July 23rd, 2007 · Comments Off on Phone-jammer James Tobin will face new trial
The slow-walk of justice for Republican wrongdoers has been setting some kind of a record in NH. Tiny blurb in Thursday’s Union Leader:
A new trial for accused 2002 GOP phone jamming conspirator James Tobin is expected in either December or January. Tobin’s conviction on phone harassment and conspiracy charges was reversed by a federal appeals court in March and remanded to the trial court… Briefs will begin to be filed in September.
In 2004, James Tobin was serving as New England chair for the Bush/Cheney campaign when hints of his phone-jamming role leaked into the press. Conveniently, he was not indicted until December, 2004, more than two years after the phone-jamming. It took only a few days from Tobin’s indictment until millions of dollars from the RNC started flowing that month into payments for his defense lawyers. But…
Wait a year
… it took another year for the case to come to trial. Tobin was found guilty in December, 2005 by 12 NH jurors. And Tobin’s lawyers, within a few days, had transformed their hundreds of pages of objections into multiple appeals of Tobin’s conviction.
Wait a year
In January, 2007, a bizarre spectacle played out in Federal Appeals Court in Boston–watching it unfold, I predicted that Tobin’s conviction would be overturned–as it was, on very narrow procedural grounds, in March, 2007. The judgment clearly stated that Tobin could be re-tried.
Moving comparatively quickly, when events in March get some follow-up in July!
So now, it seems, in December 2007 or January 2008, NH will re-try Mr. Tobin. Will he finally take the stand and respond to some questions about the crime that took place more than five years in the past? Will the many links from Mr. Tobin to his bosses in Washington, DC get any exploration? Will the lonnnggg slow-walk of the phone-jamming case finally speed up now that a pardon from Bush would need to come before January of 2008?
July 20th, 2007 · Comments Off on Science and fairy tales, together at last!
“I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his laboratory is not only a technician: he is also a child placed before natural phenomena which impress him like a fairy tale.” (Said Marie Curie, and thanks to the Quotations Page for this quote.)
Long before Harry Potter, I spent many happy hours reading my way systematically through the entire “Fairy Tales” bookcase in the Manchester, NH public library. That science could be lovely was something I never imagined, although I do remember one family gathering in our late-night back yard, when we waited with wonder for tiny bright Sputnik to swing through the familiar starfield.
Growing older is great when it adds to our enchantments!
Comments Off on Science and fairy tales, together at last!Tags:Wide wonderful world
My quick-dinner fall-back, which I learned about in the Netherlands, is handfuls of mixed chopped vegetables tossed into the boiling water when I’m cooking pasta. Top with pesto or nuke some chunky red sauce in the microwave.
Today’s NYT has 101 more ideas, including an easy recipe for gazpacho.
The official magical moment is July 21, but….one noted grown-up author won’t win any points toward the Hogwarts Prize for Patience.
Less than 24 hours after getting her hands on a pre-release copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pulitzer-Prize-winning highbrow NY Times critic Michiko Kakutani had managed to scarf down her entire bookful and blast out a glowing review, said to have irked JK Rowling enormously.
The Guardian says Kakutani’s review contains “little more than hints.” Not really. I recommend staying away from Kakutani’s survey of plot points if you’re planning to enjoy JK Rowling’s surprises. But surely even a child would understand that.
The magical hopes and feelings of underage readers aren’t really at risk here, despite the indignant hype being spun into gold by big Potter-profiit PR teams.
I think it’s lovely that Rowling has written a book that once again respects and satisfies young people’s magical wishes–and cute that Kakutani couldn’t wait to tell us so.
Well, any bizbuzzword is born to be treated in soundbites, and I’ve got one for you–thanks to Jay Rosen (whom I met at the 2003 (first) BloggerCon) just posted one that has real information content, quoting James Surowiecki:
…collective wisdom is a good way of coming up with an answer when there is a right or wrong answer (in a kind of Platonic sense)…
I’m not sure, though, that the same can be said about a question like: Which movie is better? There may be no Platonic truth of aesthetics…
So crowdsourcing might be good for some things, not so good for others? Bzzt–I don’t think that answer’s going to please either camp.
Bonus miscellanea–One of many favorite David Weinberger quotes, from Bloggercon 2003 years before Everything is Miscellaneous: “Is it the opinion of the panel that weblogging is a life skill, and everyone should learn it? Or is it like singing, that not everybody should do it in public?”
Elsewhere, Jim talks about his own South Pole adventure, battling frostbite and altitude sickness as he dragged a 110-lb sled for 8 hours a day–burning 1000 calories per hour! That part, at least, sounds very good to me!
Ronni’s bright-red time machine and my beige-y gold one whisked us last Friday into a lovely mid-century twilight zone of stage-settings from the 1940’s and 1950’s.
The remarkable thing about NH’s “Strawbery Banke” is that wandering there lets you side-slip from the many memory-objects on display there into your own private world of forgotten memories.
What a pleasure it was to wander there riffing on memories with Ronni Bennett, who has even more photos in her blog “As Time Goes By”.
Not that I regret this young woman’s decisions, crazy as some of them were–well, maybe I’m blushing a bit at those orange curtains.
You see in this photograph married grad student housing in Princeton, where Frank and I were living when we got the word–we were pregnant! Well, OK, I was.
So this long-haired black turtlenecked soon-to-be-ex-grad-student, wearing a lotus-y necklace, decides …I’m going to be a mom–time to get serious about my life! No more cigarettes–well, that was a good decision.
Get serious, be grown-up–I know! I’ll get Frank’s grandmother to teach me how to crochet so that i can make a blanket for my baby.
Now, there were a ton of things I didn’t think of. Just for example, since Frank stopped being a grad student and started being a post-doc during my pregnancy–neither of his two different medical insurance groups would pay for the delivery.
But, by gosh, my baby had the most beautiful blanket!
I grew up in a (New England) world with no air conditioning. I’m not sure how grownups who spent days in offices managed on really hot days–but little kids with backyard sprinklers did just fine.
Keeping our house cool inside needed different tactics.
First, our windows were opened up wide every bedtime, on the theory outdoors would get cooler before we woke up.
Second, once sunrise arrived, grownups stayed alert for the absolute instant when air outside the house got hotter than the air inside. Bang, bang, bang, those windows got shut again!
This morning in Cambridge, MA, I’m sorry to say, that slam-windows moment came at 8:30 a.m. But at least so far I don’t need the whir of my room air-conditioner, thanks to old New England tactics from long ago.
As of July 3, it’s 34 years and counting for Frank and Betsy–not to mention (wow!) more than 60 years now for Frank’s mom and dad.
I still don’t understand why the long-term love of any two people is endangered by the thought that two different people (whose lifestyle couple #1 might not approve) want to promise to love one another forever.
It’s easier to imagine that Hollywood “marriages” lasting 55 hours set a bad example to couples from more normal origins–but I hate to think that our US Constitution needs an amendment fo protect us from poor Britney Spears. (And isn’t she heterosexual, IIRC?)
The best marriage advice, according to my little brother, is to keep on caring about each other, respecting each other. For my more long-winded but heartfelt version, here’s some advice I wrote way back in 2003.
Love is a wonderful thing, and good luck to us all!
