Author Archive: Hostile Witness

A Perfect Murder

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DURHAM, N.C. — A jury convicted novelist Michael Peterson Friday of bludgeoning his wife of five years in the stairwell of their Durham mansion. — CourtTV.com, “Novelist convicted of first-degree murder in wife’s staircase death” Peterson says his wife fell down the stairs. Coincidentally, another female friend of Peterson’s was found dead at the bottom of a staicase in 1985 . . . Read more →

Lesbian Rescue Fantasies

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From a company newsletter: [Insert woman’s name here] is quite a rescuer. She started with animals and now has six dogs, 13 cats and a rabbit. Last fall, she decided to extend her caretaking talents to children by becoming a foster parent. She and her partner, [Insert another woman’s name here], are foster parents to 7- and 9-year-old children and expect to take in several more soon. In fact, the two recently added on to their house to accomodate the growing family. Read more →

A New Standard in Low Standards

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — Maurice Clarett was charged Tuesday with lying about items stolen from a car he had been driving. Clarett was charged with misdemeanor falsification, city attorney spokesman Scott Varner said. If convicted, Clarett would face up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. — ESPN.com, Sept. 9, 2003 Read more →

The Latte Factor

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Is $1 million really better than a good cup of coffee? Someone has trademarked the phrase “The Latte Factor,” referring to his claim that you could save the $3.50 a day you’re spending on little things like coffee, invest it, and wind up with millions of dollars. I don’t doubt that under a certain set of assumptions, that’s true — although under another set of assumptions, you could invest the money and lose it all, in which case you’ve got no lattes and no money). Read more →

The Day Care Worker Killed My Kid

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…parents now are pushing for laws that would make it a felony for a day care worker to give a child medicine without written permission from a parent or a doctor’s order. One state already has passed such legislation.   Last month, North Carolina made it a felony to give children medicine without permission. That law was named for 5-month-old Kaitlyn Shevlin, who died in 2001 after being given the generic form of Benadryl. Her care giver, Josephine Burke, served four months in prison on misdemeanor charges of child abuse and neglect. — The Washington Times, “Day care drugs worry moms,” (emph. added) Sept. 3, 2003 Read more →

Goldilocks and the Three Networks

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Diversity on television White and black characters are overrepresented, while Latino and Asian characters are underrepresented on prime-time TV, according to a recent UCLA study tracking diversity on television. (I would say first of all that if you want to know anything about diversity, you should definitely ask someone at UCLA. They are all about diversity over there, and here’s what it leads to — “researchers” watching sitcoms with a stopwatch.) Read more →

Three Short Arguments Against Affirmative Action

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WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that race can be a factor for universities shaping their admissions programs, saying a broad social value may be gained from diversity in the classroom. The Fairness Argument If it was unfair when we used to discriminate against blacks and Jews, don’t tell me it’s fair now to discriminate against whites and Jews. Read more →

HW’s Video Game Reviews

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NBA Street The most racially insensitive video game I’ve ever seen. Every black character is a prancing, jive-talking buffoon, there’s a 7-foot-6 Japanese guy with a four-word English vocabulary — “Not in my house” — delivered with an accent straight out of a Godzilla movie, and followed by inscrutable grunting and mumbling . . . And so on. My kid loves it. Read more →

HW’s Book Reviews

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Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter C.P.A. And I know a father who had a son He longed to tell him all the reasons for the things he’d done He came a long way just to explain He kissed his boy as he lay sleeping Then he turned around and he headed home again — Paul Simon, “Slip Sliding Away”   Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children and no theories. — John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester You might get the idea from reading this book that being rich is synonymous with being happy. I’ve never seen any indication that that’s true. Read more →

HW’s True Hollywood Stories

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Clara “Auntie Em” Blandick Clara Blandick was born June 4, 1880, aboard an American ship in the harbor off Hong Kong. She appeared in over 100 films, most notably as Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz (1939). In later years, she suffered from severe arthritis and failing eyesight. Read more →

Reviving Interest in the Space Program

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I had no idea we were still launching space shuttles until Columbia blew up yesterday, which is one way of reviving people’s interest in the space program. President Bush says “the cause in which they died will continue,” meaning manned space flight. “Send him up there,” my wife says. Read more →

Rent Hikes Cause Homelessness?

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I read a story in Time magazine about a family in Columbus, OH, evicted from their apartment and living in a homeless shelter because they couldn’t afford a rent hike on the apartment. The husband was unemployed at the time; the wife was a pizza delivery driver. Both are high-school dropouts and they have three kids. The lesson here, according to Time: All it takes sometimes is a sudden rent hike to push a working family into a shelter. Read more →

The Forer Effect

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Psychologist B.R. Forer found that people tend to accept vague and general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to themselves without realizing that the same description could be applied to just about anyone. Consider the following as if it were given to you as an evaluation of your personality. Read more →

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