Mark Schannon This is a true story. The person trapped in the Kafkaesque world of U.S. Immigration is still in a holding facility so I have to be careful about specifics because I firmly believe the Immigration people will take it out on him should they be able to identify him. |
by Brian Sorrell Gadgets? How about God-gets? That should be the word, because that's what they are. Newfangled electronic devices are newfangled Gods - in agnostic hands. From the iPod to the Blackberry to the sleekest of the slickest cells, we no longer wear our faiths on our sleeves: we clip them to our belts in polytheistic, plastic holsters. |
by Chip Spear Why do we continue to insist we are engaged in a "War on Terror"? Terror is a psychological state, it is not a political entity, it is not group or a movement. Terrorism is a means, an offensive tool of war. It is a strategy designed to further political goals of a group or state. We are not waging a war on terror. That would be like saying that The New England Patriots are waging a war on the forward pass, or the Yankees are waging war on fast balls. |
by Ryan Seay
Last month, I had the pleasure of repeatedly working with some superb artists who, across the past two decades, have really impacted their respective genre, music in general, and even some non-music-related causes ranging from politics to pets. No independent band has received a greater welcome or greater success than they have and it will take a band of megalithic proportions to topple them from that achievement. This month's featured artists, here at Blogcritics, are NOFX. |
Sidney Simpson Developing Criminal Record?
One has to feel sorry for Sidney Simpson. For surely the child has some suspicion that her father, O.J. Simpson, murdered her mother. I can’t imagine living a life with a man I think killed my mother.
Sidney, now 20, got into a bit of trouble recently for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct. The problem stemming from an incident involving bad comments she thinks were made about her mother.
It’s not clear if such comments were made or, as I would suspect, the comments were really about her father. Sure, she’d defend her father no matter what she suspects. He’s her father and the only living parent she has left.
From Local 10.com:
O.J. Simpson's daughter is expected back in court today.
Sydney Simpson, 20, was granted a continuance last month on charges of resisting arrest and disorderly conduct stemming from an incident at Everglades School last year.
She was arrested in January 2005 after refusing to stop yelling at officers outside the school.
Witnesses said that Simpson got into a scuffle after she thought someone had made negative comments about her mother.
Going the Speed Limit a Dangerous Thing
Here’s a True Crime snippet about how dangerous it is to not commit a crime when everyone around you is.
With the coming growth of such as I-pods soon enough we will see more offbeat films like the ones these ingenious Georgia State students dreamt up. As soon as I came across this story I was intrigued.
Now I don’t know where I-285 is but I’m familiar with I-95 and the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Roads where one puts one’s life in danger trying such silly shenanigans as going the speed limit. Even with the speed limit on the interstates now 65 mph, few drivers would dare stick to the number, much less go one mile an hour less.
What these kids did, they got four cars and each car claimed a lane on I-285. The four cars then all drove that interstate, in tandem, at the posted speed limit. They filmed the many driver reactions to this stalemate.
It’s considered good form to move to the right if you’re driving “slower” to allow other drivers to pass. For these four cars to drive, side-by-side, blocking all traffic behind, is probably not against the law, per se. It would be considered bad driver etiquette but few go to jail for that.
I can envision a collective montage of driver rage under this circumstance. Drivers on the interstates too often veer dangerously around other drivers they consider as going too slow. I’ve often had drivers veer around me, giving me a fine middle finger to boot, even when I was in the extreme right hand lane. We need to admit it, there are no lanes for drivers who want to go the speed limit.
Not that I, please believe, go the speed limit either when upon the interstates. Indeed I often drive up to Maryland from the back roads of Delaware and I know when I’ve got to speed it up as, well I’ll be tail-gaited unmercifully if I don’t. My rule of thumb is to go ten miles an hour beyond the speed limit and to stay in the far right lanes whenever possible. Even at that I get tail-gaited and likely cursed by drivers who simply want to go as fast as they can.
In the case of the Georgia State students’ little experiment, they reported vehicles were passing them on the shoulder! This on an interstate!
Good luck to these innovative film pioneers. They’ve got a great story line and view into this country’s driving habits.
From AJC.com:
It won't win an Oscar, but 'A Meditation on the Speed Limit,' a short film that was the brainchild of college student Andy Medlin, is quite a hit.
Some strange scenes, including a car passing in the emergency lane, were the product of Georgia State students simply following the speed limit.
"I was pretty sure that I was doing something stupid," said another.
That may be true. But, young and brash, they had a plan.
They wanted to go the speed limit on I-285.
Who Reported St. Guillen’s Body to 911?
For whoever called in the report that a body was over at “Fountain and Seaview” is very likely the murderer of Imette St. Guillen, a pretty woman who was to graduate with a master’s degree this coming spring.
At the time of this writing there’s not much publicly known about the crime. I think that bit about a deranged friend, as written by the Nypost.com to be a strange turn of phrase. I don’t know if the reporter wrote it that way or the reference is an oblique hint as to the investigators’ theories.
I suspect the words as reported do indicate some suspicion by the cops that St. Guillen was murdered by someone she either knew or left with when she was last seen in a NY bar.
The intriguing thing about this murder is that 911 call. Because as I understand it, St. Guillen’s body was covered in a blanket which was taped close. Tape also was applied in such a manner as to completely cover her head. Whoever called 911 that morning certainly seemed to know there was a body under that blanket. Something a casual passerby might not have assumed.
St. Guillen, shown here holding a card made by her family reading "I ¤ NY" and bearing pictures of a yellow cab and the Statue of Liberty, was set to graduate with a master's in forensic psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the spring.
Instead, a deranged fiend ended her life, abducting her early Saturday after a night out on the town, brutally raping and strangling her and then dumping her body in remote corner of Brooklyn.
"I want people to realize New York was her life," St. Guillen's stepbrother Luke Holbrook, a Boston cop, told The Post.
"Someone in New York should step up and honor her by coming forward with information."
An anonymous caller tipped police off to where her body was dumped.
The brief exchange with a 911 operator at 8:30 p.m. Saturday - details of which were revealed to The Post - went as follows:
Operator: "Hello, 911."
Caller: "I think there's a body over at Fountain and Seaview."
Operator: "How do you know? What did you see?"
Caller: "It looks like a body. You should send someone to take a look at it."
The tipster then hung up.
Illnois Police Trained in Massachusetts?
Three parking tickets and a tow-away notice before anyone noticed the offending vehicle contained a dead body? Kind of like doing a “wellness check” on a house and not finding the dead bodies under the comforter.
From Keyetv.com:
(AP) PEORIA, Ill. Police in Peoria now say three parking tickets and a tow-away sticker had been placed on the sport utility vehicle in which a
dead man's body was found last week.
Officers confirmed Friday that someone in the parking-enforcement division had issued the tickets and sticker to the SUV, which was parked illegally near Methodist Medical Center. The ticket writer did not see the body of 46-year-old Michael Hudson of Decatur inside the black Mercedes.
Hudson had been reported missing February Sixth, and his body was discovered in the back seat three days later when someone walked by and noticed a foot against the passenger-side, backseat window.
How About That Joran Van der Sloot and His Latest Story?
Indeed, he’s been quite smitten about talking to the many cameras recently focused upon him.
The latest story by Joran is that he and Natalee went to a beach that night, that they planned on having sex but neither one of them had a condom. So Joran left Natalee alone on the beach and he has no idea what happened to her.
I say “latest” story because young Joran certainly has had his share of stories. Including the one where he and his buddies, Deepak and Kalpoe, dropped Natalee off at the Holiday Inn. And where they also fingered two innocent black men as being security guards they saw that night. These same black men spent ten days in jail thanks to Joran and his lying friends.Of course Joran apologized to Greta and said their framing of those innocent men was a “bad thing”. Joran said he lied because he was embarrassed about the condom and he was fearful of being charged with Natalee’s disappearance.
For three nights Joran’s been on Greta and finally I had to change the channel. Allegedly his parents didn’t want him to do the personal interviews (Joran’s spoken on other shows as well) but there they were, with him in America and why else would they come here?
Hey look. A young American girl is missing and the last three to see her alive have lied endlessly about that night. Now Joran says they lied because they were embarrassed? Common sense says better to be embarrassed than locked up for a crime one didn’t commit.
Add to the strangeness of this flurry of interviews, Joran talks nonchalantly about gambling and drinking and “regularly using condoms”. This kid is 17 years old!
I suppose the Van der Sloots decided Natalie’s body is properly buried in the sea and the Aruban investigators can’t pin a thing on them. Now is the time to get out and about and tidy up that bad image.
One free murder and an image makeover to boot.
My first post on Van der Sloot
Leaving With a Dumb Criminal Story
Heh. He had the gun, with the serial number tattooed on his body!
From the Boston Herald:
A Framingham man arrested in May on gun charges after police found an exact tattoo of the weapon, down to the serial number, on his hip was sentenced to five years in prison after he pleaded guilty to 10 charges.
Justin Breakspear, 20, of Framingham, will be on probation for 10 years after his release from MCI-Cedar Junction, said to the Middlesex District Attorney’s office.
Breakspear originally pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in Middlesex Superior Court on July 19, but changed his plea to guilty on all charges. He pleaded guilty to two counts of the illegal possession of a machine gun, second offense, two counts of illegal possession of a firearm without an FID card and two counts of improper storage of a large capacity firearm.
Breakspear also pleaded guilty to a second offense of carrying a gun without a license, defacing a firearm’s serial number and the illegal possession of marijuana.
At first he denied the guns were his, but the tattoo convinced police otherwise.
More True Crime Updates HERE
The 2006 NAACP Image Awards-A Caucasian Tunes In
Now ordinarily there would be a disclaimer inserted here that race of the viewer does not matter or should it.The rebuttal to this would be that the nature of the awards themselves are racially oriented so such disclaimers are not needed.
For surely, I would argue, a white person might have a perspective an African-American might not.
First, I thought the NAACP Image Awards, aired on Fox on Friday, 3/3/06, were terribly boring. Now is there a person on this planet, of any race, color or culture, that could call that assessment a racial one? Boring is boring no matter the skin color.
Indeed I was expecting a bit more entertainment although it must be understood that these awards are given out a week earlier with the broadcast aired after the fact. This fact tends to take some of the pizzazz out of any award show.
There were few entertainment segments and those that existed hardly captured the flavor of African-American talent so abundant in our culture and the wellspring of mainstreaming blacks into our society. There was one dance sequence that intrigued but it was entirely too short. Indeed even the singers who won awards didn’t sing their songs and this disappointed.
Frankly if I were producing a black awards show to be broadcast during prime time across middle America, I’d have some Jazz features, definitely some Motown, even a bit of rap music. IF that’s stereotyping then I accept the accusation. But ostensibly this is a show of entertainment, else why bother with the broadcast after the awards have already been given? It seemed a prudent thing to insert, on the televised broadcast, features that entertainingly show the audience the richness and depth that black culture brought to this country.
Or is the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) trying to look so mainstream that frankly the show presented could have consisted entirely of white people and no one would have noticed the difference. And I don’t mean this as a compliment.
Even the little bit of politics inserted quietly into the gala was lackluster. At the beginning our troops in Iraq were greeted, thanked and lauded. I was so glad for this because I regularly, in front of my lying eyeballs, see plenty of black American troops in Iraq and for the NAACP to make this any sort of issue would be to slap those fine African-American soldiers directly in the face.
The insertion of Tookie Williams into a montage of celebrated persons who died last year was the only faux pas of the evening. Come on, NAACP. You pick your battles. Tookie Williams was hardly any black hero and his image insinuated along with such as Rosa Parks was just dumb.
I got to wondering why even bother with a black image awards event. Then remnants of my old Public Relations degree kicked in and the notion made sense.
From the NAACP Image Awards Web site:
Presented annually, the NAACP Image Awards is the nation’s premier event celebrating the outstanding achievements and performances of people of color in the arts as well as those individuals or groups who promote social justice.
The NAACP Image Awards are an exciting, star-studded salute to the best in entertainment. Honorees, presenters and performers have included many of the major celebrities in America as well as international political figures and dignitaries. There are 36 competitive categories in the fields of motion picture, television, music and literature. There are also several honorary awards including the Chairman’s Award, The President’s Award and The Image Awards Hall of Fame.
The NAACP Image Awards originally aired late night for eight years in the “Saturday Night Live” time slot on the NBC Network. Since 1996, the NAACP Image Awards have been shown in primetime on the FOX network where they have become a major programming event.
To understand the importance of the NAACP Image Awards, they have to be placed in a social and historical context.
Ideas and images create the belief systems that control our individual and societal actions. When it comes to forming ideas, reinforcing stereotypes, establishing norms and shaping our thinking nothing affects us more than the images and concepts delivered into our lives on a daily basis by television and film. Accordingly there is ample cause for concern about what does or does not happen on television when there is little or no diversity in either opportunities or the decision making process.
AS the awards were presented, more questions passed through my mind. How on earth are such nominations decided? We assume here that the award recipient should be an African-American “in the arts” as the organization contends. No problem so far.
But for the best comedy? The best drama? Must the entire show be about black Americans? Should all or a majority of the cast be black American? An example would be Grey’s Anatomy, which won outstanding drama series. I’ve never watched this show but what is unique about it, in terms of black images, that it should receive an award from the NAACP? I ask the same question about The Young and the Restless, a soap opera for goodness sake. What makes the shows/movies awarded deserving of this special award from an organization devoted to minding the rights and images of African-Americans is what I wonder here? HBO’s Lackawanna Blues won many awards but the movie is about black people and black culture. The relationship gelled for me. The other entertainment award winners and their connection to black culture is nebulous in my middle-age white mind.
Above is a montage of three individuals or groups that received a special award from the NAACP. Susan Taylor and the Neville Brothers I can understand. I will never understand the laud placed on Carlos Santana as, go with me here, isn’t he white?
Which is not to cast aspersions on Santana for he is a fine entertainer. It’s lost on me why he deserves an NAACP image award.
Below a complete list of winners from the NAACP image award web site.
More TV Reviews HERE
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