The Pagan Science Monitor

Objection, judge! Have you been drinking?

But first, the Quotation du jour:
"When an attorney arrives intoxicated at the prison for a legal visit, the policy shall be that he shall be escorted out of the facility. If correctional officers assess the attorney as too impaired to drive, the Madison County Sheriff shall be called."
-- Policy memo taped to the wall in the public lobby of Limestone Correctional Facility, Harvest, Alabama, where the state warehouses HIV-positive prisoners. The carceral certainty in the directive's first word [emphasis added, of course] continued to make the investigators giggle a year after the first time we read it on the wall.
Now, the story: The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reports that the former chief judge of St. Clair County (Illinois) Circuit Court, and a colleague, face judicial misconduct complaints for a December 2006 car wreck attributed to drunk driving.
According to the Complaint [PDF warning!] by the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board, Judge Patrick M. Young started drinking before a St. Louis Rams game, kept drinking till about 5, and wound up with eight beers and two bloody marys in his honor's blood.

Quotation du jour: Tue. 9-25-07

The blues poems I would often make up in my head and sing on the way to work. (Except that I could never carry a tune. But when I sing to myself, I think I am singing.) One evening, I was crossing Rock Creek Bridge, singing a blues I was trying to get right before I put it down on paper. A man passing on the opposite side of the bridge stopped, looked at me, then turned around and cut across the roadway.
He said: "Son, what's the matter? Are you ill?"
"No," I said. "Just singing."
"I thought you were groaning," he commented. "Sorry!" And then he went on his way.
So after that I never sang my verses aloud in the street anymore.
-- Langston Hughes, The Big Sea: An Autobiography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1940), p. 217

Sorry for another hiatus, friends. You set yourself to mock the law, critique the policy, and take a modest stab at satire. You find to your dismay that what the kids in you know call "A Shite State of Affairs" leaves you in a funk: That days, then weeks, then a summer and a main era slip past when all you can say is, It's the same crap, same crap, the same.
The plain fact is, T.P.S.M. is not and never will be anybody's "daily look" at anything. I'll try to post faithfully every Friday afternoon. I'm grateful for my friends, life, and the universe, and angry about the rest of it. Welcome to the weekly Pagan Science Monitor.
Oh, and in honor of Bush at the UN this morning, a re-post of my fave QDJ.

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

--W.H. Auden, "August, 1968"

Update: There's one QDJ I like better than that one. It's here.

Tags: politics, poetry, blues, Langston Hughes, politics and poetry, music and politics, Trainspotting, Iraq, Bush, Quotation du Jour, QDJ, W.H. Auden.

Quotation du jour, Mon. 7-2-07

"The first method for estimating the brain-power of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him....There are, in fact, three types of brain. One understands things for himself. The second discerns what others understand. The third neither understands for itself nor appreciates others."
-- Machiavelli, The Prince (1513/1532), ch. 22

Quotation du jour -- Sat. 6-30-07

"For all the difficulties, the instinctive coutermeasures, we go on watching closely, trying to read a face, trying to measure intentions. Friend or foe? It's an ancient preoccupation. And even if, down through the generations, we are only right slightly more than half the time, it's still worth doing. More than ever now, on the edge of war, when the country still imagines it can call back this deed before it's too late...."
-- Ian McEwan, Saturday, Doubleday, 2005

(Image copyright Justen Robertson.)

Tags: policy, Quotation du Jour, QDJ, Ian McEwan, "Saturday", social skills, love, war.

Quotation du jour: Fri. 6-22-07

"Shut up! Stop laughing! This ain't funny! This is a real gun!"
--Anonymous, un-apprehended bad guy, quoted this afternoon by my friend M., recalling how she got a fit of hysterical giggles while caught up in a convenience-store holdup on the Southwest Side of Chicago about 10 years ago.
Context: This week, M. is returning, for her brother's wedding, to her family's village near Ramallah, West Bank, Palestine. She remembered coming home to Chicago after her last family visit as a teenager: Sadness to leave her extended family, but relief to be back in Chicago, her home town. Especially, M. clung to the thought, "I'll never have to see another gun again."

Quotation du jour: Sat. 6-16-07

The patron had engaged me as kitchen plongeur; that is, my job was to wash up, keep the kitchen clean, prepare vegetables, make tea, coffee, and sandwiches, do the simpler cooking, and run errands.... (Ch. XX)
...And yet the plongeurs, low as they are, also have a kind of pride. It is the pride of the drudge -- the man who is equal to no matter what quantity of work.... (Ch. XIV)

-- Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, 1933

Because the temperature in my apartment rose with the sun, and sleep became impossible, and I realized I had dreamed I was a dishwasher again. I took the book off the shelf (whoever snagged my copy of Catalonia, bring it back) and found my favorite passages again before the dog woke or I even made coffee.

Quotation du jour, Fri. 6-15-07

My mother called me to her bedside
These words she said to me
If you don't quit your rambling ways
They're gonna get you in the penetentiary
Gonna get you in the penetentiary poor boy
Gonna get you in the penetentiary
If you don't quit your reckless ways
They're gonna get you in the penetentiary

Well the jury said I had to pay
And the clerk he wrote it down
And the judge called out my number
Two sixes upside down
Two sixes upside down poor boy
Two sixes upside down
The judge called out my number
Two sixes upside down

-- Woody Guthrie, "Poor Boy," posthumously released, 1968

Seeya, Scooter.

Tags: politics, law, policy, Scooter Libby, prison, Valerie Plame, Valerie Plame Wilson, Impeachment, Zombies.  

Quotation du jour, Mon. 6-11-07

Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own

Quotation du jour, Tue. 6-5-07

"You know, if you really think about it,
whoever invented music was really
kind of a genius."
-- Gene, my father, baritone saxophonist, and master of the unintentional howler.

Quotation du jour, Sun. 6-3-07

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

--W.H. Auden, "August, 1968"

Tags: politics, poetry, politics and poetry, Iraq, Bush, Quotation du Jour, QDJ, W.H. Auden.