The terrible way that the nuns in the Catholic church treated unwed mothers and their children in Ireland has been documented over and over again, but new horrors keep emerging. The latest is the report in the Washington Post about the discovery of the remains of nearly 800 children found in a massive septic tank at the back of a home run by nuns. These children are supposed to have died between 1925 and 1961.
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The recent botched attempts at executing prisoners on death row has resulted in some confusion as to what to do next. The problem stems from the fact that the cocktail of drugs that had traditionally been used are no longer freely available, partly because the countries where they are produced have refused to allow them to be shipped to the US for use in executing people and partly because the drug companies that produce them are fearful of the bad publicity that would result if the public discovered that they are being used not to treat people but to kill them.
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I was involved recently in organizing a program at our university to highlight the problem of human trafficking. That label immediately conjures up the notion of women and children being forced into the sex trade and this is undoubtedly a major problem. But there is also human trafficking of people and children for labor, who end up working in appalling conditions in foreign countries and cannot escape.
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Jesse Eisenger at ProPublica had a long article on why only one minor investment banker has been prosecuted so far for their role in the financial meltdown that devastated so many people.
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A dishwasher is the most mysterious domestic appliance. You shut the door, turn it on, hear the sounds of sloshing water, and the dishes appear clean. I had assumed that it was something like a clothes washing machine in that it filled the container with water and then churned it around. But I noticed that our new dishwasher seemed to go into the sloshing sound mode pretty quickly, long before there would be time to fill the volume. So I was glad to come across this video where someone had placed a camera inside the dishwasher to reveal its secrets.
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The National Spelling Bee contest has been going on since 1925. I went and looked at how the difficulty of the winning words has changed over the years. These are the last words that the winner has to get correct in order to clinch the championship, after all the other contestants have struck out.
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The Frankenstein story is a morality tale that gets played over and over again in political life. A group (a government or political party or other organization) covertly supports and encourages extremists in order to achieve their own goals, thinking that they can control their surrogates and rein them in after they have served their purpose, only to find that the group has grown beyond its control and is determined to continue on its own path and in order to do us, turns against its own creator.
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This film is a mess. There is no other word to describe it.
How it got nominated for five Academy Awards including best film, actor, supporting actor, director, and screenplay beats me, unless it was because of the star power of highly acclaimed director Martin Scorcese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio. But it did not win a single one, suggesting that there is at least some justice in the world of judging films.
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As has been the custom for many years, Asian-Americans (and especially those whose ethnicity traces to the southern states of India) have dominated this contest. All others get steadily weeded out as the final rounds approach and this year was no exception with two Indian-Americans being declared joint winners.
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