The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jeffrey Smith:

My grandmother (to whom I was next of kin) thought she had everything taken care of. She filled out -- at least partially -- a living will form she had found in a magazine, but after she showed me it to me with a few lines filled in, I never saw it again.

And she always had told me that her funeral arrangements had been taken care of with the funeral home, so she didn't have to discuss them with me, though she did mention that she wanted to be cremated. I believed her, because she and the funeral director were old friends. But when she died, the old director's granddaughter couldn't find any file on her. She even was able to call her aged grandfather, who didn't remember them ever doing any paperwork.

I trusted, but I didn't verify. (Fortunately, none of this really mattered, the way things turned out.)

I only saw him a couple times after he moved to California, but I contributed to Locus back in its mimeographed days, and since then he always treated me like a distant cousin who was welcome anytime. I'm sorry "anytime" didn't come around often enough.

A bad joke we used to say way back when, while waiting to be called to a restaurant table -- they would announce "Johnson, party of 4" and other names that weren't us, and we'd say "Donner, party of 8." Another name would be called, and we'd reply "Donner, party of 7."

Well, it seemed funny back in our youth.

"The Donner Party" is my favorite of all the great films I've seen on The American Experience.

I'd also like to recommend the early John Wayne film The Big Trail (dir. Raoul Walsh, 1930). Not about the Donner party, but about "wagons west." The way they filmed it was to build a bunch of Conestoga wagons (three-quarters scale) and put them on the trail. Crossing rivers? Up and down hills? The actors and crew had to do it. The plot is very ordinary, but the documentary aspects of it are fascinating.

Earl #15: Has anyone here had their privacy violated or been retaliated against due to participating on a jury?

No, but in one of my recent cases, a murder trial, the defendant's friends sat in the back of the courtroom and just stared at us in a "subtle" form of intimidation. After we announced our guilty verdict, the judge shut down the courtroom, no-one in or out. Then a sheriff collected us and let us out of the courthouse, down back stairs and through the basement. Just before letting us out a side door, he said, "I know you'd like to stand around and discuss things with each other, but don't. Scatter and move fast." We did.

But nobody has ever come to my house or even called me on the phone about any of my jury service, not even when I've been foreman.

As a veteran of way too many juries, I don't mind the petit jury trials too much. It seems like something worth doing. But I didn't enjoy grand jury service. The main point of grand juries seems to be to make sure that the prosecutors are somewhat organized when they go to trial. (In my last jury trial, neither the ADA nor the two defense attorneys had a clue as to how to handle physical evidence.) As the guy says in the article, you do feel successful when you force the ADAs to change their proposed indictments, but it doesn't happen often. Mostly you just listen to way more testimony than the trial jury will hear from these witnesses, and try to stay awake. At the end of it, I had a little bit of interesting knowledge about the manufacture of generic drugs, and a little bit about money laundering, but that was like fifteen minutes of good stuff pulled from hours and hours and hours in the grand jury room.

In Baltimore, you get called for jury duty every year or two, in a one-day-or-one-trial system. I sometimes get the one day, but I usually get the trial. There is something about my profile that makes me acceptable to both sides, and out of any jury pool that I'm in, I'm usually the designated "white guy." One lawyer or another will throw every other white guy out of the jury box until they finally call my number, and then they relax -- they're ready to go to trial. If I don't get on a jury, it's because my number is so high they just never quite get to me. Once I'm in the box, swapped in for someone they've excused, I am never swapped out for someone else. Never.

Baltimore City grand jury service is four months; I've never had that. It looked like my co-worker was going to get that last year, and I spent a lot of time learning how to do his job. Then he broke his wrist and got excused because of all the physical therapy he was going to have to do -- and I had to do a lot of his job anyway.

I've had federal petit jury duty, but a long time ago and I don't remember how many months it was for. I had to call in every night to see if I had to report the next day or not. Usually not, and I didn't get on any of the cases I was up for. (No, I did get on one jury, but as soon as we were picked the defendant decided to plead out. Maybe we looked mean.)

My federal grand duty service was for fifteen months. (Not a typo.) That seems unconscionable, but it was one day a week, so it wasn't as intrusive as it sounds. And some Wednesdays we didn't have to go in. But it was a lot of Wednesdays of being bored.

My wife had a bad experience on one jury, when (it turned out later) one of the jurors was having trouble...um...concentrating, because she was more worried about how she was going to get out on the street so she could get her next fix. She ended up being pretty disruptive in the jury room, but the judge just told her to settle down and help everyone come to a verdict. She did, but months later the proceedings were declared a mistrial because of her presence.

Homicide and The Wire did not use up all our stories.

I remember being in elementary school, but I wasn't; I was in junior high. I remember walking home, but I didn't; I rode a yellow school bus in 8th grade. So I apparently don't remember where I was when I heard the news, except that I was in some school somewhere. (Changing schools every damn year might have something to do with this; I don't know.)

I do remember RFK, because my memory of that is too bad to be made up. I heard it early in the morning on the radio, and when my mother -- a conservative -- woke up and came into the kitchen, I callously said to her, "Well, you don't have to worry about Bobby Kennedy becoming president any more." She burst into tears while I stood there like an idiot.

I trust my memory on the Challenger, because I was on the phone with a colleague when the news came on the radio, and I passed the information along to her as I was hearing it.

And here is the story of the last American soldier to die during the Great War.

Crayola doesn't have the 'flesh' color anymore, but the Beginner's Bible Coloring Book that Teresa particled a month or so ago called for the "Flesh of Christ" color, so I'm guessing there's special Christian crayons.

cauliflower

Two getting-out-of-the-way-of-ambulance stories:

1) Walking through downtown Baltimore, I hear sirens. An ambulance is working its way down a busy street, with a few drivers making half-hearted attempts to clear a path. I am irritated at the lack of effort. "Wow," says my friend visiting from Brooklyn, "cars are actually getting out of its way."

2) I'm taking I-95 into the city; the very long exit ramp is a two-lane parking lot, the product of having the Inner Harbor and the baseball stadium both at the end of it. An ambulance comes up behind us, because the same exit is for Shock Trauma. No way, I'm thinking. But...everybody -- and I mean everybody -- in the right lane pulls over so they're half on the right shoulder and half in the right lane. I was in the left lane, and we all pull over so we're half in the right lane and half in the left lane. The ambulance comes by half on the left shoulder and half in the left lane, and makes slow but steady progress all the way down. I am amazed at seeing well over a hundred cars participate in this effort to get someone to the hospital. I don't know that I'll ever see its like again.

Disch's new book, The Word of God, in which Disch decides that he himself might as well ascend to Godhood, seems an appropriate note to go out on. I only read a couple pages of it pre-publication, and don't have my copy yet, so I can't say much about it, but I thought people might be interested.

I have adopted the date format that I expect someday (maybe when the US goes metric, so don't hold your breath) will become the standard:

2008.06.07

Aside from being logical, like the 7 June 2008 format, if you type a bunch of dates in the computer this way they can automatically be sorted. (I first discovered this when typing up a series of concert bootlegs.)

I have completely switched over to this now, even when writing checks. 95.06.07 was even easier, but 08.06.07 is problematical, so "2008" is necessary.

Sorry, no respect for Scott McClellan, who knew that he was out there telling lies every day.

I always figured that we wouldn't know for sure if Bush was the Worst President Ever because the WPE is the one that it takes the country the longest to recover from, and it's unlikely we'll recover from Bush in our lifetimes.

My 50-year-old sister still calls our mother's friends "Miss Mary" et al. Mary has been "Miss Mary" to her as long as Mom's been "Mom."

I don't remember who told me this, so I don't know how reliable it
is, but supposedly dust jackets were originally supposed to protect the
books until the buyer got them home, at which point they were supposed
to be discarded. Which is why old used books rarely have jackets.

Is it better to be a "Summer Girl/Boo Hoo Tee Hee Girl" or a "Boating Boy/Yama Yama Girl." I'm guessing the latter, but that's not based on much.

Like Patrick, I only met Clarke
once. I said to him not the most important things I thought about him,
only the most recent: did he feel his writing had changed after 2001?
I felt the transitions in "A Meeting with Medusa" were more like film
edits than the old "meanwhile"s and "later"s, and I wondered if he'd
picked anything else up from working on the film. He said nothing at
all had changed, and turned away.

It may have been a disappointing encounter, but it didn't lessen my
opinion of him at all. Nothing, not even the mediocre collaborations,
ever has.

Someone mentioned Project Vote Smart way above. One of the things they have is a compilation of the scores for all major elected officials from many, many special interest groups, so you can see how candidates have voted on different topics. I've been a supporter of PVS since almost the beginning, so I definitely suggest you check out their site.

They also send out their own questionaires, which politicians often ignore (often at the insistence of their handlers), but which make for fascinating reading when they are answered.

Marilee, back at 491:

I was startled when I first heard Eva Cassidy's version that someone could make such a familiar song so completely her own.

Thanks to Teresa for particling the Israel Kamakawiwo'ole version; I hadn't seen the funeral footage that was at the end of that.

I have two strong memories of Iz. One was actually seeing him in concert (I know; how lucky was I?), back when he was with the Makaha Sons of Ni'ihau. What a voice! He also had a great stage presence, telling stories and laughing. He wasn't as big as he got to be later, but he was still plenty big even then -- I saw him at the airport and they were using a forklift to get him on the plane.

I was also vacationing in Hawaii when he died, in 1997. We were on Maui and were driving up Haleakala with the intention of eating a picnic lunch at the top, but we got fogged in partway up and pulled off the road. We just ate in the car listening to the radio, and that's when we learned that Iz had died. It was a Hawaiian music station, but it didn't play much music that day -- it just became a talk show with people calling in and crying. That night back at the hotel we watched the tv shows about him. A weird way to spend a vacation day, but it seemed right. We had tremendous respect for him, and still talk about some of the things he told the audience back at that concert in the 80s.

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