NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

A statue of justice in front of one of the downtown courthouses. That's not just shadow - it is dirty and wet. How will we, as a nation, clean it?         

Tucker and Market

A major intersection downtown. Three of the four visible buildings are courthouses.The one on the left with the vertical stripes is the St. Louis University School of Law (me, J.D. 1974). The school was on the main campus three miles west when I was there. A few years ago the university bought a plain, vacant office building and completely rebuilt the interior. Now the law school is near the courthouses.

I think law schools have become a bit of a scam. SLU, a mid-level school, costs $41,000 a year (three year program). Jobs are becoming more scarce and there is a good chance that, in time, artificial intelligence systems will eliminate the need for many of us.         

Twisted

I made it back downtown with the fisheye lens. To complicate matters, I shot HDRs with it, something I've never tried. 

The top image is an old (by American standards) courthouse that gets great light in the late afternoon reflected from the windows of the building across the street. You can see a bit of it in the extreme warp at the top left.

The second picture was taken in exactly the same place as yesterday's lead pic, just different lens and digital technique. Note the weird digital noise outside the circle of the image. That area was theoretically dark, as the fisheye should have kept all the light within the circle. What you see in there was created by Photomatix, the HDR software. Kinda cool. I blacked it out in the top photo and left it in the second. Which do you prefer?

I've been terrible about comments. Too damn much work, with some special business planning issues on the table right now. On the current schedule, retirement is 43 months away. Maybe I should start a countdown clock.                                    

Gray And Wet

Some of our CDP colleagues have been talking about chilly, damp late winter days. That's all we've had here for a while. Some of us have shown first flowers poking out of the earth. I haven't seen any yet but I have not gone out of my way to find them.

On Sunday afternoon, my camera and I wandered around downtown to see how this would photograph. These shots were taken either through open car windows or running out from a parking space, blasting a few shots and then quickly back in to dry off the camera.

The top pic is Igor Mitoraj's Eros Bendato (Eros Bound) in Citygarden, seen here a few times before. Below, the relatively new federal courthouse rises over the one it replaced, now used by the state courts.  At the bottom, the water-streaked granite panels of the cafe in Citygarden.      

Order In The Court

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Like most American cities, St. Louis' law courts cluster downtown. The three stone buildings shown here are: lower left, the state civil courts building, whose goofy architecture has been discussed on the blog before; lower right, what is now called the 22nd Judicial District of Missouri Building and used to be the federal courts before they built the fancy new one at the upper right. Hard to tell from this perspective, but the new federal courthouse is almost exactly as tall as the Arch, completely blocking the view coming downtown from the west. The structure in the center with the aqua glass windows is just an office building but it's got nothing but lawyers.

How many lawyers compressed into what volume of space creates enough fissionable material for a bomb? Maybe the Iranian government knows.