Another Mass Transit Fan States His Case

Suspect, 17, arrested in bus beating case:

The attack occurred about 3 p.m. last Wednesday, when a masked male boarded the bus near N. 60th St. and W. Silver Spring Drive and immediately began beating the driver.

The bus driver drove about two blocks north on N. 60th St. before the suspect grabbed the steering wheel and stepped on the accelerator.

The bus traveled about another 50 yards before crashing into a tree near N. 60th St. and W. Carmen Ave.

The suspect got off and ran north. The bus driver suffered minor injuries, but no other injuries were reported.

Ride mass transit, and you ride with a large number of strangers and the occasional felony-minded individual who will attack you for no reason. At which point, none of your fellow riders will come to your aid.

You know, if only mass transit used expensive, inflexible trains instead of buses, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe the argument should be that trains won’t run in to trees as easily when their drivers are beaten. Keep trying, New Urbanists, and remember what that Urban buys you.

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Book Report: The Book of Tomatoes by National Gardening Association (1995)

I bought this book because I was going to put in some tomato plants. Of course, I didn’t read the book until I’d already done several wrong things with the tomato plants, but what’s a guy to do?

This book is a supplement to the National Gardening Association’s regular materials, apparently. It covers the gamut of tomato raising, from selecting the right variety between the determined/indetermined growth varieties, natural resistance to disease and insects, and onto fertilization techniques, planting considerations, and finally into canning tips and recipes for tomato dishes.

I learned a lot from this book and hope that next year I can put its lessons, coupled with the big ones I’m learning this year on my own, into practice.

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In The Court Of Public Opinion, The Verdict Is Not "Innocent"

Story from last week: John Burroughs Teacher Arrested For Misconduct With A Minor:

A John Burroughs School teacher is on administrative leave after being arrested for misconduct with a minor.

….

Ladue Police were tipped off by an anonymous call, and a Johns Burroughs’ teacher has since been arrested. Police aren’t releasing his name because he hasn’t been charged yet.

“There was an inappropriate relationship that took place over a 3 year period,” says Detective Andreski. [emphasis added]

Ah, that reliable old anonymous call. Less reliable than the testimony of a cellmate overall.

Later: Burroughs School Still in Shock over Allegations against Teacher:

It is alleged that the teacher had inappropriate contact with a Burroughs student.

Ladue Police said they’re investigating the alleged relationship between the teacher and the student, which could have occured [sic] over a three year period. [Emphasis added.]

Hmm, that seems to hedge a little, doesn’t it?

The story now: Prosecutor: Not Enough Evidence to Charge John Burroughs Teacher:

St. Louis County Prosecutors said there is not enough evidence to file charges against a teacher at a private school in Ladue.

Not that he didn’t do it, but that there wasn’t enough evidence to file charges. Hah! As we’ve seen, there’s often a way to prosecute where something isn’t against the law; is it possible this poor, soon to be jobless teacher actually didn’t do anything?

Of course, if one presumes that one is innocent until proven guilty. However, in the world of law enforcement hemming, prosecutorial hawing, and media rah-rahing, false charges and overeager arresting get footnotes instead of salacious headlines.

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Book Report: Lonesome Cities by Rod McKuen (1968)

So J2 didn’t dodge the McKuen bullet for long. This collection, a 1960s collection of McKuen’s lyrics, uses the schtick of travelling, as the sections are titled after cities but only sometimes have to do with them. Mostly, though, they deal with lost love and alienation. Not a bad set of topics for poetry.

The pieces aren’t very image laden, but after the book below, this was a bit refreshing.

The book foreshadows some of the self-indulgence and self-consciousness that makes McKuen’s later work lesser, including poems written for people because McKuen wanted to write a poem for someone. That’s a police composite sketch, not a work of art.

Still, one of McKuen’s better works, worthwhile even if it doesn’t put children to sleep.


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Book Report: The Braille Woods by Ann Townsend (1997)

This chapbook, published by the St. Louis Writer’s Center, was J2‘s first volume of poetry. Unlike his elder, he did not receive the Rod McKuen treatment fresh from the womb.

As I was active in the poetry scene in St. Louis at that time, I thought perhaps I might know of her. However, she’s a professor at some university in Ohio with a pile of literary magazine publications, not one of the locals who stepped beyond the Kinko’s chapbook.

The poems have a lot of dense imagery within them, but mostly, that’s it. I didn’t get a lot of other deeper meanings or connections with the pieces. Nothing I’d like to read again, and certainly nothing I’d memorize to recite to myself when bored. Nothing I’d quote, and nothing I’d set my Yahoo! IM status to so I’d sound smart. That means, I guess, she’s no Ogden Nash or Michelangelo.

Your mileage may vary, of course. Maybe an incident, nicely evoked, of seeing a blind person in the woods while you’re on a hike and not saying anything to the blind person, even though the blind person senses you’re there, means something to you. That’s the title poem in a nutshell.

Did nothing for me.


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Whatever Happened To….?

Remember that Stupid as Kryptonite (or some such) guy? In the old days, apparently people linked to him and he got an early paid blogging job for a left-leaning consortium or something? You ever wonder what happened to him?

Me, either; I didn’t think about him until he sent me an e-mail trying to sell me counterfeit software:


Like Kryptonite to High Software License Prices!

Oh, how the mitey have fallen.

(Sure, it could be a random combination of names built by a spambot. But which narrative would you prefer to perfect your reality?)

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Where There’s A Headline, There’s A Way (To Prosecute)

Finally, after the initial furor has died down, some creative prosecutor has found a way to bring charges in the Child Commits Suicide In Response To Online Taunting case:

The incident prompted an international cry for action, but Missouri and federal prosecutors here in St. Louis examined the circumstances shortly after Megan’s death, and passed on trying to build a criminal case. No law, they said, applied.

Then, in January, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles began issuing grand jury subpoenas, signaling a new interest in the case.

MySpace is based in Santa Monica.

Prosecutors are said to be seeking a felony fraud indictment under the legal theory that Lori Drew defrauded MySpace of computer time and resources by supplying false information.

In December, St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Jack Banas said that the circumstances surrounding Megan’s death defied a simple placement of blame.

After local and localized federal prosecutors decided no laws were broken, another, more ambitious headline-hungry creative prosecutor has found a way to advance his career get his name in the national papers serve justice.

In twenty-first century America, forget double jeopardy. You’re not safe from prosecution or persecution until everyone in government service has a crack at you.

(Yes, I know that double jeopardy applies to actual prosecution. However, it’s enough now that any act brings the possibility of numerous charges in multiple jurisdictions that make it clear that the principles behind double jeopardy, that the government and its individual executors shall not continuously hound a private citizen, are violated de facto but not de jure.)

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I Blame Bush, Inadvertently

Huh, who knew I was suffering from the effects of the Bush economy and endorsing a Democrat challenger in this year’s presidential election?

With the skyrocketing costs of fuel and food, people cite sticker shock as the catalyst pushing them into the garden.

“It’s crazy that we’re spending so much oil, time and money on food,” Staley said. “If we can do it in the backyard, why not?”

Concerns over food safety and the environment are among other factors prompting people to get their hands dirty. And, of course, the bragging rights that come with serving a homegrown tomato.

I mean, if the journalist is going to ignore other reasons for the draw of gardening–that is, of exerting control over the nearby environment and tying down that Gaia wench and making her do what you want for a change, the nesting instinct, the desire to have a food source when the centralized government falls and disorder reigns, or having free seeds come in the mail–and if the journalist is instead going to impute the failing environment story, why not just go right out and say that gardeners are voting for Obama this year?

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When Corporate Training Fails

Brazen robber shot Overland store clerk:

Overland Police Chief James Herron said a surveillance camera showed police what happened next:

The robber pulled a small-caliber semiautomatic handgun and demanded money. The clerk did everthing right, Herron said. He obliged — opening the cash register drawer and stepping back, just as management had taught him to do.

But the robber fired anyway. He shot the clerk once in the shoulder, then reached into the register to grab the money. The robber then jumped onto the counter and tried to fire several more times, but the gun malfunctioned. He ran out the door and down the street. Two customers on the lot saw him. They found the clerk on the floor behind the counter and called police.

Fortunately, corporate training didn’t include the advanced techniques, dying to prevent corporate liability for accidental employee-inflicted wounds during self-defense.

Similar story related at Books, Bikes, and Boomsticks. Perhaps a wave of similar incidents will change corporate policies in this regard, but I’m not hopeful that corporations will ever value their individual employees rights to life and self-defense over their own legal liabilities.

Also, memo to the city of Florissant and to all similar (soon to be simply “all”) cities who lust for surveillance cameras to prevent crime: discounting the British example, wouldn’t common sense indicate that cameras haven’t eliminated bank robberies or gas station hold ups and won’t particularly impact street crime?

Not, I suppose, if budget is on the line. A higher principle than anything stated by government officials.

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Book Report: Rooster Cogburn by Martin Julien (1975)

Given my love for books that were made into movies or movie novelizations, of course I picked up this book at a book fair. I didn’t look too closely, though, as it’s neither. It is the tie-in to the movie, but in this case, it is a forward by the producer, an introduction that includes interviewish fan magazine style pieces on the stars (John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn), and then the script for the movie.

As such, it’s an even quicker read than a novel would have been.

The movie is a sequel to True Grit, and I’ve not seen either of the films, so I had no preconceived notions about it. However, I’ve read books that include the script of a film I liked (particularly Casablanca, and I’m always struck with how thin the scripts seem compared to the actual film. As a writer, of course I’d like to think that the words are paramount; however, the actors and cinematographers add something. Don’t get me wrong, a movie with poor choices of words makes a bad film as easily or maybe more easily, but the other factors add a richness to the experience that the script itself cannot.

That being said, it’s a decent Western story, sort of a stock bit but serviceable.

Now, of course, I’ll have to see the film to see if I’m correct in my thesis. I’d add it to my wish list on Amazon, but none of you googleheads looking for free book reports to turn in as your own bother to read this far, much less click my wish list. At least, I hope you’re smart enough to read enough to turn in something else. None of these book reports has particular scholarly merit. But in case you don’t, I’d like to add HEY TEACHER/PROFESSOR, YOU SUX!

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Odd Trivium About Me

I have no problem drinking a warm glass of water. Not even a lukewarm glass; I can drink a relatively hot glass of water. Which comes in handy here, because the tap in our kitchen has some sort of taste running through the cold water when you first turn it on. So when I’m thirsty, I don’t have to wait for the cold line to clear. I’ll just drink a glass of hot water if we’ve just been washing dishes or whatnot.

Some people, like my beautiful wife, cannot abide by anything but the coldest of water. I don’t know if that makes me odd, or her.

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You Only Hurt The Ones Who Are Loyal Customers

In an era of shrinking newspaper circulation, it’s good to see that the St. Louis Post-Dispatch thinks so little of its loyal readers and its delivered circulation, which helps with its ad rates donchaknow, that it’s taken to helping part them with some extra money because they can. Notice the cutesy line at the bottom of this subscription card?

Shipping and handling extra
Click for full size

The line is: Subscribers may pick up the newspaper to avoid delivery costs. That would seem to indicate that the Post-Dispatch adds shipping and handling to its home subscribers who make up the bulk of its audience. Does it really?

Here’s a bill:

Shipping and handling exhorbitant
Click for full size

Fifteen cents on a daily delivery and forty cents for Sunday? That’s 30% markup over the daily cover price of 50 cents and 27% over the Sunday cover price. But if you want to avoid that surcharge, you can subscribe so the paper gets its recurring revenue and circulation numbers and then you can drive every morning to a place where you can pick it up.

Or, I suppose, you can do like the subscriber noted above and cancel your subscription, picking up a paper once in a while at the grocery. Or not at all.

Well-played, circulation department. Your earnest pursuit of zero subscriber base is noteworthy and efficient.

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Book Report: An Altogether New Book of Top Ten Lists by David Letterman (1991)

It looks as though it’s been four and a half years since I read the first Book of Lists, and what a four years it has been. Punchlines about Iraq and President Bush, written in 1990 about a different set of circumstances, still cause one to do a doubletake.

Like the other book, the best lists are on topics that aren’t dated; the ones that are, I can appreciate for the historical/nostalgic value and get some of the humor from them, but they’re not going to last long. Of course, you can get these lists on the Internet now, but when has free availability online ever stopped me for spending a buck or less for a paper copy?


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A Book Listing Meme That Proves, Again, That I Read A Lot

Via Dustbury, I again have an opportunity to list some books and identify what I’ve read. Apparently, this is some list of books people tend to own just so they look smart.

The schtick is as follows:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Additionally, I have listed in green the ones that I have on my to read shelves to actually read. Additionally, I have posted links to the reports on books that I’ve finished in the last couple of years so you can see I did read them.

Anyway:

  • Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
  • Anna Karenina
  • Crime and Punishment
  • Catch-22
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Wuthering Heights
  • The Silmarillion
  • Life of Pi: a novel
  • The Name of the Rose
  • Don Quixote
  • Moby Dick
  • Ulysses
  • Madame Bovary
  • The Odyssey
  • Pride and Prejudice
  • Jane Eyre
  • The Tale of Two Cities
  • The Brothers Karamazov
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
  • War and Peace
  • Vanity Fair
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife
  • The Iliad
  • Emma
  • The Blind Assassin
  • The Kite Runner
  • Mrs. Dalloway
  • Great Expectations
  • American Gods
  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
  • Atlas Shrugged
  • Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
  • Memoirs of a Geisha
  • Middlesex
  • Quicksilver
  • Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
  • The Canterbury Tales
  • The Historian: a novel
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Brave New World
  • The Fountainhead
  • Foucault’s Pendulum
  • Middlemarch
  • Frankenstein
  • The Count of Monte Cristo
  • Dracula
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • Anansi Boys
  • The Once and Future King
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
  • 1984
  • Angels & Demons
  • The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
  • The Satanic Verses
  • Sense and Sensibility
  • The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Mansfield Park
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  • To the Lighthouse
  • Tess of the D’Urbervilles
  • Oliver Twist
  • Gulliver’s Travels
  • Les MisĂ©rables
  • The Corrections
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
  • Dune
  • The Prince
  • The Sound and the Fury
  • Angela’s Ashes: a memoir
  • The God of Small Things
  • A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
  • Cryptonomicon
  • Neverwhere
  • A Confederacy of Dunces
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything
  • Dubliners
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Beloved
  • Slaughterhouse-Five
  • The Scarlet Letter
  • Eats, Shoots & Leaves
  • The Mists of Avalon
  • Oryx and Crake: a novel
  • Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
  • Cloud Atlas
  • The Confusion
  • Lolita
  • Persuasion
  • Northanger Abbey
  • The Catcher in the Rye
  • On the Road
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame
  • Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
  • The Aeneid
  • Watership Down
  • Gravity’s Rainbow
  • The Hobbit (well, the graphic novel, anyway)
  • In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
  • White Teeth
  • Treasure Island
  • David Copperfield
  • The Three Musketeers

Sadly, the list is mostly unread, even the books that I actually think are worth reading and not just fluff put on by contemporary reviewers or poseurs.

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The Boilerplate

How often newspapers pose the important question about governmental authorities who might have done wrong based on a single citizen’s spurious and often dubious assertion. Here’s one such story from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Questions arise after girl’s day out of school:

As Milwaukee Public Schools spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin puts it, “A 12-year-old girl, it’s not appropriate that she’s out without the family knowing where she is.”

As the mother of this particular girl and MPS officials agree, the sixth-grader was out of Burroughs Middle School, 6700 N. 80th St., for a day last week without her family knowing about it.

Whose fault was that? The school’s or the girl’s?

According to St. Aubin, the girl was suspended from school April 22 for misbehaving in class. The mother said the suspension was a result of a verbal argument between the girl and another girl during a class.

St. Aubin said the girl was told of the suspension and given a letter to take home to her parents, and she was not supposed to come to school the next day. A voice mail message explaining that was left for the girl’s mother, St. Aubin said.

The mother says the girl was not told she was suspended and the mother didn’t get the letter or a voice mail.

The girl went to school the next day.

The mother said her daughter told her that shortly after she got to school, she was told by an assistant principal that she had to leave and was given a dismissal pass and a bus ticket to go home. Administrators ordered her to go out the door, the mother said. She said her daughter did not know how to take a bus home and went to Noyes Park, several blocks north of the school, where she spent the day without food or shelter.

The mother showed reporters the girl’s suspension notice, an early dismissal slip from the school with a time of 9:20 a.m. that day written on it, and a bus ticket she said was the one given her daughter. [Emphasis added.]

Good on the paper for bringing to light this story of a suspended girl who apparently told her mother she didn’t know that she was suspended. Mysteriously, the notice that she was suspended appears as evidence that the school did wrong.

As a government entity, the paper holds the school up as an example of government incompetence or malfeasance. At least until the time comes to raise taxes to give more money to those incompetents or miscreants, in which case it will become a moral imperative to support the bureaucracy against the individual tax payers.

You know, that should be only one word, tax payers. Breaking it out into two somehow seems to add a certain emphasis that is lost when it’s classified through single word usage.

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Things I’m Asked All The Time

Dude, is that you in that picture dressed like a scientist riding on the back of a moped driven by an actor dressed in a suit?

Of course it is. Don’t be ridiculous.

Did you really almost get into a wreck on that moped? What would make a mild mannered fellow like you do something like that?

Yes, and I was paid $1 for my role in that commercial. This brings my total revenue from Internet modeling and acting to $2.

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Book Report: Alice in Jeopardy by Ed McBain (2004)

Et tu, McBain?

I guess it comes as no surprise. Many of his post-2001 books, particularly the ones after 2003, offer their asides that identify exactly how McBain felt about President Bush. He managed to dodge overt political disapproval for almost 50 years, but the climate and tenor of the times allowed him to unleash his disdain, so this book includes a throw away about how Bush ruined the economy and two references to the Iraq War as a Bush crusade. These sorts of things put me off of writers almost daily; it’s only McBain’s exemplary career beforehand that keeps me from dismissing him as a leftist hack. Sadly, that’s what it’s like to be a semi-conservative reader in the early part of the 21st century.

Now, this book is a Florida book. Because I’ve not read a Matthew Hope book for a while, it’s easy for me to forget that McBain did his dabbling in the world of MacDonald (mentioned by name in this book) and Hiaasen. It seems like he’s trying to emulate the latter a bit here, with a cast of odd characters weaving in and out.

The titular Alice is a recent widow whose husband drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. She’s running out of money, waiting for the insurance company to finally pay up, and trying to keep it together. When someone kidnaps her children, the various law enforcement agencies move in with little success and Alice herself has to do something.

The book falls short of the Hiaasen standard and doesn’t move quickly enough to fit into the MacDonald mold. Ultimately, it’s a lesser book in the McBain canon (politics aside), but it’s not a bad book on its own. If someone writes the incomplete Becca in Jeopardy, I might read it. But it’s not an 87th Precinct novel, that’s for sure.

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Enjoy Your Popcorn, Conservatives

You know, a lot of conservative sorts of political observers have had a lot of fun watching Obama make a series of gaffes and get caught up in ill-considered personal relationships.

However, as long as these things are coming out in the primaries, they’ll be old news by election time, and if Obama ends up the nominee, I think a long, bruising primary battle will have given him some inkling of what he’ll face in a real election, so he’ll be better equipped for the real election than if the Democrats had just crowned him early.

The bruising fight between Obama and Hillary might be fun for some conservatives to watch, but ultimately it might strengthen Obama just enough for November.

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