David Lee Powell has been executed.
Edited to add: Here’s a link to updated Statesman coverage.
Archive for the ‘Clippings’ Category
Eyes Wide Shut.
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010L’affair Rodenstock.
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010Mike Steinberger has an interesting article in Slate about Daniel Oliveros and Jeff Sokolin, two prominent NYC wine dealers who specialized in very old and very famous wines (for example, 1945 Mouton Rothschild in magnums).
It seems that their dealership may actually have been a major source of counterfeit wines; this ties into the Koch/Rodenstock affray, previously noted in this space, and well summarized in the article.
Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters (part 4 of a series).
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010By way of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, we have discovered The American Scholar‘s reprint of a speech given by William Deresiewicz at West Point in October.
Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.
…
Will you have the courage to do what’s right? Will you even know what the right thing is? It’s easy to read a code of conduct, not so easy to put it into practice, especially if you risk losing the loyalty of the people serving under you, or the trust of your peer officers, or the approval of your superiors. What if you’re not the commanding officer, but you see your superiors condoning something you think is wrong?
How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?
Go. Read.
Eye on the Killer Guy.
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010David Lee Powell’s latest appeal has been rejected at the state level.
Barring intervention at the federal level by the Supreme Court, his execution is scheduled for sometime after 6 PM tonight.
Edited to add: Powell has filed a new appeal, based on allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
Edited to add 2: Denied.
“This isn’t the sort of job that rewards competence, you know.”
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010The Hidden World of Girls.
Monday, June 14th, 2010I’m a day late and a few bucks short on this (somehow I missed it the first time around) but I did want to put up a link to this story from NPR’s “The Hidden World of Girls” project, featuring my friend Pat Cadigan.
(Lawrence and I discussed this: I get the Pat Cadigan beat, he gets the giant spider beat. Seems like a fair split to me.)
Perhaps he should have gotten the flambé license.
Monday, June 14th, 2010Prominent NYC bartender and absinthe advocate arrested for pouring booze on the bar and lighting it.
Chief Byrnes said that the fire, set around 2 a.m. along the roughly 15-foot-long bar, was six feet wide and had flames that leapt two to three feet in the air. It burned for several minutes and then extinguished itself. No one was hurt, and no curtains singed, but Mr. Trummer was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment and criminal nuisance, both misdemeanors.
(The photo at the top of the first linked article is interesting, especially in light of the detail from the second linked article about Mr. Trummer’s previous citations.)
Edited to add: Lawrence sends along a link to this YouTube video of bartenders at Apotheke playing with fire. I’m linking instead of embedding because I find YouTube videos a PITA to get properly embedded.
Sometimes, you’ve just got to shake your head…
Thursday, June 10th, 2010…and say “Wow”.
Tim Rutten reviews the new Chuck Barris book, Della: A Memoir of My Daughter, in the LAT.
Pull quote:
…it is difficult to understand how a reputable house like Simon & Schuster came to publish this wretched volume.
Ring, ring, ring, banana phone!
Thursday, June 10th, 2010The International Banana Museum is moving.
Obit watch: Abraham Nathanson, inventor of Bananagrams.
And the judge in the Nicaraguan banana pesticide fraud case feels threatened.
“Houston on fire. Will history blame me, or the bees?”
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010Obit watch: Arthur Herzog III,
(Subject line hattip. Question: was that, or “Jaws: The Revenge”, Michael Caine’s worst movie role?)
Edited to add: Well, Lawrence decided to challenge me. Therefore…
.mobi dick
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010Was your retirement fund heavily invested in speculating on “.mobi” domain names?
How’s that working for you?
The problem, of course, is that the iPhone and other mobile devices have rendered .mobi useless.
If only someone had told Schwartz that before he shelled out $200,000 for “flowers.mobi” in 2006.
In unrelated news, here’s the latest update I’ve been able to find on progress in building nanoscale violins.
Timeless. Changeless.
Wednesday, June 9th, 2010In my family, there’s a running joke: you know it is a slow news day when the local paper runs a story about the timeless, changeless ways of the Amish.
The NYT covers the sudden Federal interest in changing Amish farming practices. Specifically, cattle runoff from the Amish and Old Order Mennonite farmers around Chesapeake Bay is destroying the bay’s ecosystem; the Feds are trying to persuade the farmers to implement practices that would reduce runoff, and even offering government grants to farmers. Of course…
Persuading plain-sect farmers to install fences and buffers underwritten by federal grants has been challenging because of their tendency to shy from government programs, including subsidies. Members neither pay Social Security nor receive its benefits, for example.
In other news, William Grimes (author of Straight Up or On the Rocks
(That reminds me: has anyone out there read Chasing the White Dog
Yes. I am sure Mr. Duncan arranged his death with the favorable tax consequences to his children in mind.
Oh, guess what? David Lee Powell has filed a new appeal!
Houston attorney Richard Burr said in a 53-page application for a writ of habeas corpus that Powell has been a model inmate, that he poses no threat to society and that to execute him would violate his constitutional rights prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment.
Statesman Eye for the Death Row Guy
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010(Hattip to BlogHouston, where “Chron Eye for the Death Row Killer Guy” is a recurring feature.)
The Statesman seems to have embarked on a pro-David Lee Powell campaign, in advance of Mr. Powell’s scheduled execution on June 15th.
Yesterday, we were treated to a long article about Powell, his desire to live, and whether his execution had “been robbed of its meaning and purpose” after 32 years.
Today, we’re treated to an editorial stating that life without parole would be a fair punishment for Mr. Powell, since, after all, he hasn’t repeated his crimes and has been a model citizen on Death Row for the past 32 years.
Now, why did it take 32 years to get to this point? Well, part of the reason is that Mr. Powell has appealed his conviction twice, and was granted new trials in 1991 and 1999.
And what did Mr. Powell do to justify the death penalty? He killed a cop, Officer Ralph A. Ablanedo. Specifically, he gunned Officer Ablanedo down with an AK-47. (This was in 1978; I’m not sure if, when the paper refers to an “AK-47”, they mean a real AK-47, or one of these AK-47s. However, the APD site refers to a “fully automatic AK-47”, so I’ll give the paper the benefit of the doubt on this one.)
In addition…
There does not seem to be any legitimate question about Powell’s guilt. The whole thrust of the Statesman‘s argument is that Powell’s successfully fought a delaying action for 32 years; and now that he’s managed to delay this long, we shouldn’t execute him because too much time has passed since the crime.
I’m not a blind supporter of the death penalty. I believe there are problems with it (and, at some point, I’d like to do a longer post about that). But Powell is not the poster child for injustice that the Statesman is making him out to be.
I have no joke here, I just like saying…
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010…”Baldenfreude”.
The NYT has at least two things going for it:
- The “Time Topics” blog.
- The ability for readers to get word definitions by double-clicking on a word within an article.
Put those things together, and what do you get? A list of 50 words most looked up by NYT readers.
Number one on the list? “inchoate”. “baldenfreude”, which is actually a MoDo coinage, comes in at #6. “Kristallnacht” ranks 13th. Heretically, “Manichean” comes in at #28.
The takeaway from this?
Still, we should remember that this is journalism, not philology.
“…think it possible you may be mistaken.”
Monday, June 7th, 2010Two of my favorite authors showed up while I was making the Internet rounds this morning.
The San Jose Mercury News has an interview with Tim Cahill, who just finished a semester of teaching at San Jose State. I hadn’t heard much from or about Cahill in a while, and the interview explains why.
Slate has an interview with Anthony Bourdain, specifically dealing with issues of right, wrong, and taste.
I was just in Liberia recently, and although I find certain tribal practices personally deeply repellant, I’d always felt uncomfortable with the idea of these “enlightened humanitarians” going to Africa and lecturing people who don’t have clean water and have been living with these systems for centuries about how to behave. And yet I gotta tell you, Liberia made me ask myself: Are some things just wrong? Genital mutilation would be one. Some of the practices of some of the traditional tribal elders—witch doctors, basically—are another. I really wonder whether there are absolutes in some cases. It’s something I’m wrestling with, clearly.
This interview is part of a series, “The Wrong Stuff“, by Kathryn Schulz, and is tied in to her forthcoming book, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
I also wanted to link to this story about a Baltimore shooting involving an off-duty cop (hattip: Balko); not because I want to comment on the story itself (that’s being ably handled at Balko’s site), but because of this:
Baltimore Police Maj. Terrence McLarney, head of the homicide unit, said there is no indication the two men met inside the establishment or knew each other.
Terrence McLarney? Terrence f’ing McLarney? Tell me this can’t be the same Terrence McLarney who was a Detective Sergeant in Homicide when David Simon wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets
(Subject line hattip.)
Edited to add: Well, McLarney and Worden both have entries in Wikipedia, believe it or not. And Worden apparently played “Det. Donald Worden” in a Season 5 episode of The Wire. McLarney’s entry says this:
In July 2008, McLarney was named the official commander of the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, a position he had been the acting commander of since May 2008.
So, yeah, seems like the same guy.