Editor’s note: Part I/Part II
Photo credit: « м Ħ ж » ONE – Introduction I was a university student in Business Management when I first heard the term Eighty-Twenty Principle. It was applied quite simply to the balance between inventory and profitability. In essence, it said that eighty percent…
Photo credit: Sophia Louise ONE – Introduction David Simon, creator of The Wire and Treme, said in an interview with Bob Edwards that America is a “prisoner of short-term gain.” I thought this a most elegant summation of this country’s evolution into the ethical swamp…
Some of you may remember the initial post about my friend Buddy being poisoned with Agent Orange in Vietnam. More collateral damage care of our government. Lovely euphemism, eh? Just between us, it usually means someone gets killed as a by-product of waging war.
Sadly, I now write a follow-up to that post.
In support of cultural evolution of alternative and often derided forms, I wish to laud the language of lethargy. May we start at the bottom? Y’all. The term most mocked among the finer breeds of educated humanity in the USA. As words suffer from the…
It is important to ask of those who feel they have the South neatly bound in easy platitudes of rednecks, bigotry, ignorance and poverty, accompanied readily by the images of wasted lives in rural primitivism, if they might have drifted into a bit of their…
Editor’s Note: This post first appeared August 1, 2011.
It was the last day of jury duty for this particular cattle call. No one wanted to be chosen – especially for the murder case requiring a voir dire that day. Maybe an additional month! Maybe sequestered in an Airline Highway motel! Oh, god, how bad could this semiannual nightmare get?
One hundred and fifty people were called for voir dire on the Big Murder Case. He was one. Almost the entire pool had their immediate futures on the line. The courtroom seated the whole group. A sub-set of fourteen was called in each round for questioning in the jury box. The usual. “Do you know the defendant?” “Have you been a victim of crime?” and – wait a minute! “Would you be reluctant to return a verdict of guilty knowing that several witness feel too intimidated to testify in court?” Why is everyone saying no to what seems to me a pretty important little question? A small window opened.
Last Supper Redux from Gerald Cannon on Vimeo. — 265 executed inmates and their last meal request and date of death. — Vocal track of execution of Jerome Boudin — Musical tracks formed from short samples and compositions using DEAD in the C Major Scale
(The best humor is always painful. So is the worst.) As you know, the best cultures always honor their elders. Perhaps that is even true of bacterial cultures, or things in that mold. And we all know that the elder is the most beautiful…