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civic contribution buzz
Tuesday, August 28 2007
I'm a registered voter of Ulster County, New York, and this makes me eligible to serve on juries there. I'd received paperwork summoning me to jury duty during the Scotland trip, which I'd postponed to this week. Perhaps surprisingly, this morning I actually had to report to the Ulster County Court House (in Uptown Kingston) for jury selection. I parked in the Uptown Hannaford parking lot and walked up to the County Office Building, which turned out to be different from the court house, which was only a block or two away, very close to the restaurant bearing an anachronistic menu choice in enormous typeface: "CHOP SUEY."
At the court house my belt buckle set off the metal detector as I went through, but I was sent on my way after a half-hearted wanding. Due to a late start and my having gone to the wrong building, I was the last prospective juror to take a seat in the large room with about eighty others. A guy standing at the front was half way through giving instructions for filling out the form we'd all been mailed. Eventually he departed and we were all left alone. Perhaps surprisingly (given the randomly-selected nature of the people present) a thin atmosphere of conversation immediately rushed in and displaced the silence.
Next two ladies came in and took attendance. I was struck by the fact that most of the names being called out were either Slavic or Jewish, with a few Italian and conventional WASP names too. I might have been the only one there with a German last name, though I know for a fact that Ulster County (particularly my Dug Hill Road neighborhood) is full of people of German descent. Racially, the jurors were nearly all white. I looked around and only saw one black person, an immaculately-dressed gentleman. This led me to wonder if perhaps it's hard even here for a black man to avoid a felony conviction (and thus ineligibility for serving on juries).
Eventually we were all sent home because the case for which we'd been assembled had stalled; the defendant in a burglary case had failed to show up.
Back out on the sunny streets of Uptown, I felt a mysterious and utterly unexpected bounce in my step. I was feeling some sort of rush just for having participated (however fleetingly) in one of the positive institutions of our civilization. I've also felt this feeling after voting and even paying taxes, but not quite this strongly. There must be a reward system, even in the brains of mildly-sociopathic misanthropes, that injects happy juice into our brains whenever we contribute to the good of our society.
Before coming home I picked up a load of construction lumber so I can fashion some sort of woodshed to hold firewood this winter.
This evening I spent some time trying to get the latest version of Bathtubgirl.com's database onto a local machine somewhere in Arizona so that my erstwhile girlfriend Kim (aka Bathtubgirl) will have a familiar mechanism for keeping her journal even after the plug is pulled on her site. Some months ago Kim's crazy mother called child protective services on her after she blogged about her infant daughter on her site because "It's a porn site!" (And will no one think of the children?) So maintaining the journal on the site became impossible, and so then the keeping the site up no longer made sense. The move of the data was more of a bitch than expected, mostly because doing anything through PCAnywhere is like typing with your hands in boxing gloves.
Never, ever buy a seriously-discounted laptop battery online, particularly if it's for sale by a company called Compuvest. Such batteries are always past their prime and will not hold anywhere near the charge of a freshly-minted battery. The problem with laptop batteries, at least the kind made for the Compaq Evo N410c, is that it's not obvious from their labeling when they were made. They have date codes, but they're codes, almost certainly to keep the true nature of their ages encoded.
I began to wonder today if there are any family-values-obsessed Republicans at all who are actually heterosexual. These are, after all, the people promoting the idea that homosexuality is a "choice," which is something that could only cross the mind of someone who imagines being able to make such a choice. As more and more of them are busted for playing footsie under dividers in men's rooms (for God's sake, guys are trying to crap in there!), it's becoming increasingly clear that those who can't stop bringing the subject around to gay sex are in fact suffering from a very public obsession.
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