About Me

Name: Hal Davis

Location: Plano, Texas, United States

View my complete profile

In early January we went on our first cruise, ever. My wife and I, my dad and his wife, and my son and his girlfriend drove down to Galveston and spent a week in the Caribbean on Voyager of the Seas (Royal Caribbean Line).

I've mentioned before that my son is a very talented musician, and I sorta get by on the harmonica and vocals. We took our axes on the cruise, thinking there might be some sort of Open Mike Blues Jam. There wasn't, and my son's new Telecaster just stayed in the cabin.

But they had a couple of different Karaoke things going. One was very traditional, and set up as a contest, so the finalists were announced near the end of the cruise for a gala time.

Then there was the Pig and Whistle pub, open late, a bit rowdy, sometimes with off-color lyrics. Derek Lewis held forth with his "Kamakazee Karaokee" [spelled the way it is on the back of my T-shirt]. His shtick is to call out to pedestrians on the grand mall, and convince them to come in and sing a song, without even knowing ahead of time what the song is. Hence the Kamakazee part.


I brought my harps, and he invited me to play along. We did some 12-bar blues, and he sang the lyrics to Margaritaville. Pretty surreal. But we sure had fun. He even burnt me a CD with a recording of it, but I'm not posting it here because of copyright concerns (don't have Jimmy Buffet's or Derek Lewis' permission).

The crowd was well lubricated, and I was duly made a Superstar, with all rights and privileges appertaining thereto. Including the right to buy and wear the official T-shirt, and two photochromic rings (may not be very visible in the picture).

The next night I went back and backed Derek up while he played Mustang Sally, which is one of my all-time favorites to do on harp. It's my theory that harmonica is a poor man's horn section. I think he burned a CD of that as well, but I didn't go by the following night to pick it up.

I didn't set out to become a web expert, but I'm sure learning more than I expected to. Way back when the www was new, I had my web host guys take some paper brochures I had put together and turn them into web pages. Sooner or later, not sure why, I got Microsoft FrontPage and started maintaining my web site myself. Maybe I was just being cheap, maybe I was trying to be control freak, or maybe I just wanted to learn more about making sausage.

Somewhere along the way I learned that when a divorce client (or prospective client) asked me a question that I had been asked by someone else, I could save myself some time by putting the answer on my web site, and then just pointing folks to the canned answer. That's how my web site grew into the huge thing it is now.

Then I discovered a way to do form emails, so I could send someone a canned email, including a link to a part of my web site, and then customize the email for the particular occasion or particular client/prospect. For instance, after I efiled an Original Petition for Divorce, I'd attach a copy of the document to an email to the client, along with a form email on what happens next. I'd mention that if the case didn't get wrapped up, eventually the judge would send us a "move it or lose it" letter, and then I'd say "for more details, follow this link" where they'd get a page or so just on dismissal deadlines and what to do to keep it from getting dismissed. This became even more important when I made a few videos to explain things, and I had to email a link to the video, because I don't know how to put a video into an email.

Then, I learned a bit about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Part of the trick to getting Google to rank your pages high is to have a lot of the words folks are looking for (hardly a trick, it's the essence of what search engines are all about). But one thing I didn't realize is that Google also likes seeing the key words in the titles of the pages, and in the URL addresses.

After optimizing for SEO, a lot of the links I used a lot got fairly long, like this:
http://civilized-divorce.com/procedural-matters-plano-divorce.html#3

Now that's not so terribly long, but some email programs wrap a line when they get to as few as 40 characters, so that URL might show up in their email as
http://civilized-divorce.com/procedural-
matters-plano-divorce.html#3
or something like that. This results in a broken link, because a line break has been inserted into the middle of the address.

So, I began to wonder how I could shorten the URLs so they wouldn't be cut in half in an email, without losing all those groovy keywords.

I remembered hearing about TinyURL.com, and started reading up. There's a pretty good entry in Wikipedia about it. Turns out the guy who owns the domain had the same sort of problem I did, and he created an automated web site that will take a really long URL and shrink it down to something really small, like
http://tinyurl.com/12345
Then, you can send folks the short URL, and then his web site redirects the inquiry to the really long address you started with.

The only real problem Wikipedia mentioned in this regard is that some folks are using TinyURL to send unsuspecting folks to a malicious web site. But, what that means is that you can only trust a URL as much as you can trust the person who gave it to you. So, if you were going to click on my really long URL, you'd probably click on the TinyURL.

TinyURL also has a Custom Alias feature, and as best I can figure it out, what that means is that you can request what goes after the slash, and if nobody's taken it already, it's available. So I can put CivDiv in the TinyURL and folks have more confidence that it's really about me and Civilized Divorce.

So, while I could have taken
http://civilized-divorce.com/procedural-matters-plano-divorce.html#3
and turned it into something like
http://tinyurl.com/9ag8?llv
I've actually turned it into
http://tinyurl.com/CivDiv-DWOP
(DWOP is courthouse slang for Dismiss for Want Of Prosecution)

Another tip: when you get TinyURL to give you a new URL, be sure to copy it or write it down, because as best I can tell, there's no way to go back and find out what URLs it has created for you.

At any rate, this isn't intended as a web tutorial, but kind of marveling at how much I've learned about a topic I didn't set out to learn much about. But it is kind of a cool tip, if you email folks long links.

Often my clients express confusion and alarm when the attorney on the other side files an Answer which contains the following language: "Respondent enters a general denial" and "Respondent prays that Petitioner take nothing ..."

Definitions first. The side that starts the case, such as by filing the Original Petition for Divorce is called the Petitioner. The other side, which responds to the lawsuit, is the Respondent.

Second, on procedure. For the Petitioner to move forward with the case, he must prove that the other side knows about the lawsuit (divorce), and proves it one of three ways: (1) a constable or process server delivers written notice and then files a sworn statement that they delivered it; (2) Respondent signs a Waiver of Service before a notary public, and then it's filed with the court; or (3) Respondent (usually through an attorney) prepares and files an Answer.

But right now we're talking about the Answer and the alarming language in it. It's less confusing to examine the principles in a negligence suit than in a divorce. Suppose someone slips and falls on the front steps of your house, and they're hurt, and they sue you to get help with their medical bills through your homeowner's insurance policy. They'll file something with the court that says that you were negligent (such as by leaving the skateboard on the steps), that your negligence caused their injury, and that you should pay them $100,000 for their medical bills and pain. They've given notice of why they are suing, why it's your fault, and how much money they want. If you learn about the lawsuit and do nothing about it, they can go to the judge and get the judge to award them $100,000 because everything they've said must be taken as true because there was no objection or contrary evidence.

But you are smarter than that, and you have your attorney respond to the lawsuit, by filing an Answer. In the Answer, your attorney says you enter a general denial. This is more or less like a kid in a schoolyard saying "Did not!" or "Prove it!" It means that their mere statement that something is true in the Petition is not to be taken as conclusive proof, and they should be required to put on evidence to show that it's true, and you should be allowed to question the evidence and put on contrary evidence.

Your Answer will also "pray" that "petitioner take nothing." Well, first, let's deal with the Prayer. In this case, Prayer has an ancient meaning, which is not spiritual. A Prayer means a request. When you ask God to do something, that is a prayer to God. But a prayer to a court is simply a request for the court to do something.

Any well-drafted pleading filed with the court should end with what you'd like for the judge to do about it. And the principle applies that the judge is never going to give you more than you ask for. So, when the person slips and falls on your sidewalk, and he thinks the most he could get for his injuries is $75,000, he goes ahead and sues for $100,000 because he knows he won't get more than he asks for. Usually the amount sued for is incredibly high, but sometimes there are reasons to use a lower number. If your neighbor wanted to sue in small-claims court without a lawyer, he may have to sue for less than $5,000 or $10,000.

And when you file your Answer, you pray that Petitioner take nothing, or that the judge awards him zero.

The real effect of the Answer and General Denial is that the Respondent announces that he is ready to go, and if they have to go to trial, he is prepared to counter the Petitioner's statements and give reasons why Petitioner shouldn't get everything she asked for.

Today's Dallas Morning News, front page, above the fold headline: Gay Marriage | Case puts same-sex divorce at state door | As Dallas man seeks split, AG says court can't end what doesn't exist in Texas.

Two unidentified men married in Cambridge, Mass. in 2006, then moved to Dallas, and one has filed for divorce in Dallas. The wording of the article leads one to think that one or both of the couple were originally from Dallas, and only moved to Mass. in order to get married there.

The Texas Attorney General is intervening, to make sure that laws of the State of Texas are not broken. A divorce is, by definition, the termination of a marriage. And, by Texas law, a marriage is defined as one man and one woman. The union of two men is simply not a marriage in Texas, and thus cannot be ended with a divorce in Texas.

On one hand, my religious and social conservatism side with the Attorney General, that you can't use a back door to get the state to recognize the union of two men as a marriage. After all, it's not like the Texas legislature just made up the definition of a marriage. Throughout recorded history the definition of marriage was always between a man and a woman. We needn't delve into the history of bigamy, but even then if a man had several wives, the wives weren't married to each other: each was married to the man.

Efforts of the gay rights community to call a homosexual union a marriage irk me, as it seeks to redefine a term that has been very well defined for millenia, thank you very much. It reminds me of Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee explaining to Alice that a word means what they want it to mean. I'm similarly irked that folks say "decimate" (to reduce by 10% as a punitive measure) when they mean "obliterate." Or that folks say "burglarize" when they mean "burgle" (after all, a dead person isn't said to have been "murderized").

But, on the other hand, I think it's only fair that some of the benefits and burdens of marriage be made available to our homosexual brethren and sistren. Probably chief among them is the ability to be covered by their partner's health insurance. And, there's community property and intestate inheritance rights. Obligations of mutual support. Perhaps even alimony. Certainly child support and parenting issues.

It follows that if marriage-like rights are conferred on a homosexual union, a divorce-like process must be available should the bonds of the marriage-like relationship fail.

I don't know what will happen in the Dallas divorce case, but I think that the Texas legislature should pass legislation to establish and recognize same-sex unions, and adopt Texas divorce law for terminating such unions, whether the union was joined in Texas or elsewhere.