In 1977, the California legislature reinstated the state’s death penalty. A short time later, Ron Briggs helped his father, State Senator John Briggs, write what’s become known as the Briggs Death Penalty Initiative, which upped the number of death-penalty-eligible crimes to 28. California voters passed it, and as a result 13 people have been gassed or dosed on our dime. Now Ron Briggs says his death penalty law “simply doesn’t work.”
Briggs, now a county supervisor for El Dorado County, spoke on KCRW’s Which Way, L.A.? this week to explain why he supports SAFE California’s ballot measure to replace the death penalty with life in prison without parole. He put aside the complex arguments that America’s modern right has trouble wrapping its collective gourd around (arguments like “killing people is bad”) and focused on a fact that any bag-bedecked tea partier can love: capital punishment wastes crock shits of money.
It’s National Poetry Month, so I’ll spare the world more of my Taco Bell haiku and instead celebrate Tracy K. Smith, who today won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her collection Life on Mars.
Here’s “Eggs Norwegian,” from the latter part of that book, the section that the New York Timesdidn’t like as much as the rest. But only a joyless curb cut of a person wouldn’t enjoy this poem at least a little bit, because it’s about both a dog and frenching and contains possibly the best ever usage of the word “whispers.”
I just finished a spec script for one of the best new comedies on TV, New Girl. As I do pretty much whenever I write a new script, I’m announcing it here so that it makes some small dent in the world before it gets tucked away and likely ignored forever.
Anyway, my episode’s called “The Dream Circle,” and it’s about dreams, Twizzlers, and the Harlem Globetrotters. I like it.
Forgive the sentimentality, but I’ve listened to this song repeatedly every spring since I moved to Los Angeles. It reminds me what the hell I’m doing here and gives me some strength to keep going.
Here are the three most boring subjects in popular nonfiction:
1. Anything about running
2. Camping stories
3. Recaps of baseball games
Since Faithful is 75% recaps of baseball games, it’s pretty boring.
Actually, let me modify that list. More tiresome than all of those things combined are first-hand accounts of catching balls at batting practice, and since Stewart O’Nan takes up another 5% of the book with paragraphs and paragraphs of those, that only leaves 20% of the book that couldn’t be easily replaced by strings of the letter Z.
School nachos and unidentified nuggets, courtesy of http://assfacemclegs0.blogspot.com
I just finished listening to today’s Morning Edition story “What’s Inside the 26-ingredient School Lunch Burger?” about the movement among parents to rid school cafeterias of processed food. The nonsense geysering forth from the people on both sides of the issue made me so indignant that I spoke the word “dipshit” aloud multiple times in my shower before 9am, then dropped everything else I had to do this morning (i.e. repeatedly clicking the Get Mail button until I’m employed) to immediately write a rebuttal.
Here, I dug up this a thing I wrote March 17, 2003 to explain the origin of April Fool’s Day to middle-school kids.
Did you ever wonder about the history of April Fool’s Day? Well, we’re going to tell you about it anyway! This is not a joke:
400 years ago in Europe, they used a different calendar than we use now. New Year’s Day fell on April 1, and people partied and got jiggy with things every April 1, much the same way we do now on New Year’s.
Then, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII got an idea. For various Pope-related reasons, he designed a new calendar with New Year’s Day on January 1. He declared that everyone in the world must use his new calendar. (Back then the Pope could do stuff like that.)
When the Pope spoke, people listened. But the thing was, 400 years ago, news didn’t travel very fast. It took some people YEARS to find out about the new calendar. So the uninformed were still getting jiggy every April 1, while other people had previously jigged out back in January. Folks who knew about the new calendar looked at the April 1 jiggmeisters, pointed, laughed, and called them “fools.” They even played pranks on the fools. We imagine the pranks went something like this:
Reading the news that Magic Johnson is poised to become a part owner of the Dodgers, it occurred to me that, 21 years ago when Johnson announced that he is HIV+, the idea of someone living 21 years with HIV was almost unthinkable. The amazing success in the treatment of AIDS is one of the great triumphs of modern medicine. With that in mind, here’s a piece I wrote for the teen audience of The-N.com on June 5, 2006, the 25th anniversary of the first reported case of AIDS.
25 years ago today, the Center for Disease Control reported the first five cases of a disease that we now know of as AIDS. When I heard that fact this morning, it reminded me that, if you’re reading this (which you are) you’ve never known a world without AIDS.
I usually hate pointing out that I’m older than you, but today I’m remembering when I was in junior high and high school, which, though it was several years after those first cases were reported, was right at the time when AIDS took over the public consciousness and changed ideas of sex forever. When I first became a teenager, a high school student going into a drug store and asking for condoms would’ve been treated roughly equivalent to a high school student going into a drug store and asking for a bag of weed. By the time I graduated, high school students could pick up condoms from the school nurse.
Seth Madej has written, produced, and performed award-winning projects for television, radio, print, stage, and the Web. He was once known as The-Seth. You have never heard of him. Remedy that by clicking here.
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The Big Nowhere seems to be the book in which Ellroy found his footing. It reads like a practice run for LA Confidential, which this book precedes and with which it shares some characters. It retains the murder-mystery aspects of Ellroy's e...
In 1977, the California legislature reinstated the state’s death penalty. A short time later, Ron Briggs helped his father, State Senator John Briggs, write what’s become known as the Briggs Death Penalty Initiative, which upped the number of death-penalty-eligible crimes to 28. California voters passed it, and as a result 13 people have been gassed or dosed on our dime. Now Ron Briggs says his death penalty law “simply doesn’t work.”
Did you ever wonder about the history of April Fool’s Day? Well, we’re going to tell you about it anyway! This is not a joke:
