Prisoner gets compensation over cockroaches

An Israeli judge has ordered the country's prison authority to pay an inmate over $1,000 in compensation after he complained of having to share a cell with cockroaches.

Mordechai Yehudai filed a lawsuit complaining of poor hygiene, a lack of fresh air, broken windows and inmates who smoke in a handful of cells, a spokeswoman for the Israel Prisons Service said

"The Prisons Service mistreated the plaintiff in a number of ways, including ... broken windows, cockroaches as well as incarceration with smokers," judge Irit Cohen wrote in her verdict, according to newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

The spokeswoman said the inmate's cell would be cleaned up. Yehudai has been held in three different prisons and has had complaints about conditions in all of them.

"Prisoners have the right to sue us whenever they see fit and we comply with the court's rulings," she said.

I thought, when I first read this, that I'd be able to rant about it at length... but in the end, I just can't do it.

It's simple, really.

If you don't like the conditions in prison, don't do something to get you put there.

Duh!

Rolle accuses official of using disrespectful language

Updated: December 4, 2007, 7:55 PM ET

BALTIMORE -- The NFL is looking into an accusation made by Baltimore Ravens cornerback Samari Rolle that an official called him a "boy" during Monday night's 27-24 loss to New England.

"The refs called me a boy. No. 110 called me a boy," Rolle said in the locker room after the game. "I will be calling my agent in the morning and sending my complaint. I have a wife and three kids. Don't call me a boy. Don't call me a boy on the field during a game because I said, 'You've never played football before.' "

Okay, Rolle... so did the refs call you "boy" or did one ref (#110) call you "boy"? Hard to buy into your side when you can't even keep that much straight.

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said Tuesday the league is looking in to the situation.

Of course, they are. If they don't, the PC-Police will be all over them...

No. 110 is head linesman Phil McKinnely, a former player for three NFL teams during the 1970s and '80s. McKinnely, who played collegiately at UCLA, is black, as is Rolle.

Well, looky here... It suddenly gets all kinds of better...

No. 110 did, in fact, play football... so guess what, Rolle? That makes you... um... WRONG!

Got another question for you, Rolle... does "boy" fall into a different classification than the oh-so-dreaded n-word? You all know the classification I'm talking about - the it's-okay-for-me-to-use-it-but-if-you-do... clause. See - where I live - I hear "boy" and the oh-so-dreaded n-word tossed around almost as much as the f-word when a group of young black males is in one place.

Now, if you're against that, Rolle... hey... more power to you. In fact, I'd actually have to thank you. Maybe if we get enough high-profile people making it a point not to act like morons, the rest of the population will follow.

This, of course, brings up another question...

In another article on this same issue, I read that McKinnely is 53... Rolle, at the ripe old age of 31, is chronologically a "boy" to McKinnely.

See... McKinnely was playing in the NFL quite literally when Rolle was in diapers.

The Ravens were demonstrative after the game about the officiating, especially on the final drive that led to Tom Brady's pass to Jabar Gaffney for the winning touchdown with 44 seconds left. After the touchdown, set up by a fourth-down defensive holding call on Jamaine Winborne, linebacker Bart Scott was penalized 15 yards for complaining and another 15 yards for throwing the official's flag.

"In a game of this magnitude, you don't make that kind of call," Rolle said. "Let the players decide the outcome of the game. You can crown them champions now. I'm not taking anything away from them. They are a great team. They're not asking the refs to help them, but it's just an empty feeling."

Wish I'd seen the play... but you know, Rolle... the players did decide the outcome of the game. Bart Scott seems (and again, I didn't see the game - so I'm only going on what I read in the news) to have thrown a temper tantrum because the Ravens lost... and was penalized for it.

Why was the whole team punished? Well, hel, I don't know... something about sportsmanlike conduct, maybe? Was this before or after the 'you never played football' remark, hmmm? Seems like the issue might go a little beyond Bart Scott.

***

So, to recap...

What I see is an asshole cornerback who mouthed off to an official - decided in whatever fit he was throwing to tell a man who was playing pro ball when he was in diapers that he'd never played the game. The official got irritated and retorted - with one word in his response that could be taken on any number of levels...

Looks like Rolle thinks he doesn't make enough money... I guess that $11 million signing bonus and $12 million the first year isn't going to make ends meet for his wife and three kids.

Get over it, Rolle. You're either a spoiled brat, a gold digger, or just an asshole.

The word "hero" gets thrown around a lot these days. In most cases, I agree with the usage. Sometimes I don't - but that's not why I'm writing this.

I have to tell you about a hero. I don't know why I have to do it right now, but I do.

Maggie was born in California in 1922. Her parents had immigrated (legally, thankyouverymuch) from Mexico shortly after they were married. Her family wasn't wealthy, but they were strong and happy.

Like many, when The Great Depression hit, Maggie left her studies to work in the fields and help feed her family. For many, many years, she could not read and could only barely make a scribble that resembled her name when the occasion called for it.

Sometime in the mid-to-late 40s (and I can only guess at the date from the styles in the wedding portaits - which were fairy-tale quality, to say the least), she married a Merchant Marine named Victor Maresca and had a family. But three wonderful children weren't enough for the Marescas. When their kids had grown and begun their own families, Victor and Maggie opened their home (and their hearts) to troubled teenage girls. The Marescas served as foster parents for many girls - usually six at a time - and turned those girls' lives around. (I know, because some of them still came around later)

In 1983, Victor passed away. I never did find out the details. And Maggie...

Maggie kept taking in girls - six at a time - and turning their lives around.

I first met Maggie in 1989, after having either run away from or been kicked out of a number of other foster homes. I never really understood why Maggie and I clicked the way we did - but there was something about her that, from the start, made me realize that this house was the place I needed to be.

When I first moved in, Maggie had been taking classes with a private tutor to learn to read and write. She managed both of these at about a second grade level. But what she lacked in "book knowledge" she made up for in real-life experience.

In a world where a lot of people were wrapped up in what they thought other people wanted, Maggie was genuine and full of love.

She didn't care what other people thought, and made it a point to make sure "her girls" didn't care either.

She taught any of us who wanted to learn anything she knew - from cooking to cleaning to tending birds and grooming dogs and even reupholstering old furniture. She lived for her kids - not just her own three biological children, but all the girls that came to be her kids after them, too.

I don't remember exactly when everything happened - seems like it was late in 1991...

Maggie went to the emergency room for an emergency appendectomy.

Now, all of us girls knew that she'd be there a couple of days... but none of us were prepared for her to be in the hospital for a week.

When she was finally able to come home, we learned what had taken so long.

In removing her appendix, the doctors had discovered she had cancer.

Cancer didn't slow Maggie down... in fact, it didn't really seem to change things at all. She just kept on doing the things she'd always done. I helped her make new drapes for the living room (and hang them) and spent a lot of time just talking about life in general.

There's never enough time, though...

In the summer of 1992, I moved out. I was 18... I'd graduated... and it was time for me to spread my wings. Maggie gave me her blessing, as long as I promised to come around and visit.

I kick myself, still, for not coming around more.

A year later, I'd only "come around" a handful of times... and every time I was there, she was the same vibrant, loving woman that had given me the strength to succeed.

It had been a couple months since I'd "come around" and I didn't know they had taken her girls away. Some idiot with a bunch of letters after their name had decided she was too sick...

In August of 1993, I came home from my crappy job to my equally crappy apartment and the world seemed to crash down around me.

Maggie was dead. They'd taken her girls away, and she went straight downhill.

The next few days blurred together. The funeral was a nightmare - the service was open-casket and I couldn't do anything but stand there and beg her to wake up. The graveside service shattered me - and my friends (who were there because they'd grown to know Maggie as my 'mom' and loved and respected her) had to lift me up off the ground when they started to lower the casket.

I don't think there's a day that goes by where Maggie doesn't cross my mind... I never know when or where it will strike... Every time she comes to mind, I miss her...

Every time something big happens in my life - I miss her. I want her to be here... to share with me the important moments in my life...

Like I said - I don't know why I needed to write this right now... but I did.

Maggie had spent a large portion of her life taking care of young girls who needed unconditional love. She was a strong and beautiful woman who spent years building troubled young girls into strong women.

If you're looking for a hero, look no further than Maggie Maresca.

New York Times
November 18, 2007
The Medium

Sweeping the Clouds Away

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Say what? Sesame Street “may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child”? Okay... I’m confused... but read on...

Say what? At a recent all-ages home screening, a hush fell over the room. “What did they do to us?” asked one Gen-X mother of two, finally. The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Oh, give me a frakkin’ break! So 123 Sesame Street wasn’t the frakkin’ Ritz... so what? And get off the closet-homosexual kick with Bert and Ernie already! Oscar’s depression... pfft... Oscar’s a GROUCH! That’s what he does! And Cookie Monster... Cookie Monster... Is nothing sacred?!

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Having become something of a connoisseur of children’s entertainment during the last 14 years or so – I suppose I am forced to agree with the basic feeling of the first sentence in this paragraph (although I argue loudly against the way it’s written)...

Today’s children’s entertainment is a primer for the loud, flashy, bright video-game sound-bite culture we’ve been foolish enough to embrace. There are a precious few children’s shows that actually teach anything anymore... and those few that do take place in fantastic, make-believe settings that have only vague similarities to the “real world.” Maybe the example cited here by Ms. Heffernan might be problematic for some parents -- Sally being befriended by Gordon -- assuming they’re too lazy to explain to their kids that the show is old, and things were different, then.

Live-action cows also charge the 1969 screen — cows eating common grass, not grain improved with hormones. Cows are milked by plain old farmers, who use their unsanitary hands and fill one bucket at a time. Elsewhere, two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows. Overweight layabouts, lacking touch-screen iPods and headphones, jockey for airtime with their deafening transistor radios. And one of those radios plays a late-’60s news report — something about a “senior American official” and “two billion in credit over the next five years” — that conjures a bleak economic climate, with war debt and stagflation in the offing.

Oh no! Cows eating grass?! How DARE they?! Cows being milked by farmers?! Who could possibly allow that sort of garbage on television?! PETA can’t even find anything to scream about, for cryin’ out loud!

And Gods forbid kids might see other kids being kids! A pillow fight! Imagine the dangers!

(If you can’t hear the sarcasm, please go read someone else’s blog. It’s only going to get worse from here.)

And we can’t have news reports of war and debt and government fiasco in the background... ever! That would be waaaaay too much like... well... like NOW!

The old “Sesame Street” is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper “Elmo’s World” started. Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original “Sesame Street” might hurt your feelings.

I ask for the gazillionth time in the last nearly ten years... will someone please shoot Elmo and put him out of my misery? The original Sesame Street might hurt feelings, huh? I doubt it... it’s a frakkin’ TV show - it’s an integral piece of cultural history - and if all this crap about how terrible it was for us to watch is any indication of where “culture” is headed now - let me off the train! Frak it - I’ll jump! At this point, I’d rather go off a cliff than ride the Pussification Express any longer, thankyouverymuch.

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Alistair Cookie and Monsterpiece Theater were entertaining. They also gave kids and parents a bit of common ground - because it served (no matter it’s intention) as a bridge to Masterpiece Theater (which also played on PBS - go figure). The pipe was part of the character... big deal! My dad smoked a pipe about the same time... gods forbid my TV hero and my real-life hero have something in common!! (Yes, Cookie Monster was, in fact, my hero... for many years, thankyouverymuch.)

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Oscar the Grouch... so the name says it all. Amazingly enough, Oscar didn’t develop “personality disorders” until the rise of drive-thru psycho-pharmaceuticals. He lived in a garbage can - on what we’ve now learned (thank you Ms. Heffernan) was a decrepit slum of a street filled with all sorts of shady characters. Of course he was a frakkin grouch! You would be too -- and no amount of Prozac and lifetimes of therapy would fix that. And you know the worst part about Oscar... no matter how much of a grouch he was... someone was always trying to do something nice for him... always trying to be his friend... Gods forbid we teach our children something like THAT!

Snuffleupagus is visible only to Big Bird; since 1985, all the characters can see him, as Big Bird’s old protestations that he was not hallucinating came to seem a little creepy, not to mention somewhat strained. As for Cookie Monster, he can be seen in the old-school episodes in his former inglorious incarnation: a blue, googly-eyed cookievore with a signature gobble (“om nom nom nom”). Originally designed by Jim Henson for use in commercials for General Foods International and Frito-Lay, Cookie Monster was never a righteous figure. His controversial conversion to a more diverse diet wouldn’t come until 2005, and in the early seasons he comes across a Child’s First Addict.

Snuffleupagus was visible only to Big Bird because he was supposed to be Big Bird’s IMAGINARY friend! Duh! Big Bird needed someone he could identify with - and Snuffy was that big, lumbering somebody.

Oh yeah - imagination is unhealthy. I keep forgetting that part. I guess that’s for the best... I mean, we can’t have anyone being *gasp* different *shudder* now can we?

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.

Oh, what’s that? Right, the trance of early “Sesame Street” and its country-time sequences. In spite of the show’s devotion to its “target child,” the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster” (as The New York Times explained in 1979), the first episodes join kids cavorting in amber waves of grain — black children, mostly, who must be pressed into service as the face of America’s farms uniquely on “Sesame Street.”

So - the “target child” is the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster”... who has the chance to just sit and watch cows being cows just how often? Granted, I was never a “4-year-old inner-city black youngster”... but I was a 4-year-old small-town white youngster and I didn’t have much opportunity to watch cows just being cows.

So - the show depicts kids playing in the grain... oh no! They might be allergic! Get cut by a piece of grass! (Been there, done that - it hurts) And Gods forbid the kids watching might want to do it!! Oh no, oh no!

In East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.” The figure was even higher in Washington. Nationwide, though, the number wasn’t much lower, and was largely determined by the whims of the PBS affiliates: 80 percent in houses with young children. The so-called inner city became anywhere that “Sesame Street” played, because the Children’s Television Workshop declared the inner city not a grim sociological reality but a full-color fantasy — an eccentric scene, framed by a box and far removed from real farmland and city streets alike.

The concept of the “inner city” — or “slums,” as The Times bluntly put it in its first review of “Sesame Street” — was therefore transformed into a kind of Xanadu on the show: a bright, no-clouds, clear-air place where people bopped around with monsters and didn’t worry too much about money, cleanliness or projecting false cheer. The Upper West Side, hardly a burned-out ghetto, was said to be the model.

So - just so I’m clear here - are we really under the assumption that the ‘hood in the Pride Family is a better image to show kids than Sesame Street? Maybe I missed something... maybe something in the heart/mind communication downloaded an old version of the parents’ handbook... but it seems to me that Sesame Street - with all it’s oh-so-awful elements - was about making the best of the world around you... even when that world had problems...

People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids.

Points of Entry

Caveat teletor: Volumes 1 and 2 of “Sesame Street: Old School” are available on DVD, which you can sample and buy on Sesameworkshop.org. With a few episodes, extras and celebrity appearances by the likes of Richard Pryor and Lou Rawls, “Old School” sounds harmless enough. But are you ready to mainline this much ’70s nostalgia?

The Way Old: YouTube is great for performance art. If 1969 is not far back enough for you, how’s 1935? The Oscar-winning short film “How to Sleep,” by the Algonquin Round-Tabler Robert Benchley, can be found here in sumptuous black-and-white; search for his name and the film’s title on YouTube.

Come of Age: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the men of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” have at last introduced their online-only young-adult series, “Quarterlife.” It started Nov. 11 on MySpaceTV.com, and it marks the first time a network-quality series — a long indie film, really — has been produced directly for the Internet. If the old times unnerve you, welcome to the new times.

Okay - so in re-reading this for the third time, maybe I over-reacted.

Then again - maybe I didn’t.

My mind keeps going back to that ‘Gen-X mother of two’ at the beginning... What the frak do you mean, ‘what did they do to us’?! They created a broadcast preschool classroom... and gods forbid that classroom might have different types of people in it... people with different thoughts and different appearances and different moods...

What did they do to us? They gave us the real world on the small screen... not Survivor or Big Brother or any of this so-called reality train-wreck crap that’s on TV now... just a tiny bit of life in a diverse neighborhood.

What did they do to us? They showed us that it was okay to be different... okay to see things that no one else saw... okay to be friendly to people that weren’t friendly back...

I know what they did to us... and if I ever find the people that undid it... well, let’s just say those bastards won’t be seeing sunny days any time soon...