A Memory Salad

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The child has few memories, so those he has are detailed.

We were in my hometown for some reason one summer Sunday afternoon a couple years ago and I said to my girlfriend that I wanted to show her where I grew up. (As if I have.) We drove down roads I used to bike on, walk on. I grew up in the suburbs, in upstate New York, in the 1970s and ’80s, a neighborhood without sidewalks, with kids biking across their neighbors’ lawns (well, I did) without fear of criticism. I remembered knowing which houses had dogs that were poorly restrained (avoid those lawns or find a new speed in my pumping little legs) and which houses were simply scary for reasons no one could explain but everyone knew which houses simply seemed scary.

(Years later, in high school, I was fundraising or campaigning for something and I dared, out of my OCD-ish sense-need to knock on every door, I knocked on the door of one of the houses that I always thought was scary. The owner was friendly and nice as could be. I felt like I had discovered something.)
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Help End Beheadings

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Besides sign petitions and click “like” next to articles that describe conditions that must be changed in the world, there is not much that one can do or give in a material sense to aide the pursuit of transparency and justice. Every so often, the opportunity arises, however.

For any readers of this web site who live in the United Kingdom, you can help affect change in your nation’s policies, today. The rest of us can help, as well. The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice has an outstanding £5.9m bid on a contract to provide prison expertise, “training needs analysis,” to Saudi Arabia. According to news reports, the previous Minister of Justice, Chris Grayling, set up a wing of the department that would sell its knowledge about prisons and prisoner management to those who want to pay for the know-how. It was called Just Solutions, or JSi. The current justice minister, Michael Gove, shuttered the program and stated that the department needs to maintain its focus on domestic issues. (I am combining news sources here: The Guardian, Financial Times, International Business Times.)

This is a contract to provide expertise to another nation’s internal, domestic criminal justice system, one that uses capital punishment, unlike the United Kingdom, which does not have capital punishment. Not only does Saudi Arabia use capital punishment, it uses beheading as its method, performs the punishment in public, and kills for crimes that most Western nations do not consider crimes: sorcery, apostasy (not believing in the correct deity), adultery. It also employs corporal punishment, something very few nations, including the United States, do not use. It flogs its citizens for reasons that include writing things its regime does not approve of.

The Ministry of Justice said all the right things, about how it would have a positive, even liberalizing, effect on the Saudi justice system, but it made no claims as to how this might take place. (Freedom of information requests have been denied to this date, and not all the details of the proposed contract are available.)

When the advice-selling section was closed this year, the Ministry of Justice at first claimed that the contract process with Saudi Arabia was so far along that it would be financially damaging for the United Kingdom (£5.9m? really?) to pull out now but then deleted any such claims from the official record. It continued to insist that the contract must go forward, however.

Thus, the official reason for the contract going forward is that it exists.
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The Year of the Cat

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(What follows is a re-run of one of the eight most popular cat-related columns published in 2015 in The Gad About Town.)

The stories about Angel’s supreme being-ness are too many to recount and they bore her anyway. Our entire Planet Earth, all four rooms of it—and, really, that’s three rooms too many for anyone, but space is needed for all seven billion humans upon it—are here because she willed it through complete indifference.

Without trying, but after a really deep stare at nothingness, there was tuna, and even better, salmon treats, but there was no one to bring these savories to her. She developed opposable thumbs but was bored with the effect and thus willed opposable thumbs onto someone who could use them to bring her platters of tuna, and even better, salmon treats.
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