A Lawyer Dog And A Red Herring

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by Lisa

The Louisiana Supreme Court’s recent decision about a suspect who asked for a lawyer, dawg is laughable. I wouldn’t try to convince anyone that a reasonable police officer in the situation would think the fellow was asking for a canine of any sort – that’s patently absurd, regardless of Crichton’s Writ of Centiorari.

Ironically, resting on the phrase ‘lawyer dog/dawg’ may allow appeal. The appellate court would observe evidence determining if the findings of fact are erroneous – and these facts are clearly erroneous. There are probably hundreds of hours of American Idol video where a judge is clearly talking to a contestant and not a dog. The suspect’s entire statement — “if y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what’s up.” (yes, the court transcript misrepresented the slang term dawg as dog and spawned the whole foray into canine litigators) — might reasonably be considered equivocal. A request like “maybe I should talk to a lawyer”, per Davis v. United States, did not count as invoking right to council. The request in this case, correcting the transcription error, was “I know that I didn’t do it, so why don’t you just give me a lawyer, dawg, ’cause this is not what’s up”. It’s not quite as easily construed as a procedural question (e.g. “Ain’t there supposed to be a lawyer in here or something with y’all?” in Nebraska V Relford (2000) … but it’s not “I want to speak with a lawyer” either. Maybe the SC will agree to hear the appeal and we can debate the proper questionable phrase in his request.

Halloween 2017: Lion Mask

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by Lisa

We made Anya’s lion mask a few weeks ago, but I couldn’t get the cardboard to hold together without using a lot of tape. Which meant the surface wasn’t consistent and was not easily painted.

So I decided to use the mask as a base for papier-mâché. First step – make papier-mâché goo. A good bit of research, and I realized there are a lot of ways people make this stuff. But since it’s going to be on her face, I didn’t want to use building supplies or even PVA glue. Decided to try the boiled flour/water binder. Boil a cup of water. In a separate container, stir together 1/4 c flour and 1/4 c cold water and stir until it is smooth. Once the cup of water is boiling, slowly whisk the flour into the water and boil for a few minutes until it thickens.

The paper – I used my pasta pot, and the paper fibers stayed within the basket quite well. Boiled paper for about ten minutes to soften it up, then used the immersion blender to break it up. Pulled the basket out of the water, and set it to drain. It was still wet, so I put the blob into a towel and pressed out more water.

Once I had a fairly dry blob of paper fibers, I mixed in the binder and used the immersion blender to form a consistent paste-like texture.

Then we pressed a thin layer over the mask – tried to get a texture that looks a little bit like fur.

Most important thing, Anya enjoyed glooping the stuff onto her mask, and she likes the finished result. I popped it into the oven on warm and am checking it every half hour or so to make sure we don’t burn it.

Tomorrow, we’ll paint it with a glittery tan paint, adding some pink paint in the ears, nose, and mouth area. Probably sort something for whiskers too.

The Red Herring

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by Lisa

This entire story arc is is sad, but the two ostensible protagonists come off terribly – Kelly more-so than his boss, but that might be intentional. Trump is asked why the administration hasn’t spoken about military personnel KIA – a question which I interpret to mean why has the WH not addressed the situation that led to their deaths. But the malignant narcissist in chief makes the whole operation about how awesome he is (or is not) at consoling grieving military families. Red herring. But for some reason everyone grabs a pole and goes fishing. Investigations into the operation are below-the-fold side-bars, and at least two media outlets took to ringing gold star families to determine what percentage Trump has actually called. Now we’ve got a whole school of red herrings swimming around: 25k checks in the mail, people who *were* comforted by Trump’s call, percentages who have never heard from the dude.

Then Kelly – instead of saying yeah, he advised Trump to tell the family that this is what the kid wanted to be doing, explained how this knowledge was a great comfort to *him* when his son died, but conceded may have been offensive to someone else (or that the message got lost when translated to Trump word-salad) or that there is literally nothing you could say to a family driving to pick up the casket of their dead son/husband that would help. Continuing that he’s crushed to think he may have had a part in increasing the family’s pain and hopes we can all focus on helping grieving families (here are some volunteer ideas) and returning military personnel (more volunteer ideas). Oh no, Kelly has to attack a Congresswoman for hearing a phone call whilst in the car with a constituent’s family?? And for a speech she may or may not have made in 2015. Even if she was completely full of herself and usurped a building’s dedication for self-aggrandizement (a move more typical of Kelly’s boss than, ya know, halfway sentient human beings) … so what.

The worst part is that Kelly’s explanation of what he counseled Trump to say and why … for me, the whole story made sense at that point and I’d forgotten that it was a red herring that got resolved. I could totally see how a military person might find comfort in knowing how much his son *wanted* to be there and died doing exactly what he wanted to do surrounded by the closest friends you could imagine. And I could also see where someone else might hear “he got what he asked for”. Wouldn’t have thought farther on it, had Kelly stopped there. But as he kept going on about the Congresswoman, I started to think about how little effort must have gone into preparing the message for the family. Did anyone from the WH side knew the kid or his family well? Or contact his superior officer to find out anything about the kid other than the fact he is dead? Did his parents hate that he enlisted and worry about him constantly or were they thrilled that their son was defending freedom across the globe? Did he enlist out of a sense of duty or a sense that the military provided a paycheque and future he couldn’t find elsewhere?

And why wouldn’t these kind of calls be scheduled? ‘Meeting the casket’ sounds like the flight arriving from Dover, which I would expect to be a military transport. Even if it isn’t a military transport, someone in the military should have known the departing flight number and had a halfway decent guess what the bereaved family would be doing that day.

And then I remember the whole thing is a logical fallacy and wonder what the fuck happened in Niger? What was so bad that sending the nation down a week-long narrative about what does or does not console grieving families, lies about what some obscure member of Congress said in a speech a few years back, who should or should not be present when a family decides to put Trump on speakerphone, and how many gold star families Trump has actually called is the *better* play.

New (To Me) WordPress Spam Technique

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by Lisa

In the past week, one particular image that I posted has received about a hundred comments. Not real comments from people who enjoyed the image, unfortunately. Spam-bot comments. I get a few spam comments a month, easily just dropped. But exponentially increasing numbers of comments were showing up on this page. The odd thing, though, is it wasn’t a page or a post. It was an image embedded in a post.

Evidently embedded pictures have their own “attachment page” — a page that includes a comment dialogue. I guess that’s useful for someone … maybe an artist who uses a gallery front-end to their media can still get comments on their pictures if their gallery doesn’t provide commentary. Not a problem I need solved. WordPress includes a comments_open filter that allows you to programmatically control where comments are available (provided your theme uses the filter).

How do you add a function to WordPress? I find a lot of people editing WordPress or theme files directly. Not a good idea — next upgrade is going to blow your changes away. If you use an upgrade script, you could essentially ‘patch’ the theme during the upgrade process (append your function to the distributed file). Or you can just add your function as a plug-in. In your wp-content/plugins folder, make a folder with a good descriptive name of your plugin (i.e. don’t call it myPlugin if you have any thoughts of distributing it). In that folder make a PHP file with the same name (i.e. my filterCommentsByType folder has a filterCommentsByType.php file.

For what I’m doing, the comment header is longer than the code! The comment header is used to populate the Plugins page in your admin console. If you omit the header component, your plugin will not show up to be activated. Add your function and save the file:

<?php
/**
* Plugin Name: Filter Comments By Type
* Plugin URI: http://lisa.rushworth.us
* Description: This plugin allows commenting to be disabled based on post type
* Version: 1.0.0
* Author: Lisa Rushworth
* Author URI: http://lisa.rushworth.us
* License: GPL2
*/
add_filter( ‘comments_open’, ‘remove_comments_by_post_type’, 10 , 2 );
function remove_comments_by_post_type( $boolInitialStatus, $iPostNumber) {
$post = get_post($iPostNumber);
if( $post->post_type == ‘attachment’ ){ return false; }
else{ return $boolInitialStatus; }
}
?>

When you go to your admin console’s plugins section, your filter will appear in the list and be deactivated. Click to active it.

Voila, no more comments on attachment posts. Or whatever other type of post on which you wish to restrict commenting.

Unimaginably Large Numbers

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by Lisa

Unimaginably large numbers are, unfortunately, hard to conceptualize. FEMA has delivered 6,200,000 gallons of water to Puerto Rico in the month since Hurricane Maria hit the island. That sounds like a lot of water and probably makes for a good press release. Problem is there are 3.5 million residents. Who should drink half a gallon or so a day (3/4 of a gallon is the WHO recommendation for an adult, but there are kids there too, and I like lazy math). There have been 30 days since the hurricane stuck. Three and a half million people drinking half a gallon of water a day for thirty days is 52,500,000 gallons of water. Not quite 12% of the water needed and my estimate is significantly low.

Doesn’t sound quite so impressive if you say FEMA has delivered 10% of the water needed in Puerto Rico. It also makes breaking into superfund sites to access water more understandable. 100% chance of death if you don’t get water, even an 98% chance of death from poisoning is a better option.

Finally, a REAL FACT!!

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by Lisa

Speaking about his failure to address the death of American soldiers in Niger, Trump said he’s mailed / is mailing / will mail tomorrow (yeah) letters. And defended this method of communication saying “Other presidents did not call, they would write letters, and some presidents didn’t do anything”. Most certainly, he is correct that some presidents did not call the family of deceased service members. The first telephone was installed in the White House in 1877 – and even then, I don’t know that phone service throughout the country was advanced enough to warrant phone calls from the chief executive.

Statistically, I am certain some presidents did do nothing too. Over half a million Union soldiers died in the Civil War — penning an individual letter to each family (even if you could combine a couple of siblings into one letter) would have been unrealistically time consuming.

We’re ten months into the administration, and I think we’ve finally gotten a fact fact!

Aquarium Decorations

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by Lisa

We’ve had goldfish in an outdoor pond this summer, but will bring them indoors for the winter. It’s starting to get cold at night, so seems like it is about time to get the aquarium set up. Anya picked this bag of day-glo rocks. The bag says you need 1-2 pounds of rocks for each gallon of aquarium. 30 gallon aquarium … and a 25 pound bag of rocks. So we needed a second bag. Talked her into mixing colours because I couldn’t imagine being a fish and looking at such bright stuff all day. Every day. (And then going into the completely earth-tone pond!). She picked black.

While shopping, there were a lot of plastic-looking decorations … but we’ve got rocks everywhere around here (and Scott’s got a collection of rocks too) and decided to build a cave and add some smaller rocks for decoration.

We took a two gallon pail and mixed the aquarium gravel. She ended up using about 80% black rocks and 20% bright, and it looks quite nice. I used two large rocks from Scott’s collection as pillars along the side. Then stacked some slate for a back pillar.

Placed a large piece of slate on top. Voila, a little fish cave.

Finally, we all selected some favourite rocks. Anya chose where they are placed – the smaller ones at the front centre are sofas and chairs for the fish 🙂

The rainbow under the tank is a quick runner I made for the top of the bookshelf. I didn’t want the piece damaged by the tank, so Anya picked the fabric (puzzle pieces). I cut two pieces, added a really thin quilt batting that isn’t thick enough to use for a bed quilt, made a quick quilted runner to place under the tank & ‘stuff’ (air pump, power strip).

Halloween 2017: Lion Costume – Furry Suit

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by Lisa

I have Anya’s Halloween costume finished. I used a minky fur in camel for the body and a long-haired fur in camel for the mane and fur accents. The costume is just a shirt and pants made with minky fabric. For the pants, I used a free pattern from FunFleece — where the pattern says you can cut the pieces simultaneously on folded fabric, it should indicate that you need to cut two mirrored. If you cut on folded fabric, it is mirrored by design. If you cut two pieces separately … well, it won’t go together well, you’ll have to rip the seam, and then cut one the right way. No reason I know this 🙂 Once I had mirrored pieces, it was a quick job to serge it together, fold the waistband, insert elastic, and stitch the band together. The legs were quite long, so there is a 1.5″ folded hem at the bottom that can be let out as she grows.  The shirt is a pattern I drafted based on one of her long sleeved t-shirts.

The mane is a large rectangle with each side serged to keep the fur from shedding everywhere. It is serged together under her chin and tucked both sides of her forehead to fit the opening to her face. The back is opened so the mane pulls on easily. I used a few sewing clips to pull it together.

I cut small elongated trapezoids of the long fur fabric and serged them together to make a cuff. They just slip over her hand like a bracelet. Add the tail I made earlier, and we have a lion:

Somtimes a fierce lion with claws:

Tips For Avoiding Unpleasantness

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by Lisa

Mayim Bialik has offered her tips for avoiding sexual harassment and exploitation. This would be like me offering tips to avoid police brutality — be polite, be deferential, don’t make sudden moves, keep your hands visible. Or my tips for avoiding traffic stops in the first place – drive the speed limit, control your vehicle, signal before turns and lane changes. Not bad advice per se, but it completely ignores the fact that my skin tone and gender play a significant part in my success in achieving positive interactions with police officers (or avoiding the interactions to start with). Ignores that, in areas I frequent, police don’t encounter a lot of dangerous traffic stops.

The fact is, her real secret to avoiding harassment wasn’t her clothing or her mannerisms – it was her situation. As others have pointed out, sexual assault is about power. I didn’t wear demure clothing, I had a very open and solicitous personality, but I wasn’t harassed until I needed the job. You need the job to feed your kids or to keep your apartment, then casting directors have a lot of power over you. To start out with, even a lot of skeezy guys stay away from statutory situations. But ignoring age. Get into acting to earn rent money, to feed yourself … that’s a different scenario than Mayim. Get into acting for something to do – you can tell a guy he’s gross. Or refuse to continue the discussion at his hotel restaurant. Then his hotel room.