Our home in Beirut (near the Greek Orthodox part of town, which my wife swears was just a coincidence). If you look closely you can that our 4th floor landing was once a sniper’s nest. The bullet pock marks on the wall are outgoing (incoming can be found if you lean over and look down). It’s amazing (and sad) that…
Check out this lengthy piece (and well worth reading the whole thing) by David Simon about murders, stats, the BPD, the state’s attorney’s office, and the need for main-stream media. (And thanks to an anonymous comment for cluing me in.) The Stat: In 2011, the Baltimore Police Department charged 70 defendants with murder or manslaughter. Yet in 2010, the department charged…
I’m off to Beirut to see the missus, who has been there for a month already. Yes, Beirut, the Pearl of the Levant, The Paris of the East, Chicago by the Sea. Except for rolling blackouts, a near civil-war next door (in the country that imposed peace in Lebanon, naturally), and some burning issues in the city of Tripoli in…
Need some good summer reading? Why not Eliot? It’s fiction set very firmly in Baltimore’s Eastern District. I know those streets well (even if the cameras are new to me). (and I love that he gives a shout out to Larry, the world’s best dispatcher.) I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say I enjoyed taking the turns…
In his autobiography Benjamin Franklin wrote: On the whole, I proposed as a more effectual watch, the hiring of proper men to serve constantly in the at business; and as a more equitable way of supporting the charge the levying a tax than should be proportion’d to the property…. It paved the way for the law obtained a few years…
Remember Dudas (AKA Christopher Coke), the Jamaican drug lord? He was sentenced in Manhattan (though most of his criminal acts were in Jamaica). When he was holding out in Tivoli Gardens, I did not think this he would ever be sentenced, much less by a US court. I wonder if life today is better or worse in Tivoli Gardens without…
From the Times: A federal judge ruled Thursday that the police did not sufficiently warn Occupy Wall Street protesters against walking on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge before arresting about 700 of them in October. The ruling, by Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, allows a class-action suit filed by protesters to proceed against…
And the report by Jerusalem Postreporter Gil Shefler, who got beat up by extremists on one end of the spectrum, but isn’t sure which. I’m amused that Gil asks the Greek Nazi party (Golden Dawn) how they differ at all from the German Nazi’s of WWII. All the party member can come up with is: “The Nazi’s didn’t like Greece.…
Check this out by Michael Corbin in Baltimore’s City Paper: Better of Two Evils. Makes me sound like such a intellectual bad-ass. And potty mouth. Fuckin’-A! Seriously though, it is very powerfully written. Makes me want to re-read my own books.
The end of the semester means I get caught up on some of my reading. I finished The Autobiography of Ben Frankin (good stuff) and David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.” (The footnote on the necessity of formal wear would have been very useful to read before we crossed the Atlantic on the QM2 last…