Earlier this year Last year my friend Clark had an idea for a short documentary film — a day in the life of a Detroit street dog. He said he’d brought it up before among our little guerrilla tribe, and no one liked it, but I loved it. Immediately I started imagining how we’d do it: We’d need some sort of ride-along expert, either a vet or (the guerrilla, zero-budget solution), a vet student, preferably someone with access to the specialized equipment you’d need, including drugs. We’d need a radio-collar system to keep track of whatever dog we settled on as our star. We’d need at least one but preferably several small, wearable video cameras, like the new GoPro, along with specially fitted harnesses for the dogs to carry them on their chests. And we’d need a crazy crew who wouldn’t mind working all night in some of the city’s worst-of-the-worst neighborhoods, probably following our subject on bicycles, carrying equipment in backpacks. We’d have to be our own security, which would mean no security.
It’s still a great idea. But after several fruitless phone calls to the city and the Michigan State vet school, along with a back-of-the-envelope budget estimate, I decided it wasn’t going to be done by us.
It’s not going to be done by the Discovery Channel, either. The channel applied for and was approved for a tax credit for nearly $560,000 to make a series called “A Dog’s Life,” about guess-what:
Besides using crews to film the dogs, the project would attach small cameras to the animals to capture Detroit life from a dog’s-eye view.
Bad news for the Discovery Channel: The city turned them down for permits, saying such a portrayal would be bad for the city. Note to the Discovery Channel: Try Flint. They’re hungrier, and unless I miss my guess, the problem is just as bad there. My vet, who works as the on-call professional for animal emergencies for several different police agencies, said the problem was always bad, and became critical when the foreclosures started; people would simply turn their animals out to fend for themselves. Weird breed mixes are a common sight in the city. Most have at least some pit bull in them, but you really do see all kinds — Wendell, Sweet Juniper’s dog, was a resident of the Detroit streets before he was adopted, and he looks pretty close to purebred German shorthair. Jim has written several times of what an enthusiastic bird dog he is on the neighborhood’s pheasants, so it stands to reason.
Filming them is still a good idea, and it can be done for a lot less than a million bucks. Fly under the radar, and you don’t need permits.
OK, this is the second-to-last day of Hell Week, i.e., the first week of classes at Wayne. I have to hit the shower, the gas station and probably several other places before heading downtown, so quick bloggage:
I only caught the end of the president’s speech in Tucson last night, but before it was over I predicted it would drive conservatives crazy, and whaddaya know?
Good gravy, this flooding in Australia is positively Biblical.
I’ve been reading some of the inside-baseball mea culpas and discussion over the early misreporting from Tucson this weekend, and it strikes me as a huge waste of time. Every study I’ve read says people want news NOW, and don’t mind if early reports in a breaking situation are wrong, as long as they’re corrected quickly; in fact, they expect it. Reporting Gabrielle Giffords to be dead, and then correcting it a few minutes later, doesn’t strike me as an egregious mistake after a woman’s been shot in the head point-blank. It happened with Jim Brady during the Reagan assassination attempt, and it’ll happen again.
What do you civilians think? As for me, I think I need a shower. Later, all.
Casey said on January 13, 2011 at 9:11 am
Years ago I read a little book titled The Hidden Life of Dogs. Written by a woman who followed her own dog out at night to observe him/her with other dogs, the social structure of the group of dogs hers palled around with… It was fascinating and it’s a book I saved, reread and recommended for years. My only hang up about it was the fact that she let her dog out to roam, something I would never do then nor now. When I was a teen, my mom would let our beagle out to roam, and one night he didn’t come home. We found out that he had fallen into a neighbor’s backyard pool and drowned.
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Clark said on January 13, 2011 at 9:20 am
Oh boy; I made the age-old mistake of looking at the freep.com article comments. Now I’m cross-eyed. It’s just an echo chamber full of racist White suburbanites who like to gawk at the city. When will I learn not to look? The only thing worse is the comment board on any YouTube video featuring overweight people, racial minorities of any sort, attractive women, or anyone playing an instrument or singing.
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Connie said on January 13, 2011 at 9:22 am
Hell week? In the college bookstore world, in which I was long ago employed, it’s called Rush Week.
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Casey said on January 13, 2011 at 9:23 am
Floods in Australia we ere covered here in Calgary by CBCRadio who interviewed by phone a local Calgarian man living in Toowoomba Queensland. (how’s that for a place name!).
Pics of a chasm in the road and cars piled up like a giant child’s toys: http://www.cbc.ca/homestretch/episode/2011/01/12/australian-floods/
( don’t know how to make a link on this I-pad. Sorry, you’ll have to copy/paste. Worth the extra effort.)
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coozledad said on January 13, 2011 at 10:03 am
The Republicans are only conditioned to applaud a speech-impaired Ken Doll who’s mounted a heap of rubble with a bullhorn. And them American flag stickers won’t given away like gubbment cheese.
I think we can put this down to the Republicans’ anagogic impulse to flagellation.
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mark said on January 13, 2011 at 10:17 am
You actually predicted, during the viewing of a few minutes of the President’s address, that some conservatives would be driven crazy by t-shirt sales in the lobby?
The President’s remarks were excellent and have received bi-partisan praise.
Nance here on edit: No, I predicted that the warm response he was getting would send them over the edge. I heard the cheering — admittedly, weird for a memorial service — and figured it would be Paul Wellstone all over again.
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coozledad said on January 13, 2011 at 10:19 am
The shirts were given away.
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velvet goldmine said on January 13, 2011 at 10:31 am
These modern memorials are weird anyway. It feels very strange to hear raucous cheering during a memorial service, but at the same time I can understand the underlying level of defiance. We will celebrate these people, dammit, and no pyscho with a Glock can ever completely erase them from this world.
As for the T-shirts, my sense is that “Let’s Roll” apparel hit the streets pretty quickly after September 11. I don’t recall right-wingers having a problem with that and other “never forget” 9-11 memorial wear. Again, part of me finds it unseemly, but the less uptight corners of my mind understand the grasping after any kind of unity, especially as a form of protest against violence.
And if it was given away, why the hell not?
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nancy said on January 13, 2011 at 10:32 am
Clark, when I consider newspaper comment sections, I always think of that myth about the goddess being rescued from the underworld (Persephone? Demeter? One of those), who’s told that whatever she does, she musn’t look back. And then she does, and she’s cursed forever.
Just don’t look. It’s easier for everyone.
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Bitter Scribe said on January 13, 2011 at 10:39 am
They’re already hyperventilating over imaginary threats to Sarah Palin:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/blood-libel-sarah-palins-controversial-reference-riled-emotions/story?id=12601352&page=1
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Bob (not Greene) said on January 13, 2011 at 10:44 am
$P must be related in some way to Mitch Albom. Everything is all about her. I love, by the way, the compare-and-contrast exercise set up by She Who and Obama speaking on the same subject on the same day. Martyr Warrior vs. National Healer. She’s such a hick.
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johnc said on January 13, 2011 at 10:44 am
I’m sort of with you on the early reporting thing, Nance. But what I can’t get around – and I know it makes me sound old fashioned – is the fact that you’re not supposed to report something you don’t know. In this case you would know she is dead if a reliable, authoritative source told you. There are few feelings worse than being a reporter either on deadline (what is deadline anymore?) or simply in a hyper-competitive environment and hearing an editor bark into your ear: “Channel 5 says she’s dead! Is she dead?” Sometimes you just have to say: “I don’t know.” That’s a hard thing to say.
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Jolene said on January 13, 2011 at 10:47 am
part of me finds it unseemly
I felt that way too, but it’s all about the venue–a basketball arena on a college campus. People stood in line for hours to be among the 14,000 who were admitted. Who’s going to do that? Not retirees or grown-up people with workaday jobs.
The university staged this event, and it does seem to me that the university president has jumped in front of the camera a time or two when it wouldn’t have been strictly necessary. I imagine, though, that his main job these days is to keep the state legislature from cutting the budget to the bone, so it’s hard to blame him for wanting to showcase the university.
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ROgirl said on January 13, 2011 at 10:48 am
I was also struck by the petty, small-minded, self-absorbed response of $P. That statement may speak to her crowd, but it sure as hell drives a stake in whatever clout she fancied she had as a kingmaker for the Republicants.
Orpheus and Eurydice.
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Julie Robinson said on January 13, 2011 at 10:49 am
Looking back didn’t work out so well for Lot’s wife either.
Disney made that movie, only cleaned up and with a cat. And Dean Jones.
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coozledad said on January 13, 2011 at 10:51 am
Bitter Scribe: Imagine the black Marias that would be rolling through the night if Sarah ever got power, chasing the phantoms that were underimpressed by her fetish wear.
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John said on January 13, 2011 at 10:59 am
“Intellectually, she seems not to be able to understand what’s going on here,” Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C. said in a radio interview.
Understated quote of the day! And Cooz, the Black Maria is also called Mother’s Heart as it is said that there is always room for one more.
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nancy said on January 13, 2011 at 11:00 am
Orpheus and Eurydice! That’s it! Thanks.
Agreed on the journalism standard, John. I’m just observing what I see among my fellow news consumers. They really don’t seem to care, as long as early mistakes are immediately corrected. It’s hard to swallow for anyone raised and trained on, “When in doubt, leave it out,” but there you are.
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LAMary said on January 13, 2011 at 11:02 am
I think $P would be unhappy if she knew she looked sort of bad on in that video. Her habit of putting her bottom lip up over the top lip really stood out this time, and she looked a little puffy. Also, the camisole was very pedestrian. Go for silk, hon. You can afford it and it doesn’t look too showy. I’m sure a significant number of her devotees are with her because of her looks, so she needs to watch those details. People won’t be so willing to listen to her narcissicistic swill if she starts looking like a middle aged local politician from the backwater.
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Sue said on January 13, 2011 at 11:05 am
I had no problem with the reporting as it was unfolding; every reporter was careful to emphasize that this was a ‘fluid’ situation. I thought Fox was more on top of things than the others into late afternoon, reporting earlier but also correcting information earlier, but then I had to turn them off as it became apparent that the shooter wasn’t connected with Fox and they started to go back into Fox mode.
As for the assembly last night, I assume if family and friends of the victims suspected it might be unseemly or unwieldy they would have avoided it. A large group of people getting together to share pain and show support might be expected to… share pain and show support. So sorry Michelle Malkin’s delicate sensibilities were offended by all that nasty applause.
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Kirk said on January 13, 2011 at 11:06 am
Reporting the death of someone who isn’t dead remains a cardinal sin in the news business. If she was shot in the head and it looks bad, tell us that. But until you hear from someone in position to know, without a doubt, that she’s dead, don’t say she is.
The cable stations more and more are cautioning viewers that all kinds of stuff gets reported in breaking-news situations and, thus, some of what they report might turn out to be wrong. Fox’s Shepard Smith was falling all over himself making that point Saturday. But I also heard some stuff that clearly shouldn’t have been mentioned at all until it was a lot more solid.
And I agree about the memorial service. I didn’t watch it all, but I found it jarring that the crowd applauded (and whooped and whistled) after the Indian guy’s presentation. By the time Obama spoke, it didn’t feel so odd. I guess when you have a basketball arena filled to the rafters …
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Dorothy said on January 13, 2011 at 11:14 am
A memorial service inside a basketball arena is going to have a completely different vibe than a service inside a cathedral. The applause bugged me too, but as Jolene said it was on a campus so you know who the audience was.
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Scout said on January 13, 2011 at 11:18 am
It would be almost comical to watch the conservative automatic knee jerk reaction to absolutely everything that is said or done if the reason for this entire circus didn’t include the lost and shattered lives of the victims and their survivors. They have no shame, and beyond that, no self awareness that would tell them that the best thing they could do right now is just STFU. That is especially true of their de-facto she-devil leader, who after being quiet for 4 days (presumably reloading) comes up with the genius “blood libel” quote. Giffords being Jewish makes this even more unfortunate for Snowbilly Snooki.
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velvet goldmine said on January 13, 2011 at 11:23 am
Since it was taken down, I can’t prove this, but I seem to remember from the CNN site that Giffords’ spokesperson told the press that she had been told Giffords had died.
At the same time, I have that same wincing feeling about reporting a death. Even when ON FACEBOOK I passed on CNN’s announcement that she had died, I felt pretty embarrassed about jumping the gun.
“C’mon, let’s get it nailed down! Somebody…let’s find out! Let’s get it straight so we can report this thing accurately!”
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Kirk said on January 13, 2011 at 11:27 am
Meanwhile, as the Tucson memorial service/rally is going on, the Orange Speaker is hosting a big Republican fundraiser.
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Sue said on January 13, 2011 at 11:39 am
Kirk, really? I hope they had a moment of silence, to show their respect and solidarity.
Between that and Sarah’s video release yesterday, it’s apparent that few major Republicans are paying attention to timing. I personally think Sarah did irreparable (sp?) damage to her career yesterday. Her rock solid base will never change but no one with any sense will consider her either as candidate or kingmaker after this.
Which brings me to a question I’ve been wondering about the last few weeks, as cracks have started to appear in Sarah’s support base – if she does decide to run, how bad will the mischief primary voting be in states that don’t have a check on these things? I’m not a mischief voter but I think it would be irresponsible beyond the usual, not sure why.
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Kirk said on January 13, 2011 at 11:45 am
Yes, really. It was a big cocktail party. He declined an invitation to fly out to Tucson on Air Force One. Several Republican and Democratic congresspeople did fly along.
Several reports of this on the Web, and I heard NPR’s Ken Rudin mention it this morning on a morning talk show on WOSU, an NPR outlet here in Columbus.
EDIT on mischief voting: I have mischief-voted in primaries and would do so again under the right circumstances. I’m trying to figure out which would be more mischievous: voting for Palin or voting against her.
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Suzanne said on January 13, 2011 at 11:51 am
I will never forget Frank Reynolds announcing that Jim Brady had died after the Reagan shooting, even having a moment of silence, and then having to annouce a short while later that Mr. Brady was indeed not deceased. It was a classic moment of television! “Let’s nail down the facts!!”
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coozledad said on January 13, 2011 at 11:59 am
Kirk: Republicans don’t make decisions like that without heavy input from the donors and lobbyists. I’ll bet they sat Boehner down and told him “You’re not going. It’d be like teeing up with a range ball at Inverness.”
It’s hard out there for a tangelo.
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Julie Robinson said on January 13, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Speaking of nailing down the facts, remember Al Haig’s “I’m in control here at the White House”?
I have mischief voted a few times because in Indiana primaries are open. In our area the real choices are usually made in the Republican primaries.
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nancy said on January 13, 2011 at 12:04 pm
I didn’t even consider it mischief voting when I was a Hoosier, Julie. It was practical self-interest.
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Connie said on January 13, 2011 at 12:07 pm
But in Indiana you are required to publicly declare your party when voting in the primaries. You can be informally questioned if you request the primary ballot for a party other then that for which you previously voted. When I first moved to Indiana I was horrified to learn they kept track.
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brian stouder said on January 13, 2011 at 12:15 pm
At Primary elections, I always stay with my arbitrarily declared party. For my first seven presidential/national elections, it was “R” all the way. RWR made an R out of me*, I think, along with the News-Sentinel op-ed page of those days.
Speaking of Reagan, Lawrence O’Donnell made an incisive point on his show last night, with regard to Sarah Palin’s citation of some inane saying of Ronald Reagan’s (something about people who jump to blame society when one person breaks the law – or whatever the hell). O’Donnell’s point was, RWR said that in his second year as governor of California; he was on the upswing on his learning-curve (and his career), and he would have lots more seasoning before he ultimately became the President of the United States.
And, what (O’Donnell asked) did Sarah Palin do in the second year of her term as governor of Alaska? She quit.
O’Donnell really captured and encapsulated something there, I think. Palin isn’t stupid (much less evil), so much as incomplete, or unfinished. (One might well add – willfully so)
*much as President Obama made a “D” out of me, now and as far ahead as I can see
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Kirk said on January 13, 2011 at 12:27 pm
In Ohio, you have to tell them you’re a Republican or Democrat if you want to vote that ballot. There was a time when I had voted in almost as many Republican primaries as Democratic primaries. Only once was I challenged by a poll worker. I had to sign a form stating that I believed in the principles of the Republican Party. And they had me sign it in pencil.
And Cooz, I have no doubt that you’re correct. Billionaires are busy people. Once you start postponing one cocktail party, the whole week’s schedule gets screwed up and you wind up having to pay the corporate jet pilot overtime and all that.
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moe99 said on January 13, 2011 at 12:37 pm
Looks like the GM bailout worked.
http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blog/2010/11/16/can-critics-of-gm-bailout-issue-a-recall-of-their-predictions/
Can’t wait to see what the right wing hankie wringers have to say about this.
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Sue said on January 13, 2011 at 12:39 pm
After years of vetoes by Governor Doyle, Wisconsin is moving ahead on the promised voter ID bill. It’s got lots of support and was a campaign issue, and the hope is that it will be in effect as early as the next election cycle in the spring.
I heard this morning that there is concern that it will make it harder for the targeted groups to vote, plus another group, senior citizens.
Oops.
I want to be in the polling place the first time a senior gets turned away because they couldn’t get to one of the remaining DMV offices to get a photo id. This law wasn’t aimed at them! It was aimed at all the floods of illegal brown people coming up from Arizona, and the brown people and young people and Acorn people who travel en masse from polling place to polling place, putting Democrats in office. You know, like they did last November.
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Connie said on January 13, 2011 at 1:11 pm
Sue, back in 08 the South Bend polls turned away a large group of retired nuns because they didn’t have ID.
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Julie Robinson said on January 13, 2011 at 1:26 pm
Sue, as I stood in line to vote this last November I watched an elderly woman be turned away. The workers were gentle and kind, but they could not take any of the documents she kept producing, such as her library card, credit card, utility bill, or even voter registration card. She remembered that she had a passport at home and was sent off to retrieve it. Later we wondered why she wasn’t given a provisional ballot. Or why both she and her driver weren’t aware of the law, which is now a few years old. It was a sad sight.
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Deborah said on January 13, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Coozledad, “It’s hard out there for a tangelo” great line.
Look, it’s clear no matter what Obama and the folks who put the memorial together would have done it would be spun negatively by the right wing machine. As soon as I heard about the shooting my first thought was “how will this be spun?” (on both sides). I don’t remember that happening on 9/11, or maybe I was just in shock and missed it. Maybe it takes that level of a tragedy to make people stop and be civil.
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Bruce Fields said on January 13, 2011 at 2:17 pm
I’m a huge fan of the idea that elections should be between the two best candidates. Anything can happen in an election, and I’m not willing to take the risk that some surprise will render the previously unelectable candidate electable. And it would seem likely to lower the level of the debate.
I can’t see how it would be fair to turn away Republicans from voting in Democratic races in Ann Arbor: they’d lose almost any voice in the local elections.
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Rana said on January 13, 2011 at 2:55 pm
I don’t have any problems with the mood of the memorial – different people react to things in different ways, and not all memorials are necessarily solemn, quiet things (wakes, for example).
But t-shirts? Bleah. That just feels tacky.
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Little Bird said on January 13, 2011 at 2:56 pm
About the dogs with cameras thing. Someone out there makes what they call a “puppycam”. It’s a camera that fits on the dog collar and I thing the premise of the product is (ostensibly)so folks can see what their pet is getting into. I don’t know if it takes real video or that one frame every three seconds type of thing like some of the “nannycams” did.
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Jolene said on January 13, 2011 at 3:28 pm
In today’s column, Nick Kristof has some amazing statistics re gun deaths. Of course, we all know they are terrible, but I didn’t know there are, on average, 80 gun deaths per day in the U.S.
I don’t, for the life of me, understand why we are so incapable of, as a nation, taking a look at the data and deciding to do something about it. Ignoring this fact is comparable to the politicians (and many ordinary Americans) who persist in believing that we have “the best healthcare system in the world,” despite ample evidence to the contrary. Drives me nuts.
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brian stouder said on January 13, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Drives me nuts.
Whenever my lovely wife says this or that (usually something I’ve just done) “Drives her nuts” – I always (always!) retort with “And that’s a short drive”
and then, I get a ‘love tap’
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jcburns said on January 13, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Nance, the thing about the new journalism standard becoming “throw it out there if you’ve heard it anywhere and then correct it fast if you’re wrong” is that a lot of this new media (and Twitter is prime among them) have no real standards or audit trail where you and easily find the corrections to superseded reports. (Big debate going on about do you delete an incorrect tweet or just update it.) Me, I am ALL for going back to what JohnC said at comment 12—you do NOT report it if you don’t KNOW it…and then we all get reminded about what knowing it means.
Reading ‘Sound Reporting—The NPR Guide to Audio Journalism and Production’ this afternoon from the library, by the way.
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Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on January 13, 2011 at 4:15 pm
Jolene — I’m wondering, and don’t have time to check myself: how many of those are suicides? That’s still a gun control argument, but of a tactically different sort. I’m guessing it could be as many as half of those, Tucson tragedies and similar events aside. If it’s all people shooting others in drug violence, different approach.
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Jolene said on January 13, 2011 at 4:39 pm
It’s all gun deaths, Jeff–homicide, suicide, and accidents. Kristof says, “Likewise, suicide rates are higher in states with more guns, simply because there are more gun suicides. Other kinds of suicide rates are no higher.”
I couldn’t quickly find the suicide vs. homicide percentages for a recent date, but it appears to be roughly a 60/40 split w/ a relatively small number attributable to accidents and actions of law enforcement officers.
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nancy said on January 13, 2011 at 4:42 pm
JC, so true. Here’s what drives me crazy: When a well-connected social networker, i.e., someone with lots of FB friends or Twitter followers, links to a story on their social network, and then receives 25 comments thanking them for “helping to keep us informed.” If “slacktivism” is achieved by reducing social activism to “liking” a certain number of pages, then we need a new word for this sort of journalism. Slacktastic reporting, maybe.
Oh, and Jeff’s right, Jolene — at least half that number of gun deaths are suicides.
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moe99 said on January 13, 2011 at 5:02 pm
It appears that the Chinese Mommie Dearest story is more complex than the WSJ let on:
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/433363_moms.html
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Jolene said on January 13, 2011 at 5:11 pm
To be clear, I should have said a 60/40 split w/ the greater percentage being suicide. Also found this interesting article re the cultural correlates of gun death. Unsurprisingly, the people most fervently in favor of gun rights are most likely to die from gunshot wounds.
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Dexter said on January 13, 2011 at 5:38 pm
Boehner was blubbering again yesterday on the House floor. This act is getting old really fast.
Is this guy stable enough to be third in succession to 1600 Penna Ave?
Can’t he conduct ANY business without crying like a lost child? Maybe he needs that cigarette going at all times to keep his emotions in check.
Is it even normal for a public leader to break down every time he’s in front of a camera? Do some people think it’s cute?
I knew just one man of Boehner’s age who cried like he does…well, probably 20 years younger than Boehner, and this guy was a soldier in Vietnam who was totally incoherent, crying and babbling , totally out of touch with reality, having a breakdown.
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Deborah said on January 13, 2011 at 7:02 pm
Here I go with the armchair psychology again. There is a neurological condition called Involuntary Emotional Expression Disorder (IEED), people who have it laugh or cry uncontrollably for periods of time when they are provoked by something only slightly sad or funny or not sad or funny at all. I don’t think the way Boehner cries is like that, but maybe there are degrees of it?
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MichaelG said on January 13, 2011 at 7:17 pm
Hubert Humphrey used to shed a tear now and then.
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deb said on January 13, 2011 at 7:20 pm
nance, i agree with you about the stuff that gets posted on FB and elsewhere being taken as gospel. drives me nuts, too. yesterday somebody posted a warning about a new FB atrocity, “effective today,” that compromises users’ privacy unless you disable it. i looked it up. what he said was true, but FB started doing this IN APRIL. ironically, the guy who posted this is using his FB posts to shore up his “news consulting” business.
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Kirk said on January 13, 2011 at 7:46 pm
Ed Muskie blubbered in frustration at some of the “dirty tricks” played on him by the Nazis in the Nixon administration.
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Bitter Scribe said on January 13, 2011 at 7:51 pm
Julie Robinson: They wouldn’t take a voter’s registration card as ID? Where do you live??
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nancy said on January 13, 2011 at 7:53 pm
I can answer that: In Indiana. Where a talk-radio host called crossover voting “an abuse of the system.” The GOP is strong in this one.
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Kirk said on January 13, 2011 at 8:06 pm
I seem to recall the Oxycontin-addled shitbag encouraging Republicans to vote in Democratic primaries in ’08. Guess this local-yokel hoojie radio person doesn’t have what it takes to make the big time.
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Julie Robinson said on January 13, 2011 at 8:23 pm
Yep, here in Indiana not-my-man-Mitch shoved through a picture ID requirement for voting. And gave us a BMV chief who thought removing the clocks would give the perception we weren’t waiting for two hours to get our licenses renewed, among other idiocies. That last one didn’t work, BTW; it turns out we Hoosiers aren’t THAT stupid.
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Connie said on January 13, 2011 at 9:21 pm
Some years ago Time magazine did an issue that looked at all the gun deaths in this country on a certain day. In my vague memory there were suicides, there were murders, there were accidents. They told the story with photo of each person.
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brian stouder said on January 13, 2011 at 10:07 pm
Paging Alex –
Say – did you post at Ft Wayne Observed, on his post about Charlie Sheen supposedly visiting Fort Wayne?
The post and the comment are listed on the sidebar, but the post itself seems to have been deleted.
Possibly the Councilman didn’t realize that the woman he was said to be visiting was a top-of-the-heap (so to speak) porn star from the Summit City?
I didn’t know that either, ’til I read this:
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/life/stories/2011/01/12/peo12-g4ab8c1t-1.html?sid=101
an excerpt:
Sheen checked out of the Palms yesterday and flew to Los Angeles to work on his sitcom and discuss his well-being with execs. Among the porn stars with whom Sheen cavorted was 23-year-old Bree Olson, who made out onstage with ex- Jesse James flame Michelle “Bombshell” McGee at a porn-star gathering Sunday at the hotel. Sheen recently flew a private jet to Olson’s hometown of Fort Wayne, Ind., Radar Online said.
Aside from that, and speaking of Indiana’s voting laws, my mom votes by absentee ballot. I have no idea how photo-ID affects that mode of voting, but she gets it done.
Finally, regarding gun laws and violence and all the rest, I learned sonething new tonight, regarding the armed citizen who was one of the heroes at the scene of the catastrophic attack. I had heard about him early on, and that he was armed, and that he did not pull his gun from it’s holster.
But what I had not heard ’til tonight was that the armed citizen had emerged from the Walgreens, and saw the unfolding horror by the supermarket, and ran toward it while switching OFF the ‘safety’ switch on his weapon, and he was ready to pull his firearm and kill the man he saw standing at the scene of all the horrors, with the gun in his hand.
And if he had done that, he would have killed one of the other heroes in the middle of that carnage; the real shooter’s spree had ended, and the survivors had wrestled that guy to the ground, where they pinned him. One of the other citizens had taken the actual shooter’s gun away, and was standing there with it.
We came just that close to yet another severe injury or senseless death.
I thought that was amazing, and as Rachel Maddow points out, it gives the lie to the idea that arming more people would be some sort of a deterrent or remedy for these blood-spattered sprees that we seem to have every year or so
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Linda said on January 13, 2011 at 10:22 pm
Bitter Scribe:
I don’t know where that other person lives, but in Ohio, they only take picture I.D. And that leaves out voter’s reg cards.
Brian, I’ve seen it posted that if there weren’t a bunch of gun owners in the crowd, things would have gotten much worse. I guess if you’r a gun appologist you gotta keep moving the goalpost.
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moe99 said on January 13, 2011 at 10:38 pm
“were” or “weren’t” Linda? I get confused easily.
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Linda said on January 13, 2011 at 11:16 pm
Moe99,
To clarify: a bunch of gun owners in the crowd supposedly made everybody safer. How this is I’m not sure, since the best thing that one of them did was to not use his gun. But go figure.
Re: the tiger mom, thanks for the link. When I read the article, I thought the WSJ crowd ginned up the b.s. for internet hits. They succeeded. It reminded me of an interview with Dolly Parton, one of my favorite public people, in a women’s magazine many years ago. They picked the most negative-sounding phrase and put it on the cover, totally out of context. In context, it was much nicer. As they used it, it sounded like a provocative slam. What a cheap trick.
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Dexter said on January 14, 2011 at 12:46 am
Linda is correct. Ohio: no picture ID, no ballot. I have a voter’s registration card which I show, knowing it is worthless. Then they tell me I need a picture ID. It’s been this way for several elections; I vote in every election.
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joodyb said on January 16, 2011 at 12:13 am
OMG WENDELL!!!!
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