By way of Balko: sexual perversity among the penguins.
This gives me an excuse to note that Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World is available from Project Gutenberg.
(Hattip.)
Anything so he can measure up to men…
June 11th, 2012Random notes: June 11, 2012.
June 11th, 2012Two stories by way of Lawrence:
This odd one about a scientist who works for the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas trying to stop approval of a $20 million dollar grant to Rice University and M.D. Anderson. Lawrence sent it to me and asked if I could make heads or tails out of it; I think I can, but it seems to me to be one of those HouChron stories that’s like a puzzle with half the pieces missing.
I’m not sure if this has been on FARK yet, but since Lawrence sent it to me, I’m linking to it anyway as part of the “Art, damn it! Art!” watch: a 200-foot-long knitted rabbit on the side of an Italian mountain.
The NYT has a story I find kind of odd about the NYPD Accident Investigations Squad. Basically, the AIS investigates traffic accidents: “But they do so only in cases of death or when a victim is deemed likely to die.”
The problem, according to the NYT, is that AIS sometimes doesn’t investigate accidents where the victim is not immediately dead; if the person dies days later, evidence may be “lost”.
I have two problems with this, both related to the incident the NYT cites:
- “That delay, Mr. Stevens said, meant that most of the evidence from the crash — skid marks and surveillance video, witness accounts, and alcohol in the driver’s bloodstream — had been lost.” How was it lost? The way I read that sentence, the AIS started to collect the data, then stopped because the victim was still alive (she died three days later). Did they throw away what they had already collected? That seems like an…odd choice, to say the least.
- Reinforcing point 1 is the fact that the NYT is able to report that the driver in the accident had a 0.07 BAC. So at least some evidence was preserved. “Felony charges were considered…” What felony charges? 0.07 is below the legal limit, as far as I know. And “those charges were dropped because the police testing equipment had not been properly calibrated”. Uh-huh. That’s certainly interesting, and I wish the NYT had gone into more detail on the calibration issue.
Edited to add: It occurs to me that some folks might be as confused as I was by the NYT references to the Highway Patrol and the NYPD. The state of New York does have a state police agency, the New York State Police (whose website is currently broken, it seems). There is also a group within the NYPD called the Highway Patrol “primarily responsible for patrolling and maintaining traffic safety on limited-access highways within New York City.” So it isn’t a statewide police agency in the Broderick Crawford sense, but a confusingly named NYPD division. Got it.
Boot to the head!
June 8th, 2012According to the NYT, one of the current hot button issues in the United Kingdom is: “Who will represent Britain in the under-80-kilogram weight class for men’s tae kwon do?”
Aaron Cook is ranked #1 in the world in this weight class. Aaron Cook is not on the team. Lutalo Muhammad, who is ranked #59, is on the team.
The British Olympic Association rejected Muhammad last week; his nomination has been resubmitted and the BOA is meeting today to consider it. And the World Taekwondo Federation is also investigating, though their ability to actually do anything is limited.
Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?
June 7th, 2012The same thing we’re going to do every night for the next eight and a half years, Pinky: hard time in Federal prison.
Random: June 7, 2012.
June 7th, 2012Kwame Brown, chairman of the Washington DC City Council, resigned his position yesterday.
Innocent until proven guilty, yadda yadda, but according to the WP‘s reporting, Brown and the prosecution have already made a plea deal.
Ray Bradbury obits: WP. LAT. NYT. NYT appreciation by Michiko Kakutani. Lawrence. A/V Club. Scalzi.
Recall.
June 6th, 2012Sorry, folks. I’m getting a slow start today; I had a doctor’s appointment this morning. (Nothing serious, just the 7,500 mile oil and filter change/lube/check the fluid levels.)
How about that successful recall election yesterday? No, not that one. It seems that the good people of Fullerton, California, voted overwhelmingly to throw out three city council members. What makes this interesting is that the recall started as a reaction to the council’s perceived indifference to the beating death of Kelly Thomas. (Warning: that last link contains a graphic and disturbing image.)
This is the first time I can recall that voter anger over police misconduct has become that much of a hot button issue. Let us hope it is not the last time.
I will probably wait until tomorrow to post a roundup of Bradbury obits.
Important safety tip. (#12 in a series)
June 5th, 2012This one’s a quickie: if you’re going to steal a car, you probably shouldn’t steal an art car.
Pop open the freezer.
June 5th, 2012The Austin Public Safety Commission passed, on a 5-0 vote, a resolution recommending that the Austin City Council provide funding and set up a process for review of “cold” cases outside of APD. (One member abstained from voting.)
This raises some questions:
1. Who is the “Austin Public Safety Commission”? Are they the people who do the gun buybacks?
Answer: No, the gun buybacks are the “Greater Austin Crime Commission”. The “Austin Public Safety Commission” is a city organization that serves as an “advisory body to the city council on all budgetary and policy matters concerning public safety”.
2. What “cold” cases are they looking to have re-examined?
If you said “the yogurt shop murders” to start with, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.
3. Why do they want an external review of these cases? Do they not trust the APD? If so, isn’t that a problem that should be addressed?
Interesting question. Kim Rossmo is the vice chairman of the commission.
4. Is this a good idea?
I’m not sure I can judge this. Having a fresh pair of eyes to look at complicated stuff always seems like a good idea. But the case is 20 years old now; how many people have looked at it? Not just within APD, but outside of the department? Is there really a lot of evidence for Rossmo’s theory of “groupthink”? On the other hand, did the APD really push a weak case because they were looking to close a red ball?
I’m inclined to think that the case probably can’t be solved at this point, and I’m not sure how much good another set of eyes would actually do. Color me both skeptical and happy if I’m proven wrong.
Followup roundup.
June 1st, 2012Looking at site stats this morning, I noticed that my ThinkPenguin endorsement seems to be getting some traffic. I thought I’d bop over to their site and check: yes, they have the new dual-band wireless N USB adapters available. And to tell the truth, I like the design of this adapter better than the one I have.
Earlier this week, I commented on the death of Mack Wolford. Lauren Pond, a photojournalist, had been working with Rev. Wolford for the past year as part of a documentary project on the Pentecostal snake-handling religion. Ms. Pond was at the service where Rev. Wolford was bitten, and sat with him and his family as he died. Some of her photos, and her thoughts about what happened and her obligations, are in the WP.
And speaking of bad cops…
May 31st, 2012Around this time last year, we noted the police officer in Franklin County, VA, who shot his ex-wife and engaged in a wild police chase that screwed up traffic for miles.
Well, the former sheriff – the one who allegedly ignored warnings that his deputy was hunting his ex-wife – the one who allegedly told dispatchers not to put out a BOLO – has been charged with “misconduct by an elected official”. This is a “class 1” misdemeanor charge, so it isn’t like he’s going to do hard time, but..
…he’s also being sued by the dead woman’s family. And by two former deputies who were fired after an investigation in 2009 that led to charges against the sheriff of “failure to maintain adequate records”. (Those charges were dismissed.) And by another woman who claims the sheriff didn’t act on threats to kill her son until it was too late.
(This comes by way of the Cato Institute’s new “National Police Misconduct Reporting Project” which in turn is an outgrowth of work done by David Packman.)
Patricia Cook.
May 31st, 2012On February 9th of this year, Officer Daniel Harmon–Wright of the Culpeper, VA police department shot and killed Patricia Cook in the parking lot of a church preschool.
Officer Harmon–Wright was responding to a call about a woman “acting suspiciously”, and claimed that Ms. Cook attempted to flee, rolling up the window in her Jeep and trapping his arm as she did so.
There are questions about Officer Harmon-Wright’s account of events. For example, Ms. Cook’s Jeep did not have power windows, which raises obvious questions about the whole “rolling up her window and trapping his arm” thing. Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog has some good coverage of the case here.
One point noted by Reason and other reporters is that Officer Harmon-Wright has several names: he’s also gone by “Daniel Wayne Sullivan” and “Dan Wayne”.
This is interesting enough, but there’s another aspect to the story that I think is worth noting: Officer Harmon-Wright’s mother, who was “an administrative secretary to the chief of police” when he was hired as a police officer, has been charged with three counts of “uttering” and three counts of “forgery of public documents”. Apparently, the grand jury turned up evidence that she had altered public records to remove “negative information” from Officer Harmon-Wright’s personnel file.
Some folks go “wow” at $320 million dollar incinerators, and I can’t blame them for that. Other folks go “wow” when they’re faced with how deep the corruption seems to run sometimes.
(Hattip: Commendante Balko.)
Art, damn it, art! watch (#29 in a series).
May 31st, 2012Sol LeWitt was a conceptual artist. (He passed away in 2007.)
One of his works was “Wall Drawing #448″. This work has two parts. Part one is a list of instructions on how to create a wall drawing. Part two is an example of what that drawing would look like.
In 2008, the owner of the work consigned it to a gallery in Chicago.
The gallery lost the instructions. The owner is suing, claiming that the instructions are basically a certificate of authenticity:
The gallery says their insurance won’t cover the loss (I’d really like to know why) and apparently tried to settle with the owner. The owner is asking for a minimum of $350,000.
Stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else.
May 30th, 2012You gotta fight…for your right…to declare bankruptcy.
The strange story of David Webb, fake DEA agent. Doug Swanson
Random observation.
May 30th, 2012At least 90% of the time (if not more), when someone tells me “you shouldn’t burn bridges”, that person has just finished pouring gasoline all over the structure in question, and is now standing in the middle of the bridge flicking their Zippo.
Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?
May 30th, 2012I don’t want to mock the death of Mack Wolford. I was not raised in the Pentecostal snake-handling tradition, nor does it fit in with my personal religious beliefs. (As I recall, there is a Bible verse that says something to the effect of “Don’t test God.”) But I do respect folks who have those beliefs and act on them; I don’t think they are crazy, but are trying to relate to God in their own way, and more power to them.
However, I do think his death is worth noting, not just for the odd factor, but also because it gives me a chance to talk about Jeremy Seal’s The Snakebite Survivors’ Club: Travels Among Serpents
This had the potential to be an interesting book, and about half of it is. The chapters on snake hunting and snake bite survivor hunting in Africa and Australia are quite good. Unfortunately, his chapters set in India seem oddly disengaged from the rest of the book; I’m not sure why, but they don’t seem to fit.
And while he has an interesting story to tell as his through line through the chapters in America (backsliding snake-handling minister decides to end his marriage through rattlesnake; unfortunately, his wife survived her bites, and he’s doing time), he has a typically British condescending attitude towards America (and especially the American South) that I found annoying.
If you find a copy of this for $3 or less, I think you might get that much entertainment out of it. Otherwise, I’d suggest skipping it. I haven’t read it, but this Whit Gibbons
Edited to add: Added a link to a review of Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia