Saturday, August 21, 2010

D-Day

When Scottish troops landed on "Sword" beach in Normandy on June 6th, 1944 they were encouraged on by Bill Millin who played bagpipes on the beach while under fire. He was playing "...morale-pumping tunes for his fellow commandos". He carried no weapons except his "ceremonial dagger". He was the only bagpiper on Normandy beaches that day and his actions were depicted in the D-Day movie "The Longest Day". When his unit captured a number of German snipers, they were asked why they didn't target the bagpiper. Their response was "...they didn't bother..." because he appeared to "..be on a suicide mission and was clearly mad". We was referred to thereafter as the "mad piper". Millin died recently at the age of 88.
(Source: "Bill Millin; braved enemy fire to play bagpipes on D-Day" by T. Ress Shapiro of The Washington Post. In The Record on 8/21/10).

Sunday, August 15, 2010

"Cooping"

I came across this term while reading a Time magazine article and did some research on it. The term referres to the practice of forcing "unwilling participants" into voting "often several times...for a particular candidate in an election". The "participant" was often dressed and re-dressed before taken to a polling place and was usually heavily under the influence of alcohol when "voting". The term, I believe, comes from the idea that the "participant" was kept in one place while election day was occuring and then released after the polls closed. He was in fact "cooped up" in "vile dens, drugged, drunken and carried to voting places...". Many people believe that this is how Edgar Allen Poe died. He was found dressed in someone else's clothes lying on the street the day after an election day in 1849. In the movie "Gangs of New York" there is a scene depicting this practice in New York City around 1860. (Complaints about corruption of the electoral process are nothing new).
(Source: Wikipedia.org/wiki/cooping. 7/19/10. Also www.wisegeek.com/what-was-cooping.htm).

Saturday, August 7, 2010

4th Amendment

The police suspected an individual of trafficking in drugs so they attached a GPS tracking device to his car and along with his cell-phone records monitoried him for a couple of days. The police did not get a search warrant for the use of the GPS. Evidence the police acquired tended to show that the individual was indeed in the drug distribution business. He was found guilty but a federal appeals court in Washington DC voted 3 to 0 to reverse that finding claiming that the defendant' 4th Amendment rights were violated. The GPS was in fact a search and the appeals court said the defendant had an expectation of privacy. One of the Appeals Court judges quoted in The Record on 8/7/10 was Douglas Ginsburg (Wasn't he once nominated for the Supreme Court?).