Can it live up to the excitement of its NFC counterpart? Probably not!
Archives for January 2015
Puppies Puppies Puppies
The puppies have landed, and are currently getting some downtime. It was kind of hectic, introducing all the dogs to each other and Steve, making sure my scent was all over Ginger and the puppies before the introduction so the others would understand they are part of the pack now, then we had to give Ginger a bath and set up her room, etc., so there wasn’t an opportunity to take any pics but I will have some later on today. I want them to have some QT with mama to get situated and feed, and I don’t want anyone getting overstimulated or the puppies overhandled, so photos will have to wait a bit.
Thurston and Lovey are just adorable and are so teeny tiny they fit in my hand. They are sort of shapeless little blobs that look like half manatee half dog. You just want to burst when you see them.
Guess The Complexion Of The Shooter
Here’s all you need to know:
A Sentinel, Okla., man on Thursday shot the town’s police chief four times and was then released from custody after questioning.
All lives matter and I’m glad no one was killed in this bit of 2nd Amendment insanity — but if after Martin and Brown and Rice and Crawford you still somehow wondered if white privilege were a thing, just give it up.
Sentinel Police Chief Louis Ross was shot in the chest three times and once in the arm Thursday morning after breaking down the front door and entering a house at 205 S 4, Sentinel Mayor Sam Dlugonski said.
The chief was wearing a bulletproof vest that was loaned to him by a sheriff’s deputy minutes before the raid on the home. He survived the shooting, and authorities said the vest saved his life.
Dlugonski and a neighbor on S 4 both said the man detained in the shooting was Dallas Horton, who lives at 205 S 4. Investigating authorities did not release the man’s name.
Agents with the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said the man who shot the chief was released after hours of questioning when they determined they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him.
“Facts surrounding the case lead agents to believe the man was unaware it was officers who made entry,” OSBI wrote in a news release.
Well, yes. But then there’s this:
Chief Ross said Washita County 911 received two calls from a man who identified himself as Dallas Horton, and claimed to have a bomb inside the head start school….
Chief Ross told News 9 he called for county back up before entering Horton’s home.
Up to this point, Horton claimed he never knew any officers were in his home.
“Don’t know what he heard or didn’t hear screaming from five officers of the law announcing our presence, requesting to see hands,” said Chief Ross.
I’m going to go way out on a limb here and state (a) it’s amazing, just flat out gobsmacking, that anyone could shot a cop four times and not face a gazillion bullets coming the other way; and (b) that I simply cannot imagine the circumstances in which a non-white cop-shooter who did survive the initial event would be back on the street the same day.
That conclusion could just reflect my biases. It certainly involves an inference beyond the facts known to me as I write this. Still, American history and our recent past seem to tell a pretty consistent story to me: African Americans, and especially black men, face the threat of violence under the cover of law to a degree that a middle class white guy like me cannot begin to fathom. So I’m prepared to make the leap that the color of the shooter here made a difference in his treatment by law enforcement. I certainly could be wrong: any individual case can be an outlier in any direction. But if I had to bet…
Again, I want to repeat something really important: it’s a great thing that neither the police chief nor the suspect are dead. That’s what we would want to see come out of moments of crisis in law enforcement.
I’m just noting here that I want that outcome for all those confronting the sudden presence of armed cops: toy wielding shoppers, kids on a playground, young men walking, anyone. Such happy endings shouldn’t be reserved only for a gun nut who can be distinguished from those less fortunate individuals by — among other things I’m sure — the fact that he happens to be white.
Image: John Singer Sargent, Graveyard in the Tyrol, 1914-1915.
Playoff Open Thread
It’s also beer brewing day here: Behold the wort for the inaugural batch of Double Dog IPA. Go Pack! Go Colts!
A Sunday Nerd Humor Break
Via the indomitable xkcd:
Have to admit that it was beat…
beat…
beat…
before I snorted. Damn that Heisenberg fella, always dodging about.
Best nerd/science jokes in your repertory in the comments, please. And anything else.
Get It While It’s Hot
The latest issue of Charlie Hebdo is available in an app for smartphones and tablets: IOS (Apple) here, Android here, and Windows Phone here. If the other versions work the same as the Android version, you open the app and then you’re offered the option of an in-app purchase, which allows you to buy an English version for $3.47 (or French or German, IIRC). In the English Android version, when you touch a cartoon or article, an overlay shows you the English translation.
Since I’m writing at a website that requires a glossary to be understood, I doubt it will surprise you that a lot of the humor appears to depend on references that are opaque to the uninitiated. Here’s an open thread.
Long Read: “Ralph Steadman on Charlie Hebdo, the Right to Offend and Changing the World”
The older I get, the more I think we need a word for the opposite of nostalgia — a word to express the dark humor-slash-remorse one feels upon remembering that the terrible things one dreaded in the past have come true, usually in forms even worse than we imagined. Robert Chalmers, in Newsweek, interviews the 78-year-old visual satirist probably best known in America for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson:
We were sitting in a bar in Aspen, Colorado, almost 20 years ago, I remind Ralph Steadman, when he first told me that he’d become a cartoonist because he wanted to change the world. It wasn’t the first time he’d made this declaration and it wouldn’t be the last. But it’s a mission statement that seems horribly apposite this afternoon, as we sit in the living room of his house near Maidstone, Kent, watching live news coverage from the print warehouse where Said and Cherif Kouachi, the killers of the Charlie Hebdo artists, are making their last stand.
“It is interesting that you should mention that remark today,” says Steadman, “because, looking at what has been happening in Paris, I now feel that I have succeeded. I did manage to change the world, and it is a worse place than it was when I started. Far worse – an achievement I had always assumed would be impossible.”…
Some years ago, when we were travelling in Utah, Steadman told me that he feels interviews sometimes risk sounding like posthumous tributes. What adjectives, I asked him, would he like to see in his own obituary?
“Distasteful,” he said. “Unhygienic. Truculent. Moody. Provocative towards bastards.”
“How about long-lived?”
“Oh, yes. I’d like my obituary to say: ‘He was very long-lived. Endlessly. We thought he’d never go away’. A pause. “And we were right: he didn’t.”…
“I think – I know – that satire does frighten fascists. Fascists don’t like satire. They don’t like it at all. And they especially don’t enjoy visual satire. Because of its unique power to communicate. As Wittgenstein [Ludwig] asserted, the only thing of value is the thing you cannot say. Sometimes you can’t communicate the idea or the emotion, but a drawing can. You draw something, and people say: ‘Oh, I see what you’re getting at now’.” And that thought, Steadman says, “brings us back to what happened in that room at Charlie Hebdo. Some things,” he adds, “there are no words for”.
Steadman’s graphic response to the Charlie Hebdo murders — as well as some of his other works — are at the link. Well worth clicking over to see!