If you haven’t seen Dunkirk or Hacksaw Ridge yet, bookmark this blog and watch both movies. Both films deal with decisive events during WWII – the Battle of Dunkirk, long considered an Allied defeat, and the battle to take “Hacksaw Ridge,” a stronghold of the Japanese in Okinawa. Both movies depict the bloody realities of…

From buddy cop flicks to Law and Order, you can find evidence of a healthy respect for the law all over the big and small screens. When you’re watching a movie, you have to suspend belief, just for a few hours, to get the full effect. Movies often stretch both reality and the limits of…

Nobody, including me, likes to follow “dumb” rules. Unfortunately, Maryland’s legal code is chock-full of some pretty bizarre laws and regulations. In my spare time, I read Maryland’s legal codes — mostly so I can clean up in pub trivia, but also because it might some day help me at my job. And I have…

Into every like, they say, a little rain must fall. Unless you’re in Florida, where the rains come every day (both literally and figuratively). Today’s gem is care of the New York Post: “Robert Johnson, 38, is charged with making [pot brownies] and giving them to his teenage daughter to peddle at a [baseball] game.”…

If you’ve been to court, and the judge gave you probation before judgement, or gave you a suspended sentence, then you’ll be placed into probation. Probation is a special set of rules that apply just to you that are set by the judge. Generally it’s a year, 18 months, or in Circuit Court it could…

There was a story in the Columbia Daily Tribune recently about a 22-year-old guy from Maryland who was allegedly dating a 12-year-old girl from Missouri, and now he’s facing federal charges for “enticing a minor to engage in illicit sexual activity.” He and his brother tried to bring the girl back with them to Maryland,…

We love Twitter. We love the memes and celebrity clapbacks and the insane “Twitter wars” between politicians and everyday people. It’s like watching a soap opera distilled into 140 characters. But just when we thought it couldn’t get any more nuts on that platform, a Maryland native had a “hold my beer” moment that led…

The saying goes that life imitates art far more often than art imitates life, and nowhere is that more apparent than in our favorite films. All those superhero flicks and larger-than-life characters require a little suspension of disbelief, but the ground rules of society stay more or less the same no matter how super our…