Five fisherman from Sri Lanka died last month after drinking the unknown liquid they found in bottles floating about 300 miles offshore. The fisherman reportedly believed the bottles contained foreign liquor. Ceylon Today reports that efforts are underway to inform nearby fishing trawlers about the dangers of drinking from floating bottles. It’s a good thing the authorities are doing that because, otherwise, the most common sense thing to do when finding unidentified liquids is to drink them. Better planning would have saved their lives. You can also plan better when negotiating your staffing ..read more

Commas are important. See, for example, Let’s Eat, Grandma and the Rachael Ray magazine blurb proclaiming that Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog. (The latter, sadly, turned out to be a fake. The real magazine blurb had the commas.) If I had put a comma in the title above, after How Long, you may have thought this post was intended for Pro Football Hall of Famer Howie Long. It’s not. Howie played 13 seasons with the Raiders but almost certainly does not read this blog. This post, instead, is intended for anyone who wants to know how long you can retain an independ ..read more

Friday night I saw The Gilmour Project play at Northfield MGM, a smallish venue near Cleveland. Great show with plenty of Pink Floyd deep cuts and a “how did they just do that?” version of The Great Gig in the Sky with an electric guitar handling the Clare Torry solo vocals. And, as many of you know, there is a law requiring that the last song at any Pink Floyd tribute show must be “Comfortably Numb.” There were no violations of law at this concert. Last week I came across another law that, in a totally unrelated way, left me uncomfortably numb. Tucked away in a 1,492-page omnibus bill that r ..read more

If I type “Olson” into google, my top results are Matt Olson, first baseman for Atlanta (makes sense since a lot of my web activity is baseball-related); James A. Olson Guitars (no idea why since the only place I play guitar is on the radio); and Major John Olson of the U.S. Space Force (also no idea why since I have never been to outer space). The most relevant Olson for me today though is none of these. Instead, it’s a long-awaited decision in a case called Olson v California. In this case, a group of app-based gig economy companies sued the State of California, alleging that AB 5 and its A ..read more

The government loves acronyms. Sometimes a little too much. If you check the DHS.gov website for its guide to acronyms, you’d see that AA can refer to eight different things, all entirely unrelated. AA can mean Affirmative Action, Approval Authority, or my favorite, Atomic Absorption. (A close second is Anti-Aircraft Improvised Explosive Device Incident. Sadly, no explanation is provided for why DHS drops the IEDI part.) AAA has four approved meanings, including American Ambulance Association and Area Agency on Aging. In law we get lots of acronyms too, and sometimes they show up in case name ..read more

When Sly and the Family Stone released “I Want to Take You Higher” in 1969, it was originally a B-side. The song took off, though, and became a Top 40 hit anyway. The song is an upbeat ode to how music can make you feel good. Fun fact: It was used as the theme song in the Canadian children’s show, Hilarious House of Frightenstein, to introduce the show’s disc jockey, the Wolfman, who is either a fictional part-wolf part-man or a human DJ who achieved vocational excellence (and got his own TV show!) despite an untreated case of hypertrichosis. The Family Stone wasn’t the only band that would l ..read more

About six months ago in Cambridge, Ontario, Sonny Ayres was born, the fifth child of parents Britteney and Chance. But Sonny was no ordinary baby. He weighed 14 1/2 pounds. (Yes, for the benefit of those moms reading this and looking aghast, he was delivered by c-section.) According to Guinness (the book, not the beer), the heaviest recorded birth was 22 pounds, in 1879 in Seville, Ohio. That baby lived just 11 hours. A different kind of weighing was at issue in a recent decision by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, determining independent contractor status. The issue was whether three plai ..read more

Darling, you got to let me know Should I stay, or should I go? These lines open the 1981 hit single “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by the Clash. Slight correction, according to Genius lyrics, the opening lines of the song are “Oh! Hola!” which is kind of fun. Should I stay or should I go is the question the Supreme Court answered last week regarding arbitration cases. In January, we previewed this pending case. The case involves independent contractors who sued, alleging misclassification. The contractors had signed individual arbitration agreements, and the business successfully moved to com ..read more

This past weekend, the solar storm was supposed to be strong enough that we could see the aurora borealis in Cleveland. At 11:30 Friday night, my family went to the Polo Fields in nearby South Chagrin Metropark to see for ourselves. Lots of others had the same idea, and the fields allowed us an unobstructed view of the sky, where we saw…. nothing really. We read that iPhones capture light better than our eyes, so we too photos of the blank sky. Turns out there’s some truth to that. I took the photo above, which makes it appear that I saw a nice light show. But I didn’t. I took a photo of what ..read more

The world’s largest passenger elevator is inside the Jio World Center building in Mumbai, India. It can hold 235 people and is designed to cater to large gatherings, such as weddings or convention attendees. The elevator has glass windows, offers panoramic views of the gardens below, and features a crystal-studded ceiling. It has two sofas so passengers can relax while ascending the maximum five floors at the slow but deliberate rate of 1 meter per second. Thinking big doesn’t just work when building elevators. It also works when building independent contractor agreements. Here’s what I mean ..read more