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Derek Chauvin verdict
Tuesday, April 20 2021
There were lots of big stories and dramas in 2020. A once-in-a-century pandemic swept through the nation while an inept president did nothing and said stupid things, ultimately leading to his defeat in the polls, a defeat he refused to accept. But there was another huge story that intersected at times with the main braid of intertwine stories: the on-video murder of a Black man named George Floyd by a police officer named Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis in May of 2020. The video of Chauvin coldly kneeling on Floyd's neck for nine and a half minutes until he was dead resulted in widespread Black Lives Matter protests, some rioting (particularly in Minneapolis), and a displacement (albeit temporary) of the coronavirus pandemic in the news cycle. Ultimately Derek Chauvin was charged with several counts of murder, a trial was held, and at around 5:00pm today the jury verdict was finally read by the judge. Usually juries give the benefit of the doubt to police officers, and it's very rare for them to convict no matter how much evidence is provided. In this case, though, the jury hadn't deliberated very long and wasn't hung. This suggested to me that we might be looking at a real unicorn here: a jury that had decided a police officer had murdered someone. I sat next to Gretchen on the couch as the judge read the verdict, Gretchen holding my hand in nervous anticipation. With the first guilty, I knew history was taking one of its better paths. It turned out the jury found Chauvin guilty on all charges. We were all ectatic, especially Gretchen (who is highly demonstrative of such things).
Tomorrow Powerful would be taking the Subaru to Van Kleeck Tires to get four new tires and an inspection (which it was due for at the end of January; it hasn't been street legal since). I'd just replaced the brake surfaces on the rear wheels and thought maybe I should give it a test drive before Powerful drove it, given that I hadn't driven it after the brake work and Powerful had never driven the Subaru ever before. So after seeing the Derek Chauvin verdict, I loaded up the dogs and drove straight to Uptown. I got two new quarts of paint from Herogs, one of the dark blue (Sherwin Williams Blue Chip) and the other of the yellow (Sherwin Williams Lemon Twist) for the ongoing laboratory floor repainting project. While there, I also got more storage solutions, including a somewhat-expensive dining room turntable that I might eventually motorize. While there, I also got some groceries at the Ghettoford Hannaford, concentrating on interesting ethnic foods. Who knew you can now get cans of hummus and baba ganoush at the Kingston Ghettoford?
Back at the house, Gretchen was still in an unusually unsettled state post-Chauvin-verdict. She started out by cleaning the refrigerator and then at some point decided to make Impossible Burgers (which we have frozen in our freezer(s). The burger that I ended up having contained pickles, sauerkraut, dijonnaise mustard, tomato, and lettuce, and it was one of the best sandwiches I'd had in a long time.
Today was 4/20, normally a big day in the world of smoking pot. I didn't use pot in any way today, mostly because Tuesdays aren't big pot-ingesting days for me. But today Gretchen rained on my cannabis-loving ways by telling me that actually New York State won't be legalizing the growing of pot until 2023. So that marks the end of my free-wheeling documentation of whatever pot-growing efforts I might be engaged in.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210420 feedback
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