Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

An 8-year-old and an Uzi

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It kind of surprises me that this story emerges from outside Boston, MA:

December 5, 2008

Police Chief Among 4 Indicted in Boy’s Death at Gun Show

By KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON — A Massachusetts police chief, two Connecticut men and a gun club were indicted Thursday in the case of an 8-year-old boy killed by a submachine gun he was firing at a gun show.

The boy, Christopher K. Bizilj of Ashford, Conn., accidentally shot himself in the head while taking his turn with a 9-millimeter Micro Uzi on Oct. 26 in Westfield, Mass. He was accompanied by his father, an emergency room doctor, who, the authorities say, had chosen the Uzi for him to fire.

Massachusetts law generally makes it legal for children to fire a weapon if they have parental consent and are supervised by a certified instructor. But that does not apply to machine guns, which may not be fired by anyone under 18.

“There is no exception that would allow a machine gun to be furnished to an 8-year-old, with or without parental consent,” said William M. Bennett, the Hampden County district attorney, who obtained the indictments from a grand jury.

The accident occurred at the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo, held at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club. The show was sponsored by COP Firearms and Training, which is owned by Edward B. Fleury, the police chief in Pelham, a western Massachusetts town of some 1,400 people about 30 miles from Westfield.

More details:

At a news conference where he announced the charges, Mr. Bennett said Dr. Bizilj (pronounced bah-SEEL) had chosen the Micro Uzi for Christopher to shoot because it was small and, the father thought, would therefore be easier to handle.

“He did not realize its small size actually made it more dangerous,” Mr. Bennett said, adding, “Although it might appear a heavier or longer weapon would be more dangerous, the small size of the weapon together with the rapid rate of fire made it more likely that an 8-year-old would lose control and the muzzle of the weapon would come close to his face, which is what happened here.”

As he fired, Mr. Bennett told The A.P., Christopher was supervised only by a 15-year-old.

Easy mistake to make, I suppose.  Those Micro Uzis look perfect for little kids.  Can you get a Bratz Baby[z] with a Micro Uzi?

OK, I guess this blog is starting to turn into a Concerned Parent forum, I better come up with some other topics…

Bratz Babyz

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This is so fracking disturbing (a little Battlestar Galactica in-joke there) I just had to add it as a postscript to my previous post.  These are the Bratz Babyz, featuring lipstick, hair product, baby bottles hanging from chains like a model’s Evian bottle, and, apparently, spaghetti-strap diapers:

babyz

Really, this is messed up that three-year-old girls are given these to play with.  (This in implicit response to my loyal reader who implied that I was overreacting to this phenomenon.)  The whole Britney/Paris teen-harlot thing is much less funny once you have preschool age daughters entering this screwed-up world!!!

-uptight Dad

Bratz Cease-and-Desist Shocker!

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bratz

Forget the boring old Big Three Auto maker bailout hearings — for parents of pre-Tween girls, the major business news this week is Mattel and Barbie’s resounding victory over MGA and their upstart Bratz dolls.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The rowdy Bratz dolls have been evicted. Barbie has regained control of the dollhouse.

Toy giant Mattel Inc., after a four-year legal dispute with MGA Entertainment Inc., touted its win in the case Wednesday after a federal judge banned MGA from making and selling its pouty-lipped and hugely popular Bratz dolls.

“It’s a pretty sweeping victory,” Mattel attorney Michael Zeller said. “They have no right to use Bratz for any goods or services at all.”

U.S. District Judge Stephen Larson rocked the toy industry with his order that MGA must immediately stop manufacturing Bratz….

The decision was a stunning defeat for MGA, which exploded onto the tween scene in 2001 with the edgy dolls and made hundreds of millions in profits, giving Mattel’s more classic doll-diva Barbie a run for her money….

Mattel has fought to neutralize the Bratz line for years. The dolls — with their huge lips, pug noses, almond-shaped eyes and coquettish figures — were an instant hit with young girls. MGA had taken Bryant’s original four dolls and spun out a line of more than 40 characters, complete with accessories and related toys such as Bratz Boyz, Bratz Petz and Baby Bratz…. The judge’s injunction named all 40 dolls in the Bratz line, including the four originals — Yasmine, Chloe, Sasha and Jade.

I have been living in fear of the day when Celie and Iris learn about Bratz, Barbie’s evil, “sassy” (a.k.a. hyper-sexualized) cousins.

Note however that the judge “allowed MGA to wait until the holiday season ends to remove the toys from store shelves.”  But will any sane parent purchase a Bratz doll now knowing that repair/maintenance services, including the necessary silicon/Botox refresher treatments, will be discontinued in February???

Puppet Show: Mousie and Bunny — Fights and Friendship

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Celie and Iris got a new puppet theater today as a belated birthday present.  They wrote and performed their first three-act play: Mousie and Bunny — Fights and Friendship.

Dramatis personae: Mousie and Bunny

Act I.

One day Mousie went to a puppet show and he met Bunny.

Bunny: I am the biggest bunny in the world!

Mousie: And I am the squeakiest thing in the world and I like to steal cheese.

Bunny: You are mischievous and I say STOP or I will put a trap out.

Mousie: If you do, I will put out a bigger trap.

Bunny: You are so bad!

They fight and start crying: Boo hoo.

Act II.

Bunny:  It’s your birthday Mousie and because your mommy is sick I’m going to make you a big cake.

Mousie: I’m going to bring the knives and forks and everything.

Bunny: I am going to give you the best birthday party of all.

Mousie and Bunny: YIPPEE!!!

They embrace and kiss.

Act III.

One day Bunny went to the Chocolate Moose store.  Then he saw his friend Mousie.

Bunny: Hey Mousie, why don’t we get chocolate with rainbow sprinkles.

Mousie: I want chocolate with chocolate sprinkles.

Bunny: No!  You should have chocolate with rainbow sprinkles, like me!

Mousie: No!  You should have chocolate with chocolate sprinkles, like me!

Both shout: You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong!

And cry: boo hoo hoo.

Allison Two Speakers

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Sarah’s dad was a 1960s/70s audiophile who liked fancy stereo equipment (fancy equipment of most kinds, actually — video, ski, camping, etc.) and when she was growing up, the family living room featured these two enormous Allison Two audio speakers. Allison was a cult/boutique audio company based in Boston (I think).

Five years ago we asked Sarah’s parents about the speakers and without very much warning, and at significant expense, Sarah’s mom (Moonraking readers may know her as Grandma Suzy) had them shipped to us. We got a few good years out of them and then they stopped working so well and we put them in the basement where their condition further deteriorated. Recently Sarah brought them to an audio store in town that came up with a $500 estimate to fix them.

I finally decided that these collectors-item speakers (or so I like to think of them) should find a loving new home with someone who can fix them, so I put an ad on Craigslist asking for $50 or best offer. Nothing. Very disappointing.

Then a couple weeks ago I check my spam filter and find two urgent week-old messages from a guy somewhere south of Chicago who is VERY interested and has a friend who could come to town to pick them up for me. I end up responding to a few questions about the conditions of the woofers, tweeters, and “mids,” and taking some bad photos with my laptop. Apparently it all passed muster, because he sent me a check for $50 and is going to get them over Thanksgiving.

Here’s the photos I showed him:photo-305photo-306

It sounds as if he may end up cannibalizing them for parts, but I still like the thought of some piece of them rocking on.  Sarah’s dad would have been pleased, I think.

Feckless Budgeting and Bad Math

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This is an amusing article (with a poignant side):

Kathy Peel, a Dallas-based family manager (that is, a life coach whose niche is training families to run their homes like businesses), said that incidences of feckless budgeting and bad math seem to be on the rise, at least judging from the reports of coaches trained in her system. Leslie McKee, a Peel-trained family manager in Pittsburgh, has noticed a pattern of “people signing up for discount stores that sell in bulk and over-purchasing ‘bargains’ that are so enormous they will not live long enough to use the item,” she said. “Then they call me and spend more money to help them organize it all into mini-malls inside their homes.”

I wonder if we could re-train in order to run our house as a profitable business.  Is there a market out there for products like cat poop, platefuls of rejected frozen peas, and avant-garde stagings of kittens being born out of eggs?

Mortimer Adler’s Syntopicon

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This photo cracks me up:

campbell-500
It’s from this NY Times book review:

In “A Great Idea at the Time,” Alex Beam presents Hutchins and Adler as a double act: Hutchins the tall, suave one with a gift for leadership; Adler “a troll next to the godlike Hutchins,” with a talent for putting students to sleep. Making the acquaintance of Hutchins through his works was, to Beam, “like falling in love.” By contrast, “to be reading Mortimer Adler’s two autobiographies and watching his endless, self-promotional television appearances was a nightmare from which I am still struggling to awake.” As an appendix to the Great Books, Adler insisted on compiling a two-volume index of essential ideas, the easily misspelled Syntopicon. A photograph in “A Great Idea at the Time” shows Adler surrounded by filing-cabinet drawers, each packed with index cards pertaining to a separate “idea”: Aristocracy, Chance, Cause, Form, Induction, Language, Life and so on. The cards registered the expression of those ideas — Adler arrived at the figure of 102 — in the Great Books of the Western World.

Ah, the Great Books and the Great Ideas.  I like the Great Books myself, some of them anyway, and have a residual respect for freshmen core curricula (I did a program of that sort myself), but the photo could not be more perfect as a representation of self-satisfied mid-20th-century academic pomposity.

The review also cites Joseph Epstein as commenting that Adler “did not suffer subtlety gladly.”

I just saw an interesting presentation on Digital Humanities and text tagging, and Adler’s cards struck me as a early manifestation of a similar urge; you have to figure this guy would’ve killed to be able to create a searchable/mappable online database of the 102 Great Ideas.

Here’s a funny clip from a t.v. interview with Adler explaining how he can read 10 books in one day — if by “read,” you mean “inspect them” and “put them on [your] bookshelf for future reference”:

The year CBS killed everything with a tree in it

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Re: Wasilla Hillbillies, I found myself watching The Beverly Hillbillies recently with the sound off (but with subtitles) while working out on the Arc Welder or whatever it’s called at the Y, and thinking “wow, this is a really good show.”  The writing and acting seemed sharp and hilarious; I especially admired the physical comedy of Irene Ryan as Granny.  I kind of inanely mused, as I huffed and puffed, about the cleverness of the very idea of the “Beverly Hills Hillbillies,” re-imagining the “hills” of L.A. as a site of displaced rural Southernness.  So most likely I was just having a weird exercise endorphins reaction.

In any case, bear with me and check out these fascinating/weird tidbits from wikipedia:

Cancellation and “the Rural Purge”

Nielsen ratings for the 1970-71 season indicate that the bottom had dropped out for the perennial Top 30 series but was still fairly popular when it was canceled in 1971 after 274 episodes. The CBS network, prompted by pressure from advertisers seeking a more sophisticated urban audience, decided to refocus its schedule on several “hip” new urban-themed shows, and to make room for them, all of CBS’s rural-themed comedies were simultaneously canceled. This action came to be known as “the Rural Purge“. Pat Buttram, who played Mr. Haney on Green Acres, famously remarked that, “It was the year CBS killed everything with a tree in it.”[2]

In addition to The Beverly Hillbillies, the series that were eliminated included Green Acres, Mayberry R.F.D. and Hee Haw.

And some surreal details about the Granny character:

She was extremely scrappy and was an expert at wielding a double-barreled, 12-gauge shotgun, although the one time she actually fired it, unknown to her, Mr. Drysdale had replaced the shotgun pellets with bacon rind and rock salt after he arranged for Hollywood stuntmen to dress up as fake Native Americans to “attack” the Clampett mansion. She was also able to tell the precise time, to the minute and even the second, by looking at the position of the sun. ….Two of Granny’s phobias were “Injuns” (she actually bought wigs so the Clampetts wouldn’t be “scalped”) and the “cement pond” (she has a fear of water). In a long story arc in the show’s eighth season, Elly May dates a U.S. Navy frogman, which confuses Granny: After seeing the frogman climb out of the pool in his skin-diving wear, she thinks that anyone who swims in the pool will be turned into a frog.

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I think this was one of the shows that I would only watch when I was home sick from school. There was a taboo in our household on watching television during the daytime, so there was something distinctly unhealthy and corrupt-feeling about lying on the couch with a fever, drinking ginger ale (also only permitted when sick) watching hours of reruns.  I associate Family Affair, which I think was pretty awful, with this as well.

End of the Southern Strategy?

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Two NY Times articles today suggest that the Southern Strategy — the Republican party’s coded appeals to racist working-class whites to peel them away from the Democrats — may now be dead.

Less than a third of Southern whites voted for Mr. Obama, compared with 43 percent of whites nationally. By leaving the mainstream so decisively, the Deep South and Appalachia will no longer be able to dictate that winning Democrats have Southern accents or adhere to conservative policies on issues like welfare and tax policy, experts say.

That could spell the end of the so-called Southern strategy, the doctrine that took shape under President Richard M. Nixon in which national elections were won by co-opting Southern whites on racial issues. And the Southernization of American politics — which reached its apogee in the 1990s when many Congressional leaders and President Bill Clinton were from the South — appears to have ended.

“I think that’s absolutely over,” said Thomas Schaller, a political scientist who argued prophetically that the Democrats could win national elections without the South.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have “become a Southernized party,” said Mr. Schaller, who teaches at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “They have completely marginalized themselves to a mostly regional party,” he said, pointing out that nearly half of the current Republican House delegation is now Southern.

Wow.  Could this really be true?  It’s been an infuriating constant in my adult consciousness of national politics that the prejudices and whims of racist Southerners have always exerted a disproportionately determining influence on elections.  And this electoral dynamic has surely allowed this racism to flourish, since it in effect normalized it and rewarded those who practiced it.

It didn’t occur to me until someone else pointed it out that McCain’s obsession with Obama’s “socialism” was linked to this tradition, since “redistribution” of wealth has often been code for “giving money to black people.”  I had been bemused at why on earth working-class folks would be upset by Obama proposing to raise the taxes of people earning more than a quarter million a year.

What a great thought, that racists in Mississippi who believe that an Obama victory may mean that that there will “be outbreaks from blacks” will be marginalized and mostly ignored in national elections.  It’s very satisfying to look at the “racism map” that shows the relatively small Southern region that supported McCain more strongly than it did Bush in 2004.  (Satisfying to see how self-enclosed and cut off that region is from the mainstream, not Sarah Palin’s “real America” in the least.  And of course, satisfying and a relief to see that Indiana is definitively not part of that region.)

Here’s a related Op-Ed piece.

Australian Slang

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brokentemple

Am almost done with this Australian mystery novel, The Broken Shore by Peter Temple.  It’s very good although to tell the truth, I’ve sometimes had trouble following the plot because of the Australian slang/jargon.  There’s a whole Glossary at the end which is helpful.  Here are some good items:

Quickpick: A lottery ticket that spares the buyer the task of choosing numbers by randomly allocating them.  Anything chosen without much thought or care.  Also a term for someone, not necessarily a prostitute, picked up for sex.

Pommy:  Someone from England.  The English are often known as Pommy bastards.  This has been known to be said affectionately.  The term derives from “pomegranate” as rhyming slang for “immigrant.”

Bludger: Once, a man living off a prostitute’s earnings; now applied to anyone who shirks work, duty or obligation.  A dole bludger is someone who would rather live on unemployment benefits than take a job.

I tried out one of the book’s pieces of slang, not one of the ones about prostitutes, on our Australian friend Catherine, and she immediately recognized it: spaggy bol, “Spaghetti bolognese.  Also called spag bol.  Italian immigrants to Australia were once called spags.“