There Was A Failing, Of Course

This struck me as a profoundly French reaction:

"There was a failing, of course," French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on BFM television. "That's why we have to analyze what happened."

What struck me as French, in the prime minister's statement, was the unvarnished acknowledgement of the obvious, combined with the call for analysis.

Apparently their intelligence services knew about these bad guys, but didn't make them a high priority.

Well, the intelligence role is hard. There's a lot of bad guys. It's hard to know who's about to really go berserk.

As with our Boston Marathon bombers, I wonder if the fact that the principals were actual brothers made it harder to catch them. The fact that brothers are associating would not raise red flags. And they might do more of their communication in person, making it harder to catch them by electronic surveillance.

The populace finds this sort of event unnerving. The populace then supports MORE electronic surveillance. But the intelligence services are already up to their necks in data. One of their problems is finding the signal in the noise.

In the midst of all the chatter
how do you find the messages that matter?

Coincidence or Unconscious Choice

On Facebook yesterday it popped up a '3 years ago today' post, which was a picture of my dog, Juliette, which I had posted shortly after she died.

The funny thing was, I already had an appointment to go see a breeder about a new puppy today. I didn't realize it had been 3 years already. We've only had one dog during that interim, namely, Romeo.

Now we're up to 2 dogs again. Here is my daughter with the new addition, on our ride home:


She's a yellow Lab. We have not yet chosen a name for her. The breeder called her Lilly. I'm leaning toward Blondie. My brother said instead of Blondie, maybe Hairy Debbie. I also had a suggestion of Butter, which I considered expanding to Butterball or Butterscotch or even Buttercup.

Buttercup
would rhyme with pup.
But so far it's Blondie
of which I'm more fondy.

Not True Muslims

It's a funny thing, this argument I hear with some regularity that so-and-so was not a true Muslim because no true Muslim would have done such a thing. I gather a true Muslim is virtuous, and since the act wasn't virtuous, the person's self-identification as a member of the community was false. Of course it must be the case that no truly virtuous person commits vicious acts. But surely this is all beside the point, which is that sometimes religious beliefs play a part in some vicious acts. I'd be willing to say that not all religious beliefs are true, and that the false ones can sometimes be hazardous to oneself and others. 

Not all religious beliefs can be true,

Since not all religions agree. 

This may seem controversial to you,

But it seems like sound logic to me. 

Murder Most Foul

From an essay by W.W. in The Economist:

"To describe the cartoons, and not show them, is essentially to do the bidding of the terrorists."

I, for one, welcome our new terrorist censors. Oh, that cartoon? I don't know how it got in this blog post.

It says something offensive? Something about 100 lashes if you don't die laughing? I had no idea. I don't speak French.

Crazed fanatics cannot be allowed
to get a country thoroughly cowed.

Flaky Crystals Of Ice

There's a temptation to think of snow as something measured in inches, on account of it so often is. But I often think, while shoveling it, that I would like to receive its measurements in mass as well, since 2 inches of fluffy snow seems to weigh less than 1 inch of soggy snow.

When it comes to shoveling, it seems like mass must matter more than volume.

This morning's load was powdery fluff,
and that's how I prefer the stuff.

Candy Stick-Up

A classic criminal error, repeated anew:

"A man and a teenager accused of pointing a gun at a Southwest Side gas station clerk before stealing candy Sunday morning were arrested after police followed their footprints in the snow."

Footprints in the snow
let the po-po know
exactly where to go.

Future Bleak for Van Den Bleeken

In Belgium, there hasn't been an official execution since 1950.

But they do have legal euthanasia now, which can be legally provided for the cessation of psychological suffering.

Which leads to this odd situation:

"Frank Van Den Bleeken, who has spent the past 30 years in jail for repeated rape convictions and a rape murder, will be euthanised in prison in the northwestern city of Bruges."

He has actually decline to apply for parole, because he thinks he's a danger to society. But he also feels conditions in prison are inhumane. So he went through the process of requesting euthanasia due to psychological suffering. And the powers-that-be approved his request. Doctors agreed his condition was "incurable".

'The sisters of his last victim were opposed to the decision, preferring that he be left to "rot in his cell".'

In the absence of execution,
he found a new solution.

Guilty of murder and rape,
he seeks the final escape.

Enright Bublitz

The 1910 Census records show a 7 year old boy in Chicago named Enright Bublitz. Both of his parents were listed as having been born in Germany. So how did this kid end up named Enright? It's an Irish last name.

It looks like he had a career as a police officer in Illinois but retired out of state. (You can see his name on a membership list here, but the PDF takes a while to load).

He died in 1995, in his early nineties.

Was his first name some kind of mistake? Or might he have been named after an Irish friend of the parents?

My last name
and his first are the same.

But how that came to be,
remains a riddle for me.

Donna Douglas

Actress Donna Douglas has died. She was known for 2 roles.

1) Elly May on the tv show, The Beverly Hillbillies

2) The female patient, in a famous Twilight Zone episode:



Here is how the LA Times described the episode:

'The episode recounted the recovery of a woman named Janet Tyler after a series of medical procedures attempting to fix a face that has apparently been completely deformed. While she deals with the doctors and nurses in the hospital, we see her head wrapped completely in bandages... But in the episode's final moments, the bandages are removed and Tyler's face is revealed to be Douglas'. "No change. No change at all," the doctor laments. And then we see the face of the medical staff -- snouted and horrific. But in this world, it's Douglas' face that's the monstrosity.'

Ayn Rand described the episode with more dramatic flair and philosophical overtones:

'In some indeterminate world of another dimension, the shadowy, white-clad, authoritarian figures of doctors and social scientists are deeply concerned with the problem of a young girl who looks so different from everyone else that she is shunned as a freak, a disfigured outcast unable to lead a normal life. She has appealed to them for help, but all plastic surgery operations have failed—and now the doctors are grimly preparing to give her a last chance: one more attempt at plastic surgery; if it fails, she will remain a monstrosity for life. In heavily tragic tones, the doctors speak of the girl's need to be like others, to belong, to be loved, etc. We are not shown any of the characters' faces, but we hear the tense, ominous, oddly lifeless voices of their dim figures, as the last operation progresses. The operation fails. The doctors declare, with contemptuous compassion, that they will have to find a young man as deformed as this girl, who might be able to accept her. Then, for the first time, we see the girl's face: lying motionless on the pillow of a hospital bed, it is a face of perfect, radiant beauty. The camera moves to the faces of the doctors: it is an unspeakably horrifying row, not of human faces, but of mangled, distorted, disfigured pigs' heads, recognizable only by their snouts. Fade-out.'

I don't think I ever knew that Elly May and the Not-Really-Ugly Patient were played by the same actress.

The snouted plastic surgeons failed,
and radiant beauty instead prevailed.

TP Puzzle

There's a shot of the weird bathroom tissue they use at my office.

At first I thought it was an antitheft gimmick. Because home dispensers wouldn't accommodate this odd design.

But then I wondered if it was a more-paper gimmick. So the cleaning people woudn't have to replace them so often.

What is the goal
of a roll without holes?

7 F at 7 AM

Frost
embossed
soon gone
with dawn.

Hit and Run and Return

Today's church scandal features an Episcopalian bishop who ran down a cyclist.

'“Several news agencies have reported this as a ‘hit and run.’ Bishop Cook did leave the scene initially, but returned after about 20 minutes to take responsibility for her actions,” Sutton wrote, according to the text of the email obtained by The Brew.'

Was it a hit and run?
She did come back twenty minutes after the damage was done.

Someone of the same name in the same general area has a history: "The Brew asked Tillman if Bishop Cook is the same Heather Elizabeth Cook, 4325 Cabin Creek Road, arrested on September 10, 2010 on drinking, driving and drug charges in Caroline County, according to this local media coverage and online court records."

It's always a shame
to take the blame
for somebody else who has the same name.

But it sounds like the address matches too,
which increases the likelihood that the identification is true.

Vote the Name You Know

The pundits predict we'll get Clinton or Bush. 

I'll stand on a ledge if you'll give me a push. 

Killing in Question

"Failure to frisk puts killing in question. Mother says pat-down would have prevented cops shooting son in ER."

That's the heading and subheading on a front-page story on today's paper edition of the Chicago Tribune.

Basically, a mom wishes the state troopers had frisked her son before an ambulance took him to the ER. Because after he got to the ER, her son pulled out a gun, and wouldn't put it down upon request, at which point the local suburban police shot him and killed him.

According to the legal experts quoted in the story, there's no duty to frisk, as such. Police have fairly broad powers to frisk if they feel threatened, apparently. But they don't have to frisk every time someone yells at them.

Actually, in a lot of place, residents complain about over-aggressive frisking from the police. It's one of the complaints you hear a lot. You particularly hear that young black men get frisked disproportionately. And, yes, this guy who got shot was a young black man.

The online headline is a bit more subdued: "Family asks why man shot by police in hospital wasn't frisked after crash"

That's fair. You might well ask. But I don't think it quite "puts the killing in question" as the paper headline put it.

If I were going to question the original killing, I guess I would ask rather why it's necessary to shoot someone who is refusing to put a gun down. The answer that I will hear, I think, is that the police feared for their own lives or those of others. And I can see being afraid when an angry guy is holding a gun. I guess I would be afraid too, particularly if he pointed it at me. It's very clear that everyone is afraid of this guy, since they scramble in fear away from him.

There's some video from a news station here, showing some surveillance footage that doesn't show you all that much. There's some other footage here.

A couple of the news stories mention that 9 shots were fired in less than 2 seconds. Yes, that's how the police shoot you nowadays, a lot of the time. They practically empty a semi-automatic pistol into you, and they can do it pretty fast. They don't shoot you once and wait to see if you drop. That's regarded, I believe, as an unreliable approach.

The police report said: "The officers fired until the immediate threat was over."

In the unfortunate circumstance that you get hit with 9 rounds,
you're probably "over" before you hit the ground.

The Interview

We downloaded The Interview... a movie I wouldn't normally be in a hurry to see. It made me laugh, off and on. I thought the guy playing the dictator was good - he had some charisma, probably more than the real dictator of the same name.

It's not exactly that I highly recommend it,
but I didn't want some government to end it.

Last Place You Look

I was playing Santa in a quiet house,
wrapping gifts for a certain spouse...

When I realized one present was missing. I really only stash Christmas gifts in one of 2 places, so I reexamined those places.

Nope.

Had I had stashed the gift in some new, previously unused location?

But I couldn't think of where that would be.

Finally, I began to wonder if it was possible, just possible, that I had never removed that particular gift from the trunk of my car.

And sure enough, that was the place,
the big solution to my case.

The Interview

Retreat! No... Charge!

"Sony Pictures has approved limited Christmas Day screenings of "The Interview," reversing course after taking heat for canceling its planned release after threats from hackers."

I suspect it's idiotic,
and not a thing of beauty,
but has it become my patriotic duty?

The Case of the Funnybone Faint

Once it happened to me,
I got knocked out through my knee...

It was in elementary school, maybe 4th grade. The teacher gave us a problem, I think a math problem, to solve. Anyway, it was some kind of speed contest, and the teacher instructed us to stand up as soon as we solved the problem.

I was good at this sort of thing, and I'm competitive, so I finished the problem and jumped up very quickly... and banged my knee into the underside of my desk. I got an immediate radiating sensation, like I'd hit my funnybone, except in my knee.

And then... I was waking up. I thought it was morning. I thought I was home. And then I heard my teacher saying: "John Enright, get up off of the floor this instant!"

Yes, she thought I was faking it. However, as Angela Gentile explains it:

"A vasovagal or vasodepressor response is a reflex the body goes through when a certain trigger is present. When the funny bone, or ulnar nerve is struck hard by a pointy object, a vasovagal response can occur. This can also happen when the peroneal nerve (just below the knee) is struck. The body responds by having a large amount of blood pool into the legs, which in effect pulls blood away from the major organs, like the brain and heart. The brain goes unconscious for a short time, until the blood gets pumped back into the brain and heart."

Why did my teacher think I goofing around?
Did she mistake me somehow for a class clown?

The Merry Widow

Last night we enjoyed the local Light Opera Works production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow. It's a new translation/adaptation. Act III doesn't quite match either of the versions described in the linked Wikipedia article. But I liked it.

There's a joke in this version that got a lot of laughs. I'm guessing it wasn't in the original. So, spoiler alert on the joke.

*** recurring gag spoiler ***

The joke depends on the fact that the characters are all multi-lingual in European languages, but they all consistently regard English as "the language of love".

English, you see, is the modern language of science, of business, and so forth. But we tend to think the "Romance" languages have the edge on expressions of romance.

I think it's the tendency, in English speaking cultures, to emphasize speaking plainly, as opposed to high-flown hyperbole. English is seen as lacking in ornament, like Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, kind of bare.

But, in fairness
to English's alleged bareness,
take a good look at a Shakespeare sonnet,
and whether or not you find ornament on it,
I hope you'll agree that it's lovely beyond compareness.

Cop Killer

So, after all the tormented examination of some killings by police officers, we get an unarguable revenge killing of 2 police officers.

The killings by police officers, were an odd mix of cases (Brown, Garner, Rice, Crawford), but all involved black men shot by cops in cases where the initial situation involved either very minor crime, or no crime at all. The Rice and Crawford cases involved toy guns that the police didn't know were toys. The Brown and Garner cases involved confrontations that escalated terribly.

But now we get this, a black man, Ismaaiyl Brinsley, killing 2 cops in revenge, "putting wings on pigs" as he reportedly put it on Instagram.

NYC has a melting pot police force, and the 2 cops he killed were not "white" exactly, but not "black" either. Going by surnames and appearances, one looks to have been Hispanic, and the other East Asian. In other situations, if they were victims being lionized by the left, they would already be referred to as "people of color".

The perpetrator, though, is a black-looking man with a Muslim-looking first name, who may have considered himself as a Muslim, who shot 2 cops on anti-terrorism training duty.

Needless to say, the perpetrator, who also shot his own girlfriend, was probably all kinds of crazy. And I think he did us all a favor by offing himself.

Did I mention that NYC protesters were filmed calling for "dead cops"?

This reminds me of the 60s, when the revolutionaries would chant "Off the pigs!". The way it plays out, is renewed respect for the police.

People feel a need for organized protection. They would like that protection to be conducted in a reasonable, non-discriminatory manner. But they really don't like murderous jerks who set out to kill cops. The optics on this are terrible for the left. This is a big splashy case which will command a lot of national attention.

When you demonize the police,
you do not help the cause of peace.

Correction: They weren't on anti-terrorism duty. "In a related story, both were reassigned from an anti-terror beat to enhancing security at a public housing development in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood — the exact population the NYPD is accused of victimizing."

Bedford-Stuyvesant is a notoriously tough black neighborhood. You may have heard the old Billy Joel song:

I've been stranded in the combat zone
I walked through Bedford Stuy alone
Even rode my motorcycle in the rain
And you told me not to drive
But I made it home alive
So you said that only proves that I'm insane.