"It's not that I want to prevent someone from having a beverage, but there were mugs, Super-Slurpee kind of things with straws coming out."

The judge will have order.

[Judge Gene Gasiorkiewicz] bought two big boxes of custom-printed plastic travel mugs. The silver mugs have the scales of justice in black on two sides, with the words "RACINE CIRCUIT COURT BRANCH 2" printed

[He] paid about $300 for the roughly 100 mugs - all "made in the U.S. of A." - and said he will give every lawyer who comes before him their first mug free. If it gets lost, he said, the attorney's on the hook for the replacement.

"They can put whatever they want inside it," he said. "When it sits on the counsel table, it's
uniform."

It's good that a judge has a strong feeling for uniformity. It has something to do with being consistent and treating people as equals... doesn't it? In any case, people look totally unprofessional drinking from straws. In fact, I hate to see any adult drinking from a straw, and I loathe when a restaurant serves your water or other drink with a straw already stuck into it. Do you just go ahead and drink from the straw when that happens? Do you realize that the person you'rewith may see you as looking childish — as if you'd worn shorts out to dinner? When there's a straw in my drink, I have to take it out and put it on the table, not that I'm trying to punish the bus boy. But it's really those fat plastic straws that I hate. If a drink came with with 2 paper-wrapped paper straws, I'd be tempted to use them and perhaps drift off into all sorts of straw-prompted nostalgia. Oh... sorry. I'm ranting. But then, I never portrayed myself as a person with judicial temperament.