I'm now, uh, crusty, not curmudgeonly

When I started this blog about a week ago, I subtitled it the "Online journal of a curmudgeonly trial lawyer and internet dilettante," and I privately congratulated myself on the choice of the word "curmudgeonly."  As I am myself in some ways, it is a bit of an anachronism.  It seemed to fit.

But I had a ghastly moment of realization tonight while browsing various websites. 

Some weeks ago I first learned of a blog that is being maintained anonymously by a young lawyer who's apparently clerking for an unspecified US District Judge here in Houston.  It's called "The Curmudgeonly Clerk," and its author is obviously very bright and energetic, a model blogger with a good legal mind.  I assume he or she is "young," because almost all clerks for federal judges are just out of law school, typically in their early to mid-20s.

When I clerked in that same building in a pre-PC era, the state of our technology was that we had two massive, brand-new "word-processors" — each about the size of a Volkswagen — on which the judge's and her three law clerks' written output was transcribed from longhand by two secretaries.  There was one dedicated Lexis/Nexis terminal in the building law library for the use of all the Houston-based district and circuit court judges and their clerks, but I was one of the very few who used it regularly.  We had telephones in chambers — but no fax machine.  I am reasonably sure that they'd run off all the carrier pigeons already.

So I suspect that, based on chronological age alone (independent of inclination and attitudes), I may be more accurate in describing myself as a "curmudgeon" than this judicial clerk.

Still, the name of his or her blog had slipped only my conscious mind.  Upon being reminded of it tonight, I immediately realized that I'd unintentionally semi-plagiarized it.

Since I practice in the federal courts here, presumably including before the same judge for whom "The Curmudgeonly Clerk" clerks, and since my blog is not anonymous, this isn't among the brighter things I've ever done.

Hence a new subtitle for BeldarBlog — and my apologies to the Curmudgeonly Clerk.