Hilarious

I love this dog.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Creationists Pollute Young Minds at Museum on Nightline

This is what we're up against...

Religulous (2008) Trailer

Looking forward to this...

Seven Words

So sad.

Cake and Crisps

Play Along:

Knock, Knock

(Who's There?)

Smell Mop

(--------------)

It's actually not my joke, Antonia told it on the fantastic show Top Chef which just wrapped up its 4th season on Bravo.

My wife is addicted to several reality television shows. Jon and Kate plus 8, What Not To Wear, Top Chef (which is very good), Mystery Diagnosis, that show with Gene Simmons , and the inspiration for the joke retelling above, You Are What You Eat. You Are What You Eat is one of a crop of reality shows that airs on BBC America. Other shows of note include Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares ( episode "The Walnut Tree" seems to be on a 24 hour loop), How Clean Is Your House, Last Restaurant Standing, My Big Breasts and Me and the nation specific makeover craze Britain's Worst Teeth. When it comes to reality television, the British do it right.



Back to the knock, knock, joke. On the aforementioned You Are What You Eat, a nutritionist, Gillian McKeith, shows people the crap they eat and then turns them into healthful sprites who outlive those tortoises that live a very long time. That is unless they fall off the wagon, or should I say, ice cream truck. The show starts off effectively every week with the, "surprise, we've been secretly taping you and recording everything you ate this past week." They then astonish the viewer and shame the participant by displaying on one long table, everything that person ate during the course of the week. The volume is usually frightening but the inevitable fish and chips usually look pretty good. And then the unthinkable happens, Ms. McKeith demands that her fallen angels defecate into Tupperware which she then smells and rubs between her fingers. She is so scientific about it, "Oh Nigel, you're barely chewing your food," "My god that is the most putrid smelling poo I have ever whiffed;" you half expect her to taste it and describe its mouth feel. Worse yet she makes all the participants smell and feel it as well.
As if the long table of fried food wasn't embarrassing enough.

The show proceeds with drastic changes in diet, negative reactions to tofu and claims of feeling more healthful. It ends with the necessary hugs and the before and after underwear photos . The self help shows have a formula that works. I just thought it was important to inform everyone that there is a show on television which makes people smell and feel their own poop. If you have a DVR, use it, you will not be disappointed.

In other TV news, injustice in our universe hit an all time high as the TBS sitcom My Boys was brought back for another season. The sitcom equivalent of a dead baby joke makes me pine for Misguided (great show recently cancelled),

and, John McCain knows how to be creepy.

Also, The Amazing Race is awesome.

Insurance Bad Faith in Florida, A Simple Understanding

The creator of the Pringles can has died. Actually he died a few months ago without much fanfare. By far the best part is where they placed his ashes, insert horrible joke about new Pringles flavor here. Soylent Green is people. With that out of the way I thought I would give everyone an insurance primer regarding a carrier's duties to its customers. This is not legal advice and you should in no way rely on this or sue me if you think I am wrong.

By way of background, we have essentially two kinds of insurance coverage in this universe, first party coverages and third party coverages. First party coverages encompass situations when you are making a claim against your own carrier for damages. In the auto insurance context, this would encompass your collision coverage, uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage, and no-fault coverage. It might be simpler to think of home owner's coverage as being primarily first party, e.g., a pipe leaks and destroys your house, you make a claim against your own policy to repair the damage. The essence of the first party situation is that there is no one else involved, just you making a claim against your own insurance carrier.

Third party coverage is simply liability coverage, it is the insurance purchased to pay claims against you that could be brought by third parties for accidental harm you cause. In the automobile context, if you have 100k of bodily injury coverage, your insurance company would pay up to 100k of injuries you caused to third parties arising from your use of an auto. The great value of third party coverage is the defense usually embodied in the coverage. Even if you maintained only a $10,000.00 bodily injury auto policy (the minimum), if you were sued by a third party for negligence involving your insured auto, your insurance carrier would be responsible for the attorney's fees and expenses involved in the defense of your case. Those expenses could easily exceed the actual amount of your liability policy within a few months of litigation.

One quirk, the dreaded "wasting" policy. Usually reserved for professional malpractice policies, the wasting policy wastes away with each defense cost. In these policies, the total amount of coverage is applied to defense costs and liability payments creating an unavoidable conflict for defense counsel hired by an insurance carrier. Imagine reducing the funds your client has available to settle a claim each time you speak or write to that client. It's a bad idea, but it persists.

So what is insurance bad faith as it applies to both first and third party situations. Generally, insurance bad faith occurs when an insurance carrier fails to treat its policy holder with the same consideration it would bestow on its own corporate executives. This is obviously a very general standard and usually whether or not bad faith has occurred is a question of fact for a jury to decide. However, there are some factual scenarios where the Florida courts and legislature have provided some guidance. I'll deal first with the third part party context.

Imagine that you cause a car accident seriously injuring another individual. Also imagine that like most individuals in the state, you only maintain 10k in bodily injury insurance coverage. What are your insurance company's responsibilities? They have an affirmative responsibility to protect you from a judgment in excess of your 10k policy limits, i.e., they have to try and settle the case on your behalf. They may not be successful but as soon as they are notified of the accident they must begin steps to protect the policy holder's interests. The injured party may demand that you contribute funds, that you provide proof that you cannot contribute to a settlement in excess of your limits, they may demand that you sit in front of a court reporter to answer questions about your assets, they may demand that you stand on one leg, hop up and down and sing O' Canada; they can demand whatever they like, what is important is that insurance carrier communicates all of the demands to you in a timely manner providing you with every opportunity to settle the claim.

Bad faith arises in the third party context when your carrier fails to actively attempt to protect you from a judgment in excess of your policy limits. The simplest example would be a situation where you accidentally kill someone with your car, your insurance carrier then receives a letter saying that the estate of the deceased is willing to settle their claim for your 10k policy limits at which point your insurance company does anything except send them a check for 10k. Thirty days go by, the estate files a lawsuit against you and the resulting judgment is 1 million dollars. Clearly, the carrier should have settled the case, clearly they acted in bad faith by not settling the claim when the opportunity arose, and clearly a potential bad faith claim exists for the 990k not covered by the 10k bodily injury policy.

If you have not figured it out, a necessary precursor to bad faith in the third party setting is the determination of value for the underlying case in excess of the policy limit, e.g., the million dollar judgment in the previous paragraph. In the first party setting a judgment in excess of limits is unnecessary but the legislature has provided insurers with a procedure by which they can avoid charges of bad faith, the civil remedy notice. When jerked around in the first party context, let's say your home owner's carrier will not pay for damage an appraisal umpire has said they owe, you have only one option if you intend to file a bad faith suit. You must file a Civil Remedy Notice with the State of Florida's Department of Financial Services, the Notice must indicate which statutory provisions you think your carrier is violating. After the notice is received by the carrier and accepted by the state, the carrier then has sixty days to resolve the dispute. They can do that by simply paying what is owed under the policy. If they make the appropriate payment within sixty days of the civil remedy notice, there cannot be a bad faith claim.

Of course, there are wrinkles, complexities in both the third party and first party context which raise questions about what constitutes insurance bad faith. We cannot address them all but two issues in the third party scenario arise often and have received some guidance from the courts. First, what is the appropriate course of action when there are multiple claims being made, the total value of which would exceed your policy limits. Though there is no clear practice for a carrier to avoid bad faith allegations in the multiple claimant situation, there is an indication that in Florida one claim cannot be paid diminishing the total funds available for other claims, if that first payment is not in the insured's best interests. Inevitably a court would decide if a carrier's actions in the multiple claimant framework were reasonable attempts to protect their insured. (It should be noted that several other states allow insurance carriers to settle claims on a first come, first serve basis).

The second scenario to consider involves multiple insureds rather than claimants. Often there are multiple insureds liable for a loss, e.g., the owner of a car and the driver. It's conceivable that an injured party might accept a settlement for one insured but refuse to release the other. Florida courts have approved of insurance companies obtaining releases for some insureds while leaving others without funds under the policy to settle, but, the circumstances must show that there were no other viable options to settle the claim(s) against all of the insureds.

The mandate for an insurance carrier in the third party context is clear, protect as many insureds as possible from excess judgments.

Hope you enjoyed this boring introduction to first and third party insurance bad faith, stay tuned for the primer on reinsurance. I can feel you shivering with anticipation.

Wife/Cousin; Sister/Cousin or How We Are All Related

Get the joke in the picture? It's actually my family tree. My father-in-law/step third cousin once removed was actually the first to tip me off. On my first trip to my wife's home in Odessa (Florida), her father casually asked me my last name. I told him the distinctive and unusual last name of Hungarian origin and he responded in peculiar fashion, "Really, (Hungarian last name), like the (Hungarian last name)'s from Nicaragua." I was slightly surprised but not entirely taken aback because our family had achieved some notoriety in small circles (a Canadian librarian later wrote a book which featured some information about a long dead relative named Laszlo). There is no (Hungarian last name, "HLN"), from Nicaragua that I am not related to in some way. The Jewish community of the country had always been and remains, small.

I return to the initial meeting with my wife's father.

After replying that yes, I am one of the HLN's, he promptly revealed that as a teenager he had spent time on a certain "finca" owned by Julio HLN, my great uncle, and that...wait for it...we were all related. He was chuckling, my wife then girlfriend, was not. My wife's grandfather had sent my father-in-law to Nicaragua to learn Spanish and while there he stayed with family, his family and my family.

This is how it goes. My wife's paternal, paternal great grandfather, i.e., my father-in-law's paternal grandfather was a widower. At some point, he decided to remarry. He already had children but desired companionship. Like many people, he sought his companionship from familiar environs. For him, familiar environs meant the people from the same small Hungarian village of Jews that had since dispersed into diaspora from diaspora. While he was in Michigan, he knew the HLN's in Managua and sent for and married Lillian, sister of my paternal grandfather, Morris. We are one family. There is no blood between my wife and I, at least not within the last four generations, but it was always funny to think that my great aunt was my wife's grandfather's stepmother. Had my great aunt actually been my wife's great grandmother, then my wife and I would be third cousins, not exactly a genetic time bomb. In fact just being of European Jewish descent presents far more genetic concerns.

While my wife's grandfather was living I enjoyed hearing him tell stories about the nefarious deeds of my Nicaraguan family. I am slightly dubious that my paternal uncles' remember what a good swimmer my father-in-law was during his visit more than forty years ago though they swear up and down they remember his visit and always refer to him by his nickname.

My wife and I would have been married even if we were third cousins, I would have been game if we were even closer. Apparently cousin love is no big deal. For an understanding of your relationship to others in your extended family, plus an explanation of what it means when someone is "once removed," click this link. For the record, I knew my wife for seven years before we knew our families were intertwined, that "small world" thing can really blow you away sometimes.

Counting people with a drum

I thought this was worth the three minutes it takes to view.

Open Letter to My Sister/Cousin's Friends

Dear Allison and Allison's Boyfriend:

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you. I don't believe for a second that you honestly mistook the oven for a toilet, that is not a mistake drunk people make. The mistake is that you thought it was funny.

You actually thought to yourself, "this is going to be a funny prank," which unfortunately means that not only are you inconsiderate horrible guests (that should know better than to ever call again), but you are also stupid. So stupid, so moronic that when you arrived at your host's home at 4:30 AM you decided it would be funny to urinate in her oven. My sister/cousin (another story about how we are related may follow) is a nice young girl, not some dude who left you an upper decker that you have a running prankfest with, she is a sweet girl who on occasion actually used her oven. She is sweet and you are jerks.

Did you even acknowledge the violation? Only when prompted. And then your meager apologies were short shrift as you made no attempts to clean the mess and left town without even the slightest, "hey, I think my boyfriend may have pissed in your oven last night." You just left her to discover the urine when she turned the oven on and filled her apartment with the alkaline smell of ignoramus piss. We hate you. You are not friends of ours.

I hope you have equally inconsiderate friends that get drunk and drop a deuce on your carpet. If you were actually sorry, you would replace the oven recognizing that no person should have to eat from a pee oven regardless of whether it is actually harmful or unsanitary. So step up and replace the oven, or make your boyfriend buy one. Damn it, do the right thing. My two year old knows you don't pee in the oven. You suck. Plus you should replace her sheets and blow up mattress. Screw you for treating her apartment like an hourly motel.