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The particulars of how to legally change your name may not be of much interest to you, but you might want to consider the topic in the broader context of how to handle, in planning your estate, variations in your name on assets you own or documents you have signed. It’s a subject that comes up with surprising frequency when I’m helping people plan their estates.
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I promise I didn’t make this one up (I don’t think I could if I tried). This is the entire text: Good Day, As a follow-up to my post yesterday, you might enjoy a post I came across about George Washington, the title of which refers to a book about him. The post indicates that it has been posted before, but I don’t think I had seen it.
The third Monday in February (February 21 this year) may be widely known as Presidents Day, but the federal holiday is still officially named Washington’s Birthday.
It’s not even officially called Presidents Day in Arizona. The official name of the holiday in Arizona is Lincoln/Washington Presidents' Day. You of course remember that Washington’s birthday is actually commemorated on February 22, right? So fly the flag tomorrow, even if you already flew it yesterday. APPARENTLY IT’S COMMON KNOWLEDGE THAT JOHHY DEPP SHOT HUNTER S. THOMPSON’S REMAINS FROM A CANNON2/14/2017 I don’t think I had ever heard that Hunter S. Thompson’s remains were shot out of a cannon, or that Johnny Depp was responsible for doing it, but according to Lowering the Bar, it’s “quite well known.”
What wasn’t well known until now (again according to Lowering the Bar) is that Depp spent $3,000,000 doing it. I’ve written a few wills with unusual requests for disposition of the testator’s remains, but never anything like having their ashes shot out of a cannon. If you want some practical tips, my newsletter in November of last year discussed the subject of funeral and burial instructions. The problem is that creators are allegedly routinely shortchanged on their cut of the income from their creations. According to the accounts I have read, sometimes they are shortchanged by creative accounting, and other times by outright lying about sales volume.
You do remember the characters referred to in the title to this post, right? Did you know that Harry Shearer, who played Derek Smalls, is also a voice actor on The Simpsons? Via Instapundit. Specifically, the essay that I discovered at The Oatmeal is about the author’s ride in a Google self-driving car. There’s nothing on the page to indicate when it was written, but it couldn’t have been too long ago. The author makes several excellent points, including the often-overlooked one that self-driving cars will be a tremendous benefit for people who are unable to drive.
The warning in my earlier post linking to The Oatmeal still applies. I’m not going to get into the subject matter of the particular situation that made me think about this, it because it could be controversial, but just as an exercise in legal analysis, here’s my take on filing a lawsuit against an art museum for displaying paintings that you find offensive: it’s not going to get you any results.
If you want to read about the particular situation it in more detail, go to the post about it on Lowering the Bar. That post contains a link to a page where someone posted a copy of what appears to be the complaint that was actually filed in court. As a lawyer, I found it pretty amusing, although I can’t help wondering if it is a put-on. There’s a story at CNET under the headline “Uber’s self-driving cars back in SF, but now they’re legal.” What the story actually says is that Uber is using five self-driving vehicles to do mapping in San Francisco, and that the vehicles aren’t actually operating autonomously but are being driven manually. In other words, the real story here is still that Uber has moved its autonomous vehicle testing to Arizona, and California, as the story makes clear, hasn’t budged on its refusal to allow the autonomous vehicles to operate there.
These cost/benefit analyses are always going to have major elements of subjectivity, in my opinion. With self driving cars, I don’t think the fact it will eliminate jobs for some (most?) people who get paid to drive is an economic negative. I think logically it’s pretty easy to see that making cars self-driving isn’t really any different from mechanized farming. I doubt anyone would argue today that the cotton gin or the mechanical combine should have been banned to save the jobs of the people who did those tasks manually. I don’t mean to disparage people who drive for a living, or make light of the disruption to their lives that may result from vehicles becoming autonomous, but how is eliminating driving as a manual occupation really any different from eliminating picking corn or processing cotton as a manual occupation?
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AuthorThe contents of this blog, this web site, and any writings by me that are linked here, are all my personal commentary. None of it is intended to be legal advice for your situation. Archives
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