Bent Corner

Jarrel Gray, a 20-year old Frederick Maryland man was killed this past Sunday morning after being Tasered twice in a 23 second period by a Frederick County Sheriff Deputy. This from the Frederick News-Post:

The deputy found three men fighting, Jenkins said. A female was also on the scene.

Jenkins would not provide the names or ages of the other people at the scene, but he said the deputy was a corporal and a 13-year veteran of the department.

When the deputy told the three men to show their hands, one of them did so immediately, another walked away before showing his hands, and the third man, identified as Gray, did not comply, Jenkins said.

The sheriff said no other officers were present when the deputy deployed the Taser. Gray, of the 7000 block of Ladd Circle, fell to the ground unconscious; he was given first aid on the scene.

Emergency responders arrived in minutes, Jenkins said. Gray was then taken to Frederick Memorial Hospital where he was pronounced dead about 7:30 a.m.

Gray’s family says that he was deaf in one ear and may not have understood the deputy’s instructions to show his hands.

I don’t like these Taser devices. For supposedly being non-lethal, there sure are a lot of people now dead because of them.

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My representative in congress Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett spoke at a town hall meeting on energy in Mount Airy and said he thought “gasoline needs to cost more that it already does” in order to promote conservation. He also said that “too many people are driving pickup trucks as personal transportation.”

I don’t know about people driving pickup trucks, but I know that gas already costs too much as it is. It doesn’t need to cost more then what it costs now. The fact that my elected representative in Washington D.C. actually hopes that gas goes up in price just confirms what I already know - I have a representative that does not represent my interests. Not only my interests, but the interests of my fellow neighbors in the Maryland 6th district.

Roscoe Bartlett uses the power of his office to satisfy his own whims. He doesn’t use his office for the benefit of the people he is elected to represent.

I also know that Roscoe Bartlett will continue representing the 6th district of Maryland until he either retires or dies. He will never lose an election. My fellow voters here in the 6th district of Maryland will continue to vote for Roscoe Bartlett no matter what he says or what he does. He can even say that he hopes our gas prices go up and people will still reelect him into office.

The New York Post is reporting that NBC has fired nearly the entire production staff from “Saturday Night Live”. The people that do all of the behind the scenes work on the show each and every week are now faced with a holiday season without the benefit of a job.

It must suck not being able to provide Christmas presents for your kids. That doesn’t matter though. What’s important is that the writers get their fair share (whatever that is) of all that Internet streaming video money the networks are raking in. It doesn’t matter that the paid advertising doesn’t even cover the bandwidth costs associated with streaming video on the Internet. It doesn’t matter that the networks only stream episodes on the Internet as a way of promoting the show and that they are not streaming them as a revenue source. That’s something for the accountants to figure out. The writers aren’t really good with numbers. They are much better with words.

Speaking of words, The New York Post included the following words in their article about the layoffs:

Despite being scrooged out of their Christmas-season paychecks, the “SNL” crew still has a big heart. Playbill reports that the cast plans to perform a nontelevised show tonight at the New York Upright Citizens Brigade Theater on West 26th Street. Ticket proceeds from the sold-out performance, which was produced by Lorne Michaels, will benefit the Writers Guild’s strike fund.

The proceeds went to benefit the Writers Guild’s strike fund? They could have given the money to the people that now don’t have jobs because of the strike. That actually would have been the decent thing to do. I’m not saying that the Writers Guild doesn’t need money in their strike fund. You don’t expect Julia Louis-Dreyfus to buy her own red WGA strike t-shirt, do you? Now that would just be silly.

It’s a known fact that streaming video on the Internet is worth billions upon billions of dollars. Look at all the people that are now millionaires because of videos they posted on YouTube. I heard that Chocolate Rain guy bought his own island in Dubai and he’s even thinking of adopting a baby from Cambodia. The vast fortunes that can be made from streaming video on the Internet are without limits.

A percentage of this limitless streaming video Internet wealth is clearly worth fighting for no matter who gets harmed in the process.

I didn’t even know that direct current (DC) electricity service still available anywhere, let alone New York City. It seems that alternating current (Con Ed) still had one lone DC power station still up and running and feeding DC to customers. It was finally converted over to Nikola Tesla’s alternating current (AC) electricity on November 14.

Back in the day Thomas Edison and had a long standing fued over which current was better. Edison pushed the idea of using inefficient DC while Tesla campaigned for the much more efficient AC current. Edison would denounced AC as being too dangerous. He would even electrocute live cows with using AC to try to show just how scary dangerous AC current supposedly was. In reality, DC is much more dangerous then AC.

For getting electrical power from one place to another, AC is clearly the superior form of current. It’s not even debatable.

Nikola Tesla was truly a genius and he was one of the most important men to ever live. Of course he died penniless and severely in debt because that is just the way Life works.

Link

Charles Brownstein, Executive Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) was interviewed by his friend and Newsarama administrator Matt Brady. The purpose of the interview was to discuss the Gordon Lee trial. There was something said in the interview that I found interesting. Specifically, it’s something Brownstein said about why the trial ended in a mistrial:

Before the jury was brought in, lead counsel Alan Begner brought some motions before the judge, including an oral motion in limine asking the judge to instruct prosecutors that their witnesses could not admit statements referring to Gordon’s previous criminal conviction for selling adult comics to an adult.

The phrase “selling adult comics to an adult” refers to Gordon Lee being convicted in the early 90’s of distributing obscene materials. It’s a phrase that gets mentioned a lot. It’s normally followed with the explanation that this prior conviction has nothing to do with his current legal troubles because that involved an adult and this involves a very young child.

What if the two cases are more connected then it seems?

Sandra Allen of Rome, Georgia was the adult that Lee was convicted of selling obscene material to. She wasn’t a comic book reader. She wasn’t a reader of obscene material. She was a mother of a child that came home from Lee’s comic book shop with a comic that she judged to be pornographic. It bothered her that her minor aged child could somehow get his hands on something she felt was pornographic. She didn’t understand how the neighborhood comic book shop could sell her son something she thought to be obscene. She decided she would make a visit to the comic book shop and check things out for herself.

On November 1, 1991 Sandra Allen went to Gordon Lee’s comic book shop and found more of what she believed to be pornographic on display to anyone entering the shop. Allen purchased two adult comics from Lee’s shop, Debbie Does Dallas and Final Taboo and took them directly to the Rome Police and made a complaint.

Upon receiving the two books, Rome Police Officer Marshall Smith took the two books to Floyd County Superior Court Judge Robert Salmon. After reviewing the two books purchased at Lee’s store, Judge Salmon issued an affidavit stating that there was probable cause to believe that pornographic materials were being sold at Lee’s comic book store. Based on the affidavit and the two books, Judge Salmon issued a search warrant for Lee’s comic book shop.

Over 300 allegedly obscene books and magazines were found and seized at Gordon Lee’s comic book shop by Rome Police. Lee was eventually convicted. His conviction stemmed not from the seized books and magazines, but from the two books purchased by Sandra Allen.

The seized books and magazines were not part of Lee’s trial.

Technically it’s true that Lee’s prior conviction was for selling “adult comics to an adult“. The comics being Debbie Does Dallas and Final Taboo and the adult being Sandra Allen. What is often overlooked is the reason Sandra Allen even went to Lee’s comic book shop and purchased the obscene comics in the first place. It wasn’t because she was looking for titillating reading material for herself. She went there because she was angry that her juvenile aged child was sold a pornographic comic book by Gordon Lee’s comic book shop.

A mother was upset by something her child received from Gordon Lee’s store. Why does that sound so familiar?

I’ve been trying to learn more about the Writers Guild of America (WGA) writers strike. Much of what I’ve read or heard about the reasons for the strike seem to be contradict other things I’ve read or heard about the strike. I found a list of points at the WGA.org website. Here’s a quick summery of the main sticking points:

• Home Video (Videocassettes and DVDs) Residuals - They currently get 0.3% of the distributors’ gross for the first $1 million and 0.36% thereafter. They want 0.6% of the distributors’ gross for the first $1 million and 0.72% thereafter.

• Non-Traditional Media Residuals - They currently get .3% of the gross for downloads where the customer pays for the download. They currently get paid nothing when the customer pays nothing. They want a residual payment of 2.5% of the distributor’s gross for re-use on non-traditional media, including the Internet. I’m not sure what they want to be paid when the content is free. It’s hard to assign a percentage to free.

If you go back and watch the YouTube video I posted the other day from the people from The Office, what they say in the video seems to contradict the information found on the WGA website. B.J. Novak, actor and writer for The Office, says that every time he meets a new viewer to The Office, they are watching it on the Internet or on DVD. I’m assuming that when they say they were watching it on the Internet, they were downloading the episodes from iTunes. Only recently did NBC start streaming episodes from free. The inference is that Novak and the other writers aren’t getting paid for the episodes on the Internet or on DVD.

That’s not true. If money changes hands, the writers are getting a percentage.

Marvel Comics is unveiling a fee-based online archive of more than 2,500 back issues. Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited will offer comics in a high-resolution format for $59.88 a year, or at a monthly rate of $9.99. If you subscribe for a full year, you will be billed $4.98 each month. Comics are read online. No download is required.

The service appears to be up and running along with free samples of various titles.

The biggest drawback is that new issues won’t be on the Marvel site until six months after they are published in the conventional dead tree format. Hopefully this policy clinging to an outdated way of thinking will change over time. When music is released on CD, I can go to the iTunes store and purchase it that same day. I don’t have to wait six months. I should be able to do the same with a comic book.

I was looking online for fantasy based art today when I stumbled upon some very sad news. Artist Keith Parkinson passed away two years ago to Leukemia. I wasn’t aware of this sad news. I even had a Keith Parkinson calender for 2006 and I didn’t know he was gone. This truly sucks. I have always been a fan of his work. He created fantasy art that always had a very realistic look to it.

He used to work for TSR where he was responsible for some of the best Dungeons & Dragons artwork. That’s how I became familiar with this work. His artwork was also featured on Magic The Gathering cards. He also did the box art for the EverQuest massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

He will be missed.

NBC has launched something they call NBC Direct. It allows viewers to watch complete episodes of most NBC shows. I guess NBC chose to do this as a result of their recent blow up with Apple iTunes. NBC chose not to sell their programing through iTunes, or iTunes chose not to sell NBC programing. I honestly lost track of which came first.

I’m watching the newest episode of The Office. Though it’s just as funny as the first time I watched it, it’s a real pain in the ass to view. The episodes have enough DRM to choke a goat. You have to use Internet Explorer 6 or 7 to launch the player. NBC Direct does not support Firefox. You also have to be a Windows XP or Vista user. If you are an Apple user or a fake UNIX (Linux) user, you are out of luck.

It also features paid advertising. Annoying paid advertising. Every commercial break shows the very same stupid commercials. The good people from Lipton evidently want me to know that the way I look at tea will forever change. That’s good because the way I currently look at tea is that it sucks. My view on tea can only get better. With that said, Lipton seems to think that I will now like tea because they have placed their tea in tea bags shaped like pyramids. That’s not the way to make me change my opinion on tea.

If they want me to like tea, they need to figure out a way to make it taste just like coffee.

Other then showing why the WGA writers are on strike, I don’t see why NBC decided to launch this crappy service. It’s clear NBC plans on making money by featuring content on the web. It’s also clear that they need to realize they will need to actually pay the very people that create this content. Also, putting cumbersome restrictions on customers forcing them to watch content a certain way will only turn away customers. I should be able to put content on my iPod and watch it where and how I want. Because of NBC’s restrictive DRM, I cannot do that.