Casual Observations

• There have been 12 mass murders in our nation’s history involving the shooting deaths of 11 or more innocent victims. The first half of those occurred over a span of 50 years, from 1949 to 1999. The second half occurred during the last six years. Something’s terribly wrong here and it appears to be getting worse.
• Both of Texas’ U.S. senators are an embarrassment. First John Cornyn addresses the Senate on Syria and doesn’t take a side on the issue, but takes all sides. Then Ted Cruz says of the only avowed and unrepentant racist ever to serve in the U.S. Senate: "We need 100 more senators like Jesse Helms."
• I don’t care what Johnnie Manziel did at Kyle Field last Saturday, he has absolutely no chance of winning a second Heisman in this, his last year at Texas A&M.
• Texas coach Mack Brown has done an abysmal job of late in hiring assistant coaches and that is the main reason for the Longhorns’ fall from an elite status. It may be time for a regime change.
• Coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival, 12 Years a Slave has become the frontrunner for this year’s best picture Oscar. It should be noted that coming out of last year’s TIFF, Silver Linings Playbook was in the same position. I will have my Oscar predictions coming up around the end of the month.
• I will be on vacation next week, so don’t look for any blog entries between Sept. 20-29.

Who’s the real bad guy here?

Why is everyone upset at this guy ....

I am somewhat bewildered over all this holier-than-thou hand-wringing going on among the self-anointed morally superior over the fate of New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner while no one seems to be talking about San Diego Mayor Bob Filner.

Let’s compare their transgressions.

Weiner sent a picture of his crotch from his phone to and exchanged X-rated text messages with a woman last summer. The seriousness here is that all this happened more than a year after he resigned from Congress in disgrace after admitting to similar activities.

...while letting this jerk off the hook?
 

But unlike the moment when he announced his resignation from Congress, his wife, Huma Abedin, a woman I greatly admire, was by his side for Tuesday’s disclosures. She said Weiner told her before he decided to run for mayor that more of these pictures might be revealed (pun intended), but the decision was made that he should run anyway.

By the way, all sides agree there has never — ever — been any face-to-face or any other sort of physical contact between Weiner and the woman who received a picture of his weiner. Yet, it seems that whole world is up in arms.

Meanwhile, all away across the country, a third woman is accusing Mayor Filner of actual hands-on sexual harrassment, saying the mayor tried to kiss her no less than four times during a business meeting. Those accusations came today, just one day after political consultant Laura Fink said Filner patted her "posterior" during a fund raising event.

And on Monday, Filner’s former communications director Irene McCormick Jackson actually sued Filner for sexual harassment, claiming Filner subjected her and many other women to "crude and disgusting" comments and inappropriate touching. Among other things, Filner allegedly told Jackson she should not wear underwear to work.

Look, I’m not saying Weiner deserves a pass here, but let’s put these things in perspective. How about some of that outrage directed out West?

An anniversary of note

It was 78 years ago today that Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow met their grisly end. And it only seems like 45.

A murderess' magnet

As human beings go, Casey Anthony is a rather despicable one. After murdering her 2-year-old daughter and hiding her body in a swamp, she partied and dance the night away at area clubs while officials searched for the missing infant. What kind of people does someone like this attract? The type that you could shower for a week, and not wash off all the slime.

No more handwriting in Indiana

I had a friend once whose former husband used to type the child support checks he sent. She thought it was sort of strange and I must admit I thought so too.

But maybe he was just years ahead of his time. Either that, since I lost touch with the woman in question, her ex may have moved to Indiana and become a member of that state’s Department of Education.

I say that because that department has now decreed that schools no longer have to teach writing in longhand to students. Instead, they are expected to become proficient on a keyboard.

According to Indiana clinical psychologist Dr. Scott Hamilton, after students are taught how to sign their name in cursive, “The time allocated for cursive instruction could then be devoted to learning keyboarding and typing skills. From an intuitive standpoint, this makes sense, based on the increasingly digital world into which this generation of children is growing up.”

Yeah, it does make sense. But are they going to teach students to type on a standard computer keyboard or on a Blackberry?

The 10 most powerful people in Dallas

The powerful one

As you can tell by now, I’m a sucker for lists. This one comes courtesy of former Dallas County Election Judge Victor Medina, giving us his choices of the 10 most powerful people in Dallas:


1. Dallas City Manager Mary Suhm (a no-brainer choice)
2. Dallas County Commissioner John Wylie Price
3. Dallas Mayor-elect Mike Rawlins
4. DISD interim superintendent Alan King (can an interim be all that powerful?)
5. State senators John Carona and Royce West
6. Dallas Police Chief David Brown
7. Former President George W. Bush
8. Dallas County GOP Chairman Wade Emmert
9. Channel 8 reporter Brett Shipp
10. Dallas Observer writer/reporter Robert Wilonsky

I can argue the merits of 7-10. How is Bush all that powerful in Dallas right now? He’s a tourist attraction but so is NorthPark. Since Dallas and Dallas County are no resoundingly blue, how can we have a red party chairman up there? What makes Brett Shipp all that powerful? And while I have all the respect in the world for the great Robert (Does he ever take a day off?) Wilonsky, I’m not sure he could organize a parade attracting 250,000 spectators and then whip out his checkbook to cover te $340,947 cost, saying “I got off cheap.” As usual, however, Wilsonky does a damn fine job of writing about it.

This should keep the intruders out

Herman Cain

I don’t know how familiar you are with Herman Cain, but a lot of people who don’t have their heads screwed on straight are becoming enamored of this guy who is running for the Republican nomination for President. When he officially announced his candidacy last month, he declared:

“We don't need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States of America; we need to reread the Constitution, and enforce the Constitution... I know that there are some people that are not going to do that, so for the benefit of those who are not going to read it because they don't want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”

No there isn’t.

Now you would think that the former head of Godfather’s Pizza, or at least one of his handlers, would have been able to tell him the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is found in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution.

But that’s nothing compared to his latest plan. He wants to build a Great Wall of China along the U.S./Mexico border and on the U.S. side, dig a moat and fill it with alligators. Don’t believe me. Then watch this. And, if you don’t want to watch it, you can read the transcript:

“I just got back from China. Ever heard of the Great Wall of China? It looks pretty sturdy. And that sucker is real high. I think we can build one if we want to! We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence! Now, my fence might be part Great Wall and part electrical technology...It will be a twenty foot wall, barbed wire, electrified on the top, and on this side of the fence, I’ll have that moat that President Obama talked about. And I would put those alligators in that moat!”

Palin conjures up those box-of-rocks comparisons again



Palin, Paul and mangled history

 I wouldn’t have mind it if Sarah (the joke who would be President) Palin had simply mangled the historical accuracy surrounding Paul Revere. Afterall, most Americans’ images of Revere are based not on history books but on a work of fiction — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere that was written in 1861, 86 years after Revere, at the behest of physician Joseph Warren, attempted to ride from Boston to Concord to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the regular army, as it was called then, was after them. Revere was one of several riders who made the trip and many of them traveled all the way. Not Revere, however. He never made it past Lexington.

But even Wadsworth never suggested that Revere was “defending the nation” with his ride, as Palin tried to claim. It should have been obvious to this half-term governor that at this time there was no nation to defend — the Declaration of Independence didn’t come into being until a year later. And where Palin got the idea that Revere’s warnings had anything to do with a colonial form of gun control is beyond any logical explanation.

Fortunately we have writers like Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg who know enough about history to put it all in a proper perspective.

I may be somewhat stocky, but folks in Philly still call be Rocky

Trust me, I’m not making this up. Sylvester Stallone is negotiating with the production team responsible for the current Broadway musical production of Sister Act about turning his 1976 Oscar-winning film Rocky into a musical. The plans right now are to have it ready to open in Germany (I have no idea why) in the fall of 2012 and then on Broadway by spring 2013. Stallone would not be a member of the cast.

I could’ve fallen for the lovely Maid Marion
But instead I’ll just have to yell “Yo, Adrian”

I’ve got to find a way to win the title somehow
Because, as every knows, I’m gonna fly now

Don’t have sex with your spouse in Florida, you could be arrested

For those of you planning family Florida vacations this year, I felt I owed it to you to warn that if you want to have sex in the Sunshine State with your spouse or significant other either do it before October 11 or else consult with a vet or a handy livestock breeder prior to your lovemaking to make sure you are following “accepted animal husbandry practices, conformation judging practices, or accepted veterinary medical practices.” If you don’t, you’re breaking the law in Florida. And that means these guys could be busting through your door at any time.

The best illusion of the year

Start the video and concentrate your vision on the white dot in the middle of the screen. Do the colors stop changing when the dots begin to rotate? They don’t, but it appears they do. Apparently the spinning motion suppresses the viewer’s ability to detect the changes.

The official name for this illusion is “Silencing awareness of change by background motion” and on Monday it was named the best illusion of the year at a contest for this sort of thing in Naples, Fla.

My inquiring mind wants to know

Exactly how did Florida state legislator Nan Rich learn that a man apparently suffocated a family goat during a sex act? (There’s also a side note here to our mayor if he’s still serious about drooping pants — get the legislature involved.)

A dog hero

Food violations at Jonestown

I don't know of anyone who, when considering an evening of haute cuisine, decides to dine at a sports facility. So the news that 72 percent of the food vendors at Jonestown had some kind of health inspection violations did not come as a major shock to me. What did surprise me was the reaction from Jonestown spokesman Brett Daniels, who obviously follows the David Marguiles (see following post below) theory of crisis response. Daniels said the ESPN report was misleading and only a handful of the 185 concession stands at the stadium had serious problems. I don't know how he defines "handful," but one concession stand seems one too many in my book. Especially if that's the one that gives me food poisoning.

A strange sense of balance in the world

For every piece of news that makes me advocate and actively pariticipate in vigilante justice, along comes something that makes me feel good about the world we live in, although someone needs to tell David Marguiles he needs to come up with better arguments on behalf of his clients.

These folks are dumb enough to be elected to Joe Barton's Congressional seat

Let me see if I get this straight. A 19-year-old woman, a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy are minding a 9-month-old baby outside the apartment of one of these idiots. The 19-year-old tells the 14-year-old to assume full custodial duties for the infant because she, the 19-year-old, has to go inside to use the bathroom. Minutes later, the 14-year-old decides she needs to go inside as well, handing the infant off to the 12-year-old. When the two older females come back outside, what do they see? They watch as the 12-year-old, carrying the infant in his arms while he's riding a motorcycle, crashes the motorcycle into a curb. The baby was hospitalized with head abrasions. Here's hoping when it leaves the hospital, it leaves in the care of someone with enough sense to look after its best health and welfare.

The Father's Day Tragedy

The immensity of it dwarfs even Shakespeare's epic tragedies and that's the reaction of someone as far removed from the chain of events as yours truly. I don't want to even imagine - nor do I think I even could - what it must be like for those with direct association to what happened at that apartment complex in southern Dallas County this Father's Day just past.

David Brown Jr., 27, shot and killed 23-year-old Jeremy Jontae McMillan as McMillan was driving his girlfriend and two small children into the apartment complex where he planned to have a Father's Day dinner. The last word I had was that Brown and McMillan did not know one another.

A short time later Brown, wearing only brown boxer shorts and a pair of sunglasses, then shot and killed Craig Shaw, a five-year veteran of the Lancaster Police Department before Brown himself was shot and killed by other Lancaster policemen.

And the instigator of all this violence was the son of a man I admire and respect as much as any human being I know and, to compound the tragedy, the head of law enforcement in our city, Dallas Police Chief David Brown.

I am so afraid the final chapter in this woeful tale has yet to be written and, when it is, it's only going to make me sadder.

Uhm ... excuse me .... say, driver ... uhm, ya think we might be going the wrong way

According to the story in The Dallas Morning News, a woman driving a Ford F-150 pickup truck the wrong way on Interstate 30 crashed head on with a Chevrolet Tahoe traveling the right way near Ferguson Road. The Ford had two passengers inside.

I am familiar with that stretch of road and, trust me on this, it's difficult to get on I-30 around there if you're going the wrong way. But even if the driver managed to pull it off, don't you think at least one of the passengers in the truck might have noticed something was amiss.

And if not, the Dallas County coroner owes all of us a warning about what substances, legal or otherwise, these people had in their bodies.

Reservation confirmed

It's not fair to boast about the accuracy of this prediction. What with the legacy of Texas juries in cases like this and this particular defendant's history of evil deeds, this sentence was a no-brainer. Let's see if we can capsulize Donald Andrew Bess's guy's criminal background:

• Convicted this week and sentenced to death for the 1984 rape and murder of an SMU coed, a crime he committed immediately after he was paroled from prison on another rape charge.
• He stood trial for the rape and murder of Angela Samota while serving a life sentence for another rape in Houston.
• Two women testified during the punishment phase of Bess's current trial that he raped them.
• His ex-wife testied Bess physically abused her, including when she was five months pregnant, and later, in a fit of anger, he kicked their baby's crib when the 5-month-old infant was asleep inside it.

Like I said: A no-brainer.

Southwest Airlines, where's bags fly free and heads don't fly at all

I'm just dying to see where this story is heading (pun intended). For one thing, I had no idea there was any market - "underground", above ground or at ground level - for human heads. Then there's the mention that some of the heads were not "whole" (Exactly what part of the head was being shipped?). And, if you stumbled across a listing for company calling itself "JLS Consulting LLC," I'd be willing to bet you wouldn't automatically jump to the conclusion that their business was transporting human heads across state lines for any kind of purpose. Finally, there's the statement that JLS founder Jance Hepler "works with human specimens to produce educational courses." What exactly does that mean?