Category Archives: Crime

the whistler in darkness

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from the Archive

The first few nights I thought he was trying to flag a cab. Then I thought he was trying to flag a hooker. Then I thought he was keeping six, and this was a more subtle form of yelling “Cheez it!” when the cops turned up. Still don’t know, but it’s damn annoying.

There’s a whistler in this town, and he comes out after midnight. If this were the Scottish moors he could call a collie a mile away; this is the kind of whistle that passes through stone and steel and my bedroom window as if they weren’t there. He sounds off about once every 90 seconds, for couple of hours, and downpours do not deter him. Sometimes there are bursts of whistles, sometimes just one. The bursts are not musical, just the same rising note, a nonverbal questionmark. I wonder what the question is.

The screamers are back. Tonight, there were two: a man and a woman, and a yeller, all going at once, having, to all appearances or accoustances, a grand old time, screaming and screaming and yelling. Yeller isn’t angry, just loud enough that I can hear him a block over, and he yells alot. Some day instead of tuning him out I’m going to listen to it. I’ll either be bored or forced to testify: guess which is more likely!

And then there is Whoo! Whoo! (not to be confused with John Woo, the Hong Kong phenom of film) Whoo! is a guy whose vocabulary has been reduced to a single word, the aforementioned “Whoo!” and a single volume setting, maximum. Foreigner was playing in town recently, and Supertramp is coming, so maybe he’s just reliving the glory days of rock, when your Bic lighter and your Black Sabbath T-shirt were all you needed for a party. It’s nice to hear someone having such a good time in the neighborhood, but if I get him in a dark alley I’m going to…tell the junkies the cops might investigate all that noise…and then I’ll just walk away. No fingerprints.

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pervy pilgrims punished!

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I guess this is just not my day for taking the high road, eh? I seem to have made a complete recovery from dignity, and in record time! Ah well, best to plunge ahead before this is totally out of date.

wig wearing wenchWell, it’s already kinda sorta over by several centuries, but it doesn’t seem to have hit the blogosphere yet in any major way, so I’m claiming it. What we have here is an article about the kinds of sexual crimes the Pilgrims had in their laws, and the kind and number and,  in several cases, names, of the people who transgressed those laws, along with some fun assorted tales of what happened to them after that.

It is instructive to note that a good 50% or more of these crimes take place regularly in the bathrooms and on the dance floor at Celebrities, but that’s neither here nor there. We shall not even mention the Pumpjack, because that’s more appropriate for a discussion of the punishment than the crimeChained Male. Yes, don’t kid yourself; ain’t nothing the Pilgrim Fathers of America liked to see as much as a Pilgrim Mother or Pilgrim Young’un of America trussed up like a gimp and bent over in a set of stocks.

It cannot be said (as it is of those whose sole knowledge of this period is that one Demi Moore movie) that they punished the victims rather than the perpetrators, but they didn’t believe in letting them feel left out, either, as you can see from this excerpt of the full MSNBC article.

Leviticus provided their guidance and that Old Testament book is not exactly nuanced. Sodomy? Death. Bestiality? Death. Man has sex with his daughter-in-law? Death. Adultery? Death. You get the picture.

The laws of Plymouth Colony echo Leviticus. You could be sentenced to death for sodomy, rape, buggery and, for a time, adultery. (Sodomy and buggery might be synonymous to us, but buggery apparently referred more to bestiality.)

Some Christian preachers today quote Leviticus 20, approvingly arguing that both the Old and New Testament are the infallible word of God.

And on his farm he had a sheep…
In practice, though, even the Pilgrims did not typically enforce death for sex. In fact, only one person was put to death for a sex crime in the colony, poor Thomas Graunger, a teenage farm boy who, perhaps flush with the surge of hormones, turned to those he knew best. His story could make you look at the Thanksgiving turkey in a whole new way.

Governor William Bradford recounted the tale:

“He was this year detected of buggery, and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey … He was first discovered by one that accidentally saw his lewd practice towards the mare. (I forbear particulars.) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confessed the fact with that beast at that time, but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment.”

As punishment, he was forced to watch all the animals killed. At first, the court had a problem figuring out which sheep Thomas favored — sheep looking pretty much alike — but Thomas helpfully pointed out his sex partners. After being killed, they were buried in a pit, and then Thomas himself was hanged. If you wonder what the animals did to deserve it, Leviticus was cited by the court: “If a man lie with a beast, he shall surely be put to death; and ye shall slay the beast.”

Though Thomas was the only person executed Hiya Pilgrim, new in town?for a sex crime, punishments were still brutal. Even for lesser crimes, like fornication, you could receive whippings, brandings, wearing a Hawthorne-esque scarlet letter, time in the stocks, fines and banishment. Yet if court records are any indication, there was no shortage of colonists willing to tempt fate. 

Read the rest here…

operation global media domination: sic transit gloria bloggy

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TIAAh, how long ago it seems; geological ages ago, fast-vanishing in the rearview mirror of the hurtling cosmos. And yet it was only yesterday that I was the most popular blog of the half-million blogs on WordPress. Today I’m #52 #91. Sigh.

Sic transit gloria bloggy. At least I’m up to 65,000 59,000 on Technorati.

Keith Olbermann, you’ll always have a special place in my heart. A place closer, perhaps, to the part I use to play poker with than the part I use to store actual affection in, but that could all change over drinks sometime. Call me. Although this was far from your finest rant, it was worth a cool three thousand hits in 24 hours.

Salon, I’m going to have to start reading you more often. Link to me again and I may blogroll you; we can work something out. Have your pixels call my pixels. (If my guess is right they follwed me from a Gawker post about Salon’s disingenuous celebrity uterus coverage {gee, even Salon checks their trackbacks; even famous people like to hear what others are saying about them} and on which I blogwhorishly dropped a link to my own blog post about the infamous and unnameable Cthulhu ultrasound. Then they poked around until they discovered Keith. But this is just a theory, and we all know what the mainstream press thinks of Chtulhu-TomKat-BushBashing theories).

Mere moments ago I was linked to in DirtySpoke‘s review of Anal Amy. We shall see if this is better than Olbermann, hitwise. UPDATE: two hits. That would be a no, by a factor of 10 to the third power.

I’m going to let someone Catholic explain all this to Sister Mary Martha. Volunteers?

And in a special bonus section tonight, we’ll answer some questions that popped up via the Search Engine Referrals.

  • Yes, Vic’s diner at the corner of Main and Cordova is closed. No idea when/if it will reopen, but I already miss their sweet Filipino spagetti (sic). Starting December 1, drown your sorrows in Pat’s Pub, where they’ll be serving their own microbrew. Tonight is Redneck Wednesday, with country rock on the stereo and Bud and Jack Boilermakers for $3.75. Apparently the Pacific up by the porn theatre is going to be joining the ranks of microbrewers; hey kids, it’s not just for gourmets anymore!
  • Kimveer Gill is still dead. Time to deal with it; put the black candles and athame down and back away slowly.
  • Steve Irwin also dead. Film will not be shown at eleven, nor at any other time.
  • The Blackzilla video here is NOT the one you’re looking for, people.
  • Lucy Gao still worth a half-dozen hits a day. Someone needs to be looking at freshening their newsgathering methodology.
  • Beautiful Agony Free Samples Not Here!

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled Communal Anarchist, Cthulhoid, short attention span Canuckistani blog.

Heidi Fleiss fails to pimp bigly

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Remember me?

It’s true. Heidi Fleiss does not know how to turn it out. The former leading madam of Hollywood is a dreadful marketer.

Heidi Fleiss cannot pander.

Despite the frenzy of headlines that resulted from news (from the horse’s ass’s mouth) that Mike Tyson would be joining her Daniel Libeskind-designed stud farm in the Nevada desert, today Heidi Fleiss revealed that the mansion of manliness will be doing without his cannibalistic presence.

Helluva lot she knows about marketing.

Seriously, honey. When a story about a potential employee drives the blogosphere into a perfect storm of fetishistic repulsion and attraction, and you are a madam looking for publicity for your new venture featuring exotic men for rent, what you have is not a damage-control situation calling for denials.

What you have is a gift from god.

What do you think of my book?

ad placement o’ the day

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The last thing the millionaire rapist sees will be... 

From the Sun, via Fark, which seems to have totally missed this charming juxtaposition. You must go to the site click here to see one of the adds they’ve got in rotation on this story. I’m thinking somebody’s media buyer just got fired.

Short form: imprisoned rapist Iorworth Hoare wins lottery. Upon release, moves to expensive neighborhood. Is terrorized by giant European Eagle Owl.

Hogwarts 1: rapists 0.

In related news, fellow WordPress blogger and Vancouverite Marcus Frind, president of the Internet dating site Plenty of Fish, helped the US Marshals track down one of their most wanted criminals after he discovered the man was living with a woman he’d met through the site. Not exactly the kind of publicity I’d be hammering home to the public, myself. I mean, the news that my company is cooperating with law enforcement and putting away killers = good. The news that spree killers are trolling my dating site for women = bad.

But maybe that’s just me.