Pugnacious

A few nights ago, A-Nu was walking down the street, minding her own business. It was dark but not late, and there were assorted other people around as well as a good bit of traffic. She approached a corner, where an overgrown hedge blocked her view of the foot traffic proceeding down the street perpendicular to the one A-Nu was walking on.

Just as A-Nu got to the end of the hedge, a pug came rocketing around the corner, a manic gleam in its bulging eyes, copious amounts of drool issuing from its hideously squashed mouth. "OH SHIT!!!" A-Nu exclaimed involuntarily upon confronting, and nearly stepping upon, this foul apparition. The foul apparition's owner, who turned out to be attached to the foul apparition via leash, rounded the corner an instant later and trained a self-righteous glare on A-Nu. A-Nu ducked and ran. She knows better than to mess around with inherently delusional people, a class to which pug owners belongs by definition.

Anyway, A-Nu's faithful readers will be pleased to know that she has almost fully recovered from this traumatic experience. Oddly, however, the encounter turned out to be somewhat prophetic. That very night A-Nu went home and learned, via the interwebs, that Chief Judge Herndon of the Southern District of Illinois had issued an opinion denying the government's motion to quash a subpoena "requesting records of the training of . . . canine Paco." United States v. Thomas, 2008 WL 4671501 (Oct. 22, 2008).

While not particularly literary in nature, this opinion delights A-Nu because of its repeated references to the drug-sniffing dog as "canine Paco." Given that many judges intentionally don't use names (preferring terms like "plaintiff," "defendant," "officer," "witness," etc.), A-Nu finds it endearing that Judge Herndon not only refers to Paco by name, but also anoints him with the title of "canine."

Moreover, the opinion holds that the records are necessary to determine whether canine Paco is a "well-trained narcotics-detection dog," evoking images of evidence being introduced as to canine Paco's grades during narcotic-detection school; disputes as to whether canine Paco's skill level rose to the level of WELL-trained, as opposed to merely adequately-trained; and even -- perhaps -- evidence of canine Paco's unsavory off-the-record personal life the that judge might or might not deem unfairly prejudicial under Federal Rule of Evidence 403.