Yet another version of this weblog and it too will fail to draw a wide audience or readership. So with that perhaps it is more liberated, freer to go to some darker places. Where the car lights just don't quite light up the road enough to see what is around the next bend.
A few quick remarks.
Have you seen Zodiac? Must have been one of the more amazing films deeply ignored by the tedious awards programs. Mark Ruffalo is amazing. It is a great film because it isn't tied up with any "happily ever after" ending. The crime is unsolved and everyone ever touched by working on it is personally or professionally crushed. Even the director's commentary is informative. And James Ellroy does commentary, too.
The temptation to go down to the courthouse and view the Tynesha Stewart murder trial is pulling like undertow. Timothy Wayne (anyone with Wayne as a middle name in Texas who is charged with a violent offense is even odds guilty as charged. Someone once said there were clearly more men with the middle name Wayne in the Texas correctional system than enrolled in a Texas college system. The names Lee, Earl, Ray, Wayne are all good candidates for prison time.) Shepherd is accused of murdering his former girlfriend, dismembering her body, burning it on two patio grills, and either eating most of it, running it down the apartment disposal (which if you have lived in an apartment you would know that the disposal couldn't handle the job completely) or placing whatever was left of his beloved in an apartment Dumpster. Her remains, including her head, which could not burned completely because it is really impossible to burn a human head to the point of disintegration on a patio grill, were then dumped in perhaps two garbage landfills.
The Harris County Sheriff's Department would not go into the land fills to recover any evidence. Her family did not have any remains to bury. Perhaps it was too risky, too time consuming or the victim was just a black female and not a valuable aspect to securing Mr. Shepard's conviction. Or there were other things in the landfill that people didn't really want to find. At any rate, people volunteered to search for her. Texas EquuSearch volunteered to take the required vaccinations and search at no cost to the county. Ms. Stewart's body parts including her head or skull were never recovered. And the landfills' owners and managers were never inconvenienced.
But that is probably not going to be discussed in court in Harris County. Certainly not so near an election. And certainly not by anyone who doesn't want to ask such a question that really has no bearing on convicting Mr. Shepard. Who, it is said, was questioned for 12 hours after repeatedly asking for an attorney. There will be some inconvenience with that matter, but after all, no one is really going to worry about Mr. Shepard's civil rights. The fire department that responded to calls from Mr. Shepard's neighbors about the horrible black smoke threatening to engulf his balcony while he "grilled" some "meat" for a wedding, thought that the meat in his bathtub looked a little odd, but they did not stop the cook out. The neighbors complained that the smoke smelled dreadful but no one really questioned exactly what he was doing on his balcony burning something rather than actually cooking.
May Ms. Stewart rest in peace. May Mr. Shepard's court appointed counsel have a decent voir dire. May something resembling a trial, respectful of the Code of Criminal Procedure and the rights of the accused occur. And may those who did not readily search for something to bury find some peace, too.
The City of Houston which is just south of civilization is trying to recover from Hurricane Ike. Three hundred fifty persons are missing. If they go door to door and check every person who got something to eat at a shelter, perhaps they will find them. Many are children and it is difficult to understand how people with children can simply refuse to get off Galveston Island when officials told them that if they didn't they were going to die. The Coast Guard was picking people and pets up in helicopters and taking them to safety. Yet people refused to let the Coast Guard, one of the more honorable service and first responder teams in America save them. It isn't difficult to understand when you realize that children were not dismissed from school until Thursday before the hurricane hit Saturday or people were required to work until absolutely they were told to leave. By 6 am the next morning, the ferry to get off Boliver was closed. And it was too late. Where were the poor supposed to go? Did they know? Were they told? After people spent hours upon hours on the highways during the hurricane Rita evacuation disaster, people didn't want to leave their homes.
Animal shelters euthanized animals before the storm so they wouldn't drown. Drowned livestock are causing serious health problems in some areas.
The smell of rotting trees, debris, and dying vegetation is knocking us over on our streets. Our cats sit in the driveway to watch the rats run across the street from one pile of trash to the next. Our fences are down, our roofs are damaged, over one hundred thousand in good neighborhoods and bad have no electricity. Our schools, which usually look like they have been damaged in storms and never repaired, are not opened in many suburban areas. We don't have traffic lights on the busiest streets in America.
