evanmorris.com
From the monthly archives: January 2008
Interesting. A mention of John le Carré in the Capa item below prompts a bunch of Google ads pushing spyware removers.
In the U.S. south, is Canadian a new racial slur?
It was a routine e-mail from the boss sent to congratulate a junior prosecutor in Houston, Tex., who had won manslaughter convictions against an intoxicated driver.
“He convicted Mr. Sosa of a double intoxication manslaughter, got a weak jury to give him 12 years in each, and then convinced Judge Wallace to stack the sentences,” Harris County assistant district attorney Mike Trent wrote in an office-wide memo. Then came the odd part: “He overcame a subversively good defence by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing.”
The e-mail was sent in 2003 but came to light only this month as part of an unrelated controversy with his office, forcing Mr. Trent to defend himself against accusations of bigotry — not because he offended the people of Canada, but because “Canadian” has apparently become a code word for blacks among American racists.
[more at link]
The Capa Cache – New York Times
To the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.
The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.
Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.
This is great news for anyone interested in the history of photojournalism. More at link.
Sen. Kennedy to Endorse Obama | The Trail | washingtonpost.com
Sen. Ted Kennedy will endorse Sen. Barack Obama tomorrow at American University, campaign sources said. The veteran Massachusetts senator follows his niece Caroline Kennedy, who today in the New York Times compared Obama to her late father.Kennedy’s decision came after weeks of mounting frustration with the Clintons over their campaign tactics, particularly those with racial overtones. Kennedy expressed those frustrations directly to the campaign but was reportedly infuriated when Bill Clinton yesterday compared Obama’s South Carolina victory to Jesse Jackson winning the state’s much smaller caucuses in 1984 and 1988.
Interesting. WordPress regards <muntz> as a real tag and won’t allow it.
today’s moodcat
