I’m trying to get the latest update on the corpse-in-coach story from a couple of weeks ago, but it’s been unaccountably pushed off the electronic front pages by such trivia as global volcanic-ash-air-chaos, WaMu’s CEO weaseling in front of Congress (really—there has to be a required course in MBA programs for this) and the Vatican being persecuted by the, you know, truth.
The latest (still more than a week old) seems to be that preliminary findings by a British medical examiner indicate that Kurt Willi Jarant had been dead for about 12 hours when staff at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport put paid to his wife and her daughter’s attempt to get him onboard an easyJet flight to Berlin.
The two women are naturally claiming to have had no idea that he was dead, that he must have “passed” at the airport, and they’ve lawyered up.
There have been no results at posting from the post-mortem, and the widow and daughter are free on bail. Gitta Jarant has now said that she wants to have Willi cremated soonest and take his ashes home to Berlin. She’s cooking up something straight out of ITV in the way of, Willi being a pilot, “the pilot souls” were just calling him home (but not to Berlin)), and so it was fitting, really, that he went that way.
You have to wonder, what with court costs, lawyers’ fees, non-refundable airfare cancellations, etc., if it wouldn’t have been cheaper to have had him cremated in the first place.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Death and... (Chapter 2)
In the US we’re celebrating the annual recurrence of the second half of Ben Franklin’s two inevitabilities: filing federal tax returns. State ones, too, if you’re in one that sucks income taxes out of you.
I live in the sad, self-important state of Washington, now. No state income tax, but they pick your pocket with sales tax. In my county that would be 9.5%, worse even than California.
But even though I haven’t lived in the Commonwealth of Virginia since June 2008, it seems I owe them $11. How the hell does that work?
My accountant told me that the Governor of Virginia is very happy I’m willing to contribute. I told him that “willing” would be an over-generous characterization of my attitude. Since I sold my house there last year, the accountant said this’ll probably be my last contribution. Please God.
Much as I loathe Washington & just about everything connected with it, I will not miss the Old Dominion’s grasping income-clutching ways. What continually ate my lunch was this:
Assume you overpaid your state taxes through payroll deductions & you got a refund for $400 last year. Virginia makes you declare that $400 as income for the year. & pay tax on it.
That money is not income, it’s what you didn’t owe them in the first place, but what sat in their coffers for a year collecting interest (for them) until you throttled it from their grubby Confederate History Month-celebrating, right-to-work, tobacco-farming, concealed-weapon-toting good ol’ boy throats.
Let some of those tea-partying crackbrains burn that in effigy.
Meanwhile, I’m writing a check for $11 & noting it “refer to Appomattox Court House, April 1865”.
I live in the sad, self-important state of Washington, now. No state income tax, but they pick your pocket with sales tax. In my county that would be 9.5%, worse even than California.
But even though I haven’t lived in the Commonwealth of Virginia since June 2008, it seems I owe them $11. How the hell does that work?
My accountant told me that the Governor of Virginia is very happy I’m willing to contribute. I told him that “willing” would be an over-generous characterization of my attitude. Since I sold my house there last year, the accountant said this’ll probably be my last contribution. Please God.
Much as I loathe Washington & just about everything connected with it, I will not miss the Old Dominion’s grasping income-clutching ways. What continually ate my lunch was this:
Assume you overpaid your state taxes through payroll deductions & you got a refund for $400 last year. Virginia makes you declare that $400 as income for the year. & pay tax on it.
That money is not income, it’s what you didn’t owe them in the first place, but what sat in their coffers for a year collecting interest (for them) until you throttled it from their grubby Confederate History Month-celebrating, right-to-work, tobacco-farming, concealed-weapon-toting good ol’ boy throats.
Let some of those tea-partying crackbrains burn that in effigy.
Meanwhile, I’m writing a check for $11 & noting it “refer to Appomattox Court House, April 1865”.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
News of the weird
Well, as we move into one of the two inevitabilities (paying taxes), it turns out that a couple of women in the UK were trying to push the envelope on that whole death thing.
They tried to get a corpse onto an easyJet flight from Manchester, UK, to Berlin.
Evidently it’s cheaper to buy a ticket for a cabin passenger than the cost of freight for a coffin—although you’ll have more room in the coffin than a seat.
But then there’s all that paperwork. I imagine that between them, the UK & Germany could keep you filling out forms for hours on something like this.
I’m wondering what the passenger experience would have been sitting next to a person who’d been dead for some days. Bodily decomposition is every bit as inevitable as death & taxes, after all.
easyJet is one of the pioneer no-frills airline, but even so, that’s a bit of a downer as you’re heading out for your all-inclusive hol in your flip-flops & Bermuda shorts & you discover that the miserable git next to you who won’t help hand over the drinks isn’t a jerk, he’s a corpse.
Would never happen on US carrier because you’d have an entire planeload of lawsuits filed the instant the wheels touched down, for emotional trauma, pain & suffering & the obvious need for aromatherapy treatments.
They tried to get a corpse onto an easyJet flight from Manchester, UK, to Berlin.
Evidently it’s cheaper to buy a ticket for a cabin passenger than the cost of freight for a coffin—although you’ll have more room in the coffin than a seat.
But then there’s all that paperwork. I imagine that between them, the UK & Germany could keep you filling out forms for hours on something like this.
I’m wondering what the passenger experience would have been sitting next to a person who’d been dead for some days. Bodily decomposition is every bit as inevitable as death & taxes, after all.
easyJet is one of the pioneer no-frills airline, but even so, that’s a bit of a downer as you’re heading out for your all-inclusive hol in your flip-flops & Bermuda shorts & you discover that the miserable git next to you who won’t help hand over the drinks isn’t a jerk, he’s a corpse.
Would never happen on US carrier because you’d have an entire planeload of lawsuits filed the instant the wheels touched down, for emotional trauma, pain & suffering & the obvious need for aromatherapy treatments.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Jesus wept
Okay, this just takes the wafer: at the Good Friday service in the Vatican, the preacher to the papal household likened the focus on priestly sex abuse scandals to anti-Semitism.
While individual priests committed the abuses for at least the last 50 years, the hierarchy (from diocese to Vatican) was more concerned with covering up the crimes and protecting their institutional reputation than doing anything that would stop the pedophilia.
And it seems, according to the Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa, that the recent calls for Church to man up and acknowledge the facts and apologize with humility and sincerity amount to persecution on a scale suffered by the Jews through history.
(Considering that the Church itself was in the forefront of centuries of anti-Semitism, this is particularly ballsy.)
While Cantalamessa attributes the comparison to an unnamed and possibly apocryphal “Jewish friend”, his asseveration was egregious enough to prompt a Vatican PR flack to engage in damage control—distancing the Pope (who has been personally linked to the scandals in his pre-pontifical roles) from it as well as trying to ’splain that the preacher didn’t really mean to equate calls for accountability with, you know, pogroms or the Holocaust.
I have to say that Holy Week, and particularly Good Friday, is a bizarre time for such dissimulation. Just another nail in the cross.
While individual priests committed the abuses for at least the last 50 years, the hierarchy (from diocese to Vatican) was more concerned with covering up the crimes and protecting their institutional reputation than doing anything that would stop the pedophilia.
And it seems, according to the Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa, that the recent calls for Church to man up and acknowledge the facts and apologize with humility and sincerity amount to persecution on a scale suffered by the Jews through history.
(Considering that the Church itself was in the forefront of centuries of anti-Semitism, this is particularly ballsy.)
While Cantalamessa attributes the comparison to an unnamed and possibly apocryphal “Jewish friend”, his asseveration was egregious enough to prompt a Vatican PR flack to engage in damage control—distancing the Pope (who has been personally linked to the scandals in his pre-pontifical roles) from it as well as trying to ’splain that the preacher didn’t really mean to equate calls for accountability with, you know, pogroms or the Holocaust.
I have to say that Holy Week, and particularly Good Friday, is a bizarre time for such dissimulation. Just another nail in the cross.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Sign of the times
God bless the company that knows how to pull off an April fool in grand style.
Google. Need I say more?
Google. Need I say more?
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
You can't make this stuff up
Okay, once again the party of Family Values & Upholding the Right has been caught with, er, its pants (or someone’s pants) down.
Really—what is there to say?
Really—what is there to say?
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Ada Lovelace 2010
For my contribution to this year’s Ada Lovelace Day, I’m thinking about Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine for the development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), a methodology for measuring miniscule elements in human bodies so they can be traced.
RIA has been used to screen blood for the hepatitis virus in blood banks, to determine effective dosage levels of drugs, to detect foreign substances in the blood, and other medical applications.
What’s interesting to me about Yalow, aside from that whole nanotechnology breakthrough, is that she got her shoe in the physics door during World War II, when graduate schools gave financial aid to, gasp, women rather than have to close down research facilities for lack of men away at the war. Had it not been for that little contretemps, Yalow might have continued on as a secretary to one professor or another.
I first came across her when she hosted a PBS series on the life of Marie Curie in 1978, the year after she received the Nobel Prize. Kudos to PBS for raising that awareness, because current media like the Discovery Channel or TLC wouldn’t touch it, Yalow not meeting their standards of on-camera talent (either babelicious or tattooed to the gills).
So we've made progress on some fronts, and steps back in others.
RIA has been used to screen blood for the hepatitis virus in blood banks, to determine effective dosage levels of drugs, to detect foreign substances in the blood, and other medical applications.
What’s interesting to me about Yalow, aside from that whole nanotechnology breakthrough, is that she got her shoe in the physics door during World War II, when graduate schools gave financial aid to, gasp, women rather than have to close down research facilities for lack of men away at the war. Had it not been for that little contretemps, Yalow might have continued on as a secretary to one professor or another.
I first came across her when she hosted a PBS series on the life of Marie Curie in 1978, the year after she received the Nobel Prize. Kudos to PBS for raising that awareness, because current media like the Discovery Channel or TLC wouldn’t touch it, Yalow not meeting their standards of on-camera talent (either babelicious or tattooed to the gills).
So we've made progress on some fronts, and steps back in others.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Achtung 2.0
¡Lieber Gott! A new version of the ever-amusing video of Hitler taken from the 2004 movie Downfall.
In this one Der Fuerher encounters the joys of cloud computing:
I must say, it had me laut lachend.
In this one Der Fuerher encounters the joys of cloud computing:
I must say, it had me laut lachend.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Reading history
I’ve been on a bit of a reading tear lately with a focus on the first and second world wars. (You remember them—they were in all the newspapers.)
Most of the stuff I’ve been ingesting has been academic in focus, and here’s what I’ll say about that: those professors just LURV their long paragraphs. I mean, we’re talking many that run on for a page. Even back in the day when I was in academia I had a low tolerance for this sort of thing—it’s literally hard to read then that amount of text is piled up.
A major offender is A.J.P. Taylor, even though he’s writing for the general reader. But I have more charges to file against him. In The First World War, an Illustrated History, he proposes that Archduke Franz Ferdinand “set the fuse” for the war when he married Countess Sophie Chotek.
(He married her for love, without the approval of the Hapsburg court, and in that petrified environment she was not allowed to be by his side at any official function. But in his role as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army, he could have his consort receive all honors due an IG’s wife. So when the chance arose to review the army in Bosnia in June 1914 he snatched it and took Sophie with him.)
It’s quite a stretch to make such a direct connection and as far as I know he’s the only historian ever to do so.
But then I pulled out The Origins of the Second World War, in which Taylor shows himself to be not only pompous and condescending, but also the biggest apologist for Hitler this side of David Irving.
Seems Hitler never wanted the war, it was entirely the result of actions by everyone else (French, British, Italians, Americans, Soviets, other Germans, possibly even Ecuadoreans), but not Hitler.
Obviously I’m not the first person to pick this up, because in the second edition he spends considerable time defending his position: basically all the other historians are wrong & he’s right and so there! “I have a clean record here.”
So—pomposity and petulance as well as painfully long paragraphs. Not a winning combination.
Most of the stuff I’ve been ingesting has been academic in focus, and here’s what I’ll say about that: those professors just LURV their long paragraphs. I mean, we’re talking many that run on for a page. Even back in the day when I was in academia I had a low tolerance for this sort of thing—it’s literally hard to read then that amount of text is piled up.
A major offender is A.J.P. Taylor, even though he’s writing for the general reader. But I have more charges to file against him. In The First World War, an Illustrated History, he proposes that Archduke Franz Ferdinand “set the fuse” for the war when he married Countess Sophie Chotek.
(He married her for love, without the approval of the Hapsburg court, and in that petrified environment she was not allowed to be by his side at any official function. But in his role as Inspector General of the Austro-Hungarian army, he could have his consort receive all honors due an IG’s wife. So when the chance arose to review the army in Bosnia in June 1914 he snatched it and took Sophie with him.)
It’s quite a stretch to make such a direct connection and as far as I know he’s the only historian ever to do so.
But then I pulled out The Origins of the Second World War, in which Taylor shows himself to be not only pompous and condescending, but also the biggest apologist for Hitler this side of David Irving.
Seems Hitler never wanted the war, it was entirely the result of actions by everyone else (French, British, Italians, Americans, Soviets, other Germans, possibly even Ecuadoreans), but not Hitler.
Obviously I’m not the first person to pick this up, because in the second edition he spends considerable time defending his position: basically all the other historians are wrong & he’s right and so there! “I have a clean record here.”
So—pomposity and petulance as well as painfully long paragraphs. Not a winning combination.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Unsafe at any altitude
It’s puckish timing that, immediately upon the news of a British Airways computer programmer’s arrest on charges that he’d planned to use cabin crew strikes to facilitate bombing an aircraft in flight, we receive news that BA cabin crew have voted to strike, starting 20March—a week hence.
The British style of labor actions appears to be short spurts of high-volume strikes interspersed with intervals of rather sullen showing up for work & going through the motions. (Kind of like auto-erotic strangulation which I see on many episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Tighten the noose, loosen it; repeat. The trick is to release before the participant actually dies.)
This latest follows that pattern: on strike for three days starting 20 March; four days from 27 March; no strike over Easter (because that would really piss off the leisure traveling public whose wrath would be directed at labor, not management); but possible further action after 14 April if BA haven’t caved by then.
There’s the usual pompous posturing on both sides; basically a whizzing contest between BA & Unite management. You hear the same in any dispute involving Unite; their leadership have a single script & they emote the hell out of it. PM Gordon Brown has stepped in to wring his hands & tsk-tsk the two parties, but no indication that anyone wants to actually make progress.
The union’s timing is definitely well-chosen: announcement that they’re screwing up flight schedules so soon that people won’t have much of a chance of rescheduling on airlines that aren’t constantly mired in revolving labor disputes. Plus a lot of money will be lost on cancellation penalties. This is what the Unite union had planned for December until British courts tossed out their strike vote because they were calling in ballots from Chicago graveyards.
I’m certainly no fan of Willie Walsh & the management of BA; they’re right up there with United & Continental as 20th Century businesses that haven’t sussed out this whole 21st Century model. (They remind me of generals in the First World War who just didn't get the impact of entrenched machine guns & heavy artillery on frontal assaults.)
But the union is even further into cloud-cuckoo land. They don’t seem to realize that this economy isn’t the one of 50 years ago, when labor could posture & threaten & walk away with huge gains. & they don’t seem to notice that other unions, like the UAW, have agreed to cutbacks of all sorts in order to keep their employers viable &, you know, employing them.
There’s one more worry for the flying public: if you happen to get on a BA flight that hasn’t been cancelled, how will you know that your substitute cabin crew isn’t an Al Qaeda cell?
The British style of labor actions appears to be short spurts of high-volume strikes interspersed with intervals of rather sullen showing up for work & going through the motions. (Kind of like auto-erotic strangulation which I see on many episodes of Law & Order: SVU. Tighten the noose, loosen it; repeat. The trick is to release before the participant actually dies.)
This latest follows that pattern: on strike for three days starting 20 March; four days from 27 March; no strike over Easter (because that would really piss off the leisure traveling public whose wrath would be directed at labor, not management); but possible further action after 14 April if BA haven’t caved by then.
There’s the usual pompous posturing on both sides; basically a whizzing contest between BA & Unite management. You hear the same in any dispute involving Unite; their leadership have a single script & they emote the hell out of it. PM Gordon Brown has stepped in to wring his hands & tsk-tsk the two parties, but no indication that anyone wants to actually make progress.
The union’s timing is definitely well-chosen: announcement that they’re screwing up flight schedules so soon that people won’t have much of a chance of rescheduling on airlines that aren’t constantly mired in revolving labor disputes. Plus a lot of money will be lost on cancellation penalties. This is what the Unite union had planned for December until British courts tossed out their strike vote because they were calling in ballots from Chicago graveyards.
I’m certainly no fan of Willie Walsh & the management of BA; they’re right up there with United & Continental as 20th Century businesses that haven’t sussed out this whole 21st Century model. (They remind me of generals in the First World War who just didn't get the impact of entrenched machine guns & heavy artillery on frontal assaults.)
But the union is even further into cloud-cuckoo land. They don’t seem to realize that this economy isn’t the one of 50 years ago, when labor could posture & threaten & walk away with huge gains. & they don’t seem to notice that other unions, like the UAW, have agreed to cutbacks of all sorts in order to keep their employers viable &, you know, employing them.
There’s one more worry for the flying public: if you happen to get on a BA flight that hasn’t been cancelled, how will you know that your substitute cabin crew isn’t an Al Qaeda cell?
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