Half-ton Woman Indicted in Slaying of Nephew, 2

From CNN (emphasis is mine):

A grand jury indicted Mayra Lizbeth Rosales, 27, on Thursday on one count of first-degree murder and on one count of injury to a child in the death of Eliseo Gonzalez Jr. She previously had been charged with capital murder.

Rosales weighs nearly 1,000 pounds and cannot fit through a door to leave her home, leaving prosecutors wondering how to bring her to court. As of Thursday evening, she was not in custody.

Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino said that holding her at the county jail for her trial would be impossible because she needs extensive medical care.

::shakes head:: I don't even know.

via Slog

image via KGBT

What He Said

From The Stranger's David Schmader:

Sometimes Olympic triumph looks like an ugly halter top.

That, David Schmader, is a very good point.

via Slog

Guns Don't Kill People: The Update

The 14-year-old boy who shot and killed a 54-year-old hiker he mistook for a bear has been charged with manslaughter.


via Slog

Son, You're a Loser. Why Can't You Just Be Cool Like Your Old Man?

From Orlando's Local6:

SPRING HILL, Fla. -- A Gulf Coast man was charged with murder after he said he gave his 15-year-old son powerful prescription drugs because he wanted the boy to know "how to party right." Steven Alfano was charged with third-degree murder after son Vincent died of an accidental overdose in June. Witnesses said the 47-year-old Spring Hill man showed his son how to crush and snort pills like the painkiller oxycodone and the heroin substitute methadone.

Alfano was arrested Friday and is being held without bail. Officials did not know if he had a lawyer. The father initially told police he kept the medications locked away so no one else could get them. Alfano later told two of Vincent's friends that he knowingly gave the drugs to his son to teach him to party. The conversation was recorded by police.

Way to go, dad. Way to go. RIP, Vincent.

via MyDeathSpace

You and Your Big Ideas

Greyhound Scraps Ads after Canada Bus Beheading

Headline of the Day

Sydney Morning Herald:

‘Bus beheader’ had mouth, nose and ear in pocket.

Umm.... ::furrows brow:: I don't, uhh.... What the fuck??

A police officer at the scene reported seeing the attacker hacking off pieces of the victim's body and eating them, according to a police tape leaked on the internet....

And you thought my fermented Chinese tea complete with slimy yeast cultures was weird.

via Slog

Guns Don't Kill People

Guns fired by teenagers aiming at hikers mistaken for bears kill people.

OSO, Snohomish County — Troy Almli gave his mother a warning just before she headed off to Sauk Mountain on Saturday for a much-anticipated hike with a longtime friend.

"Be careful," he said. It was opening weekend of bear season, and "There'll be a lot of [people] with guns out there."

Pamela Almli, 54, brushed away his concerns.

An avid and accomplished hiker, she felt as safe and at home on the trails as just about anywhere.

But her son's fears were justified.

About 10:30 a.m., while Almli was bent over on a marked hiking trail, she was fatally shot by a 14-year-old boy who mistook her for a bear.

"How could anybody think a 5-foot-2 Swede was a bear?" Troy Almli said. "We just can't see it."

He said the family is not anti-gun or anti-hunting, but the shooting was befuddling. So his aunt and grandfather on Monday retraced his mother's last steps to see if they could make sense of the tragedy.

Police said the 14-year-old and his 16-year-old brother, both from Concrete, were dropped off in the Sauk Mountain area near Rockport, Skagit County, on Saturday morning by their grandfather, but he was not with them when the shooting occurred....

Wow. I guess grandpa thought leaving the firearm-wielding boys alone seemed like a good idea at the time. Yikes!

via Slog

Random Police Violence at July 25 NYC Critical Mass

New York's finest. Word is that:

the cyclist in this video was arrested, held for 26 hours, and charged with attempted assault and resisting arrest. One other cyclist was ticketed Friday night for riding outside the bike lane, which is not actually illegal and often necessary, considering how popular bike lanes are for double parking.

via Slog

July 25 Critical Mass Melee: What He Said

In the interest of providing access to both sides of the story, the full account of the incident from the driver's point of view is available here. And now an excerpt:

While a some cyclists I’ve spoken with have written Mark off as another indignant road-hog, Mark says he actually used to be a bike commuter when he lived in Seattle a few years ago. “I sympathize with [cyclists’] cause. I ride bikes too. I’m a liberal hippie democrat,” he says, adding “I’m gay, the person with me was a lesbian and we were a attacked by eco-terrorists. It’s the most Seattle thing that could have happened.

Do you have any thoughts or experience with Critical Mass? What opinions do you have?

My consideration on this issue continues.

July 25 Critical Mass Melee

Critical Mass is a simple gathering of bike lovers who organize a regular monthly ride through city streets to assert their right to the roads. Critical Mass is not a formal organization or group although groups within individual cities decide to be as formal or as informal about their particular city's endeavor; instead, it is more of a concept meant to bring bike lovers together to celebrate their common interest in both their past time and their desire for safety and road space.

I'm certainly not exhaustively familiar with Critical Mass; you know any Critical Mass rides in my future will be many hours of bike riding down the road, literally and figuratively. I do know that I am upset about the melee during Seattle's most recent ride.

From KING 5:

A demonstration turned violent Friday night after a group of cyclists taking part in the Critical Mass demonstration got into an argument with a driver on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Critical Mass is a group of cyclists that takes to the streets the last Friday of every month to promote cyclists’ right to the road.

It’s wasn’t clear what sparked the confrontation at 15th and Aloha, but witnesses say they saw about a dozen cyclists surround a white Subaru, blocking in the driver.

Apparently, the driver felt intimidated and tried to back up to get away, but he backed into at least two cyclists.

He then tried to take off, but cyclists chased after him, bashed in his car window and assaulted the driver. The driver was taken to an area hospital.

From an actual eyewitness (a bystander):

I was just looking up news information about an event that I witnessed tonight and found a frighteningly misinformed article on the event on the King 5 news website. Their “Bicycle demonstration turns violent” article paints a picture of cyclist brutality committed on a vehicle, injuring the driver and scaring the passenger, who they describe as a pregnant woman. While there is no denying that the cyclists circled the car and trashed it, this was all an attempt to stop the car and driver from possibly hurting anyone else, as the scene they describe in their newscast takes place about 200 ft from the scene where the motorist accelerated from 0 to 40 THROUGH a standing line of cyclists at Aloha and 14th, luckily only injuring two of them as his car was pointed at a group of six.

I was standing about 20 feet from the scene and saw the entire altercation. I honestly cannot believe what I saw. Originally, the vehicle was trying to inch (westward on Aloha) into an oncoming mass of cyclists on a narrow road, where he had to pull into the oncoming traffic lane in order to get around the cars parked in his lane. About 6 cyclists peeled off to park themselves in front of the vehicle, explaining that he needed to wait and they would all be out of his way in a minute. The driver, however, remained agitated and expressed that they were “in a rush” and “would be late”. When the cyclists asked what they were going to be late for, the driver responded, “We have reservations!”, which left the group largely speechless until one of the cyclists again explained that he would save a lot of time and trouble if he just waited another 30 seconds for the rest of the cyclists to pass. At that moment, the driver suddenly put his car in reverse and backed up—5 feet into the sidewalk (now the car is parallel to Aloha—thank goodness there were no pedestrians behind him!)—and stopped. This strange behavior panicked everyone and no one moved except to shout “Stop.” This is when his passenger started yelling for him to “Calm down and stop” as well. After staying put for about 10 seconds, the driver then said “fuck this” and accelerated into the line of standing cyclists. When he hit the first ones, he continued to accelerate, but steered into the larger mass of cyclists before turning the wheel and tearing off in the opposite direction (east on Aloha) with one of the hit cyclists still on the roof of his car.

The driver sped down Aloha with a mess of bicycles and cyclists in his wake, a cyclist on his roof, and everyone, including his pregnant passenger, yelling for him to “Just stop!” At the bottom of the hill, the driver stopped at a stop sign and the cyclists swarmed the car, slashing his tires and breaking the windows in order to make sure that he did not continue operating his vehicle through the city like a madman. His door was opened, the driver got out of the car in tears and walked, unmolested back up to where the cyclists were splayed out in the street apologizing to everyone. His passenger was relatively calm, also walked up the street unmolested, and explained that her friend had made a mistake and that she had been yelling for him to calm down and stop the car. While there was a little hysterical yelling by the freightened (sic) bicyclists, there was absolutely no physical confrontation.

The reason that I am writing you is that it seems alarmingly irresponsible that such a biased story would be printed and broadcast when King 5 admits that “It’s wasn’t clear what sparked the confrontation”. Not that this is surprising by any means, which is unfortunate. I guess I just want to make sure that the real story is put out there before this damning misinterpretation gains any steam.

I am very distressed about this, both as a new bike rider (if you can call my current ability "riding") and as someone who absolutely acquiesces with this celebration and expression. I certainly plan to incorporate Critical Mass rides into my bike-riding (and hopefully bike-loving) future.


image from actual incident via Slog
via Slog

Busted in Bed Together: FOX News and The Bush Administration

This is certainly no surprise but its disconcerting none the less.



via Slog

Steven Colbert Really Prefers to Blow Dry His Grapes

Check out Steven Colbert's hilarious interview with Sierra Club executive director and The Huffington Post Green's prolific blogger, Carl Pope, who was an incredibly good sport about all sorts of Colbert fatuousness.

Aah, Steven, how I heart you.


via The Huffington Post

Cultivating Girls with Precarious Ideas about Sex One Purity Ball at a Time

Every year, the Purity Ball makes the news and I lose my mind a little bit. The Ball is a formal, primarily Evangelical event attended by girls as young as four and their fathers. The girls pledge to remain pure and virginal until marriage; the fathers pledge to protect their daughters' virginity.

Let's begin with a creepy excerpt from Nancy Gibbs' July 17th article (The Pursuit of Teen Girl Purity) in TIME magazine:

Kylie Miraldi has come from California to celebrate her 18th birthday tonight. She'll be going to San Jose State on a volleyball scholarship next year. Her father, who looks a little like Superman, is on the dance floor with one of her sisters; he turns out to be Dean Miraldi, a former offensive lineman with the Philadelphia Eagles. When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. "We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today's world," she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet--a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. "On my wedding day, he'll give it to my husband," she explains. "It's a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I'm supposed to be loved."

Kylie talks with an unblinking confidence about a promise that she says is spiritual, mental and physical. "It's something I'm very proud of. I plan to keep pure until marriage. It's a promise I made to myself--not pressure from my parents," she says. She speaks plainly about what she wants in her life, what she thinks she has the power to control and what she doesn't. "I'm very much at peace about this," she says, and looks out across the twirling room. "I don't feel like I need to seek a man. I will be found."

These messages provided by these events and the parents who encourage their daughters participation are incredibly complicated. The messages insinuate that girls' worth is dependent only on their sexual activity or inactivity. And aren't these parents getting a little too involved in what's going on between their daughters' legs?

Perhaps providing a thorough sex education (including issues about emotions and self-esteem, peer pressure and hormones, STIs and contraception, pregnancy and responsibility), empowering girls to make their own decisions and being prepared to love and respect them after they've made their own decision, good or "bad," is the way to cultivate a sense of worth and strength in these maturing girls. In a time where abstinence-only sex education is a widespread and Congress-endorsed, albeit irresponsible, means of "teaching" students throughout the country, it is imperative for kids to be given as much information as possible and to be allowed to make decisions without fearing repercussions and crushing guilt.

From Feministing:

Flowery language and valorizing these days doesn't change what purity balls are about: the ownership and fetishizing of young girls' sexuality. Perhaps someone should remind Time of that fact.

via Feministing

The Art of Dying

The Stranger recently did an article on the death care industry and Seattle artist Greg Lundgren, owner of Lundgren Monuments. Lundgren makes incredibly beautiful and unique translucent glass headstones. I really appreciate non-traditional funerals and funeral accouterments and Lundgren is absolutely providing a service to those who prefer something less funereal than sand blasted Barre gray monuments fabricated from Vermont granite. Boring.

Lundgren's monument business is also part art gallery which showcases the glass headstones and a wide array of atypical urns, caskets, action figures, portraits and other memorial art. From the article:

One [piece], by Arne Pihl, is a polished piece of dark wood. Others, by Timothy Foss, look like Japanese ceramics glazed with modern, minimalist patterns. Stefan Gulassa made a small, white cupboard for mementos of the deceased—a watch, a fishing weight, some fly-tying scissors—like Joseph Cornell's evocative boxed assemblages, but with a discreet metal case in the back that holds the ashes.

Lundgren's urns, made of small slabs of glass, look like tiny modernist houses. "An urn is a house, a little house," Lundgren had said a few days earlier, while giving me a tour of his studio. "This is style. This is fashion. When 50 Cent and P. Diddy die, I'm going to make them big bling diamonds out of glass."

The funeral-industry people are particularly taken with one object on Lundgren's shelves: a ceramic pipe wrench made of human bone china. "Human bone china?" they keep repeating to each other. "Human bone china!"

Its maker, Charles Krafft, stands inconspicuously—as inconspicuously as he can, being the tallest, baldest, most bearded man in the room—by the front door, drinking wine. Krafft makes hollow ceramics from pulverized cremated remains, then fills the object with the leftover ashes. He has made a ceramic military helmet for a veteran, a ceramic dog for a veterinarian, and a ceramic bottle of vodka for a friend of his ("an alcoholic gay man"). He also makes ceramic rifles, grenades, and "disasterware," including kitschy Dutch windmills with swastikas for blades. Krafft is one of the only artists in Lundgren's gallery—one of the only artists in America—who has been working in the funerary arts for years.

The gallery contains no ridiculous, gimmicky funeral shit: LifeGem, for instance, manufactures diamonds made from the liver, yes, you read it right, the partially cremated liver of your loved one. In order to make this diamond, the crematory operator is responsible for scooping some molten tissue from the flaming corpse of your cherished family member or friend. Then, the tissue is simply dropped in the mail to LifeGem and they take it from there. Who doesn't want to wear momma's liver around their neck? This gross, imprecise scooping, by the way, is illegal in New York State.

The article is really thorough and profound; it covers many aspects of the funeral industry and discusses the Goliath conglomerates (Service Corporate International, specifically, which also contains Batesville Caskets, Dignity Memorial, the National Cremation Society, Advantage Funeral and Cremation Services, Making Everlasting Memorials, Memorial Plan Cemeteries and Funeral Homes and Funeria del Angel) that are crippling and absorbing the small, privately-owned businesses in Seattle and the entire country. I really encourage you to read the article; I think its imperative to have as much knowledge about this topic as possible. It is impossible to know when you may be faced with making funeral arrangements and going into the process armed with at least some basic information will benefit you immensely in the end.

5 Approved Obama Jokes

Obama is "sympathetic to late-night comedians." He really is. Obama understands that they're having a hard time finding "jokes to make about [him]" so he's going to help them out. Yesterday, he issued a list of five official campaign-approved jokes about him that anyone ANYONE! can use without renumeration. So, so nice, right? Here they are:

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, "You know, we don't get many kangaroos here." Barack Obama replies, "At these prices, I'm not surprised. That's why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil."

A traveling salesman knocks on the door of a farmhouse, and much to his surprise, Barack Obama answers the door. The salesman says, "I was expecting the farmer's daughter. Barack Obama replies, "She's not here. The farm was foreclosed on because of subprime loans that are making a mockery of the American dream."

A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why the long face?" Barack Obama replies, "His jockey just lost his health insurance which should be the right of all Americans."

Q: What's black and white and red all over?
A: The Barack Obama issue of New Yorker magazine, which should be embarrassed after publishing such a tasteless and offensive cover, which I reject and denounce.

And my personal favorite:

A Christian, a Jew and Barack Obama are in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean. Barack Obama says, "This joke isn't going to work because there's no Muslim in this boat."

via Truthdig

What He Said

from Bob Cesca:

...The president ought to have good judgment. No shocker there. Judgment in this regard is the difference between, say, an invasion of Cuba leading to thermonuclear war or, on the other hand, a smarter, more sensible quarantine option. (Historians will forever hypothesize how Nixon, for instance, would have handled those 13 days.) Is certain behavior appropriate or obnoxious? If [John McCain] is unable to control himself and blurts out a joke about bestial rape or killing civilians despite the fact that there are reporters everywhere and he happens to be running for president, it goes a long way towards determining whether he's someone who we can trust to make snap decisions with global implications or whether he's simply a tweaking street loon who talks to invisible shadow people.

The president should know the difference between funny and not funny, or else -- stay away from the comedy. A sense of humor doesn't literally mean "the ability to recite a joke." Anyone can repeat a joke. But politicians like Senator McCain have managed to accumulate a captive audience of reporters who have to laugh at his jokes or else be tossed out of the barbeque loop. Consequently, he can tell one of his awful jokes and everyone in the corp snarfs up their cole slaw. This reaction has thusly given the senator the false impression that he's funny, when he's really not. The gorilla rape joke, for example, is only funny in the context of, say, a larger bit about unfunny jokes -- or bad comics who try way too hard to be funny....

via The Huffington Post

Let's Move on Already; Obama Doesn't Really Care That Much

On Larry King, Obama talked about The New Yorker cover:

Well, I know it was The New Yorker’s attempt at satire. I don’t think they were entirely successful with it. But you know what? It’s a cartoon, Larry, and that’s why we’ve got the First Amendment … You know, we’ve—one of the things when you’re running for president for almost two years is, you get a pretty thick skin. And, you know, I’ve seen and heard worse.

via Slog

I'm Pretty Sure McCain Doesn't Know Anything At All

In 1993, Czechoslovakia split into two nations: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. We pretty much all know that. Or so I thought. McCain referred to current events in Czechoslovakia TWICE in the past two days. They say your memory is the first thing to go, right?


via CNN Political Ticker

Tony Snow's Funeral

via Truthdig

You'd Better Get to Mardi Gras While You Still Can

This screen grab from NASA's new ClimateTimeMachine shows the alarmingly large portion of the southeastern United States that would be underwater if the thinning part of the Greenland ice sheet melted in its entirety, raising worldwide sea levels six meters.

via Slog