Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Cal Johnson, Part IV...

I've posted about Cal Johnson several times before. Eight months ago (last May 22), he was arrested and accused of kidnapping and torturing his wife of 23 years. His wife posted comments on two of my posts (linked above), supporting her husband and painting a story of a good man addled by drugs.

Today Cal Johnson pled not guilty to all 18 charges brought against him:
Judge Allan Preckel found sufficient evidence to bind over Cal C. Johnson, 47, on 18 counts ranging from assault and battery to deadly threats. Johnson is accused of abducting his wife and shocking her with a stun gun because he believed she was having an affair.
I don't have the faintest idea where this case is going to end up, nor do I have a strong idea about where I think it should end up. Read my earlier posts to see why this case is so complex and confusing...

Incidently, the article I excerpted and linked to above is posted on NBC 39's web site. In that article, they excerpted my earlier blog post (with Mrs. Johnson's comments). In doing so, they excerpted and modified Mrs. Johnson's remarks -- mainly to elide some derogatory things she had to say about a channel 39 reporter! They also neglected to give me credit for the post, or the common courtesy of a link. This is a common practice on the lamestream media, unfortunately – it's happened to me a half-dozen or so times now. In fact, the only time the mainstream media has ever credited my blog was during the Harris Fire, when they published a link to the Lyons Peak cameras whose photos I was enhancing in near-realtime. In my own experience, it's very rare for a blogger to fail to give credit to a source. Who's the more professional lot?

Mercury!

The MESSENGER robotic explorer has completed its first fly-by of Mercury, and is now returning the data it gathered. At right is one of the first images it sent back, including about half the surface of the planet that has never had high-resolution images made of it before. The many instruments on MESSENGER collected a lot of data on this brief fly-by, and it will take some days before it all gets back to Earth and “digested”. Scientists will be studying it for years to come...

More of these, please, NASA – and less of the incredibly expensive and not-very-productive manned missions. Please.

Click on the image at right for a (much) larger version...

Tipping Point...

This one is purely for fun...