Another of Duane in St. Pete. I would have loved to offer him my hairbrush.
Wail on, Skydog!
Add this to Dear Abby's list of pet peeves: you're trying to open a vein in a crowded public venue and some buffoon jogs your arm:
A Japanese woman went on a stabbing rampage at a crowded train station, wounding seven men after failing to slash her own wrist, police said Tuesday.The woman attempted to cut her wrist with an army knife at a shopping mall Monday night near the train station in Hiratsuka, 43 miles southwest of Tokyo, but someone bumped into her and she became angry, said police official Hidetoshi Yukitake.
"She was screaming as she was slashing people at random," Yukitake said.
None of the seven men stabbed were seriously injured, he said.
The woman was arrested at the scene after being overpowered by onlookers.
"She said she was frustrated. She was also angry at her father," Yukitake said.
Nobody died and she got daddy's attention. This must have been one of those "cry for help" rampages.
The forced integration of stabby people that hate each other:
Male prisoners in the nation's largest corrections system, long kept segregated by race in an effort to temper violence, will soon be sharing cells with inmates of other ethnicities.A program aimed at integrating California's prisons for men will begin in coming weeks at two facilities and will be extended to the state's 28 other penitentiaries over the next year or so, officials said.
Segregating prison housing has long been the system's unwritten policy. But after an inmate's civil rights lawsuit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a mediated settlement led the state to reverse course despite many inmates' opposition.
Officials now argue that segregation perpetuated racial divisions and that integration would lessen them.
"We believe that once integrated housing is in place, it will ease those tensions and build that tolerance," said Ken Lewis, spokesman for the California State Prison, Los Angeles County, in Lancaster. "The system has to have something in place to give them a push. One day these guys will get out, and they'll have to learn to live among different people. If he can be tolerant in prison, he can be tolerant on the street."
Mule Creek State Prison in Ione and the Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown, which are both in Northern California, will be the first to implement the program, with Lancaster and others to follow.
Many inmates fiercely oppose integrating cells, calling it a dangerous idea that is guaranteed to lead to widespread riots and death.
"It's like screwing around with the ecosystem," said Rodney Raxon, 35, a white inmate at Lancaster's high-security prison. "We don't want any part of it."
Raxon spoke inside a cramped, sweaty gymnasium-turned-dormitory for 150 low- to mid-level offenders. The racial divide was palpable. Amid the rows of beds, blacks shared triple-decked bunks with blacks, Hispanics with Hispanics, whites with whites. They took turns using a handful of tables, as well as the television remote control. On this day, it belonged to the Hispanics.
Several inmates said racial separation helps preserve the peace. In dining halls and prison yards where convicts can commingle if they choose, they hang out with their own. Chosen representatives handle communication between groups, they said, to avoid riots.
As the gym's black representative, Lavel Atkins, 34, of Compton, Calif., said he defuses nearly 20 grievances a day over issues such as whether one inmate's splashing water on another was a sign of disrespect. There would be more disputes, he said, if members of various races were forced to room together.
"Personally, I'm not racist, but if a white guy moved into a cell with me, he would have problems with his white friends," Atkins said. "A majority of the prison population don't think for themselves. The gang leaders do."
I hope Political Correctness is wearing lots of magazine body armor, 'cause Common Sense is going to stick that mofo.
In describing youthful memories of being abed and watching her mother fumigate the room with Black Flag against mosquitoes, reader Nancy introduced the term "FOFE" -- the full-on Florida experience.
I can think of a lot of personal FOFEs:
-Cracking an egg on the sidewalk to test whether it really would "fry," then watching as it did.
-A proud and uneventful summertime walk callus-shod across a blacktopped parking lot. Then taking those first few steps into the air-conditioned mall and shrieking in pain as my bare feet burst into flames like twin phoenixes as they touched the cool, tiled floor.
-The Bear.
-Blithely stumbling barefoot into a patch of sandspurs, followed sequentially by intense pain, whimpering, and the helpless, hopeless wish for a helicopter rescue. Then came the desperate scan for a safe place to step and the summoning of courage to begin pulling the spikes of the miniature morning stars out. I am convinced that the first thing to grow in the Garden of Eden after the Fall of Man was the sandspur.
-Smugly watching from behind closed jalousies as uninformed young playmates frolicked behind the DDT "cloud truck" as it went through the neighborhood in the summertime twilight.
OK, I admit I followed it once, but only for a few houses.
-Trying to suck in air during the night in the sauna that is an un-air-conditioned Florida home. Keeping a bottle of rubbing alcohol by the bed to slap on to help cool off during the waking portions of those fitful, sweaty slumbers.
-Examining the gaping wounds in young flesh left by the ubiquitous and not misnamed "saw palmetto."
-Christmastime visits to the beach and stopping on the way home for some smoked mullet to eat on the porch.
UPDATE:
A snapshot of a childhood FOFE, courtesy of Reader Owen.
A Washington state principal kept a runaway in school and learning - he even arranged transportation- and all he got for his trouble is arrested:
Mark Evan Brown, 37, principal of Highland Christian School, was arraigned Wednesday. He spent five hours in the Snohomish County Jail before being released on $100,000 bail Wednesday night.According to charging papers, the story begins with Brown and a 14-year-old female...run away.
Brown prepared a little-used room at the school by putting a hide-a-bed and television in the room for her, prosecutors say. He arranged for somebody else to pick her up and bring her to the school, according to charging papers.
Then he got her started on her lessons.
That an educator's commitment to a member of the disenfranchised runaway population has ended in his incarceration is tragic. Maybe one day they'll make one of those uplifting education-themed movies about him. Some akin to To Sir, With Love, about a principal who went out on a limb to guide a student into adulthood and doesn't regret it a bit.
Duane getting some guitar notes from the vending machine.
This must be were he got them as Layla producer Tom Down said he played "notes that aren't on the instrument."
Wail on, Skydog!
Though the practice of child labor was long ago outlawed, this young Florida girl toils unaware.
Her abject misery evident, the child is forced to model the "cute summer outfit" destined to be purchased for some richer child.
Handling serperts and alligator wrasslin'? Man, I want to go to that service:
The pastor of a Kentucky church that handles snakes in religious rites was among 10 people arrested by wildlife officers in a crackdown on the venomous snake trade.More than 100 snakes, many of them deadly, were confiscated in the undercover sting after Thursday's arrests, said Col. Bob Milligan, director of law enforcement for Kentucky Fish and Wildlife.
Most were taken from the Middlesboro home of Gregory James Coots, including 42 copperheads, 11 timber rattlesnakes, three cottonmouth water moccasins, a western diamondback rattlesnake, two cobras and a puff adder.
Handling snakes is practiced in a handful of fundamentalist churches across Appalachia, based on the interpretation of Bible verses saying true believers can take up serpents without being harmed. The practice is illegal in most states, including Kentucky.
Coots, 36, is pastor of the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Jesus Name in Middlesboro, where a Tennessee woman died after being bitten by a rattlesnake during a service in 1995. Her husband died three years later when he was bitten by a snake in northeastern Alabama.
Coots was charged Thursday with buying, selling and possessing illegal reptiles. He had no listed telephone number and couldn't be reached for comment. There was no phone listing for the church.
"It is disturbing to me that individuals would keep such dangerous wildlife in their homes and in neighborhoods where they put their families, visitors and neighbors at such high risk," Milligan said.
The snakes, plus one alligator, were turned over to the nonprofit Kentucky Reptile Zoo in Slade. Most appeared to have been captured from the wild, with some imported from Asia and Africa.
I resent him bringing in that puff adder. The local venomous snakes aren't good enough for Sunday meetings? Next thing they'll be importing grits from Taiwan.
Duane visiting with folks at a St. Pete show, March 1970.
Wail on, Skydog!
I've written about Illinois man James Dowdy before. As comical as his fetish is, it's sad that it's so completely ruined his life:
James Dowdy has gone to prison three times, and may go there again, for the same crime: burglarizing homes and stealing women's socks.Dowdy had been free on bond in one alleged sock caper when police say he was caught with socks that had been taken from someone's laundry room Monday morning in Belleville. Dowdy, 36, remained jailed Wednesday on a felony burglary count filed the previous day.
Dowdy's mother, Linda, said he needs to be institutionalized to get psychiatric treatment for the fixation she says has tormented him most of his life. She thinks the fetish took hold when he clung to some of her socks as keepsakes when he was forced to live for a year with his dad as a child.
"He cries to me all the time, `Mom, I hate myself. I'd rather be dead than live like this,"' the 59-year-old mother, her voice cracking, told The Associated Press. "He doesn't hurt anybody, and he never takes anything of value. He takes nothing but socks."
Police have said there's no evidence Dowdy has ever threatened anyone in his apparently single-minded quest for socks, almost always the female variety. But on Wednesday, police Capt. Don Sax said that while Dowdy is "obviously a guy with a problem," authorities have run out of patience.
"I'm sorry, I don't personally have any sympathy for him anymore," Sax said. "He's been doing this long enough, he's been out of jail plenty long enough, that he could have easily gone out and sought help for whatever problem he has."
In 1994, Dowdy was sentenced to three years in prison for trying to burglarize a home, ultimately getting caught by police with a bag of socks.
"I know what I did was wrong," he told the judge during sentencing for that crime. "And the thing with the socks, I would like to get help with it so I can get over it, get it out of my life and get on with my life."
In 1997, however, Dowdy got a six-year sentence for breaking into another woman's home and stealing socks. In 2004, he was sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to attempted residential burglary, a felony reportedly tied to his strolling into a female neighbor's home for her socks.
Last year, witnesses in Dowdy's neighborhood reported seeing a suspicious person slinking about, at times peeking through windows. Often, police said, socks were left behind, though it's unclear whether the culprit dropped them clumsily or as a calling card.
Police responding to one of the reports saw Dowdy -- who fit the description of the man reported by neighbors -- trying to crawl into his house through a basement window, socks in one hand and a flashlight in the other.
Charges of attempted burglary and disorderly conduct are pending. Dowdy's court-appointed public defender in that case declined to discuss the man's legal troubles Wednesday.
Early Monday, a man told police he saw a stranger crawling out of his basement window after his 15-year-old daughter heard someone downstairs. Sax said police dogs led officers to the house where Dowdy lives with his mother, and socks taken from the caller's basement laundry room were found in his bedroom.
Sax credited the victim -- a homeowner who owns guns -- with staying levelheaded and not confronting the burglar. Police and Dowdy's mother fear that luck may not hold up.
"I told the police officer the other night they're going to call me in the middle of the night to identify my son's body because somebody's going to shoot him," Linda Dowdy said. "And in all honesty, I can't blame that person because I would be trying to protect my home, too."
Still, she added, "I'd like for somebody to look at him as a human being and not a monster. He's not a bad kid, he's really not. He just has a problem."
Amazing how a kid's psycho-sexual development can get so hosed.
A repost of a vibrant fave from what I've called the 1970 Piedmont Park Motor Oil concert.
Wail on, Skydog!
