Friday, May 25, 2007
Yesterday we got the horrific news about Cal Johnson, a Jamulian accused of some rather extreme abuse of his wife. Today he was arraigned; he plead "not guilty" to all charges:
Cal Johnson, 47, appeared shaken as the prosecutor went through the graphic details of the alleged assault. The 14 charges against him range from rape to assault with a deadly weapon to false imprisonment of his wife. Johnson entered his not-guilty plea through his attorney via a closed circuit television feed in the courtroom.
Another news report had more details:
Deputy District Attorney Claudia Grasso said the chain of events that led to the arrest began a week ago."Throughout the weekend, the defendant was insistent she was having an affair with a family friend," the prosecutor told the judge.At one point, Johnson held the woman's head under water running from a bathtub faucet and threatened her, Grasso said.Later, the defendant confronted his perceived romantic rival, punched him and threatened him, the prosecutor said.Monday, Johnson allegedly threw a computer keyboard and mouse at his wife, and late that night, woke her up and told her they were going to meet the alleged "other man" at a church, Grasso said.Instead, Johnson and his wife ended up in a secluded area and he threatened to kill her, the prosecutor said."The defendant proceeded to stun her over 100 times, called her a bitch and said she was about to die," the prosecutor told the judge.Johnson then sexually assaulted his wife, but she was able to run off and hide until morning, Grasso said.The victim suffered bruises and lacerations all over her body, according to the prosecutor.
It's frightening to think that people capable of such behavior (assuming all the charges are true) walk around amongst the rest of us, and we can't tell. They need to have a big neon sign on their forehead!
If any of my readers know either Cal Johnson or his wife, I'd sure appreciate some insight and background -- I know nothing more than what I read in the sketchy news reports...
If you like this photo, you'll love the site it came from: Cute Overload.
Losing the 1,500 or so posts from my old blog is darned annoying. I really don't want to lose them permanently. So I did some research this evening to find out if there was any way to automatically put data into my new blog, despite the fact that Blogger has no "import" feature.
And it turns out that there is way, albeit a highly geekly one. I backed up my old blog every day into a set of XML files. These files can be easily interpreted by software -- and I know how to write programs. And Blogger, bless their pointy little heads, has an "API" -- a way for programs written by geeks like me to interact with a blog. This API allows new posts to be created, and it allows comments to be tacked on -- probably the two most important things I care about. It doesn't handle images, unfortunately. But at least I could recover all that writing!
So I set to work late this afternoon, to write this little program. A couple of hours ago I finished it -- and it works! I uploaded one post, and voila! It appeared, like magic. Then I uploaded 10, and they appeared. Wow! So then I got bold, and uploaded 50 -- and only some of them appeared. Oh, oh. Something screwy going on. Worse, every attempt after that to send more posts failed, though my program got no errors.
This was really weird. I then did what software engineers always do when weird shit happens: I started researching in all the places where someone might complain about this. And sure enough, in a news group dedicated to the Blogger API, I found other users complaining about exactly this problem -- and some explanations from Google. The explanation is that in their never-ending quest to fight spam blogs (an honorable goal that I fully support), they've implemented some stuff to detect automatic posting -- especially high rates of posting to a single blog. They've set a limit of 50 posts per day -- if you go over this, they go into a blocking mode which manifests itself with exactly the symptoms I'm experiencing.
This is a real problem for me, and I've written an email to Google to explain why. In practical terms, this means I can only import 40 or so blog posts a day -- and maybe less if their software counts comments too. This could take me months to import my old blog! I can see why they're doing this, but...their very mechanical approach means that a legitimate use (which importing certainly is!) gets incorrectly tagged as something evil (spamming).
If they don't offer me some sort of solution, I'm afraid I may have to move my blog again, to another provider with a better import or API capability. WordPress is the obvious alternative choice, and I just may end up heading over there.
I sure hope I get a good answer from the folks at Google...
The always-excellent libertarian CoyoteBlog first makes this observation:State unemployment rates for April were released last week by the BLS, and there are now 18 states that have set historical record-low jobless rates in the last year. Here are the 18 states with historical record-low jobless rates…
…California: 4.7% in November 2006
…Arizona: 3.9% in March 2007
…New Mexico: 3.5% in February 2007
…Texas: 4.2% in April 2007…
Then says:I wonder where our economy would be without those 15 million Mexican immigrants. Negative unemployment?
Heh!
Cal C. Johnson was arrested yesterday on suspicion of kidnapping, torture, assault with a deadly weapon, spousal abuse, sex assault and making death threats. He's being held on $5M bail, pending arraignment. Cal Johnson is a Jamulian:An East County man was in prison Thursday and facing a number of criminal charges for allegedly kidnapping his wife and torturing her with a stun gun because he believed she was having an affair.Detectives arrested Cal C. Johnson, 47, in Lemon Grove Wednesday, according to sheriff's officials.Authorities had been looking for the Jamul resident since the previous day, when a passer-by found his nude and terrified wife in a remote area off Proctor Valley Road, near Chula Vista.The woman reported that Johnson had abducted her from her home over the weekend and taken her to Mexico, officials said. He then purportedly waited for nightfall and brought her back into the United States, taking her to the back-country location where she later was found.There, Johnson allegedly began shocking her with the electric self-defense device in an attempt to force her to confess to his false accusations. The woman reported that her husband assaulted her with the stun gun more than 150 times, according to investigators.
Arraignment is scheduled for this afternoon. I don't know anything except what's in the news stories.If you know anything about the people involved, or the incident, please add your information in the comments.
The Moscow Times has an interesting article about President Putin's "Estonia Complex". It does seem like Putin has a very short fuse on all matters Estonian, and perhaps this is why:
Putin seems to have taken personally Estonia's decision to move the memorial to fallen Red Army soldiers. This may be because he sees it not only as an affront to his country but as an affront to the memory of his father. As Putin once told it, his father was betrayed by Estonians during the war.
Before he was first elected in 2000, Putin gave a series of interviews to three Russian journalists for a book called "First Person." In the first chapter, he talks about his father. During the war, he was in an NKVD sabotage battalion operating behind German lines and was sent as part of a group of 28 people to carry out an operation in Estonian territory. They succeeded in blowing up a supply train and were able to hide in the woods, but eventually they ran out of food and turned to the local population. Estonians brought them food but then gave them up to the Germans. Only four people in the group survived, including Putin's father, who hid in a bog, breathing through a reed, to escape detection by Nazi soldiers who were searching for them with dogs.
The article goes on to tell of some instances of Putin's Estonian Complex, and also talks about his warped perceptions of twentyth century Baltic history -- no doubt instilled by his education as a Soviet youth, and high consumption of beer (read the story!).
As many of my readers know, I'm not exactly a big sports fan -- I know next to nothing about most sports, and I don't follow them at all. But if I were a sports fan, I wouldn't be expecting to see open water swimming champions from Jamul -- maybe baseball, or soccer, or some other such sport that can be practiced here -- but open water swimming? Nevertheless, I read this morning that Courtney Weigand, a 17 year old girl from Jamul, took fifth place in a national competition:
Courtney Weigand Takes Fifth Place In National Championship USA 25K Swim
In a long grueling swim, seventeen-year-old Courtney Weigand takes on the 2007 USA 25K National Championships at Fort Myers, Florida with a splash and promises to return to an even better repeat performance next year.
Jamul, CA (PRWEB) May 25, 2007 -- Local teenager Courtney Weigand (17), of Jamul, CA, took fifth place at the USA Swimming National Open Water 25K competition May 21, 207, with a finish time of 6:57.33. Courtney swims for North Coast Aquatics (NCA), a local swim club located in La Jolla and Carlsbad and is on the North Coast Aquatics National Team. She is coached by NCA head coach, Jeff Pease.
"I was in third place at the 10.5 mile mark," says Courtney; "but my body and mind didn't cooperate to keep me there."
"It's very mental swim," adds her open water coach and kayaker for the race, John Lapp. "Courtney had never swum a competition farther than 10 miles, and this swim was over 15 miles; but she picked up her pace when she saw the finish line, and was able to take home the fifth place medal."
Courtney, who has been doing open water swims since she was six, was the youngest finisher to place in the 25K race, swimming around Estero Island at Fort Myers, Florida. On June 10, 2007 she heads for the Alcatraz swim, and in December she qualified in the Double Waikiki swim to compete in the 10K Grand Prix Open Water Swim, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a qualifier for the USA Olympic Trials 10K swim in October, which will also be held in Fort Myers, Florida.
"The top two women finishers were 24 and 25 years old, " explains Lapp. "Courtney is a strong swimmer and has a lot of years ahead of her as an elite open water swimmer. She did really well. This was her first 25K swim, and now she knows what to expect. We'll be back next year. She'll do even better!"
Congratulations, Courtney!
Next thing you know, we'll have a Jamulian astronaut...
