Thursday, July 12, 2012

Being different is no crime, being too different is

We've gotten on to a crime and criminal theme this week.

My son, reviewing some of my favorites from the SLCMugshots website said, “I wonder if some of these people are criminals because of the way they look.” He meant things beyond their control, like this unfortunate individual:


If I get a zit on my nose I hide out in a dark room for three days until it’s gone. I can't imagine facing the world, knowing people will be startled by your appearance. He was arrested for controlled substance, and I don't know what that means, but I would think pain pills. I imagine whatever did this to him might cause him a lot of pain, both physical and mental.


Above: charge is forgery.

I'm not excusing criminal actions, but sometimes you can see an individual has a very rough path to walk.

On the other hand you have guys who deliberately make themselves ugly. These guys think marking up their heads with tattoos is cool or sexy, and I'm on record as saying it’s idiotic to brand yourself as so antisocial that you illustrate your face. A person who does that makes himself not only unemployable, but more easily identified if he commits crimes.

Assault:


Aggravated assault:


Methamphetamine:


I forgot to write down the reasons these two  Queequegs were arrested:



It's not enough this guy wears his hostility inked on his head, but he also wears a shirt to emphasize it:


Above: the charge states simply, “Hold for U.S. Marshals.” He could run, but he couldn't hide with a face like that.

These guys can change their appearance with haircuts:


Above, “Failure to appear.”


Above: busted for weed. You think when the cops spotted his dreadlocks they got some Rastaman vibrations about him?


Above: this fellow not only needs a haircut, but a comb as well. He was arrested for “no auto insurance,” which I didn't realize was an offense that could land one in jail. Maybe he caused an accident through negligence. After all, he doesn't pay attention to his appearance, maybe he gives the same degree of care to his driving.


Above: this man needs to change his shirt. “Lewdness with a child” is the charge. KISS my . . . what?

I call these guys the Braidy Bunch:


Above: drug paraphernalia.


Above: driving under the influence.


Above: weapons violation.

Only one woman made the list today:


I forgot to write down the charge for “Batgirl,” but she's smiling, at least. As my wife, Sally, put it, “Maybe those bats are looking for a dark cavern.” Ho-ho! Good one!

Last, none other than Thomas Jefferson made the mugshots website on Independence Day. He was charged for “tax evasion, sedition, treason and miscegenation.”


Lest you think I made that one up, I took a digital photo from my monitor of the web page:


Above: I'm not sure what the ad headlined “SHIT” is about, but it shows a horse. Horseshit...huh. Very strange, even for a website full of strange people.


Wednesday, July 11, 2012

The shoplifter


There was just something wrong about the woman. It was the expression on her face when she looked up at me.

It was in my local Walmart this past Sunday. She was crouched, looking at the bottom row of a display of beard and hair trimmers. I wanted to look at the trimmers but she was in my way. Aware that I was there she glanced back at me, but apparently me being there didn't stop her. She took a trimmer from the shelf and put it in a large carpet-bag she was holding. I stepped back into the traffic aisle in time to encounter a male Walmart employee. I stopped him and said, “There's a woman shoplifting.” He said, “Okay,” and moved on. I had noticed as he approached me he had glanced at the woman just before I stopped him.

The woman was joined by a man, and the two of them moved on. The employee came back and found me. “Those people have been in the store quite a while. We've been watching them.” He didn't have to say any more. Walmart has people who do nothing but watch for retail theft. When you enter any big store you are under observation. Sometimes, as in Walgreens, they have monitors visible, as in the pharmacy area, to let you know you're being watched. Security is sophisticated nowadays, and it's a good idea to to have it in mind. If you act suspicious you will draw someone's attention. My son, who was in town with his children, had also noticed the woman. He said, “It's amazing what people try to get away with.” I know. At the same Walmart a couple of years ago I saw two employees detaining a woman who had stuck a $2.00 set of colored marking pens in her purse. They had her sitting on a bench. One employee, holding the pens, asked her, “Why did you do this?”

“I don’t know,” said the woman in a voice that squeaked from anxiety. For a couple of bucks worth of marking pens she was going to become persona non grata at Walmart. In my town that's a fate worse than death. 

I think shoplifting, especially in large chain stores with security always watching, is a high risk endeavor. But according to some articles I've read it can also be profitable. Organized gangs of shoplifters go through stores. They can steal thousands of dollars worth of merchandise in a few minutes and be gone.

According to a 2006 article by Joel Groover in Shopping Center Today, organized shoplifting rings account for millions of dollars in thefts:
. . .the FBI’s 2004 Uniform Crime Report, an analysis of statistics culled from 17,000 law enforcement agencies, points to a marked rise in shoplifting. “Most of the crimes within the larceny/theft statistic have decreased since the year 2000,” said Eric Ives, head of the FBI’s Major Theft Unit, Criminal Investigative Division. ‘Shoplifting has increased 11.7 percent.’
     Organized retail crime is so pervasive and insidious it amounts to an all-out assault on the retail industry, writes Read Hayes, co-director of The University of Florida’s Loss Prevention Research Team, in a 59-page study titled Organized Retail Crime: Describing a Major Problem. In addition to running aggressive shoplifting rings and sophisticated credit card and check scams, for example, the crooks hit factories, cargo trucks and distribution centers. Customer-friendly return policies often enable them to take that loot back into stores and swap it for cash — plus sales tax — without providing personal identification or presenting a receipt. ‘Stolen or tainted goods are even repackaged and sold, along with first-quality goods, back to retailers by dishonest wholesalers,’ Hayes wrote in his report.
     The phenomenon of organized shoplifting — often called boosting — has plagued malls in one form or another for decades. Over the past several years, however, the crooks have modernized. ‘There has been a change in the [level of] organization,’ said David Levenberg, vice president of security and loss prevention at General Growth Properties and the chairman of ICSC’s Subcommittee on Security. ‘They have become more formalized and more technologically astute.’
But unlike Walmart, which has a zero tolerance policy for shoplifting, other retailers may make it easy for shoplifters to operate, because some refuse to prosecute, fearing false arrest lawsuits. Some don’t feel the penalties justify calling law enforcement. Again from Groover’s article:
When it comes to effectively prosecuting organized retail theft, the barriers are high. Shoplifting, after all, is a misdemeanor unless prosecutors can prove the thieves stole enough merchandise to cross felony thresholds or transported large caches of loot across state lines. Martinez cites the case of a Berlin, N.J., couple who scammed T.J. Maxx stores up and down the East Coast out of as much as $600,000. The two would steal or buy merchandise, make fake receipts with high prices on them and then use the receipts to return the items for cash, says Sgt. Louis Torres, a detective with the Holmdel (N.J.) Township Police Department. Neither the state nor federal government would take the case, but local police were swayed by T.J. Maxx’s notebook full of evidence. The sentence? Probation.
Of course we all pay for shoplifting, so if law enforcement doesn’t take it seriously, then stores and consumers will continue to take hits to the wallet. A few years ago I would have turned away from a person I might have seen shoplifting (didn’t want to get involved), but now I feel differently about such crimes.



Tuesday, July 10, 2012

“Nor iron bars a cage...”

This 12-page booklet from 1945 is very rosy look at prison as a place of rehabilitation and training.

The California Department of Corrections Guidance Center of the Adult Authority was, according to this, concerned with “the description of the man as a human being in order to plan for his future with the greatest likelihood of helping him to succeed upon return to society.” A commendable goal. I wonder if it was met with much cynicism? In the years since we have seen the United States move into the position of having the largest per capita prison population in the world. A cursory look at today’s situation shows that the idea of prison is to remove people considered dangerous from society, and to punish. They also punish people convicted of non-violent crimes by throwing them into prison with the violent inmates. I don't know how much the system looks into a man’s (or woman’s) psychological background, but with minimum sentences it seems that nowadays rehabilitation isn’t much considered.

I'm not saying that the goals of this 1945 organization weren’t good, but I think its philosophy would nowadays seem foreign to the American public. Be tough on criminals. Throw 'em in jail, lock 'em up, throw away the key is more the attitude. But it also depends on the crime. A kid from the ghetto whose chances of making it in life are pretty slim anyway will go to prison for years for drugs; a white collar crook who steals millions and wreaks havoc with lives far beyond the reach of the ghetto kid may earn a relatively short sentence. Everyone knows about the unfairness but no one seems inclined to do much about it.

This booklet gave a “talented inmate” (no credit given, but who signed his name “Peek”) a chance to do the artwork. The lettering, which was once a required skill for a commercial artist, is very professional, and the illustrations are good. In our Photoshop era most of what you see here would be taken over by a computer program, not an artist hunched over a drawing board. Whatever crime he committed to get him there I hope Peek got a job as an artist when he got out, and that he never went back to prison.














Sunday, July 08, 2012

Who...whom? I'm flummoxed.

Of all the rules of English that flummox* me, the “who-whom” rule is the most flummoxing.

Flummuxable as it is, there is a rule, but I can never remember it. This is a quote from www.grammarbook.com: 
Use the he/him method to decide which word is correct.
he = who
him = whom\
Examples:
Who/Whom wrote the letter?
He wrote the letter. Therefore, who is correct.
For who/whom should I vote?
Should I vote for him? Therefore, whom is correct.
We all know who/whom pulled that prank.
This sentence contains two clauses: We all know and who/whom pulled that prank. We are interested in the second clause because it contains the who/whom. He pulled that prank. Therefore, who is correct. (Are you starting to sound like a hooting owl yet?)
We want to know on who/whom the prank was pulled.
This sentence contains two clauses: We want to know and the prank was pulled on who/whom. Again, we are interested in the second clause because it contains the who/whom. The prank was pulled on him. Therefore, whom is correct.
Where I get in trouble is when I try to remember, “is ‘he’ who or whom?” A rule isn't a good rule if it can’t be remembered.

----------------------------

*According to my American Heritage Dictionary, “flummox” is slang, and means to “confuse; perplex (orig. unknown)” Flummox and flummoxing, used above, are words, but I have coined a new word, flummoxable, which probably won't enter the language anytime soon. It doesn’t help that flummox as a word flummoxes people, who don’t know what it means. It’s one of the reasons to avoid slang if possible, and also clichés. I might not know what their general meaning to others is. I'd be embarrassed to list all of the slang I don’t know, but going back to 1965 I was totally flummoxed by “out of sight.” It was the title of a song by James Brown, but also used in conversation, "Man! That chick is outtasight!” I finally tumbled to the phrase meaning “beyond good.” I thought for a long time it meant the person being referred to was beyond the field of vision.

Here's the late James Brown when he was pretty much outtasight himself.



Speaking of songs flummoxing up the works, Stevie Wonder's song “Uptight,” flummoxed my old Army first sergeant. In the song Stevie sings, “Baby, everything is all right, uptight, outtasight... Sarge took it to mean that to be “uptight” was to be all right. So he would ask, “How's it goin' there, Postino? Everything uptight with you?” (His meaning, to which I would reply using my meaning, the one the word really referred to, Stevie Wonder notwithstanding:) "Sure, Sarge, I'm as uptight as I can be.”

Thursday, July 05, 2012

Republicans, unconscientious objectors

I’ve been wondering exactly what the conservative objectors to Obamacare (official title is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) are specifically objecting to. Is it being made to buy something against their will by the Federal Government? In this case it’s health insurance, but in and of itself that’s not unusual. As car owners we have to buy car insurance. I don’t know about your state, but I'll bet it's like mine:  if I don’t have insurance I get fined. That’s not a federal law, but I’ve been stopped in one other state, California, where I was asked for license, registration and proof of insurance. If a law is common to all the states I believe that it is in effect federal, if not in name then by application.

Is being subjected to a penalty (under the tax law, according to the majority opinion of the Supreme Court) if you do not buy insurance give conservatives heartburn when trying to digest Obamacare? 


If you’re a homeowner then buying insurance for your house is smart. Ask the people in Colorado and Utah, not to mention every other Western state this summer, who have lost their homes to wildfires. Buying health insurance is a good idea if there’s a chance that you could rack up a debt that could send you into bankruptcy, losing your home and everything you own.

According to BTX3’s Blog there are precedents which go back to the Founding Fathers for the federal government requiring us to buy something. Quoting his blog entry of May 1, 2012:
·    In 1790, a Congress including 20 Founders passed a law requiring that ship owners buy medical insurance for their seamen. [George] Washington signed it into law.
·    In 1792, another law signed by Washington required that all able-bodied men buy a firearm. (So much for the argument that Congress can’t force us to participate in commerce.)
·    And in 1798, a Congress with five framers passed a law requiring that all seamen buy hospital insurance for themselves. [John] Adams signed this legislation.
These cases were found for the New Republic magazine by Professor Einar Ethauge of Harvard Law School. They shoot in the foot an argument by protesters of the Act. When they invoke the Constitution someone can point out these laws, which have apparently passed Constitutional muster.


I’m for anything that will help people who are dying because they can’t afford insurance. In his opinion, as BT says in his blog, the objections to the law are effectively new Jim Crow laws. As he states:
I’m categorizing this post under “The New Jim Crow”, because the lack of health care results in the deaths of tens of thousands of black babies due to lack of pre-natal or post-natal care in the first year of life...
Every year in the United States.
Put in any other terms – the lack of Health Care in the US is genocide.
I mostly agree with BT. I think it's more complicated than just racism, but at least part of the objection to the healthcare law is racism. It was proposed by a black president, and will bring a lot — thousands? millions? — of Latinos and blacks into the system. As far as it being expensive for the country, hell yes, it’s expensive, but it’s expensive for society to have to support poor people the way we do now, anyway. There will always be poor, and there will always be a need to take care of segments of our population. Right now we do it through a system of taxes and charity, but we don’t drive the poor out to the forest in trucks and then machine gun them.


Nazi Germany had a way of taking care of people they didn’t like or considered a drag on their system. Some Americans feel the same way, alas.

Nothing so overt, anyway. What we do is we let poor people get really, really ill with cancer or liver or heart disease, then when they collapse we take them into the healthcare system and by that time it’s too late. They die. On the taxpayer’s dime.

Leading the hysteria against the Affordable Health Care law are right-wing radio people who are selling their listeners the idea that a common sense approach to health care is wrong because it was passed by the “other” political party.

And as for what I'm hearing lately from Republicans, “It's the biggest tax in American history,” knowing their record for hyperbole and repeating untruths until they become mantras, I'm going to need to see the math on that.


Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Is that smoke I smell? And what have we got to read around here?

Wildfires abound. Not in my neighborhood, thank god, but in nearby towns. Looking at the mountains this afternoon I saw a huge plume of smoke. My wife, who was with a friend across town, called me to ask if I knew anything about it. I’d been watching a TV news report on it just minutes before and was able to relay information. We have had over a couple of dozen major fires in our state, many of them started by people not thinking, doing dumb things. The fire that was all a’blaze last Friday in the Southwest corner of the Salt Lake Valley (and burned four houses to the ground) was caused by a man who parked his pickup truck over dry grass, and caught it on fire with his hot catalytic converter.


Taken from my front porch. The fire is burning in a town of 10,000 on the other side of the mountain.

Of course they evacuate whole neighborhoods while the fire is being fought, and despite the best, often heroic efforts of firefighters, unfortunately, some structures are lost. People get on the TV news programs to tell their stories: “We only had minutes to get out so I grabbed our important papers and ran!” It made me think, where are my important papers, and define important. I'd probably grab my two external hard drives. The computer I could replace, but those hard drives back up everything I have. For important papers themselves I suppose they mean birth certificate, marriage license, U.S. Army discharge, et cetera...but I can replace all of those because they're public documents available from various bureaucracies. Not so the most important stuff, the hard drives and my massive collection of books and magazines, which fills my basement, and which. if it were to catch fire would turn my house into a fireball that could be seen from space. Because of all my paper goods I'm mighty careful about fire, as you can probably tell.

Earlier today I reached into a magazine holder next to the couch, just to see what I had available nearby for reading material. I drag things from the basement to upstairs, and back downstairs again all the time. I want to read it or use it for reference, so I haul it around until I'm finished with it. I scanned the covers of magazines I had at hand. I’m sharing them with you so you can see that I have many eclectic interests. But many of these magazines (and these are just the magazines, not the books, which number in the thousands) I have because I like the covers. The Vanity Fair cover with Penélope Cruz is straight glam, and there's nothing wrong with that. I also like the Lego Club magazine I picked up at a thrift store. Toy catalogs and reference are fun to look at, but if I had as many toys as I have magazines and books I'd have to build a house behind my house just to keep them. I also have an old Mechanix Illustrated with a great cover (interchangeable bodies for cars!) from 1957; and a National Geographic from 1991 with an article on the Wyeth family of artists. There are more, of course, but I’ll show them to you and you can tell me if I'm nutty or not, worrying that someday these might go up in flames. If they do I might just jump into the fire with them: MAN CAN'T LEAVE COLLECTIONS, BURNS ALONG WITH TONS OF BOOKS AND MAGAZINES. I can see that headline right now.


Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts from 1988 is an academic journal with beautiful graphics inside. I found it at a library sale, and wish I'd found more. You don't find this sort of thing on a newsstand, so I've always got my eyes open for specialized magazines, especially when they have anything to do with graphic arts.


I also found almost all of the 2004 issues of Fortean Times, published in the UK, at a library sale for a nickel apiece.



Mechanix Illustrated  has a article, “You'll Own ‘Slaves’ by 1965!” by Otto Binder, which is about robot servants. Snort. As if. Otto was a science fiction writer who created the Adam Link (human-like robot) stories in the 1930s and '40s for Amazing Stories and the fanciful article in MI is just an extension of his science fiction presented as “fact.”


I have books about N.C. Wyeth, with most of his book illustrations. It's the sort of collector I am, though, that when I see something with his art, even if I already own it somewhere else, I'll buy it. It helps that I get this stuff so cheap in thrift stores, but it reminds me I'm obsessive-compulsive.


So many New Yorker covers are so well done. This colored pencil cover is an explosion of bright colors and despite the deadpan expression of the Asian girl in front it gives me a feeling of joy.




Rudy Nappi, who was also a paperback book cover artist, did this detective magazine cover. I like the covers with paintings a lot more than photographic covers. Except for the New Yorker I can't think of any other magazines that always use artwork on their covers.





Sunday, July 01, 2012

The unreal reality

Breaking Pointe is a mini-series on the CW Network. It is advertised as an inside look at a ballet company, Ballet West, which works out of Salt Lake City, Utah. I think most ballet aficionados who tune in to the show are looking for more ballet and less of the personal life of the dancers, but it was quickly established what the filmmakers have decided to show, and that’s soap opera.

Such as:

Rex loves Allison, but she doesn’t love him because she still carries a torch for Jonathan (whom we don’t see). She pushes Rex away as he tries to get closer.


Ronald (Rex’s brother, also with Ballet West) loves Katie, but Katie did not get a contract renewal, so she had to go to Idaho to find another job, leaving both young lovers stricken. (Katie does have to dance for the rest of the season with Ballet West, but after the season she'll be gone.)


Ronnie is a superstud lead dancer who is very into himself. As young ballerina Beckanne says just before the opening night performance, “You know Ronnie is being serious when he isn’t flirting with all the girls.” Beckanne is wise beyond her 19 years, and even at her young age has pegged Ronnie as potential trouble.


I don’t know what the gestation of the show has been, how long it’s been in the editing room, from filming to broadcast, but decisions had to be made as to what to show in six one-hour programs. They’ve gone for the romance, personal breakdowns and diva behavior.

Allison DeBona acts the diva. She is upset about the tempo the conductor has set for the music for her solo.  She goes on and on about it, and the troupe members enable her negativity by their passivity. Allison is upset because Rex is pushing her to commit (a role reversal there), and her parents don't think he's right for her. When her parents visit they try to enable her but also guide her relationship decisions. She tells them to leave it alone, to quit promoting her ex, Jonathan, to her, because he’s gone. Wow, she even had me crying. (Read heavy sarcasm into that statement.) In looking  for information online about the show I see that Allison has been taking a lot of heat from viewers over her tempermental behavior, and inflicting mental cruelty on a boy who loves her.


Allison milks the drama.

My personal feeling is that Rex should just drop Allison like a bad habit. Honest, you have to see this guy. He’s a young Adonis. As I told Sally during one of his hopeless expressions of love for Allison (and her rebuff, of course), this guy could have any girl anywhere, any time. Why any man would stick around and take the heartache of unrequited love is beyond me, anyway, but especially when he looks like a movie star.

The show couldn’t resist it when Rex and Ronald traveled home to San Francisco over a weekend to be with their family, sisters and parents, every one of them impossibly beautiful. Life just ain’t fair. (I should’ve been born with Rex’s looks and body, with the additional ability to play guitar like Eric Clapton. That seems fair to me.)


The show isn’t all soap opera. There are lighter moments when the dancers go drinking at one of the few actual nightclubs in Salt Lake City (camera shots of the city avoid the LDS Temple, and no religious references are made). There is time spent in the rehearsal hall, with the rehearsing dancers diligently scrutinized by the boss, Adam Sklute. There’s also a truly annoying little Russian woman who is constantly kibitzing and correcting the dancers. She yells out “Stopstopstopstopstop!” over and over, and it begins sounding like a mantra. After a time I’m sure the dancers want  to stopstopstopstopstop her and throw her out the window.

As with other reality shows, there’s something the filmmakers would like us to forget. There are cameras filming, there are soundmen with boom mikes out of camera range. Filming the rehearsals, the concerts and being with the dancers when they are expressing intimate thoughts, or arguing over matters of romance, makes the show unreal, not real. It’s my contention that reality goes out when cameras come in. Yes, these are real people, real dancers, members of a ballet troupe, young people who have love affairs and dalliances along the way. And yet they’re doing it in front of cameras. How real is that?

Think about it. If cameras set up in your house, at your place of business, in front of a park bench where you are whispering words of love to your significant other, would you be able to act natural? Hell, no. I know if they were filming me I’d be putting on my best Barrymore, with flourishes and gestures. Reality is a misnomer for this type of program and another name should have been used to define it, because under the conditions reality is unachievable. (Maybe they should call it "fakeality television.")

Despite the negatives, there's at least one thing I like about the show. It's Beckanne, a 19-year-old with a lot of talent, a fresh face and a positive attitude. She is careful to stick to dancing and avoid drama.


I know I'm not part of the demographic the producers and CW Network are aiming at, the 18 to 34-year-old female viewers the program skews to. Because of my outsider status I tend to apply my cynicism to the personal and the emphasis on relationships. I'm sure the audience the show plays to is lapping up the very things I'm most critical of.