Lawyer Live-Tweets Delaware Courthouse Shooting, Draws Ire by Daring to Speak Ill of Guns

Posted on February 11, 2013 by wellsdc

(WARNING: I’m going to say some not-nice things about guns in this post. If this bothers you, please click this link.)

A gunman entered a courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware at about 8:00 a.m. local time this morning and shot at least four people, killing two, before police killed him. One of the deceased, according to CNN, might be his “estranged wife,” but nothing is certain, since this occurred less than two hours ago as I am typing this. I wish that I could add surprise to my disgust, but someone deciding to resolve things with their estranged spouse via bullets is not an original solution. My main impetus for buying a handgun in 2008, in my lawyering days, was out of a sense of discomfort around certain opposing parties in a few lawsuits.

What is still relatively novel is the phenomenon of live-tweeted tragedies. Anyone who has lived through a traumatic event knows that thoughts come in random and unpredictable ways. Anyone who makes frequent use of Twitter knows that people can now share those thoughts in as long as it takes to type 140 characters or less into a handy smartphone. They also know that a quick thought sent into the Twitterverse may be subject to extensive deconstruction by people who have the luxury of not being in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event, and who will presume to know better than that person how they should have responded.

That brings me to my point. I have never met Jennifer S. Lubinski, nor have I ever been to Wilmington, Delaware. We are privy to her thoughts on the experience, though, thanks to social media.

A woman was shot right in front of my partner.He hid behind our boxes of exhibits on handcart.He says woman will not make it.

— Jennifer S. Lubinski (@jslubinski) February 11, 2013

I just witnessed my first shooting.DE chancery court lobby.Multiple down.Police here.Where’s the #NRA asI’m hiding in parking lot? — Jennifer S. Lubinski (@jslubinski) February 11, 2013

I guess mentioning the NRA was her big mistake. As we all know, guns don’t kill people. That guy could have just as easily walked into that courthouse with a knife, baseball bat, or extremely taut rubber band and killed the same number of people, because shutuplibertySecondAmendmentFREEDOM. One might be tempted to call that hyperbole, but minor challenges to the sanctity of guns tend to bring out the sputtering and syntactically challenged among us. I really see no point in blocking out the names on these gems, especially since I am mostly going off of the tweets that Ms. Lubinski herself retweeted, or that were made in direct reply to her. Continue reading →

Something Even More Annoying than Food Pictures on Social Media

Posted on January 23, 2013 by wellsdc

Let’s face it: people are posting too many pictures of their food to social media sites, especially Instagram. I know, I know. I don’t have to look at the pictures, and no one is suggested imposing a legal ban on food pictures (so keep your First Amendment rants to yourself, thank you much). It’s just an irritating trend. In fact, pictures of food topped BuzzFeed’s list of “11 Things No One Wants to See You Instagram.”

That said, I will freely admit that I post pictures of food on occasion. On. Occasion.

The world needs to know that these exist. I regret nothing.

I am not a prolific poster on Instagram. I may post to Facebook every five minutes, according to some who probably wish they had my type of ADHD, but I try to limit photos to things that are interesting, unique, or for which I have an awesome caption. I do post pictures of food from time to time. Just this week, I posted a picture of the beignet pancakes I had at Kerbey Lane, because how often does anyone get to eat beignet pancakes? How awesome is the very concept of beignet pancakes??? Beignet freaking pancakes!!!!!!!

(I also reserve the right to post pictures of ridiculously overblown chili cheeseburgers and absurdly large cinnamon rolls. The common thread is a unique mix of superlative qualities and hyperbole.)

Apparently, some people have taken amateur food photography to a whole new level, according to the New York Times:

There are the foreign tourists who, despite their big cameras, tend to be very discreet. There are those who use a flash and annoy everyone around them. There are those who come equipped with gorillapods — those small, flexible tripods to use on their tables.

There are even those who stand on their chairs to shoot their plates from above.

People, get over yourselves. I mean, I know this is all taking place in Manhattan, the home of pretension those of us in the provinces can scarcely imagine, but really, gorillapods?

The solutions some of these restaurants have found, however, might be even more annoying than the food photography: Continue reading →

My Moment of Internet Fame, Dapper Octopus Edition (UPDATED x2)

Posted on December 29, 2012 by wellsdc

I’m just going to take a moment to toot my own horn and salute a pseudonymous Photoshop wizard. This is the story of how a funny picture I found, along with the caption I gave it, spent a few moments near the top of Reddit. (The story consists almost entirely of pictures, so chill.)

The picture apparently first popped up on Pinterest, and then made its way to Reddit, where someone, possibly a user named Zelvetical, gave the little guy a top hat:

I found it on a site called Dark Roasted Blend, and proceeded to share it on Facebook, then on Tumblr, where I added this caption:

All of human history has led us to the moment that we developed the technology to digitally add a top hat to a photo of an adorable miniature octopus.

As of the morning of Saturday, December 29, 2012, the Tumblr post has over 46,000 notes, which is a record for anything I’ve ever posted. Then I got this: Continue reading →

Instagram and Sturgeon’s Law

Posted on December 5, 2012 by wellsdc

“If you see the finger-mustache guy on the road, kill him!” -Zen Master Linji [citation needed]

To me, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, and various other social media sites that mostly involve photos just look like a giant collage maintained by a crazy person with expensive tastes.

When I first discovered Tumblr, it appeared to be largely devoted to pictures of empty Starbucks cups framing a slightly out-of-focus Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the background. When I joined Pinterest, the boards automatically assigned to me, which the system seemed to think I would like, consisted mainly of pictures of tiaras. I am not kidding. Instagram was closed off to me for most of its still-short life, on account of my not having an iPhone. I remedied that last summer, but I wouldn’t say I entirely understand what Instagram is all about. Thankfully, the comical folks at College Humor have let me know that I am not alone:

CollegeHumor’s Favorite Funny Videos

Here’s the thing, though. Several wise friends have pointed out that hating on hipsters and hipster-y things has reached a point of becoming pretty hipster-y in and of itself. I’m not going to stop ripping on the most annoying of the hipster tropes, but I am going to try to be a bit more thoughtful about it.

Instagram and its ilk brings to mind Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crap.”

This applies to any and all forms and genres of media, be it visual arts, television, or cleverly-filtered smart phone pictures of half-eaten gnocchi from a deli on the Lower East Side. (Do they have delis on the Lower East Side? I haven’t been to Manhattan in eleven years, and even then I was not required to navigate.) (Also, do they serve gnocchi in delis?) (What exactly is gnocchi?)

Somewhere amid all the detritus (and by detritus, I mean “pictures of finger mustaches”) are a few bits of awesome. Yes, there is more detritus out there, in part because there are more people in the world, but mostly because more of the people have access to the internet, and the means to take and post pictures. Some people genuinely believe their pictures are meaningful, while others believe posting bad pictures is a good idea. I’m sure we have all fit in both categories at times. If you can get past the coffee foam and blurry sunsets, every so often something good will pop up.

And while you’re waiting to find it, you can join me in derisive laughter at finger mustache guy.

Photo credit: ‘Fingerstache’ by Vorhese [GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikipedia.

Cutting Off the TLD to Spite the Face

Posted on October 16, 2012 by wellsdc

The group United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has, by all appearances, a worthwhile goal, which is to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. To accomplish this, it often puts pressure on private companies to divest from Iran, both directly and through any subsidiaries or affiliated business that might do business there. By and large, this is clearly the free exercise of economic power to try to bring about social change, something I generally support. I could say a few things about the long-term wisdom of tarring an entire nation of people with a history and culture spanning millennia based on the oft-psychotic behavior of a 33-year-old regime, but let’s focus on UANI’s latest campaign instead.

According to a UANI press release dated September 18, 2012:

On Tuesday, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) launched its World Wide Web campaign, and called on both the Internet Corporate for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE) to disconnect the Internet access of sanction-designated Iranian entities such as its Central Bank and its military’s engineering arm.

ICANN is the nonprofit corporation that has the authority to designate and assign domain names on the World Wide Web. RIPE performs a similar service in Europe. UANI sent letters to both agencies on September 7, demanding that they cease providing services to “sanction-designated Iranian entities.” This may work as a public relations move, but it has multiple problems, not least of which is the fact that ICANN and RIPE can’t just turn off a spigot and cut Iran off. UANI seems to be suggesting cutting off specific Iranian entities included on the sanctions list, but it could never work that way. John Levine, a writer for the internet technology journal CircleID, calls the idea that ICANN or RIPE could just cut Iran off “ridiculous”: Continue reading →

The saddest meme in Republican history

Posted on August 2, 2012 by wellsdc

The other day, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed that an unnamed Bain investor told him that Mitt Romney won’t release any more tax returns because that would demonstrate that he did not pay taxes for ten years. We don’t know who actually said that, so it is possible that Senator Reid is making it up. Politicians certainly lie through their teeth all the time–well, Mitt Romney does. I’m sure others do as well.

In response to this, people on the right could have just pointed out that Reid has not provided any evidence for his assertion besides his say-so, which would have gotten the point across that he made an unsupported (albeit plausible) accusation. But that would have been sensible, and this is the American right wing we’re talking about here.

First, they point out that Harry Reid will not release his own tax returns, which is irrelevant because Harry Reid is not running for president.

Not content to leave it at that, someone creates a Twitter hashtag suggesting (facetiously, one hopes) that Harry Reid is a pederast. I assume the intention was to demonstrate the impact of unfounded accusations, not to look like a group of schoolchildren who just learned a big word. The meme yielded gems such as this:

Harry Reid’s Disgusting Attack on Romney & His Love of Sheep ow.ly/cEZEx #HarryReidRumors #HarryReidisaPederast

— Jeff Dunetz (@yidwithlid) August 1, 2012

BREAKING: Team Reid stating that Harry Reid is only 1/32 boy-toucher. #HarryReidisaPederast — Eric Shrugged (@eriContrarian) August 1, 2012

There’s no evidence #HarryReidisaPederast, but there’s no evidence he isn’t. Why is he refusing to address this? What’s he hiding? #p2 — Derek Hunter (@derekahunter) July 31, 2012

II don’t think Harry Reid is a pederast but until he releases all his FBI records, we can’t know for sure. Can we? #harryreidisapederast — DrewM (@DrewMTips) July 31, 2012

It’s always just hilarious when a person using “pederasty” as a cheap device for a lame attempt at satire uses words like “disgusting” to describe the other person. It is difficult to fully explain how an allegation made as part of an ongoing controversy over an unprecedentedly tight-lipped presidential candidate’s financial history is different from completely made-up accusations of pederasty by a bunch of Tweeters. Honestly, before yesterday it never would have occurred to me that such a distinction would be necessary. If you haven’t already figured out the distinction, there is no hope for your intellectual development beyond its current state, or you are currently under the age of six.