Recently, as we were walking from our car into our local Walmart, Karen noticed a small car near the front of the parking lot and mentioned that she had had never noticed a Nissan Versa before, that it was smaller than our Honda CRV.  I really hadn’t either until just a couple of weeks earlier when I posted an image of one in a photo post, Stop Action Note, on Haw Creek.  We had noticed it, I guess, because we had talked a bit about getting a newer car that we would still be able to tow behind our small motorhome.

When we came back out, I saw a skinny young man run up to the car and get in it, which certainly didn’t seem right.

The parking spot was a handicap spot, but there wasn’t a disabled license plate on the car.  A short while later, we happened to be next to the same Nissan Versa in traffic and I saw that there was an ADA¹ hang tag on the mirror. I sincerely doubt that it belonged to the driver.

After some health issues, I had recently decided that I was going to be less judgmental about healthy appearing people using handicapped parking.   I have never been to the point where I have needed – or wanted – to be able to use the handicap parking spots, but I can now certainly understand the need for some people, even if there is nothing visibly wrong. “Just because somebody isn’t using a wheelchair, walker or cane, doesn’t mean that they don’t need the handicap spot.”²

The young driver had spryly ran up to the car before he drove off.

In our state, the Disabled Person (DP) placards/certificates and license plates give disabled people special parking privileges in designated areas when they are the driver or a passenger of the vehicle.

“Misuse and abuse of disability permits is an issue inside and outside of the handicap community. Legally and ethically, people who have not been issued a handicap parking permit must not park in the handicap spots. That includes non-disabled friends and family. No ifs, ands, or buts. The permit owner needs to be present whenever the permit is being used. Ignoring this rule could result in fines for you and the person who borrowed the permit. Your permit can even get revoked.”²

In Arkansas, “misuse or abuse of these privileges is a Class A misdemeanor; offenders can have their vehicles impounded or fined up to $100-$1000 and/or have their license suspended for 6 months.”³

That very healthy looking young man who ran up to and got in the Nissan Versa in that handicap parking spot was likely not the person who the placard belonged to.  If it was his, he must been having a really good day.

I’ve written about this before in Parking Privileges & Parking Privileges  – YES!.  What can ya do?

1. Americans with Disabilities Act
2. 4 Tips You Need to Know About Handicap Parking Etiquette
3. Information for Disabled Drivers in Arkansas – DMV.com, a privately-owned website and is not affiliated with government agencies.

Faces out of time #1

Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration photographer, in California, February 1936

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. (wikipedia)

Dorothea Lange, Resettlement Administration photographer, in California. California, 1936. Feb. Photograph retrieved from the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017759800/. (Accessed November 04, 2017.)

Call Number: LC-USF34- 002392-E [P&P]

Notes:

• File print filed under “Lange, Dorothea” in the Biographical File in the Prints and Photographs Division Reading Room at the Library of Congress. Print formerly filed in the FSA-OWI classified file under C34.
• Title and other information from caption card.
• U.S. Farm Security
  Administration/Office of War Information Black & White Photographs
• Library of Congress Prints and
  Photographs Division

Note – This image has been digitally adjusted for one or more of the following:
– fade correction,
– color, contrast, and/or saturation enhancement
– selected spot and/or scratch removal
– cropped for composition and/or to accentuate subject matter
– straighten image

Revised and updated; Originally published June 22, 2012

We’ve been talking about it for quite some. After the area’s damaging wind storm last week, we decided to get a quote and have some of the trees closest to the house removed.  These are all trees that are outside my ability to take down, even if I were in shape enough to do the work.  The estimate was very reasonable and the tree service company has good recommendations.

The branches of the biggest tree, the one with the orange-red leaves in the above picture, spread far out over the roof of our porch.  Because of the perpetual shade on that part of the roof, we’ve had problems with moss and lichen growth on the roof.

It’s a wonderful old shade tree that was quite young and slender when we moved here in 1981. At that time it was one of just a few hardwoods in a yard that was full of tall skinny pines.  Unfortunately, it is now a hazard to the house that needs to be addressed.

There are four other “smaller” trees that will be removed.  Three are tall pines, two of which have a slight lean toward the house, looming over the camper when it is parked next to the house.

The last tree is an ash that has been leaning toward the driveway and power lines for it’s entire life.  It’s already lost all of its leaves.  (I photo-edited the image to make the tree stand out from its background.) It was more of a threat to the house’s power and phone (DSL) lines that to the house. The tree service owner pointed out at the back side of the tree that it looked like its weight was causing it to lean even more.  The tree service is going to cut this one up in 14” lengths for us as ash is a nice, slow burning firewood.

We’re not sure when the tree service is going to be able to get to us.  They have a lot of business right now with trees down from last week’s storm.  We’re hoping that they’ll be able to fit us in between some of the larger jobs.

Dust, Drought, and Depression #2

This young lady, Lois Adolf, is #004 in the series Eyes of the Great Depression

In 1939, Lois Adolf’s family was “on relief.”  Her father had borrowed money from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) for rural rehabilitation, “$2,138. 80 acres of Indian land, on three year lease.”   In August, a photographer from FSA doing documentary work visited.  That photographer was Dorothea Lange.

“One of Chris Adolph’s younger children.  Farm Security Administration Rehabilitation clients.  Came to the Yakima Valley in 1937 from Bethune, Kit Carson County, Colorado.  He owned his own farm there and he had lived there all his life.  Drought forced him out with his wife and 8 children.  His wife had been a school teacher …. ‘I’ve broke thousands of acres of sod.  The dust got so bad that we had to sleep with wet cloths over our faces.’” ¹

Besides the photo that became one of the iconic images of the Great Depression, Lois appears in several other photos Lange took on her brief visit with the Adolfs.

Bill Ganzel located  Lois in 1979 and interviewed her for “Dust Bowl Descent,” a grant project administered by the Nebraska State Historical Society.

“Lois didn’t remember the photograph being taken, let alone why she might have felt sad. She remembered being close to her mother. But she also remembered how terrible the dust storms in Colorado were. She remembered how hard it was to make a living. That was why they left the plains for Washington. She loved Washington and never wanted to move back.”²

Lois’s father, Chris Adolf, told Ms. Lange, “My father made me work. That was his mistake, he made me work too hard. I learned about farming but nothing out of the books.” ³

[Question:] “Tell me about what was it like in Colorado?”
[Lois Adolf Houle:] “It was terrible. [Laughs.] We had dust storms and droughts. We survived back there as long as we possibly could. I can remember one dust storm back there. We were coming from my grandparents’ in Straton. And as we got closer to home, you could see this big gray matter up in the air. And the minute we got home, we had a storm cellar built with things to eat and everything else in it. We were all taken to the storm cellar right away, and they went in and closed the house all up good. And we stayed down there until the storm was over. It just came to the point where we couldn’t live any more back there. And we had relatives out here already.”
[Question:] “Did they write back or anything?”
“Oh, yes! Oh, yeah! Everything was ‘beautiful’ out here. [Laughs.] This was the land of milk and honey out here.”⁴

__________

¹  Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon, W. W. Norton & Company, Oct 11, 201,  Plate 16.
² Bill Ganzel
³ Library of Congress
⁴ Oral history excerpt, Lois Adolf Houle, Living History Farm, York, Nebraska

__________

Child of the Depression products from Exit78 at zazzle.com

Dust, Drought, and Depression 002. Originally published April 9, 2013
Click on images for background information at Flickr and links to original images at Library of Congress.

It seems all too common these days, but this happened almost 16 years ago.

Robert McNiel (not his real name) was arrested at work in Arkansas.  He pled guilty in Wyoming and was sentenced to three years and two months on Federal charges.

I didn’t know McNiel well as he worked in another part of the facility.  However, I had worked with his wife – who was a lot younger than him – on a couple of projects.  Both had worked there for several years.  McNiel, a Naval Academy graduate, had started at the facility soon after resigning his naval commission.

McNiel had tickets to events of the XIX Olympic Winter Games, held in Utah from February 8th through February 24th, 2002.  His planned route would take him through Wyoming on Interstate 80.

McNiel’s arrest resulted from a Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) undercover operation. A DCI agent posed as a 39-year-old Cheyenne, Wyoming woman in an internet chat room where people interested in sex with preteens gathered to trade photos and solicit contact with children. At some point, McNiel contacted the agent and, within a few minutes, was discussing the possibility of a sexual encounter with the agent’s fictitious 9-year-old daughter. As the conversation continued, McNiel started sending images depicting children engaged in explicit sexual activities, eventually sending 10 pornographic images as well as an image of himself to help the woman he was corresponding with – the undercover DCI agent –  decide if she wanted her daughter to have sex with him.

Robert McNiel is now a registered sex offender living in an isolated mobile home
on the windswept plains of eastern Wyoming.

The agent and McNiel agreed to meet in Cheyenne in February, 2002, when he was planning to travel to Utah.  FBI and DCI agents arrested him at work in Arkansas on January 22nd.

McNiel pled guilty to interstate transportation of child pornography in May 2002 and was sentenced in August.  During the sentencing, the judge stated that he never would have imagined he would have been called on to sentence a Naval Academy graduate for a child pornography offense.

The Victims.

It would be easy that there were no victims in this case, that McNiel was caught through an undercover internet sting. However, that would be wrong.

Even if McNiel didn’t take the pictures, the kids in the images are victims of a perverse underground system that exploits some of society’s weakest.  McNiel had to have gotten those images from somewhere. More than 80% of sexual abuse offenses against children are committed by people they know.

“In a sense, every viewing of child pornography is a repetition of the victim’s abuse.” –  from the Supreme Court majority opinion in Paroline v. United States et. al.

There are also other victims, victims in all crimes that all-too-often are never considered, never mentioned – the families of the perpetrator.

I have known two women who were at one time married to men who became sex offenders. One was McNiel’s wife.  The other was an internet blogging friend. These women are, for the most part, unacknowledged victims. They have had to accept that a person they had once completely trusted has done, or planned to do, morally reprehensible and criminal acts.  They have had to deal with the horror that the person they thought they knew could even think of going down that path.

Then, of course, there are the children.  The wife – or, probably, ex-wife – has to deal with what to tell the kids about where daddy is gone and why.  The kids, of course, have lost their father, sometime temporarily, sometimes, where the criminal penalties are severe, permanently.  While my parents divorced when I was quite young, I can only imagine the trauma of having one’s father go to prison.

… Monsters are real.

As a convicted and registered sex offender, former engineer
Robert McNeil has limited employment opportunities.

References:

• What Happens When You’re the One Being Photographed for Child Porn: A Victim Shares Her Story
• I watch child pornography to prosecute sex crimes.

Dust, Drought, and Depression #1.

In the 1930s, the dust bowl, drought, and economic conditions drove many independent farmers,  tenant farmers, and sharecroppers from the land.

Others left because of advances in agriculture they couldn’t afford.

Dorothea Lange, with her photo of James Abner Turpen, a Texan farmer on relief, recorded the impact of farm mechanization.

Goodliet, Hardeman County, Texas. James Abner Turpen, a Texan farmer on relief – ‘Tractored out’ in late 1937. Now living in town, and on the verge of relief. Wife and two children. “Well, I know I’ve got to make a move but I don’t know where to. I can stay off relief until the first of the year. After that I don’t know. I’ve eat up two cows and a pair of horses this past year. Neither drink nor gamble, so I must have eat’n ’em up. I’ve got left two horses and two cows and some farm tools. Owe a grocery bill. If had gradutated land tax on big farms, that would put the little man back again. One man had six renters last year. Kept one. Of the five, one went to Oklahoma, one got a farm south of town and three got no place. They’re on WPA (Works Progress Administration). Another man put fifteen families off this year. Another had twenty-eight renters and now has two. In the Progressive Farmer it said that relief had spoiled the renters so they had to get tractors. But them men that’s doing the talking for the community is the big landowners. They got money to go to Washington. That’s what keeps us from writing. A letter I would write would sound silly up there.” 

Dust, Drought, and Depression 001. Originally published February 23, 2013
Image. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/fsa2000001797/PP/ (Accessed August 23, 2016.)

Andy Baily, creator and developer of CommentLuv, a premier comment and spam busting WordPress plugin, closed the doors at some point in the last year or two.  Andy had been very public about his struggles with Multiple Sclerosis¹ (MS) since the battle began in 2012 and eventually decided that he could no longer provide support for the plugin.

Apparently the disease progressed to the point that Andy could no longer provide the service and quality in the product that his thousands of customers had come to expect. While the plugin seems to work fine for now, eventually as WordPress continues to be upgraded, compatibility and/or security issues may develop.

For bloggers, Christine Cobb at My Bonus Blog has a couple of suggestion for replacement plugins for the features that are included in CommentLuv Pro.

Andy is still active online with a Facebook MS diary and an account on Twitch, which I don’t have a clue about.

1. Multiple sclerosis is the most common autoimmune disorder affecting the central nervous system. – Wikipedia

While looking for an image to go with this post on Pixabay, I came across an image of a blue colored bird on a branch, puking.  While that may be very appropriate for how some feel about Twitter, I decided to find something more visually appealing.

I’ve tried Twitter – twice, at least.

Now, I’m sure that Twitter is useful and worthwhile to some. I’ve not been able to see that for me.  I’ve tried both a personal account and a “business” account. For the amount of time I spent with each, there was little reward.  Sure, there were times where I was able to follow breaking trends and news, but I can get all of that in other places – if I want to.

I actually created my personal account 5 years ago. I’ve made 730 tweets and I have 7 followers.  (There were a few more followers at one time.) 730 tweets in 5 years averages out to 146 tweets a year or about .4 tweets a day.  However, the tweets all came in a very few periods where I was trying to figure Twitter out and use it.

Bully-Pulpit

Like many others I am bothered by the tweeting of the POTUS.  He comes across as a loudmouthed bully, even on Twitter where you can’t really hear his voice.  As president, he has the Twitter bully-pulpit which should not be, despite current evidence to the contrary, a place for a bully to preach, but rather a wonderful platform from which he could –and should –  advocate his positions and agenda.  Trump’s personal account has 41.1 million followers.  His POTUS account has 20.8 million.  Even with duplications between the two and “followers” from the opposition, that’s a hell of a bully-pulpit that is badly utilized.

As I was writing the blog post yesterday afternoon, I kept hearing a beeping sound, something like a smoke alarm when the battery is just about dead. That didn’t make sense, because our smoke alarms are brand new – with 10 year sealed batteries –  just installed last week. Beep…..

For a while I ignored it as I wanted to finish the post before heading in to work. Beep…..

After I got dressed for work Beep…..I started looking for where the sound was coming from. Karen was in town at the gym, followed by shopping, so she couldn’t help.

I stood under the hallway alarm. Beep…..  That wasn’t it.

So, I went and stood under the kitchen alarm.  Beep….. Nope, not there, either.  Sounded like it was coming from the living room. I stood in there for a while and Beep….. couldn’t figure out where it was coming from.

I couldn’t wait around any longer as I needed to head in to work. Beep…..

As I left the house, I grabbed the bag of trash waiting by the front door and took it outside to the trash bin. Beep…..

After I got home from work, I asked Karen if she had thrown out an old smoke alarm.  She had, but it wasn’t beeping.

I wonder if it beeped when the trash was picked up this morning. Beep…..