November 16, 2009
Facebook and pancakes saves dude from 25-year jail term
Cops detained Rodney Bradford from New York for 13 days after he was accused of breaking into a Brooklyn residence with a gun, while he was eight miles away at his father’s place in Manhattan.
Bradford won his freedom, thanks to his Facebook status update, which showed what he was doing at the time the crime was committed.
The Telegraph reports that Bradford’s comment where he is teasing his girlfriend for not having joined him to eat pancakes was accompanied by a time-stamp and “was probably instrumental in the district attorney’s decision to drop the charges,” his lawyer Robert Reuland said.
Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the Kings County district attorney’s office, confirmed that the case had been dismissed.
Bradford could have been sentenced to 25 years in jail if he had been convicted in the case.
October 27, 2009
Natalie Portman on Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals”
From the Huffington Post:
Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist. I’ve always been shy about being critical of others’ choices because I hate when people do that to me. I’m often interrogated about being vegetarian (e.g., “What if you find out that carrots feel pain, too? Then what’ll you eat?”).
I’ve also been afraid to feel as if I know better than someone else — a historically dangerous stance (I’m often reminded that “Hitler was a vegetarian, too, you know”). But this book reminded me that some things are just wrong. Perhaps others disagree with me that animals have personalities, but the highly documented torture of animals is unacceptable, and the human cost Foer describes in his book, of which I was previously unaware, is universally compelling.
The human cost of factory farming — both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals — is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and the origins of the swine flu epidemic, whose story has gripped the nation, in factory farms.
I read the chapter on animal shit aloud to two friends — one is from Iowa and has asthma and the other is a North Carolinian who couldn’t eat fish from her local river because animal waste had been dumped in it as described in the book. They had never truly thought about the connection between their environmental conditions and their food. The story of the mass farming of animals had more impact on them when they realized it had ruined their own backyards.
But what Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs: Catholics take communion — in which food and drink represent body and blood. Jews use salty water on Passover to remind them of the slaves’ bitter tears. And on Thanksgiving, Americans use succotash and slaughter to tell our own creation myth — how the Pilgrims learned from Native Americans to harvest this land and make it their own.
And as we use food to impart our beliefs to our children, the point from which Foer lifts off, what stories do we want to tell our children through their food?
I remember in college, a professor asked our class to consider what our grandchildren would look back on as being backward behavior or thinking in our generation, the way we are shocked by the kind of misogyny, racism, and sexism we know was commonplace in our grandparents’ world. He urged us to use this principle to examine the behaviors in our lives and our societies that we should be a part of changing. Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.
I say that Foer’s ethical charge against animal eating is brave because not only is it unpopular, it has also been characterized as unmanly, inconsiderate, and juvenile. But he reminds us that being a man, and a human, takes more thought than just “This is tasty, and that’s why I do it.” He posits that consideration, as promoted by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has more to do with being polite to your tablemates than sticking to your own ideals, would be absurd if applied to any other belief (e.g., I don’t believe in rape, but if it’s what it takes to please my dinner hosts, then so be it).
But Foer makes his most impactful gesture as a peacemaker, when he unites the two sides of the animal eating debate in their reasoning. Both sides argue: We are not them. Those who refrain from eating animals argue: We don’t have to go through what they go through — we are not them. We are capable of making distinctions between what to eat and what not to eat (Americans eat cow but not dog, Hindus eat chicken but not cow, etc.). We are capable of considering others’ minds and others’ pain. We are not them. Whereas those who justify eating animals say the same thing: We are not them. They do not merit the same value of being as us. They are not us.
And so Foer shows us, through Eating Animals, that we are all thinking along the same lines: We are not them. But, he urges, how will we define who we are?
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October 9, 2009
Remember this date: October 9th, 2009.
The day Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, NASA bombed the moon, and Marge Simpson was on the cover of Playboy.
What’s next, Anne Coulter wins a humanitarian award, poses for Penthouse to celebrate, then embarks on a mission to Mars?
October 2, 2009
Letterman You Dog!
Who knew?
From the wires:
Late-night host David Letterman acknowledged on Thursday’s show that he had sexual relationships with female employees and that someone tried to extort $2 million from him over the affairs. CBS says an employee has been charged with attempted grand larceny in the case.
Letterman told his story during a taping of his show, mixing in jokes to an audience that seemed confused about what it was. He called it a “bizarre experience” that left him feeling disturbed and menaced.
The late-night comic began his show by walking onstage and briefly leaning on a pillar with his back to the audience. Then he gave a monologue with jokes against frequent foils like Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin. He told his personal story after sitting behind his desk.
He said he was glad the audience was in a pleasant mood “because I have a little story that I’d like to tell you and the home viewers as well.”
Three weeks ago, Letterman said he got in his car early in the morning and found a package with a letter saying “I know that you do some terrible, terrible things and that I can prove you do some terrible things.” He acknowledged the letter contained proof.
Letterman said he called his lawyer to set up a meeting with the man, who threatened to write a screenplay and a book about Letterman unless he was given money. There were two subsequent meetings with the man, the last one resulting in the check being delivered.
He told the audience that he had to testify before a grand jury on Thursday.
“I was worried for myself, I was worried for my family,” he said. “I felt menaced by this, and I had to tell them all of the creepy things that I had done.”
“The creepy stuff was that I have had sex with women who work for me on this show,” he said. “My response to that is yes, I have. Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Yes, it would, especially for the women.”
Whether they wanted to make the relationships public was up to them, he said.
“It’s been a very bizarre experience,” he said. “I felt like I needed to protect these people. I need to protect my family. I need to protect myself. Hope to protect my job.”
Letterman mixed in jokes while telling the story, keeping his audience off guard.
“I know what you’re saying,” he said. “I’ll be darned, Dave had sex.”
September 27, 2009
Secret Staten Island Ship Graveyard
This weekend a buddy of mine and I went on a mission to a secret ship graveyard in Staten Island, where old boats are left to die. One of the coolest places I’ve ever been to, although it was like being in a Super Mario Bros. game, as each step could be your last. I nearly lost it myself, at one point my leg falling through a rotted piece of wood, but managed to come away with just a few scrapes, along with some old tools and a nice chunk of a steering wheel.
September 18, 2009
Those are people who died, died…They were all my friends, and they died.
Those are lyrics from Jim Carroll’s seminal 1980 punk anthem, People Who Died. This week, Jim Carroll, who also wrote The Basketball Diaries, passed away, along with a man who NEVER puts Bebe in a corner, Patrick Swayze, as well as Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary fame.
They all were important to me in various ways, J. Carroll because Basketball Diaries – book not movie, sorry Leo – is absolutely terrific, possibly the best writing done by a teenager since Rimbaud; Swayze not for Dirty Dancing or Ghost, but for Roadhouse, which I watched at least ten times in college because it’s packed with sex and violence; and Mary Travers simply because my mom is a huge folkie so I grew up listening to her.
It’s weird how it always seems to happen in threes…Ted Kennedy, Les Paul, John Hughes. Before that, Michael Jackson, Suzanne Sommers (whoops, Farrah Fawcett!), Ed McMahon.
But then again, if you throw in Walter Cronkite (July 17), David Carradine (June 4), Bea Arthur (April 25) and Natasha Richardson (March 18), there’s always someone leaving us. Makes you realize how short life is, and also how silly it is to fixate on so much of the dumb stuff we do, such as reality TV, thinking Obama is Stalin and Hitler’s love child, and what stupid thing Kanye West did this week.
Although, as to the last, it actually made my day. What a…
