Ronnie L. White, the man accused of killing a
Since the crime involved law enforcement officers, standard protocol is to transfer suspects to an out-of-area jail. But they didn’t transfer him. And he died.1
At 10:15 a.m., an officer checked on White in his holding cell. He was alert. Fifteen minutes later, an officer bringing him lunch found him dead.
Wait a minute.
They serve lunch at 10:30 a.m.?
Jay met Queen Elizabeth II last year, and today we learned what she paid for her flight to D.C.:
She chartered an airplane for £381,813 (about $761,203).
Certainly, that price tag ensures that the queen regnant and her royal passengers did not have to pay to check their luggage.
… Unless maybe the chartered plane was from American Airlines.
I took the bus each day to middle school, waiting at the Monroe Street library parking lot with 15 or 20 other students. We passed the time playing Butts-Up against the building.
The bus came at the same time each day. Students who missed the bus had to take the next bus, dubbed the Late Bus, which came about 20 minutes later.
The people on the Late Bus would inevitably show up to class 20 minutes late, offering up the excuse of “Late Bus” before taking their seats.
But the teachers, or at least my 1st-period teachers, thought the tardy students were saying "late bus" (as in, "we were on time to the bus stop, but the bus was late") and let it slide.
Every day.
Eventually, students figured out that they weren't penalized for being late so long as they blamed it on a late bus. As a result, they would hide at the bus stop... hoping the regular bus wouldn't see them so that they could ride the Late Bus.
That allowed them more time to play Butts-Up, you see.
I never did that. But I thought about it.
Answer: It's been missing in action since 1931, when the company incorporated and we simplified the logo. Believe it or not, adding an apostrophe to the sign on the front of each of our stores would cost more than a half million dollars! Not to mention changing the logo on all our products, bags, etc. Just think of it as the plural Wegmans, as in the many generations of Wegman family members that have built the company! If you are interested in Wegmans History, check out our Timeline.
Javon Walker had a horrible weekend.
Oh, it started off just fine. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that he spent $15,000 on Dom Perignon at the Tryst nightclub inside the Wynn Hotel on Saturday night, using a few of the bottles to spray the crowd.1
But Walker, who recently signed a $55 million contract with the Oakland Raiders, was found Monday morning unconscious on a street off the Las Vegas Strip. Evidently, he was the victim of an armed mugging. He suffered a fractured orbital and is now in "fair condition."
I'll try to learn where, exactly, Walker was found... so that I can avoid that area when I'm there this weekend.
1I have of course learned about the Vegas technique of "making it rain," but Walker's spray-everyone-with-Champagne move leaves the surrounding crowd far wetter.
While on a family bike ride, according to the New York Times, Barack Obama was concerned that he didn’t look cool in his bike helmet … until he realized that it was the rest of his outfit (sneakers, jeans, tucked-in polo shirt) that made him uncool.
The paper quoted him as saying: “Obviously the rest of my apparel was apparently not up to snuff, because I got a hard time from all sorts of blogs who said I looked like Urkel.”
Okay, great — Obama reads blogs. And he knows who Urkel is.
If he wins the election, I wonder if Barack Obama would follow President Bush's precedent in not using email. After all, we know Obama uses a Blackberry (the 8700c model, to be exact).
Click here to enlarge this graph from today's Washington Post comparing the dueling tax-cut proposals from McCain and Obama.
You know how the Forest Glen Metro stop has those confusing elevator buttons that no one but me finds confusing?
And you know how they put little white arrows to make sure people like me don't accidentally press the emergency alarm button?
Well... I pressed the emergency alarm button again this week.
I'll quit complaining about those buttons as soon as someone admits they are confusing.
"Recount," an HBO film about the contested 2000 presidential election and the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court ruling, stars Kevin Spacey as Democratic insider Ron Klain.
Klain, who served as Gore's chief of staff and helped run the vice president's recount effort in 2000, told me he is pleased with the Kevin Spacey casting. However, he pointed out that the talented Eve Gordon, who played his wife Monica in the film, is 10 years older than Monica was in 2000 "and not nearly as gorgeous."
Meanwhile, Klain scolded me for saying "BWI airport" rather than its full name ("Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport") and for not paying close enough attention to my cousin-in-law's research on Robert Jackson.
Below is our conversation:
D.C., we're told, is Hollywood for ugly people. And yet they got a balding guy to play you. What's up with that?
Kevin Spacey is balding, but he is better looking than me, and a two-time Oscar winner, so it is hard to complain. The person with a gripe is my wife, who was played in the movie by a very nice and talented actress – but one who is 10 years older than she was in 2000, and not nearly as gorgeous. How many people can say that their “real” wife is hotter than the actress who played her in a film?
In 2004, you worked for Wesley Clark before joining John Kerry's campaign. What it's like to arrive at a campaign having come from an opponent?
A certain amount of prostrating yourself in humble apology is required. But in a reasonably competitive multi-candidate primary (as the 2004 election was), 80% of the talent in the party winds up working for a losing candidate. Those who work for the winner know that they need to welcome those who chose wrongly. It could, after all, be them the next time around.
When HBO releases "Recount" on DVD, will it include a deleted scene in which I'm in your house admiring your collection of pictures of you and Al Gore… and saying to myself, "Wow, this guy really likes Al Gore"?
I’m fairly certain that there are no scenes from my home on the DVD. There may, however, be this nice chat between Kevin Spacey and myself, held in a “fake” living room that is not my home, but bears some resemblance to it … if my home were atop an office building in New York City instead of in suburban D.C. As to your other point, yes, I do like Al Gore, and there are a number of pictures of him hanging up in my REAL home.
Is it hard to joke about the film, given that it can be painful to relieve that moment in American history?
Joking about the film is easy; joking about the recount itself is hard. What happened in Florida in 2000 was a travesty and an injustice on many different levels – a failure of both our political system and our legal system. And the consequences for our country – the cost of the Bush presidency – has been tragic. I rarely go a day without thinking about it.
What did John McCain mean when he delivered this line in a speech: "We should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies"?
I believe that this is one of a number of criticisms, some veiled, some explicit, of the Bush administration’s performance over the past eight years; this one refers to the botched relief efforts following Hurricane Katrina. Sen. McCain is doing a decent job of building the case against the Bush presidency – he spent almost as much time [in that speech] attacking President Bush as he did attacking Senator Obama. There are only two serious problems with this aspect of the McCain message. First, he voted for most of the major policies of the Bush presidency. Second, he isn’t running against President Bush.
What do you think the BWI logo is supposed to resemble?
I assume it’s a 1970s logo that was meant to suggest the Concorde or some other high-tech plane. But the important point is that BWI airport is now named after Thurgood Marshall, for whom we will celebrate the centennial of his birth in a few weeks (on July 2, 2008). You would know this if you paid closer attention to the Robert Jackson Center-related emails sent out by your cousin-in-law.
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Coming out ahead in the current sandwich war between Subway and Quiznos requires the ability to determine whether "large" is longer than a foot.
They are each $5, you see.
Okay, so here’s what I've learned, via David M. Herszenhorn, about last night’s private meeting between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:
President Bush understands the importance of email in everyday life and commerce. As reported by the Weekly Standard, he regularly used email before moving into the White House, saying: "I stayed in touch with all kinds of people around the country, firing off emails at all times of the day to stay in touch with my pals. ... There's no better way to communicate."
But the president has not sent a single email since taking office, since they would be saved for posterity like all written documents relating to his office. Bush says he looks forward to using email again once his term in office comes to an end.
There are other good ways to communicate, of course — say, a person-to-person conversation or over the phone. And those don't require an archived transcript.
It's unfortunate that the current setup provides a disincentive for our presidents to use the best communications technologies available.
In his speech last night in New Orleans, John McCain said the following line: "We should be able to deliver bottled hot water to dehydrated babies."
I replayed it for Marnie, who was as confused as I was.
(See video here.)
Was it a reference to failed Hurricane Katrina rescues?
Today we will be examining the Baltimore Washington International Airport logo.
Is it supposed to resemble the dome of the U.S. Capitol launching into the air? If so, why is the top slightly angled to the right? And what situation would require the U.S. Capitol to become a rocket headed for outer space?
Then again, perhaps it's not meant to look like the U.S. Capitol, which after all isn't particularly close to the airport. Maybe the BWI logo is simply an airplane. But still, why do they make the plane look like a rocket?
For the last year or two, Fred Risser — whose wife dislikes watermelon gum — has been the longest-serving state legislator in the nation.
Over the weekend, he announced he will seek re-election in November.
