stoutfellow

A mysterious crime wave that has troubled Germany and Austria for years has been solved.

Before clicking on the link, put down your drink and swallow whatever's in your mouth.

Now there's an odd coincidence. I mentioned a while back that I'd added my first Dylan album to my collection. One of the songs on the album is "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll", which told the story of Ms. Carroll's death at the hands of a tobacco farmer named William Zantziger. (She was a black barmaid who, when Zantziger demanded a drink, asked him to wait a minute. He caned her for this offense; later that evening, she collapsed and died of a stroke. Because it was unclear how much the caning had contributed to her death, he was only convicted of manslaughter. Dylan's song bitterly denounced him and the light sentence - 6 months, $625.)

Zantziger died last week.

I'm a bit behindhand with this, I guess, but I just learned that Cardinal Avery Dulles has died.

I've only read a couple of his many books - Models of the Church and Models of Revelation - but he impressed me. He was one of the few thinkers I've run across who recognize that the correct response to "The map is not the territory" is to get lots and lots of different maps.

Would that there were more. As of Dec. 12, there's one less.

Bitch Ph.D. has some useful comments on the trampling death of a Wal-Mart employee on Black Friday. Worth a look.

This will sound very familiar to Buffy fans.

From time to time I teach a general education course in statistics. Many of the people who take it are nursing students, and there is a considerable section on the ethical aspects of medical experimentation. I am forced to wonder whether this section will be revised, given that the FDA has now decided to withdraw from the Declaration of Helsinki.

Words cannot express my disgust.

Terry Pratchett, one of the finest authors of this generation, has been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's.

There are no words.

This has got to be a joke. Right? Right?

Sigh.

This is a horrifying story. The Miami New Times headlines it as "Sex offenders are ordered to sleep near a center for abused kids"; Michael Froomkin points out that "the government is requiring people — maybe people who are very not nice, but still people — to be homeless and to sleep under a bridge".

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, has died.

Or perhaps it would be fitter, as they taught us in Latin class, to say vixit - "he has lived".