Well, here it is at May - don’t have much to say... Yup... In April spent most of a week on Jury duty, first time in my life, they finally drug me in an' made me do it... Personally I dislike the idea of passing judgement on another human being - while on the other hand, I was curious enough about the process so that I made only a few halfhearted jokes and foul-ups, hoping that would disqualify me... No luck there...
Basically the case was a total waste of everyone’s time - about half of us on the jury agreed that the accused probably was guilty, but the prosecution seemingly hadn’t spent a whole lot of time preparing their case... Photos of the “Crime Scene” were provided via Google-Earth -- while Police reports were unsigned and undated... There was even a question of on which exact day the crime was committed -- and then the testimony was contradictory... out of four people who gave evidence both for and against, no two agreed on important factual details... If you’re at all familiar with Akira Kirosawa’s “Rashomon,” we were presented with a situation somewhat analogous to that... From the evidence presented, there was no way the Jury could determine what actually had happened on the evening in question... And so, about all that we could do was decide, not that we believed the accused to be innocent, but that the prosecution hadn’t made their case... They basically wasted all our time - even a correctly filled out police report could’ve helped...
From my viewpoint, the one upside (other than not helping to swell the bulging prison population) is that being in downtown LA, I spent my lunch hours nosing around Little Tokyo and spending far too much money in the bookstores and such... Even found some G-Pen Nibs - haven’t seen any of those in years - then lost them somewhere going through the multiple metal detectors at the Court House building... so went back the next day to buy some more... Also visited the Japanese-American Museum, which is worth seeing for anyone visiting LA... It contains most of one of the barracks from the WWII detention camps and lots of memorabilia from that era and earlier... It’s interesting to note that during World War II - a number of German-Americans, Italian-Americans, British-Americans, American-Americans were all convicted of treason, spying, sabotage and the like... while NO Japanese-Americans (that’s NONE as in ZERO) were ever convicted for any such activities - and yet they were the only racial group who were locked up, their property confiscated and so on... Meanwhile Japanese units in the US Army fighting in Europe were among the most decorated and suffered some of the highest casualty rates of any US Army unit... Just something to remember when it comes to racial intolerance...
But, with that said, this month’s calendar has nothing to do with any of that... It's just another calendar... No special point to it, other than perhaps our Tribute to National Dairy Month (Whenever that may be) - just a lovely pix of Kelly as colored by Sean an’ drooled over by numerous others...
Uh Huh... JQ
