Author: Dan Brekke

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Court of Special Sessions

In connection with my ongoing Irish-American research project, I’ve had occasion to peruse The New York Times archives at length. Looking for information on one case in an 1860s version of a police blotter column, I started reading accounts of cases brought on September 7, 1867, to the city’s Court of Special Sessions. The tribunal apparently tried petty crimes. But it didn’t regard them lightly. If someone made a credible enough accusation to get a police officer take you in, you’d have your hands full at the very least and stood a good chance of being sent to prison. On the other hand, looking respectable counted for something if you were a shoplifter. From the Times:

Court of Special Sessions.

Before Justice Dowling.

There were sixty-one cases tried yesterday at the Court of Special Sessions. The charges, in but very few of the cases, were of more than ordinary gravity. These we give:

A VICTIM TO SCIENCE.

John Shay was charged by Mr. Geo. W. Shaw with attempting to steal his watch on Broadway Bridge. The prisoner was leaning over the balustrade of the bridge, looking down the street. He turned when complainant was passing and made the effort with which he is charged. Counsel for the prisoner denied the direct statement of the complainant, saying that his client was on an errand connected with his employment, and that he merely stopped upon the bridge to see the operations of a photographer, shortly after which he was arrested and charged as complained. The complainant was so positive in his evidence, and as there was no rebutting testimony, the prisoner was found guilty and sentenced to three months in the Penitentiary.

A TALE OF A TUB.

Ellen Gallagher was found guilty of stealing a wash-tub from Thomas Mulholland. After gathering the tub from the door of the complainant while his back was turned, she endeavored to effect a sale to the daughter of Mulholland, whom she met on the next floor. Mrs. Mulholland recognized the tub, and the prisoner was arrested. Officer Cornelius Read was called, but stated that he knew very little of the case, only that the prisoner had confessed to him that she stole the tub. This “only” of the officer’s was sufficient to send the prisoner one month to the Penitentiary.

Under “Miscellaneous,” we find among other reports, this:

Mary Burke, a respectable looking lady, was charged with entering the store of Bertha Rosenberg, and stealing therefrom a roll of muslin containing five yards. Mrs. Burke entered the store and examined different articles but bought nothing. Mrs. Rosenberg suspected that something was wrong and stopped her on the way out, discovering the parcel. In consideration that it was her first offence, and that her connections were otherwise respectable, the prisoner was permitted to pay a fine of $50 and go.

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January 9

Just one small birthday wish to cast out into the universe: January 9 was our Uncle Bill Hogan’s birthday. I can and have summoned up lots of labels for him, Catholic priest and communist being two of them. He was also a committed Chicagoan, a lover of ideas, a reader, a selfless devotee of the human cause. And most of all, as I’ve said many times before, an optimist, a real believer in the possibility of making the world a joyful — not just less miserable — place for everyone. He would have been 81 today, I think. Happy birthday, Uncle Bill.

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Exit Poll: Undeclared Candidate

CNN on Tuesday night published results of its Democratic exit polling in New Hampshire. In addition to posing the standard demographic questions–showing younger voters tended to vote for Obama, older ones for Clinton, for instance–the pollsters asked the following: If Bill Clinton had been running, who would you have voted for–him or your candidate? (It’s the fourth question listed; the results table doesn’t give the exact wording.)

Overall, the response seems to have been that people would have stuck with their candidates by a large majority: 61 percent said they’d vote for that candidate, 37 percent said they’d vote for Bill Clinton. Of those who said they’d stick with their candidate, 47 percent voted for Obama yesterday and 27 percent chose Hillary Clinton. Of those who said they’d vote for Bill Clinton instead, 58 percent voted for Hillary Clinton yesterday and 24 percent voted for Obama.

In other words, a majority of Hillary Clinton voters in this New Hampshire sample–note all the qualifications there–would vote for her husband instead if given the chance.

How big a majority? That’s a little hard to quantify exactly, since I’m not sure how percentages were rounded up or down and I can’t find a place right now to pose questions to CNN, but let’s try: The reported sample population is 1,955. Assuming every member of the group answered this question, 1,193 people said they’d vote for their candidate instead of Bill Clinton; 723 said they’d vote for Bill over whoever they voted for yesterday; and 39 apparently didn’t answer.

Among the 1,193 voters in the “I like my candidate better than Bill” group, 27 percent, or 322, voted for Hillary Clinton; among the 723 people in the “I like Bill better than whoever” group, 58 percent, or 419, voted for Hillary Clinton. (For comparison: 561 Obama voters said they’d stick with him, 173 said they’d vote for Bill instead.)

If I’ve got those numbers right — and if is the operative word here — 56.5 percent of the Hillary Clinton group said they’d vote for Bill Clinton if he was on the ballot. I find that shocking. Maybe the result is meaningless, a quirk. But maybe it shows that Hillary Clinton’s voters, to some extent, view her as a surrogate for the ex-president (and saying that, I’m shocked again: It flies in the face of one of her main appeals, which is, as Gloria Steinem reminded us yesterday, that she’s a history-making woman). It may also show that the former president is still a powerful draw for Democrats

In any case, I’d love to see the results if the same question were posed in the primaries to come. Go read the poll yourself and tell me whether I’ve got it right.

[Later: MSNBC, which published the same poll, focused on this finding last night. They report the full question as, “If Bill Clinton were eligible to run for a third term and had been on the ballot today, who would you have voted for?”]

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New Hampshire

With all the attention on the putative front-runners in both parties, the Main Stream Media (MSM) short-shrifted some of the candidates further down the New Hampshire results list. As usual. Who, for instance, bothered to cover the vote in the hotly disputed Kucinich-Thompson beauty contest? Who even thought of analyzing what the outcome could mean to the country?

No one.

Don’t go scrambling for your Daily Cyberbugle, I’ve got the numbers right here:

Kucinich: 3,845

Thompson: 2,808.

That’s with 96 percent of precincts reporting, but I think it’s safe for Kucinich to cut loose and douse his Secret Service detail with biodynamic sparkling apple juice. He won. He took down big, sleepy Fred. Kicked his behind, really, winning 57.2 percent of the votes cast in the race.*

One might be tempted to scoff and say, “Well, Mr. Pundit, they didn’t really run against each other — they’re in different parties for heaven’s sake.”

That point must be conceded, and I’m pondering what it means. For now, I just want to bask in Kucinich’s victory. And Thompson’s defeat, which isn’t the same thing.

*The Kucinich-Thompson race.

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Urgent Message from Voice-a-Roni!

If you get close enough to Silicon Valley and its associated industries and companies to meet someone in the tech public-relations game, you’ll hear at some point about how much better and smarter PR is now that we have email and social networking and other electronic magic wands with which to communicate a marketing message.

Uh huh.

About three years ago, I contributed to a blog focused on IP telecommunications. I had done some reporting on VOIP — voice over Internet Protocol, the technology behind Vonage and other Net phone companies — and a friend who had started the blog offered to pay me pretty well for posting. But the gig didn’t last long. What did last is the appearance of my name on the blog, along with one of my email accounts.

After I stopped posting altogether, a trickle of email pitches and press releases started to arrive; the trickle turned to a stream and the stream into a torrent. The messages, with subject lines like “Symmetricom Technologist Featured Speaker at SCTE’s Conference on Emerging Technology”* and featuring companies with names like Voice-a-Roni UltraCom**, just keep coming. The people behind them, like Tammy Snook and Lindsay Whent and Julie Nicholson (to name three who are in my trash right now) don’t seem at all discouraged that I’ve never ever responded to their messages.

Not that they would be discouraged. I am loaded into an email address list with hundreds of other people who have made the mistake of showing the faintest tremor of interest in a topic and talking about it publicly. All of us get spammed on the slim, slim chance that someone, somewhere might write about Symettricom or Voice-a-Roni.

In the grand panoply of events, it’s a minor annoyance. But it illustrates one of my gripes about the way technology is used. PR people are famous for asking journalists about how they like to have stories pitched. They usually mean: would you like to get our news release by fax, phone or email? But that’s beside the point. What no decent journalist wants is some boilerplate message blindly shotgunned into the void. What each good journalist wants, if they’re open to a pitch at all, is a pitch from someone who knows what the journalist is interested in and what the journalist has written on the subject. That takes research and social skill and real interest in the recipient of one’s message. Without that thought and interest, email and the other “tools” are just dumb and robotic.

*Actual subject line

**Not a real company

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Message

Left on our phone the other night:

“Obama!

“Hey, it’s E____. I had to call you guys and share my happiness about Obama winning at least the first caucus, because we were all sitting there in pain about Gore back in 2000, and finally I have an election that I have a little bit of hope that the person I want may win. Anyway, I just had to say that and I hope you guys have a good night. Bye.”

That was a fun call to get. And E____ and I are in the same camp. Although as I told a John Edwards canvasser, I can’t spell out logically while I’m leaning this way. And after years and years and years of looking for the rationale for my votes and often coming up short, I’ve given myself permission to just go with my instinct on this one.

(One of the best pieces I’ve read about Obama recently came from David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who has played the role of centrist/conservative (the paper recently hired a real conservative for the op-ed page). Brooks argues for Obama on the basis of his personal experience, temperament and intellect:

Moreover, he has a worldview that precedes political positions. Some Americans (Republican or Democrat) believe that the country’s future can only be shaped through a remorseless civil war between the children of light and the children of darkness. Though Tom DeLay couldn’t deliver much for Republicans and Nancy Pelosi, so far, hasn’t been able to deliver much for Democrats, these warriors believe that what’s needed is more partisanship, more toughness and eventual conquest for their side.

But Obama does not ratchet up hostilities; he restrains them. He does not lash out at perceived enemies, but is aloof from them. In the course of this struggle to discover who he is, Obama clearly learned from the strain of pessimistic optimism that stretches back from Martin Luther King Jr. to Abraham Lincoln. This is a worldview that detests anger as a motivating force, that distrusts easy dichotomies between the parties of good and evil, believing instead that the crucial dichotomy runs between the good and bad within each individual.

Obama did not respond to his fatherlessness or his racial predicament with anger and rage, but as questions for investigation, conversation and synthesis. He approaches politics the same way. In her outstanding New Yorker profile, Larissa MacFarquhar notes that Obama does not perceive politics as a series of battles but as a series of systemic problems to be addressed. He pursues liberal ends in gradualist, temperamentally conservative ways.

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Hummingbird

One of my favorite quasi-rock ballads from way back is “Hummingbird,” by Leon Russell. But in one sentence, I digress. What I really want to point out today is a cool posting by the son of one of my long-distance riding partners, Rob. The lad hung a hummingbird feeder just outside his bedroom window (he fashioned a perch and the from old bike spokes). Then he started taking pictures, and came up with some pretty amazing closeup shots. I’m confident I’m the first person on the Internets to link to his page.

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Storm

Storm010408

The National Weather Service reports, and eyewitness accounts confirm, that we’re having a storm. The forecasters have this to say about the current atmospheric proceedings: “A WALLOP OF A STORM CONTINUES TO BARREL ITS WAY THROUGH THE BAY AREA EARLY THIS MORNING.” That’s right — a wallop. Wind gusts up to 75 mph. Rain blowing sideways. If you live east of here, and nearly everyone does if you look at the map the right way, the wallop is headed your way.

More later. I have to brave the tempest for a trip into the city. [Pictures (click for larger versions]: Above, Codornices Creek in northwest Berkeley, over its banks. Below, the entrance to Golden Gate Fields.]

Storm010408A

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Since 1969

Steakhouse010208

At 17th Street and South Van Ness, San Francisco. I’ve walked by this sign a couple of dozen times in the past month without seeing it; I pass it at a sort of diagonal, and there’s always something happening on the sidewalk that I’m keeping my eye on. Then today, there it was. Faded. Peeling. Shabby. The joint it advertises is several blocks away. If it still exists, I imagine it resembles the sign.

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