee and the profit!!
Jacob will never have a problem posting here I imagine. But while I am impressed with you ‘Google Fu’ I suspect that it will fail you 3/4 of the way into a bottle of Rioja on a Friday night when you wish to ramble in a drunken post — always funy & welcome as I’m sure you realise.
I did google that one — but I did geophysics/geology before law and was interested in maths in those days. Now I can only count if the items are £20 notes…
You may be interested in my latest post on the ‘Beer goggles effect” — Geeklawyer!
This is a good method and essentially the one I took. But it only works because the fourth power is the square of the square. so to get an approximation, as you discovered, it is only necessary to iterate between the nearest square roots of square roots: 7 & 8. My interpolation was intuitive (I guessed about 7.5) while yours used the better arithmetic difference, relying on associative properties of exponents, to interpolate.