Onyx Lynx

• Federal appeals court overturns Barry Bonds' felony conviction.  "Rambling" is not obstructing justice.
• Petraeus (remember Petraeus?  This is a song about Petraeus) was sentenced to two years probation and $100,000 fine for giving his biographer (and lover) classified material.  No.  Get your mind out of the gutter.  Secrets.
• Former guard at Auschwitz testifies at his trial on 300,000 charges of accessory to murder.  This is precisely why I do not suffer Holocaust deniers.

Turning the podium over to Comrade Misfit (Just an Earth-Bound Misfit, I):

Earth is the only home that we have. It would be nice if we treated our home with a little more respect than one might give to a single-wide that one is renting for three months whilst evading a process server.

That is all.

• The butler did it.
• I've been following another kerfuffle for the last week or so, which has eaten considerable time and necessitated Fleetwood Mac and Billie Holliday vids, with occasional Robin Williams.  Since I have no intention of writing about it directly (cue gagging), let me just repeat (from almost exactly 6 years ago!) that thing of Theodore Sturgeon's from the introduction to The Stars Are the Styx:

  "He [Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy] said, 'Well, I'll tell you what to do. Write me a story about a guy who goes to the bus station to pick up his wife; she's been away for the weekend. And the bus comes in and the place is suddenly full of people. And across the crowd he sees his wife, talking avidly to a young man. ... She walks across, meets her husband, gives him a kiss hello.
  
  'Write me that, Sturgeon, and everybody in the country will know how you feel about that meathead senator!'
  
  ... It was this: that if you have real convictions...it's going to come through, no matter what you're writing about."

  This is where I have to explain that I don't look for political messages in my fiction and consequently only notice them when they're fairly blatant.  And blatant political messages in my fiction mean the fiction gets disregarded and probably disposed of, unless I got it from a library.
  
• Medical marijuana is effective against certain brain tumors, but the Feds will still bust you.
• Annual (somewhat) comment policy declaration:  After about ten days, comments go to moderation.  I do check once or twice a day, which is how I found 5 (!) spam messages in one day.  Spam and trolls will be raygunned.

Helmut Monotreme at Sadly, No! on Scott Walker.

Because it’s projection. We know Scott Walker’s record, we know what he stands for, and we know that he’s going to try to privatize the US just like he’s tried to privatize Wisconsin. I use the word ‘privatize’, cause it’s a lot simpler than typing out “steal the common wealth and birthright of the citizens and sell it to unscrupulous patrons who are already as rich as Croesus at fire sale prices, who might let the electorate use a degraded version of whatever they haven’t consumed completely, if they can pay through the nose for the privilege.”

ETA: Maybe not. (AlterNet)

That would be Jimmy Hatlo, who sometimes had characters captioned with "The Urge to Kill."

Not interested in killing.

But when I read things like this and this and this, I had a brief fantasy of using Pavlovian operant conditioning on Mr. Bates.  Just so he would know, without any doubt at all, the difference between a Taser and a gun.  Not that Tasers are peaceful and non-fatal, of course.  Also, Mr. Bates should be sued for wrongful death until he has to live in the streets.  (Vindictive?  Moi?  We're all lucky he didn't want to play doctor surgeon.)

I mourn Eric Harris.

(Is there a reason to shape Tasers and guns similarly in manufacture?  Not that that would stop a determined killer, but why not make "mistakes" less likely?)

Günter Grass, writer (with problematic past) and Nobel laureate.

(Yes, I restored his umlaut.  Computers let one do that.  We don't have to scream at diacritical marks anymore.  Hačeks!  Accents!  Umlauts!  Whatever you call the thing above the A in Ångstrom! ["Ring" is what the character viewer calls it.])

Because the proper response to the announcement that Hillary Rodham Clinton is kicking off the 2016 Presidential Campaign season is thorough immersion in Monty Python sketches.  Not because I dislike Ms. Clinton, but because the fertilizer level in the news is about to rise.  And now for something completely different...

• Jurassicpork looks at police reactions to known white killers and unarmed black men.  Yes, he uses the G word.  You would too.
• Jesse Curtis weighs in with two articles to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the end of the Civil War:  "Why Black Southerners Fought" and "Why White Southerners Fought."   And yes, you need to read them both.
• My really-should-be-annual link to "I'm a Fighting Liberal," by the late Steve Gilliard, because the truth never gets old.  Driftglass reminded me (he's up to 2012 in his retrospective).

• Stan Freberg, humorist.  Mark Evanier remembers him.  I've mentioned him once or twice as shaping my sense of humor.  Even though he didn't much care for rock 'n' roll.
• Julie Wilson, singer (that "undated photograph" was on every announcement of her concerts.  Until this obit, I had no idea of what her actual face looked like) and actress.
• Dr. Phyllis R. Klotman, scholar and archivist of African-American film.
• Lon Simmons, Bay Area sportscaster

Happy Passover and Happy Easter (Western, tomorrow) to those who celebrate!

Driftglass is marking his tenth anniversary as a peerless, tireless, unblinking blogger (taking "conservative" pundits apart like cheap watches and dissecting their wormy cerebra, with a side order of Chicago politics) with selected "Best of" posts and fundraiser.  Reflect that in a just universe (that one, over there), Drifty would have a column in the New York Times and would be lauded as "insightful and prescient," and the person currently holding that position would be whimpering and mewling in some conservative think tank.  It is not for nothing (although I don't get paid to say it) that I occasionally refer to Driftglass as the Mike Royko Memorial Emeritus Chair of the Unseen University School of Journalism.

I wanted to pull out a few for particular attention, but there are Too Many (and he's only up to 2009), so sample this one, and this one, and this one.  And then read the rest, salty language and all.

And if you can drop something in the tip jar, that'd help.

(And I need to catch up with Blue Gal.  I've been neglectful lately about investigating bloglinks.  That must change back.)