In Montenegro, hiking trails are not only marked with colors (always red and white, but I am not sure if that means that all the trails are connected). In addition, wherever the path forks, cats are positioned whose job is to ensure that you don’t get lost.
If you take the wrong path, the cat will protest loudly. If the cat realizes that you are new to the area, it will accompany you for part of the way.
Each cat works in a designated area. For example, almost every time I climb to the fortress above Kotor, I meet this cat. By now, it already recognizes me and greets me happily, always walking the same stretch of the way next to me. But never all the way to the top, nor all the way into town on the way back. It has its own territory, for which it feels responsible.
Everywhere in the world, people put up posters and notices when they have lost their own dog or cat.
In Bolivia, when people have found someone else’s dog, they go to great lengths to print color posters and distribute them all over town, in an attempt to reunite the dog and its owner, not forgetting to reassure the unknown owner that they will take care of the dog in the meantime and that the dog is relaxed.
Some clients are better not having. When you find out that someone takes up too much time or causes you a headache, it’s often the best thing to fire that client. Whenever I did that, clients were surprised: “But you can’t fire me!” Of course I can. We have a contract and I can terminate that contract.
Over time, one becomes quite good at spotting these querulous clients and doesn’t take them on in the first place. Let’s look at one such example which conveys a lot of the warning signs that lawyers should be on the look-out for:
Re: query help with claim to european court and or claim against behorde in Berlin
That’s the biggest red flag already in the subject line!
People who want to go to the Supreme Court or “the European Court” (which one?) or “the International Court” (which one? with even more options) are always wackos and never pay their lawyer’s bill. Yes, always and never.
First, you can’t usually address the highest court without having gone through all lower courts. Second, I always ask clients: “Why do you plan from the outset to go the European Court of Human Rights? You can only do that if you lose at all previous levels. Why would that be your plan A?” It turns out they want to fight against “the system” and give their life a purpose. This seems highly attractive to conspiracy nuts, but I have a feeling we’ll get to this.
dear Mr Moser, I hve been looking for help for some months.
Meaning you have already annoyed dozens of other people.
I have posted on some international law school sites
Ah yes, as suspected. By the way, what’s an “international law school”?
to try and find someone to help with what has amounted to serious breaches of EU law
Of course. Very serious. But not serious enough to quote the law allegedly breached.
involving corrupt Judges, corrupt lawyers that quite frankly stitched me up and their actions left me on the street penniless and nearly dead with lost possessions.
And here we have the promised conspiracy theory. The whole “system” is in cahoots to conspire against the innocent victim, who will relentlessly fight against corruption, or at least relentlessly spam any lawyer whose e-mail address they can find.
at the moment I still am and need to find a lawyer again in Munich. I was in Berlin last year. Unfortunately not having much luck.
Whenever you are the third or fourth lawyer on a case, something is wrong with the client.
my submissions submitted to sz gericht this time, were done on a prono basis and expected a good outcome. the judge however has relied on the fabricated and fraudulent informaton from the jobcenter and ignored our evidence.
Again the conspiracy. Because a judge simply having a different opinion or interpreting the law differently is not enough.
“Jobcenter” refers to the German unemployment agency, so now I know that the case probably centers on benefits denied.
now i have no one representing me and the order made that the sozialamt pay me for two months pending a further decison, they have not even paid that. that happened last year in berlin as well by the way. also the lawyer had asked the court to make an urgent order for a pension for me, and although the court said I should try to sort this out with the sozialamt, nothing has happend and I am still homeless.
That sounds like a problem indeed, but it would just be so much more credible if it could be conveyed in a calm manner and without believing that the justice system of the Federal Republic of Germany is conspiring against a poor lady by not paying her for two months. (Although admittedly, mistakes are made and laws are misapplied by the unemployment agency. But the reason we know this is that courts usually rectify it.)
MY LIFE HAS BEEN PUT AT RISK REPEATEDLY:
I was already worried there wouldn’t be a single sentence in all caps.
the claim to the behorde is an option to the european court
Which European Court? And why would the European Union or the Council of Europe be concerned with a small dispute about unemployment benefits?
but I have suffered so much this past year.. someone has to pay for this unlawfulness.
This is a typical motivation of querulous clients. It’s often less about their own advantage or benefit, but about making someone else pay, and if only by holding up the whole state bureaucracy by writing letters every day.
But remember this: if you are a lawyer and you accept such a case, it’s always yourself who will end up paying.
Ana E[…]
The best way to deal with such requests is to delete and ignore them. The second best way is to quote a fee that you know they cannot pay. So I replied:
Dear Ana,
unfortunately I charge 400 EUR for a consultation.
To which Ana replied:
I see. Can you suggest someeone. surely you could be compensated through the money that I would get from behorde, you could take a fee from that.
Like the previous lawyers?
high prosepct of success.
Ah yes. Hence all the winning.
was told they have to pay the rent that was never paid etc, or can you suggest how I can get referred to a probono firm that does this sort of case, as it could well be a test case etc.
You’ve been looking around the internet for months, e-mailing anyone who can’t run away fast enough, yet you are still asking me to refer you to someone? And why would I burden my lawyer friends with referrals like that? Unlike me, they don’t have a funny blog for which they are gathering material.
When people think their case is important enough to be a “test case” (which contradicts the “high prospect of success”), they almost always overestimate their case. And, either way, even test cases need to be paid for. I may eat a test cake for free, but your case sure doesn’t look like cake to me.
I still not even know what the last decison of the landesozialgericht says and one one will tell me it is bizarre,
Oh. So your analysis of “high prospect of success” is based on a court decision that you haven’t read?
I asked the previous lawyer but lawyers are strange in germany, they feel they do not need to explain or discuss things or tell clients who are non german speaking what is in them.
Yeah, we only work when we get paid. Really strange.
I will do it myself if you would be so kind as to tell me or send me a format template pleaes for claiming against the behorde in Licthtenberg.
Sorry, there are no templates for highly important test cases. Also, a template is not enough to fight a wall of corruption.
I am entitled to those monies in order to get my stuff back from the landlord. that is a serious breach of article 8.
Article 8 of what? Ok, probably of the European Convention on Human Rights (which is not EU law, as claimed above). But if I wasn’t such a hot-shot lawyer, who could guess?
would you be at least willing to tell m ethe paragraph in the decision relating to the money, what it says please ?
I don’t know, I haven’t received or seen any court decision. (None was ever attached.)
But in any case, we had a different problem, which I pointed out to the lady:
No, I can’t do anything unless I get paid.
This was some time ago. I unearthed the correspondence now because I have recently begun to publish more of these stories on my blog. Out of curiosity, I e-mailed justizcase@…, innocently inquiring about the outcome of the case. To which she replied:
none of your business.
fuck off or I will report you.
To whom?
Thank Fck I dont live in Fascist Racist Germany
Well, thank Fck (whoever that is) that I was smart enough not to help.
Sadly, the courts don’t have that choice.
By the way, all the e-mails from people who compare the contemporary German justice system to Nazi jurisprudence would fill another article.
Great, a film about Churchill and about World War II! A movie for which even this student of history can leave the desk for a few hours without a guilty conscience. And off to the cinema I was. There, the first disappointment: notwithstanding that I came to watch a film about Churchill, I was still not permitted to smoke cigars in the theater.
Before we start, let me prepare you for the second disappointment: Darkest Hour is no comprehensive Churchill biopic, not even a comprehensive Churchill-in-World-War-II film. It only deals with a few weeks in May 1940, from Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister until the rescue of British soldiers trapped in Dunkirk. But that’s the topic of a separate recent movie.
Because this blog has often been accused of negative defeatism in its reviews, I will start with something positive: Churchill is not portrayed as a simple heroic figure, but as a human being with weaknesses. His politics is guided by clear principles, but a plan he has not. Or, to quote one of his critics in the film, he has a hundred new plans every day. Viewers are also reminded of the Battle of Gallipoli, a disastrous landing campaign in World War I based on one of Churchill’s grand ideas. I don’t know if contemporary viewers know much about this, if they know anything about World War I at all. Myself, I only learned about it in Australia, when I watched a military parade one April 25th to commemorate that internecine battle in Turkey, where in 1915 almost all young men from Australia and New Zealand of that time lost their lives.
But I digress. Which may be, and that brings us to the end of the positive part of this review, because Darkest Hour doesn’t manage to captivate me. Gary Oldman has been much lauded for his portrayal of Churchill, but I fail to see why. For example, it’s obvious that he detests smoking and often holds the cigar in his hand or mouth unlit.
At least that part I could have portrayed with more pleasure.
One of the secretaries receives far too much space, as if she was the second lead character. Miss Layton, played by distractingly beautiful Lily James, of course has a brother in Dunkirk, causing her to shed the odd tear while typing orders. Churchill notices that and takes her into the top secret map room, where he explains to her (and to the viewers who may still not have gotten it and who may also need helpful signs to understand where Belgium and the Netherlands are) once again how dramatic the situation is.
That’s quite tacky.
It becomes unbearably tacky when Churchill goes to work on the tube (which is of course not historically correct) and strikes up a conversation with a clichéd cross-section of the British public (a bricklayer, a young mother, an even younger couple, a colored subject of the crown), all of whom reinforce his will to never surrender. Even a toddler calls out “never!” because the front in France and the fight against fascism are more important to him than strawberry ice cream. Even in Soviet propaganda films, I have never seen such an implausible scene.
Save yourself the two hours. You will spend the money more wisely if you buy Winston Churchill’s own book about World War II. That’s not quite objective either, but Churchill was not only a brilliant orator, but also a good writer. In 1953, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his World War memoirs.
Or you will use the money saved by not going to the cinema for a trip to London to visit the Cabinet War Rooms, the underground headquarters shown in the film (charging a whopping entrance fee of 18.90 £ though), and the Imperial War Museum (free admission).
I had already written about the Romanian Railway’s ingenious way to air-condition its trains in the sweltering summer heat. It seems however that someone forgot to turn off the air-conditioning in winter, because this is how the train from Iași to Timișoara looked this week:
The Trans-Romanian Railroad is clearly positioning itself as a serious alternative to the Trans-Siberian one.
I have already described one way for the people of Kotor to witness the sunset: to climb up Mount Vrmac, the mountain that stretches into the Bay of Kotor from the left in the first two photos.
The other possibility is scaling the steep mountain behind Kotor, where the deserted villages of Big Zalazi and Small Zalazi are in wonderfully peaceful valleys. From there, you have views like these:
I don’t even know why I am putting so much effort into writing short stories, when all you need to do is become a lawyer and then wait for people to send their own crazy stories.
Latest example:
Re: My abduction from Germany
Dear Sir,
I was abducted from Germany when I was three years old, after my nanny was assassinated in the house.
I suffered from amnesia all life long, and only recovered one year ago.
I reported the case to the police in Rostock.
My real name must be, from my souvenirs, Connie Aglaé Violetta Kathaerina Sylvana Neuhel Offelsman.
What should I do now?
I would like to retrieve my papers, and my family’s inheritance.
Thanks for writing back to me.
Cordially,
Catherine C.
P.S. They battered me cruelly when I was three, until four, and even tried to kill me, until my adoptive father over there came and forced them to send me to tribunal in Mauritius, where I was legally adopted, but this has not been declared internationally, since I threw away my passport, in order for them not to do ‘chantage’ against my grandparents living in Germany, because I was in panic. I am not in very good health now, whatever doctors say (hepatic problems and fatigue, depression).
As a lawyer, I am trained to read through long stories quickly and identify the main issue:
Dear Catherine,
because this is a rather complicated story, I suggest that we take a few hours to speak about it in detail over Skype.
I charge 400 EUR for such an initial consultation.
Of course she didn’t have the money. Just more “information”.
The only thing I can tell you, for the moment,
is that they tried to violate me then renounced
they burned my skin with spices and later with burning oïl
I was 4 years old
They put me in a grave for children
Their magistrate in Mauritius forced them to adopt me because I called the police over there
I don’t dare to show myself on the screen because sometimes my skin is good, sometimes it appears light Brown. I met a fireman in hospital and he said that burned people never recover their colour completely.
Knowing that I am German, I feel uneasy, because they are my only family. They didn’t even want to pay for my studies. I always had to be gentle, and therefore, they finished by accepting to bargain that even me had the right to a life.
Cordially.
And:
Dear Sir,
another information I have is that my father was asthmatic, and he died when I was 2 years old, on the 1st February 1983. My mother was French and I was born in La Salpétrière hospital. He talked to me often and told me that he declared my birth in German Consulate. And that they took my imprints for my passport, as well as an ADN test done.
Therefore, could you at least investigate?
He also told me that I would be able to recuperate my inheritance until the age of 47 years old, because it was specified on the testament.
Therefore, maybe you could do an investigation on my name, therefore you will be able to be paid later, when the case is settled? The family names arising in my head are Neuhel Offelsman Sohntra, and O connoughan by my mother.
I live in France since 16 years, and had many problems with this family, which conduce me to believe with more certitude that they are not my family because they have always been intimidating me, except the father who had himself a lot of problems in his life, with the mother and everything. He sometimes insinuated I was not his child, but I did not hear well from one ear, now it’s better.
The nanny had a case in tribunal for me, until I was three, for her to adopt me, but this never happened, not in due time. She was killed at home.
My dog barked and made me go out of the house. I ran to Rostock and took the bus over there. The grocer did not understand, because I was not in a state to report.
Sometimes I think this story is unbelievable, and think no one will help me.
I will arrange with my bank this month, to see if there is a way to pay you immediately, and arrange a consultation over Skype, but this will take 7 to 10 days.
My father was a banker and a doctor.
Can I write to the consulate on my own? Will they still have the information, or else was I reported dead? Do I still have family in Germany? Would they accept to see me again, in that state? That’s why I feel unsure. Otherwise, I don’t understand where these souvenirs come from. With so many détails. I am Christian, and never would lie, therefore I’m pretty sure I’m telling the Truth. Only prayer in Jesus and St Micheal saved my life all this time. But this family put me in asylum in France, where the judge said I had Nothing to do in there, and where psychiatric treatment are given to people when they are consenting. Is it because of my intonation of voice? I never knew, and the psychiatrists don’t know even, that’s the ridicule of this situation. They talk to me pleasantly, and we exchange about everything except the essential. I never let anyone dominate me too much, that’s part of my character.
Catherine C.
To which I only replied:
Without getting paid, I am not even reading your e-mails.
Before we start, let me prepare you for the second disappointment: 
The Happy Hermit 