Everybody Loves a Happy Ending

Or do we? Of course, I think human nature generally wants things to come out right in the end when it comes to storytelling. We want evil to be vanquished, the good guy to get the girl, and all to be right with the world. But at the expense of the storyteller's goals?

During my convalescence yesterday I watched (with commentary, for the first time) Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, and Blade Runner, none of which are what you'd call crowd pleasers. But who would want them to be? Blade Runner has even had the ending changed a couple of times as Ridley Scott got to be able to edit the film the way he wanted it. Yes, it's gone from "happy" to "indeterminate," but it works better. Another key example is Terry Gilliam's Brazil, in which his "happy ending" involves the main character going insane. By contrast, the studio hack's recut "Love Conquers All" edit tried for a more traditional happy ending, indeed, in the same drive into the sunset way that Blade Runner started with.

All of that is just an overly long intro to this BBC News piece about the happy ending in film, including some notable examples of sad stories "happied up" for movie going audiences. I understand the desire for a happy ending, particularly in dire economic times. Escapism is, for many people, what film (or TV or music or whatever) is all about. But it can be about much more and can be equally entertaining, in a completely different way.

Prosecution to Nowhere (The End)

The long strange saga of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens (R - The Tubes) is almost to an end. You'll recall last year that Stevens was indicted on federal corruption charges while seeking reelection. Rather than try to drag out proceedings past the election, Stevens (perhaps foolishly) pressed for a speedy trial that he thought would clear his name in time for the votes to be cast.

It didn't work that way. Stevens was convicted, right before election day, and lost his long held seat in the Senate. At the time, he claimed that the Government had played all sorts of games with evidence in his case and that he had been wrongly convicted. Post trial proceedings bore that out, to the point that the judge reamed out several prosecutors in open court.

Now, it's been announced that the Government will move the court to overturn the conviction and dismiss the indictment (via TalkLeft):

In a statement, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said he and other Justice lawyers had reviewed the case and 'concluded that certain information should have been provided to the defense for use at trial.'

'In light of this conclusion, and in consideration of the totality of the circumstances of this particular case, I have determined that it is in the interest of justice to dismiss the indictment and not proceed with a new trial,' Holder said.

It's rare any time the Government admits it screwed up and tries to make things right, so kudos to Holder and crew for doing that. Still, as Jonathan Turley points out, it comes just before the court itself was about the lower the boom on the Government, so maybe it's just a matter of beating the judge to the punch.

I was never a fan of Stevens. But nobody deserves to be prosecuted in the way he was, even ones political foes.

Album of the Day (Special Edition)

The Hazards of Love, by The Decemberists (2009): I was off in Richmond last week (hence, light blogging then), and so was unable to score a copy of the new Decemberists opus. Thankfully, the girlfriend was looking out for me and brought a copy down with her for the weekend - thanks, honey! Laid up ill today (and, perhaps, for a few more days - hence, more light blogging), I had a chance to lay down and listen to it, curled up with the liner notes and everything. That's important, as it's basically one long piece of music (17 separate tracks segued together) that tells a story. That's right, friends - it's a concept album!

And a damned fine one, at that. I agree with what some people have said that it's sort of a mix between The Tain and The Crane Wife. One thing, for sure - it rocks harder than anything else they've done. Granted, if your favorite Decemberists stuff is the shorter catchier stand alone tunes, this one probably will not rock your world. Which is too bad, really.

Elder Porn?

Eugene Volokh has a post over at VC about an interesting development in Massachusetts, where a law has been proposed that would make it a crime to, among other things, produce pornography using folks over 60 years of age:

The law is not limited to people who are mentally handicapped and thus unable to consent, or who are photographed against their will by their caretakers (the justification discussed in this story). The operative provisions cover people over 60 and the disabled whether or not they are incompetent. One provision, relating to people's being "deemed incapable of consenting," would cover only "an elder or a person with a disability adjudicated as incompetent by a court of the commonwealth," but I don't see how this would stop liability under the other provisions, since consent is no defense under the other provisions in any event.

As Eugene points out, the law would essentially treat this stuff like child porn, i.e., very severely.

I'm sympathetic to the idea of protecting folks who can't consent or are otherwise disabled from being exploited. But what's the deal with the blanket age restrictions? I've got no desire to check out a bunch of nekkid grandparents, but surely somebody does.

Assuming a bunch of 60+ fully consenting geezers want to provide them with material, why should the state step in to "protect" them? Isn't it incredibly ageist to assume that just because someone was born before 1949 they can't protect themselves from being exploited? Not to mention, it seems to reinforce the notion so central to our culture that "youth=sexy," which exacerbate the kiddy porn issue.

Really, is there a need here?

Snitches Lie

Here's another one from the "no shit" file. In what is reported to be the first study of its type (via TalkLeft), researchers have discovered that people who are given "incentives" for "secondary confessions" - i.e., snitches who are doing it to help themselves out - are likely to be bullshitting:

A study by psychology researchers Jessica K. Swanner and Denise R. Beike investigated how 129 research volunteers would respond if offered an incentive for information and found that incentives tended to increase the reporting of false information.

'The results of our study were interesting but discouraging,' Beike said. 'An incentive actually did the opposite. It brought forward not the reluctant informant, but the opportunistic.'

According to the abstract of the study (linked at TalkLeft), the researches thought going in that giving incentives would really increase veracity. I have no idea why and imagine they must not have spent a lot of time in the criminal justice system.

Does this mean that every time someone comes forward and drops a dime on someone he or she is lying? No. It means that lawyers, judges, and juries should be very skeptical of such evidence when it is presented and not take it at face value.

UPDATE: A couple of things, spurred by the comment of Anonymous (who may, or may not, be who s/he says s/he is).

First, the link at TalkLeft I referenced is actually a press release type device, not an abstract. My bad.

Second, I may have misread a quote attributed to one of the researchers, to wit:

With the use of incentives, we should have seen an increase in true secondary confessions. But an incentive actually did the opposite.

My reading of "we should have seen" is equivalent to "this is what we thought would happen." I suppose you could read it as "in a perfect world, it would be good if this would happen," but the research didn't back that up. I'll admit I could be wrong, but it's not exactly clear. If I am wrong, I apologize for the flippant remark above.

Regardless, the important part of this story is not what the researchers thought they would discover going in, but what they actually did learn in the end. And, for that, I thank them for their efforts.

Album of the Day

Harbor Lights, by Bruce Hornsby (1993): This album kicked of Bruce 2.0, if you will. He left The Range behind and started putting on record the more extended and instrumentally interesting pop/jazz/bluegrass hybrids that popped up during live shows. The basic trio of Bruce, John Molo (drums), and Jimmy Haslip (bass) is augmented by such high profile guests as Pat Metheny, Branford Maralis, Bonnie Raitt, and Jerry Garcia. It's a brilliant reinvention, one that served as a solid foundation for the next phase of his career.

Guard Your Dying Tongue

It might be true that someone who knows he's about to die have no motive to lie about something, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to get all verbose at such moments. You might just get better:

A US man who thought he was dying and confessed to having killed a neighbour in 1977 has been charged with murder after making a recovery, US media say.

* * *

Convinced he was dying after a stroke, Mr Brewer reportedly admitted to police he shot dead 20-year-old Jimmy Carroll.

The 58-year-old, who had fled Tennessee after the killing, was arrested after his condition improved, reports say.

See, it never pays to talk about crimes, even with one foot in the grave.

Blame the Charts

Someone once said (my Google-fu is weak today, I can't figure out who) that we change something by measuring it. That's why "reality TV" is such a contradiction in terms - by definition, filming what people do changes what they're doing. A corollary of that principle might be that by changing the way we measure something, we can change how it develops.

That's the operative theory behind this piece over at HuffPo by John "Don't Call Me Cougar" Mellencamp. He blames the downward spiral of the music industry on the change in how the charts were figured back in the 1980s:

At this very same time, new Nielsen monitoring systems -- BDS (Broadcast Data Systems) and SoundScan were employed to document record sales and radio airplay. Prior to 1991, the Billboard charts were done by manual research; radio stations and record stores across the country were polled to determine what was on their playlists and what the big sellers were. Thus, giving Oklahoma City, for example, an equivalent voice to Chicago's in terms of potential impact on the music scene. BDS keeps track of gross impressions through an encoded system that counts the number of plays or "spins" that a song receives. That number is, thereafter, multiplied by the number of potential listeners. SoundScan was put in place at retail centers to track sales by monitoring scanned barcodes of units crossing the counter. A formula was devised whereby the charts were based 20% on the SoundScan number and 80% on BDS results. The system had changed from one that measured popularity to one that was driven by population.

Record companies soon discovered that because of BDS, they only needed to concentrate on about 12 radio stations; there was no longer a business rationale for working secondary markets that were soon forgotten -- despite the fact that these were the very places where rock and roll was born and thrived. Why pay attention to Louisville -- worth a comparatively few potential listeners -- when the same one spin in New York, Los Angeles or Atlanta, etc., was worth so many more potential listeners?

That makes some sense, but I'm not sure things weren't headed that way long before. The music biz underwent a huge shift in the 1970s, particularly as artists started filling arenas and stadia. It was no longer enough for an artist to make some money for the company over a long term. Instant and, preferably, huge success was more important.

It reminds me of something Bill Bruford said once about Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic Records in one of the old Yes documentaries (Atlantic was home to Yes for years). He said that the early record labels were started by guys like Ertegun who were basically zealous collectors. In other words, passionate about the music itself, not so much the biz. Once that generation was passed by, the paradigm shifted.

Album of the Day

Absolution, by Muse (2003): Muse is one of those bands that isn't really prog, but gets mentioned a lot in prog circles (ProgArchives puts them in the "prog related" ghetto). I don't really see why, in particular, but I like lots of stuff on this album, regardless. I particularly like the thundering use of piano here and there, which adds a nice touch. I'll definitely check out some more of their stuff.

Newsflash!

Neil Gaiman makes up the stuff about the dead people!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Neil Gaiman
comedycentral.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Mark Sanford

I'm so crestfallen . . .

Having the Last Word

It may come as a shock to some people but we do still prosecute moonshiners in this country. My office winds up representing people in those cases every now and then. One of the more famous shiners, Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, was recently convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was 62 years old.

Rather than report to prison yesterday, he killed himself. But he went out with a message, courtesy of his custom made tombstone:

POPCORN SAID FUCK YOU

See a picture here. It's not how I'd go out, but he certainly did it his way.

Dial-a-Prayer

More like dialing for dollars:

Information Age Prayer. For the low, low price of $3.95 a month, they will run your prayer of choice through a voice synthesizer every day, and allow the computer to speak to god for you. Is a loved one sick? For only $9.95 per month, the computer will beg god to help them 5 times a day!

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that there is someone/thing up there to beseech, don't you think it would piss her off awfully bad to have the help do it?!?

I think I'll start up a companion service, maybe to allow people to pay to have someone entreat Satan on their behalf to do some bad things. I could do it for less than $3.95 a pop and still make a killing!

The Myth of Fingerprints

Remember the National Academy of Sciences report I blogged about last month about the sorry state of forensic science in this country? Today's LA Times has a column that looks at one of the most widely used and venerated parts of the field and its particular problems. Starting more than 100 years ago, there have been questions raised about fingerprints:

But by the time of Stratton's trial in 1905, fingerprinting had moved from the realm of scientists to that of police agencies.

Faulds was sitting silently at the defense table, Beavan wrote, stewing bitterly. The limitations of his technique were being ignored.

'The least smudginess in the printing of them might easily veil important divergences ... with appalling results,' Faulds wrote in a book that year. Police were 'apt to misunderstand or overstrain, in their natural eagerness to secure convictions.'

His warnings were ignored. Jurors took just two hours to decide Stratton's fate, with the fingerprint as the only piece of evidence linking him to the crime. He and his brother were hanged 19 days later.

The concerns Faulds raised would go unanswered and largely ignored for decades as fingerprints became definitive proof of identity. What had started as a hypothesis for 19th century scientists became an article of faith for forensic scientists and the courts in the 20th century, says Michael Saks, the author of several articles on the social history of identification sciences.

That article faith has sent many people to prison, and maybe a few to their deaths. How many were innocent? We'll never know, until someone is willing to launch off the Fingerprint Reformation.

Sober Deleting Won't Trump Drunk Bestiality

Somewhat along the lines of yesterday's post about anonymity on the Web, chances are lots of what you've "deleted" from your hard drive is actually still there. Generally, all deleting does is relabel that space as available for use, it doesn't actually erase it. That "unallocated disc space" can be a rich source of embarrassment, and criminality, if someone knows to go look through it.

Which means, it's never a good idea to point somebody in that direction. Like this woman, who while in the drunk tank accused her boyfriend of looking for child porn while on her computer. Unfortunately:

According to a police affidavit . . . a cop told Owen that he had found videos of her on the laptop and asked if she 'knew what those files might be.' Owen, pictured in the below mug shot, replied, 'The one with the dog.' Cops believe that the dog in question, Toby, is a beagle. After asking if she was 'going to be charged with this," Owen said that the videos "were just something she did when she was drunk and barely remembers it,' adding that she tried to 'delete them the next day when she was sober.'

Damn that demon alcohol and those seductive beagles!

Album of the Day

Inferno, by Squonk Opera (2001): Squonk Opera isn't actually a band. It's a theater group from Pittsburgh that specializes in multi-media avant garde musical productions, several of which have made it to CD. I was vaguely familiar with the name and picked up their first album (which really is just an album) a little while back. It intrigued me enough to pick this one up when I saw it at Paul's last year. Inferno is inspired by Dante's poem, but is set in Centralia, Pennsylvania, a town that rests on top of an ongoing coal mine fire. It's certainly not Oklahoma! and it's ilk, but it has its own charms.

There's Crazy, Then There's Batshit Insane

Wow, they really are tougher in Texas. You'd think this would qualify someone was legally insane in just about anybody's book:

While in the Grayson County Jail five days after his arrest, Thomas plucked out his right eye. A judge subsequently ruled he was competent to stand trial.

Last December, a death row officer at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood on his face and had him taken to the unit infirmary. Thomas told officials he had pulled out his remaining eye and ate it.

He was taken to a hospital for treatment, then was transferred to a prison psychiatric unit.

Case closed, right? Nope:

A condemned Texas inmate who removed his only eye and ate it in a bizarre outburst several months ago on death row is "crazy," yet sane under state law, a judge wrote in an appellate court ruling Wednesday that rejected his appeals.

* * *

Thomas 'is clearly 'crazy,' but he is also 'sane' under Texas law,' Judge Cathy Cochran wrote in a 14-page statement accompanying the court's brief order.

Look, I know that the legal definition of insanity is much more narrow than the medical definition, much less the popular conception of crazy. Nonetheless, someone not named Oedipus who plucks out his own eyes, then eats one for good measure, should probably get the benefit of the doubt.

There Goes Your Anonymity

I've argued, on more than one occasion, that thinking you can be anonymous on in the Internet is a fool's game. People who spout off about their jobs, spouses, or what have you online and then get angry when someone calls them on it aggravate me to no end.

Along those lines, over at Findlaw Julie Hilden looks at the issue of when a court can force an ISP to disclose the identity of of an anonymous poster in a defamation case. She endorses the approach from Maryland's highest court, which held that:

the plaintiff must establish facts sufficient to make out a prima facie case as to each of the elements of defamation, including damages and, if such a case is made, the court must balance the defendant's First Amendment right to anonymity against the plaintiff's right to seek a remedy for claimed defamation in deciding whether to unmask the defendant.

But she also calls for a federal standard to apply nationally, which might not be a bad idea.

So, remember folks - before you badmouth somebody online, think about whether you can afford to pay the bill!

Album of the Day

When Dream and Day Unite, by Dream Theater (1989): Since I've been rolling with a theme of "when lead singers leave," here's another one that fits the bill. Charlie Domenici is sort of the John Rutsey of Dream Theater, appearing on their debut album and then disappearing into the ether. Although James LaBrie certainly has his off nights (e.g., lots of Once in a LIVETime), he's got a better metal screamer style voice. He suits DT's material better. That being said, this is still a pretty excellent album, especially for a debut. I wouldn't want to live without "Only a Matter of Time" in my collection.

Who Says Racism Is Dead?

Over the weekend, a 73-year old cancer survivor in Homer, Louisiana, was gunned down by cops while hosting a backyard barbecue (via Reason). He was black, the shooters were white. Coincidence? Apparently not:

"People here are afraid of the police," said Terry Willis, vice president of the Homer branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. "They harass black people, they stop people for no reason and rough them up without charging them with anything."

That is how it should be, responded Homer Police Chief Russell Mills, who noted the high rates of gun and drug arrests in the neighborhood.

"If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names," said Mills, who is white. "I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested.

Credit Mills for his honesty. That doesn't change the fact that he's a bigot who needs to hand in his badge right now.

More on Those AIG Bonuses

A quick follow up on yesterday's post about the AIG bonuses, on the day that AIG's CEO got smacked around by a House committee. Big Tent Democrat over at TalkLeft reprints an Email he received from "a person knowledgeable about the inner workings of AIG over the last decade" that explains some of the background. Anonymous makes two relevant points.

First, he argues that most of the employees at AIG, including most of those getting the bonuses, didn't have anything to do with the toxic stuff that caused the firm's collapse. That includes the CEO who was getting whipped up on the Hill today, as he just came on the job last September.

Second, these bonuses are not what most people traditionally consider "bonuses." They are not rewards for good performance. Rather, they are rewards for staying with the firm. Most important, the payments being made now are the reward for a promise made a year or two ago to hang around. In other words, it's the carrot that was dangled in front of these folks before the shit hit the fan. That puts these payments in a different light.

I'm still not sold on whether there's not something that can be done about these bonuses, but I'm starting to come around a bit.