Anne Orsi

November 1, 2012

Lesson One: Become an Atheist Activist Today

It’s election time again, which means that now is the perfect time for atheist activism. I know a way for you to become an effective atheist activist without ever leaving the safety of your keyboard, and I’m going to share it with you.

Come on – let me see a show of hands – how many of you reading WWJTD know of a church or other religious organization in your community that tells its members how to vote on issues? Raise those hands higher. I can’t see you. Okay, now look around. See all the hands waving in the air? There are lots of them.

It’s time to do something about this.

Did you know that most nonprofit organizations – including churches – cannot endorse candidates, tell their members how to vote, publicly support one side of an issue, or lobby? I know. It’s stunning. You’d never know it from the way so many of them behave. But if they lobby, electioneer, or outright tell their congregation how to vote, they’re supposed to lose their coveted tax-exempt status.

Because it’s illegal for them to engage in politics. Not illegal in the criminal sense, but in the sense that they enjoy a favored status in exchange for a promise that they will not engage in politics. So, when they break that promise, they should lose their favored status. The problem is, they tend not to. The IRS just doesn’t have enough proof against most of these churches.

I want to do something about that. I want you to do something about that. And I can tell you how to do it in a legal, above-board, non-confrontational way.

We can make these particular churches pay taxes just like everyone else – because if they blur the line between church and state, they are supposed to lose their tax-exempt status. At the very least, getting a letter from the IRS warning them that their political activity is dangerously close to the line may inspire them to cut it out.

Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code gives most nonprofit organizations, including churches, their tax-exempt status. Almost all churches are organized as non-profits and approved under 501(c)(3). That’s how tithes and offerings and other donations to them are tax-deductible. But, that special status comes at a cost: no 501(c)(3) organization may endorse, support, or oppose any candidate for public office. They cannot make contributions to political campaigns, and they cannot make any public statements for or against a candidate. They cannot take sides on any issue. Violation of this requirement will cause the IRS to strip the organization of its tax-exempt status.

Now, some minor politicking is permitted, but strict rules apply. No fundraising can happen at the event where the church or other 501(c)(3) organization does its politicking. If one candidate is invited, then all of the candidates running for that position – not just the one favored by the organization – must have an equal opportunity to be heard at the event. And most importantly, the organization cannot give even a hint as to which candidate it supports.

These rules also apply to ballot initiatives, referendums, and other matters voted on by the public. They apply to laws and constitutional amendments presented to the people for their vote. Gay marriage, abortion rights, gambling – all of these are issues churches like to weigh in on, and their publicly stated positions are grounds for them to lose their tax-exemption.

Why doesn’t the IRS do something? Because the IRS doesn’t have the time or the manpower to go around the country looking for these kinds of violations. It takes effort, proof, and a complaint to get them going. The only thing they routinely investigate without a complaint being filed are income tax returns, randomly selected for audit.

The IRS will investigate a church or other nonprofit organization if one of its higher-ranking agents has a “reasonable belief” that the organization’s activity violates its 501(c)(3) restrictions. It’s up to us to provide a basis for that reasonable belief, because the IRS won’t police each and every church. Thank the FSM, we are perfectly capable of recognizing and supplying concrete proof of these violations, so as to create that “reasonable belief” in the minds of the upper echelon of the Internal Revenue Service. We non-theists are all about reasonable beliefs!

Revocations of these tax-exemptions actually can happen. They don’t happen as often as we might like, but it’s up to us to help change that. As far as I know, the tax-exempt status of only one church was ever revoked, although the tax-exempt status of other nonprofits violating this rule have been revoked over 40 times.

The notorious case of the IRS pulling the tax-exempt plug on a church is Branch Ministries v. Rossotti. Branch Ministries and its church bought a full-page ad in the Washington Post and USA Today opposing Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. The advertisement clearly said that the church had placed the ad, and it solicited tax-deductible contributions to help pay for the ad to be run in additional newspapers in large markets. The ad claimed that Clinton supported abortion on demand, homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. It cited various Biblical passages and said, “Bill Clinton is promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws … How then can we vote for Bill Clinton?”

The bigger question for Branch Ministries became, “Since we’re overtly supporting a particular candidate and letting the world know about it, how can we maintain our status as a 501(c)(3) organization?” Answer: It could not.

How do we make sure that more churches are investigated, and that more churches pay taxes? Not every church will do us the favor of being so blatant about its political activities. Therefore, we must report what we see. We have to give the IRS proof to support that reasonable belief that a church or nonprofit group engages in political activities. They won’t self-report these violations any more than an illegal immigrant will self deport. It’s up to us to do it through the available legal channels.

The IRS needs documentation. It can get that documentation from any number of sources, but the most reliable are:

Newspaper or magazine articles or ads
Television and radio reports
Internet (yes, the IRS apparently believes everything it reads there)
Voters guides created and/or distributed by the church
Documents on file with the IRS (e.g. a Form 990-T filed by the church)
Church records in the possession of third parties or informants

That last bit is where we come in. The IRS says that information obtained from informants must be reliable, so we need to do more than just send an email to complain. Proof will get the church’s tax-exempt status revoked. Send photos, audio recordings, video recordings, news articles – anything that provides independent proof that the activity has happened. Heck, if you can tolerate sitting through a religious service close to election day, go to church and record the pastor or priest’s political rants. You know they’re giving them in pulpits across the nation.

Here’s an example of how it’s done.

Actual Church Sign at 702 Church St., Benton, AR
Photo taken October 23, 2012

There’s a church near where I live that is also a polling place. Churches as polling places are an issue for another day, so let’s leave that for now and focus on something even more in-your-face egregious.

One of the ballot initiatives in our area has to do with medical marijuana. This particular church has taken it upon itself to say that legalization of marijuana for medical purposes is a moral issue. There are reasons for and against legalization of marijuana that I won’t get into here – whether or not the ballot initiative should pass isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about whether someone’s church should be allowed to tell them how to vote on the issue.

This church was featured on my local news a few days ago. I have a link to the news report, and I have IRS Form 13909, which can be downloaded as a PDF file or completed online. This is the complaint form to use when you see nonprofit organizations engaged in the political process. If you bookmark no other IRS form, bookmark this one.

The form asks for the basic information about the church. Its name and address are easy enough to find with Google, but the form also needs the church’s EIN, or tax identification number. You can usually find that number on the website of the National Center for Charitable Statistics. Now, this particular church doesn’t appear in that list. This probably means that it is simply holding itself out to be a church under Section 508 of the Internal Revenue Code, without ever going through the 501(c)(3) approval process. No matter – the same rules apply. If it’s going to go around telling folks how to vote, it’s going to lose its tax-exempt status.

The rest of the form is fairly self-explanatory, but the instructions are attached to the form at the link I’ve provided. Once you’ve completed the form, it can be emailed to the IRS at eoclass@irs.gov; mailed to IRS EO Classification, Mail Code 4910DAL, 1100 Commerce Street Dallas, TX 75242-1198; or faxed to 214-413-5415.

Easy, peasy.

Do this, and become a law-motivated atheist activist today.

(This post originally appeared at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/wwjtd/2012/11/lesson-one-become-an-atheist-activist-today/ )

October 22, 2012December 29, 2023

The Best Doctor in the World

My migraines have never responded to prophylactic treatment for very long, but Dr. Robert Lee Archer always has another suggestion. I appreciate his dogged determination to find some way of helping me, and his kind patience when I express my frustration.

His manner is wonderful – it is something I wish all doctors had. If it is possible to teach “personality” to medical students, they should all be required to emulate Dr. Archer’s personality or not pass the course in “bedside manner.”

I have the utmost respect and admiration for Dr. Archer. I’ve been his patient for about 15 years, and he is unfailingly attentive and thoughtful. Some doctors don’t seem to hear what their patients say, but Dr. Archer not only hears, he understands and remembers. I think the world of him, and I wish I could clone him and put him in every doctor’s office I ever have to visit.

October 16, 2012

Amicable and Neighborly

I’ve been busy lately. Reason in the Rock is fast approaching, and the last minute details are time-consuming. I’m doing some research and reading to aid those involved in various aspects of the West Memphis Three matters, and there is a lot of stuff there. On top of that, my family is in the process of selling the family farm. After 100 years of deeds being swapped among four generations and various family-owned entities, there are title issues enough to make a saint swear. My brother and I are working on the title issues, and we are far from sainted. I’ve even had to reopen the long-closed probated estates of both of my grandparents and one of my great aunts to resolve matters.

And yesterday, taking a well-deserved break to engage in a little church-related activity, which is always good for the soul, I stumbled across a float of the Flying Spaghetti Monster created by the Seattle Atheists.

I want it.

The Arkansas Society of Freethinkers needs one. Can’t you just see it in the annual holiday parade here in Little Rock? We freethinkers can dress in our clerical vestments – that is, full pirate regalia – and toss packages of Ramen noodles to parade watchers. It’ll be Christmas, Mardi Gras, and soup kitchen all rolled into one. We would be able to touch so many people with his noodly appendages!

And I have nothing else to do but figure out how to build a working model of our amazing deity. Really.

But wait! What’s this? In my inbox is a missive from the company that manages the condos that lie on the other side of my back fence. Gracious, whatever could they want?

Dear Ms. Orsi:

I obtained your contact information from a mutual friend, David Simmons. I am writing on behalf of the Townhouses-in-the-Park Property Owners Association. I have been asked to contact you in reference to your swimming pool and the manner in which the water is being drained. The POA Board believes that the chemicals in your pool water are killing the ivy and eroding a French drain located below your pool on the TIP property. The POA Board wishes to handle this matter in an amicable and neighborly fashion. Would you please contact me to discuss this issue?

Thank you, in advance, for your cooperation.

Not again. This is, sadly, not my first rodeo with these “amicable and neighborly” people.

I clicked on the attachments.

I swear by the noodly appendages and meatballs of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and by all else that is holy, that these two photos are what I was sent as proof of the evildoing of my swimming pool.

I fumed a bit. I needed to collect my thoughts before I called the email’s author, because I was more than a little irked. I tend to become extremely sarcastic when I’m annoyed. Sarcasm is not “amicable and neighborly,” or so I’ve been told. So I called Mom and ranted for about 20 minutes.

When I finally calmed down, I called the contractor who had installed the offending pool in 2009.

“Jimmy,” I said, “you aren’t going to believe this.” I told him what was up. He sighed, and said he’d come take a look.

When I calmed down some more, I called the author of the email. She was out.

A few days later, Jimmy came. He looked. We both peered over my fence onto the hillside between my pool and Townhouses in the Park. He scratched his head. “So, where’s the dead ivy?” he asked. Unable to answer his question, I peered over the fence again. Nope. No dead ivy could be seen.

“What do I do?” I asked him. He shrugged helplessly. He outlined the possibility of draining the pool higher up the hill, still on my property, of course. I asked him for a bid. He left, shaking his head. We both know that the mere existence of my pool bugs the crap out of the Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association. We’ve been down this road before.

Orsi, john Francis Jr — Dad, Summer 2002, on the lake in his boat

My beloved father, whose ashes were spread into the Cache River on our family farm over a decade ago, wrote what our family calls “John Letters.” Sometimes he sent them. Usually, Mom, Susan, Jay or I edited them to remove the most sarcastic and offensive parts. At times, to Dad’s chagrin, we’d edit them into starchless, plain vanilla, politely worded protests that in no way resembled what Dad really and truly wanted to say.

The city of Des Arc was the recipient of at least one unedited John letter a few years before Dad died. The city was not amused. Dad was proud of himself. He was such a clever wordsmith.

I’ve written a John letter to the property manager representing Townhouses in the Park. Oh, I’ve edited it. I’ve refined it. I really, really want to send it. I’m proud of myself. I am such a clever wordsmith.

Dear Ms. Jackson:

The Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association is fond of complaining about my swimming pool, which apparently exists mostly to annoy them. While I was in the process of building it in 2009, Townhouses in the Park reported me to Little Rock Code Enforcement for building not just one, not even two, but three swimming pools in my back yard. Seriously.

After that, they said that the drainage from the pool was washing out the soil from beneath their asphalt and would cause their parking lot to collapse. Yes, they really said that. To alleviate their concerns that my pool would wash Townhouses in the Park all the way down Cedar Hill to the Allsopp Park tennis courts, I installed a drainage system that diffused the backwashed water over a very large area on my property.

Then, on a Saturday night after a pipe had burst that morning and been repaired, they decided to come over to my house when I was having a dinner party to complain, in front of my arriving guests, that there was too much water in their parking lot. They must really hate thunderstorms.

Next, they claimed that the three year old masonry wall of my pool which faces them, and which they cannot see without coming into my yard beyond the wooden privacy fence that separates my property from theirs– and which even then they could not see since a second retaining wall blocks even my own view – was crumbling and collapsing in decay. It wasn’t.

In their latest complaint, Townhouses in the Park apparently believes that the al Qaeda sleeper cell that is my swimming pool suddenly awoke after one of the hottest, driest summers in memory to unscrupulously assassinate what appears to be a two foot spread of ivy hanging over a wall, presumably just down the hill from my property.

As Townhouses in the Park is aware, the backwash from my pool, which amounts to about a bathtub’s worth every week or so, is eliminated on my property through a perforated pipe about 15-20 feet long into a French drain that is even longer. The diffuse drainage is unlikely in the extreme to have zeroed in on that unsuspecting bit of ivy after four years of peaceful coexistence. From the vantage point of my property, I am unable to discern any dead ivy; I cannot tell where the photo was taken. The plants on my property that are even closer to the point of drainage are alive and healthy. Even the ivy.

But, in the interest of resolving this matter in an amicable and neighborly fashion, I had the contractor who installed the pool and drainage system come to look at it. Unsurprisingly, he said there was no way my pool’s backwashed water was the cause of the dearly departed’s demise. Had my pool water been inclined to murder unsuspecting plants such as that particular patch of English ivy, it would do so from the point of drainage all the way to the wall; it would not have the necessary intelligence or purpose to target a single spot at least ten feet away from the point of drainage, leaving all plants between the drain and the target unmolested. That’s just how terrorist swimming pools and their affiliated suicide bomber drainage systems roll.

The seepage pipe in the wall is similarly unaffected by me backwashing my pool. By the time the water gets from the drain to the wall, it has gone through soil at least ten feet wide, twenty feet in length, and ten feet in depth. There is simply not enough water concentrated in that area at any given time to cause the problem complained of.

Townhouses in the Park should be aware that in the event there ever really is a problem that I don’t already know about (and haven’t promptly taken reasonable steps to address), I may not take them seriously. There is a story about a little boy who cried “wolf.” The Townhouses in the Park Property Owners Association should familiarize themselves with the moral to that story.

Should I?

im_so_clever_coffee_mug-p168405407367148248envqn_400 — (source)

Oh, hell. I know I shouldn’t. But I really, really want to.

October 8, 2012September 25, 2024

Analogy

I’m puzzling out a thorny computer problem by consulting the best authority I can find. It’s my dogeared, well-perused copy of the Complete Authoritative and Perpetual Guide to Computing.

The person who gave it to me hand-copied it from one belonging to a friend of hers, who hand-wrote his copy to make it a reasonable facsimile of a copy that one of his friends had, who translated his copy from a Windows 3.1 manual written an ancient dead language. That one written in the ancient dead language was a hand-written copy of a Windows/286 manual that was written in an archaic form of the dead language, and the compiler referred to his class notes about operating systems that he took in high school to fill in the obvious gaps. Where his notes were deficient, he reached into the deep recesses of his memory and thought he got it right.

Now, the pages of that Windows/286 manual were out of order, but while he looked over his class notes, the compiler hired a kooky homeless guy he had befriended to set everything straight. The homeless guy, who admittedly heard voices that no one else could hear, used the flaky fragments of part of a coffee-stained MS-DOS manual as a go-by, and where the MS-DOS manual was too fragmentary to be reliable, he consulted the manual for an Apple II+.

According to the provenance recorded in the flyleaf of my copy, that Apple II+ manual was cobbled together by combining a couple of pages from a QDOS manual with an early Unix manual, which itself was written entirely in C-language and translated into Pascal by a classroom full of ADHD monkeys on typewriters. So, my copy is no doubt much more authentic and reliable than anyone else’s copy.

Oops. I forgot to mention that the homeless guy confirmed with the voices in his head that the Pascal-translating monkeys were the ones who actually created computer operating systems in the first place, so anything they tapped out on said typewriters was, ipso facto, correct.

I’ll have this problem correctly resolved in no time, and no one will be able to argue that my conclusions or solutions are wrong.

September 30, 2012January 25, 2024

Family Home

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I grew up in this house. So did my mother. My grandparents built it in 1940, the year my mom was born. They hired prominent Little Rock architect Maximilian F. Mayer, who, at the same time as he designed their house, was working on a significant project to preserve the territorial and early statehood buildings that now comprise the Historic Arkansas Museum. The year after the initial construction was completed on my grandparents’ home, Max Mayer would design Johnswood, the home of Pulitzer prize-winner John Gould Fletcher and his wife, Charlie May Simon.

When my grandparents moved to Little Rock in 1972, my parents, moved into the house with my brother, sister, and me. They lived there for 30 years.

about 1975. Polyester double-knit by the fish pond.

1980, me in front of the bow window at the east end of the house

The rose garden over the reflecting pond

Roy Lee Gray, groundskeeper extraordinaire

Music session in the garden room – Fred & Jay

It sits on an entire city block on Main Street. In addition to the house, there were outbuildings: an old servants’ quarters (a two-room building with a bathroom that was used as an office), the children’s playhouse, a large tool shed, and a small greenhouse, a lath house where camellias were grown year-round. My grandfather and mother worked with prominent landscape architects to cultivate the grounds, and they had a landscape crew working daily. Specimen plantings, intricate brickwork, and careful planning groomed the city block where the house sits.

My mother and grandmother grew flowers and arranged them for the two living rooms, the mantels, the foyer, and the dining table. They rarely bought flowers, and the local florists knew that any they delivered would be rearranged once they crossed the house’s threshold. In early spring, daffodils of every imaginable color and configuration filled the backyard. Ancient oaks towered over the grounds. Crepe myrtles, plum and crabapple trees, quince, figs, apples, and pears grew around the property. The vegetable garden covered nearly an eighth of the property and divided beds with brick walkways. Except in the dead of winter, we had fresh vegetables and fruit from our own yard.

Then, my parents moved from Des Arc to Little Rock ten years ago, and the house was sold to at least two successive owners who lost it in foreclosure. No maintenance was done, and from the looks of things, the place was completely abused and neglected.

The front door. Is that black paint between the top of the portico and the master bedroom window above? The black stuff on top on the lintel looked like mold. I think Stewart Morton told us that the big lantern that used to hang over the door was stolen.

Slime mold and algae growing on the dormers, peeling paint, missing and damaged window screens.

Apparently the screen door never closed properly, because leaves halfway filled the space between the two lower screens. I wasn’t sure how they got there until one of the guys put his entire hand between the top of the two lower screens. The columns are rotting and one appears to have shifted. That handrail is pure art.

The living room window, with all kinds of signs warning people about things.

Kitchen window with a sign warning that “Trespassers Will…” and that vandalism will be prosecuted. As if the worst vandalism wasn’t accomplished by recent legal inhabitants. Not that I’m disgusted, or anything. really.

Algae on a dining room window frame, damaged siding with holes, missing shutter, peeling paint.

This is the ceiling in the kitchen below Jay’s bedroom. There is no water source to explain the ceiling damage. I’m dying to know how the ceiling paint got that rusty hue. I’m sure it’s some kind of artful paint effect.

Someone evidently attempted to caulk the big double-paned picture window in the kitchen. The stuff felt like plaster. Then again, it might be an artful representation of surf. Or something.

Susan’s room, looking toward her dressing room and the central hallway. Green and white are the colors of the Des Arc Eagles. This is perfect redecoration of the bedroom of a former cheerleader, don’t you think?

The little tub in Susan’s bathroom. Later, I’ll dig out and post photos of our boys in this tub when they were little, just to embarrass them.

The big window in the landing of the main staircase. I have a pretty photo of Page Corman Jones that was taken in front of this window when we were in high school – check it out and the one of Jay taken the same day for comparison. There were numbers posted all over the house. They indicated items to be salvaged before the house is torn down.

The doorjamb into the master bedroom apparently was optional. The control for the ceiling fan was ripped out of the wall. All over the house there were holes in the walls and big areas splotched with white paint.

The door to the master bedroom. Apparently someone opened it with a boot instead of twisting the knob. That is not the original brass knob.

This was taken from the big window in the master suite’s sitting room, looking down on the fish ponds and rose garden. The big reflecting pond was covered with plywood planks. The little pond, well, more on that in a moment. The crepe myrtles have grown so tall that they block the views from my bedroom, the upstairs landing, and the master suite areas.

The intercom outside to doorway into the little attic.

Someone etched smiley-faces into the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway. (WTF? Who DOES that?) This is the wallpaper that Darlene so admired. Maybe those faces are a ghostly reflection of happier times this house experienced with family and friends who loved it.

Mom, standing next to the fireplace in the front living room. She looks like she wants to cry, doesn’t she? She remarked on the stained marble. See the chipped and peeling paint? I think this is the same yellow and white that the room was when our family moved out. Our stockings hung by this fireplace every Christmas. (See the corresponding photos from 1984 in the photos above.) The nails were still there. The floor also surprised me. All the thick wool carpets had been pulled up to expose the hardwood floors, which were in terrible shape.

We kept our games in this cabinet in the library. Life, Clue, Parcheesi, all the rest. The weekend games were so much fun! I am not sure what that disgusting-looking stuff on the door and cabinet is. The entire library, shelves and all, was encrusted with this nasty grime. This used to be such a peaceful, wonderful, book-filled room. When they took up the carpet, they apparently didn’t repaint. You can see how thick the pile was. There was always a puzzle in progress, too.

Another view of the library, and the dressing room leading to the bathroom and the big closet. Once when Susan and I had a sleepover in the garden room (on the other side of that closet), Mom and Dad told us a story of a little girl who died and whose body was walled up in that closet when the house was being built. Either Johnny or Flo Prislovsky hid in that closet and thumped on the wall, making all of us little girls scream – terrified that her ghost really did haunt the place! Aren’t parents great? Scaring the shit out of impressionable and delicate little flowers such as we were.

Another view if the library, looking into the dressing room and the long front hallway.

The breakfast room. The metal art deco chandelier was left when Mom and Dad moved, but it’s gone now. And I seem to remember this room being much brighter. How, with that huge window, was this room so dark?

The garden room’s big bow window, all rotted and awful. The flowerbed beneath the window on the brick terrace is overgrown with weeds. Mom used to keep caladiums in that bed, and the view of the yard was unobstructed.

The garden room fireplace. Just like the living room fireplace, the soot stains on the marble surround were awful, and just like in the library, the filthy woodwork is completely mind-boggling. The parquet floor was refinished in the about 10 years before Mom and Dad moved out, but you sure can’t tell it now.

Inside the playhouse. The most amazing thing is that it was still standing! Mom had considered tearing it down years ago.

The playhouse, which was still white when Mom and Dad left Des Arc. The brick patio in front of the playhouse was totally overgrown with weeds. Jay warned the school officials that they were standing on hallowed ground: countless squadrons of plastic army men are entombed next to that patio.

A view of the back yard from the playhouse patio. In the spring, this yard is filled with two giant semi-circles of daffodils. Missing in this photo are the lath house where Mom, and her parents before her, grew camellias year-round, and the sheds. The Des Arc School District has bought the house and will tear the rest of the buildings down. The brick structures in the distance are high school buildings.

Partial view of the back yard looking from the playhouse patio (aka the plastic green army’s sacred burial ground) toward the formal gardens behind the house. The raised brick flowerbeds cap the horseshoe-shaped yard outside the main back door. A single determined rosemary bush was all the remained of what mom planted there. The beds between the sidewalk and the raised beds were overgrown, and the crepe myrtles are so tall that the view from the house is obstructed.

Oak next to the playhouse. Two trees had what looked like the rims of bicycle tires nailed high on the trunks. Seeing them was another WTF moment for us.

Another view of the hoop nailed to the tree beside the playhouse.

This was my favorite spot in the yard when I was a little girl. I creatively christened it “The Place.” There used to be a tree here with a low branch that grew parallel to the ground that made a perfect perch for reading a book. The tree was surrounded by flowering shrubs, all of which are gone. It was a wonderful, peaceful, private place. Privet and overgrown scrub dominate it now, with a lovely patch of dirt.

The other hoop we found nailed to a tree.

Looking toward the playhouse from the back hedge

Looking toward the rear of the house from the back yard.

The plywood-covered large fish pond, the library window (downstairs) and the sitting room window (upstairs). These were beautiful formal gardens with wide brick sidewalks. The sidewalks are hidden by fallen leaves and overgrown weeds. The siding on the wall has been torn off in one spot – possibly to look for termites? The open window looks out of the front living room. The crepe myrtles are twice the size they were ever allowed to grow in my memory. I recall them being cut back to the ground at least twice, and pruned yearly to control the spread of the branches. Note the peeling paint and the algae slime on the exterior walls.

The little fish pond sits across a brick patio at the far end of the big fish pond. My grandparents installed a statue of a boy riding a dolphin, which was destroyed and taken by the people who bought the house from my parents when they left. The brick wall of the pond is seriously damaged, and the pillar that held the fountain lay on its side, broken. There is a formal portrait of Jay, Susan and me when we were about 5, 10, and 11 that was taken in front of the little pond. I don’t recall if it shows the fountain. I’ll try to locate it and post it for comparison. The brick wall behind the fountain becomes a latticed brick wall to the right of the fountain. An entire section of that brick wall was just gone.

The plywood on the big goldfish pond. I think every kid who ever came to our house fell into that pond at least once trying to leap across it. My dachshund, Fritzi, fell into it more than once, paddling frantically and unable to get her stubby little paws high enough to climb back out. A family of wood ducks used this pond as their home for a number of years. Feral cats attacked the ducklings once, and my dad sat on the back stoop with a pellet gun determined to protect the ducklings from the evil predators. And he liked duck. Yum.

Looking through the back window into the formal living room. The amount of algae and mold on the house – and inside it – was horrifying.

The formal lawn and the horseshoe-shaped sidewalk, with the raised beds. Surprise spider lilies can survive neglect quite happily, apparently.

This lawn was once surrounded on all sides by a formal rose garden inside the brick border. Not a single one of the 50+ varieties of roses that Mom and Dad left there survived, and it’s impossible to tell the lawn from the flowerbed.

The vegetable gardens were where Jay and the guy from the school are standing, and stretched all the way to the edge of the yard. brick walks, a brick-lined drainage ditch, and brick borders outlined the beds. A huge asparagus bed stretched at least five feet wide and twenty feet long – and they were DAMN good eating! We grew tomatoes, peppers, squash of all kinds, okra, beans, Jerusalem artichokes, lettuce, spinach, carrots – if it grew from a seed, its seed was planted in the garden at some point over the years. There were several apple and pear trees, none of which survive. Those apples made the best pies in the world. We even had a grape vine. There was a gigantic fig, but apparently Jesus got mad at it (like he does) and shriveled it up because it sure isn’t there now. The building to the left is the tool shed and small greenhouse that mom built to replace the big one.

A view inside the little greenhouse, which apparently still works fine given the lush grass and vines growing within it.

The back side of the garden room, showing the chimney and the siding window covered with algae and mold. That broad leaf plant in front of the bay window is some kind of mysterious Little Shop of Horrors weed.

A close-up view of the missing siding in back. It looks like termites feasted well. The peeling paint was just amazing.

Another humorous anti-vandalism sign. As if. This was on the bow window in the garden room, I think.

This is what remains of my bathroom. the mirrored doors of the cabinet behind the sink are missing, as is one of the drawers and several of the ceramic knobs which mom installed when we moved into the house in 1972 when my grandparents moved to Little Rock. If I recall correctly, all the tiles were intact in those days.

Another view of my bathroom. The door is damaged, as were lots of damaged doors in the house. I have to wonder what the heck went on there that doors were such victims of violence.

The ceiling fan in my bedroom. I wouldn’t dream of turning that mold-encrusted thing on. Spores would be flung far and wide and attack us for generations.

The current view from one of my bedroom windows onto the croquet lawn – now obscured by gigantic crepe myrtles.

I had to check the secret hiding place in the top of my closet. mom used to stash her jewelry there when she and dad would travel. Good t hing the house never burned down while they were gone. Sadly, there was nothing in there.

A view from the landing, looking out the big window onto the sidewalk (obscured by leaves) and the horseshoe-shaped croquet lawn. See the rot on the windowpane?

Looking directly onto the lawn from the window in the landing. For a few years, Dad decided to become a lawn guru. His goal was to have perfect grass inside that U-shaped area. He bought books, devoured them, applied pesticides and herbicides, and personally plucked offending crabgrass and clover. He eventually did get it perfect. Then he moved on to another project, and things went back to normal.

The fireplace in the master bedroom. I’m guessing that the only reason it isn’t soot-encrusted is that no one ever lit a fire there. Carrying logs upstairs was a pain, and that fireplace never drew smoke properly. The green paint was applied over the wallpaper. In fact, paint was applied over wallpaper everywhere there had been wallpaper, except in the breakfast room and the wet bar. In many places, the wallpaper was peeling away from the walls, taking the paint along with it. I don’t know what the heck that red and green thing is on the wall next to the window.

This photo looks into what was my dad’s closet. Apparently the people who lived there after us used closets rather hard.

Another view inside Dad’s closet. The woodwork is separating from the door frame.

Dad’s closet again. Those big drawers were part of what made this house so perfect for hide-and-seek.

One of Mom’s closets, the “shoe closet.” She kept her Imelda Collection on these shelves, and, yes, we really did call it her “shoe closet.”

The other side of the shoe closet, with a dormer to the right. Another great hide-and-seek place.

My bedroom, looking from the hall door toward the bathroom. When Mom and Dad moved out, the walls were painted a soft peach and there was carpet on the floor. The pinkish patch on the wall is wallpaper, but none that was ever on the walls when anyone in my family ever lived there. Maybe it was there when my grandparents lived there. I don’t know.

Susan’s room, looking from the front hallway to the back hallway. Clearly, a fan of the Des Arc Eagles (go, team!) occupied this space. When it was Susan’s room, there was pretty wallpaper with birds on it. When it was my mother’s room as a girl, it was pretty, too. It was not splatter-painted with anything, and there were no stripes. The photo of her room in the earlier collection above was taken from the same spot.

Susan’s room again, this time from the back hallway looking toward the front hall and her dressing room and bathroom. Come to think of it, these Green and White colors of Des Arc High are absolutely perfect for the bedroom of a former cheerleader.

The laundry chute in the closet in the back hallway. Best. Hiding. Place. EVER. Hide and seek was really fun in this house. Before we were teenagers, we were small enough to fit inside the laundry chute, and hiders could climb unseen from the second floor down to the first to evade the seekers. There were two doors in the chute on the first floor level, and by balancing one’s feet just right on the ledge that marked the top door, a hider couldn’t be seen when the seeker looked either up or down the chute. Of course, SOME kids cheated and used flashlights to spot the laundry chute hiders.

The laundry chute again. I don’t know why I took two photos of the top and none of the bottom. I was in shock, I guess.

The toy closet in Jay’s room. The door to this closet is hobbit-sized, and adults cannot stand up inside. Evidently that did not deter a modern-day Michelangelo, who painted these shelves a shocking tu-tone blue.

Jay’s room, looking at the toy closet door. The toy closet was built under the slope of the roof next to a dormer. Jay’s room was also painted in multiple hues.

The cabinet leading to the secret room off Jay’s bathroom.

I remembered the secret room being bigger than this. Maybe I was just smaller. We left some posters in there when Mom and Dad moved. They had been removed. My recollection is that they were posters of Donny Osmond, David and Shaun Cassidy, and Styx, and one black-light poster of a mushroom. Really.

The artistic endeavors in Jay’s room. Green and white, handprints, and – how the heck did they do those FOOTPRINTS? They are about three feet from the floor.

Jay’s room, from the hall door. There are these great patches of white paint everywhere. Do those patches cover graffiti or something? I didn’t ask.

The ceiling in the second floor hallway between the doors to my room and Susan’s room. No one dared go into the attic, so I have no idea where the moisture came from that did this damage – if it was caused by moisture.

Looking from the formal living room down the long front hallway into the garden room. I was amazed that the brass art deco light fixture was still there, although the globe was long gone.

These are the doors halfway down the long hallway between the living room and the garden room. The door to the library is to the left. Every Christmas these doors were gift-wrapped closed so no naughty kids could peek before Santa had a chance to leave. On Christmas morning, we were allowed to retrieve our stocking from the living room, but only Dad could break the ribbon on the gift-wrapped doors. He would then go into the garden room, shout at the fat intruder he found there, chase him up the chimney, and come back to declare the house safe once again. Oh, and presents.

The bar. Possibly the most highly trafficked three square feet in the entire house. The rule was that Mom or Dad would fix the first drink offered to any guest, but after that they were on their own. For some reason, there was a lock on the cabinet that held the booze. When we were teenagers it was kept locked. I don’t know why. We were happy to find the key, though. My mother wants everyone to know that that is not the original wallpaper.

The bar. The upper cabinet was kept locked during the 1970’s. I don’t know why. Really.

The living room ceiling, beneath the doorway into the master bedroom. This photo is yet another example of mysterious apparent water damage where no water should ever have been.

I’m shocked by how quickly the house deteriorated due to termites, moisture damage, and neglect. I’m even more shocked that this former showplace of a home now shows how it was abused after my family left.

Significant pieces of the landscape are already gone. The formal English rose garden is forlorn, almost bereft of roses. The reflecting pond and raised goldfish pond sit damaged and dirty. The vegetable garden is denuded of fruit trees and flowers. The privet hedge surrounding the property, which kept it private despite its main street address, is overgrown in spots and spotty in others. The camellias that filled the hothouse are mostly dead. This is what the death of a lovingly maintained property looks like, and it didn’t take long.

The public high school is next door, and the school district recently bought the property for $45,000 at auction. The school will tear down all the buildings. The plants aren’t far behind.

It was a gorgeous house with beautiful gardens. Its loss is a travesty.

September 23, 2012

The Most Awesome Man in the World

Who is the most awesome man in the world?

The Most Interesting Man in the World — I said “Awesome,” not “Interesting.” (source)

No, no, this is a guy who has it ALL.

Carlos Slim — I don’t mean the “Richest Guy in the World,” either. (source)

The man I’m talking about is a kick-ass guy who’s really got it going on.

The Boogeyman checks under the bed for Chuck Norris. (source)

But, no, he’s not the toughest man in the world.

Let me give you some hints.

He’s got a day job. He’s enormously intelligent. He spent time at Columbia University in New York. He has a great sense of humor. He gets hate mail along with fan mail. He weighs in on matters pertaining to NASA missions. He’s participated in Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything). He’s on television a lot, even though he’s not an actor. He can hold his own with the likes of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. And, oh yeah, he’s black.

There’s a guy who’s more awesome than Barack Obama, something many people have no trouble agreeing with, although, of course, 47% of us are all about Obama. Really.

There’s just one problem: the Most Awesome Man in the World demoted Pluto, and he steadfastly refuses to apologize for it.

Pluto, a planet with five moons — Pluto has five – count ’em: FIVE – moons. Earth is so wimpy it only has one moon. Do non-planets have moons? I think NOT. (source)

But does that make him less than the Most Awesome Man in the World?

In spite of his slander against Pluto, I say no. Neil deGrasse Tyson IS the Most Awesome Man in the World.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium, is an engaging, interesting speaker and science educator. He bases his views on evidence and proofs. He was already so cool by the age of 15 that he was presenting astronomy research to professionals. Carl Freaking Sagan himself tried – unsuccessfully – to recruit the college-bound Neil Tyson to his astronomy department at Cornell. (Tyson went to Harvard instead, then graduate school in Texas and at Columbia.) He has eloquently explained the God of the Gaps. He has schooled a prosecutor who wanted him, as a juror, to rely on eyewitness testimony, and inquired of a judge why the defendant was accused of possessing 1,700 milligrams of cocaine, rather than 1.7 grams – less than the weight of a dime. His stories of his experience with jury duty underscore something that I’ve often said is wrong with the legal system – it’s set up to discourage critical thinking.

He was asked what he believed to be the most astounding fact about the universe. He responded eloquently:

The most astounding fact is the knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth, the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars, the high-mass ones among them, went unstable in their later years. They collapsed and then exploded, scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy – guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems, stars with orbiting planets, and those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

When I reflect on that fact, I look up – many people feel small, because they’re small and the universe is big – but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity. That’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant, you want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings-on and activities around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.

I follow Dr. Tyson on Twitter. Twitter is an insipid thing, parsing the world into 144 characters or less. I only use my account to promote this blog, but I have this Twitter feed on my browser’s homepage that shows me interesting things that other people have to say. It’s one way of keeping up with who just posted what where. I see in my Twitter feed when Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, posts news about religion in the public world, when Dante Shepherd posts new webcomics on his blackboard, when Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame finds a cool article. I follow political commentary on Twitter: The Tea Party Cat makes wonderfully pithy comments. Indecision is Comedy Central’s hub for all things political, and – oh! – Wonkette. The snarky Wonkette site may be my favorite political news anywhere.

I follow the thoughts of people, too. Among my favorites are Andy Borowitz and Ricky Gervais. Those guys are funny. Some people – and I am not among them – can really make those 144 characters work hard.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one such tweeter. His insights are worth repeating. And despite his obvious astrophysical prowess, his tweets don’t focus on the universe so much as they focus on, well, the world. For example:

and

Those Tweets were collected on a single site, which I was glad to see, because I know I’m not the only one who thinks just about everything Neil deGrasse Tyson says is worth hearing. I admire the heck out of the man. His values (“If aliens did visit us, I’d be embarrassed to tell them we still dig fossil fuels from the ground as a source of energy”), his wisdom (“Just to settle it once and for all: Which came first the Chicken or the Egg? The Egg — laid by a bird that was not a Chicken”), his pride in his offspring (“More evidence my 14yr old daughter is a Geek: after prompting me to ask if she knew any jokes about sodium, she replied, ‘Na'”), his knowledge (“According to the song, Rudolph’s nose is shiny, which means it reflects rather than emits light. Useless for navigating fog”), and his insights (“I’ve come to conclude that Fettucini Alfredo is just Mac-and-Cheese for food snobs”) entertain, illuminate, and educate.

What’s not to like about him? Other than the Pluto thing, I mean. Let’s disregard that for the moment.

Set aside some time and listen to his “Brain Droppings” keynote speech from TAM 6. I’ve listened to it more than once, and I don’t get tired of it. He proves, yet again, that he is the sexiest astrophysicist alive.

September 17, 2012

West of Memphis and the West Memphis Three

Last week I went to the Market Street Cinema to see the free screening of West of Memphis, the newest offering among the documentaries about the West Memphis Three. (It’s offered again later this month for anyone interested, and will be back again later in the fall.)

In the event that anyone reading this has lived under a rock for the last couple of decades and isn’t aware of the case, the West Memphis Three are Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley. They were teenagers when they were convicted of the capital murder of three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas.

In 1993 and 1994, there was a media circus surrounding the arrests and the trials. The West Memphis police, ignorant and superstitious, claimed that Echols, who was a weird kid who dressed funny, liked magic, and listened to heavy metal music, was the leader of a Satanic cult that ritualistically killed the little boys. After a nine hour interrogation, the West Memphis Police coached a confession out of Misskelley, a mentally handicapped high school dropout. All three were convicted. Echols was sentenced to death; Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life without parole.

After nearly two decades of legal wrangling, the WM3 were freed from prison about a year ago, when, rather than go through a new trial, they entered pleas pursuant to North Carolina v. Alford, pleading guilty but simultaneously declaring their innocence. It was a long road getting there – 18 years long. That’s half again as long as the Millennium Falcon’s Kessel Run. They took the whole 18 parsecs to get there.

In the film, Prosecutor Scott Ellington repeated his assertion that, despite not having reviewed the evidence in the case, he believes the West Memphis Three are guilty. He was not the original prosecutor. That dubious honor went to John Fogelman and Brent Davis, a pair to whom I have no problem assigning contempt.

Likewise, the judge was not the one who had presided over the case for 18 years. Judge David Burnett repeatedly ruled against the defense at the pretrial, trial, and post-trial proceedings. Had he still been on the bench when this offer was extended, we cannot be assured of the same outcome.

A week before the murders happened, I hung out my shingle and opened my solo law practice. Even though I had been out of law school for five years, I felt like a neophyte when it came to actually practicing law. Oh, there are stories, some of which I’ve told and some of which I will never tell, about how I groped my way to a successful practice. But in 1993 I was uncertain and confused about the practice of law. And like most of the rest of the state, I was riveted by the unfolding case. By the time of the trials eight months later, I was appalled at the travesty of justice I saw. I felt completely impotent. I had no idea that I might have helped, and boy, I wanted to help. I had gotten into the business of law to help the underdogs of the world, and the West Memphis Three defendants were underdogs from the day they were conceived.

When the first appeals were being pursued, Arkansas’s Death Penalty Resource Center, a state agency that provided litigation support and appellate representation in death penalty cases, was defunded and disbanded. One of its attorneys, Al Schay, sublet office space from me. The day he trundled in the boxes that held the transcripts of the Echols-Baldwin trial, he said I could read them. I had read countless transcripts as a law clerk for an appellate judge, and was undaunted by the thousands of pages of testimony and exhibits. I sat on the floor of Al’s office after hours and I read. And read. And became enraged at the prosecutors and the judge who presided over the cases. The fact that those three young men were convicted of capital murder on such flimsy evidence was appalling. What’s worse, I don’t remember a single motion that went in the defense’s favor – except one. That one favorable ruling was ultimately undermined by juror misconduct. The ruling should have prevented Jessie Miskelley’s coached confession from coming into evidence against his co-defendants. However, the jury foreman in the Baldwin-Echols trial made a special effort to ensure that the jurors were aware of it.

Courtroom Rotunda, Arkansas Justice Building — Courtroom Rotunda at the Arkansas Justice Building (source)

The day the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld the convictions, I realized that the court was nothing more than a calculating political beast. The majority reached its conclusion because that was the conclusion they felt they politically had to make. Three devil-worshipping teenagers had ritually murdered three little cub scouts. It was sensationalism that sold papers. It was sensationalism that provided job security even in the august halls of the Supreme Court, where I had been so proud to work not long before. It sickened me.

Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols should never have been convicted. They did not receive a fair trial. Did Jessie Miskelley? I don’t know. I’ve never read the transcript of his trial. My guess is that with the same people in positions of power, and the same facts, he did not. I know that Dan Stidham, Misskelley’s lawyer, believes he did not.

I met Dan Stidham at a seminar recently. For fifteen years, Dan Stidham was an active hero in the West Memphis Three case. He was appointed to serve as Jessie Misskelley’s attorney at trial, and was the only attorney who stuck with his client after the trials, even to the point of preparing Jason Baldwin’s appellate paperwork when Jason had no lawyer. Stidham is now a circuit judge, but he was Jessie Misskelley’s lawyer throughout the trial and appellate process until 2008, when he assumed the bench. I told him that I wished I had reached out back in those days. I didn’t because I thought I had nothing to contribute. I realize now that I could have offered my time. I told him that when the trials were ongoing, I had wanted to do something – anything – because I saw what a miscarriage of justice was happening. He gave me a look that said, “Why didn’t you?” and I felt more impotent than ever. I regret not doing something back then, even though I didn’t think I was competent to do anything.

West Memphis Three Tipline Billboard — (source)

In the years between their convictions and their release, I was peripherally aware of the movement to free the West Memphis Three. I had seen the billboard in West Memphis with its tipline phone number. I read each court’s decision denying any relief at all to the convicted men. I never forgot them, but I believed their case was hopeless. A results-oriented judicial process was at work, one I knew intimately from the inside. It didn’t matter how the judges reached their decision, only that they reached the one most politically appropriate. They had constituents to answer to each election cycle. A case as notorious as the West Memphis Three had to be controlled with an iron fist.

I never saw Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills or Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, the HBO documentaries about the West Memphis Three. I never read Devil’s Knot, investigative reporter Mara Leveritt’s book about the case. I had read news articles about the case, though, and read each judicial opinion at every level, both state and federal, as the fruitless appellate process lumbered on over the years.

Then, in the spring of 2011 I heard from Ken Swindle, an attorney in the northwest part of the state, whose contributions to a listserv for trial lawyers I had admired for several years. Would I sign a petition asking for a new trial for the West Memphis Three? I didn’t have to think about it. Hell, yes, I would! The West Memphis Three case exemplifies for me what is wrong with the criminal justice system on so many levels: cronyism among law enforcement officials and the State Crime Lab, results-oriented judicial decision-making, religious bigotry, a lack of critical thinking skills among the population at large (which make up our juries), prejudice, bad science, superstitious ignorance, the lack of resources available to all but the wealthiest criminal defendants, and the complete failure of standards of reasonable doubt and the assumption of innocence.

There’s no way I could ever practice criminal law. I would stroke out in very short order from the stress caused by the rampant injustice. The assembly-line attitudes I have encountered in family court and in juvenile court are bad enough without compounding it with the inequities of the adult criminal justice system.

But finally, the Arkansas Supreme Court did the right thing. Finally, it agreed that DNA evidence had to be considered in light of all the rest of the evidence – including evidence that at least four trial witnesses had recanted in the intervening years, and possibly including evidence that the Echols-Baldwin jury was tainted by the published confession they were never supposed to consider – and which the jury foreman made sure they did. And when the Arkansas Supreme Court sent the case back to the trial court this time, there was a new judge in town.

Judge David Laser acknowledged in open court that the release of the West Memphis Three pursuant to the Alford pleas wasn’t justice for anyone – not for the defendants, and not for the victims – because innocent men remained convicted, and were robbed by the State of nearly two decades of their lives. The terms of the plea agreement allowed three victims of a miscarriage of justice to finally go free, albeit under the burden and stigma of probation. Judge Laser said,

I don’t think it will make the pain go away to the victim families. I don’t think it will make the pain go away to the defendant families. I don’t think it will take away a minute of the eighteen years that these three young men served in the Arkansas Department of Corrections.

West Memphis Three Press Conference — WM3 at the Press Conference After Their Release Hearing (source)

Since their release, I have seen the first two Paradise Lost documentaries as well as the third one, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, which was being made just as the WM3 were freed. I have read Devil’s Knot. The thing is, it didn’t take any of these efforts to convince me that justice was not served. While they told me more than I knew before, I knew when I read the transcripts and looked at the evidence on the first appeal that the West Memphis Three were innocent. Not just “not guilty,” which can mean that they probably did it but the state didn’t prove the case, but innocent.

And that leads us to the real question: who killed Chris Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore?

West of Memphis left me with more questions than ever before. In December 2011, three new witnesses came forward with hearsay evidence that Terry Hobbs, Stevie Branch’s stepfather, has admitted guilt to members of his family. It’s my understanding that, despite his strong assertion that he would look into anything the defense brought him, Ellington has not done a single thing in the last nine months to look into those allegations. Hearsay is plenty good enough for investigators to launch investigations in much less serious crimes. If it is true that the “Hobbs Family Secret” is that Terry killed those boys, Arkansas is denying justice not only to the WM3, but to the victims and their families.

That having been said, West of Memphis did not show conclusive evidence of Terry Hobbs’s guilt. I don’t think it intended to. It raised serious, valid questions that need investigation, though. Someone killed those kids, and that someone has never done a single day’s worth of prison time for their murders.

Also disconcerting to me were David Jacoby’s on-camera statements and his willingness to allow recordings of his telephone conversations with Terry Hobbs about the night the boys disappeared. Jacoby is a friend of Terry Hobbs, and was with Hobbs for part of the evening and night when the families and police searched for the missing children. He stopped short of saying outright that he wasn’t with Hobbs during the time Hobbs claims. Since he is Hobbs’ alibi, I wish Jacoby had been asked that tough question directly, and I wish he had given a straight answer. The implied answer is there, but the lawyer in me wants it airtight.

I don’t know if Terry Hobbs did it. I don’t know if there was someone else in those woods who killed the children. But “beyond a reasonable doubt” and “innocent until proven guilty” have to mean something. They just HAVE to. And despite two juries, and despite the affirmed decisions of the appellate courts, the West Memphis Three were not proven guilty.

As a postscript, my hat goes off to Ken Swindle, who didn’t stop working on the case when the West Memphis Three walked out of that courtroom last August. Ken has filed requests for disclosure of evidence under the Freedom of Information Act on behalf of two of the victims’ parents. The West Memphis Police Department maintains that the case is closed, so the information is fair game under FOIA. The problem is, they won’t deliver. The plaintiff parents, Pam Hobbs, ex-wife of Terry Hobbs and mother of Stevie Branch, and Mark Byers, adoptive father of Chris Byers, are both very outspoken supporters of the West Memphis Three. Today, Ken requested a hearing on the FOIA request, which has been resisted by both the West Memphis PD and Scott Ellington, the current prosecuting attorney.

You go, Ken. Call me if you want help.

August 31, 2012

The Mote in God’s Eye – 35 Years Later

I have always considered The Mote in God’s Eye a seminal book about initial contact between humans and another sentient, advanced species.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, both true masters of hard science fiction, collaborated on this book in 1974. I read it in high school – so sometime shortly after it was written. I remembered it clearly as cutting edge stuff. In one scene that has popped into my mind on multiple occasions throughout the years, the humans react with horror to the speeding vehicles used by the Moties for individual ground transportation. I was glad to know my ever-unreliable neurons hadn’t messed with my memory when I found it on pages 252-253 of the new copy I bought recently:

Tall, ugly buildings loomed above them to shoulder out the sky. The black streets were wide but very crowded, and the Moties drove like maniacs. Tiny vehicles passed each other in intricate curved paths with centimeters of clearance. The traffic was not quite silent. There was a steady low hum that might have been all the hundreds of motors sounding together, and sometimes a stream of high-pitched gibberish that might have been cursing.

Once the humans were able to stop wincing away from each potential collision…

Motie, found on Rocket Ship Pajamas — Motie

The first time I read that passage, many years ago, I imagined the reaction of an 18th century sophisticate to riding in a modern New York taxicab or merging onto an urban freeway at rush hour. I thought about how a Cro-Magnon might respond to riding in a car down a quiet street in a small town. What if the Cro-Magnon was on a motorcycle?

Thirty-something years later, as someone who writes speculative fiction – sure, merely as a hobby, but, hey, a girl’s going to dream – I noticed this classic story didn’t seem so cutting edge any more. I realized that a book written during my own lifetime, a book that blew me away when I first read it, has become dated.

I’ve noticed this a time or two before. Robert Heinlein’s books about Lazarus Long, for example, are very dated in some of their sexist, chauvinistic attitudes, even though the stories and the science are not. Heinlein makes multiple references to the pleasing shape of his female characters’ anatomy, but never to the sexual attributes of male characters. The worst offenders of these books were written near the end of Heinlein’s long, prolific career. Oddly, the character noticing the anatomy didn’t rub me wrong, perhaps because we all are capable of noticing pleasing physical characteristics of the opposite sex; the author himself struck me as a dirty old man. (I know, I know. I have no basis other than my gut for even saying that. And I revere Heinlein as one of the everlasting gods of the genre. Really, I do.)

Something similar struck me on a number of occasions while rereading The Mote in God’s Eye. For instance, when Sally explains human birth control methods to a Motie, she says that “nice girls” don’t use birth control. She explains that they simply abstain from sexual relations if they don’t want to become pregnant. Her words shock the Motie, but not for the same reason they shocked me.

Even of those I know who are relatively prudish, I doubt very many, at least the people I know, would actually think that “nice girls don’t take birth control.” Nope, not even my devoutly Catholic best friend. (Of course, to hear the abstinence-only sex education crowd talk, that’s all it takes for birth control. I submit that those folks are completely unrealistic, and statistics belie their position. But that is a topic for another day.)

I guess I’ve become accustomed to the progressive social portrayal of the future that modern speculative fiction tends toward. Except for futuristic dystopias such as The Handmaid’s Tale and 1984, which feature government-imposed sexual repression, sexuality’s treatment in speculative fiction over the last half century seems fairly universal – all sex, all the time, anything goes. Certainly that was the case by the mid-70’s.

The sexual revolution was in full swing in 1974. Attitudes and social mores toward sex heaved and groaned in those years. Roe v. Wade had been decided the year before. The Equal Rights Amendment had passed both houses of Congress two years before, the same year that the Joy of Sex, which was still in the top five bestsellers in 1974, became a sensation. Birth control was in wide use, and the Summer of Love was almost a decade in the past. In 1961 – thirteen years before the Mote sun gleamed in the middle of the Coalsack, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land paved the way for these attitudes when Valentine Michael Smith created a new religion incorporating free love. By 1974, co-ed college dorms commonly dotted campuses across the nation. Penicillin cured everything but herpes and hepatitis; no one had heard of AIDS or HIV. Hair was six years into its run on Broadway, complete with full nudity.

The attitudes that dated The Mote in God’s Eye extended to the personnel on the two ships that visit the Mote world. With the exception of Sally and the perpetually pregnant Moties, every single character in the book is male. But, there’s more. I remember this book as one of the truly inspirational ones in my adolescent library, packed with action and tension. Reading it this week, it hasn’t felt the same. At first, I couldn’t figure out why the book just didn’t hold my attention the way I remembered it doing 30-something years ago. Now, less than a hundred pages from the end, I think I may have figured it out.

The book needs red ink. Had Niven and Pournelle not banged out this novel on an Olivetti typewriter, if they had used a word processor, they probably would have tightened their prose and eliminated things like lists, awkward scene transitions, jerky dialogue, and other things we can now avoid by revising a million times without rewriting the whole darn thing page by tortured page. Editing just isn’t what it used to be, for which we probably should be grateful. Otherwise our eyes might still cross, reading post-Victorian verbosity.

And then there’s the passive voice. The book doesn’t read like a scientific treatise, but still, a lot of the descriptions employ the verb “to be.” Characters interact actively, but they tend to observe their surroundings in a list. I wonder if I noticed this only because I’ve been writing more myself, and try to use E-Prime unless it just sounds silly. I wonder if I notice it because I have critiqued the work of other writers in recent months.

I hope critiquing hasn’t led to this. I like reading what other people write, making suggestions for improvement, and getting good feedback from them on my own work. If critiquing means the joy of reading suffers, then I’ll have a big hole in my life.

But now, now I have a book to finish. And even if it isn’t as good as I remember, it’s still good.

August 28, 2012

Twinkies

Because someone mentioned it in comments on my Facebook link to a recent blog post, I am now compelled to discuss the pros and cons of Twinkies, that sweet treat adored by stoners and other kids everywhere.

The Twinkies Legend ramped up a few years ago when the fried Twinkie was introduced to thronging sophisticates of fair fare. People drove for hours just to taste it, and the initial purveyors of this particular fine food sold 26,000 fried Twinkies in just 18 days. The magic was not obvious to those watching from the sidelines, but no one can deny the faithful. We, personally, have never tried this delicacy. According to reports, the famous creamy filling melts and soaks into the cake, giving it a souffle or pudding-like texture. It was an instant hit.

Deep-frying isn’t the only way to get Twinkies into your family’s diet. There’s an entire cookbook, 112 pages long, containing more than 50 recipes with Twinkies as an ingredient.

Never get between Americans and their Twinkies. In 1987, teamsters who delivered Twinkies to New York City and its New Jersey suburbs went on strike. Area Twinkies lovers panicked. The reaction was “not unlike smokers who start to tense up when they run out of cigarettes and all the stores are closed.” Twinkies addicts called distant friends and relatives to send in emergency supplies. We imagine the airlifts resembled Berlin in 1949.

Disaster struck again in March of 2000, when the teamsters’ strike closed bakeries all over the Northeast. The Internet came to the rescue during this “Great Twinkie Famine of 2000.” eBay made out like a bandit, selling 20 batches of Twinkies for over $5,000.

Twinkies are popular, no doubt about it. According to Hostess Foods, 500,000,000 Twinkies are produced annually. In case you got cross-eyed counting zeroes, that’s half a billion, with a B. America’s population today is a little over 3.14 hundred million; America is pi, and Twinkie is the ubiquitous cake that radiates among us.

pi, twinkies, and fat captain america — Source, Source, and Source

You might think that with popularity like this, the company that concocts Twinkies would be sitting on a big pile of money. Not so. Just this January, Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy protection – the second time it has done so in the last ten years. Yesterday we learned that negotiations with its unionized employees might result in the employees owning a piece of the action. Twinkies lovers everywhere hope that out of these bankruptcy negotiations will come the ingredients for Twinkies’ success.

Like so many of our favorite mass-produced foods, the ingredients of Twinkies cannot be identified by the common consumer. In fact, they are so mysterious that a guy named Steve Ettlinger wrote an entire book about these ingredients. It turns out that Twinkies come from mines. That’s right. Twinkies ingredients are mined (limestone, gypsum), drilled (petroleum), refined, and synthesized into those tongue-twisting polysyllabic compounds that are printed on the package.

Upon learning about these ingredients, we were bemused to realize that it is necessary to chill Twinkies before frying because plastic melts at high temperatures. And that creamy filling? There’s no cream in it. It’s sugar and shortening. Maybe even made from beef – so vegan Twinkies lovers, beware. When confronted with the truth about the sources of ingredients, David Leavitt, Vice President Snack Marketing at Hostess said, Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to deconstruct the universe. We think the millions of people … would agree that Twinkies just taste great.”

That’s right. He said it. Food doesn’t actually have to be made of food to taste good.

Science has weighed in on the Twinkies question. The T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project at Rice University subjected Twinkies to a series of strenuous tests to determine their properties. T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. is an acronym for Tests With Inorganic Noxious Kakes In Extreme Situations. Dedicated researchers jolted Twinkies with electricity, dropped Twinkies from staggering heights to replicate Galileo’s experiment, exposed Twinkies to radiation, plumbed the depths of Twinkies intelligence, subjected Twinkies to rapid oxidation, tested the density of Twinkies, and more.

At this point, we are hard-pressed to find anything positive about Twinkies except their taste. We thought that perhaps the nutritional value would be positive, since we heard rumors a couple of years ago that someone once went on a Twinkie Diet and actually lost weight. It turns out that what the guy essentially did was starve, so don’t replace your amphetamines with Hostess products just yet. If you want a hypoglycemic rush, Twinkies are your tool.

So what about the rumors of the eternal shelf-life of Twinkies? Turns out this is in error, too. We can attest to the lie. When we helped our teenage son empty the trunk of his car once, we found a box of Twinkies that had been bouncing around back there for quite some time. “In case I need a snack,” he explained. Sure. Boys get hungry. We understand. So we removed one of those delicious golden snack cakes from the box. It felt funny. It was hard. Like, brick-hard.

“How long have these been back here?” we asked.

Our progeny shrugged. “A few months, maybe.”

We were glad he hadn’t been on a crime spree. Had he needed to use the Twinkie Defense, he’d’ve broken a tooth.

August 26, 2012

Litterbugs Litter Butts

So today was the day for the Adopt-a-Highway litter pick-up.

The sign says “Freethinkers of Central Arkansas,” but that group was one of several that merged with the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers a couple of years ago. Somebody in charge of the organization really ought to do something about getting the name on the sign changed. Somebody? Somebody? Oh. Wait. That would probably end up being me. Therefore, it’s fine the way it is – for a little longer, anyway.

We do our highway clean-ups on Sunday mornings, because, well, it’s not like we go to church. It’s the one time in the week when people in our group are apt to be available. We met at 9:00 a.m. today, before things got too blazing hot. The mile we adopted is in downtown Little Rock, on State Highway 10 near the state capitol. It’s part of LaHarpe Boulevard where the highway crosses a railroad and becomes Third Street, then crosses the railroad again a couple of miles before it officially becomes Cantrell Road. Little Rock’s primary roads don’t tend to keep a single name for long distances. Don’t ask me why.

trash, cigarette butts, litter, gross — This patch of the side of the road is about two feet square.

Litter along this street doesn’t tend to get too out of hand. I don’t know if that’s because the property owners along this stretch tend to be conscientious about keeping their sidewalks clean. (I’m especially giving you nods of approval, Dillard’s Corporate Headquarters and Episcopal Collegiate School.)

In the years that I’ve participated in the highway cleanup, I’ve noticed one thing to be consistently true:

Cigarette smokers are some trashy, nasty, litter-bugging sumbitches.

And I don’t mean just a little trashy, either. If you count the actual number of things picked up today, far and away the most numerous were cigarette butts. If I’ve counted correctly, there are about thirty pieces of litter in the photo to the right. Twenty-six of those are cigarette butts. I circled the litter butts in red so you could see them better. The non-butt pieces of litter are circled in blue.

Do cigarette smokers realize that their butts are not biodegradable? Do they understand that when they throw their butts out of the car window they are really and truly littering? Do they know that the rest of the world really doesn’t want to look at their trash?

I guess not. I may be a little sensitive to this, seeing as how just this morning I spent an hour and half with about 15 other folks on the side of the road picking up mostly cigarette butts discarded by thoughtless smokers. Cigarette smokers litter butts like breadcrumbs through the forest paths of their lives. Why?

cigarette butts — This is my HOUSE, dammit!

trash, matches, liltter — We do have trash cans.

I don’t smoke. I am allergic to cigarette smoke. My throat closes up when I spend to much time around it. I can’t breathe. So I am grateful for the modern courtesy of people going outside to smoke when they are in my company. Smoking indoors caused me lots of unpleasant breathing issues before it became customary for smokers to go outside. I will provide ashtrays for my guests who want to smoke.

Smokers who come over to my house and toss their nasty butts in my yard are pretty friggin’ rude, in my book. Do they think no one picks up after them? Do they think I want their ugly butts to just sit there, waiting for some archaeologist to come along in a couple hundred years to dig them up and think that I lived on top of some trash heap? Damn litterbugs.

After I got home from the highway cleanup today, I went out through my son’s basement bedroom to the patio. The photo to the left shows what was on the steps outside his door. I circled the cigarette butts – five of them, and those are the ones I didn’t have to look for. They were just thrown, or carefully placed, right there on the steps leading down to the yard. I didn’t circle the matches in the photo on the left, but I was pretty appalled at the collection I found, and the photo on the right shows more matches that were apparently used to light those cigarettes. The matches were tossed onto the stoop. They are wooden, so they are biodegradable, but that doesn’t mean I really want them littering my damn deck. and we’ve got a serious drought going on. I don’t want my house to burn down, either.

I have a couple of family members who occasionally smoke at my house. I suspect that one of them left those butts outside the basement door. Another of them is my favorite youngest male first cousin, who I’ll call Paul, because that’s his name. Paul doesn’t litter cigarette butts at my house anymore. There’s a reason for that.

Paul came over one evening, and we spent a pleasant few hours chatting. Paul has spent many hours at my house, and he knows I can’t handle cigarettes inside. Off and on throughout his visit that evening, Paul would go out onto the deck to smoke. He took a can with him. I don’t remember if it was a can of beer or of soda, or if it was empty or full. He did not ask for an ashtray, though, so I assumed he was using his can as his ashtray.

“This pot is kind of cool,” Paul said. “But why does it have a hole in its side?” He was standing on the deck looking at the hanging plant that graced the door to my living room.

“A what?”

I looked at the pot. Sure enough, there was a hole in the side of the pot. I had just bought the flowers in that pot a couple of weeks before, filled the empty pot with a coconut coir potting mixture, and planted them. For a moment I was confused. I didn’t remember it being the type of pot with holes for strawberries or herbs to grow out of its sides. I reached for the pot and turned it to see if there were more holes on the sides, which I had just missed because of a psychotic break or something.

“That’s weird. It’s smoking,” said Paul.

“Shit!” I dashed for the water hose a few feet away.

After playing Fire Marshall, I looked at Paul, who looked very sheepish.

“Um,” he said.

“I guess you weren’t using that as an ashtray,” I said, nodding toward the can.

“Yeah. No. No, I wasn’t.”

“That pot didn’t originally have a hole in its side,” I said, because at that moment it dawned on me that the hole had just materialized. Or dematerialized. The plastic had melted, mysteriously.

“No, I guess it didn’t.”

“Paul, we’ve discussed smoking pot,” I said gently. Because we have, lots of times.

Pots really shouldn’t smoke.

(Paul, you know I love you. Don’t hate me for telling this story.)

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