I’ve been fairly vocal in defending the police in several of
the recent highly publicized shootings. Yesterday’s revelation of a video showing
the Charleston, South Carolina policeman gunning down a helpless suspect is an
entirely different scenario. The cop is clearly shown shooting the victim as he
ran away and then surreptitiously planting his own stun gun next to the dying
man. The cop was rightfully arrested for murder. I’ve always maintained it’s
hard to criticize police who make snap decisions in a highly energized
situation but this was a blatant execution and they should throw the heaviest
book they have at him.
The case also points out the value and importance of video
in these situations. This was shot by a bystander but equipping every cop with
a camera is certainly the way to go. My own employees fought tooth and nail
against having video cameras installed in the buses, feeling we would be spying
on them. We’ve been able to demonstrate that 95% of the time the video is used
to exonerate them from baseless accusations from our customers. Several now
refuse to drive buses that don’t have operating video cameras. People who do
the right thing have nothing to fear from cameras.
My wife rescheduled her yoga obsession right in the middle
of our traditional date night which will now migrate to Wednesday night. This
freed me up to go see a horror movie which she would never allow a joint
viewing of. My daughter recommended It Follows which was strange as the horror
genre is not her usual forte. She was right though, this movie rocks. A very
simple premise in which some sort of slow walking creature stalks a series of
victims and killing whoever actually lets it touch them is used. It can assume
any body it chooses and then just walks inexorably towards the victim. The
curse holder is the only one who can see the stalker. The curse can be passed
to someone else through the tried and true horror movie procedure of teenagers
having sex.
The movie is set in the crumbling areas of Detroit (I know
that doesn’t narrow it down at all) and delivers almost constant tension. While
there are a couple of cheap scares, the movie works because of the pervasive
sense of doom the victim and her friends experience. There’s only one scene of
gore and the rest is just the creature inhabiting creepy, dead eyed bodies walking
relentlessly forward. There’s a couple scenes where they know they’re being
stalked and don’t bother to look around which was frustrating as the creature
walked up on the oblivious, but again, that’s to be expected. A very scary
movie that will have you cringing every time a senior citizen with a vacant stare
is walking by you.
I returned to my usual literary fare of military science
fiction after a brief foray into Ms. Pessl’s magnificent novels. I also returned
to Christopher Nuttall and his Empire series with The Thin Blue Line.
Nuttall catches up with the heroine from his earlier novel about the fall of
Earth, Belinda Lawson. As the galaxy spanning Terran Empire falls apart with
the destruction of Earth, Lawson, an enhanced marine pathfinder is sent to one
of the oldest colony worlds to help secure a conference.
She links up with an Imperial Marshall and Nuttall puts them
through his usual series of entertaining paces. He’s a talented story teller
and has a flair for the military point of view. I’m back to my speed reading
manner and this book went by entirely too quickly. Again, tribute to Nuttall’s
developing talent as an author. I’m already reading the next in his series.
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