The 90s: Those Were the Days

NOTE: WordPress switched self over to the New Block Editing, which she hates. She can’t find a thing. Can you imagine WordPress PAID PEOPLE to study how to make self slower and more inefficient? Where, for instance, are categories and tags? Now self has to hunt for them. Thanks a lot, WordPress! It’s like those apps that keep downloading on her Android, preventing her from making a call (You have to wait for the app to finish downloading; there’s a download a day).

If you press the button for paragraph, you get a menu that has ten items for paragraph. AAAARGH. Who has the time. Can’t a paragraph just BE a paragraph, does self have to pick and choose one out of ten options for paragraphs?

In the 1990s, and especially after the Rwandan massacre, the American Bar Association (ABA) “recruited an astonishing five thousand American lawyers to go abroad and spend months of their time working pro bono publico, free for the common good, drafting laws and training judges. (“Lawers are bored. We were dying to go,” said one of them, Mary Noel Pepys, a land use lawyer from Kansas who went to Bulgaria and slept in her coat in the winter)”

“At a reception in Sofia in 1994, an older gentleman, a professor at the university, walked up to Sandra Day O’Connor “and pulled out a badly frayed copy of the U.S. Constitution and said he had been reading it for 40 years. O’Connor, who always carried a copy of the Constitution in her pocketbook, choked up. ‘It will serve you well,’ she told the man, ‘and guide you as it has us.’ “

— First: Sandra Day O’Connor, pp. 288-289

Can you imagine ANYONE in Trump’s White House pushing such a program. Now, everything is ME ME ME, how much can I get, how much can I get away with. Even Melania can’t summon up any energy to start something as simple as a Sister City Relationship with her hometown (Unless she’s really trying not to call attention to how she left it!)

She had plenty of time to start some kind of humanitarian thing with Eastern Europe, who knows? But no. She just didn’t care. Too busy re-negotiating her pre-nup to Dear Donald? (Does my pre-nup say I need to hold his hand in public? Then no, I do not need to hold his hand)

Self thinks the public’s perception of the law profession has forever been marred by association with Trump, the seediest President in American history. Think of the Trump lawsuits to block: a) revealing his taxes; b) suing to stop books like his niece’s from being published; or c) suing Democratic officials to make them look bad, such as the suit Gov. Brian Kemp brought against Atlanta Mayor Kesha Lance Bottoms to stop her from implementing her order to make wearing a mask mandatory in Atlanta.

Self is glad she’s reading a book about idealistic lawyers, for a change.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

my guilty pleasures: Bicycles

Self was supposed to watch a Curtis Choy movie on eventbrite, which started at 5 p.m., but was having difficulty because she couldn’t remember the password to the email account linked to the event, and she didn’t feel like thinking up a new password because she’s had that same password pre-populated on all her different accounts for about 10 years, and if she changes one, it means she’ll have to change everything, and that would suck. Can’cha just tell self is such a whiz at all these different on-line events she signs up for? Also, she doesn’t feel like creating a new account for just one event, as that’s how she ends up with a gazillion new accounts all over the place, that she continually forgets the password for, and that is how things get out of hand.

Instead, self will reminisce about a crazy adventure she had in 2012, when she agreed to meet an old friend and her two daughters in Amsterdam.

The trip down memory lane was triggered by viveka’s blog, my guilty pleasures, one of self’s absolute faves. Her most recent post is on Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: BICYCLES. viveka starts off her post by citing some statistics about bikes in the Netherlands.

In 2012, self was wrapping up a residency at a writer’s retreat in Scotland. Her friend was renting a house in Amsterdam for a few weeks and invited self to join them. Self didn’t know until she arrived that she’d be expected to bike all over, and she hadn’t gotten on a bike in 30 years (because California suburbs are bike deserts). So the first thing that happened to self was: she pretended like she had no problem biking, and immediately fell down. And she kept falling down. The last straw was when she crashed into a car at a traffic light. The man got out of his car and self wanted to die of shame. Have you ever seen a Dutch person angry? Neither had self, until that moment.

After that wonderful experience, the rest of the day continued, but self was “out of it.” That is, she was on automatic pilot, falling in between cars, falling on the sidewalk, etc. The worst part was, it was only her first time in Amsterdam in 40 years. So she didn’t recognize anything. Come to think of it, she didn’t even know why she agreed to bike in the first place. She would have gotten anywhere she wanted to go, much faster, if she had just walked. But her friend had gone to all this trouble of renting a bike for her (before self arrived). So it would have seemed really mean and petty if self didn’t at least try to show her appreciation. By biking and falling down. Biking and falling down.

Then we boarded a ferry to a distant island, and it was expected that the whole group would bike the circumference of the island. Self wondered why no one asked themselves: is this woman capable of biking the circumference of an island, after that display she gave of falling down 20 times on her way to the ferry? Apparently that was not a question that occurred to anyone. End of story.

Self has no memory of the island at all, even what it was called, and she has no memories of Amsterdam except a wee canal, and afterwards encountering a young man who was blissfully enjoying the sun, and who offered her a joint. NICE! The time to have enjoyed that joint was before she got on a bike, but let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth!

Self will post pictures with bicycles, shortly.

In the meantime, stay safe, all!

Sunday Read: wsj, Tuesday, 28 July 2020, p. A3

Eric Murfitt, controller of Mercantile Portland, a downtown clothing retailer who “said he supports the fight for racial justice” but “blames Portland’s leaders for letting the protesters go too far and holds federal agents responsible for turning them into martyrs” told wsj: “They’ve gotten a lot of sympathy from a lot of people . . . None of that . . . should have gotten sympathy.”

Justin King, owner of Rooks Barbershop, whose “windows were broken three times at his downtown store” and “regularly participates in demonstrations,” said it happened “while I was out getting tear-gassed. It was pretty frustrating.”

Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler is “a sixth-generation Oregonian” struggling to straddle the line between police reform and ceding control to the only black member of the Portland City Commission.

Oh by the way:

“Last week . . . the city council in Washington D.C. . . . approved a . . . roughly 3% cut to the police budget” (which, in self’s humble opinion, seems pretty WEE, given all the weeks of protest)

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

 

Front Page, Today’s WSJ (Thurs, 9 July 2020)

Trump is ordering schools to open, but doesn’t tell us HOW we’re supposed to open to reduce the risk to children and their teachers.

Instead — GIMME A BREAK — he picks a fight with the CDC?

Our Supposed Secretary of Education is 100% behind POTUS about schools opening and is also 100% not having a clue how. (“Just open.”)

This is a travesty.

So angry right now.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Revisiting Self’s Melancholy/ What Is Going On With WordPress?

Three years ago, a short story called “This Is End” appeared in the Cost of Paper, vol. 5

It was science fiction about a character self kept using again and again, in different stories. The MC, Dragon, had a girlfriend, Her, who’d gone missing.

He doesn’t know what happened to Her (There are finite ways to disappear in space) but his favorite theory was that she was still alive, on another ship:

Floating, off to the right: the remains of the former space station, the Kobayashi Maru.

It caught fire. The wreckage drifted, was lost. Then found. Then lost, and found again.

And sometimes, when the ships drift past each other (literally ships that pass in the night HA HA HA), Dragon thinks he sees Her, gesturing to him from a window.

---

AND NOW FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, WHICH IS A VENT ABOUT THE NEW WORDPRESS SYSTEM OF FORMATTING, WHICH IS CALLED BLOCK EDITING.

Suddenly, without warning, right while she was in the middle of typing this post, each paragraph acquired its own frame. Like it was a picture. Which, self doesn’t have to tell dear blog readers, is ridiculous.

BLOCK EDITING WITH THE NEW WORDPRESS SYSTEM OF FORMATTING IS THE WORST.

The text floats in little bubbles, and appears so unstable. One little press of the key, and the entire block disappears.

Oh no! There it is again, but then it disappears again. Sort of like Dragon’s girlfriend, lol

Why mess with a system that worked fine — at least, it did for self.

Now, instead of editing tools being all to the side, they appear in the text, right on top of these little boxes — confusing as heck! She doesn’t need to see extra little visuals on top of each paragraph, what are they doing there, it’s not as if each paragraph requires its own format.

She starts typing and whole paragraphs bloom THAT SHE DID NOT HERSELF TYPE. Oh it’s auto-fill. WordPress remembered that you typed a sentence like this before, so it makes it easy and just copies what you typed before. WHICH MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE, because where would the fun be in blogging if you just copied from something you’d written before?

With block editing, everything gets so — jiggy. Like the text needs Xanax. The toolboxes and the blocks and the menus keep floating around on the screen, as if the document were suffering from ADD, and self doesn’t know how to get the words to stop moving because they apparently move in response to every slightest twitch of a finger.

And, self discovers to her dismay, she has very twitchy fingers.

FINALLY: This message that suddenly popped up on her Dashboard: START MAKING MONEY FROM YOUR POSTS!

10 (or more) years ago, she asked a friend (who was a marketing whiz, who was being paid big bucks to be said whiz) whether she thought self could release some of her writings as “extras” for people willing to pay a very small amount — say, a dollar. And this marketing whiz (who is still her friend, believe it or not, just not the type of friend she sees a lot, really just someone she encounters occasionally on FB), gaped and said: Why would you charge for something that’s free? I mean, that’s why it’s on the internet, because it’s supposed to be AVAILABLE. You can’t charge for anything on your blog. People would stop reading. And such was self’s faith in her obviously successful friend, she let the matter drop and never explored the idea of making a little money from blogging.

Until today, 12 years later, when she saw this message.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Have You No Decency, Sir

A widower is requesting Twitter to remove Donald Trump’s tweets suggesting his wife was murdered by prominent Trump critic Joe Scarborough.

— Associated Press, 26 May 2020

“My request is simple: Please delete these tweets,” Timothy J. Klausutis wrote to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The body of Lori Kaye Klausutis, 28, was found in Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach, Florida, congressional office on July 20, 2001.

Klausutis said in the letter, sent last week, that his wife had an undiagnosed heart condition, fell and hit her head on her desk at work. He called her death “the single most painful thing that I have ever had to deal with” and said he feels a marital obligation to protect her memory amid “a constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories since the day she died.”

Klausitis said Trump is among the conspiracy theorists spreading “bile and misinformation” on Twitter “disparaging the memory” of his wife and their marriage. Trump’s tweets violate Twitter’s community rules and terms of service, he said.

“An ordinary user like me would be banished,” Klausitis wrote. In a statement, Twitter said it was “deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family.”

But the company did not say it would do anything about Trump’s tweets or mention them directly.

Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.

Domestic Abuse and the Police: Why Victims Don’t Report

9-1-1 call by Nicole Brown Simpson, 1989: the Aftermath

• Simpson, according to police officer Ron Shipp, (who knew O. J. Simpson pretty well, who’d been dropping by Simpson’s house about once a month, to use his tennis court, sit in his pool, etc) “was very upset because he thought that he was going to lose Hertz and his image was going to be tarnished.” So the officer “went to his supervisors at the West L. A. station and asked that the case against Simpson be dropped . . .” and then Shipp “returned to Nicole to implore her to leave O. J.’s precious image intact.”

Toobin is very clear on this point:

• In a trial that resounded on talk with conspiracies within the LAPD, this was, in reality, the only conspiracy: the one to help O. J. Simpson escape prosecution for beating his wife in 1989. Small wonder, then, that in the week before her death, Nicole called a battered women’s shelter, not the police, to report that her ex-husband was stalking her.

— The Run of His Life: The People vs O. J. Simpson, p. 267

In effect, Toobin’s book is the justice that the O. J. Simpson trial, and the attending circus orchestrated by the defending lawyers, never afforded Nicole Brown Simpson and her fellow murder victim Ron Goldman.

She should have hired a lawyer. Why didn’t she? Gaslighting by O.J. perhaps? She was not the smartest, self will grant you. She was terrorized. Maybe she thought a lawyer wouldn’t believe her?

Self would still have called a lawyer. Five years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was dead. DEAD. DEAD.

Stay tuned.

 

 

Code-Two High: The Run of His Life, pp. 51- 52

Officer John Edwards and his partner, a trainee named Patricia Milewski, go to Brentwood to check out a 911 call. Edwards presses a buzzer, a woman indentifying herself as the housekeeper steps out.

She said, “There’s no problem here,” then told the officers to leave.

After a few minutes of this back-and-forth, a blonde woman staggered out from the heavy bushes behind the gate and started yelling to the officers, “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!” She pounded on the button that opened the gate and then flung herself into Edwards’s arms.

“Who’s going to kill you?” Edwards asked.

“O. J.”

“O. J. who?”

As she got into the squad car, the woman turned and said to Edwards, “You guys never do anything. You never do anything. You come out. You’ve been here eight times. And you never do anything about him.”

Then O. J. walks out of his house, wearing only a bathrobe and screams to the officers, “I don’t want that woman in my bed anymore! I got two other women . . . ”

The officer explains that he is going to have to take O. J. in.

O. J. : “You’ve been out here eight times before and now you’re going to arrest me for this?”

What really kills is that the housekeeper, who witnessed everything, tells the officers to leave. Women who enable abusers are the worst.

Not satisfied with her attempts to keep the police from taking Nicole’s statement, the housekeeper walks over to Nicole, seated in the squad car, and pleads, “Don’t do this, Nicole, come inside.” Then she tries pulling Nicole from the car.

It turned out there were two other women staying in the house, one of whom was having sex with O. J. Neither of these two women tried to help Nicole while O. J. was beating her.

Enablers are bad, but women enablers are the worst. Here’s looking at you, housekeeper! And the two women houseguests. The sounds of the beating must have been heard all over the house. O. J. said it was “a mutual-type wrestling match.”

The police discussed the case with prosecutors. They found O. J.’s explanation credible (That’s like asking a murderer for his version of events and then putting more credence on the murderer’s version than the victim’s because … well, because the victim’s dead. Or might as well be): “If this was just a … drunken brawl after a New Year’s Eve party, a prosecutor” said, “then maybe they should just let it drop.”

The police steer Nicole Simpson towards “mediation” rather than prosecution. That was pretty much the day Nicole Simpson’s fate was sealed. If she had filed charges, she might still have been killed by O. J., but at least he’d be in jail.

Nicole Simpson had called the police eight times. No one thought she should file charges.

Let me put it this way: No woman waits in the bushes for the police to come, with a black eye, and a lump on her forehead, and a cut lip, from “mutual drunken wrestling.” Why they put more credibility on his version than hers is beyond me. Maybe they liked watching USC football too much?

There was one woman police officer who came to the house that night, but she was a trainee. Doubt she would contradict her superiors.

Stay tuned.

Trigger Warning: Cruelty to Animals

Wall Street Journal, 24 December 2019, p. A6

U.S. HALTS BOMB-SNIFFER DOG PROGRAM AFTER DEATHS IN EGYPT, JORDAN

by Jessica Donati

The U.S. has stopped providing bomb-sniffing dogs to Egypt and Jordan after an investigation disclosed that several dogs in those countries died because of mistreatment and neglect, U.S. officials said Monday.

The report was triggered by a whistleblower complaint and published by the State Department Office of the Inspector General … prompting the department’s response.

The report found that two dogs died in Jordan of neglect and mistreatment this year, including one death caused by heat stroke and another by poisoning from an insecticide.

Three out of 10 dogs provided to Egypt in August 2018 have died, the report found. Egyptian authorities have refused to grant U.S. personnel access to the dogs or their kennels. The U.S. Embassy has requested medical reports for the dogs that died this year.

Hedgebrook to Self: There’s Always Centrum

Years ago, when Calyx Publisher Margarita Donnelly was still alive, she told self about Hedgebrook. She said, It’s the most magical place. But you can only go once. So don’t waste it.

Self had Hedgebrook, that tantalizing lure, in the back of her mind, for decades. Eventually, she started writing a novel. Then she thought: This could be finally be the project I can apply to Hedgebrook for.

She did not hear back on her application, for almost a year.

Wow, they must have tons of applications, self thought.

Finally, because her landlady was pressuring her to extend her lease, and self didn’t want to do that if she was going to Hedgebrook, she decided to call Hedgebrook.

“Umm, hello,” self said. “Have the results of next year’s residencies already been released?”

Impactful (maybe also painful) silence.

Who is this?

“Marianne Villanueva.”

Another long silence. “The results were announced six months ago. We’ll have someone call you.”

And that’s when self’s gut fell all the way to the bottom of her shoes.

Sure enough, someone did call to tell self she’d been rejected. Not wait-listed. Just flat-out rejected. “There’s Centrum, if you like the area,” said the caller.

“Oh,” self said. “Thanks so much for the recommendation.”

Stay tuned.