I am still thinking about how our justice system operates on two levels -- one level for the rich and another level for the poor.
First, justice for the poor:
Back in 1986, a 44-year-old welfare mom was involved in a criminal trial, charged with welfare fraud for failure to report some wages she had earned as a nurse’s aide. It seems that she and her three children --ages, 7, 11, and 13 - had gotten $115 more in food stamps than they were entitled to.
Since this mother was guilty of doing this on more than one occasion, the prosecutor called her a “run-of-the-mill criminal” who was engaged in just plain old-fashioned stealing. Upon hearing the evidence, the jury decided to make an example of her and, although some members of the jury wanted to sentence her to life in prison, they finally settled on a 25-year minimum sentence.
As it turned out, this welfare mom was released from prison after serving two and a half years of her sentence, while her mother, who worked as a maid, kept her children out of foster care. The cost to the taxpayers of keeping her in prison was about $50,000, or about 500 times the value of the food stamps.
Ultimately, after her release from prison, the mother finally got her act together, graduated from a business college, and now at age 67 is able to enjoy the families of her grown children.
Now, justice for the rich and connected:
“Most Impressive Fall From Grace: Au revoir, Duke Cunningham - we'll see you in eight years and four months. The disgraced Republican lawmaker was sentenced last week (March 4, 2006) to the longest prison sentence ever given to a member of Congress after taking $2.4 million worth of bribes in exchange for lucrative defense contracts.
“Cunningham was also ordered to pay "$1.8 million in restitution for back taxes," "an additional $1.85 million for cash bribes he received," and the proceeds from the sale of his 7,628-square-foot Rancho Santa Fe mansion. Judge Larry Burns said, "I think what you've done is you've undermined the opportunity that honest politicians have to do a good job. The amount of money involved emasculates prior bribery crimes.
“Cunningham's jail time began immediately, but the judge said that his sentence could be reduced by as much as 15% for good behavior. So here's hoping he doesn't shiv anyone over a pack of cigarettes.” (Source: Democratic Underground.com. “The Top Ten Conservative Idiots, No. 235”).
Some influential friends of Cunningham requested that former President George W. Bush pardon him before leaving office. Fortunately, Bush didn't act upon that request.
Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense and Psychodrama, had a film career lasting from the early 1920s through 1976. During that time he made over fifty films with three of them -- North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963) considered to be among his best work. After viewing the shower scene in “Psycho”, for years many people, especially women, were afraid to take a shower behind a shower curtain.
In the 1963 horror film, Hitchcock has thousands of seagulls attacking people. For years after viewing this film, some people could not enjoy watching a flock of seagulls gather nearby.
Now, for the pièce de résistance, let us consider the 1959 film “North by Northwest,” starring the most famous actor of that day -- the dashing Cary Grant. Many film buffs consider “North by Northwest” to have the best editing sequence in film history. The 9-minute-long crop-duster sequence is a mini-film within a film, having a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Here is a brief refresher on the plot of the film leading up to the crop-dusting scene. Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is a Madison Avenue advertising executive who a gang of spies mistakenly believes is a CIA agent named George Kaplan. Shortly after being kidnapped and escaping from the gang, Thornhill must find the real Kaplan to free himself from a murder charge. As he follows the trail of Kaplan to Chicago, he meets the beautiful Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who pretends to help him meet Kaplan at a remote crossroads in the middle of a perfectly flat, open countryside, but instead is setting him up to be killed.
Thornhill travels by bus to meet Kaplan at the remote crossroads. The crop-dusting scene opens with a bus speeding down to the crossroads and stopping. A man emerges from the bus, and the bus disappears into the distance, leaving Thornhill standing alone beside the road, a tiny figure in the middle of nowhere.
Now, for the 9-minute crop-dusting sequence.
Video. [The Best of Hitch] - North by Northwest crop dusting scene.
When you were growing up, did you ever have the experience of using an outdoor privy? A privy is defined as “a type of toilet in a small structure separate from the main building which does not have a flush and is not attached to a sewer.” As recently as 50 years ago, about one-quarter of American households --- and over half of rural households --- didn't have complete indoor plumbing. And the 2000 census revealed that over a million Americans were still using outdoor toilets, most of them the least fortunate--often poor, elderly, or living in rural and isolated communities.
Although outdoor privies have virtually disappeared from the American landscape, there are those individuals who look back nostalgically to a time when outhouses were more than a memory. Hence, we have a group called the Outhouse Preservation Society. One of the members of this organization received a gift, a fancy outhouse from her boyfriend as a Christmas gift. She treasured it, decorating it with painted saw blades, horseshoes, hand saws and a 1958 Sears catalog. For $10 one can become a lifetime member of the Outhouse Preservation Society, which also sells address books, coffee mugs in the shape of a chamber pot, license plate holders, and other such gifts.
Perhaps you have heard the expression that a beautiful and curvaceous woman was “build like a brick sh*thouse!” Well, that was supposed to be a compliment because originally this term meant anything that was appealingly overdone or a level of quality that was better than was necessary. Since most privies were constructed of wood, a brick outhouse was considered the mansion of outhouses.
Some outhouses had one hole, and some had two. But the creme de la crème of outhouses had three holes -- the smallest one for Baby Bear, the medium-sized one for Papa Bear and the biggest one for Mama Bear. Generally, outhouses were single story; but in some special cases, outhouses were two story and occasionally three or more stories for apartment buildings -- connected by skywalks. An ingenious use of chutes directed the waste from the top facility separate from the bottom one.
Before toilet paper became widely used, the poorer people used catalogs for wiping. The catalogs from Sears, Roebuck and Company and Montgomery Ward were the most popular ones. Farm folks sometimes used corn cobs, which they rubbed briskly to soften before using them. A bucket filled with lime was often available to cut down odors by sprinkling over the waste. When using an outhouse, people had to be on constant alert for black widow spiders, wasps, yellow jackets (attracted by the smell), snakes, and hordes of flies. Sometimes a fly swatter was kept handy.
In researching the web for this post, I gathered much more lore about outhouses than is possible to use in a short post like this; but I must mention one more interesting detail that I discovered. Why are outhouses so often depicted with a quarter-moon on the door? It appears that in 16th and 17th century Europe, due to the widespread illiteracy prevalent at that time, a way had to be devised to distinguish the outhouses by gender. The answer was to use a circular symbol (the sun) for men and a quarter-moon for women. Somehow the circular symbol got lost over time.
Those of you who grew up using an outhouse -- do you miss sitting in the outhouse on a warm summer night with the door open so you could contemplate the moon and the stars as you went about your business? Would you give up your warm, cozy bathroom and the luxury of indoor plumbing to once again experience the joy associated with the outhouse of yesteryear? If your answer is in the affirmative, you might like to go to this site and wax nostalgic about outhouses as you take the “Official Outhouses of America Tour."
http://www.jldr.com/ohindex_realohs.shtml
Video. This Old Outhouse - Number Two. The long-awaited sequel to "This Old Outhouse" featuring a collection of privies from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Wisconsin and Northern Minnesota with background music by Billy Edd Wheeler. At the very end of the video, when you see the Double Decker, you will want to note the levels occupied by the professional football rivals - the Packers and the Vikings.
I am reading a book about Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University genius who is recognized internationally as the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Albert Einstein. The title of the book, written by Kitty Ferguson, is “Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything.”
What spurred my interest in Hawking is that his is a story of a man overcoming adversity. Born in 1942, he enjoyed riding horses and playing with other children and was on the rowing team at Oxford University, receiving his B.A. degree there at the age of 20. Soon after that, he developed symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known in the United States as Lou Gehrig's disease. Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that attacks nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord resulting in muscle weakness and atrophy. As the disease progresses, the degeneration of the neurons will eventually cause the person to die from total paralysis due to the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement. Since Hawking is now 66 years old, he has survived much longer than most persons stricken with ALS.
“In Hawking's many media appearances he appears to speak fluently through his voice synthesizer but, in reality, creating the text is a tedious drawn-out process. Hawking's setup uses a predictive text entry system, which only requires the first few characters in order to auto-complete the word, but as he is only able to use his cheek for data entry, constructing complete sentences takes time. His speeches are prepared in advance, but having a live conversation with him provides insight as to the complexity and work involved in his responses. During a TED talk, a posed question took 7 minutes to answer.
“He describes himself as "lucky" despite his disease. Its slow progression has allowed him time to make influential discoveries and it has not hindered him from having, in his own words, "a very attractive family.” When Jane (the woman he married in 1965) was asked why she decided to marry a man with a 3-year life expectancy, she responded: "Those were the days of atomic gloom and doom, so we all had a rather short life expectancy." (Source: Wikipedia. Stephen Hawking, “Illness.”)
I had a friend, a former neighbor, who died from ALS. He suffered from it for about five years, with it affecting the control over his arms and legs. In the latter stages, his wife had to assist him in so many of his daily routines. He mercifully died from a fall in which he hit his head on the pavement in a parking lot. He died several days later after an unsuccessful brain operation was performed.
In her book about Hawking and other physicists who are looking for a complete theory to explain the universe, Kitty Ferguson used this quote from Murray Gell-Mann of the California Institute of Technology:
“It is the most persistent and greatest adventure in human history, this search to understand the universe, how it works and where it came from. It is difficult to imagine that a handful of residents of a small planet circling an insignificant star in a small galaxy have as their aim, a complete understanding of the entire universe, a small speck of creation truly believing it is capable of comprehending the whole.”
Video. Journey to the Edge of the Universe. Strap on your seat belt and hold on tight as you take this 10-billion-year journey to the edge of the universe and back again. The video is much more effective if you view it in the full screen mode.
Video. Stephen Hawking: Science Proves That God Exists! Stephen Hawking in a lecture at Utah University on August 23, 2008.
We have all heard the expression that if at first you don’t succeed , you should try and try again. A 68-year-old woman in South Korea has put that expression to a test and then some. After not succeeding the first time in taking the written exam required for a driver’s license in 2005, she has tried again, and again, and again without success. After trying to pass the exam almost every day since then, her next attempt will be number 772. An applicant is required to score at least 60 on the written exam before they get behind the wheel for a driving test. After spending almost $3,000 in fees to take the test, the highest score she has ever achieved is 50. Now a lot of people are rooting for her to succeed.
QUESTIONS:
Have you ever failed the written exam for a driver’s license? How many times did you retake the exam before passing it?
Have you ever failed the driving test behind the wheel? How many times did you take the driving test before succeeding?
Do you think that drivers over the age of 70, in order to get their driver’s licenses renewed, should be required on a year-to-year basis to pass a written exam and demonstrate driving competency behind the wheel? How about over the age of 80? Over the age of 90?
Just for Laughs. If you don't want to laugh, skip these videos.
Video. MADtv - Bunifa's Driving Test. This is an all-time favorite from MADtv - Bunifa (Debra Wilson) takes her driving test.
Video. Taxi: Reverend Jim's Driving Test. From the sitcom "Taxi," Reverend Jim (Christopher Lloyd) takes a test for his driver's license. Also starring Judd Hirsch, Jeff Conaway, Tony Danza, and Marilu Henner. What does a yellow light mean?
