a nation whispers, “we always knew that he’d go free”
28 Aug 07
In 1959 a twelve-year-old girl named Lynne Harper was brutally murdered near a small town in Southern Ontario. I was born seven years later in a city about an hour’s drive away, and as a child growing up in the 70s I can remember people still talking about the murder. Of course, Lynne Harper’s wasn’t the name I knew. The name I knew was Steven Truscott.
Truscott was 14 at the time of the murder. He was tried, found guilty, and convicted to death by hanging. The death sentence was commuted to life in prison and he was later paroled and lived for a number of years under another name.
This is a man whose name I have known all my life, always connected to the notion of wrongful conviction. As a child I remember my grandmother referring to him as that poor boy who went to jail when everybody knew he didn’t kill that girl. But go to jail he did. The public reaction to his being found guilty was mixed, but of historic importance here is the public outrage at the idea of the state executing a 14-year-old boy. In many ways this case led directly to the abolition of the death penalty in Canada.
The simplest argument against the death penalty is that you can’t bring the wrongfully convicted back. Men like Donald Marshall, Guy Paul Morin, and David Milgaard might not have lived long enough to see the invention of the DNA technologies that exonerated them. There are, of course, more sophisticated arguments to support the abolition of the death penalty, but this simplest one seems incontrovertible.
Today, that seems like a bit of an aside. Today, 48 years after going to jail for a murder he didn’t commit, Steven Truscott was acquitted by the Ontario Court of Appeal.
Sources
CBC News. In Search of Justice.
CBC News: the fifth estate. The Steven Truscott Story: Moment of Truth.
R v Truscott. The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Steven Truscott. Wikipedia.
CBC News. Wrongfully Convicted.
Tragically Hip. Wheat Kings.
Posted by pzed on August 28, 2007 at 9.58pm
Honey, well. . .
27 Aug 07
Last year over xmas Jodi and I spent three or four days visiting family out of town. When we got back, we discovered that the thermostat had been stuck on for probably half that time. Now, I had been procrastinating on replacing it for at least two winters. It no longer gave an accurate temperature reading, but I’d say it was between 35 and 40°C in here. We turned the furnace off (’cause, you see, you kind of had to open up the thermostat and flick the mercury to get the furnace to go on or off, only it had never before gotten so stuck that it wouldn’t turn off, it was more like if you set it for 18 it would turn on at 12 and turn off at 24) and spent a fitful night sweating in our underwear in what should have been a too cold bedroom. When we rose in the morning and the house had cooled, it was as though the house had had a fever and we had nursed its delirious soul through the night.
Well, no more of that!
Now I have a question which it’d be great if someone could answer. The installation instructions for the thermostat look super easy. They even say something on the box about it being super easy (or some such equivalent). But nowhere does it say anything about turning off any power. Shouldn’t you have to turn off some power somewhere? Instruction one is, “Take your old thermostat off the wall and carefully label the wires.” I’m thinking there should be some power to turn off. Or is there just not enough power running through these things to do any damage? Maybe I should get in there and lick those wires to get that delicious, 9 volt battery tingle.
Posted by pzed on August 27, 2007 at 9.17pm
rock city, part one
26 Aug 07
After a long delay, but with inevitable satisfaction, it gives me great pleasure to recount my and Jodi’s tour of Rock City. When we mention Rock City to our friends, they have one of two reactions: northerners (mainly, but not exclusively, Canadian) say “hunh?” Southerners, on the other, get a queer look on their faces, followed by something along the lines of “You’re going there?”
Rock City is in Georgia, but so close to the state line that the nearest city is actually Chattanooga.
We spent the morning (of July 31, 2007) checking out downtown Chattanooga, which like most downtowns in America isn’t particularly people friendly. We walked down a number of barren streets (literally—one entire block of abandoned and falling apart shops was so desolate I was nervous to stay long enough to take out my camera, foolishly) looking for coffee. We finally got lucky at a place called Greyfriar’s, which was nice enough, and the coffee was reasonably priced (not what we’re used to in Athens, who like Chattanooga has a main street called Broad; but I digress).
Rock City costs about $15 to get in, and then you follow a path through some nifty fissures and other formations until you get to the peak of Lookout Mountain.
If you ask at the ticket counter or the main gate (and people do!) “How long does it take to get through here?” the answer is about an hour and a half. However, we did overhear some seemingly relieved power tourists saying they could do it in more like an hour. Incidentally, we obeyed the signs and stayed on the path. There’s some mighty powerful wildlife in them there parts.
That guy was about five millipedinous inches long. One interesting thing about this place is that it was originally created as a private garden, and the wife of the couple who owned the property and subsequently opened it to the public made an effort to bring in a wide variety of native and regional plant species. Since the location is relatively near the Carolinas, and since Southern Ontario too is (was?) a carolinian forest region, a whole lot of the plants brought in for the garden looked very familiar.
The path through the rocks winds past a variety of sites of interest, crossing over itself in a number of places.
Here’s a picture of Jodi’s butt following the butts of some other tourists through the Grand Corridor.
Those who know me know I absolutely hate tucking in my shirt, and I pretty much also hate looking at tucked in shirts. And the worst is t-shirts tucked in to shorts. If you’re gonna tuck in your shirt, do it right and wear some proper trousers and decent shoes, fer cryin’ out loud. Here’s some more wildlife.
And of course, no self-respecting tourist attraction is complete without a deer park.
Reindeer—no doubt the carolinian kind. Unlike us, they weren’t mad enough to come out in the summer sun.
Getting close to Lookout Point, you get to choose whether to cross the safe-seeming stone bridge, or the entirely not safe-seeming swinging bridge. Jodi and I staged this lovely shot for you of her on the one, and me on the other. That’s Chattanooga over her right shoulder.
They say from Lookout Point, you can see seven states.
That’s on a clear day. The day we were there it was so hazy we could pretty much see Georgia (the state we were in. . . I mean, the State we were in; you can see for yourselves what state we were in) and Tennessee, all of a half mile away. We could, however, see Lover’s Leap.
We didn’t, thankfully, all though it looks like maybe these people did. From Lookout Point we could also see a number of fascinating local features, like the Enchanted Maize. . .
. . . and Chattanooga, of course. . .
. . . and this little guy.
Here’s a close-up. He was rather hard to see, but that’s why our cameras have lenses.
Here’s another view of Lover’s Leap, complete with waterfall.
So Part One of the tour is above ground, and kind of fun. Complete with a break for coffee at the concession stand up top, it took us well over our allotted hour and a half. It’s like we already had our money’s worth, and we hadn’t even gone underground yet!
Underground is where things get a little weird.
The gnome thing goes from being an occasional curiosity to the central theme. Here Jodi looks back in some distress, wondering “should we go on, or should we run far, far away?”
She’s also shimmering like some Celestine Prophecy character planning to vibrate into another dimension, but that’s just lighting. We’re actually not quite underground, yet, so I can show you the little gnome guys working the still.
And here’s one more bug shot, to round out that theme. Is that a carpenter bee?
Actually, no, it’s not. Don’t know what it is though. It floated like a bumble bee, which it clearly isn’t, and was hanging out around the hanging flowers.
At any rate, this has become a long, picture-heavy post. Here, to whet your appetite, is the gate to the Fairyland Caverns, about which you will hear (and see) a great deal in Part Two, whenever I get around to posting that.
Posted by pzed on August 26, 2007 at 9.16pm
killing time while digesting
23 Aug 07
Despite the 31 degrees and 71% relative humidity, I decided to boil water in the kitchen today. The house is still quite cool compared to outdoors, although it is getting a little sticky. But I was hungry and craving something I haven’t had in a while. And I need leftovers for lunches. So today’s dinner was tuna macaroni salad, only with a few modifications. I used an entire 900g bag of macaroni and an extra can of tuna, which necessitated using more Miracle Whip; and I also added some chopped broccoli and cauliflower to stretch the vegetables. The veggies were a really nice addition (especially, I’m embarrassed to admit, the cauliflower) and may become a regular part of the dish, if only laziness doesn’t overcome me in future.
Now that that’s done, off to the gym!
Posted by pzed on August 23, 2007 at 6.30pm
the path is clear
22 Aug 07
Today, a big fat wet air mass settled on Southern Ontario, but our house stayed cool and dry inside. Rather than stay in after dinner and heat the house up by doing one or more of the many things that need doing, I decided to go outside and get all sweaty working in the garden. I had only intended to do a little weeding, but somehow I ended up scraping up all the mud and weeds and fallen bits of tree that had made the above path pretty darn hard to see (I must remember to start taking “before” pictures).
Afterwards, I went to the alley where we park the car and cut down all the little trees that always spring up along the back fence—one of these is a mulberry and the others are equally weedy—and then cleaned up the last couple months accumulation of litter from the parking area. (In Windsor, at least in older neighbourhoods like ours, the garbage pick-up is off the alleys, and people aren’t always careful how they put their garbage out. Our parking area is bounded by walls and a fence on three sides and seems to be a catchment area for other people’s windblown trash.)
Finally, I had a shower and it still wasn’t yet eight o’clock. How is it that there is always so much that remains to be done?
Posted by pzed on August 22, 2007 at 9.10pm
portrait, or landscape?
4 Aug 07
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. 1920. Scribner’s, 1968.
The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the center of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows. (28)
Posted by pzed on August 4, 2007 at 9.48pm
