i can't wait to play pac-man!

an incredibly depressing story in the nytimes about a man wrongly convicted as a result of a bastard judge (who refused to reconsider the case and had to retire before anything happened) a DA, who later became sheriff and was charged with stealing from the drug fund, who hid exculpatory evidence and refused to investigate the actual perp because he was friends with him.

for me, the interesting parts of the article were twofold:

that the perp, who had been living just fine knowing he had committed the crime and that an innocent man was in jail for it, threw himself in front of a train when confronted by a letter from the wrongly convicted.

and that, strangely depressing for me, upon being freed the wrongly convicted man exclaimed "I can’t wait to play Pac-Man!" only to be crushed when his niece informed him that so much time had passed while he was in jail that the game was no longer readily available.

hopefully he'll be happy that you can play pac-man on these fancy things called personal computers.

oh, and hopefully the killer's last moments were exceedingly painful.

but more importantly, hopefully there's some real justice (because hoping someone suffers isn't really in the scope of what I'd call justice) - the DA should be charged and the judge should be reprimanded.

aernout mik in the lower haight

carlos snapped a shot that I thought was an aurnout mik piece for an installation at fifty 24 aka the upper playground gallery. for some reason this didn't make it into the chron. weird. the lack of news coverage made is seem more like a piece of art for some reason.

in other upper playground news matt, aka the guy with the big coat aka upper playground's owner, is the new editor at juxtapose - a great magazine made even better by his addition.

this is great news for matt and the artists he's been working with as well as the cannon.

the boys i mean

so, this weekend being a chance to relax of sorts...I've turned my attention once again to war poetry, for no good reason. today ee commings comed up twice, via a song of olaf and hat hung upon a tit. thusly i returned to owen and skipped over hardy. perhaps I will tackle the greeks this week's evenings.

it does make me sad again for this huge instability we have wrought across many lands.

i am so disheartened by the fact that age seems to be the way we frame the injustice of war when in fact it is ultimately greed that seems to be the driving force.

my thought for the day, aside from general disgust, is this: GW Bush has managed to make Vietnam seem more like a tactical blunder than the horrific strategic failure that our Iraq endeavor is likely to become. How sad it is that any war can be trivialized simply by scale of strategic impact when the costs are so huge on a human scale.

snarky quotes for the new year

whilst responding to a Pho thread, I did some math I thought was pretty funny:

Two thirds of all opinions are wrong. Unfortunately most of the other third are held by people smart enough to keep theirs to themselves.

[sigh] at least I didn't try to do anything foolish like give up cynicism for the new year...