Some Links

I hope Carrie Fisher fully recovers. She has no idea how many fans echoed her heart attack when they heard about it.

The thing about this story that makes me very curious is why the letters are sent to that particular address in the first place.

Yes Virginia, there is a Spider-Man.

Here's a gingerbread creation I can get behind. I want a C64!

I was delighted to hear a great story about my hometown police department:

"Adrian and I were driving on Lincoln Ave. Towards Wal-Mart when I saw a police car with 2 officers and they were talking to a lady and her little (maybe 3 year old) daughter I thought something must have happened...Well it did in front of my eyes I witnessed these 2 policemen handing the little girl a wrapped present from the trunk of the car...I was almost in tears and I gave the officer a thumbs UP and a Honk of approval and he waved back . It made my Christmas seeing this Act of Kindness in my Town !" -Betty Lynn Garza on Facebook

I love this video that sets two pug puppies against a mostly indifferent kitten. The fact that the puppies aren't sure whether they should be playing with each other or trying to get out amuses me.


I still haven't been able to wrest control of my Twitter account from Inkwell. At least he is still allowing the blog posts to go through.

A new vaccine developed to protect against ebola was apparently 100% effective in a trial during a live outbreak. If that's really the case, it would be an amazing success. A total of 5,837 people were given the vaccine. Two people had serious side effects (including an allergic reaction) while many others had general soreness. The World Health Organization has a good summary of the results. While the vaccine only protects against one strain of ebola, it's a good start and the trial is definitely promising.

Author David Brin answers the question "Is Government Useless".

Question: If you are pro-life, are you for preventing unwanted pregnancies, or are you for punishing people who have unwanted pregnancies? Because there are many ways to reduce abortion that don't involve making it illegal and punishing people who are in desperate situations - but the pro-life movement rejects them all. Which suggests to me that the movement isn't about preventing abortion as much as it is about punishing people who have sex.

Linkdump!

Did flails even exist?

Here's another article about albinos in Africa. Depressing read, but important, I think.

Atlas Obscura, which has become a favorite destination but threatens to overwhelm with too many articles, had a fun story about a nuclear bomb that was dropped on South Carolina.

So, are there no secret hidden chambers off King Tutankhamun's tomb, or is Egypt suppressing the truth? I don't know, but I'm curious to see how it turns out.

MetaFilter has a history of Looney pyramids. These come from the same guy who created Fluxx.

It seems to me that if police are scared to beat people up because of viral videos, then that should be considered a good thing.

Ever wondered why it's called "drop candy"? Well MetaFilter has a link to a video that explains it (5 minutes in!). I'd love to try the nector candy, but I'm not a huge drop candy fan and I'm broke, so I'll just share it instead.

A story linked on Slashdot says Apple doesn't know why its online streaming service is deleting people's files.

Transgender folks are, sadly, able to tell us about our biases.

DC Comics honors Darwyn Cooke.

Let's finish with Simon's Cat:

It's over... sort of...

The occupation of a peaceful bird sanctuary is finally over after the final hold-out surrendered this morning, but not after some truly fraught and surreal moments. I made the mistake of trying to listen to some of it, since the tweets about it didn't make any sense. I quickly figured out why they didn't make sense. Because the people talking were total nutters.

I listened as a young man, the last hold-out, was talked down to by some ultra-conservative jerkwads who nearly managed to talk him into killing himself by putting on a lesson of what not to say to a suicidal person before an FBI investigator finally managed to wrest the conversation away from them and back into the realm of sanity. The talk ranged from Biblical references, to prison rape, to pizza and marijuana, to UFOs and nuclear leaks. In short, the kid was completely delusional by the end. It sounded like a lack of sleep combined with being surrounded by nutcases and hearing only their points of view. When you are stuck in a bubble like that, it's not good for you.

The next step will be the authorities examining the bird sanctuary as a crime scene. As several references were made to the thing being booby-trapped, I suspect law enforcement will move slowly and carefully in some places. Once it's been determined how much damage the bozos did, then they can be charged for cleaning up the mess and with any other crimes discovered. I hope they didn't do too much damage to archaeological sites, but I fear they may have, based on their own videos of "building roads" in sensitive areas.

I hope the folks that need mental health assistance get the help they need, and I hope the rest of them spend a long, long time occupying a federal building before they are released... if ever.

My Moment of Panic

I call the police every day.

It's part of my job, calling the sheriff's office or the police to get information for our daily report of police activity. I've gotten used to talking to cops.

But I never call 9-1-1. That's the emergency number, and I never have an emergency. Right? Well... today I called the emergency line.

I was driving home after finishing up my last story for the day. I turned an annoying blind corner onto the street that leads to my subdivision, and there was something strange in front of me.

I first registered an SUV stopped in the roadway, askew. It wasn't aimed straight. I then noticed there was something/somebody on the sidewalk to my right side, and there was a big orange dog in the street headed toward the sidewalk. I registered that the dog was attacking/lunging at a dog on the sidewalk being held on a leash by a woman who looked, frankly, really angry and scared. Then I noticed that she had a child with her, trying to hide behind her.

I then realized the SUV was trying to block the orange dog from getting to the woman. I pulled up, stopped my car and turned on my emergency lights. I heard the woman yell, "Get your dog on a leash!" to a man carrying a two-by-four approaching from a house on my left-hand side. I wasn't sure what to do, so I dithered while the man ran behind my car, where the orange dog was running to either get away from him or cut off the woman and her dog, or both. I heard a smacking sound and the orange dog yelped, then the man was headed back to the house. I didn't see the dog after that (I think it ran while I was looking at the woman).

All this time the woman had been trying to drag her dog, which appeared to be a young brown Doberman, up the street. She was now next to my car, so I yelled (since my windows were up) "Do you want me to call the police?!" She nodded, looking grim and frightened, and I dialed 9-1-1 for the first time in many years.

I may have been a little over-excited. I told the dispatcher that a dog was attacking a jogger and her dog and child. I offered to stay and direct the police to where the dog and the man had come from. While I was talking, the woman got her dog around the corner and away. The SUV driver slowly drove off. And the man returned to his house. I didn't get any names, and no one was there to support me.

Rather than stay in the middle of the street, I pulled a u-turn and parked nearby. The police arrived a few minutes later and I directed them to the house. As soon as he saw the officers, the man came out and started to apologize, saying his dog had broken its leash. Because of the neighbor dogs, which always run loose, he said. Two more officers arrived, including one I knew. I gave my name and address and such, then I went to my car...

...which I'd locked with the keys inside. D'oh. Fortunately, it's cold out. When it's cold out, I wear a coat. When I wear a coat, I keep my wallet in the pocket. And in my wallet... my spare key. I was able to get inside my car without utterly embarrassing myself in front of the cops and clear out. As I left, the police were questioning the dog owner.

I'll be sure to look at the police log tomorrow to see what I hath wrought.

Yes, All Lives Matter...

But if your kneejerk response to "Black Lives Matter" is "All Lives Matter" then you are very much missing the point. Thankfully a nice person at Reddit explained it better than I possibly can, so here, read this and see if it changes your mind about the slogan. Apologies for any serious language, this is a serious topic.

Imagine that you’re sitting down to dinner with your family, and while everyone else gets a serving of the meal, you don’t get any. So you say “I should get my fair share.” And as a direct response to this, your dad corrects you, saying, “everyone should get their fair share.” Now, that’s a wonderful sentiment — indeed, everyone should, and that was kinda your point in the first place: that you should be a part of everyone, and you should get your fair share also. However, dad’s smart-ass comment just dismissed you and didn’t solve the problem that you still haven’t gotten any!

The problem is that the statement “I should get my fair share” had an implicit “too” at the end: “I should get my fair share, too, just like everyone else.” But your dad’s response treated your statement as though you meant “only I should get my fair share”, which clearly was not your intention. As a result, his statement that “everyone should get their fair share,” while true, only served to ignore the problem you were trying to point out.

That’s the situation of the “black lives matter” movement. Culture, laws, the arts, religion, and everyone else repeatedly suggest that all lives should matter. Clearly, that message already abounds in our society.

The problem is that, in practice, the world doesn’t work the way. You see the film Nightcrawler? You know the part where Renee Russo tells Jake Gyllenhal that she doesn’t want footage of a black or latino person dying, she wants news stories about affluent white people being killed? That’s not made up out of whole cloth — there is a news bias toward stories that the majority of the audience (who are white) can identify with. So when a young black man gets killed (prior to the recent police shootings), it’s generally not considered “news”, while a middle-aged white woman being killed is treated as news. And to a large degree, that is accurate — young black men are killed in significantly disproportionate numbers, which is why we don’t treat it as anything new. But the result is that, societally, we don’t pay as much attention to certain people’s deaths as we do to others. So, currently, we don’t treat all lives as though they matter equally.

Just like asking dad for your fair share, the phrase “black lives matter” also has an implicit “too” at the end: it’s saying that black lives should also matter. But responding to this by saying “all lives matter” is willfully going back to ignoring the problem. It’s a way of dismissing the statement by falsely suggesting that it means “only black lives matter,” when that is obviously not the case. And so saying “all lives matter” as a direct response to “black lives matter” is essentially saying that we should just go back to ignoring the problem.

I know I'm racist. I was born and raised in a racist society, and I'm absolutely certain that I have internalized things that happen in a way that I don't see the problem as clearly as people who are victims of racists attitudes can. I fight it when I'm aware of it, but I bet I offend people all the time with my racism, and I bet I am blissfully ignorant of some, if not most, of the hurt I cause that way. And I'm sorry about it. I try to get better, I try to recognize the ways my skin color has benefited me, but there are some experiences I will never be able to truly understand. And I will never truly get rid of it, no matter how hard I try. I will do the best I can, but it's so embedded in our society, so pervasive, that I don't know if it'll ever go away in my lifetime. I hope things are getting better, but I have my doubts.

Black Lives Matter. Don't dismiss the slogan out of ignorance or deliberate misunderstanding of what it means. Black Lives Matter.

Friday! But not my last day of work this week...

So this is the first day this week that I don't have to head into work before 8 a.m.

Not a complaint, really. My editor gets in at about 5 every morning. More of an observation of how strange life can be. So... um... I'm going to post some links. At least one of them is not something you should read if you are feeling grief and despair at the current situation in the United States.

Ok, I'm going to leave that particular link until last. In the meantime, I'm going to be a little more lighthearted.

So, this kind of makes me want to try knitting again. I was pretty miserable at it, I think this project is well beyond my foreseeable capacity.

The source of rubber bricks washing up on the shore may have been discovered.

The second part of the Breaking Cat News Christmas Special has been posted. Poor kitty!

Inkwell will be sad: Cat Fancy is going away.

Do What You Wanna Do - DJ Earworm's United State of Pop mashup for 2014.

Now to get serious. Let's start with Jon Stewart's serious reaction to the Eric Garner decision.

Strange Fruit, a multi-link MetaFilter post that connects historical racism to current events.

Morning thoughts and a link...

Mark Evanier on Ferguson.

I have a lot more to say about Ferguson, but it's probably all ranting and repeating myself. I believe the process was so flawed that justice is unlikely to be served. But then, the justice system in general is pretty flawed in this country.

School board last night. I was exhausted and a bit confused, and now I need to write about it... which is going to be difficult. And yet somehow I always manage. Plenty of examples at the newspaper's website.

Ok, too much to do to write. I'll try to post something about what I'm thankful for tomorrow... or maybe I'll just spend so much time digesting I won't bother posting.

Morning thoughts and links

A New York City high school is teaching kids how to interact with police. I've often thought a crucial element of drivers education should be how to react if you are pulled over by a cop.

Not much to report this morning. It's chilly out, which has led to Inkwell settling on my lap, usually when I'm trying to do something on the computer or iPad. I've turned the heat way down to save money, as medical bills are killing us so far this winter. This is a short workweek, in that I'll be working three days, have a day off, then working on Friday. I also have evening meetings today and tomorrow (city council and school board) so I'm going to not get much rest between now and the holiday.

I'm looking forward to seeing my parent-in-laws Wednesday night. I sometimes get a little too wrapped up in my job... it's nice to see people I'm not reporting on once in awhile.

I'm more than a month behind in reading comic books, and I've got three issues of Fortean Times piled up to read (which will be a joy, but is kind of strange to see because I love reading the mag so much). I've been very busy at work, and not in the mood for much when I get home.

Other than that, I'm surviving, and hopefully I'll have enough energy to make it through the holiday season this year.

Linkdump

Ten Things You Should Know Before Moving to Seattle.

Have you seen The McBain Movie?

A typeface designed to help dyslexics read.

The Renton Police bring down the Streisand Effect upon themselves. I grew up in Renton. I wouldn't have known a thing about this... except the police decided to bring attention to it.

Ten Things Not to Say to a Depressed Person. And since that's a downer, read this next: Ten Supportive Things I'm Glad Somebody Said to Me, from the same author. Via.

The Oldest Unsolved Seattle Police Homicide.

I'm sure you can spot a Monty Python reference from a mile away.

Aim for the Stars.

It's not a Bloggity linkdump without a pug.