Things I Learned on the Internet This Week 8/8/14

Another week gone, and the internet (and the world it reflects, or possibly refracts) continues to fascinate. So, in my continuing efforts to excuse to myself the embarrassing amount of time I spend surfing the internet, here is a selection of highlights from my procrastinations this week:

Warren Layre, 61, told The Inquirer in an interview last year that the officers beat him with a steel bar and kicked in his teeth during a warrantless raid on his machine shop on West Sedgwick Street in June 2011. Speaking to a reporter two years later, he pulled back his lip to show the gaps in his teeth that remained.

According to Wednesday’s indictment, Liciardello reported less than $7,000 of the $41,158 they seized from Layre’s shop.

Truth really is stranger than fiction, as this story of six corrupt cops up on racketeering charges in Philadelphia attests. For ten years, these guys ran rampant through the city, shaking people down and sending people to jail on trumped-up charges and basically running a standover operation, and the only thing that stopped them was that one of them finally got caught and turned stool pigeon. If this was on TV, it’d be a huge hit, and I expect some day it will be. In fact, I think these guys are a natural extension of the portrayal of law enforcement in our entertainment culture, which I think has a lot of similarities to what happened (and continues to happen) between Hollywood and the Mafia.

Moving on to American law enforcement at the institutional level, we learn from the Washington Post that

Nearly every criminal case reviewed by the FBI and the Justice Department as part of a massive investigation started in 2012 of problems at the FBI lab has included flawed forensic testimony from the agency, government officials said.

For years, even decades, a team in the FBI crime lab misrepresented its results in order to secure convictions. Not unlike the situation in Philadelphia, the problem was known but institutional inertia prevented it from being attended to until outed by investigative reporter Spencer Hsu.

The review comes after The Washington Post reported in April that Justice Department officials had known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people but had not performed a thorough review of the cases. In addition, prosecutors did not notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.

Worst of all, innocent people may have been executed. The first article in the series sums it all up pretty well, I think.

Officials started reviewing the cases in the 1990s after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials. Instead of releasing those findings, they made them available only to the prosecutors in the affected cases, according to documents and interviews with dozens of officials.

In addition, the Justice Department reviewed only a limited number of cases and focused on the work of one scientist at the FBI lab, despite warnings that problems were far more widespread and could affect potentially thousands of cases in federal, state and local courts.

As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects.

And, just in case you weren’t yet fully convinced of the dysfunction in US law enforcement culture, here’s one more slug to the guts.

“I felt so vulnerable being laid out on a table, with all my clothes off and in a bag and all the swabs and brushes and combs,” she recalled. But at least, she figured, the police would use the swabs and hair samples to help catch the rapist.

They did not. Like hundreds of thousands of other rape kits across the country containing evidence gathered from victims, that of Ms. Ybos lay untested for years on a storeroom shelf.

(hat tip to Charles P. Pierce, one of my favorite writers, period, for this post, where I found most of the above)

Having gotten through all that, I think we could all use a break. Here’s a picture of the sunset at Second Beach, where I went camping with my girl and just the loveliest bunch of people you could ever want to hang out with last weekend. Continue reading “Things I Learned on the Internet This Week 8/8/14” →

A Glimpse Into This Writer’s Life

It’s been a pretty exciting week for this semi-pro writer. Yesterday came an email from the submissions editor of a well-respected speculative fiction market (one I’ve been trying to break into for years) saying she was passing my current submission up to the editor-in-chief. It’s further than I’ve ever gotten with this market, so even if the EIC passes, I’ve still got that going for me, which is nice.

Today I finally queried another market, who’s had a story of mine for just over a year and a half (not unusual for them, for what it’s worth), to see if my story was still under consideration. I’ve been putting this off for a long time, afraid I might trigger a rejection or, worse, that the silence would continue. But they got right back to me and said yes, the story is still under consideration. Which is cool, and totally freaks me out, because I definitely feel like I’m punching above my weight class with this one.

Currently only have one other sub out, which I don’t expect to hear back from for at least another month. Given the timeframe, it’s one of those situations where the longer it takes to hear back from them, the better.

I’ve got two more stories that are almost ready for submission, one a novelette I wrote a couple of months ago that I’m nearly done tinkering with, the other a story I wrote two years ago in South America, revised, sent to most of the usual suspects, market-wise, and then thought of a way better ending for. If I can get one or both of those ready and out the door, I’ll feel pretty good about my number of active submissions. Continue reading “A Glimpse Into This Writer’s Life” →

Things I Learned from the Internet This Week

In a blatant attempt to rationalize how much time I spend reading the internet, I’ve decided to post this first of what I hope to be a semi-regular roundup of some of the more interesting things I’ve come across in my coffee-time divagations. Those who follow me on facebook will recognize many of the links (one of the reasons I want to do this is to keep track of all the things I link to), though thanks to the mystery of facebook I never know how many people see any given link. At any rate, here are some things I found interesting these last couple of weeks. Maybe you will find some of them interesting, too. Continue reading “Things I Learned from the Internet This Week” →

When You Say ‘My Owner’

I don’t know if this is just a Seattle thing, or if people do it other places. Maybe it’s just something that comes up in the kinds of joints I worked in back when I was still bartending. It’s a dumb little thing, but it always bothered me, and in light of a few months outside the Industry, I find it bothers me more and more.

It’s not uncommon, in my experience, to hear Industry folk use the term ‘my owner’ in casual conversation.

Point it out, and you get this moment of exasperation and incredulity. “You know what I mean.” And I do. It’s an easy shorthand, and ‘my boss’ usually refers to your manager. And in most non-corporate houses ‘owner’ is basically a job description, even if that job is mostly to loom over the proceedings, present or not, and express approval or disapproval to keep everyone on their toes. And hey, lots of them are right there in the trenches with you, pulling their weight and more, and I have lots of respect for anyone crazy enough to open a restaurant or a bar as a way to make a living. That takes a kind of dedication and perseverance of which very few people are capable.

But it still bugs me to hear people say that. Because how you say things matters. It matters on a psychological, even a neurological level. To say the words ‘my owner’ makes a physical connection in your brain. You hear yourself say the words, you experience yourself thinking the thought, and it strengthens that physical connection in your brain. Strengthening that connection makes the concept more real. It reifies it, makes it a thing that exists in your world, in however small a way.

Think about the implications for a moment. To concede the possibility of ‘my owner’ concedes the possibility of the loss of personal agency inherent in being someone’s property. Yes, we do this every time we clock in, to a certain extent. Such is the nature of working for other people. But to frame one’s employment in those terms concedes much more than trading your labor and skill-set for negotiated compensation for a set period of time. Continue reading “When You Say ‘My Owner’” →

Montages and Leveling Up

I’ve come to dislike the montage, despite its clear utility in modern storytelling, especially in visual forms like television and movies. I mean, I get it. As a viewer it’s not exciting to watch the mind-numbing repetition of martial arts training or the boring minutiae of repairing the space ship while adrift in alien space or documenting the research that goes into finding the likeliest place to start looking for the lost city where the artifact that will save (or destroy) the world has lain hidden for millennia, only to be discovered now by the worst possible antagonist. It’s a great big derailment, putting the story on hold while a character or team get ready for a mission or a boss fight or final arguments before the jury. Skip the boring parts is Storytelling 101, right? Get on with the plot.

The problem with the focus on plot is that it distracts you from the narrative, which Chip Delany taught me is a different beast altogether, and far more significant for a storyteller (and, I would add, a person; more on that below). The plot is a sequence of connected events, and indeed affects the narrative. But the narrative is what drives the plot, the why that produces the what. As heroines and heroes of our own personal stories (I really do believe human consciousness is best understood in narrative terms), what connects us to stories emotionally is the narrative. If we don’t care about characters or what’s at stake then what can a story really tell us? It’s why so many modern science fiction movies fail to stick. So much more thought and effort goes into the eye candy aspect than goes into creating multidimensional characters or situations that you can guess each character’s fate from their first onscreen appearance nine times out of ten.

From a plot perspective, the hero’s confrontation with the big bad is the culmination of the movie. But the story, properly understood, is not the fight scene and who wins, but what the hero undergoes in becoming the hero, how she develops and changes and reconciles inner conflicts in order to risk all for some greater good. In any good story, she experiences setbacks, and must level up in some significant way (usually leveling up as a person as a byproduct of the requisite dedication). Without this period of meditation, preparation, hard work, and evolution, the hero doesn’t qualify for the final showdown.

Without character development, basically, it’s not much of a story. Continue reading “Montages and Leveling Up” →