A Moment of Understanding

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

My current crush and I will visiting the same local pond (not the one in the picture above) I wrote about a year ago in “Forever Snug.” I re-ran it a couple weeks ago, edited to reflect 2016. It is here again because the sun is out and so are we:

It was one of those days in which the lifeguards outnumbered the swimmers. We were at a local park that features a small lake and beach: on holiday weekends families travel to more prominent parks that feature rides as an added distraction. So the crowds were elsewhere even on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and we were one couple out of maybe ten groups. Two families, each with three water-loving toddlers, splashed about, and none of the children were yet old enough to test their limits against the flimsy, algae-covered nylon rope demarcating the “deep end” of the pond on three sides. The lifeguards chatted with the families, flirted with each other, bought each other ice cream, and burned off the ice cream calories breaking each others’ speed records chasing after the tuneful ice cream truck.
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Today in History: June 12

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Anne Frank was born 87 years ago today.

A few years ago the Anne Frank House released a short film clip, 20 seconds long, of a home movie: a bride and groom walk out of Merwedeplein 39 in Amsterdam on July 22, 1941, and a 12 year-old girl looks on from the front of Merwedeplein 37. She is seen in a second shot leaning out of an upstairs window. Smiling. Being 12. It is the only film footage that has ever been found of Anne Frank, the 12-year-old child. The film (below the jump):
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An Assault Gets Worse

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Stanford University sexual assault story became uglier yesterday when the Santa Clara County Superior Court released 471 pages of documents that appear to prove that almost every defense claim made by the defendant, Brock Turner, under oath, was untrue.

The story, horrible as it is on the face of it, attracted international attention this week when, after a jury convicted Turner of three counts of sexual assault, the judge in the trial gave the sexual assaulter a lighter sentence than the one requested by prosecutors. The judge, Aaron Persky, told the court that he “took [Turner] at his word” when he decided to send Turner to county jail for six months instead of state prison for several years, as prosecutors had requested. He will have to register as a sex offender with every landlord and with whomever may employ him for the rest of his life.

It is understood that he will get out of jail after three months. Vice reports, “According to the website of California’s Santa Clara County Department of Corrections, he is to be released on Sept. 2, 12 weeks before his planned release, because ‘it was assessed that he was unlikely to misbehave behind bars.'” Whatever the opposite of Philip K. Dick’s “pre-crime” is, this sounds like it.
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