Day: December 11, 2000

One Man’s Blizzard Is An 11 Year Old’s Dream

Here in Michigan we’re getting slammed with a blizzard. Normally blizzards are a normal thing here in the Midwest, but the last few years have seen very warm winters. The current blizzard takes me back to my childhood.

Actually Don Larson took me back to my childhood when he wrote on his site,

How well I remember blizzards from my birth city. The blizzards of January 1967 and January of 1979 where snow was piled 15 feet along the streets for months afterwards and other winters with occasional wind-chill temperatures of -50 and -80 below zero. Brrrr!

I wasn’t born when the 1967 blizzard hit, although I vividly remember my grandparents showing me pictures of the large trees in woods by the back yard that had been toppled by all the snow and ice on them.

The 1979 blizzard, however, was a dream come true to my 11 year old way of thinking. By that time I lived with my grandparents and their house was maybe 20 miles from the nearest small city — nothing was getting through to us. The only real thing to do was go outside and play in snow banks that were three times taller than I was. There is nothing in the world that compares to several acres of 15 foot snow — the snow was so high for a few days that as we walked on top of it we were almost level with the roof of the house.

My brother and I created elaborate tunnels which quickly became competing snow castles and the site of endless snowball fights. It took forever for the snow to melt (at least it seemed like forever.)

Looking back, I’m sure what was the coolest thing in the world to an 11-year-old must have been a nightmare for the adults, but they never let on that it was anything but magical. The snow eventually faded, but not the memories.

Cussing Canoeist Law Back in the News

Michigan briefly made national news last year when a man was convicted in Arenac County district court for swearing in front of women and children.

Timothy Boomer fell out of his canoe and unleashed a prolonged fit of swearing that, according to witnesses, including screaming the F-word more than 75 times (obviously his English language skills were on par with his canoeing skills). It would have been proper for police to charge him with disrupting the peace or being a public nuisance, but instead prosecutors insisted on charging him with violating a 106-year old law making it illegal to curse in front of women and children.

Since then the law has been involved several times including the most recent incident. Jeffery Richards, 27, allegedly argued with the bus driver who drove his child from school. Richards allegedly said he was going to “rip off the driver’s f—– head and shove it down his throat,” followed by a string of other obscenities. Fine, charge Richards with making a terrorist threat or disrupting the police. But no, Grand Rapids prosecutors had to go and charge him with using obscenities in front of women and children.

The anti-cussing statute is clearly unconstitutional and at some point is going to be thrown out as such. The American Civil Liberties Union is already appealing Boomer’s conviction on the grounds that the statute is excessively broad. As the ACLU’s William Street told The Grand Rapids Press, “We simply think this law, the way it was developed, on its face is unconstitutional at all times.”

And yet prosecutors across the state have nothing better to do but pursue expensive prosecutions for violating a statute that will, in the end, turn out to have no force of law.

Thank goodness Michigan prosecutors are keeping me safe from profane speakers rather than pursuing more serious crimes.

Source:

Cussing law gets a workout once again. Barton Deiters, The Grand Rapids Press, December 3, 2000.

CNN Uses Florida Math in Reporting on Michigan Case

CNN correspondent Ed Garston wrote a story about the contest for township supervisor in the Michigan township of Fire Lake that simply doesn’t add up. According to Garston, “Two candidates for the office, incumbent Dave Stremlow and challenger Toni Larson, were tied at 600 votes each,” but then near the end of the story Garston reports that, “There are 1,038 registered voters in this town about 30 miles southeast of the northern Michigan resort of Traverse City.”

Huh? I’m not quite sure how 1,038 voters could cause a 600-600 tie unless there are multiple township supervisor seats, which doesn’t seem to be the case from the context of story.

The AlphaSmart 3000 Arrives

The AlphaSmart 3000 is a portable word-processing device aimed at the education market. It’s cheap — about $200 — and can potentially go for hundreds of hours on a few AA batteries. I know some people who swear by them as a cheap, truly portable writing device and decided to take the plunge and order one the other day.

The unit arrived via FedEx today and after playing with it for awhile I’m am very impressed with the device — for a change, I think I actually got my money’s worth on such a device.

The AlphaSmart weights practically nothing — the computer keyboard I’m writing this on weighs more than the AlphaSmart. Rather than a big color LCD screen as you would find in a laptop, the AlphaSmart 3000 has a four-line, 40-character monochrome LCD like you might find in a high-end calculator. This was my single biggest concern about the unit, but the screen is more than serviceable for word processing. The only serious problem is that the screen angles slightly and I could easily see it getting scratched or marred while being put into a briefcase or carrying case. Some sort of hinged or sliding cover for the screen would go along way to reducing such problems.

The keyboard is very nice. The keys are bigger than most desktop keyboards, although the keys tend to be a bit too springy for my taste. The AlphaSmart includes a spell checker, which works well, as well as the ability to search for specific words or phrases.

The AlphaSmart connects to a PC or Mac via a USB cable. Transferring files was extremely quick and without any problems.

If you do a lot of writing or note taking away from your desktop computer, the AlphaSmart is an excellent alternative to lugging around a heavy, power hungry laptop.

Benedictin Makes A Comeback

I knew some women experienced morning sickness while pregnant, but nothing prepared me for what my wife had to go through while pregnant with our daughter. Every morning for literally six months was a routine of vomiting that was so severe at one point that her doctor considered having her hospitalized. The sad thing was a perfectly save medication could likely have prevented her vomiting, but trial lawyers had driven it off the U.S. market in the 1980s.

The drug was benedictin and it had been widely prescribed to pregnant women since the mid-1950s as an anti-nausea agent. In the 1970s, however, some women began to complain that the drug had caused or contributed to their children’s birth defects and sued. By 1983, the manufacturer of the drug, Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals, threw in the towel on the drug and said the litigation over the birth defects was simply too costly to justify continued production of the drug. No longer would women with morning sickness have access to the drug in the United States.

Ironically, that was about the time when numerous studies demonstrated what a close look at the evidence hinted in the 1970s — benedictin was completely safe. About three percent of all infants born in the United States suffer from birth defects, and the children of women who took benedictin had the same rate of birth defects as those born to women who didn’t take the drug. Even teh Food and Drug Administration exonerated the drug and declared it safe.

But it was too late. Nobody was willing to take on manufacturing the drug and risking the inevitable lawsuits over birth defects. Now, though the drug seems to be making something of a comeback thanks to a Canadian company, Duchesnay Inc., which is seeking FDA approval to sell a generic version of benedictin. Duchesnay’s diclectin has been available in Canada since 1975.

Hopefully women in America will soon have the choice to use the same drug that women in Canada and the rest of the world have been using safely for the past couple decades.

Source:

Once maligned morning sickness drug prepares for comeback. The Associated Press, October 10, 2000.