Topic: Oddities
Car Passenger Convicted of Drunk Driving -
Fri Nov 21, 8:55 PM ET

OSLO, Norway - A 19-year-old Norwegian has been convicted of drunken driving, even though he was a passenger, had a sober designated driver and didn't even have the keys to start a car that was turned off.

"I think it's unreasonable," said Oysten Haakanes, whose case made national news on Friday. "It makes you lose faith in the courts and police."

The full story is at the link ...

Topic: Oddities
"We're tall on our blades, and very fast." Odd news from Paris ...

Paris police battle crime on rollerblades
Reuters, Sun Nov 23, 2:53 PM ET (this link will take you to a photograph of an actual arrest)

By Kerstin Gehmlich

PARIS - The shoplifter screams in shock as three towering French policemen speed towards him, grab his arms and legs, lift him up and drag him away -- on rollerblades.

Within seconds, rollerblading officer Stephane Ajuelos has handcuffed a colleague posing as a thief.

This is all part of the training programme for the Paris police's latest weapon in the fight against crime -- a 50-strong rollerblading police squad.
"Criminals are totally taken aback," said Ajuelos. "Some don't even try to run away when they see us. We're tall on our blades, and very fast. They know they don't have a chance to escape."

Aujuelos, 29, is one of 50 officers who have passed the tough entry test to join Paris's rollerblading police squad.

Officers on rollerblades have been spotted in places like Amsterdam, London, Miami Beach and Stockholm, but they can't beat the French capital's speedy force, said the unit's creator Marc Bella, a 42-year-old former speed-skating champion.

The unit initially numbered eight and its main job was to monitor the weekly processions of rollerbladers, which can number in the thousands, through the streets of Paris.

Today, the officers patrol the streets, teach schoolchildren traffic rules and help fight crime.
"Each week, we catch at least one criminal on our skates," said officer Pascal Fubini, recalling how his team caught a mobile phone thief on the busy streets.

"Someone was shouting 'Catch the thief!', and we were racing after him, passing people on the pavement, and going in between cars. We had the guy within seconds. It would have been much harder on foot or with a bike. We are extremely mobile."

ELITE TEAM

Competition to get onto the team is tough: applicants must pass demanding fitness tests and convince the unit's trainers of their rollerblading skills. About a dozen of some 40 candidates are taken on each year.

"I only want the best," said Bella. "It's a proper elite team."

Jerome Leclerc, 28, passed the entry test three years ago. He had to skate downhill at full speed, perform an emergency stop and rush down a staircase while being timed by a trainer.

"It was hard. They set the bar very high," he said.
He and his colleagues, almost all male, have one full exercise day each week, when they skate and run several miles, lift weights and practise how to overwhelm criminals on blades.

"It's the same technique as if you were wearing normal shoes. Balancing is the main challenge," Ajuelos said.

"One difference is that you can't carry someone away while skating. Another officer has to push you forward on your blades. Firing a weapon while on skates is also very tricky. I've never done it except in training."

TOUGH-GUY IMAGE

The rollerblading officers, who patrol the streets of Paris in blue uniforms, wearing knee and elbow pads and crash helmets, provoke mixed reactions among Parisians.

"It makes the officers seem more young and fun," said Alain Croullebois, 37, adding that French police in general have become much stricter since the government made it easier for officers to hand out fines.

"The blades can help polish their tough-guy image," he said.

France's centre-right government came to power with a "law and order" election pledge in 2002 and has launched tough new crime prevention initiatives.

Officer Michel Ghesquiere, who traded in his motorcycle for rollerblades a few months ago, said he believed the skates had not undermined his authority.

"You don't have the same reputation as an officer on a motorbike, but it's a very positive image too. When we go to rough Parisian suburbs, the young guys really respect us when they see that we're as good on our blades as they are."

Topic: The Culture
There's always another side to things...

Two posts below I said some nice things about the late President Kennedy on the anniversary of the assassination forty years ago today. In today's Wall Street Journal Christopher Hitchens takes the opposite view of the late president.

Here's his point:

"The Kennedy interlude was a flight from responsibility, and ought to be openly criticized and exorcised rather than be left to die the death that sentimentality brings upon itself."

Of those who thought he was such hot stuff:

"The biographers and archivists have done most of the relevant job of reporting and disclosing, and what they have reported and disclosed is a president frantically "high" on pills of all kinds (that's when he was not alarmingly "low" for the same reason), a president quick on the draw and willing to solicit Mafia hit men for his foreign policy, a president willing to risk nuclear war to save his own face; a president who bugged his own Oval Office, a president who used the executive mansion as a bordello, and a president whose name we might never have learned if not for the fanatical determination of his father to purchase him a political career. If a tithe of these things were really true of George W. Bush, Howard Dean might claim he was on to something. As it is, "the mantle of JFK" is a garment that no serious Democrat can apparently afford to discard. The last time it was plucked from the wardrobe of central casting, it made Bill Clinton look--at least to the credulous--like a potential statesman. Which turned out to be about right."

On Kennedy's legacy:

"Having tried assassination and "deniable" invasion in Cuba, and having helped provoke a missile crisis on which he gambled all of us, he meekly acceded to the removal of American missiles from Turkey and to a pledge that Fidel Castro's regime would be considered permanent. He and his brother did not completely hold to the terms of the latter agreement, it is true, but as a result the United States became indelibly associated with mob tactics in the Caribbean, and Castro became in effect the president for life. In this sense, we may say that the legacy of JFK is with us still."

Read the whole, detailed argument here:

Where's the Aura? Forty years later, the JFK cult has faded. It's about time. - Christopher Hitchens - The Wall Street Journal - Saturday, November 22, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST

Topic: The Culture
Michael Jackson and the insanity defense...

I don't know what to make of the arrest of Michael Jackson on allegations of child molestation, and I live smack in the middle of Hollywood, just off Sunset Boulevard. I have been amused by the idea floating around that John Ashcroft worked with the district attorney up the coast in Santa Barbara to time to arrest so the massive press coverage would deflect coverage away from Bush in England and all the protesters there, and from the daily bombings in Iraq, and from trade issues getting awfully hot with the EU and WTO on steel tariffs, and with China on our new tariffs on cheap bras and lacy thongs and such things. An amusing conspiracy theory, but unlikely.

But here we have it. Michael Jackson is in trouble.

Mark Lawson in today's Guardian (UK) suggests one possible outcome that might make things better for Michael Jackson - a pre-trial plea bargain of insanity by virtue of celebrity might be legally unconventional, but it would be honest.

Now that is a curious idea.

Here's how Lawson begins his argument:

"A really sensible middle-aged man would have refrained from ever holding pajama parties at his compound for 12-year-old boys. A moderately sensible man would have abandoned the practice after paying out millions of dollars to the parents of one of his little roommates. Only a very stupid or deluded 45-year-old male would have continued to let schoolboys near his duvet, as Jackson admitted was the case."

And how Lawson sees the lay of the land:

"Jackson will hire lawyers as good as a career-slide bank-balance can buy. They are certain to deny the charges, but can also almost be guaranteed to argue that it will be impossible to find 12 Americans sufficiently ignorant of news and music to serve as jurors. Outside observers will doubt whether - as in the Simpson case - it would be possible to find a dozen Angelenos willing, even if the evidence suggested guilt, to make a legend swap Neverland for cell."

The argument for insanity?

"So warped by his fame as a child that the only adult companions with whom he feels at ease are Elizabeth Taylor and a chimpanzee, the singer constructed a fantasy world in which a theme park could be a home and 45-year-old men could have 12-year-old friends for sleepovers."

The conclusion?

"If the allegations against Jackson prove true, there can be no excuse. But his case would be very different from the classic parental nightmare of a seedy middle-aged man grooming children through the internet. Permitted for four decades by money and fame to behave any way he wanted, Jackson has become a man so bizarre that there must be serious doubts about his fitness to stand trial. A pre-trial plea bargain of insanity by virtue of celebrity might be legally unconventional, but it would be honest."

Read the whole thing here. Amazing insights? British humor? We report. You decide.

Nightmare in Neverland Mark Lawson, The Guardian (UK) 22 November 2003

Topic: The Culture
Today's anniversaries:

Forty years ago today, November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. How can you not remember that, given the "specials" on all the news channels, on the History Channel, and on all the "talking head" shows on television - not to mention what you hear on the radio?

Forty years ago today, November 22, 1963, the British writer Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, died out here in Los Angeles.

Forty years ago today, November 22, 1963, C. S. Lewis, died at his home in Oxford.

In the magazine I discussed Aldous Huxley and Los Angeles - see In Defense of Los Angeles from the November 9th issue.

As for Lewis, I recent read through the "Peralandra Trilogy" again - an odd mixture of science fiction, conservative Christian theology and a few references to Tolkien and the Middle-Earth. It's good, in spite of my summary.

I guess today is the anniversary of one of those days when things somehow shifted.

Now we actually have our "Brave New World," pretty much as Huxley imagined it. And Christianity has turned sour and combative - with evangelical "end timers" calling for holy war to bring on Armageddon and The Rapture for which they long. And a charismatic opportunist from a family of opportunists, who surprisingly did some good and made it so many other people did the right thing and thought about our community here, was taken out forty years ago today, followed by Martin and Bobby. Change the world for the better? That got harder over these long years since.