New Scary-Crayon article: A McDonald's Cup Review. Not a fancy plastic promo cup either -- just your regular run-of-the-mill wax paper cup you get with any ol' McDonald's beverage purchase. Enjoy!

New blog link added: Mac Swift's Vessel of Honour. And both Mac and Dawn offer up posts about Jewishness -- Dawn, in "Who's a Jew?", discusses what it means to be a Jew (with reference to the latter part of my recent post "Feelin' Fine"), and Mac in "Love that Jew!" So if you're interested, give those a read. I still think that Joey -- who only began playing up his supposed "Jewishness" in the last year or so, from what I've seen anyway -- is full of crap, but in all honesty I thought that anyway. This is a guy who took a train to Canada back in 1999 to pick up a prostitute (since he wants to be a politician and therefore didn't want to break any American laws -- how Clintonesque) so that he could say he "fucked in two millennia" and this past Christmas loudly sang, "Ann Coulter is a racist bitch!" upon sighting the woman in the flesh on Christmas Day, for crying out loud. Why is it that I'm acquainted with so many awful people? I dunno.

Also, Dawn writes in "Police Banality":

"Maybe his whole blog is just brilliant satire. Maybe, contrary to his recent "coming-out" post, he's not even black. How else to explain this brilliant aside, as he writes about how his bonkers sister called the cops on him: "Most of my encounters with police have been somewhat relaxing, actually..."

Well, I dunno how "black" I am -- given the inherent confusion built into the term (again, see here and here for a more involved discussion of my views on the subject) -- but sadly everything I write in the blog regarding my life is the truth as best I can present it.

But hey, there's my excuse to post another pic -- very few people besides the very odd webmaster of Scary-Crayon would own a pair of slightly crooked holographic crucifix sunglasses. (No offense to any Jews or Christians reading, by the way.) And here's another pic -- the image quality's not quite as good, and I don't like the goofy smile (plus the dimples show and I hate them), but there you go. Not that I think Dawn was sincerely doubtful, but in case there were any other folks at home wondering, yep, that's me, and yes, my life is really as crappy as I say it is in here. (Hell, maybe it's worse -- lots of details fall by the wayside, you know.) And I was also being sincere when I wrote that most of my encounters with the police have been "somewhat relaxing" -- I write "somewhat" because no interrogation under suspicion of wrongdoing is ever entirely relaxing, of course. But the police have always been pleasant with me.

First off, let me say that I have no doubt that racist cops exist -- despite the naivete I'm sometimes accused of exhibiting, I've seen and heard quite enough to know that's true -- yet I do think that they are a very small minority. We hear a lot about certain ethnic minorities being targeted by police, and while I'm quite familiar with that phenomenon, I don't think that this is necessarily indicative of racism on the part of the police.

Perhaps you've heard the joke before about people "fitting the description" of some suspect whom the police happen to be looking for. Of course, that actually happens. On several occasions I was stopped outside of the Morse dorm and asked to present my student ID to prove that I belonged there, and once I was detained at length while the police phoned in to the student who had been burglarized and waited for him come outside to verify that I wasn't the guy they were looking for. (I happened to know the student -- we even share the same birthday -- so that turned out well.) It's also noteworthy that on that occasion the suspect was apparently "Hispanic" -- which just goes to show you that all it really takes is a deep tan for someone to "fit the description." But the cops aren't really to blame here -- they have to follow up on these "leads," and they take heat for it when they don't. This isn't a proper police example, but when Yale administrators neglected to reveal the "race" of two muggers who were prowling the campus at the time, the Yale Free Press attacked them in print, asserting that they were putting the students at risk for the sake of "political correctness." Personally, I see why they didn't inform the campus, and I wouldn't have either in their position -- everyone on campus would've been whipping out cell phones and dialing the police every time they saw two "black" people who looked even the tinest bit suspicious (and for many, that criterion would've been fulfilled by the color of their skin alone).

I remember discussing the issue of "racial" profiling with an acquaintance who also happened to write for the YFP (she may have been Editor-in-Chief at the time) and is now a student at the Yale Law School. During the course of this conversation, she noted that even though she knows me now, if she didn't know me she would probably cross the street if she saw me approaching, simply because of the color of my skin. I was deeply hurt by that -- hell, I'm still deeply hurt by it -- because I would hope that knowing me would have done something to convince her that she couldn't make snap judgments about people simply by looking at their skin, but she answered me thusly, "I know it sucks, and I'm sorry, but if it came down to hurting your feelings or my safety, I'd have to protect myself." I responded that she would be safest if she crossed the street every time she saw anyone approaching. And then she started talking about statistics and probabilities and I was so wounded and disgusted that I couldn't bring forth the words to respond to her. I wanted to say, "Your statistics and probabilities do not include me, and no amount of calculations will tell you how likely it is or isn't that I will do harm to you." But she knew that quite well -- she just ultimately didn't care. And it's telling that she's now enrolled in the Yale Law School, and it's noteworthy that there are many people -- including a number of educated people -- who think like she does. So the police are not to blame, for the police are merely the servants of the people.

And unfortunately, it's often the case that many of the people who are harrassed are actually involved in some criminal activity -- though they may not be engaged in the act at that precise moment -- and even when they're innocent they may exhibit some hostility towards the police or may try to run, prompting the cops to give chase and to eventually have to subdue the suspect. I remember an incident that raised a bit of a fuss during my senior year at Yale. In one of the nearby cities a suspect fleeing the police had run into the road and had been killed by an oncoming truck, and the cops were blamed by many for the incident -- not because it was believed that they had beaten the suspect and thrown him into the road -- but because they pursued him. It was argued that because the cops knew who he was, they could've always picked him up later at his home, which I think is bullocks, because a) the police can't (or shouldn't) leave a suspect at large when they spot him, b) there was no guarantee he'd return home, given that he knew the police were looking for him, and c) he didn't bloody have to run in the first place. So it's tragic when something like this happens, and even when people are involved in criminal activity, resist arrest, run, etc., they don't deserve to be mercilessly beaten and/or killed -- but that the police often feel the need to restrain them with force is understandable.

I've never run from the police. I've never been uncooperative with them -- in fact, I've even been extra-cooperative with them. As I've said, unlike many people who despise cops -- sometimes without any reason at all -- I have a great deal of respect for the police and the job they perform. So when my sister called the police on me, I offered to ride back to the station with the officers and fill out any paperwork they needed. During my freshman year, when two police officers came to interrogate me in my suite, I took them back to my room and offered them a seat (which they declined, but still). I even joked with them a bit and we shared a few good (if a bit nervous in my case) laughs. When I was detained outside of the dorms at Yale, I always presented my ID and waited quietly if they needed me to stick around for a moment while they called in the number to make sure it was valid, or, on that one occasion, while they called out my dormmate to verify that I wasn't the person who'd broken into his room. But more than that -- cops deal with criminals on a daily basis. Your average citizen walking the streets may look at superficial details and leap to conclusions, and even though these people rarely call the police, I'm quite familiar with ladies clutching their purses and crossing the streets when they see me half a block away. But the police, I think (for the most part), know how to recognize a threatening person when they see one -- if not at a distance, then certainly when they're standing face to face with a person. And I may not look it, but I am not a threat to anyone. So perhaps I've been lucky, but the police have always been pleasant with me, and my encounters with them have been far more relaxing than many of my experiences with my own family.

I was going to detail a few more of my sorrows, but that can wait for a later post. Ja for now.