Before listing the top stories of 2009, I feel the need to purge all the various notes and partial drafts I have involving stories that I thought had potential but didn't quite get posted during the year.  Many of these I still like quite a bit, but sometimes you just have to move on.  Anyway, here's the first installment of that.

• A dispute that somehow escalated to violence after somebody called another person's cellphone by mistake and the "two strangers exchanged a series of hostile text messages" was going to be Good Reason to Kill #7.

• In September, a Florida judge denied a motion he said was "riddled with unprofessional grammatical and typographical errors."  He marked up a copy with a red pen and ordered the attorney responsible for it to show it to his client.

• Bonus points: this was the the same judge who, in June 2006, ordered parties in a discovery dispute to resolve it by a match of "rock, paper, scissors."

• In New York, a pagan attorney was elected to the Queens City Council.  Reportedly, Dan Halloran is the leader of a local pagan sect that practices "the Theod faith of pre-Christian heathen religions" that "honor the Gods and Goddesses of the North," and is apparently the nation's "first openly pagan elected official."  He's also a Republican.

More to come.