The playing area is called a “sheet”. I will say no more except to note that whoever invented this sport’s vocabulary knew how to interest men in women’s curling. I will bet that inventor is Canadian and is still laughing.

The sport is a combination of  croquet, bowling, shuffleboard, and table pool played on ice. One delivers the stone with  some “English” called “out-turn” or “in-turn”. Teamates use sophisticated ice brushes to control the speed and drift of the stone to get it into a bullseye. Hitting the opponent’s stone is also allowed. This “take-out” is as important as getting a stone into the bullseye.

The dress code seems strictly enforced. The women must wear black, oversized skateboader’s shoes with smooth bottoms. I suspect there is no golden parachute or big money contracts for curlers. This is amateur sport at its best.

Andy Rooney of “60 Minutes” just said on tonight’s episode that curling was dull. I don’t think he watched long enough to see Canada’s Cheryl Bernard in action.

Washington Post staff writer Frank Ahrens called him “a full-volume pitchman, amped up like a candidate for a tranquilizer-gun takedown.” (Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Mays ).

Now one can only imagine the possibilities of his future potential. Had he been appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President Obama, he would have “moved” those bank mortgage toxic assets within thirty days (“If you call now, we will double the offer”). We would have saved the billions squandered on irresponsible banks, investment houses, and insurance companies and our nation would be “past” the bailout.

Billy Mays made money the old fashioned honorable way: He earned it. He kept free enterprise alive.

In a combat unit, the members must distance themselves from apprehension about death. They become a band of brothers out of necessity to live. When returned to civilian life, the warriors begin to realize that their experience is not easily understood. Heroism and survival are a fate and not a choice. The difficulty of explaining the smells, sounds, and trauma are beyond one’s vocabulary without showing emotion.

In the end, most warriors realize they have crossed a threshold that ordinary people will never cross. Once crossed, a warrior can never return to normality. Pretending to be normal offers a state of grace and dignity with the uninitiated in polite company.

After the disaster, the families of deceased students learned that the building cement was substandard or missing. The favored Chinese corporations had convinced communist officials that the old public schools were not safe and negotiated non-competitive contracts and handsome rewards for building schools before the 2008 earthquakes. The older “unsafe” schools (then rented to Chinese corporations at bargain leases by the communists) managed to withstand the 2008 earthquakes with little damage.

Such evil is easily understood by almost every world citizen. Unfortunately, it is an evil that flourishes in many nations including the United States of America. How can advocates invent word descriptions of such evil?

“Communist” is a word that carries powerful negative emotions in the USA. It is a favorite authoritive word used by American corporations to avoid regulation, responsibility, and morality while permiting many corporations to kill, cheat, and engage in massive greed.

It can be said that our present American economic depression was caused by “communist plots” borrowed directly from communist China. If advocates of the rule of law could make the communist label “stick” to greedy corporations, such advocates might effectively curb excessive corporate influence in the United States.

Certainly, we live in a period of corporate distrust caused by the financial and banking collapse and bailout. Identities like “banker”, ‘broker”, and “lender” have negative connotations for what were neutral words. The vocabulary of the “new” era is yet to develop.

Mastery and acceptance of this language will control the future of politics, finance, class, and the law. Thus far, the advocates of the status quo control the “game” since no new vocabulary words seem to be “in play”.

The NCBA 4ALL effort will take place again on March 6, 2009. I hope it will exceed the efforts of last year.

The present economic climate gives attorneys an opportunity not seen since the Great Depression. Millions of ordinary people desperately need legal help. The Great Depression and its aftermath raised the stature and reputation of attorneys to lofty heights. They were heroes in real life and in literature. Atticus Finch comes to mind. Now attorneys have a limited window of opportunity to regain some of that reputation. Attorneys can seize our unique role as honest public servants for the disadvantaged.