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Latest Humorous T-shirt Slogan:
"You Wish!"
This one has to be taken in context to be appreciated. The girl wearing this belly shirt was maybe 5'0" tall, with a muffin top going on, despite the fact that she was clearly in her third trimester of pregnancy. In addition she was wearing a thong that came up past her low-rise jeans and pushed her muffin top down over the edge to really emphasize the roll. I'm not in perfect shape so I don't expect that others should be, but when you are wearing that shirt, along with the rest of the outfit, you open yourself to scrutiny (and perhaps random looks of horror).

It's fun to hate:
The Soccer Moms who insist that they drive gas-guzzling SUV's for the safety of their children despite the fact that they are 6 times more likely to be in a rollover accident than any other vehicle. It's like beating your child unconscious with the butt of your gun so that he will remain on the floor, thus making him less likely to be hit by a random bullet coming through the front window.

When Shadowtwin reigns supreme:
There will be mandatory, passive birth control required to participate in any form of government assistance. If you can't afford to raise your child on your own we are here to help you, but we must first make sure that your reproductive organs are adequately contained. If you don't like that policy all you have to do is support your kids your damn self!
Vote Shadowtwin!


Wildly inaccurate, yet shockingly precise, predictions based completely on happenstance and arbitrary universal fluctuations.
Your Horoscope:


Sagitarius: 11/22-12/21
A typographical error in your Church's newsletter will lead to you performing sex acts on dozens of anonymous strangers in your pursuit of "oral highground."

Capricorn: 12/22-1/19
The stars did recently tell your wife to "listen to her heart" regarding whether or not she should leave you. The stars did not intend for you to listen to her heart. But once you used that bonesaw on her sternum (not trusting the stethoscope which just responded with a cryptic thumping sound), we're pretty sure she made up her mind anyway.

Aquarius: 1/20-2/18
The stars would like to apologize for stating in their last prophecy, "Be wary of the stranger you meet at beach this weekend. The stars aren't sure why, but they don't trust him." Through a cosmic hiccup, that information was supposed to be released this month. The August prophecy should have read, "A dark and handsome stranger will approach you on the beach, profess his love for you, and sweep you away for a jetset marriage. After which you will lead a long, happy, prosperous, healthy life as the Queen of a small island nation." We apologize for any inconvenience this error may have caused.

Pisces: 2/19-3/20
Your new stopwatch will allow you to time how long you can hold your breath underwater down to the thousandth of a second. Unfortunately, poor planning will mean that you are not able to actually share the information with anyone.

Aries: 3/21-4/19
Your innovative new device for beauticians to use while giving pedicures can be wildly successful and make you quite wealthy IF you change the name. Trust us, no one is going to buy a "Ped-O-File".

Taurus: 4/20-5/20
Your Mother always told you to wear clean underwear just in case there was an accident and paramadics had to see them. But as you board that plane today, the stars want you to know that you needn't worry about it. The debris field will be more than 8 square miles, making it impossible to find most human remains. Not to mention that the ensuing fire burned so hot that it disintegrated not only all fabric, but most of the thin metals aboard as well.

Gemini: 5/21-6/21
You just had to get that genital piercing, didn't you? The stars tried to warn you not to, but you went ahead and did it anyway... Now all your worst fears will come to bear when, at a campground this weekend, you run afoul of this guy:


Cancer: 6/22-7/22
The less traveled by areas of the Grand Canyon's north rim offer some of the most breathtaking views of this natural wonder. You will soon find out they also include some of the worst footings and none of the handrails. They do, however, provide equally awe-inspiring, terminal velocity impacts.

Leo: 7/23-8/22
The stars heard your pleas, begging for someone who you could share your love with and embrace for the rest of your life. If you are still single, throw your arms around the closest person to you at 3:44pm GMT on Dcember 9th -That'll be the one. Trust us, you won't have time to be picky...

Virgo: 8/23-9/22
The stars have piled up most of your things on the front porch. You can stay at a friend's house, but you aren't coming back home until you admit what you did and apologize. The stars' Mother was right about you... (you must have really pissed them off; the stars were in tears while they told me this)

Libra: 9/23-10/22
The stars have been doing a little thinking and a lot of math. The population of planet earth is roughly 6,796,590,704. That means that roughly 566,382,558 people share each astrological sign. About 18,620,796 have the same birthday. Based on average life expectancy as many as 248,277 people were born on the same day, in the same year, for every zodiac sign. How can one statement possibly predict the future of all of them? Ehh, fuck it. "A full moon while Venus is rising is an omen of good things to come."

Scorpio: 10/23-11/21
They say you never know how you are going to react to a crisis. After a home invasion this weekend you will: You will scream, "Do whatever you want to my wife, but leave me alone!" You will then create a distraction by throwing your newborn at the assailant as you dive through the window to safety. Now you know.

Music lost to history:

Aerosmith - Dream On When I started doing these, I could never have imagined that I would be putting an Aerosmith song here. Since I was born in 1974, this song is well before my generation. It was recorded in 1972 and released in 1983 on Aerosmith's Self-Titled Album, but to read the information on it at Wikipedia most of us would become familiar with it from a re-release in 1976.

Like most of the music being released in the late 60's/early 70's that was pushing the rock-n-roll envelope, Dream On relies heavily on solid composition and and melody. Before the era of the modern effects processor, these bands had no distortion to hide behind (or very little), and synthesized instruments hadn't yet made their way into music. In that way the music always sounds more raw to us today because, quite simply, it was. While it seems laughable to think about today, music like this was so far removed from the bubble-gum pop of the 50's that it still wasn't accepted into the mainstream. As the baby-boomers became the target demographic, the rock-n-roll movement really started to pick up speed, with bands like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith clearing the path for the much darker and heavier bands like Black Sabbath.

While I (and most of my generation) are probably far more familiar with the Aerosmith of the late 80's and early 90's, the reason this song makes it onto my MLtH page comes down to one thing: Age. Not necessarily the age of the song; In fact, as I sat down to do the research for this today, I had no idea when it was released, but would have guessed (closely) the mid 70's. Tyler was born March 26, 1948, meaning that this song was written when he was only 24 years old. I'm not sure why, but I have always thought this song was pretty amazing given his age at composition. I suppose it is human nature to wax poetic about the days of yore and the imminent passage of time, but the melody sets a mood that makes you feel it right along with him. As the song nears the end and his lyrics become more more frenzied, you can almost feel the pain (longing?) in his voice. Listen to it with headphones and no distraction sometime, you'll see what I mean.

I wrote a short bit some time ago about Kelly Sweet's cover of this song (see the video on Youtube). While I have since gotten over the initial hatred I felt towards the cover of the song, I still just can't like it. The words are there; she hits the notes; but I just can't hear it in her voice. As if there is somthing very personal about the song and Tyler's deliverance of the lyrics that just can't be duplicated. At least to me.

That said, I have heard Aerosmith doing the song with an orchestra, and it also seems to lack the passion of the original. So perhaps the thing that I like so much about it is the under-produced, raw sound of it, or it may be that I am still hearing it through the ears of that impressionable youth that heard if for the first time in a dusty old Van with my Uncle Art. Either way, it seems it is Lost to History.

Music Lost to History Archive


I Can't Believe it's Not Porn!
WhorePresents.comYep, it's not porn. It's not a site with gifts for sale either, which is probably a good thing since I can't imagine that any woman would be at all flattered to get a gift -no matter how nice- in a box that says "Whore Presents.com" on it.

Daily Reading:
BlackChampagne
Magazine Man
Shane Nickerson
Wil Wheaton
Boners
Hoyazo's Poker Blog

My reading list changes from time to time, and there are many sites that I visit that are not on the list. They are listed in the order that I visit them, enjoy!



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Shadowtwin.com: My brief career as a lead prosecutor



Thursday, September 21, 2006
 

My brief career as a lead prosecutor

As I have noted here before, I lived in a lot of different places during my childhood. Not because we were a military family, but because when my parents divorced, my dad was rather a dick about it; he seemed to think that by not supporting his kids at all it would force mom to go back to him -or so much I have come to assume when looking at the situation with adult eyes. At any rate, we lived in many places that were either already condemned, or would become condemned and force us to move along. I'm not complaining about this, mind you, I think that the experiences I had all that time ago really hammered home the importance of preparing for the future -particularly, the uncertainty of it.

The huge downside to moving from place to place was the schools. Anyone who has ever been transferred to a different school in the middle of the school year knows how difficult it is to fit in with the kids, who can be brutal at that age, when they have already formed into their own little groups. It never helped matters that the teachers always found it helpful to force you to go stand in front of the class and tell them your name and a brief story about what brought you to the new school (no kidding, damn near every teacher made me do some form of this). So you quickly go from hoping to fly under the radar for a bit to being that new kid who can't stop talking about himself. Most of the kids hate you on principle alone.

After transferring from school to school a few times, I began to learn that the kids who didn't reject you at first were often the ones that you really wanted to stay away from. Like this one kid Bert, he was (so I found out later) a troublemaker, but he was friendly with myself and my brother on the first day at our new school (we were all of 10 and 11). A short while later, a rumor began going around (which may or may not have been truthful, but the fact that the parents believed it lends to its credibility) that Bert sexually assaulted a little girl in the town. No one saw Bert for quite a while after that, though we never really knew where he went. Of course we were at that age of grandiose speculation, so we surmised that he must be serving time in the dreaded Juvenile Hall (which sounds like a place that child superheroes would hang out, actually. You know "Later, at Juvenile Hall..").

So after transferring to too many schools to count, I kind of gave up on making friends for while. The kids who were friendly to me right away were often of the same ilk as Bert, and the kids who weren't were already established in their little social circles, insofar as one can have "social circles" at the age of 11. This probably has a lot to do with the way I am today actually. I have very few friends, but the friends I do have are the type that I would give a kidney to.

One of the few good friends that I had in my childhood after all the moving around started was a kid by the name of Art (and I can't remember his last name, some friend, eh?). I met Art just as I was starting the seventh grade. The school was in Winston, Or., and was the middle school where kids from three different grammar schools would go before moving on to high school. The students there came in ready made groups, some coming from Tenmile Elementary, some from Sunny Slope, and some from Winston Elementary. I had moved to live with my father that summer, in hopes that the school hopping would stop, but it still left me as one of the kids that didn't know anyone when middle school started. Art was the same way.

Art was a bit heavyset and abnormally tall for his (our) age (not freakishly tall, or even fat, but just awkward enough that the kids poked fun at him, as kids will do). It was within the first couple of days at the new school that we would meet, and even then it would be more from circumstance than genuine good nature. While I don't remember exactly what happened, I know that Art made the cardinal mistake for a kid who was already on notice as far as "not fitting in" was concerned: he answered an unanswerable question in geography class. This was, of course, the quickest way to get everyone to shun you. It seems that kids really hate people who aren't outright stupid, and there he is flexing his mental muscle.

When lunch came that day, Art was alone at a table in the furthest recess of the cafeteria. I would love to say that I was such a big person that I went to sit with him just to be friendly, but that is hardly how it shook out. The truth is that as I was looking for a seat at one of the more populous tables, backpacks, duffflebags, jackets and other such things began occupying the seats, as the "cool kids" pointed to Art's lone table and told me to "go sit with the nerd". As I say, Art and I were in pretty much the same situation as far as the ready made friends group was concerned, but I had theorized that since everyone already had someone to pick on, I would be able to sneak into the cool crowd unnoticed. No luck with that. I did learn, however, that one really shouldn't be the only kid in the school wearing a dress shirt when it is his intention to fit in.

Art and I sat and ate lunch. I know that we introduced ourselves, but beyond that I don't think we really shared in any conversation. The next few days at lunch, I would still try to make my way to the cool kids table, but would invariably end up again at the table with Art. After a few days, I wasn't even trying to sit at any other tables, I would just go to that table in the back of the cafeteria and sit with him. It was just eating lunch, not as if this was going to be something that was seared into my memory, right?

One day, while eating lunch, Art saw the novel that I was reading (I think it was The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and began talking to me about it. It seemed we had something in common. While that was wonderful and everything, I was still holding out hope that I would eventually make it to the cool kids table, and sharing interests with Art wasn't the way to get there. The thing about it was, Art and I shared not only this interest, but we also seemed to excel in the same classes (we were both in the advanced math class), and read the same magazines (if I didn't get to the library in time, Art would already be looking at the latest issue of OMNI). I began to realize that it was foolish to think about trying to fit in with the other group when I had so much more in common with Art.

So over the course of the first few weeks of school, Art and I sat there at lunch together, but also began hanging out between classes. Of course our hanging out wasn't in the form of slacking off and making fart sounds, we would be talking about science or the latest episode of Riptide or, a personal favorite, the miniseries V. In short, we would be geeking it up between classes. It was at this point that I realized I was never truly going to be one of the "cool kids", my interests would never allow it. Sadly, Art would transfer to another school sometime near Christmas the following year. But for the year or so that I knew him, we became quite good friends.

One of the things that I remember most about Art was a project that we worked on for a grade in History class. Our teacher, Mr. LaFontaine, had a different way of handling our final reports, which was completely unknown to us when we wrote them. Instead of just grading us on our final reports, some of the final reports were picked out to be part of a court proceeding, which would be set up and run by the students, all of which was going to count as part of our "final". Everyone was to be involved in the proceeding, which would include the accused, prosecution and defense councils, a jury, and the teacher would be the judge. The one thing that I don't clearly remember is the jury; I know there was a jury, but I don't remember if it was kids from the same class that were the jurors or if they were kids from another class. The class was given four days of class time (I think) to prepare for this all.

The court cases were all to deal with possible plagiarism (which is, of course, rampant on final reports in high school) on our final papers. The teacher had pulled a number of them that looked suspicious to him, and the people who wrote them would stand accused of it. Of course, the would be innocent until proven guilty, and would be given a defense team that would try to dispute the prosecution's evidence. I don't remember for sure if we were assigned to the teams or if we were able to choose, but Art and I ended up being on a prosecution team. It was our charge to prove that a beautiful and quite popular girl named Aurora actually plagiarised her final report.

Since we were UbergeeksTM, Art and I didn't just use class time to put together our case, we were in the library after school, at lunch, even before school on a few occasions. We read through all of the books that she had listed as References in her paper and couldn't find any sign of plagiarism. There was a great deal of paraphrasing, but that is far different that plagiarism. Hell if one couldn't paraphrase, no paper would ever be written on the high school level. We couldn't find any sign that she had actually plagiarised anything though, at least not in the books that she had listed as her sources...

The report was about some event in the American Revolution, so we began looking at every reference book we could find that had anything to do with that subject. If you were going to plagiarise, we surmised, you wouldn't want to list your source right on the last page of the report. We found what would be our only evidence (at least our only compelling evidence) in a single sentence in one of the books. I don't remember the whole sentence, but it was talking about a message being sent from one person to another, one of the books described that action as being done by "Warren via Roxbury". That sentence used the word "via", which was not a word that your average 11 or 12 year old is going to be throwing around. Yet, right there in her report were those three words, along with a paraphrasing of the entire sentence. The smoking gun, as it were. We had her.

We also had a problem. In the reference book, "Warren via Roxbury" was written just like that, obviously meaning that a message was sent to Warren by way of Roxbury. In her report, that was written "Warren Via Roxbury", note the capitalization of the word "via". It became pretty clear to me that she was paraphrasing the sentence and mistakenly thought that Warren Via Roxbury was actually someone's name (or a royal title such as Von in Baron Von Ess). Of course it was our charge to prove that she plagiarised her report, and this was all that we had, so we had to use this as our evidence even though we believed that it was really just a simple misunderstanding.

I don't remember much about the actual trial. I know that we made our case and that Warren via Roxbury was our key evidence. I know that I felt terrible about actually doing it, since I was almost positive that she hadn't done it on purpose. I know also that we won our case. I can't remember what her punishment was, though I would like to think that she just had to rewrite her paper (she went to the next grade with the rest of the class, so she obviously didn't fail based on this). I know that after the trial, any hope of ever being even remote acquaintances of the "cool kids" was completely out of the question. Ahh, the joys of youth.

I started thinking about this this morning as I was watching some show on American Justice. You see, I felt guilty as hell about proving this girl guilty when I knew that she didn't do it, and this was all small potatoes. I wonder how lawyers can do the same, or worse the reverse of that with a clear conscience. I mean, it is their job to provide a vigorous defense, even if they know that you are guilty as sin, even if you tell them, show them photos, take them to where the bodies are buried, they have to defend you. How can anyone actually do that?

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