A trial was scheduled in Shorewood, Wisconsin, yesterday of a 15 year old boy–we’ll call him Adam because that’s his name–for stealing chicken nuggets off the plate of another student–we’ll call him Kakaree because that’s his name. In a video interview Click Here, Kakaree says he gave Adam the nuggets because it was March and he wasn’t eating meat that month (because it was Lent? we don’t know). A cafeteria worker saw Adam take the nuggets, and she reported the “offense” to the assistant principal. The assistant principal immediately called the police, and they came and arrested Adam. They put him in handcuffs and drove him to jail in a squad car.

When the transaction between Adam and Kakaree was explained, the police told them that, in fact, Adam had committed a federal offense. It seems that Kakaree is part of the federal free lunch program, and it’s a federal “crime” for anyone not on free lunch to eat free federal food. In the face of protesters at the courthouse yesterday afternoon, the police and the school dropped the charges against Adam. Shorewood is a affluent suburb of Milwaukee, and the African American population of Shorewood is 2.4%. Both Adam and Kakaree are African American, not that that matters, of course. The comments by readers following an article in the Milwaukee “Journal Sentinel” about the case are some of the ugliest and most racist I’ve read in a long time. Here’s a link to that article: Click Here.

I told this story at a meeting of a committee of the Council on Aging this morning, and everybody was appalled. But the fact is that if we aren’t able to deliver one of our Meals on Wheels because the person isn’t home, we have to either give it to another meal recipient or throw it away. We can’t give it to a random homeless person on the street, say, or eat it ourselves. We have to throw it away, just like Kakaree was expected to do. Based on the picture of the nuggets in the video referenced above, I’m surprised Adam could get those things down. He is 15, though, and 15 year old boys will pretty much eat anything.

ED

We had some shipping boxes on our front porch for a golf tournament Beth is organizing, and Liza and I used them to build a castle. I kept calling the structure a fort, but Liza corrected me and said it was a castle. Here’s a picture.

Here’s another picture.

ED

We have about 30 trees on our half-acre lot, and most of them are oaks. Oak trees produce acorns, and squirrels LOVE acorns. Not surprisingly, we have had many, many squirrels in our yard for the 37 years we’ve lived in our house. They’ve eaten green tomatoes off our plants, picked pears before they’ve ripened (only to throw them on the ground after taking a single bite out of them), dug up newly planted seeds, and shredded our canvas patio umbrella, presumably to get material to use to build their nests. I’ve trapped them and turned them loose into the forest miles away from my house. I’ve recruited some of my friends who are hunters to take out as many as they could. I’ve shot arrows at them unsuccessfully with my bow. I haven’t put out poison for them for fear some unsuspecting dog or cat in the neighborhood would get into it by accident, but I’ve wanted to. Over the years I became largely resigned to the fact that the squirrels were just pests that I would have to put up with.

That all changed this spring, though, when a pair of hawks nested in a tree across the street. The pair had three young that survived, and those 5 hawks have not been friends of the squirrels. In times past it was not uncommon to see 7 or 8 squirrels on our front lawn when I went out to get the mail, and they didn’t even have the courtesy to scurry when I walked out to the street. Since the arrival of the hawks, though, we haven’t seen a single squirrel in our yard or in neighbors’ yards. I’ve seen the hawks drinking water out of a puddle on the side of the street, but I haven’t seen them attack a squirrel. They must be doing that, though, or their mere presence has been enough to send the squirrels into hiding. Whatever it is, I’m happy about the hawks.

ED

We took Liza to an exhibit of kites at the Visual Arts Center today, and it was remarkable. There were around 200 on display, and they came from China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. They were from the collection of Elizabeth Morrow, an art historian and professor someplace in Missouri, and Professor Morrow has personally flown all of them. Some of the more elaborate kites were a good 30 or 40 feet long, and most of them were beautiful. The title of the exhibit is “Art on a String,” and those things really are art. Liza was a lot more taken with the kites than I thought she would be, and her enthusiasm caught the attention of a lady who was giving an interview about the exhibit while Liza was telling Beth and me how much she liked different ones of them.

We knew we wanted to take Liza to the exhibit today, so I bought a plastic kite (with string) for 3 bucks earlier in the week. Putting it together was a cinch (unlike the tissuepaper kites I struggled with as a kid), and we had it flying in no time. Liza had never played with a kite before, and she loved it. We did that until dinner was ready, and after dinner she asked if we could “go kiting” again. Neither Beth nor I had used the word “kiting”; in fact, I had never heard it before. Liza essentially invented a word, used it correctly, and communicated to me and her grandmother precisely what she wanted to do.

What’s remarkable about this isn’t Liza’s fluency in English or her linguistic aptitude. What’s remarkable to me is that the English language allows us to invent words all the time without so much as a second thought, and those words communicate perfectly well what we have in mind. We’ve seen this phenomenon at work recently with concepts associated with the Tea Party political movement. Apart from arcane slang usage, terms like “teabagging” and “teabagger” were unknown in American English. The first time they were used in political discourse, though, everybody who heard them knew what they referred to. I became aware of the slang meanings of the terms when I heard them discussed on NPR [formerly National Public Radio], and I’m sure the rank and file adherents to the Tea Party had no idea of their unsavory meanings.

William Shakespeare invented several thousand words that we use every day without knowing their histories, and today Liza joined Shakespeare’s ranks as a linguistic innovator. She’s “four-and-three-quarters” years old, but you and I do the same thing every day. Ain’t English grand?

ED

I had jury duty this morning for the first time in several years, and I found the whole thing very interesting. I didn’t get picked to be on the actual jury. They only needed 7 people, and around 80 showed up; the juror numbers went from 1 to 200-and-something, so I assume there were a whole lot of no-shows. Presumably, nothing bad will happen to the people who didn’t show when they were called.

After we checked in to verify our attendance, we were ushered into a courtroom to watch a video about the jury system in Florida. That was interesting, but I really didn’t learn anything from the video. Next, the Clerk of Court told us what was going to happen. Then we had a break while the judge was negotiating plea bargains in his chambers. There were 14 cases on the docket for this week, but they had whittled it down to three by this morning. After the plea bargaining session, there was only one man for trial.

The judge called up the first 24 people in numerical order. I was number 66, and I would have been first in the second batch, had they needed a second batch. Each lawyer got to question the prospective jurors, and I found that to be interesting and enlightening. Most of the 24 people were not married, which was my first surprise. Most did not have children, although some of the single ones did. Of the 80-odd people in the jury pool, only one was African American and none appeared to be Asian American. The defendant was a young African American man, and his Public Defender was a white woman in her early 30s. The Prosecutor was a mixed-race woman, also in her early 30s.

The alleged crime was a failure to register with the state as a convicted sexual predator. Florida requires that convicted sexual offenders and predators register with the sheriff within 48 hours of being released from police custody or of moving to a new address. Evidently the District Attorney felt that this guy didn’t do that, so they put him on trial. This raised a number of questions in my mind, all of which hinted at layers of irony that I would have loved to be able to explore.

First, if this guy is found guilty of not registering in a timely manner, are they going to put him in jail for that? He’s not in jail for being a convicted sexual predator, but would justice be well served by jailing him for not registering or for not doing so in a timely manner?

Second, if they have the guy in custody, which they obviously did, why not just make him register on the spot and forget about the rest of it? Why spend the kind of money it takes to stage a jury trial for a “crime” that appears to be totally victimless? They already convicted him of being a sexual predator and turned him loose. Why not take a lesson from traditional teacher-practice and just subtract 10 points from his final “grade” for turning in a late assignment?

Third, the prosecutor was essentially in the unenviable position of having to prove a negative–beyond a reasonable doubt. The charge was that the guy DIDN’T do what he was supposed to do, not that he actually DID something. Anybody who has had any experience in filling out and/or filing paperwork with a governmental entity or a large corporation knows intuitively that you can never know beyond a reasonable doubt that any paperwork you might fill out and/or file ever gets to where it’s supposed to be in a timely manner.

The prosecuting attorney was a bright, personable young woman, and the defense attorney was likewise. I’m half tempted to go to the actual trial the day after tomorrow to see how these two handle the case. If it didn’t start at 9 o’clock in the morning, and if I didn’t have to be somewhere else at 8 o’clock that same day, I think I would. As it is, I’ll have to put my curiosity on hold.

ED