Rejected

Yesterday I was briefly juror #7 in a small-time criminal case. The very last peremptory challenge: "The defense would like to thank and excuse Juror #7."

The defense attorney apparently didn't like my answer to his question about the presumption of innocence. To be fair, my answer was probably a bit snarky on account of his unartful question. Trying to concoct a hypothetical situation to which a juror who understood the concept would answer "yes, I would return a verdict of not-guilty," the attorney instead asked a question that left most jurors confused. After explaining that the defendant is legally presumed innocent and that the burden is on the prosecution to prove each and every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, he asked, "If you had to return a verdict right now [before the presentation of any evidence] would you be able to return a verdict of not-guilty?" Most of the jurors, because they understood the presumption, didn't answer "no" outright, but hesitated and said something along the lines that they would need to hear more information. The defense attorney had to coax them along before they would say yes, they would return a verdict of not-guilty.

So then he gets to me. Mine was the only unequivocal answer: "No I could not return a verdict of not-guilty. You asked a very specific question about a verdict. A verdict presupposes a trial. There hasn't been a trial so I certainly would not return a not-guilty verdict. Now, the defendant is not-guilty because he has not been adjudged guilty, but I could not now return a verdict of not-guilty." Bam! Juror #7 you're out of there!

I wanted to shake the defense attorney by the shoulders (who looked like this was his first trial) and tell him the hypothetical situation he should have presented was one where there had been a trial during which nobody presented any evidence, where the prosecutor had merely shrugged her shoulders and said, "oops, the dog ate my evidence." Then the jurors could comfortably say they would return a verdict of not-guilty. He lost what might have been a fair and competent foreman (I would have volunteered) and I lost a chance to play hooky from the office for a couple days. Law in practice is far from perfect.

It's Presidential Pardon Season

By any measure President Bush has been miserly with his pardons. I prefer to characterize him as being appropriately prudent. His judgment will no doubt be tested by the much-publicized case of Border Patrol agents Ramos and Campeon. Groups have been lobbying the White House for their pardon, arguing among other things, that an injustice has been done where two border patrol agents charged with enforcing immigration laws are in jail while an illegal immigrant scofflaw is free. Here's my take.

As I understand it, the border patrol agents were convicted of, essentially, committing a bad shooting and covering it up. Whether or not the shooting was justified is another issue, but it has nonetheless become THE issue for those advocating a pardon of the agents. I think law-and-order types ought to take a critical look at what's going on here. These guys became vigilantes when they committed the very serious offense of covering up the use of lethal force by a law enforcement officer (which lethal force was also judged to be unjustified, incidentally). They abused their badge to mete out their own justice without the critical review that justifiably accompanies such shootings. None of us want to see that sort of thing happen to anyone, even if the victim of the shooting is an illegal alien in the act of breaking immigration laws. And here we have to confront our own prejudices: we ought to be just as offended at the actions of these officers irrespective of the victim because the victims of vigilantism are all of us.

In other words, no pardon for these clowns. I know the irony of the situation--officers in jail and illegal alien free--is red meat to conservatives, but remember that policy by emotion is the province of our left-leaning friends. Let's not fall into that trap.

Dam Tour

When I first laid eyes on Independence Hall in Philadelphia a few years ago my first thought was “Gee, it looks just like the one back home.” That’s not surprising since I grew up taking the occasional trip to the full scale replica at Knott’s Berry Farm. Across the street at the park proper were the log ride and the Calico mine ride which both featured the distinctive smell (more here) of cool dampness seeping through ersatz rock. Can you guess, then, my first thought when we walked through damp tunnels deep in the bowels of Hoover Dam hewn from the solid rock of the surrounding canyon? I guess this is the irony of “America's obsession with simulacra and counterfeit reality”--the fake becomes the standard against which the real thing is compared. But in spite of the brutally honest rock, so much about the dam itself feels conspicuously staged, from art deco niceties incongruously adorning industrial walkways to the surrounding geological features which lends the venue a cozy isolation like the lit set of a darkened film-stage. Industrial wonders are as close as your local waste water treatment plant, but this interesting mix of industrial pragmatism and 1930s aesthetic is uniquely Hoover.

The intake towers, with its long, thin lines and polygonal top, look like something that could be mounted atop the Empire State Building.

I think many of us have been conditioned to think that power plants are these dark, dingy behemoths. By contrast, the dam's neat row of generators look like movie-set props. A set designer couldn't ask for anything more: a yellow glow from their innards and a bright red light on top remind us these are "real" working generators very much in the act of producing electricity. The floor is composed of modular panels, some of which are piled up near the yellow pipe in the foreground. This is obviously a practical feature, but even so the panels are covered in fine terrazzo flooring.

The walkway from which the generator picture above is taken is inlaid with the intricate design pictured below.

This is one of four giant pipes that feed each of the two banks of generators (one bank pictured above). That, or maybe a screen shot of a video game set in one of those ubiquitous, generic factory/plant/warehouse locales. The industrial green lighting and lime stains are there for the benefit of realism, no doubt.

Ditto for the lime stalactites beginning to form on the ceiling of this tunnel leading to one of the generator banks.

On the near side of the dam can be seen a couple of towers. These, believe it or not, are bathrooms. The bathrooms feature original period fixtures.

The art deco influence of the 1930s is evident throughout. The angels at this memorial honoring the workers that built the dam is classic

So is this stylized plaque. It looks like a scene that could have come from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

One of those most interesting things I saw had nothing to do with the dam at all. Perennially congested, the section of I-93 that passes over the dam will be bypassed by a bridge currently under construction over the low side of the dam. The bridge is supported from below by a semicircular arch. Cantilevered sections of the arch are being erected from each side of the canyon and the ends are supported by a humongous overhead gantry. The whole thing is brightly lit at night and gives the dam that movie set feeling I alluded to earlier.

The visitor center features some great pictures as well. I especially loved the old black and white pictures of bespectacled engineers with their short black ties and pants that went up to their bellybuttons. Those were real engineers!

And that's my take on Hoover. For more conventional pictures you'll have to visit yourself. I hope you enjoyed your dam tour.

Why no, that quacking, wadling thing is not a duck!

Stop telling me to get a flu shot! And worse, stop trying to remedy my ignorance by pointing out the flu shot cannot cause the flu. I KNOW that, but surely you can see the ludicrousness of the following dialog.

ME: Gee doc, I’ve got a fever, soreness, aches, I feel generally lousy and its been going on a couple days now.

DOC: Well, I’d say it looks like you’re coming down with the flu. Oh wait, it says here you just had a flue shot. Why, you're perfectly healthy. Those are just mild side-effects. Everyone knows you can't get the flue from a flue shot. Even the CDC says so.

ME: Thanks doc, *cough* *cough*. Ouch! (as he slaps me on my back which is achy and sore)

I’ve gotten “sick” the two times I’ve had a flu shot. I’m never doing that again until the risks far outweigh the side effects.

The Love of What Money Can Buy

"Hey, I didn’t know this is the car you drove!” That was Joe’s greeting when he spied me from across the parking lot at church the other day. “Wow, you are a humble guy,” he said in mock reverence. This, from a guy on a bicycle who doesn’t own a car himself. We had a good laugh at my expense, but it got me thinking.

Well, it may be time for a new car, but I haven’t quite decided yet. On the one hand I don’t need one and I’m sure I can put the money to better use. Besides, I don’t actually have the money at the moment, though I anticipate I will within the next six months or so. Also my venerable little truck, despite pushing 200K miles, has no mechanical problems to speak of. Truth be told, there’s just about nothing I couldn’t fix on it so I could, in theory, keep this truck going indefinitely.

On the other hand, this little beastie is showing its age. Check out the pictures. Need I say more? Besides, my kid sister is soon approaching driving age and I need to think about how to get her into a car. For better or worse that task is going to fall on her siblings. Unfortunately, this little truck is probably a poor choice for a hand-me-down for any number of reasons, including its manual transmission.

Here’s another input to the calculus: I’m smitten with the little Mazda roadster that was the subject of the last few posts (here, here and here). I've never been much into cars, but I kind of regret not getting my little BMW Z3 roadster way back when I was seriously considering it. It wouldn’t be the prudent thing, I’d said to myself--much the same sort of thing I’m saying to myself now. Even though it turned out to be a great decision to buy my little truck when everyone said I was nuts for buying a two-seater, this might this may be the last time I can justify a little two-seater.

Well, I have some time yet to decide. I’ll revisit in a couple months. Maybe a better use for the money will come up in the interim.

Location location location

You are a business that, like every business, is in the business of making money. You can locate your offices anywhere you like; money is no object to you. Here are your choices: 1) anywhere else, or 2) this one particular place that is crowded, looks bad, smells bad, is exceedingly expensive, has traffic is so bad that nobody--neither your employees nor clients--wants to commute there, your employees have to park several blocks away and for a monthly fee, the surrounding streets are so dangerous your employees are afraid to walk to their cars after dark and so they use a shuttle instead (whose cost is invariably passed on to the employer/employee), there’s nowhere for your employees to grab a late lunch or dinner after 4pm because the place turns into a ghost town, your employees don’t want to live nearby and couldn’t afford to pay the premium to live nearby despite this place being a dump. Oh, this place does have one arguably redeeming feature: other similarly-situated businesses are clamoring to move in so there’s a bit of caché that comes with locating your offices here.

If it was your business where would you locate? It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? And you still think so-called urban sprawl (live where you work and work where you live) is a bad thing? This is a discussion for another day, but detractors of "urban sprawl," I think, operate under a misguided idealism that old cities--these bastions of culture and the epitome of civilization--ought to be the center of our lives, literally. Ya right. Tell that to families who live in a nice planned community with nice new schools and a local town center that just opened up.

Incidentally, the place I describe above is downtown Los Angeles.

New and Fresh

Says my oh-so-helpful junkmail from Yahoo's on-line dating service, "New women, fresh possibilities...." By implication, it seems that until now all the women were old and starting to smell. Who are the ad wizzrds that came up with that one (bonus points if you catch the SNL reference)?

Not True

I already knew it was too good to be true; I was hoping it was too good not to be true. After all, a scammer wouldn't offer such an unreasonably low price for fear of raising a suspicion of fraud, right? Said the scammer, “[T]he car is priced as cheap as it used to belong to my brother and unfortunately he is no longer among us as he had a motorcycle accident.” At this point I fairly well knew it was a scam, but I wanted to see where this would go just in case it was real. He said he’d use Ebay and their escrow service which offers all sorts of buyer protection. It does, but when I then received two spoofed emails purportedly from Ebay it was clear this was an off-Ebay transaction and the money was going not to an escrow service, but being wired directly to an individual. The spoofed emails were very convincing for the uninitiated and I can see how easy it is for people to get scammed. There were other tip-offs as well, but still hoping against hope, I replied with the following email even though I knew I was talking to a scammer.

I have every intention of completing this transaction, but there are several aspects of the proposed transaction that raise security red flags. If we can resolve them I will send payment, but otherwise I cannot.

You are asking me to wire money directly to an individual, not an escrow company and certainly not Ebay's only approved escrow agent Escrow.com http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/accepted-payments-policy.html.

These escrow companies typically do not send payment instructions via email to discourage spoofed emails and fraud: https://escrow.com/FraudWatch.asp

This appears to be an off-Ebay transaction since I have no listing information or confirmation that I am a bidder for that listing. Also, a member search on Ebay returns "The email address [scammer's email address] is used by a valid eBay member with a feedback score of 0 (0% positive). We have not found a transaction between you and this member in the last 60 days."

All the contact links, including Customer Support, in the Ebay emails I received go to a domain registered by a New York individual and not to an Ebay-registered domain and apparently not to Ebay's Customer Support which is reached through a web-based form and not an email address: http://ebay-us.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ebay_us.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php

For my protection I can only complete the transaction through a verifiable Ebay transaction and using Ebay's approved escrow agent. This is the usal manner for these transactions. Please consider doing it this way. Otherwise, I'm afraid the emails I received look like spoofs and I cannot complete the transaction as currently proposed.

Becoming True

Ok, so the guy wrote back. He's doing the transaction through Ebay's escrow service and promises an invoice tomorrow. He says the car's cheap because it belonged to his now-dead brother and it brings back bad memories. I know, the sob story is de regur for scammers. Well, I'm all loaded up with all sorts of tips for spotting escrow scammers on Ebay and I've never been scammed yet. I'm willing to play this out a little on the off chance this is for real. I will either get spectacularly scammed or this will be the deal of the century. If it's the former then I'm sure I'll be so embarrassed that I'll go back and remove these posts!

Be True

I want it to be true so bad. It’s not even about the car; before last night I had no interest in getting another car. It’s that delicious fantasy of getting more back than you put in, like that dream where you put a quarter in the vending machine and it spits out two and then you do it over and over again.

The Mazda Miata has come a long way so I wasn’t surprised when, just for kicks, I looked at for-sale ads and found they are not terribly inexpensive. I’ve been thinking about getting a “project” car to fix and resell so I sorted the listings by price. I found a beautiful 2006 Miata in perfect shape with about 4k miles with an asking price of $3700! I’ve been emailing and calling the seller to verify whether the price is a typo, but I’ve not heard anything back. I’m ready to take the train 115 miles out to pick up the car, but what are the chances this ad is legit? He won’t be calling back, will he?

Manly-Man

I had breakfast with a friend and her mom last weekend and, while I had my head turned to speak with her mom, said friend reached over and grabbed hold of the hair sticking out the top of my shirt. "I just had to see if it was real," she said. "For better or for worse, there's plenty more where that came from," I responded.

This is just one more indication--apart from some old fashioned values and aesthetics--that I was born the wrong decade. How did we go from tufts of hair spilling out of leisure suits to grown men waxing the hair off their chests to look like prepubescent little boys? What changed? Surely not men, women and sex. Those three are immutable. Undoubtedly what changed are the myriad outside forces that act on those three. How can we be so prone to suggestion? As for me, I'm a proud, if anachronistic, manly-man.