Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

Especially in red areas with minority defendants, they’ll call it their patriotic duty to go blindly convict.

Grand juries are volunteer, at least in CA. There are ads each spring for volunteers and there is thorough screening. I wonder if you’d get enough volunteers to run all criminal & civil cases. There are far fewer grand jury proceedings each year.

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Thank you, ninefingershuffle, for your informed take on the matter.

The cop at my open container trial gave misleading testimony.

People like my parents, who grew up watching cop shows in the 70's and 80's, where the fictional perpetrators were disproportionately people of color.

My mom has a vague recollection of being in jury selection in the 70s and being asked if she felt that minorities were more likely to commit a crime, and she answered, in all sincerity, "Well, that's all you see on TV" and was excused. I'm not proud of her for that, but she was reflecting her cultural intake at the time.

There is the famous quote:

“A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich, if that’s what you wanted.”

Sol Wachtler
-Chief Judge, NY Court of Appeals

My poor old laptop is slowing down and, given my funds situation, I don't want to spring for a new one just yet.

Looking at the task manager after startup, I noticed that the Microsoft Edge browser shows several background instances that are burning through up to 40% of my CPU processing.

I haven't even opened Edge in several weeks. Makes me wonder if I'm mining Bitcoin for some hacker in Chechnya. So now, the first thing I do on startup is to end those Edge background tasks, whatever they are. I notice the difference in speed right away.

Are you not using an anti virus? Now would be a good time to run a full system scan, imho...

I had assumed you were supporting yourself with an OF page with the lack of poker.

I have the vanilla Windows Security antivirus, which is fine, plus uBlock Origin, plus Malwarebytes Browser Guard, plus a VPN when I go to the bootleg streaming sites, so I should be very well-protected. But I'm also paranoid, so there's that.

It's probably just Microsoft strip mining my activities on their rival browser in order to feed their massive AI project.

No, just going bankrupt. Almost there.

The Dry 2024-2025 Challenge Update

January: ✓
February: ✓
March: ✓
April: ✓
May: ✓
June: ✓
July: ✓
August: ✓
September: ✓
October: ✓
November: ✓
December: ✓
January: ✓
February: UNLOCKED

I am grateful for 13 months off the sauce. There was a moment right after I'd been released from jury duty that I found myself in downtown Northampton, which has some excellent pubs and breweries, and I thought about having a pint of something nice to celebrate my freedom, but I shook it off and drove home sober.

As I mentioned before, the last (and only other) time I stopped, I made it 14 months. I would like to go at least 15 this time around.

I never considered myself a heavy drinker, but I did go through a stage where I was drinking every day. My problem is not the drinking, it's the stopping. If I have a bottle of wine in front of me, it's not going to last the night. I was having boughts of insomnia and thought the alcohol would help. I know that everybody has different tolerance levels. But I finally decided to take a break, and I started sleeping better. Getting drunk was exacerbating my sleeping problems, not helping. Just wanted to point that out to maybe make you think about why you drink and if it's really the answer you're looking for.

I'm not as concerned with the whys and wherefores as I am with stopping the behavior. I studied psychology for 4 years in college, and I was given a full view of the spectrum of treatments, and with the benefit of that I aligned myself more with the cognitive/behavioral approach, which I found to me more scientific than the old Freudian psychodynamic approach of spending years on the couch exploring things like one's toilet training as the root cause of one's issues.

The behavior was drinking every day—not getting stinking drunk, but putting on a buzz—and gradually building up a tolerance until I was buying a 1.75 liter bottle of whiskey every 2-3 days. That kind of consumption leads to organ failure within a few years, so it needed to stop.

I've been watching the Cobra Kai TV series lately, and liking it a lot. It's a sympathetic treatment of Johnny, the heel from the original Karate Kid movie, played by William Zabka, the same actor from the movie, now middle aged.

Johnny is still a douchebag, which is great, but he earns himself a redemption arc over the course of the series. And the the show brought back Ralph Macchio, the original Karate Kid, as Johnny's nemesis and frenemy, along with a bunch of other faces and heels from the movie and its sequels.

I say faces and heels because there's a sort of 80's WrestleMania vibe to the show. Alliances and rivalries are loudly broken and renewed in every episode in fits of alternating misunderstandings and bursts of empathy.

I was going to use the word cheesy to describe the show's twists and turns, but on further thought I believe the older term corny is closer. The show wears its heart on its sleeve as it explores family dynamics and fatherhood and loyalty and honor and standing up for oneself, and it's all very 80's in style, though the setting is in the present day. And, of course, there's at least one karate Royal Rumble per episode, and the plot is sometimes twisted into a pretzel in order to get to the fights, but that's a big part of the fun.

Every episode ends in a new and shocking twist, or revelation, or character turn, all accompanied with the most dramatic of musical stings, and I find myself laughing out loud at the end of every show. But it's not a sneer of derision from me as much as it is a chortle of appreciation.

I have no intention of watching that kind of TV show, but that was an amusing review. Speaking of reviews... Any chance you're going to continue with that Rolling Stone album list anytime soon?

I like how a few 80s inspired shows a la Stranger Things, Cobra Kai and, to a lesser degree, Jean-Claude Van Johnson, are using the explicitly 80s weaknesses/kitch levels in an loving and fashionably embracing hindsight reminiscences

I liked the first season that focused more on Johnny Lawerence and his self redemption.

The show eventually ends up being a teenage soap opera type show. I made it into the 5th season but not sure I finished it and haven’t bothered to watch the 6th season. I guess should wrap it up but no real rush.

80s nostalgia is better than the real thing. People forget that we were living back then in an era of nuclear brinksmanship, and many of us assumed that it would always be that way, until the day that they finally launched the ICBMs and put paid to our civilization. Any thoughts that our monolithic boogeyman the Soviet Union would collapse seemed absurd at the time.

And if the bombs didn't get us, some power plant disaster would. After 3 Mile Island's nuclear reactor came within 30 minutes of a full meltdown, we had Chernobyl, which if not for the often fatal heroics of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians, would have suffered an apocalyptic second explosion that would have blighted the air, water and soil of a huge swath of Europe, rendering it uninhabitable for 100,000 years.

I remember working construction for my uncle just outside of one of the Millstone nuclear plants in Connecticut, and almost shitting myself in terror when the plant's lunch bell went off. The "bell" sounded exactly like the nuclear alarm klaxons that went off in the movie The Day After, after the missiles launched. Who the hell thought that sound was a good idea for lunch?

As far of the rest of the 80s went: picture me in a light pink Brooks Brothers dress shirt and acid washed jeans, my feathered hair parted in the middle, sustaining permanent hearing loss and tinnitus from a Stryper concert, because my girlfriend wanted to go and scream at Michael Sweet at the top of her lungs the whole time.

Good times.

I'm halfway through the 5th season now, and what I like about this season is watching Daniel the goody two-shoes having his character defects called out. These defects were [U]present in the movies[/U], but never addressed until now, 30 years later.

And yes, it's getting more soap opera-ish, but it's still fun to me, and they're ending the series with this upcoming batch of season 6, so I'll finish it, having made it this far.

Thanks for the reminder, Sheep. I will give it a shot.

Hi SJ, hope all is well. Ten months sober now, and I have about $9K more in the bank than I did a year ago, and I have not NOT been spending money either.

I am going solo. I have received extraordinary positive feedback from family & friends ntm the financial boom. Went to some meetings long ago, not for me, though I have done at least 90% of the steps.

I have been rebuying all my old long gone horror short story collections that have Stephen King’s original versions in them. I finally after twenty years ordered this gem on Thursday. I bet at least 99.99% of King fans don’t know it exists and you can’t find it by using anything like “The Monkey original version”.

Have read any Block yet? Take care.

Cabaret certainly had a plot.

Just found the original lol, easy peasy.

Hi BullyEyelash. Grats on the 10 months! Keep up the good work! I have read a version of The Monkey in King's early Skeleton Crew collection; not sure if that differs from the original version, but it was a hell of a good story.

That Wagner collection looks cool as hell! Since we're posting brags, I'll contribute my rarish advanced reader's copies below. That was a perk that came with running a bookstore.

I couldn't help but read the King books, so I've greatly reduced their value; but whatever, I was stuck with nothing to read at the time. I don't regret it.

The Koontz book, on the other hand, is still in its original plastic. And that title marked a career renaissance for him, IIRC.

I haven't seen Cabaret. I've toyed with putting it on the list.

Also, the local Barnes & Noble didn't carry any Block, which is a goddamn shame. My little mall bookstore carried at least a shelf full of his books back in the day.

I’ll try to and need to be brief on King’s short story revisions for Skeleton Crew and Nightmares & Dreamscapes. Mostly it’s a matter of tone, overwriting, clumsy updating of pop culture references, a lot of it obviously cocaine fueled. Most readers wouldn’t notice, having not read the originals, or care if they did.

I greatly prefer the originals, which are in the sparse blunt vein of the ones in Night Shift. The Monkey wasn’t much different iirc. I was irked he didn’t fix the poker game in Man Who Would Not Shake Hands (5 queens in the deck!). It Grows On You is basically a brand new story; he said it “became what it apparently wanted to be”. Not bad, need to reread it, just surprised me. He did ruin Bug Wheels, rewrote all the dark humor out of it during a probable frantic coke binge. And obviously the ones that I hadn’t read before like The Jaunt & Gramma I thought were just fine!

I did once have advance/reader cooies of Amarillo Slim In A World Full Of Fat People & Positively Fifth Street. Why McManus didn’t call the latter Exiled On Fifth Street beggars belief. The Stones are his favorite band and are mentioned multiple times in the book!!!

Odd Thomas did indeed resurge Koontz. The first couple were really good, but then got too out there for me, as did his others. He did have a great run peaking with From The Corner Of His Eye. Never read his early Watchers stuff; would like too but doubt I’ll have time.

It Grows On You was originally published in the August 1982 issue of Whispers, which was the “King issue”. It also has Before The Play, the prologue to The Shining, which was only otherwise available in heavily edited form in TV Guide.

Last year I bought it, about $140 for a hardcover. Turned out to be shrink-wrapped. Imagine opening a shrink-wrapped copy of Pet Sounds or Revolver.

It also turned out to be autographed.

I’ve only watched the famous Tomorrow Belongs To Me scene from Cabaret on YouTube.

Speaking of famous, why Lawrence Block is not a huge mainstream success like King and Michael Connelly is astounding.