Yearly Archives: 2007

loco

Criminally Stupid

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Lucky Jason Daskalos has been exonerated of charges of drunken and reckless driving. When cops and rich people fight, I’m inclined to cheer them both on from the sidelines.

I recognize that a jury hears more than I do as a casual newspaper reader and, further, has a duty to deal with the charges at hand, so I don’t second guess them. Still, let us now imagine how the evening Lucky Daskalos was arrested would have gone if the cops hadn’t nabbed him. By his own testimony, Daskalos, a self-professed wanna-be racecar driver, may have sped ‘a little’ and rolled through a stop sign in his powerful Porsche to a friend’s house to play poker. Upon arriving, he admits in his own defense that he chugged two vodkas in 20 minutes, having had wine earlier that evening. Now, let’s dream that he would have stopped right there and had not another drop (ha!). In the real world, he was legally drunk hours later. In this dream world, what would have happened? Would he have jumped into his Porsche and driven home legally drunk? Oh, I know! His good friend, who got him drunk, would have called a cab for him. Yeah, right.

Mind you, jurors should not convict people for alternate scenarios. However, Daskalos was a drunk with a killing machine that night. After the trial, I’m sure he celebrated “justice” with at least one vodka. He’ll be in the news again. I hope he’s the only one he kills. mjh

ABQjournal: Daskalos Cleared of DWI Charge By Lloyd Jojola And Jeff Proctor, Journal Staff Writers

“I feel great,” Daskalos said after a round of exuberant hugs with family members in the courtroom. “I feel wonderful. I never had any doubt. … I feel like the truth came out today.”

Daskalos took the stand in his defense Friday …

He wasn’t traveling at the high speed the officer said he was, Daskalos said. He wasn’t chased through the neighborhood, he said, and he didn’t speed through a stop sign.

“I did roll the stop sign,” he admitted.

Daskalos told jurors he had a glass of wine with dinner three or more hours before, but no other alcoholic drinks until having two vodka and cranberry drinks after arriving at an acquaintance’s Vista del Norte home for poker night. …

Assistant District Attorney Allison Michael pointed out that Daskalos told two officers that he had not been drinking, even though that was not the case even by his own testimony. He was, as she charged, trying to stick with that story at that point.

She got him to admit that he could have been exceeding the speed limit in the subdivision.

The day included testimony from Jason P. Gross, the resident of the home where Daskalos was arrested. He, among other things, said Daskalos had two drinks at his house before the alarm to his car sounded, and Daskalos was confronted by police.

http://www.abqjournal.com/news/metro/571443metro06-16-07.htm

mjh’s blog — Idiot on Board

“In the past 18 years, Daskalos, who also is an amateur race car driver, has been issued 36 other traffic citations, 20 of which were dismissed.”

Idiot on Board

media

Alibi Short Fiction Contest

I didn’t submit anything to the Alibi’s short fiction contest this year, so I feel particularly free to say they made terrible choices for 1st and 3rd place (which is a ripoff of a well-known Twilight Zone). My selections are from the Honorable Mentions. mjh

mjh’s 1st: “Second Impulse”

If only the dog hadn’t died. But there was the new neighbor, digging frantically in the secluded corner behind his shed, trying to bury Fido before the family returned to wail over his act of vehicular homicide.

Any minute he would unearth the human skeleton. There would be no wallet, no clothing, no dentures to find; but the bones would reveal the congenital limp. That was always the worst of an impulsive murder. It was so hard to dispose of all the evidence permanently.

Now there was no choice. The unlucky neighbor would have to disappear. An offer to help, a blow from a second shovel. Nothing could be easier.

Only, where would she hide the body?

—Thayla Wright

mjh’s 2nd: “Small Print”

Unceremoniously, the Build-a-Universe kit arrived, crammed into my mailbox, displacing my cat Schrödinger from her favorite sleeping place.

The super-stringed box, labeled with my assumed name Ima Godd, magically unfolded itself at my first touch.

Astoundingly revealed were quantum baggies full of pin-wheeling plastic galaxies, fuzzy balled proto-stars, shrink-wrapped neutron stars, and a dark, sucking bundle of black holes.

Following the instruction book, I Hawking-blended all those ingredients into a cosmic soup.

But time stood still when I read the manual’s last line that froze everything at T minus zero entropy–“Big Bang not included.”

—John Orman

mjh’s 3rd: “Dreams”

The little girl dreamed of having a cat, ballet shoes, flawless skin, and her first school dance. As a collegian she dreamed of straight hair, iambic pentameter, and roaring lions on the steps of the White House. Then came the dream of the perfect soufflé and a baby supported by Ken, the perfect man. (This led to fantasies involving the mailman.) Following were visions of saving polar bears, going vegan, and educating the masses. World peace was in there somewhere.

Now she keeps it simple. She dreams of dancing the tango. And sex—coming out of nowhere sex—unexpected, intense, dripping, and hot—with a stranger. Saving the polar bears is still in there somewhere.

—Judy Garner

mjh’s Honorable Mention: “Not Art”

Dru catches fairies and bakes them into cakes. It’s not an art, she says, it’s a science. She wakes up early and stalks through the garden. The best fairies come out early. Who would want to eat those lazy fairies that only wake up at noon, to drag themselves out and slouch from tulip petal to tulip petal? No. That’s like buying Hershey’s chocolate when you know you could drive downtown and get the good German stuff for just a few dollars more. Only 2 a.m. fairies are cake-worthy. She grinds them into the batter, juices them into the frosting, decorates the top with their crunchy little bones. “Delicious.” She licks her fingers. “Science,” she says. “Not art.”

—Sara Cordova

alibi . june 14 – 20, 2007
http://www.alibi.com/index.php?story=19383&scn=feature
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[mjh: Until next year, I leave you with my entries from yesteryears:]

2006: mjh’s blog — I Submit

I Submit

2004: mjh’s blog — Ridiculously Short Fiction

Ridiculously Short Fiction

loco

Welcome to Denver, er, Dallas, er, who cares?

We need to get our act together NOW to restrict skyscrapers to specific areas. I can live with downtown as a sacrifice zone, but monster-buildings outside of that basin are a sharp stick in everyone’s eye. The vista is doomed. Someone is going to get rich ruining Albuquerque. mjh

Proposed 30-story Albuquerque high-rise would be tallest in N.M. By Erik Siemers

In what could be the first significant change to Albuquerque’s skyline since 1990, a developer is proposing a 30-story high-rise condominium development on the west end of Downtown.

The estimated $175 million project, called the Residences at Packard Place, would be the tallest building in New Mexico, eclipsing the 22-story Albuquerque Plaza office building Downtown. …

The Downtown project isn’t the only high-rise being conceptualized in the city.

Local commercial development company Chant Associates is working on a project that could bring a 25- to 30-story mixed-use high-rise to the corner of Jefferson Street and I-25, where Johnny Carino’s Italian restaurant used to be.

http://www.abqtrib.com/news/2007/jun/15/proposed-30-story-albuquerque-high-rise-would-be-t/

How long before Lucky Jason Daskalos gives into penis envy and builds something even bigger. He’ll put a bar at the top so he can get higher than anyone in New Mexico. And a ramp for his Porsche. mjh

Uncategorized

Oops. Oh, Hell, Everyone Makes Mistakes.

We’re not “playing god” with DNA. We’re playing “not-too-bright kindergartener with razor blades.” All around the globe, people are actively manipulating genes just as top scientists say, “hey, who knew? ”

My hope is that one of our inevitable blunders in genetic manipulation wipes out humankind. My respect for irony makes me fear we’ll wipe out everything else. Buy more guns today! mjh

Intricate Toiling Found In Nooks of DNA Once Believed to Stand Idle By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer

The first concerted effort to understand all the inner workings of the DNA molecule is overturning a host of long-held assumptions about the nature of genes and their role in human health and evolution, scientists reported yesterday.

The new perspective reveals DNA to be not just a string of biological code but a dauntingly complex operating system that processes many more kinds of information than previously appreciated.

The findings, from a project involving hundreds of scientists in 11 countries and detailed in 29 papers being published today, confirm growing suspicions that the stretches of “junk DNA” flanking hardworking genes are not junk at all. But the study goes further, indicating for the first time that the vast majority of the 3 billion “letters” of the human genetic code are busily toiling at an array of previously invisible tasks. …

Complicating the picture, it turns out that genes and the DNA sequences that regulate their activity are often far apart along the six-foot-long strands of DNA intricately packaged inside each cell. How they communicate is still largely a mystery. …

“There’s a lot more going on than we thought,” said Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, the part of the National Institutes of Health that financed most of the $42 million project.

“It’s like trying to read and understand a very complicated Chinese novel,” said Eric Green, the institute’s scientific director. “The take-home message is, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is really complicated.’ “

Dump Duhbya

Makes You Wonder

Here are two headlines that really need to be seen together. mjh

FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data

plus

FBI SEEKING TO CREATE CONTROVERSIAL SIX-BILLION RECORD DATABASE

In the name of fighting terrorism, the FBI is seeking to create a new $12-million data-mining program that “bears a striking resemblance” to the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program. Documents predict that this new program “will include six billion records by FY2012. This amounts to 20 separate ‘records’ for each man, woman and child in the United States.” Citing the FBI’s “track record of improperly — even illegally — gathering personal information on Americans,” House Science and Technology Committee members Brad Miller (D-NC) and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) requested last week that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigate the proposal. In 2005, the GAO found that the FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force did not comply with all privacy and security laws. Earlier this year, an Inspector General’s report found that the FBI had repeatedly violated regulations while using National Security Letters to “obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors.” In addition, an internal FBI audit published today by the Washington Post found “that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years.” “[T]wo dozen of the newly-discovered violations involved agents’ requests for information that U.S. law did not allow them to have.” These repeated violations of federal law are made worse in light of the fact that such data mining techniques have yet to be proven effective in counter-terrorism operations. A recent Cato Institute study found that programs similar to this new FBI program are likely do little but “flood the national security system with false positives — suspects who are truly innocent.”

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/progressreport/2007/06/worst_fears.html
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FBI Finds It Frequently Overstepped in Collecting Data, By John Solomon, Washington Post Staff Writer

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau’s national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI’s domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

The Atheist's Pulpit

The Paragon of Animals

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He was so very old, having outlived family and friends. How many miles he’d traveled, no one could know. He had seen so much change — for the worst. Whether or not it was really “his time to go,” he was slaughtered by a gang of heartless, mindless killers. In a world soaked in blood, blinded by a spectrum of cruelty and violence, choked with the nausea from limitless abuse and inhumanity, his death breaks my heart — again.

If there ever was a god, he killed himself or walked away in disgust. mjh

Whale found with 19th-century weapon in neck, By Erin Conroy, Associated Press

BOSTON — A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old. …

“It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place,” he said. “He couldn’t have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years.” …

The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting. …

“We didn’t make anything of it at the time, and no one had any idea about their lifespan, or speculated that a bowhead could be that old,” [some idiot] said.

It is a measure of our indifference that the tone of this article is of amazement, not guilt. Look! We finally got him! Hey, he couldn’t have been hurt so bad — he lived another century. For all we know, he ached every day of that 100 plus years. Regardless, it’s over now. Someone got a museum piece, a moment in the news, a bowel movement. mjh

“What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!”

— Hamlet (II, ii, 115-117)

Dump Duhbya

Remembering Duhbya (spit on the ground)

Eugene Robinson – Fleeting Glory in Albania

The report was done for the Council of Europe by Swiss legislator Dick Marty, and its opening paragraph is worth quoting at length:

“What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where they have been persecuted and where it is known that torture is common practice. Others have been held in arbitrary detention, without any precise charges leveled against them and without any judicial oversight. . . . Still others have simply disappeared for indefinite periods and have been held in secret prisons, including in member states of the Council of Europe.”

…

This, I am convinced, is how future generations will remember George W. Bush: as the president who abandoned our traditional concepts of justice and human rights, choosing instead a program of state-sponsored kidnapping, arbitrary detention and abusive interrogation techniques such as “waterboarding.” …

We will remember this whole misguided administration for deciding to wage the fight against terrorism in a manner that not only mocks our nation’s values but also draws new recruits to the anti-American cause. We will remember this White House for unwittingly helping the terrorist cause perpetuate itself.