Promises, Promises on Cardozo, Barry Manilow, and Van Halen

I am teaching Jacob & Youngs v. Kent this week, which makes me happy.  I am always happy when I get to teach a Cardozo opinion just like I would be happy if I were teaching in the humanities, and this was the week we get to discuss James Joyce’s “The Dead.”  Always happy to have new insights on the case, and the Promises, Promises episode on the case is full of them.  

For one thing, the hosts point out, in passing, that Kent might have had a special yearning for Reading pipe, because it had a special status.  He longed to shower every morning in water coming through his Reading pipes, the Manolo Blahnik of pipes.  Knowing that the water he was using was flowing through the high-status Reading pipes delighted him, and he so he would sing Barry Manilow’s “Looks Like We Made It” every morning as he exfoliated.  Yes, I know, that’s totally not what that song is about.  It doesn’t help.  The hosts’ brief, anachronistic mention of the Manilow song planted an earworm, leaving me no choice but to exorcise it by sharing it with you.

In the alternative, Professors Wilkinson-Ryan and Hoffman entertain the possibility that the Reading pipes were Kent’s brown M&Ms, a topic on which we have previously posted.  If that were the case, however, the time to object to the Reading pipes was before completion.  If the building is otherwise sound, the lack of Reading pipe does not serve the purpose that the brown M&Ms allegedly served.