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This will be a little shorter than usual and I may come back tomorrow to supplement.  But this is my take on the Run for the Roses on Saturday.  I have decided to take a stand against the majority of runners in the race because I think that they are either simply too slow, not well enough conditioned or not well meant for this grueling race.  Remember that all of these horses are being asked to do something that they have never done or will most likely ever do again: run a mile and a quarter in front of a mass of 150,000 screaming, drunk people. 

Let’s concentrate on those who can get there to the wire and what true odds should be. (more…)

And that’s exactly how Chief Justice John Roberts described the latest opinion handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday in which the Court held that the mandatory, additional ten-year sentence provided for in the sentencing guidelines for a firearm “discharged” during the commission of an offense applies, even if that discharge is accidental.

The facts of the case were not complicated nor disputed.  Christopher Dean entered a Rome, Georgia bank wearing a mask and waving a gun.  He ordered all patrons and employees to lie down and got to work instructing the teller to hand over the cash.  But as he grabbed the cash with his left hand, holding the handgun in his right hand, it accidentally went off.  Dean cursed and made off with a little over $3,600.  No one was hurt in the incident. 

After his arrest and conviction, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison, ten of which was added on for the “discharge of a weapon” during the commission of the offense.  Dean made the commonsense argument that the penalty should not apply since the act was not committed intentionally.  But when arguing before the Court last month, Dean’s lawyer was asked by Justice Scalia for an example of a gun discharge that would not qualify under the statute, given the breadth of the law’s application.  Before the lawyer could come up with something, anything, Justice Breyer interjected, “When he sees a duck fly by the window and he’s a hunter,” obviously referring to Scalia’s pasttime.  It brought about some titters and probably some passing memories of Scalia’s other buddy, Dick Cheney, and his infamous hunting snafu.  Breyer dissented to the Court’s opinion, along with Justice John Paul Stevens.

Writing for the majority, the Chief Justice noted that “accidents happen . . . sometimes they happen to individuals committing crimes with loaded guns.  It is unusual to impose criminal punishment for the consequences of purely accidental conduct.”  But he was quick to conclude that offenders must bear the consequences of unintended consequences of their unlawful acts.  And here was the sop he threw to the unlucky: 

“Those criminals wishing to avoid the penalty for an inadvertent discharge can lock or unload the firearm, handle it with care during the underlying violent or drug trafficking crime, leave the gun at home or — best yet — avoid committing the felony in the first place.”

  Read the case here, Dean v. United States, No. 08-5274.

At one time, however fleeting it was, Greg Page stood atop the boxing world when he defeated South African Gerrie Coetzee (pronounced Coat-zeeah) at the Sun City Resort in Bophutatswana in 1984 at the age of 26.  But his victory was like much of his career - mired in controversy and doubt.  It turns out that his knockout of Coetzee occurred 48 seconds after the round should have ended.  After that, he held the title for a mere five months, losing to forgettable Tony Tubbs.  That victory was the apogee of a meteoric career which came to an end this past Monday.  Page passed away from the lingering effects of a serious brain injury at his home in Louisville, Kentucky.  (more…)

Last week required that I drive into Dallas and Ft. Worth on a little business.  Of course, it gave me some time on my hands between tasks, just enough in fact to make it over to the OTB at Lone Star on Thursday afternoon where I shot from the hip.  Handicapping cold can be dangerous to anyone’s bankroll but incredibly, I hit a late double at Hawthorne Racecourse, normally a bottomless pit for me, so it was fiscally worthwhile.  Don’t ask me about my good thing at Hollywood Park, Hot ‘n Lacy at 29-1, who got hooked by the chalk seventy yards from the wire.  I packed it in after that. 

The next day, Friday, I had to get on back to Amarillo with a stop at the Middleton Transfer Unit in Abilene to see an inmate there.  All these TDCJ units are built to the same, exact specs, have you ever noticed that?  But, after the full body search and conference were over, I headed back along U.S. 87 North and what I noticed between Roscoe and Lubbock stunned me.  Looking back, I guess it had been about four years since I had driven that route but the number and range of wind turbines spread along the highway was amazing.  There are hundreds of these things lining the highway on both sides and they stretch, by my estimate, for at least twenty miles.  I mean, there are literally hundreds of these turbines, spinning away.  No surprise that it was a particularly windy day with a steady gale blowing in from, where else, the southwest.  I wonder just how many megawatts of energy they produce. 

It all tells me one thing.  This is the future.  They may not be pretty and produce a noise what some describe as annoying.  But it’s the future.  The one resource we have in abundance out here is the damn wind and I suppose can’t be allowed to go untapped any longer.  I ask myself from time to time why didn’t I see all of this and cast my lot with wind and water law?  Too late for this clerk.  I’m in too deep but for the younger, stronger turks, there’s still time.  Wind and water.  It’s the future out here in the Panhandle.  The former we have too much of, the latter, not enough. 

At 90 years of age, Hall of Famer Bob Feller stills manages to pitch a decent fast ball in various old-time exhibition games.  He also maintains a disarming candor in his public comments about the game that he loves and which has been his life.  So it should come as no surprise what he had to say about Roger Clemens a few days ago.  Asked whether Clemens should be elected to the Hall of Fame, given the steroids scandal that has tarnished his reputation, Feller’s thought was that this was a decision left up to the writers who vote the players in.  But he didn’t stop there.  “Would I vote for him?  The answer is no.  I’m sorry to say that.  It’s sad, it’s very sad.  Things happen to people, they bring it on themselves.  No doubt he was a great pitcher.  No doubt about that . . . He could have handled it a lot differently, so It wouldn’t hurt him so much.  He handled it very poorly.  He had some very bad advice.”  Yes, bad advice.  Repeat after me: R-u-s-t-y H-a-r-d-i-n.

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision today which is significant in that it places discrete limits on the scope of vehicle searches once the driver has been arrested.  In Arizona v. Gant, Respondent was arrested for driving on a suspended license.  After he was handcuffed and placed in the patrol car, his vehicle was searched which turned up cocaine in a jacket.  He moved to suppress the seizure of the cocaine but the trial court, citing New York v. Belton, 453 U.S. 454 (1981), held that the police may search the passenger compartment of a vehicle and any containers therein as a contemporaneous incident of the recent occupant’s lawful arrest.  The Arizona State Supreme Court reversed, holding that the Constitution requires that a search incident to arrest be justified by either the interest of officer safety or the interests in preservation of evidence and that neither of these interests were present in this case. 

Held: Police may search the passenger compartment of a vehicle incident to a recent occupant’s arrest only if it is reasonable to believe that the arrestee might access the vehicle at the time of the search or that the vehicle contains evidence of the offense underlying the reason for the arrest.  (more…)

This past Saturday, The New York Times ran a great piece on the hapless 1985 San Antonio Gunslingers of the defunct United States Football League.  If you recall, the USFL struggled mightily for three years and never seriously challenged the NFL although from time to time, some of the teams played fairly competitive football.  But the Gunslingers were a team in a universe of their own, thanks to miserly management, courtesy of its owner, real estate magnate and oilman Clinton Manges.  The Gunslingers were the poorest team in the  league with cash-flow problems that turned the franchise into the most financially challenged team in sports history.  Or was it?  We’ll get to that in a minute.

Things were bad from the first rattle out of the box.  In the mid-80’s, San Antonio simply wasn’t ready for a professional football club.  It didn’t have a place for the team to play so they ended up in Alamo Stadium, not to be confused with the Alamo Dome, constructed much later.  Alamo Stadium was actually a high school football field with a maximum capacity of 18,000.  It was eventually enlarged to hold about 32,000 but the Gunslingers never even came close to matching that figure.  Their first game drew about 14,000 and only once did they crack 20,000 in its history.  Add to this the average salary for each player, $25,000 and no per diem allowance, and you had players moving in with fans or others doubling or tripling up with teammates.  After word spread throughout the town that players were bartering tickets for food, a group of local women took homemade tamales, barbecue and refried beans to practice. (more…)

I want to pick up where I left off in my last post concerning Marlowe, detective fiction, what all this means in everyday life and why this genre of literature thrives, even today.  The following extract is from a letter that Raymond Chandler wrote John Houseman in October, 1947.  You may remember Houseman as Professor Kingsfield, the imposing, intimidating contracts professor in The Paper Chase, a 1973 film about first-year law students at Harvard.  But before that foray into films, Houseman was a very successful stage and film producer and had been instrumental in bringing Chandler to Hollywood for script work.  In the letter, Chandler complimented Houseman on a recent magazine story he had published and then launched into something that must have been nagging at him (Chandler) for some time:

“Time [the magazine] this week calls Philip Marlowe ‘amoral.’  This is pure nonsense.  Assuming that his intelligence is as high as mine (it could hardly be higher), assuming his chances in life to promote his own interest are as numerous as they must be, why does he work for such a pittance?  For the answer to that is the whole story, the story that is always being written by indirection and yet never is written completely or even clearly.  It is the struggle of all fundamentally honest men to make a decent living in a corrupt society.  It is an impossible struggle; he can’t win.  He can be poor and bitter and take it out in wisecracks and casual amours, or he can be corrupt and amiable and rude like a Hollywood producer.  Because the bitter fact is that outside of two or three technical professions which require long years of preparation, there is absolutely no way for a man of this age to acquire a decent affluence in life without to some degree corrupting himself, without accepting the cold, clear fact that success is always and everywhere a racket.”

One must have a world view, what the Germans call Weltanschauung.  This does it for me. 

March 26 got by me.  It was on March 26, 1959 that Raymond Chandler, writer and creator of the world’s most famous detective, Philip Marlowe, died in La Jolla, California.  Chandler wasn’t a prodigious writer; he wrote only seven Marlowe novels in addition to several short stories.  During his later years, following the enormous success of Marlowe, he forayed into screenwriting and some literary criticism.  Film buffs are keenly aware of Chandler’s contributions to the finished product of Double Indemnity where he teamed with another of Hack’s heroes, director Billy Wilder, to produce the perfect movie script.  He was paid gobs of money for this and a few other scripts but he hated the work because he hated the people who ran the movie business.  He never lost his fascination with Southern California which makes sense if you’ve ever been there.  I didn’t say he loved SoCal.  He entertained an equipoised attitude toward the region - mesmerized by its geography, attracted to its mystical beauty, fascinated by the Pacific but repulsed by its crass commercialization and urban sprawl and all of this well before the 60’s and beyond.  His last ten or twelve years were sad indeed as he became a bit of a recluse, holing up in his house in La Jolla, caring for his invalid wife Cissy (who was fifteen years his senior) and battling the bottle and insomnia.  He spent those sleepless nights corresponding with various recipients.  Those letters were later collected and published in a compelling book, The Letters of Raymond Chandler.  It is riveting reading. 

But even with his declining years and the sorrow he endured at the end (it’s wasn’t pretty), his contribution to literature is significant.  He made Marlowe, a man for all seasons, as one of us, an ”everyman” whose strength, endurance, understanding and lack of pretense is a model for me, certainly.  And he raised crime fiction to an art, something that no other writer had ever accomplished before or, in my opinion, since.  Chandler best described him.

“To me Marlowe is the American mind; a heavy portion of rugged realism, a dash of good hard vulgarity, a strong overtone of strident wit, an equally strong undertone of pure sentimentalism, an ocean of slang, and an utterly unexpected range of sensitivity.”

Chandler has been gone from us for 50 years but Marlowe lives.  And look at all the manifestations of the character.  I know I’m in the minority here but I still think that Bogart was one of the weaker portrayals.  Mitchum, of course, was supreme with his ennui and world-weariness (Farewell My Lovely [1975], The Big Sleep [1978] but what about James Garner in Marlowe (1969) or Powers Boothe in the HBO series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye (1982)?  Each one managed to catch the “literary” Marlowe as opposed to the wooden performance of Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946) or a very goofy Marlowe as enacted by Eliot Gould in The Long Goodbye (1973), the latter being my favorite Chandler novel of the seven.

Marlowe lives.

Hack received the updated house rules of the Amarillo Club the other day.  I’ve belonged for many years and although the dues have increased to the point where it stings a tad to write that check every month, particularly if I haven’t even eaten once in the entire month, I still want to hang onto my membership.  Located on the 31st floor of the Chase Building, where else can you take a guest from out of town and show them 1) just how flat Amarillo really is and 2) all our churches, the one real growth industry in this town. 

But back to these house rules.  I decided to to take some time and actually read the flyer, primarily out of curiosity. (more…)