Wednesday, June 08, 2005

Roe v. McDonald's Corporation (Cal. Ct. App. - May 27, 2005)

Three very minor (and very quick) comments about this case. First, according to the plaintiff, it provides yet another reason -- apart from diet and health -- to avoid the McDonald's at the South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa. Second, it's pretty rare that courts allow plaintiffs to sue anonymously, much less without any comment (or even recognition that the plaintiff is suing anonymously). Yet that's what happens here.

Finally -- and I admit that I am totally the only one who will care about this last point -- the ostensible "expert" on security who wasn't allowed to testify (thereby dooming plantiff's case) had the last name of "Reierson." Which is interesting (to me, anyway) only because my wife's last name is "Rierson" (which itself is a butchered form of her ancestor's true last name of "Ryerson"), and I've never read an appeal that involved a similar name; indeed, have never even heard of anyone whose last name is "Reierson." How do you even pronounce such a thing? Re-i-er-son? Ray-i-er-son? I'm lost. (The good thing about Sandy having this crazy last name is that you can totally tell when someone's trying to sell her something over the telephone, since they uniformly mispronounce her name as "Re-er-son" rather than "Ry-er-son". Which gives us the option to hand the phone over to Sierra or Jack, our three- and one-year olds, to permit them to share some scintillating conversation with the solicitor. Which we've never actually done. But which we've thought about a lot.)

Of course, I say that, and then I promptly find 1000 people who's last name is "Reierson". Each of whom I've just inadvertently insulted. Oh well. Another day, another thousand people offended. Sorry about that.