June 12, 2007
Just a Few Thoughts on Paris
Paris Hilton, savvy self-promoter and beautiful heiress. I have a friend who went to high school with her (well, before Paris became a dropout) and have been told the dumb blonde role is no act, except for the blonde part. The young woman freaked out her first days in jail, so they let her out. In The Shawshank Redemption, one of the guards beats "a fresh fish" to death for wailing away his first night in prison. Why'd that guard's California counterpart get the night off when Paris reported to jail? A reader wrote in with this Hilton quote regarding her brief jailing:
”I was severely depressed and felt as if I was in a cage,”Wow, she caught on quick didn't she? Kiddo, you are in a cage. It's called jail. She wound up freaking out so much that she was released after three days with a note from her doctor. Now, I thought a note from your doctor was enough to get you out of gym class. Who knew that its power extended all the way to the Califorinia prison system? Can I use a note from my doctor to get out of paying taxes as well?
The medical emergency that Paris Hilton was experiencing was that she wasn't taking her medication (cocaine?) and that she hadn't eaten anything since entering jail. Well, I'm a born skeptic but I suspect there have been many periods when Hilton's gone a lot longer than that without eating.The supposed reason that Paris wasn't eating is that she was paranoid that someone would snap a quick picture of her while she was going to the bathroom. Hmm, I estimate about a billion people around the world have seen a full-length video of Hilton with a penis in her mouth; also, she basically pioneered the celebrity cooch-flashing shot. I doubt a blurry picture of her on a stainless steel toilet snapped with some guard's camera phone would even warrant a $50 bounty from Star Magazine.
I am utterly agnostic on the phenomena that is Paris Hilton. Is she getting treated a little more strictly than the average person caught in the same circumstances? Probably. But then again, by an accident of birth she found beauty, unfathomable wealth, and essentially the entire world handed to her on a silver platter, so "unfair" might be a word she should strike from her already limited vocabulary. And those are my few thoughts on Paris Hilton. Her sister's more my type anyway.
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May 5, 2007
HURRAY FOR SPRING WEDDINGS
As much as I love New York City, I wonder if I'll ever know its nooks and crannies as well as my friend pictured above. While many of our friends headed off to the sticks after high school (cities like Boston and DC), this woman made a beeline for NYC, where she spent . . . let's just say many many years. I would come for visits and she would drag me from one end of Manhattan to the other. I would not know where the hell I was half the time. She was my municipal mentor, which is kind of funny considering we grew up around the corner from each other.
Youthful antagonisms can flower into the best friendships, and I believe we still have a good one, despite her decampment to parts practically unknown down south a few years ago; I believe it's called Ball-mor or something, but who can tell with those accents? In the meantime, I feel like I'm holding her an open seat on a crowded subway train up here in NYC. Actually I should be holding two. The gentlemen in the above picture is her husband, who grew up in NYC, so it's a perfect match obviously. They just got married today and, looking at my clock, the west coast reception should be getting into full swing right about now.
Last year, I was on one of my city constitutionals, where I tend to walk for long periods of time with no particular destination, but a vague idea of the types of things I want to see. It was relatively early in the evening, but it was a winter month, so almost dark. I was walking east on 20th St. and saw a pair of people walking towards me as I approached Irving Place. We met right in front of the gates to Gramercy Park, and it was my now-married friends in town from Balmoral(?) to see a small show. Given that they no longer lived in NYC, I was walking in a completely random fashion, and they weren't even near the venue they were destined for, it was very serendipitous. I hope both our paths keep crossing for a long time. Congratulations M&B! Best wishes for a continued wonderful life together.
(M&B rehearsing their performance art piece in which they become anthropomorphosized semaphor flags)
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April 19, 2007
A BRIEF NOTE
I have very little to say about the killings at Virginia Tech. It's the sort of horrible occurence that does not bear attention very well. Excessive bathos and disturbing inquisitiveness about the macabre details of events seem to be a pathology of our times. We want to feel tragically sad, but we want to see the brutal fucking details as to what caused that sympathetic sadness, while affected families are experiencing actual grief. It's a sick, schizophrenic, have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too society we live in.
I'm frankly disgusted. Less disgusted with the VT murderer and more with the media for deliberately distributing the A/V propaganda of a killer, thus propelling a self-involved loser into a recognizable figure sure to propel copycats hoping for the same level of recognition. And this is how a new generation of disturbed kids reach out for the outsized recognition they sorely lack and inflicting damage they feel is proportionate in their feeble adolescent brains [sorry adolescent readers, you really will understand later, trust me.] That jackass idiot is dead, of course; no one wants to live up to his greatest achievement when it turns out to be one of pure malice, hurt, and cowardice.
If you're interested in seeing some of the victims of a disturbed pathetic loser, see here. These are some of the valuable individuals that hoped to contribute something to the world.
(I am fully aware that someone in all this was mentally disturbed. That is really horrible for him. It earns him a few iotas of mention in this post, in the third person.)
Tagged: media, murder, virginia techPosted by Lexiphane at 10:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 9, 2007
CAN YOU SMELL ME?
When your employer sends you the above image in the middle of the afternoon as part of a work-related conversation, you might feel fortunate enough to imagine a full-blown fragrance ad-campaign.
Tagged: ky, sponge bobPosted by Lexiphane at 9:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 27, 2007
BAD LAWYERIN' INSTINCTS
Wow! One has to be the worst lawyer in the world to give up the PR bonanza of representing the greatest everyman NYC hero of the last decade in favor of a trying to chisel him out of, what exactly–it's not exactly clear he deserves anything–he's just a fucking hero!
For those that missed out, Wesley Autrey saw a man fall onto the subway tracks a few months ago. Even though he had his daughters in tow, Autrey lept onto the tracks as a train was approaching and pressed himself and the man into a culvert underneath the tracks as the train rolled into the station.
A quick-acting commuter who became an instant hero after saving a teenager who fell in front of an oncoming subway train has sued a lawyer he says manipulated him into signing an unfair, one-sided contract.
Wesley Autrey Sr. says in court papers he signed the contract Feb. 12 without reading it, agreeing that lawyer Diane L. Kleiman would represent and advise him in financial and other matters stemming from his subway heroism.
Autrey, a 50-year-old Bronx construction worker, says in court papers that the contract is "a one-sided agreement" he was induced to sign by "fraud" and that it gives the lion's share of everything he earns to Kleiman and her business partner, Marco Antonio Esposito, operator of an entertainment production company.
I am not a lawyer, but I am also not a natural-born idiot. Someone in this story is.
Tagged: lawyer, subwayPosted by Lexiphane at 4:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 26, 2007
MALAPROPISM OF THE DAY
The subhed to this story in the free commuter daily AMNewYork about the death of Anna Nicole Smith reads "A Florida medical examiner said there was no evidence that the celebutante had taken large amounts of prescription medication." Now I don't want to be like one of those sniffy old matrons jealously guarding membership to society's social register with stringent standards of breeding and wealth, but I will have to take issue with the use of the portmanteau "celebutante" in this case. As I understand it, a celebutante is a young woman who parlays her inherited wealth, beauty, and social standing into celebrity status. Paris Hilton would be the gold standard of celebutantes.
Anna Nicole Smith was a 39-year-old woman who parlayed her poor Texas upbringing, with stints as a jeans model, topless dancer, and unlikely bride of a semi-mummified centi-millionaire, into a career as a drug-addled wreck who careened through life, on camera and off, to the amusement of the general public. And then in the span of about three weeks she gave birth to a baby, lost a son to a drug overdose, and then overdosed herself: a perfect tabloid trifecta, with bonus points for instigating an endless media/legal circus from beyond the grave.
I don't think celebutante is the word someone wanted to use here.
NB: Occasionally, Lexiphane.com likes to publish attempts at neologism in its pages. I'll take this opportunity to coin the following:
celibutante, noun
SEL-i-byu-tahnt
etymology: celibate + debutante, celibacy + celebutante
def: A young woman known as much for her general celebrity as for an outspoken sexual demureness.
"One-time celibutante Britney Spears has worked assiduously to attain the status of Showbiz Slattern over the past five years, going as far as romping in the bushes with another patient during her stint in rehab."
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March 24, 2007
'LE X-FILES'
Break open the champagne and bust out the tinfoil party hats, conspiracy theorists! Unlike those damn curmudgeons at Area 51, who will only respond to individual Freedom of Information Act requests for documents on a case by case basis, the French government has just made its entire archive of UFO reports open to the public. And they put it on the Internet!!!! My God, Agents Mulder and Scully would have loved this. I wonder what the French translation of "Anal Probe" is?
France is the first country to open up fully its UFO files to the public.
Although other countries including the UK collect data on UFOs, files can be requested only on a case-by-case basis under the Freedom of Information Act.
Now, thanks to a small team of space agency researchers who call themselves the Office for the Study of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena
[pictured to the right], the French will be able to access some 10,000 documents about UFOs, including photographs, police reports and videos sent in by witnesses.The team offers explanations for some of the sightings - for example when 1,000 people reported seeing flashing lights in the sky one November night 17 years ago, the researchers were able to prove it had been a rocket fragment falling back into the earth's atmosphere.
But only about 9% of France's UFO cases have ever been fully explained, the group says.
And of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, nearly a quarter are known as Category D - meaning that in spite of good data and witnesses, the mysterious sightings remain inexplicable.
So many visitors have been attempting to access the site online, however, that its servers have been overwhelmed and it has become impossible to access the archives. Or so they tell us.
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MOST FORGIVING D.A. EVER
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes's job description is essentially to lay blame. As a D.A., he's the agent of the state responsible for making the case for guilt of people charged with crimes. When it comes to, not criminal actions, but a colossal blunder made by someone in his own office that may have cost a young rape victim her life, however, he is more forgiving than Jesus, at peace than Buddha, and understanding than Oprah.
In 2005, Natasha Ramen was allegedly raped by a man named Hemant Megnath, who had lured her to his home under the pretense of showing her an available apartment for rent. Months later, she went to the police and reported the rape. Megnath was charged and released on $5,000 bail with an accompanying order of protection prohibiting him from contacting Ramen, who was scheduled to testify against him.
In October, relatives of Ms. Ramen told the police that Mr. Megnath had threatened to kill her and her husband. He was arrested on charges of aggravated harassment, under the jurisdiction of Queens prosecutors, but the Ramen family did not press charges.
Ms. Teitelman, who was standing in for another assistant district attorney on the rape case in Brooklyn, was told of the harassment arrest in Queens, Mr. Hynes said in his statement. Prosecutors routinely use such information to argue for an increase in bail or other conditions to restrain the defendant. For reasons Mr. Hynes did not explain, Ms. Teitelman did not tell Judge Walsh about the harassment arrest.
Last Thursday evening, Natasha Ramen left her job in Queens and a man cut her throat twice and deeply, nearly decapitating her (I guess we could call if 'OJ-Style'). Mr Megnath was arrested almost immediately and has been charged with first-degree murder and is being held without bail. So is it normal for a person charged with rape and an order of protection against his witness, who has threatened to kill that witness and her family, to be out on the street on just $5,000 bail? No, it's not. But D.A. Hynes lets us know that everything's cool, because it was an "honest mistake."
The Brooklyn district attorney reportedly says his office should have warned a judge that threats had been made against the family of a rape victim who was later killed.
But according to reports, District Attorney Charles Hynes says it was an honest mistake that his office didn't warn the judge ahead of time and so it shouldn't be blamed for the death of Natasha Ramen.
The Times provides some more detail:
“It was an honest mistake,” he said. “To attempt to blame her is almost as ludicrous as trying to lay the blame on Ms. Ramen’s family, who refused to cooperate in the Queens prosecution. My heart goes out to the family for the terrible tragedy that the defendant brought upon them.”
Perhaps the reason the family wouldn't cooperate was because they were terrified of Mr. Megnath, and rightly so. Note that it was relatives who had to contact the police about the death threats Megnath made to Ramen. Is ludicrous the word that is appropriate here? Is it ludicrous to think that an A.D.A might want to inform a judge that a defendant has threatened to murder the victim of his crime who is the state's primary witness in its case? Perhaps too many years of watching "Law & Order" have left me with a wildly inflated impression of professional standards of competence maintained by the D.A.'s office.
I commend Charles Hynes for being the type of boss that reflexively moves to defend his underlings when they are being attacked in the press. I'm sure that Ms. Teitelman is a good lawyer and probably well liked by her co-workers, who are rushing to defend her (in part by blaming the victim and her family.) She made an "honest mistake" however, in that it was definitely a mistake, and one that she did not make with any malice towards the victim. It's more akin to a surgeon who removes a patient's healthy kidney and leaves a diseased one in, thereby killing him; or an airline pilot who mistakenly doesn't follow the control tower's directions and lands his plane on the wrong runway, which results in a fatal crash. These are serious mistakes and ones that can't be brushed away with non-mea culpas like "Whoa, our bad. Sorry 'bout that. What's for lunch?"
Tagged: d.a., hynes, murder, rape, witnessPosted by Lexiphane at 8:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 20, 2007
KEEPING YOUR PET SAFE BY . . . ANIMAL TESTING?
When I first read the headline "Test Of Pet Food Kills 7, FDA Says", I was going to make fun of the WNBC site where I found it. By leaving out the word "That" between "Kills" and "7", they're saying that the tests are what's killing people's pets and not the tainted pet food. My apologies to WNBC's copy writers because that is pretty much what they are saying. Turns out that the procedure for testing suspected poisonous food is to feed it to dogs and cats and then see how many of them die. That's what Menu Foods, the maker of pet food under 48 different brands, did when it first started receiving complaints that pets' post-meal naps were becoming permanent. The company had to see this for itself and conducted a test by feeding the suspect food to 40-50 dogs and cats, seven of which died.
WNBC's article has another small fact that may drive pet owners and animal lovers absolutely batshit crazy: after Menu Foods concluded that their food was capable of killing one out of seven animals that ingested it, the company waited several weeks to initiate a recall. Trial lawyers across the country must get positively light-headed giddy when they read something like that.
I predict that this Menu Foods pet food fiasco will within the year be a Harvard Business School case study on how to plunge a corporation irretrievably into a shitstorm so intense and all-encompassing that you may as well burn the whole thing to the ground and take the insurance money to Brazil or Cuba, or some other country without an extradition treaty. You think tobacco execs are reviled? Menu Foods execs are going to be held responsible for poisoning puppies and kittens!
NB: You have to give WNBC bonus points for including a sidebar in its article with links to its "Cutest Pet" and "Cutest Kitten" slideshows, among others.
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March 19, 2007
PRESUMED INNOCENT BEFORE BEING FOUND GUILTY, THEN DETERMINED INNOCENT, BEFORE BECOMING GUILTY ALL OVER AGAIN
This is totally bizzare. In 1985, 24-year-old Steven Avery was found guilty of rape in Wisconsin and sentenced to a lengthy prison sentence. He served 18 years of that sentence before DNA testing exonerated him and he was freed. The State of Wisconsin eventually settled a wrongful-conviction lawsuit with Avery for $400,000. Sounds like a movie in the making, right? Almost.
In October of 2005, Avery called 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach to his salvage yard to photgraph a minivan his sister was listing for sale in Auto Trader Magazine. Halbach was never heard from again. After her charred bones were found in a firepit and a barrel on Avery's property, along with her camera, cellphone, and car, Avery's nephew admitted that he and his uncle had raped and murdered the young woman before burning her body. The nephew later recanted his confession and refused to testify against his uncle.
Steven Avery was recently convicted of first degree intentional homicide for the death of Teresa Halbach. He is facing a mandatory life sentence. CrimeLibrary has the full details of the case.
Tagged: guilty, innocence, murder, prison, rapePosted by Lexiphane at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 12, 2007
FOREIGN UNDIGNITARY
Being a foreign service officer for Israel must be a pretty tough row to hoe. Almost everyone of any importance knows that Israel and their perfidious Jewish compatriots around the globe are internationalist puppetmasters. Economic disruptions? That was the Jews, er, I mean Israel. War in Thailand? Israel. Oil spill in the North Sea? Israel. AIDS? Please! Israel. There are few problems in today's world that can't be blamed on a country the size of Delaware. Yes, it seems that a representative of Israel must have some type of sado-masochistic streak to take a job like that. From today's AP Wire:
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel has recalled its ambassador to El Salvador after he was found naked, bound and drunk, according to Israeli media reports confirmed Monday by a government spokeswoman.
The longtime diplomat, Tsuriel Raphael, has been removed from his post and the Foreign Ministry has begun searching for a replacement, said ministry spokeswoman Zehavit Ben-Hillel.
Two weeks ago, El Salvador police found Raphael in the yard of his residence, tied up, gagged with a ball and drunk, Israeli media reported. He was wearing sex bondage equipment, the media said. After he was untied, Raphael told police he was the ambassador of Israel, the reports said.
NYC diplomats only double park and occasionally run people down in the street.
Tagged: bondage, diplomat, el salvador, israelPosted by Lexiphane at 1:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 10, 2007
FINE FELINE FRIENDS AVAILABLE FOR ADOPTION
When I first spotted these two brothers, they were about six weeks old and curled into each other like an orange and white yin-yang symbol. My friend had been looking to adopt a cat and, unwilling to break up siblings, she took both home later that week. Due to an impending change in living situations by their owner, these boys now need a new home. They're both healthy, fixed, with all their shots, and one is even polydactyl, meaning he's got an extra pair of toes on his front paws. Since they're still kittens (approx. 6 months old), they're pretty high energy although also not averse to curling up on your chest and zonking out while you're watching tv. If you're interested in adopting some great cats or know someone who may be, please contact me: thelexiphane[at]gmail.com. More pictures available at The Cat Set.
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March 6, 2007
A CONTEST LEXIPHANE CAN GET BEHIND
What better place than The New York Public Library to hold the finals of the National Vocabulary Championship––an event pitting young lexiphanes from across the country against each other to see whose lexicon was largest. Robert Marsland of Madison, WI was the eventual winner after correctly identifying the latin root of the word solipsism (solus).
The article in The New York Times goes out of its way to shoehorn in as many abstruse words as possible, making it most easily read with a dictionary open beside you. Fortunately, the Times does have a great feature that aids in overcoming recondite references. Highlight any word in the body of the article's text and then Alt-Click on it; a small window will appear providing a definition. The author of the article may have overextended his lexical abilities, as well as those of his editors, when he included the word "nidicoulous" (def: reared for a time in a nest). According to Merriam-Webster, that word is spelled without the first "u", as "nidicolous". And no, I did not know that before looking it up.
[via Gothamist.com]
Tagged: contest, error, kids, library, new york times, nyc, vocabularyPosted by Lexiphane at 12:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 3, 2007
THURMOND STILL SCOURGE OF THE SOUTH
Despite being dead for more than three years, the late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-NC) continues to plague the South--or so it would seem according to the widely distributed AP Headline pictured above. The former segregationist's post-mortem toll is so great that President Bush will be visiting the stricken areas today. While wreaking havoc on southern states such as Georgia and Alabama, Thurmond's home state of North Carolina was unaffected.
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January 27, 2007
CAUGHT!
New York State Police arrested two men yesterday and the Dutchess County district attorney charged the pair with second degree murder for the killing of Manuel Morey. Morey was killed in the small hamlet of Fishkill, NY last week along with his wife and three sons [see UPSTATE HOMICIDE 1/20/07]. The husband and wife were both shot to death, the two older boys Manuel and Adam (13- and 10-years old) were stabbed to death, and youngest son Ryan (6-years-old) was bludgeoned to death before their home was set ablaze in order to conceal the murders. A grand jury will be convened sometime next week in order to tack on the additional charges of murder for the rest of the family.
The suspects are Mark Serrano of Fishkill and Charles Gilleo, Jr. of Hopewell Junction. They were allegedly involved with Mr. Morey as low-level area drug dealers who sold marijuana and cocaine. Apparently, Gilleo was so close to the family that the three boys he wound up allegedly murdering identified him as "Uncle Charlie."
On Friday morning, the police searched Mr. Gilleo’s trailer on Oak Drive in Hopewell Junction. The residence is less than two miles from the Moreys’ home. Neighbors said Mr. Gilleo, a roofer, has lived there for about a year and a half with his 3-year-old son, Kenny. The white trailer with light-green trim was surrounded by state police vehicles and two black vans, and throughout the morning and afternoon investigators, who had obtained a search warrant, went in and out of the trailer.Neighbors said Mr. Gilleo and Mr. Morey, known as Tony, had grown up together and had both attended John Jay Senior High School in Hopewell Junction. They were so close that Mr. Morey’s sons called Mr. Gilleo Uncle Charlie.
“Charlie’s family and Tony’s family were like family to each other,” said Jim Parsons, 41, who lives on Oak Drive. Mr. Parsons and other neighbors said Mr. Gilleo was known for having raucous parties with loud music and for driving four-wheel all-terrain vehicles on Oak Drive with Mr. Morey. They would yell and scream on their A.T.V.’s, annoying neighborhood residents. “He’d act whacked out,” a neighbor, Charlie Barger, 40, said of Mr. Gilleo. “Every weekend.”
On the assumption that they arrested the actual killers, hats off to the NY State Police who managed the investigation and arrests in just under a week's time. That's impressive.
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January 24, 2007
HEROISM FILTERS SOUTH
24 hours before NYC Subway hero Wesley Autrey was the toast of the State Of The Union, a similar act of heroism by a homeless man and his two friends played out less than half a mile from the Capitol where Autrey would receive his standing ovation. When 53-year-old William Slaughter, a yacht crewman, was returning home late in the evening on Monday and wearing slippery new dress shoes, he lost his footing on the dock next to his houseboat in D.C.'s Washington Channel. Encumbered by his heavy wool coat, unable to attract anyone's attention at 10:30pm, and starting to lose muscle control in the 38 degree water, Slaughter began to think he was going to drown just yards from his front door.
Just then, he could not believe his eyes: Three men were ambling along the street by the Washington Marina, separated from him by a seven-foot-high iron fence.
He yelped for them, and one, aided by the others, climbed over the fence and ran over to Slaughter, who was struggling to keep his head above water.
Floyd Lipscomb, who police said is homeless, tried to pull Slaughter out of the channel. But he did not have the strength to pull Slaughter and his heavy wool coat out of the water, Slaughter said last night from his room at George Washington University Hospital.
So Lipscomb held on tight to Slaughter's arm and told him: " 'You're not going to die tonight. I'm going to hold on to you. I got you,' " Slaughter said.
The two other men, also homeless, identified by police as Duke "Showtime" Kelley and DeLeon Butler, alerted officers that a man had fallen into the water in the 1100 block of Maine Avenue. Slaughter feared he might drown right next to where he lived, on a houseboat christened Finished Business.
Slaughter said he thinks he lost consciousness a few times while Lipscomb waited for help. But Lipscomb never let him go under, he said.
Soon the two other homeless men Kelley and Butler returned with Harbor Patrol officer Hilliard Dean, who they also boosted over the high fence to the marina. Together, Dean and Lipscomb pulled Slaughter out of the channel and an ambulance delivered him to George Washington University Hospital, where he is recovering.
Floyd Lipscomb and his two companions, "Showtime" Kelley and DeLeon Butler, are certified heroes. William Slaughter would like to thank them for saving his life, but nobody can find them. While Harbor Patrolman Hilliard Dean concetrated on getting Slaughter into the waiting ambulance, the three homeless men slipped away, back to their lives on the winter streets of our nation's capital.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at 2:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 22, 2007
EXTENDED-LIFE SENTENCE
Good news for those doing time behind bars (or bad news depending on how little prisoners are enjoying themselves):
The nation's state prison officials reported that 12,129 inmates died while in custody from 2001 through 2004, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) announced today. The deaths over this four-year period constituted an annual mortality rate of 250 deaths per 100,000 inmates, which was 19 percent lower than the adult mortality rate in the U.S. general population.
So the overall death rate for people in prison is lower than for people on the outside--and that includes death by homicide, so even including the possibility of getting shivved in the yard, prisoners die at a lower rate. One reason could be that prisoners may receive much better medical attention as a population:
The BJS report included the first national statistics on the medical treatments provided in state prisons for fatal medical conditions. Correctional authorities reported that 94 percent of inmates who died from an illness were evaluated by a medical professional for that illness. Nearly all (93 percent) of illness fatalities were provided medications for the fatal illness. Diagnostic tests, such as x-rays, MRI exams and blood tests, were performed on 89 percent of these inmates.
Pretty good, although in the end we are talking about dying in prison, so I guess inmates have to take the news with a grain of salt. A full PDF file of the report is available here.
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January 20, 2007
UPSTATE HOMICIDE
(photo by Bill Johnson/ Hackensack Fire Dept.)
Dutchess County's medical examiner revealed today that the five bodies discovered by firefighters responding to a house fire early Friday morning were all shot and or stabbed, making the incident the worst multiple homicide the small town of Fishkill has seen in its longer-than-200 year history.
It was unclear Friday night how the family had been killed, or where the bodies were found in the house. A Fishkill police official at the scene said there had been reports of gunfire before the fire broke out, but he would not elaborate. “It’s definitely being investigated as a homicide,” said the official, who would not give his name.
Maj. William Carey of the state police told The Associated Press that the fire was set “to cover the killing” of the family. “We’re just starting the investigation at this point,” Major Carey said.
Other officials said the youngest child had been bludgeoned and the middle child stabbed.
The state police identified the victims Friday night as Manuel Morey, 33, known as Tony; his wife, Tina, 30; and their three sons: Manuel, 13, also known as Tony; Ryan, 6; and Adam, 10.
The New York Times account basically goes the distance in describing the family as white trash without actually employing the term, which is real nice considering they were all just murdered:
Neighbors said the Moreys moved into a rented rundown Cape-style home on Route 82, a busy two-lane highway, a year ago. Most neighbors said they knew the family members mostly for their raucous summer barbecues and their fondness for riding noisy all-terrain vehicles late at night. The house has a dirt yard, and a woodsy plot in back abuts a 20-foot-wide stream.
Neighbors described the Morey sons as rough-and-tumble kids who liked to help their father fix their all-terrain vehicles, and played in the woods in the back of the house. Manuel was in the seventh grade. The other sons attended elementary school. Neighbors said the elder Manuel and Tina Morey grew up in the area. One neighbor, Cheryl Bianchini, said Mr. Morey irritated the neighbors by riding his A.T.V. “up and down the block at all hours of the night.”
“It was really loud and annoying, and the police were called on him a few times, but he kept doing it,” she said. A police sergeant said he could not verify that claim on Friday.
“The family had problems, troubles,” said Ms. Bianchini, whose daughter Alyssa attended Brinckerhoff Elementary School with Adam.
So much for not speaking ill of the dead. Even their landlord couldn't resist a few parting jabs about the lack of care for his lawn and his propensity to entertain:
“He tore up that lawn with his A.T.V.,” Mr. Skaarva said. In the summer, he installed a wooden stockade fence and began having raucous barbecues every weekend, he said.
“They would pull all the furniture outside,” he said. “There was a lot of drinking. We couldn’t believe how many empty cases of beer they’d put out in the garbage every week.”
Hey buddy, seriously, shut the hell up would you? A family including three children are butchered and burned and this is what you have to say to reporters? "That guy ruined my lawn!"
The WNBC story is a little more sympathetic, both to the family and the surrounding community. Video of that channel's report can be seen here. Currently, police investigators are proceeding with the assumption that the quintuple homicide was motivated by money, drugs, or both. In the meantime, there's an extremely cold-blooded person on the loose in town.
Tagged:Posted by Lexiphane at 3:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 13, 2007
THE TRAINS MAY NOT RUN ON TIME , BUT . . .
At least you'll know how long you have to wait before the next one rolls into the station. One of the most frustrating things about riding the subway is waiting an indeterminate amount of time for the next train to arrive. This causes stressful repetitive behavior among transit riders, namely the Lean-and-Peek, which involves a person steping to the edge of the platform, leaning out as far as is safe and often further, and gazing down the tunnel for any indication that a train might be coming. Repetitive Lean-and-Peak Syndrome is a malady I myself suffer from.
New overhead displays could cure this debilitating condition. The picture above is of a pilot program being deployed on the L Train line. Overhead displays communicate how long it will be before the next two trains arrive at your station. This is still in the evaluation stage, so we also get messages like this:
Interesting sentence structure there. I would have said " . . .times may not be accurate" or " . . .times may be inaccurate." " . . .be not accurate" sounds like something a non-native English speaker would write. Actually, this picture that I found linked to over at Gothamist displays a more tongue-friendly version of the same message. I would've thought the electronic messages would be uniform throughout the system, but maybe phraseology is one of the things the MTA is testing.
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LOOK BACK IN ANGER
(Portrait by Betsy Graves Reyneau)
Judge of Domestic Relations Court of the City of New York.
Student of social and economic conditions.
Able to discern misfortune and exploitation from crime and sin.
Has translated her knowledge and understanding into useful public service.
Gentleness personified with the weak and unhappy.
Stern and unrelenting with the wicked and wrongdoer.
Her talents and good heart are devoted entirely to the public good.-F. La Guardia
Jane Bolin passed away earlier this week. According to her obituary in The New York Sun, Ms. Bolin was the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School and was later appointed to the bench by Mayor Laguardia, becoming the first black female judge in the United States. The portrait above was taken around 1943-44, approximately five years after her surprise appointment by New York's mayor.
Her accomplishments are the sort of thing hometowns love to trumpet, especially when the notable person has strong family ties in the community. Jane Bolin was a native of Poughkeepsie, NY, but held little love for her native soil:
Ms. Bolin, born on April 11, 1908, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., was the daughter of a successful lawyer. Initially discouraged by a Wellesley College adviser from pursuing a law degree because of her race and gender, Ms. Bolin persevered, graduating from Yale Law School in 1931.
She practiced law with her father in Poughkeepsie and later with her husband, Ralph Mizelle, in New York. Years before it was common, she decided to keep her maiden name.
Explaining her decision to leave her hometown, Ms. Bolin said in 1944 that it was ‘‘fascist to the extent of deluding itself that there is superiority among human beings by reason solely of color or race or religion."
Ouch! Don't expect to read that on the commemorative plaque, wherever it winds up in Poughkeepsie. That's almost as harsh as Frank Sinatra's assessment of Hoboken, the town that loved to claim the singer as its own. Old Blue Eyes characterized the mile square town as a "sewer", but that still didn't keep his music from blaring out of every bar's jukebox in town.
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December 18, 2006
HEADS UP ISAAC NEWTON
I know very little about Apple Computers equity stock. I'm equally ignorant of the company's operations. I do know that I like its products and operating software. That said, a quick read-through of a recent article leads me to think that something in Cupertino stinks worse than rotten fruit.
Apple Computer has delayed filing its financial statements for a second time and said it will restate earnings to account for backdated stock-option grants.
The size of any charge related to the options hasn't been finalized, Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company plans to file its reports with regulators by Dec. 29.
Yesterday's filing was the first confirmation that Apple will restate its results because of the grants.
In June, Apple began an internal probe of its options grants, including one to chief executive Steve Jobs, and said in October that it misdated 15 stock-option grants from 1997 to January 2002.
The delayed financial reports, which were due Thursday, are for the company's fiscal third quarter, which ended July 1, and its fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. The company first delayed its third-quarter report in August.
By backdating the grants, executives inflated the options' value by choosing days when the underlying shares traded lower, making it possible for the recipients to sell them at a higher price.
Fred Anderson, Apple's former chief financial officer, resigned from the company's board after the October findings, and Jobs apologized to shareholders. Apple said there had been no misconduct by current management.
Well, that's nice of them to say that they're going to file by the end of December; that is the legal requirement: companies must file their year-end 10-K 90 days after the close of their fiscal year. The fact that they're 10+ days away from that filing deadline and saying everything's kosher is like claiming everyone's going to be okay as you're lowered down the side of the Titanic safely ensconced in a lifeboat. Technically it's true, but hardly encouraging vis a vis the overall picture.
When I followed stocks for a living, I had a general rule of thumb: any company can get mixed up and have to delay filing for a few weeks. A second delay, however, either indicates a lack of internal urgency in solving a problem or hints that there is an accounting problem so monumental that all recent financial statements are called into question and it's time to run away from the stock as quickly as possible.
Apple's statement that there "was no misconduct by current management" following the October shitcanning of its CFO is Clintonian in its fatuous veracity. Like I said before, I admire Apple Computers' software and hardware a great deal. A company that treats its investors like asshole suckers though, is one that will eventually start treating its customers the same. It bodes ill for Apple as a whole and I certainly hope some managerial housecleaning is planned for the near future.
(For God's sake, no investment decisions whatsoever should be made on the basis of the above opinion.)
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December 12, 2006
HAPPY BIRTHDAY! WATCH YOUR BACK
(Hopefully he's just here to cut the cake)
Ms. Mary Davis of the Bronx is celebrating her birthday today by going out to dinner with friends and family. A fire marshal may also be present to supervise the candles on Ms. Davis's b-day cake; she's turning 112 years old. The South Carolina native credits her longevity to faith in Christ and a commitment to vegetables. Praise the Lord and pass the green beans!
I'd be more sanguine about such a happy occasion if it weren't for two other stories I caught this week. Moses Hardy, the world's second-oldest man, oldest surviving black veteran of WWI, and son of two freed slaves, died late last week less than a month shy of his 114th birthday. And then today, the oldest person in the world Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolden died at the age of 116. Both of her parents were also former slaves in the South.
So it's been a tough week for centenarians-plus. It's interesting that all three characters in this item spent most of their lives in the South, are African American, and at least two had parents that were formerly slaves. I guess that kind of life lends one a certain fortitude regarding life's difficulties and earns one a little bit of God's forbearance.
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FEDS TO TACO BELL: WHOOPS, NEVER MIND, OUR BAD
I would estimate that about 50% of Taco Bell customers on any given day suffer from gastrointestinal distress within 48 hours of eating the chain's food. Throw a rumor of food poisoning associated with the chain to the public and pretty soon you've got a public health epidemic. Substantiate that rumor with lab tests identifying the E. coli bacteria in samples of Taco Bell ingredients and one can almost hear the lawsuits being filed as every person who got the runs after eating a Seven-Layer Burrito the day after drinking fifteen beers at a college party smells a payday, among other things.
Now that the damage has been done to the chain's reputation, however, it is time for the Feds to admit that they goofed on finding E. coli in Taco Bell's ingredient samples. In fact, the lab NY health officials used admitted they were having trouble even distinguishing between green onions and white onions.
Federal testing has failed to confirm green onions as the source of an outbreak of E. coli that sickened 64 people who ate in Taco Bell restaurants in the Northeast, health officials said Monday.
Over the weekend, Taco Bell officials said they determined that scallions were the likely source of the bacteria. But follow-up federal testing of those samples were negative for E. coli.
''In that context, we have not ruled out any food items,'' said Dr. David Acheson, chief medical officer for the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.
Meanwhile, health officials in New York said a sample of white onions taken from a Taco Bell restaurant tested positive for E. coli. However, that strain of bacteria hasn't been linked to any cases of illness in the United States anytime in the previous 30 days. The positive sample initially was mistakenly identified as being green onion, Acheson said.
I'm sure once this all gets sorted out, the Feds will go out of their way to publicize the safety and cleanliness of Taco Bell's fare. The media will be just as diligent in clearing the air. Like the article I linked to here, which I found buried in the back pages of today's paper.
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December 4, 2006
SHRINKING JOURNAL
After a significant redesign just four years ago, The Wall Street Journal will be slimming down after New Year's Day.
The Wall Street Journal, whose wide pages and text-rich look have long been an icon of the American newspaper business, is about to undergo several changes that include cutting 3 inches off its width.
Along with the size reduction, which is equivalent to about one of its columns, the newspaper will add more color and graphical elements, including greater use of photographs. It also will have fewer stories "jump" inside the newspaper.
This will bring the Journal in line with the width of most other major newspapers and apparently save Dow Jones, Inc. $18 million a year in savings, mostly through printing costs. The cuts were deemed necessary as the paper's ad revenues tapered in recent years.
The Journal has struggled more than other major newspapers in recent years due to a prolonged slump in financial and technology advertising, which are its two mainstays.
The paper has moved to diversify its revenue streams by adding an arts and leisure section called "Weekend Journal" in 1998 and a consumer-oriented section called "Personal Journal" in 2002, which was part of a broader overhaul that also brought more color and graphics to the paper.
The New York Times made a similar concession to falling ad revenues when it discontinued Circuits as an independent section of the paper and folded a reduced version into another area of the paper.
I'm curious to see what the redesign will look like. I personally liked the addition of the Weekend Journal section on Fridays. I'm less familiar with the weekend Personal Journal section as I never received the paper Saturdays.
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October 21, 2006
KILLING WITH KINDNESS
Sometimes this nicest things are the things left unsaid. The New York Sun had an unintentionally hilarious article in its weekend edition: Muslim Brotherhodd Member Blocked From Participating in NYU Panel. It described how a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization based in Egypt and the regularly acknowledged progenitor of a bizzare stream of homicidal Islam, was denied entry to the U.S. to attend a conference at NYU.
Kamal Helbawy, a prominent member of Britain's Muslim community, was on his way to New York to pariticpate in a panel on the Muslim Brotherhood at the New York University law school.
Probably intending on shaming the U.S. government, a panel participant threw gas on the poor bastard's personal and professional bonfire:
A senior fellow at the Nixon Center and a consultant to ABC News who partipated on the panel, Alexis Debat said Mr. Helbawy's absence was "outrageous.
"This was a huge missed opportunity for the U.S. government," Mr. Debat said. "Kamal Helbawy can help us in a major way to defeat Al Qaeda. He can be as helpful as CIA officer."
Mr. Helbawy did not reply "What? Wait, what? WHAT!?"
It gets better. Further in the article, there are more descriptions of the panel discussion.
The panel discussion, which proceeded despite Mr. Helbawy's absence, addressed the Muslim Brotherhood's role in world politics. But conversation inevitably veered toward Mr. Helbawy's conspicuous absence. Another panelist Nick Fielding, called Mr. Helbawy a "natural leader" and attested that he heard him give a very warm, very fascinating and very Christian" speech.
Again, Mr. Helbawy did not respond "Insh'allah, you guys are fucking killing me over here!
I know nothing about Kamal Helbawy other than from the article that he has said that Jewish people are involved in some bizarre satanic conspiracy; yeah, that makes a lot of sense. From his friends' direct quotes I do know this: they are goddamn morons. Nice going guys. Assign Christian sentiments to a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and equate him with a CIA agent. Why don't you just shoot him the face at the airport and save his family the return fare?
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October 19, 2006
IT'S OFFICIAL, LA IS THE NEW NYC
The New York Times Magazine recently chronicled the hilarious and futile fight against pigeons by some Los Angeles residents.
Dodson has lived in Hollywood for 29 years. She likes pigeons and does not want them killed or made to suffer. She said this repeatedly in the clipped, mildly truculent way she says a lot of things. But having helped muscle gangs and drugs out of her neighborhood in the 80’s, Dodson says she feels besieged again. She and her group, the Argyle Civic Association, have turned to a series of unconventional approaches to neutralize a problem they simply refuse to put up with. “We’re in the middle of the biggest boom, and there’s pigeons everywhere — like where they’re going to put the W hotel,” she says, invoking, as she often does, the upscale hotel as a symbol of Hollywood’s hard-won renaissance. “There’s nothing but pigeon poop.”
The equivalation of street gangs, luxury hotels, and pigeon shit in one paragraph illustrates why Los Angelenos are functionally insane and wouldn't last two minutes on the East Coast. I can give them a tip though. You can hate the pigeons. You can kill the pigeons--some of them. You're never going to get rid of all of them though. Learn to live with them.
UPDATE: A reread showed that Ms. Dodson wasn't equating a new luxury hotel with pigeon shit or street gangs; it was something to be welcomed. Insanity charges remain pending, based on what I've seen on Rivington St.
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October 14, 2006
SILENT PROTEST
The New York Times reports today on unrest at the nation's pre-eminent college for the deaf:
The authorities at Gallaudet University, the nation’s only liberal arts university for the deaf, moved on Friday to end a three-day siege by protesters by arresting the students opposing the board’s choice of the next president.
The campus police went into an area where about 100 protesters sat with arms interlocked, arresting them one by one and handing them over to Washington police officers who had blocked off the street along a side entrance to the university where the student protesters had gathered. As organizers had rehearsed in days leading up to the confrontation on Friday night, students went limp when arrested. They were then carried away by three or more officers.
In one of the lousiest pieces of reporting I've ever read--one that leaves more questions raised than answered--the Times doesn't elaborate on why nearly a hundred people would choose to be arrested.
The protesters are demanding the immediate resignation of Jane K. Fernandes, the former provost who was named last spring to succeed Dr. Jordan as president. Students have complained that the selection process was skewed and that Dr. Fernandes lacks leadership qualities. Dr. Fernandes met Friday with four protesters and Mr. Goldstone for more than an hour, but they found no resolution to the standoff that has paralyzed this university for a week.
I may be exceedingly obtuse, but it seems like there may be some more backstory to this story, right? Can the Times elaborate, please?
The only redeeming feature of this story is the laugh line from one of the arrested students: "Go get the drug dealers"
Anyone who's ever lived in DC will join me in a hearty chuckle on that one. Ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha! College kids! They're so cute.
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October 11, 2006
MAKING MY MOM HAPPY, FINALLY
Finally, one of my siblings stepped up to the plate and a wedding is in the planning. Barring a Vegas or City Hall elopement, my brother Tom will be the first of our merry band of four to marry after proposing to his now-fiance Sarah this past weekend. Congratulations kids.
I'll be in Santa Fe, NM next Labor Day, so don't invite me to anything else.
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AN AWARD FOR A TRUE GEM OF A GENTLEMAN
(A Man of Family and Biz-Ness)
The story of the old family firm put out of business by big-box retailers and large-volume retailers is, frankly, becoming a tired one. Sometimes the key to success is superlative customer service and relationships maintained within one's community.
I am happy to publicise the recent honoring of a man who has served the upstate community I grew up in and have known for decades. Leonard Zimmer, Jr. was recently awarded with its Business Excellence Award by the Dutchess County Economic Development Corp. That almost seems laughable at the outset, as Leonard Zimmer, Jr.'s business has probably pre-dated that organization by about a century.
Still, Leonard Zimmer, Jr. has a reputation that must be acknowledged:
The family-owned jewelry business has a long, successful history in Dutchess County.
The first store was opened 113 years ago by Thomas Zimmer Jr., whose father was a cigarmaker. It was on Garden Street in the City of Poughkeepsie. In 1899, Thomas Zimmer Jr. and brother Fred Zimmer joined forces and moved the store to 148 Main St. That's how it got it's name — Zimmer Brothers.
In 1914, Zimmer Brothers moved again to be near the Luckey Platt department store, to 319 Main St., and two years later, Thomas Zimmer Jr.'s son Leonard Zimmer Sr. joined. In 1918, the store relocated to 329 Main St.
Thirty years later, Leonard Zimmer Sr.'s son, Leonard Zimmer Jr., went to work at Zimmer Brothers and began his 58-year career in the business.
The company has since expanded and contracted and currently holds fast and profitable down the street from Vassar College. This is not a disinterested post. I've known the Zimmers and Gordons for going on 20 years. Save for my own family, I've spent more Thanksgivings and Christmas Eve's with the Zimmers and Gordons than anyone I've ever known. They're a fantastic family, to the end of every branch.
Congratulations Mr. Zimmer. I'm surprised it took so long for you to be recognized as the true asset to your community that you are. Your family and friends have known it for a long time.
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October 8, 2006
WHO OWNS WHO?
The New York Times highlights a fascinating legal mobius strip involving the legal ownership of the images of public figures. The article focuses on the personality of Rosa Parks, an iconic figure of the civil rights movement, but also an image that is pawned on everything from sidewalk tchotchkes to corporate ad campaigns.
Rosa Parks — civil rights symbol in life, marketing phenomenon in death — has become the centerpiece of the kind of posthumous peddling usually associated with athletes and Hollywood stars. While licensing experts estimate the current value of selling Mrs. Parks’s image at only six figures a year, they say that over time millions of dollars will be made by those who control her likeness. Mrs. Parks’s courage and standing have also made her one of the few recent African-American political figures, along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, whose image can generate handsome profits.
One would figure fair use for the image of a public figure, but sometimes that use can get ugly and crass:
William McCauley, 47, one of Mrs. Parks’s nephews, is leading the family’s legal battle against her estate’s executors. Mr. McCauley said he began seeing his aunt’s image pop up in advertisements all over Detroit shortly after her death. One of those ads, which ran in The Detroit Free Press, showed his aunt’s smiling face, along with the dates of her birth and death, next to a logo for the Greektown Casino, a local gambling establishment. “What a ride,” the ad said in bold type.
The image pictured above, in fact, is from an Apple Computer ad campaign. So who's a public figure? Bob Dole was a U.S. Senator and also shilled erection medication for a pharmaceutical company. Could a penis-enlargement-pill company use his face promoting its product? What about the day after he died? What right does he have to control the commercial use of his public image? Sports figures like Michael Jordan tend to be strictly commercial--and make hundreds of millions of dollars off of their appearances--but that money is derived from the public figures they are.
An easy distinction could be made by saying that the use of a famous personage should be illegal if it's for strictly commercial purposes. Here's the rub though. What happens when a person or the estate of a public person makes their entire life proprietary? The estate of Martin Luther King Jr. recently sued that the entire contents of his life were private property and license-worthy.
What are the implications there? Any textbook or newspaper (given, they're commercial operations) are required to pay a fee to excerpt segments from MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech? How far can one monetize history? Will the spread-out family tree of William Jennings Bryan get back to their roots and try to crucify us on a "Cross of Golden Reparations" for millions of unlicensed references?
I honestly don't know.
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October 5, 2006
LOOKING BACK AT NOLA
(Photo taken without permission from Alvaro Morales)
It's a little past the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the near-total devastation of New Orleans. While one can't prevent the weather, the massive loss of life that occurred over a few days will remain a blight on our national reputation for generations.
There are millions of stories to tell about a city underwater. My brother's girlfriend had to evacuate and the pictures of her once-submerged apartment are telling. My favorite professor from school had to curtail one of his first year's as the head of a New Orlean's university due to the overall shutdown of the city.
Some of the most horrific stories coming out of the Big Easy are related to healthcare facilities. Stories about the infirm and elderly with no way to escape and no infrastructure to evacuate them are heartbreaking. Some doctors were recently charged with homicide after being accused of euthanizing patients rather than leaving them to drown or die of heat exhaustion.
For the most part, however, the measures taken by medical staff to care for people in the wake of Katrina were no doubt heroic by any reasonable standard. I was lucky to get in touch with Dr. Jaime Alleyn by email recently, looking for his impressions of the New Orleans disaster. After an impressive stint as my college roommate, Dr. Alleyn went off to med school and found himself a new home at Tulane's medical center in New Orleans. A native of Miami, FL, Alleyn is no stranger to hurricanes, although he was always an irritating super-fan of a team by the same name. I asked the good doctor some questions a few weeks ago. The answers follow:
WHAT WERE YOU DOING BEFORE KATRINA?
1. I had just started my fourth year of residency at Tulane in the Dept of OB/GYN. I was the Administrative Chief Resident at the time.WHAT WERE YOU DOING DIRECTLY (24 HRS) BEFORE KATRINA?
2. I was in charge of making the hurricane schedule. Anytime that a hurricane is announced, the hospital declares a code grey. We then have to submit a code grey team to the hospital. This team consists of two shifts of personnel. There are residents from all levels(house officers I-IV) and attending physicians. The idea is to have two teams that can alternate working in shifts. This team is required to stay in the hospital until the code is called off. Some people also bring their families to the hospital with them. We have to select a code grey team for every hospital that we cover(3). The rest of the residents are told to evacuate the city as per the Mayor's order. In the past, this meant staying the hospital for a couple of days until the threat passed. Once the team had reported to University Hospital 24 hours prior to the Katrina, we began to discharge all patients that were not critically ill. The patients that were left were ones that had to stay( for medical reasons or transport reasons).WHAT DID THE CITY'S PREPAREDNESS APPEAR TO BE; DID THE HOSPITAL STAFF SEEM WORRIED?
3. We usually go through about 4 code greys throughout the year. Most hurricanes avoid New Orleans, and all we get is a little bit of rain. This year had been particularly busy, but most of the team had already experienced a hurricane in New Orleans. While this one seemed to be a little more powerful, I didn't sense that people were really scared. I personally have lived through several hurricane in the past, including Georges in Puerto Rico and Andrew in Miami. I couldn't have imagined that this would have been worse. For the first 24 hours, things progressed as planned. The code grey was running as scheduled and the whole process was relatively well organized. It was just as we had run it in the past.WHAT WAS THE HURRICANE LIKE?
4. The actual hurricane was very similar to the ones I had experienced in the past. There was lots of wind and rain. There were some broken windows, but overall the structure seemed to withstand the hurricane fairly well. That first night the electricity shut down, but the generators were working. In the morning, there was flooding in the streets, but that was relatively normal. Those streets usually flood with just a little bit of rain. At this point, we still had running water and spotty cell phone coverage. We rounded on our patients in the morning. There were no major complication with any of our patients. At this point we tried to find out, what was going on outside. As the water level continued to slowly rise, we knew that something had to be wrong. In past code greys, there was some flooding, but it usually went away fairly quickly. Since the generators were on the first floor, they stopped working. I finally got through to my parents in Miami, and they told that it seemed that the levees had broken. This is when we realized that we were going to be here a while.HOW WOULD THE GENERAL RESPONSE--CITY, STATE, AND LOCAL MEASURE?
5. Obviously, there was a breakdown by all parties involved (Federal, State, Local). From our point of view, we could not tell what was going on in the outside world. There was very little information coming in. In the end, we were in the hospital for six days following the hurricane.WHAT WERE YOUR EXPERIENCES FOLLOWING KATRINA?
6. I returned home to Miami following the hurricane. I was there for three painful weeks, not knowing where or if I would be able to finish my residency. By the last week of September, I was told that we would be going to Houston to continue my residency for the next couple of months. As I was preparing to move to Houston, I found out hat a hurricane was about to hit the city. I eventually made it to Houston, and was there for five months.ARE THERE ANY STARK MEMORIES YOU HAVE OF THE INCIDENT?
6. After going through an experience like that, there is no way that you could say that we are the same. That goes not only for the people that were in New Orleans for Katrina, but also those that were forced to evacuate. I think that everyone that was affected by Katrina is now stronger and has a different outlook on life.
Although we were dealing with some very sick patients, some of which did not make it through the storm, I will always remember the chaos of the Superdome. It is sad to think that in a country as powerful as ours, this would be allowed to happen.HOW LONG WERE YOU IN NOLA FOLLOWING KATRINA?
7. I was in the hospital for six days following Katrina. I am now living in NOLA trying to help rebuild this wonderful city.A YEAR LATER DO YOU THINK YOU'VE CHANGED AT ALL?
8. After going through an experience like that, there is no way that you could say that we are the same. That goes not only for the people that were in New Orleans for Katrina, but also those that were forced to evacuate. I think that everyone that was affected by Katrina is now stronger and has a different outlook on life.
Super-thanks to Dr. Alleyn for answering these questions and contributing to Lexiphane.com. I know typing has never been his strong suit, so I really appreciate the effort. I'm also sure the entire country echoes an appreciation of what healthcare workers managed in an impossible situation. Give it up for NOLA's Kindest!
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September 27, 2006
8TH WONDER OF THE WORLD
I'm going to gratuitously try to engender some puppy love here at Lexiphane.com. The other month, my brother and his better half adopted a Shep/Lab mix that they named Taj Mahal. I wondered why they'd named their dog after a mausoleum. They didn't. When I mentioned it to my friend Meg, she asked "Oh! After the musician?" Apparently I'm not as cool as I thought I was.
Mr. Mahal is apparently a famous jazz guitarist. Six months ago, he was designated by the state legislature the "Official Blues Musician" of Massachusetts. Hmmm, that seems like a dubious distinction; with Massachusettes being such a hotbed of the blues and all. But you can't help where you're born.
Taj the dog hasn't mastered any stringed instruments yet. Reportedly, he hasn't yet mastered not shitting indoors. But my brother is apparently mastering becoming a pet owner. Congrats man. They can be a lot of fun.
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