You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two. This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they ? Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.
CONNIE M. MESKIMEN / Hot Springs
Yay! My 32 inch waste 501s have been feeling a tad loose this past week…so I decided to go see if I could fit into 31s today. They fit perfectly, not even a little tight. Yes! So I bought 2. For some reason I usually take a one inch smaller waste in low risers (and two inches less in the inseam…go figure…). So I tried on some 527s in a 30 inch waste. Success again! The 30s fit perfectly, and look much Much better on me then the 31s (you really don’t want low risers to look frumpy on you).
Swear to you…Swear…I thought I’d never get back into 31s again. This feels so damn Good! I can look in a mirror now and think yeah, I’d hit that…for the first time in ages, just ages.
Size small shirts fit me now like they always used to. I don’t have to worry about them being too tight around the waste anymore. When I was packing more weight then I should have been, finding shirts was the worst. If they were right in the waste they were too big in the shoulders. Right in the shoulders and they were too tight around the waste. Now that I’m getting my hourglass back…at least slightly…it’s suddenly not hard to find shirts that work and that I actually look good in.
It’s still basically a no-junk food diet. No sugar in my drinks. Whole grain instead of white bread. Lean meats, high protean. I’ve added a basic multi-vitamin to my day. I’m eating out more regularly with friends in D.C. Yesterday we did a happy hour at our regular bar and then ate at a really nice Armenian place just down the block, where we started with a really nice fry bread plus this-and-that appetizer course, then I had a entree of lamb, chicken ka-bob, fried shrimp and rice. So I’m not starving myself by any means. Yet I am still…slowly now…very very slowly…loosing weight. This is why I spent the money on that beam balance doctor’s office type scale when I started this…so I could monitor my progress when the weight loss curve started flattening out. I am just amazed every day now, what simply taking the junk out of my diet did. Or conversely…what the damn junk was doing to me all these years.
And now I’m slowly adding regular exercise into my life…and I mean slowly. They organized a yoga/pilates class and I signed up for it. It’s just one day a week, but I like the mix of stretch-exercise-relax-repeat in the mix of yoga and pilates, and I hope to learn from it. My torso is starting to get a little workout now…but it surprised me how much I have to work to get flexibility back. At my age, flexibility is something guys have to work on. But I really want to get my stomach area a tad more defined. It doesn’t have to be ripped…I don’t think I even Can at my age now…with so many years of not exercising at all behind me. But if I can get some definition there I won’t be embarrassed to take my shirt off at the beach or when I’m out doing lawn work at home…
…like I need to this weekend. I’ll try to take some more photos tomorrow. I’m really feeling good now about how I’m looking. But I have a load of yard work to do now that the weather is good again.
P.S. To A Certain Someone: I don’t know if you even bother reading my blog or not…you said that you didn’t use the computer much, that you were more into nature then technology…but if you happen to read this…thank you. Much. It was the thought of you laying your eyes on me again after all these years, with all that weight I’d put on since I started working as a software engineer, that motivated me to get myself looking good again. I don’t know if we’ll ever lay eyes on each other again in this life. But…thanks. For waking me up. Again.
Only a day after students at Virginia Tech were locked in classrooms as a gunman killed 32 of their classmates, Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills went into lockdown Monday morning after parents reported seeing a suspicious man dressed as a woman near a campus bus stop.
Police described a white male about 6 feet tall, wearing a gray or blond wig, lipstick, a flowered skirt, a dark coat and high heels.
Parents first spotted the man standing near the Kingswood School parking lot around 7:50 a.m., school officials said.
"He was walking up the lot toward Kingswood School," said Lt. Paul Myszenski with the Bloomfield Hills Department of Public Safety.
While he was not observed doing anything illegal, authorities decided to lock down schools after 8 a.m. Students were told to sit in their classrooms with lights off as police did a room-byroom search.
Pam Friedman, a parent from West Bloomfield Township, was attending a mothers’ council meeting with Robin Rosenbaum and Elaine Robins, also of West Bloomfield, when the building they were in – the Institute of Science – was also locked down.
Friedman was able to speak with her son, Jake, a 17-year-old junior, by cellphone, who informed his mother he was OK.
"I wasn’t nervous at all after I talked with him," Friedman said.
DeAnn Ervin of Birmingham – whose 12-year-old daughter, Noa, attends Kingswood School – learned of the lockdown when other mothers began calling her.
Lockdowns aren’t that unusual, she said. The school practices at least twice a year.
Ervin was confident the school would protect her daughter. "They communicate a lot with us," she said. "I was more worried about her emotional health than physical."
Cranbrook’s department of public safety took part in the room-by-room search at Kingswood. No one was arrested.
Officials also checked the grounds "where people can hide," said Thomas Sias, the school’s director of public safety, but were unable to find the man.
"The problem is you have seconds to react," Sias said. "It’s a rather daunting task to check it all."
Sias praised the students who were locked in classrooms for about 30 minutes. "When we were walking the halls, you could hear a pin drop," he said.
At 9:20 a.m., the lockdown was lifted, and by 9:30 a.m., buses packed with students were rolling through the campus.
In other news, schools all across Lower Fuckingnuts County were in a state of lockdown after a woman with a crew cut was seen wearing a leather jacket and driving a Harley-Davidson low rider down Main Street…
It’s like fussing with a wound that hasn’t even begun to heal, but humans are like that. One of the hardest things to teach a kid is to leave it alone when it starts hurting again…
So the killer sent a package to at least one of the big TV networks. I’m actually surprised he didn’t post it all on YouTube or MySpace, but he may have thought that would have given him up too soon. I’ve only seen a few very brief clips so far, but one thing that that leapt out at me was how completely deranged he seemed. I’ve seen anger, I’ve seen fanatical hate, I’ve seen bitterness. I’ve had a gun pointed right at my head, saw killing rage in the face behind the iron sights, heard it in his voice (it was a road rage incident…obviously he didn’t actually shoot me…). I can half close my eyes and still see and hear it. It seems bizarre to think of it as sane, and yet I realize now it was sane, completely sane, compared to what I saw as Cho Seung-Hui vented for a few minutes about rich people and trust funds and debauchery.
I keep hearing the word "disturbed" here. Let me say it: he was crazy. It’s not just our rational mind, but all the evolutionary baggage our brains have accumulated over the eons that make us human. I’ve seen human rage. I’ve seen human hate. What I saw in that brief excerpt NBC showed us was chillingly grotesque…like a face blasted apart and sewn back together by something that had never seen a human face before and didn’t know quite where to put things. There were pieces missing from him inside…deeper more ancient things then those higher emotions of compassion and empathy. Things from the bedrock of our mammal souls. Maybe older still. And what was there wasn’t enough to make any sense when it came to making a person out of it. I’ve no idea if his personality had decayed that much before he sat down to make that video. But if it was anything near I can see why he was scaring the hell out of people long before he did what he did. The face chills you, not because of it’s anger and rage, but because it is missing something, some subtle thing you can’t quite put your finger on, but which leaps out at you for its not being there.
I don’t think they’re going to find the why of this in anything in his history or his environment. A trigger, perhaps. Perhaps not. This is a clinical case. He was crazy. I strongly doubt now that it has anything to do with anything that might have been said or done to him. In addition to the video he left a paper manifesto, with photos and writing. One glimpse of a page of densely packed text, no paragraph breaks, just one long string of words for line after line filling the entire page, was enough. I’m no professional but I’ve seen that before in case study after case study, and in the graphic art of the mad, which I have studied with interest. And…something I saw first hand…
I once worked for a private psychiatric hospital. I was a stock clerk. My job was to keep the office supplies and custom printed forms flowing to the various units, most of which only dealt with mildly disturbed folks. But one, the Intensive Care Unit, had double doors you had to be buzzed through. I made my deliveries there only just to the inside door, where one of the staff would take my things and hand me a list for the following week. One day while I was doing that, I saw a young girl who had just been brought to them. She was laying on her back on a sofa in a room just next to the door and I could see her clearly. She couldn’t have been more then 20. Young, strikingly beautiful. Her face was set in a serene, peaceful, fixed stare at the ceiling. Her elbows were at her sides, forearms up, her hands and fingers extended, the palms facing the ceiling almost as if she was pushing it away. She was talking in a low, utterly calm monotonal drone. Something like this…
remembering sank shadows echoed in water reflected gained in light realized remembered effort grounded in reputation in secure secure remember programmed joy of momentum needs energy remember the well placed expansive classrooms bringing forth eyes to ponder glass light thrown up into sky remember remember remember reframe embrace renew fever strives to purge soul light and sky remember imbalance pursuing sickness and wonder together in wonder wonder wonder wonder aware awareness gave transcendent sight casts forth water fire cast cast cast cast cast
Like that. I’ll never forget it. I wanted to quit my job then and there because I wasn’t sure I could deal with seeing and having to know because I was seeing it, how tenuous the grip the human identity really has inside of us. What is a soul?
You hear it called the ravings of lunatics, but until you’ve actually witnessed it you might assume that’s something like a politican or a fundamentalist preacher babbling on and on about something that nobody but them actually cares about. But no…it’s more like a brain just dumping its contents onto the table like it’s barfing. That’s what I saw in that video, and even more, in the page of his manafesto. It was a brain dump.
Cho Seung-Hui, I believe now, was crazy. Not crazy angry. Not crazy with hate or crazy with rage against…whoever. Just crazy. In the literal sense. We throw that word around so much that it’s practically become meaningless I suppose. But there it is. The Abyss. The unraveling of the human identity inside of a person. That’s not excusing or trivializing what he did to 32 school kids who still had their lives ahead of them, and I’m not trying to dehumanize him. Cho was certainly human. He had that rational mind, was able to think and plan, was able to consider death and what would happen after he was dead. He was calculating and methodical as only a human being can be. But a very sick one. He was mad.
One should note here that Step 5, the Final Stage, is almost always sponsored by those who endlessly proclaim how irresponsible and substance-free and unserious political bloggers are, and who thereafter write pieces which do nothing other than repeat the latest Drudge gossip.
You should go read it, because we’ll be seeing a lot more of this kind of thing when the 2008 presidential campaign really gets going.
As NRO’s designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.
The other was a nine millimeter Glock. Yes, in fact you Can hose down a place with a semi automatic handgun. Ask me how I know. And according to news accounts, he had a lot of ammo with him.
At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him.
You’re a kid sitting peacefully in class and then someone bursts in and starts shooting. Never mind you have not clue one at that point what kind of gun it is, let alone how many rounds it can hold. Never mind the blast of even a small caliber handgun inside a closed space can be positively disorienting. Never mind that with practice you can drop the clip on that Glock and have another in it and a round chambered faster then someone could probably rush you unless you were practically standing right over them. Just fucking for once in your life try to put yourself in someone else’s place you drooling soulless right wing babbling moron. You’re a kid…you are in class peacefully going on about your school day and then suddenly you and your classmates are being shot at. By the time the first few shots are fired your thoughts are a frightened scrambled mess. Count? Count? Grow a fucking brain Derbyshire, you pathetic warrior male wannabe.
Handguns aren’t very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can’t hit squat.
Why is that not surprising. I shoot mine all the time too John, and I figure I’m not all that exceptional at hitting what I’m shooting at, because most of the other folks at the range there with me usually do too. But you probably think the gun adds several inches to your dick and that’s why you’re not really working it. You think just holding it in your hand makes you something. No. It doesn’t. It’s just a damn gun and you’re still the sorry brain dead soulless asshole you were before you picked it up.
Yes, yes, I know it’s easy to say these things: but didn’t the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything?
Moron! Asswipe! The people on Flight 93 were grown Adults dealing with a situation that allowed them the means to find out what was happening to them (via their cell phones) and time to get themselves organized and together. And their attackers didn’t have guns, only crude knifes. The passengers of flight 93 had a chance the kids at VA Tech never did.
Point of fact, I read of at least one adult, a professor, who seems to have actually tried to save as many of his kids as he could, by staying behind and trying to block the doorway as his kids jumped out the classroom windows. Apparently the killer managed to get in anyway because that professor was one of the dead. But he stayed behind to try and save some of his kids. There’s a hero.
Another Reason Why Public Education In America Is Under Attack…
No…not because the religious right doesn’t want anybody to learn any science that contradicts the bible. Not because right wing republicans don’t want an educated public going to the polls. Yes…it’s all that…but it’s also this: a lot of American adults have bad memories of their treatment at the hands of teachers, administrators, principals. Not quite as extreme as this kid’s…but similar in kind…
A Hempfield Area High School sophomore spent 12 days in juvenile detention after authorities in Westmoreland County mistakenly charged him with making a March 11 bomb threat, in part because the district had not changed its clocks to reflect daylight-saving time.
Cody Webb, 15, of Hempfield, was arrested March 12 and charged with a felony count of threatening to use weapons of mass destruction and misdemeanor counts of making false alarms to public entities, reckless endangerment, disorderly conduct and making terrorist threats.
Webb, an honors student involved in student council, tennis and the Japanese Club, was immediately taken to the county’s juvenile detention center.
"Cody never even had a (school) detention," said his mother, Linda Webb. "It was a nightmare."
Cody called the school’s automated delay announcement system. An hour later someone called in a bomb threat. But the time stamp was off by an hour because of the new start of daylight savings time this year.
Now…the school officials also had, by the time they dragged Cody into the Principal’s office, a recording of the threat, but…well…like I said…there are a lot of Americans who know by now, how this story is going to go…
"Mrs. Charlton asked me if I had a cell phone. I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘What’s the number?’ I told her, and she started saying, ‘We got him. We got him.’ I was completely oblivious to what they were talking about," he said.
In the Principal’s office, administrators demanded that Webb admit to calling in the bomb threat, he said.
"I wasn’t going to admit to something I didn’t do," he said. "Me and God know I didn’t do it."
Webb’s parents, Linda and Budd Webb, arrived at the school and listened to the recorded bomb threat. Linda Webb told administrators it wasn’t her son.
"They kept saying that it was his voice. They didn’t even know him," she said.
After a state trooper arrived, Charlton told the teen he was being arrested, and the trooper read Webb his Miranda rights.
"I was in shock," Webb said.
They had their man and nothing was going to change their minds about it…let alone the facts. Yes…it gets better. But you probably knew that…
The next day, Webb had a detention hearing and was held for court. After 10 more days in detention, Webb was back in court for his case to be heard. He was released to his parents’ custody that day after Westmoreland County Common Pleas Judge John Driscoll continued the hearing when the state police failed to appear.
The kid, an honor roll student, has now been held in a juvenile detention center for 12 days and the police can’t be bothered to show up for his hearing because…why…? Well…
Trooper Jeanne Martin, spokeswoman for state police at Greensburg, said the time change was an issue. Driscoll dismissed the charges March 27.
The teen said he did call the school’s delay hot line early Sunday, March 11. But that was an hour before the bomb threat was phoned in, said the family’s attorney, Tim Andrews. After Webb’s parents obtained his cell phone records, Andrews found the call times did not match.
"I found out the district had not changed their clocks to reflect daylight-saving time," Andrews said. "They were changed Monday morning."
Somebody else besides the kid’s attorney was also looking at the evidence…
"The district attorney subpoenaed the cell phone records, and it didn’t take more than a minute to see the times didn’t match," Andrews said.
Whoops! Of course…the school considers itself blameless…
Hempfield solicitor Dennis Slyman said law enforcement did not question administrators about the school’s clocks.
"The authorities never, never asked us anything about the clocks and daylight-saving time," Slyman said. "Whatever they did was with their own investigation and outside the auspices of the school district."
It’s their fault they arrested a kid we told them had made a bomb threat, and threw him in jail…
Yes…it gets better… You knew it did…
Budd Webb wept as he described learning that his son would be cleared.
"I got a callfrom our attorney that said he had paperwork signed by Judge Driscoll dropping the felony and misdemeanor charges against my son," he said.
County juvenile detention officials wanted to keep Webb in custody, Andrews said. "They wanted him to have a mental health evaluation because he wouldn’t admit to making the call."
(emphasis mine). They had the wrong person, but since they couldn’t make him admit to making a bomb threat that he had not made, they felt that was evidence of a mental problem.
And of course…they’re blameless too…
County officials said Tuesday that Webb was in custody no longer than the law requires.
"Legally, we were OK. We didn’t step on this kid’s rights," said Mike Sturnick, supervisor for the juvenile probation office.
Well thank goodness they only kept an innocent kid in jail no longer then the law allows.
Now…at this point…if you haven’t attended public school in America, or you had a much, Much better experience with teachers and school officials during your childhood then most people, that tape recording of the bomb threat may still be nagging at you. How could they sit a kid and his mother down and play a recording of that does not sound like that kid making a bomb threat, and still insist that it was that kid making that threat…you may be wondering. I see you’ve never been accused by a teacher or a principal of something doing something that you didn’t do…
Webb gave an insight into the school’s impressive investigative techniques, saying that he was ushered in to see the principal, Kathy Charlton. She asked him what his phone number was, and , according to Webb, when he replied ‘she started waving her hands in the air and saying “we got him, we got him.”’
‘They just started flipping out, saying I made a bomb threat to the school,’ he told local television station KDKA. After he protested his innocence, Webb says that the principal said: ‘Well, why should we believe you? You’re a criminal. Criminals lie all the time.’
Upon further reflection, you can see how the whole republican right wing attack on public education, even, how their attack on our system of justice, plays on a deeply felt resentment a lot of Americans have toward their childhood experiences at the hands of ignorant kid hating louts who only became teachers because they couldn’t master the art of flipping hamburgers at McDonalds.
Home schooling…it isn’t just for religious fanatics anymore…
Webb’s mother arranged home-schooling for him until he decides where to continue his education. He doesn’t want to return to Hempfield.
The kid was an honors student. He had an active academic life. Was in the school council. And in an instant, a jackass principal taught him a lesson about life, hard work, academic excellence and achievement he’ll never fucking forget. And lesson about the public schools. Somewhere, Pat Robertson is smiling.
Oh…and…
Martin said the state police investigation into the bomb threat remains open.
No shit Sherlock. Gotta love those awesome police investigative skills you folks there have. When someone at the station complains their computer isn’t working, how long before someone checks to see if it’s plugged in…? Just curious…
I’m shy. Almost deathly so. Not a recluse. I socialize easily with co-workers and neighbors. But it takes time for me to get comfortable opening up to new people. It’s not that I’m paranoid or distrustful. I’m just…shy. I have friends I regularly go out with. But I live alone. I’m single. And I’m shy. Almost never the first one to speak up and introduce myself. It takes wild horses practically, to get me to go to a bar or club by myself. I need friends I can go with. When I’m with people I know I can let down my hair and have a good time. But in a room full of strangers I just want to run away. This may have something to do with why I’m still single. And live alone. But I am not a loner. I like my quiet time to myself…yes. But I enjoy human company too. Very much so. I’m just…shy.
Swear to god I cringe every time another mass killing happens…and next thing you know the news media is all about how the guy was a loner. And…quiet.
Garance Franke-Ruta, to her credit, has a somewhat novel take on What We Should Learn from the tragedy – namely, that we need to take domestic violence more seriously:
Because the first victim was a woman, and possible had a romantic connection to the killer, the police did not see her murder as a threat to the community. Now the police are pretty plainly telling the public that they failed to warn the campus there was a killer on the loose because they failed to understand that men who kill their partners are also threats to society.
Yes. Yes! But Sullivan doesn’t get it…
So while maybe there’s a case to be made for shutting down a campus or a neighborhood in any situation in which a killer is on the loose, it’s hard to see why intimate homicides in particular should be taken as warning signs that a killing spree is about to begin, and easy to see why police investigating a crime of passion would take the risk of random violence less seriously than when, say, there’s a murderous convict on the loose.
But it wasn’t random. There’s a sense you get, merely from the phraseology "crime of passion" that it was a spur of the moment unthinking, instant of madness kind of thing and mostly domestic violence isn’t that at all. It certainly wasn’t in this case. He chained the doors shut so the kids inside couldn’t get out. He brought along two guns and plenty of ammo. It was cold and brutal and calculating.
There are two dark and ugly shadows staring us back in the face after all this, and one of them is domestic violence and the other is the grotesque assumption that anyone who would violently attack their lover probably isn’t a threat to anyone else because…well…it was personal. But that willingness to attack the intimate other is Just the sort of thing you need to be watching out for in people. I keep harping on this quote from the author Mary Renault, but it keeps being a relevant insight into human behavior…
Politics like sex is only a by-product of what the essential person is. If you are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and it will come out in your politics when what really matters is that you are the sort of person who won’t behave like that.
There’s almost nothing that shows us what the inner person is like, then how they treat their lover. Yes, just about no one else on earth can hurt you quite as painfully, or as deeply, as the one you love (unless it’s your own parents). Yes the emotional wounds a lover can inflect, particularly during a breakup, can be devastating. Ask me how I know. But that’s because no one else’s feelings matter to you as much. If someone you love isn’t safe around you then who the fuck else can be? Nobody, that’s who.
DUNDALK, Maryland — A dramatic hostage escape from a home near Baltimore, Maryland late Tuesday gave police information they needed to storm the house and safely rescue a remaining hostage. The alleged hostage taker, Joseph Palczynski, was shot dead in the raid, police said.
The standoff had dragged on for four days, and it was the time factor that police credited with ending the siege.
"Patience," said Baltimore County Police Chief Terrence Sheridan. "It was waiting for the opportunity to save three lives" that led to the end of the standoff.
That opportunity came when hostage Lynn Whitehead escaped through a window in the home where she, her boyfriend Andrew McCord and his 12-year-old son Bradley had been held since Friday. McCord then followed Whitehead out the window and both ran to safety.
"We were having a briefing when we were informed she had come out of the window," Sheridan said. He said that Whitehead and McCord told police that Palczynski was sleeping on a living room couch and that the boy was asleep on the kitchen floor.
"At this point, SWAT team officers made what’s known as a tactical entry," Baltimore County Police spokesman Bill Toohey said. "They broke through a window, encountered Mr. Palczynski in the family room and shot him. They then rescued the boy."
"Joseph Palczynski is dead," Toohey said. "He was shot by Baltimore County tactical officers shortly after 11 tonight and died at 11:05 on the scene." None of the police was wounded.
Police rescued the boy, who was found asleep on the kitchen floor. None of the hostages was hurt, Sheridan said.
Palczynski was accused by police of killing four people in the Baltimore area two weeks ago while he allegedly tried to kidnap his former girlfriend, Tracy Whitehead, who later escaped.
Whitehead, who is the daughter of Lynn Whitehead, had broken up with Palczynski, recently, police said. The ex-girlfriend escaped from Palczynski at a motel, police said. Family members said she had been beaten with the butt of a rifle and sustained a broken nose, black eye and multiple bruises.
You can read more about Palczynski’s violent history here. He killed the couple his ex was living with, Gloria Jean Shenk and her husband, George Shenk. He killed David M. Meyers who tried to intervene while Palczynski was dragging his ex to his car. He killed Jennifer McDonel and wounded her child during an attempted carjacking because he needed vehicle to run from the cops in. For two weeks he terrorized the Baltimore area. He took some relatives of his ex, including a 12 year old boy, hostage and for four days randomly shoot up the neighborhood they lived in, demanding that police let him talk to his ex (they didn’t, knowing full well that as soon as he got her on the phone he’d start shooting his hostages). A swat team finally brought him down after one of his hostages managed to sneak a tranquilizer into his drink and he fell asleep and the adults were able to get away. Nobody later questioned the hail of bullets he was awakened to, because for certain he would have killed the boy the instant he knew the game was up, had he the slightest shred of a chance.
To assume that nobody else but the ‘Ex’ is in danger from a violent lover is stunningly stupid on its face. If they’re dangerous to their lover, then nobody else around them is safe either.
[Update…] Now we’re hearing that girl he killed first in the dorms wasn’t romantically involved with him at all. So this apparently wasn’t all brought on by a violent lover after all. Cho seems to have simply just been mad. As in…crazy.
Those Little Twists Of The Knife That Are Meant To Remind You That You’re Human Garbage
Via Pam’s House Blend… All those happy little amusements that heterosexuals take for granted…because the No Homos sign doesn’t apply to them of course…
I had a hard time getting started on this post. My mind couldn’t wrap itself around how the TN anti-gay marriage amendment weaseled itself into the most mundane aspects of our life.
Back when I first posted on the effects of an amendment within the state, I focused on the obvious problems such as being denied access to or the right to make medical decisions for a partner. Little did I consider at the time, that we wouldn’t even be able to participate in a "vow renewal ceremony" at the Tennessee Renaissance Festival.
The vow renewal ceremony has no legal standing, even for heterosexual couples. It’s purely a declaration of love and devotion. There is no earthly reason to limit it to legally married couples, other then the casual matter-of-fact bigotry that motivated the Tennessee anti-same sex marriage amendment, which the operators of the Tennessee Renaissance Festival apparently share. You just don’t treat devoted dedicated couples like dirt otherwise.
So now we see that all the anti-same sex marriage amendments are meant to act in the way the old sodomy laws used to, before the Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional: by defining gay people as innately depraved and legally unequal. It’s about more then marriage. Even the smallest things in our lives, must constantly remind us that we are different, that we are unequal, that we are hated.
May 12 – 13: Romance Weekend
In the spirit of Romeo & Juliet, love is in the air, along with many a love ballad…
Our vow renewal ceremony is a group ceremony performed by one of our vendors,
who is an ordained minister. Participants in the ceremony must be legally
married under the state laws of Tennessee. We encourage participants to come in costume.
For our homosexual attendees, we suggest something sodomites might have worn back in the middle ages, when they were being burned at the stake…
However, to address the actual claims of early demise, I asked Morten Frisch, Danish epidemiologist, to review the Cameron’s paper “Federal Distortion Of Homosexual Footprint (Ignoring Early Gay Death?). Morten is the lead author of a recent report on environmental influences on marriages decisions among heterosexuals and homosexuals. I wrote about this study here and blogged about it here. He very kindly agreed to do so and replied earlier today. As I suspected, he did not find their arguments compelling, or use of data appropriate. Here is his brief analysis:
Cameron and Cameron’s report on ’life expectancy’ in homosexuals vs heterosexuals is severely methodologically flawed
It is no wonder why this pseudo-scientific report claiming a drastically shorter life expectancy in homosexuals compared with heterosexuals has been published on the internet without preceding scientific peer-review (http://www.earnedmedia.org/frireport.htm). The authors should know, and as PhD’s they presumably do, that this report has little to do with science. It is hard to escape the idea that non-scientific motifs have driven the authors to make this report public. The methodological flaws are of such a grave nature that no decent peer-reviewed scientific journal should let it pass for publication.
As a measure of gay individuals’ average ‘life expectancy at birth’, Cameron and Cameron gathered information about age at death from obituaries for homosexual people in the U.S., and they obtained Scandinavian data regarding the average age at death among homosexually partnered persons who died within a period of up to 14 years after the introduction of laws on homosexual partnerships.
Due in part to reports like the present homosexual persons remain subject to stigmatization. The majority of homosexual people, even in comparatively liberal countries like Denmark, are not open about their sexuality in public. Particularly older homosexuals who grew up in periods when their sexuality was either a crime or a psychiatric diagnosis tend to remain silent about their homosexuality in public. Therefore, the higher prevalence of self-reported homo/bisexual experiences and feelings in younger than older age groups most likely reflects that young gays and bisexuals are less hesitant than older ones to provide honest answers in sex surveys.
The majority of homosexual individuals in the report by Cameron and Cameron were presumably open about their same-sex preferences. The groups studied comprised homosexuals who had entered registered partnerships in Denmark or Norway, and homosexuals in the U.S. whose relatives considered homosexuality to be such an integrated part of their deceased loved ones’ personalities that they felt it natural to mention in the publicly available obituary. Since, as noted, age is a strong determinant of openness about homosexuality, the study groups of deceased homosexuals in Cameron and Cameron’s report were severely skewed towards younger people. Consequently, the much younger average age at death of these openly homosexual people as compared with the average age at death in the unselected general population tells nothing about possible differences between life expectancies in gays and non-gays in general. All it reflects is the skewed age distribution towards younger people among those who are openly homosexual.
To further illustrate Cameron and Cameron’s methodological blunder, imagine a country that sets up a new register to record all cases of sexual harassment against women. After 14 years of operation the register is contacted by an advocacy group who gets access to the data to examine how sexual harassment influences women’s life expectancy. Among those women who died during the maximum of 14 years of follow-up, few women will have died after the age of 50, simply because most sexual harassment cases occurred among young women. Using the same logic and methods as Cameron and Cameron, this advocacy group could arrive at the conclusion that sexual harassment reduces women’s ‘life expectancy’ by 30 years or more. Needless to say, this would be as pure nonsense as the conclusion reached by Cameron and Cameron that heterosexuals outlive gays by 22-25 years.
(Emphasis mine) Throckmorton, to his everlasting credit, denounced forcing gay teens into reparative therapy when the Love In Action protests hit the news during the summer of 2005. He has moderated his stance on ex-gay therapy since then, retired I Do Exist, split with PFOX and the Ex-Gay movement, and now says his work "…does not emphasize changing sexual orientation as much as it does achieving congruence with chosen beliefs and values (which may or may not lead to change of attractions)." So I guess he’s not in a playing along mood.
This is a public service announcement, Via Brad DeLong, who has a more civil tongue then I do. But after reading the following I was feeling a tad emphatic.
Do you know how we can tell the difference between people who were wearing their seatbelts and those who weren’t, at the scene of an automobile accident? The ones who were wearing their seatbelts are standing around saying “This really sucks,” and the ones who weren’t are kinda just lying there. This is not to say that all unrestrained traffic accidents are fatals, or that seatbelted folks are invulnerable. But if you’re playing the odds….
The proximate cause of this post is the recent automobile accident involving Jon S. Corzine, governor of New Jersey.
Dr. Robert Ostrum said that Corzine’s surgery was successful but noted that the governor would need two more operations on his leg in the coming days. Doctors also inserted a breathing tube that would remain “for days to weeks, until [Corzine] is able to breathe on his own again,” Ostrum said. Corzine had a broken sternum, a broken collarbone, a slight fracture of his lower vertebrae, a broken left leg, six broken ribs on each side and a laceration on his head, said Dr. Steven Ross, head of trauma for the hospital.
The two other persons in the vehicle sustained minor injuries. Bet you’ll never guess which two were wearing their seatbelts.
(Or—-from a few years back—beautiful young princess, millionaire boyfriend, drunk driver, bodyguard—hit an abutment at a Whole Bunch of Miles Per Hour. Who lived? Answer: the guy who was wearing a seatbelt.)
Did you ever notice how often the words “unrestrained passenger” turn up in Trauma: Life in the ER just before something Really Messy rolls in the door? In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That’s the second collision. That body’s internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments—and that’s where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when the bowling ball you left on the rear deck hits you in the back of the head, because that continued at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.
There are two major routes that unrestrained persons take in a front-end MVA (Motor Vehicle Accident). Up-and-over or down-and-under (AKA “submarining”). With up-and-over, the upper body launches forward and up. The head strikes the windshield. (This produces the classic “windshield star”) Your injuries here include concussion, scalp laceration, and various brain bleeds. You can suspect fractured cervical vertebrae (and if you have a fracture with compromise to the spinal cord at C-4 or higher, you’ve lost the nerves that control chest expansion and the diaphragm. “C-4, breathe no more,” as the saying goes).
Go a little farther through the windshield, and it isn’t unexpected to leave some or all of your face behind stuck in the broken glass. You’d be surprised by how easily faces come off the facial bones. You can also expect fractured wrists, arms, and shoulders, from folks trying to brace themselves. A little farther through the windshield, all the way out of the vehicle (a situation we call “pre-extracted for your convenience”), and in addition to whatever damage you took on the way through, you get the damage from hitting the ground, trees, and metal poles at however-many-miles-an-hour.
Sure, you hear people talking about wanting to be “thrown clear” in the event of an accident. If you want to simulate being “thrown clear,” go to the fifth floor of a building and jump out the window. Let’s talk briefly about being thrown clear, because it happens more often than you’d think. Unrestrained driver: side impact. Vehicle spins. Driver goes out the window. In one case I recall, the driver was half-way out his window when the vehicle rolled over on top of him. That was the second-most grotesque scene I’ve ever been to. Another scene, the driver went out the window when it spun. The vehicle went into a snow bank and was drivable from the scene. The driver went into a river and drowned. Any time you go to an accident and the windows aren’t rolled all the way up and unbroken, look 200 feet in all directions for the other patients. It’s pure heck finding them three days later when someone wonders why all those birds are over there, or when someone at the hospital wakes up enough to ask “Where’s Joey?”
Okay, let’s look at down-and-under. In this one the patient goes forward and down, under the dashboard. Here’s where you’re going to find fractured femurs, broken knees, and compression fractures to the lower spine. If you’re asking “Is it possible for a human femur to be pushed through the floor of the pelvis?” the answer is “Yes.” If you ask me how I know that, the answer is: “Seen it done.” Unrestrained driver, 40 MPH impact. As the legs collapse accordion-style, the patient’s chest hits the dashboard. This can give you rib fractures, a fractured sternum, cardiac bruising, or that ruptured aorta that we all love so well. The nice thing about going submarining is that there usually isn’t any brain damage (unless you got clonked on the knob by that bowling ball, and seatbelts won’t help with that). On the other hand, femur fractures can be, and frequently are, fatal.
I think I’ll leave Traumatic Asphyxia, Hemo/Pneumothorax, and Flail Chest for the Trauma and You post that I’m going to do one of these days. Let’s just say that they’re associated with having your chest hit the dashboard or steering wheel, and they Really Suck (and not in a good way).
Seatbelts stop you from going up-and-over or down-and-under, or out the window. Sure, seatbelts can hurt you too, but hey, you’re in the presence of large amounts of free-floating energy. So. Effective May 1, 2000 New Jersey’s seat belt law is being upgraded. Police officers will be able to stop and issue summons to drivers and front seat passengers solely for not wearing their seat belts. The fine is $20 and $26 court costs. The penalty can be death.
I had the shit scared out of me back in high school, by driver’s ed films like Signal 30 and Mechanized Death and other grisly products of The Highway Safety Foundation (HSF) of Mansfield, Ohio (for years I was scared to death to drive in Ohio because I had this image of them being the absolute worst drivers in the world, thanks to those films…). So I’ve always worn my seatbelt. When they were available to me. I’m actually old enough to remember when seatbelts were optional at best. Maybe. And controversial. A lot of people back then really resented the federal government mandating seatbelts in every new car built after 1968. Ironically, those were also the days when automobile dashboards were all steel and little to no padding. Had I needed any further encouragement to wear my seatbelts, I could always remember the day I was 7 years old, riding between two adults in the front seat of a 1959 Rambler when the driver had to suddenly slam on his brakes and I was thrown face first into the shiny chrome plated radio in the middle of the solid steel dashboard. It was my first of several broken noses.
It could have been worse. That car had no seatbelts in it. None. It came without. They all did back in 1960. Probably didn’t have a collapsible steering column either. Or a dual braking system. Had great big bench seats though. Bodies could freely bounce and slam around everywhere inside of most cars back then, before getting flung out a window.
The spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans said Monday he has agreed to an urgent request for a meeting with U.S. church leaders as the Anglican fellowship nears a split over the Bible and sexuality.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, visiting Canada for a spiritual retreat with the country’s Anglican bishops, said he would meet with U.S. Episcopal leaders in the fall.
"My aim is to try and keep people around the table for as long as possible on this, to understand one another," Williams said at a news conference at the Anglican Church of Canada headquarters.
Horrific news from VA Tech. I suppose I don’t have to repeat the headlines you’ve already seen. Just keep in mind that the first things you hear about ugly, shocking events like this are almost always the noise coming out of the fright and confusion. If you have friends or loved ones down there, don’t take the initial reports you hear to heart. Hang on, find some family and friends to be with, and wait for the solid facts to start coming in.
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