Chamblee54

The folks at WordPress have a new site, called Daily Post . No, this is not Wilbur’s kid brother. We don’t know if DP talks to horses or not.
The idea is to encourage people to post something everyday. This was the concept behind NaBloPoMo. This is a good idea, with a flawed execution. The name sounds very much like NAMBLA. The mailing list is the hotel california…once you get on it, you never leave. PG blogged every day for November 2008, said it was a good time, but there is more to life.
So now WordPress is doing the same thing, and PG is signing up. Do we see a disconnect here? Maybe. PG knows deep down that there will be days when he doesn’t get a post on the innertubes. Occaisonally, PG goes out of town, sometimes to places the internet does not reach. He sometimes gets work, and doesn’t feel up to writing stuff when he gets home. On the other hand, maybe someone else can be encouraged or supported by the effort here.
Here is the comment to Daily Post: I didn’t learn about this until today. I have missed three days so far this year, but had more than one post on several other days. I was in something called nablopomo a couple of years ago. It was gimmicky, and sounded like nambla. I would hope that the WordPress version is better.
The more I write, the more I find to write about. If you keep the quantity up, the quality takes care of itself. Like Grandpa Walton said to John Boy, you are not a writer when you say you are writer. You are a writer when someone else says you are a writer.
The theme of chamblee54 is pretty pictures and ugly opinions. The pictures have little to do with the text. I got a telephone message today from a friend who said he enjoyed pictures of dogs and children, when I am writing about horrible subjects. Maybe I can post some inspiring text, and have horrible pictures to go with it.
I am glad to have this site as a source of ideas. There are always going to be days when I can’t think of anything to say, and there is nothing good to repeat. ( I make frequent use of my archive. The best way to do reposts is on the same day as the original.)
And so it goes. I can’t promise I will have something up every day, but I will on most days.  chamblee54
The world is full of things to write about, some of them entertaining and/0r educational. There is no shortages of pictures. The historic databases are formidable, and new pictures are just a click away. Or, pictures can be repeated. Pictures for this effort are from The Library of Congress

Somewhere in his drifting around the internet, PG found a reference to the story of Noah and the Ark. A light bulb above his head switched on, and the answer was apparent: Global warming is the second great flood.
In the Biblical story, G-d was upset with the way man was doing things. She gave Noah a heads up, who was ridiculed by the good citizens of the day. Finally, it rained forty days and forty nights, and everyone except Noah got wet.
In the modern version, G-d sees man making a wasteland of the bountiful planet. An amazing resource like oil is controlled by hateful tyrants, and burned to make cars run. The signs of dis ease are apparent to some, but they are ridiculed by the good citizens of the day.
This time, things are different. Instead of forty days and forty nights, it is two hundred years of burning fossil fuels. It is a time of war, and rumors of war. This is a repost.

In 1994, there was starting to be controversy about the Georgia State Flag . PG went to the microfilm files at the downtown library to investigate certain claims about the origin of this flag. Along the way, he saw a few things about the way Georgia government operated in 1956.
One of the things that caught his eye was a bill that was introduced to the Legislature. The bill would make it a felony to support integration. Laws that don’t make sense are proposed all the time.
There is currently a bill before the Georgia Legislature that deals with immigration. It is similar to the law in Arizona that has stirred up so much controversy. The proposed law here goes one step beyond.
“The bill also creates criminal penalties for any individual that encourages an illegal alien to come to Georgia or that transports or harbors an illegal alien once they arrive.”
And Marta thinks they have problems now. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.

The execution of Emmanuel Hammond was delayed by the Supreme Court last night. If the state had waited a few minutes, he could have had a midnight ride. The delay was caused by concerns over sodium thiopental, one of the three drugs used in the procedure.
It seems like the Italian producer of sodium thiopental does not want the substance used for executions. Georgia copped a supply from a British company, Dream Pharma. Apparently, it is ok for the State of Georgia to get a barbiturate from a third party source, and import it to the United States. If PG wanted to have a party (instead of an execution), imported hard drugs from a British source, and got caught, he would be in a lot of trouble. Being a government has it’s privileges.
The concept of offing condemned criminals by injecting stuff originated in Oklahoma. The electric chair needed repairs, and the state needed a new method for killing. A three drug protocol was proposed by Chief Medical Examiner, A. Jay Chapman. The first person to be dispatched with this method was David Gregory, in Huntsville TX on December 7, 1982.
One of the problems is the fact that many medical professionals refuse to participate in this procedure. Many executions are performed by prison personnel, who don’t know what they are doing. Dr. Chapman was quoted as saying “It never occurred to me when we set this up that we’d have complete idiots administering the drugs.” There are a few horror stories.
February 5th 2006 Joseph Lewis Clark, Ohio. Prison staff took 22 minutes to initially insert a single IV line, but Clark’s vein collapsed 3-4 minutes later and he raised his head and cried out “It don’t work. It don’t work.” It took the execution team a further half hour to find another vein and he was eventually pronounced dead 90 minutes after the execution had begun.
December 13th, 2006. Angel Nieves Diaz, Florida. Diaz took 34 minutes to die and required a second injection when the needle went through his vein rather than into it. His arms showed burn marks from the chemicals.
March 10th, 1992. Robyn Lee Parks. Oklahoma. Parks had a violent reaction to the drugs. Two minutes after the drugs were administered, the muscles in his jaws, neck, and abdomen began to react spasmodically for approximately 45 seconds. Parks continued to gasp and violently gag. Death came 11 minutes after the drugs were administered. Wayne Greene a reporter on the Tulsa World newspaper described Park’s execution as looking “scary and ugly.”.
April 23rd, 1992. Billy Wayne White. Texas. It took 47 minutes for the prison staff to find a suitable vein, and White eventually had to help them.
A legal challenge to execution by Lethal Injection went to the Supreme Court. In the state of Kentucky, condemned inmate Ralph Baze, successfully appealed against the use of lethal injection on the grounds that it was a “cruel and unusual punishment” which is therefore unconstitutional under the 8th Amendment. His case was heard by the Supreme Court on January 7th, 2008. On Wednesday, April 15th, 2008, the Supreme Court ruled by a majority of 7-2 that lethal injection does not violate the US Constitution by inflicting cruel and unusual punishment, which cleared the way for executions to resume in 2008. As a result of the earlier ruling, there were no executions in the US from September 25th, 2007 to May 5th, 2008. The Supreme Court ordered the release of the Kentucky protocol for lethal injection which can be read here . Kentucky uses the same three drug cocktail that most other states use and has carried out two executions by injection, both of which appeared to go smoothly. (Eddie Harper in May 1999 and Marco Alan Chapman in 2008).
With sodium thiopental becoming unavailable, states need to find a new sedative to kick off the process. Oklahoma is once again the national innovator. On December 16, 2010, Oklahoma wasted John David Duty using 5 grams of Phenobarbital sodium.
The Kentucky protocol , the method of lethal injection execution approved by the Supreme Court, specifies the use of Sodium Thiopental. Is the use of another sedative permitted? No doubt defense attorneys are filing motions saying no. This will  provide fodder for legal gymnastics over the next few years. Capital punishment is a jobs program for attorneys.
In the preparation of this post, Mr. Google supplied two articles which were generous with facts. Both should be read by anyone interested in these issues. The New York Times Sunday magazine has a slightly sensational approach, which perhaps exaggerates the clumsiness of the execution industry. A website called Capital Punishment U.K. has a clinical approach. (Here is the contents page. ) Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”

This journey was funneled by Cat’s Cradle. Here is Part one.
9- Vice President in charge of volcanoes John goes to Ilium, NY, to work on his book. This is a fictitious city, that appears in many Vonnegut visions. The concept of an imaginary city, with imaginary police, garbage collectors, and village idiot, is much beloved by lawsuit conscious publishers.
10- Secret Agent x-9 John gets drunk with a whore in this chapter. She went to school with Franklin Hoenikker, but didn’t know him. Alcohol facilitates conversation on a wide range of subjects, which makes retired drunks wonder what to talk about. This is usually better than wondering how to explain away something foolish you have said.
11-Protein The mad scientist Hoenikker was supposed to talk at the graduation of the whore’s class. He didn’t show up, so the bartender talks about the meaning of life. It has something to do with protein. The titles of the chapters were supposed to be lower case, but there is a strong instinct to make the first letter of the first word capitals. That is capital with an a. The only word which has an o in capitol is a government building downtown, the state capitol. You know this because the capitol building has a rotunda, which is round like an o.
12- End of the world delight John and the whore, whose name is Sandra, are still in the bar, when an ancient bartender comes over to tell John about the scene in this bar on August 6, 1944. The ancient bartender had a nose like a prize strawberry. In the story the bar is the Cape Cod Room, and has a nautical theme. In 1944, it was the Navajo TeePee, and was decorated in Early Americana.
13-The jumping off place John meets Asa Breed, the big dog at the company that owns Ilium. In 1782, a man was hung in the town square of Ilium. The man, named George Minor Moakley, had killed 26 people, or at least those were the ones they could pin on him. Police record keeping is not an exact science. So, before his execution, he composed a song about his murders, and he sang it before they put the hood over his head, which tends to muffle singing. Moakley was not sorry for the murders.
14-when automobiles had cut glass vases John and Mr. Breed were going to a building that had 30k employees. This meant a lot of cars were trying to fit into the parking lot. The police tried to instruct the traffic where to go, and the author used the phrase “glacier of automobiles”.
One night in 1983, PG was driving to the omni to see the police. He was driving a 1970 Plymouth Satellite, painted gold, just like Dekalb county drove in the early seventies. PG’s friend Bradley was talking about the concept of glacial swiftness. As the car went down Spring Street, near the Varsity, the omnoids noticed a lot of cars on the road, creating a condition of glacial swiftness. It turns out the Georgia Tech had a football game that night, hence the mass of cars, moving with glacial swiftness. PG started to cross North Avenue, when a car decided that red lights were for other people. Since PG started out of traffic lights slowly, this person got by without causing any damage.
15- Merry Christmas John and Asa Breed are moving through the bowels of the company building, when they have a chat with Miss Pefko. She types letters for a researcher, and says they may as well be foreign languages. Miss Pefko says that Asa Breed thinks too much.
PG has been told that he thinks too much. When he worked at Redo Blue, across the walkway was the Digital Imaging Manager. or D.I.M. The D.I.M. was a libertarian. He used to be a republican, but was disillusioned when the Contract on America turned out to be a worthless gimmick. The D.I.M. told PG that he thought too much. PG replied HURRY UP.
16-Back To Kindergarten In this chapter, John goes upstairs at the research lab with Asa Breed, the manager of the research division. Paragraph 16 is the return to work on this clifsnotes rendering of “Cats Cradle”, and PG is beginning to doubt that it will last for 127 chapters. The book is set in 1959, which is the year PG went to Kindergarten.
17-The Girl Pool John meets Naomi Faust, an employee of the research lab. Mr. V is into the names of characters at this point of his journey. In a few books, the names will be less picturesque. This is something that the early readers of Mr. V did not know. PG thinks of funny names for characters too, but he does not have Mr.V’s knack for story telling. Gnarlene Widget will have to reside in novel limbo, until there is a story she can have a role in.
18- the most valuable commodity on earth There is a trendy word now, commodification. It means to make a commodity out of a person, or of a person’s skills or output. If you look at the word, it could either mean that you make a commodity out of something, or a commode. The pronunciation would be slightly different, but the meaning essentially the same. People who read Chamblee54 regularly…if anyone like that exists…may have already heard this thought. Recycling.
19- no more mudWhen astroturf was first introduced, there was a story floating around about a halfback who drowned in mud during a game. This was supposed to make people go out and buy astroturf for their teams to play on, never mind that 300 pound lineman would instead be knocking that halfback onto concrete, with a foam rubber pad on top of it. When PG was pretending to be a cameraman at the Georgia dome, he took a couple of naps on astroturf, which is surprisingly comfortable to lay down on. It has to be better than taking a nap on mud.
20- ice nine Asa Breed tells John about Ice Nine, an invention of Felix Hoenikker. This is one of the crucial elements of the story, this ice nine. It is a crystal that will induce water to freeze, thus eliminating the existence of mud.Or rather, transforming mud into mud ice, which is still not a good surface for a nap. This lecture was interrupted by the girls pool breaking into the office to sing “oh little town of bethlehem” The visit to Ilium takes place during the xmas season. These days, Bethlehem is near Israel, and is home to Palestinians. It is close enough to Israel to have a huge concrete wall nearby, and someone spray painted “Bethlehem Ghetto” on the side of that wall.
21- the marines march on So the marines are wallowing in the mud, and one very smart marine pulls a capsule of ice nine from his shirt pocket, and turns the mud into ice. The tanks roll on, the marines march to glory, and everything is cool. The only problem is, the war of 2011 is in a dry country. Science fiction does not always plan for such realities. Also, if human beings are mostly water, wouldn’t they freeze as well? A Popsicle marine cannot kill too many people.
22- member of the yellow press Asa Breed continues to lecture John about ice nine, Felix Hoenikker, mud, and pure research. It seems that pure research, the discovery of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, was the goal at this research facility. This is an archaic vision, if indeed it ever existed. Today, the scientist is intended to turn a profit, or secure another research grant from Uncle Sugar. John was supposed to feel like a philistine after the tongue lashing by Asa Breed, but instead wondered what Sandra was going to be doing when he got back to the hotel.
At some point in his career, Kurt Vonnegut was a flack writer for General Electric. This was based in Schenectady NY. The reader can be excused if he thinks there is a connection between this company and GE, and Ilium and Schenectady. Ilium is easier to spell, and sounds like valium . Valium was an improved version of librium, and was introduced to the market in 1963, the year this book was copyrighted. Whether of not there is a connection between valium and Ilium is a good question.
23- the las batch of brownies In this chapter, we establish the date of the story as 1959. We also learn that ice nine really exists, and that all three of Dr. Hoenikkers children have a sample. Those who say the fifties were the good old days, a simpler, innocent era, don’t know what they are saying.

There is a feature today on NPR discussing ” “What’s The Longest Word In The English Language?”. The old crowd pleaser antidisestablishmentarianism was dismissed as “Just a bundle of suffixes and prefixes piled up into a little attention-grabbing hummock.” It also has 28 letters, which won’t even get it into the playoffs.
When it comes to big words, there is nothing like science. In 1964, a book called “Chemical Abstracts” published a 1,185 letter word, referring to a protein found in the tobacco mosaic virus. It starts with glu and ends with sine. This word is 8.44 tweets long.
Words like glu…sine are not used often, which brings us to the obvious winner, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious .It is the theme song for a dance routine in a movie starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke , and a few dozen animated characters.
According to the urban dictionary, Miss Andrews was not fond of Rob Petrie. “It’s reported that Ms. Andrews replied, “Fuck you! I hate you!! You’re a ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidouchebag’!!!! And get away from my door!! Why don’t you go eat “A Spoonful of Feces “!!!” (This problem might have been caused by SupercalifragilisticexpiHalitosis )
At 34 letters, the s word is the longest english word that most of us have heard of. While it probably was made up by over-imaginative songwriters, it is defined by a reputed dictionary. It translates as superkalifragilistikexpialigetisch (German), supercalifragilistichespiralidoso(Italian) and supercalifragilisticoespialidoso (Spanish). The French are too cool to use it.
A website called Straightdope has a highly entertaining feature called Is “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” a real word referring to Irish hookers? . “Our research first took us to a lawsuit that was filed after the movie came out by Life Music, Inc., against Wonderland Music, the publisher of the Mary Poppins song. It was a copyright infringement suit brought by Barney Young and Gloria Parker, who had written a song in 1949 entitled “Supercalafajaistickespeealadojus” and shown it to Disney in 1951. They asked for twelve million dollars in damages. The suit was decided in the Shermans’ favor because, among other reasons, affidavits were produced from two New Yorkers, Stanley Eichenbaum and Clara Colclaster, who claimed that “variants of the word were known to and used by them many years prior to 1949.”
The decision makes for fairly humorous reading. Apparently the judge got tired of writing out the whole word, so every time it had to be mentioned it was replaced by the phrase “the word” as if it were some loathsome artifact that had to be held at arm’s length. “
There is another story that has the s word appearing in a humor magazine at Syracuse University. An archivist named Mary O’Brien says that rumor surfaces every ten years or so, and is not true. Another old husbands tale has children in summer camps taught a song super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus. This cannot be confirmed or denied.
As for the tale about Irish entrpenuers, there is a story in Maxim magazine. It says “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the word supposedly coined by Mary Poppins to make kids sound “precocious,” was actually invented by turn-of-the-century Scottish coal miners. It was used to request “the works” from prostitutes by men too shy to recite specific acts.” The link supplied by StraightDope does not work.

When a convict is poisoned by Georgia, he (or the one woman on death row) receives a “cocktail” of three drugs. The first substance is sodium thiopental (ST), a sedative. The capital punishment as revenge crowd does not like this part of the process, As it turns out, neither does the Italian manufacturer of ST.
ST is made by the Hospira company. The Italian owners of the firm have long deplored the use of their product in executions. The US manufacture of ST has been halted, because the company cannot be guaranteed that ST will not be used to poison convicts, resulting in death.
Emmanuel Hammond is scheduled to be strapped in the gurney going byebye Tuesday night. Georgia has secured a supply of ST for this procedure. The substance was copped from a British firm called Dream Pharma . “Dream Pharma is said to have sold the anaesthetic sodium thiopental that will form part of the lethal injection given to Emmanuel Hammond in the US state of Georgia. The small company is run from the back of the Elgone Driving Agency in Horn Lane, Acton, west London by businessman Mehdi Alavi. Reprieve UK claims the 50-year-old knew that the drug was being sold for use in executions. Mr Alavi, who describes his company as an independent pharmaceutical wholesaler, said today that he did not want to comment on the matter. Earlier this month he said he had “no idea” why a prison in Arizona had ordered the drug, and two other chemicals, from him. Chemicals supplied by Dream Pharma are thought to have been used in that state last October for the execution of Jeffrey Landrigan, also a convicted murderer.”
The protocol for chemically offing convicts involves three substances. “Thirty-five states, including Virginia and Maryland, execute prisoners. All use lethal injection, and until recently all but two had used a three-drug cocktail that included sodium thiopental to kill pain, pancurium bromide to paralyze the inmate and potassium chloride to stop the heart. … Oklahoma last year became the first state to switch to another method, replacing sodium thiopental with pentobarbital, which is widely used to euthanize animals. After winning a court challenge to that decision, the state has executed three inmates since December.”
HT to PeachPundit for the ST story. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.

This is a repost, from this day two years ago. Sam Adams is still the Mayor of Portland, and Beau Breedlove is the answer to a trivia question. An entertainer from Alaska is still on the scene, and recieving too much publicity. PG tries not to mention her name. Pictures tonight are from The Library of Congress. The headline on the wordpress page said “”YOU DECIDE:Would You Want Terrorists In Your Back Yard?”. PG’s first thought was of the Georgia Legislature meeting downtown…Sam Adams should be required to finish his sentence term as mayor of Portland. Every time he appears in public, people will point at him and giggle. This is the punishment he deserves… Someone called Roughtype has a feature on the hegemony( for now) of google and wikipedia. It seems as though the internet created a new playing field for information, and goowi rules, at least for now. Is this digital darwinism?…the phrase 23 skiddoo has an entry in wikipedia. This was said by some to be the first national slang saying. It’s origin is is bit uncertain, which is fertile ground for mythmakers… One popular story has a place on 23rd street in New York, with a lot of wind blowing about. This would be similar to Georgia Pacific Plaza in downtown Atlanta. The legend is that men would hang out on 23rd street to see the wind pick up ladies skirts. The UrbanDictionary goes along with this story… In those days, as the song suggests, ” a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking now heaven knows, anything goes “. A lady simply did not let men look at her legs. To show how far we have gone, a recent interview with *the P Lady* ( The darling of the moral majority crowd ) shows her displaying her knee, albeit covered in a stocking…23 is a prime number. The only way to get it through multiplication is 23×1. However, using division, we see that 69/3 is 23. 69 is popular for an act that is uniquely related to two people participating. The concept of 69 divided by three is rather gruesome… The urbandictionary calls 23 the greatest number of all time. This may be the end of the research phase of this post. However, if any odd thoughts find their way into this narrative, they may have to be included. 23 is an odd number…The 23rd psalm is one of the high points of the Bible. And no, my name is not Shirley, nor is it goodness nor mercy…The number 23 in the alphabet is W. If you can’t say anything good, say it about him…2 divided by 3 is .666…. 6+6+6+2+3=23…. The legend is that Dr. Pepper is the combination of 23 flavors…Willie Shakesphere was born April 23, 1564. He died April 23, 1616…The very first morse code message was “What hath God wrought” (what hath God done) was from the Bible passage Numbers 23:23… On January 23, 1973, Richard Nixon announced a peace accord for the Vietnam War… On January 23, 1978, Terry Kath (Guitar player for the band Chicago) came home from a night of partying. He picked up a 9mm pistol, and held it to his head. He said, “ don’t worry, it’s not loaded.” He was mistaken, with fatal consequences…Human DNA has 23 chromosomes… Craigslist can be so poetic. “I am an opulent man. I have wealth beyond your wildest imaginations. Come scrub the diamond encrusted toilets on my lavish yacht. Furthermore, I am an exquisite man of great excellence and those who work for me often find themselves greatly life experience enhanced. Pay not negotiable”… If you enter 23 into google, the first answer is a wikipedia article about 23 enigma. This is the concept that all events are related to the number 23…William S. Burroughs is credited by some for first noting the 23 enigma. ” I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.” … Bonnie and Clyde were murdered on May 23, 1934. The letter B is two, and the letter C is three…January 23, 1985, O.J. Simpson elected to the football hall of fame

Unless something changes soon, Emmanuel Fitzgerald Hammond will soon be poisoned by the State of Georgia, Mr. Hammond was convicted of the July 1988 murder of Julie Love. The disappearance of Miss Love was widely publicized at the time, with handbills asking “Have you seen Julie Love?” stapled to telephone poles around Atlanta. Here is the story .
Julie Love was last seen by her fiance the morning of July 11, 1988. He called her that evening and she was not in. He left a message on her answering machine. He left another message the next day. When she did not return his calls, he thought at first that she was “sort of having her way” and “getting back at me a little bit.” However, when she failed to return his call the next day he became concerned. He began calling her friends and family and discovered she had not been in touch with any of them either. He went to her apartment that evening with a policeman. She was not home, and they did not feel they had a right to enter her apartment at that time. However, after her car was discovered abandoned and out of gas half a mile from her fiance’s house, a formal investigation was begun by the police. The investigation proved fruitless for over a year.
In August of 1989, Janice Weldon, a 34-year-old stripper at an Atlanta lounge and intimate companion of 26-year-old Emmanuel Hammond, had him arrested on charges of aggravated assault after he tried to strangle her. While he was in jail on these charges, Weldon reported to police that Hammond and his cousin Maurice Porter were responsible for the disappearance of Julie Love. Police followed up her report by placing a “body bug” on her and monitoring conversations between her and Maurice Porter. Porter made several incriminating statements, and he and Hammond were arrested. Porter confessed and led police to skeletal remains which were identified by her childhood dentist and next-door neighbor as the mortal remains of Julie Love. Porter and Weldon testified at Hammond’s trial.
According to them, Porter, Weldon and Hammond were driving around the evening of July 11, 1988 in Hammond’s maroon Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan. They spotted Julie Love walking by the side of Howell Mill Road. At Hammond’s command, Porter, the driver, stopped so Hammond could ask her if she wanted a ride. Love answered in the negative, and pointed to a nearby house, claiming she lived there. She walked up the driveway and they drove off. Before they got out of sight, however, Hammond saw her returning to the road. Porter was told to turn around and drive by in the opposite direction, this time with his lights on bright. They drove past Julie Love again and saw farther up the road a car which they correctly deduced was hers. Hammond told Weldon to drive, and they returned to Julie Love. Weldon stopped the car, and Hammond, armed with a sawed-off shotgun, jumped out, grabbed the victim and threw her into the back of the car.
They drove to Grove Park Elementary School (which Hammond had attended). Love’s purse was searched and Hammond instructed Weldon and Porter to take her bank cards to an automated bank teller machine and get money, using an access number given them by Love. Hammond remained at the school with his sawed-off shotgun and Julie Love. The other two returned later without money or the bank cards. The access number they had tried to use was incorrect and the machines had kept the cards. Hammond, angry at this result, struck Love repeatedly with the shotgun. Porter then raped Julie Love.
Love, pleading not to be hurt, told Hammond she had more cards at home. They drove to Love’s apartment complex but were deterred from entering by the presence of a security guard at the entrance to the complex.
At this point, Weldon demanded she be allowed to go home. She was dropped off at her apartment and the remaining three returned to the Grove Park school. Hammond got clothes hangers and a sheet from the trunk of the car. He tied Love’s feet together, tied her hands behind her back and wrapped a sheet around her body. He then wrapped a coat hanger around her neck, and, telling Porter to pull one end while he pulled the other, tried to strangle Love. She struggled and broke free. Hammond got her under control and retied her hands. He told Porter to drive to Grove Park, where they stopped by the side of the road. Leaving Porter with the car, Hammond took Julie Love into the woods. Porter heard a gunshot. A few minutes later Hammond returned alone, his face flecked with blood.
Hammond returned home at 7:00 a.m. that morning. Weldon asked him what had happened to Julie Love. He did not want to talk about it then, but later told her that after Love “put her hands in front of her face,” he “blew the side of her face off.” He dumped her body in a trash pile and covered her up with a board.
The sawed-off shotgun was recovered from Michael Dominick, to whom Hammond had sold the gun not long after killing Julie Love with it. The victim’s earrings were also recovered, after having been pawned for $140 by Janice Weldon.
After his arrest, Hammond gave Weldon’s photograph and address to an inmate due to be released soon, and offered him $20,000 to kill her…
Weldon and Porter both testified that Hammond was armed with a 12-gauge shotgun at the time of the crime. Police were unable to locate the gun. However, during the trial, one Michael Dominick informed the prosecution that Hammond had sold him a sawed-off 12-gauge shotgun not long after Julie Love had disappeared. At the time he purchased the gun, Dominick did not know Hammond had anything to do with Julie Love’s disappearance. The gun was seized by the police during a search of Dominick’s residence in connection with criminal drug charges unrelated to this case. At the time of this trial, the gun had been in the police evidence room for many months. Neither the police nor the prosecution were aware that the gun had any connection to this case until Dominick, who was in jail, volunteered the information after the trial had begun. The state offered the gun and the testimony of Dominick as newly discovered evidence. The defendant objected and moved to exclude the testimony and the gun because Dominick’s name was not on the list of witnesses furnished to him before trial, see OCGA 17-7-110, and because, except for his testimony, there was nothing to tie the gun to the crime on trial. The court ruled: “[A]s the record now stands the Court grants the defense motion. . . .”
Later the defendant testified. On cross-examination, the state displayed the gun to the defendant and asked him if he had ever seen it. He admitted he had. He denied selling it to Dominick but admitted being present when, as he claimed, Janice Weld on sold the gun to Dominick. The state re-offered the gun in evidence. This time, the court admitted it. In addition, Dominick testified in rebuttal that Hammond had sold the gun to him.
The courts seem satisfied that Mr. Hammond is guilty. The main evidence against Mr. Hammond was the testimony of his girlfriend, and Mr. Porter. There are allegations that Mr. Hammond had robbed and raped other women. The requests for clemency, 22 years after the crime, are based on the standard complaints about prosecutor misconduct and inadequate representation. This is part of the process in executing a criminal.
The part where PG wonders is the discovery of the body. According to the testimony, Mr. Porter was waiting in the car when he heard a gunshot in Grove Park . Then, 13 months later, Mr. Porter led Police to the skeletal remains, which had been undiscovered those 13 months. (The park is across the street from Grove Park Elementary School, where Miss Love was taken when first abducted.) To PG, this does not add up.
A side story to this case involves a letter to Atlanta WAGA-TV. About this time, a Federal Judge in Alabama was murdered. The letter states that the murderer of the Judge was motivated by the Julie Love murder.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress .

UPDATE: Emmanuel Hammond was executed Tuesday night. He was pronounced dead at 11:39 pm. The execution had been scheduled for 7:00pm. but a last minute delay was granted by the United States Supreme Court.
There were concerns about a sedative used in the execution process, sodium thiopental . The State of Georgia apparently copped a supply of the substance from a rather shady source. The legality of Dream Pharma is open to question. If PG was caught with drugs that he purchased from an unlicensed company in London, he would be in hot water. If the State of Georgia does the same thing, it can now use these drugs to legally kill a man.

The other day, PG went for a walk, and wound up at the Chamblee library. This is common. The library is on a route that PG likes to walk, and usually pops up about the time PG is looking for an inconspicuous place to go pee. While he is in the building, there is a shelf with popular books on it, and a cabinet of cds.
Wandering through the rows of shelves, PG wound up in the V section, and took a look at Kurt Vonnegut . There was a copy of “Cat’s Cradle” behind a salmon cover, with a large, pointy V taking up the majority of the cover. It was not the original cover, but a reissue, put out by a bookmonger trying to squeeze a few more eggs out of a productive goose.
PG was not sure if he had read “Cat’s Cradle”, or if that was even a relevant concern. Re reading an old favorite can be fun. This was a book with lots of short chapters, and then PG stumbled upon chapter 42, “Bicycles for Afghanistan”. This seemed a stroke of synchronicity, for in 1963, Afghanistan was a mistake on a geography test. Today, it is the scene of a ridiculous war, with America spending 8 times the national GDP on a war. We want to kill them there, before they kill us here. Mr. Vonnegut smoked his last cigarette in 2007, when the booboo in Babylon stole the glory from the Afghanistan plan. At that moment, PG decided to take the book home.
In November of 2008, PG wrote 58k words as a participant in nanowrimo. The novel was an unreadable mess, and has listlessly used memory ever since. One of the gimmicks in that book was a re reading of “Trout Fishing In America”, with a reaction to the text written down. Maybe this is the answer to the recent infestation of writers block? And with 127 short chapters, a poetic reaction to each one would provide plenty of text to put between pictures. Dude, make like a rodent, and gopher it. Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”
1-the day the world ended. The author is named John. He was almost called Jonah, or whale indigestion. He is going to write about the day the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. This day was 8 years and nine months before PG first saw the light of day. The role of gravity in the descent of the instrument from the Enola Gay to the H city is a little pondered fact of history. If Isaac Newton had not been beaned by an apple, would Hiroshima be a forgotten Asian town today?
2- nice nice very nice A subplot of CC is a philosophy called Bokononism. We are not in Karass anymore. This is one of those touches of Vonnegutian satire. He probably is making a statement about Jesus worship, a self inflicted torture on the weak and lame. Why a chapter about satiric religion would be called nice is a mystery.
3-folly This is some bokonian philosophy, about a woman who hires an architect to design a doghouse. It is well known that philosophy is the disease, for that which it is supposed to be the cure.
4-a tentative tangling of tendrilsThis is about karass, which is a group of people with some sort of connection. Kind of like the Synchronicity set, which is longer, tougher to spell, but easier to make plural. In english, we make things plural by adding an s to the end. No one is sure how to pluralize words already ending in s. Getting back to John’s karass, three of the members are children of a man named Felix Hoenikker. ( Mr. V did not foresee the modern meaning of Ho, and the way Hoenikker might be considered racist. )( Between 1976 and 1989, the boss man in East Germany was Erich Honecker). Mr. Hoenikker was a scientist working on the bomb, and John wanted to talk to his children about what he did on August 6, 1944.
5- letter from a pre-med This is a letter from Newt Hoenikker, the youngest of the three Hoenikker children. He tells about August 6, 1945, and gives the origin of “Cat’s Cradle”. That was then. In 1963 when this book was copyrighted, Newt Gingrich was an undergraduate at Emory University. (an emoroid). Newt will probably never be President, which is just as well.
6- bug fights This is another tale of the Hoenikker family. The middle son, Frank, was on the run from the law when the book starts. Working him into the narrative will provide a measure of suspense for this so far plotless book.
7-The Illustrious Hoenikkers Here is where we learn that Newt is four feet tall, and that Frank is wanted by several law enforcement devices. When this book was written, Newt Gingrich was married to his first wife. She was his high school geometry teacher, but she waited until he was 19 to marry him. She got cancer about the time that Newt wanted a divorce, which he told her about while she was in the hospital. That is part of the legend. It is one of those things that is none of your business, but you get mad hearing about it. This is like the time PG was working with a Professional Jesus Worshiper, who took a company truck home one night, and brought it back the next day reeking of vomit. None of your business, but for that person to act self righteous later is just a bad joke.
8-Newt’s thing with Zinka Newt Hoenikker married a Ukrainian midget. ( In 1963, no one thought midget was an offensive word. In those days the polite expression for African American was Negro. Language is a versatile instrument.) Zinka was 43 yo, to Newt’s estimated age of 19. This is in keeping with the Gingrich connection, with one key exception. Zinka decided, after one week of marriage, that Americans were too materialistic. Such a woman would not make a good Republican wife.

There have been nine presidential transfers of power in PG’s life. Seven of them were in January. PG typically ignores them. He goes out with Mr. Crook in office, and comes home to President Thief.
The best exception was in August,1974. Richard Nixon was finally undone and forced to resign. After watching Tricky Dick’s next to last television speech , PG got in his Datsun and drove to the Great Southeast Music Hall. The entertainment that night was Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
The Music Hall was the sort of place we don’t seem to have anymore. The auditorium was a bunch of bench backs on ground level, with pillows everywhere. It was a space in a shopping center, occupied by an office depot in later years. To get there from Brookhaven, you drove on a dirt road, where Sidney Marcus Boulevard is today.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk was not modest. He was the modern miracle of the tenor saxophone. He would play three saxophones at once, getting sounds that you do not get from a single instrument. At one point, the band had been playing for about five minutes, when PG noticed that Kirk had been holding the same note the entire time without stopping to breathe.
Mr. Kirk played two ninety minute sets that night. He talked about twenty minutes out of every set. Of that twenty minutes, maybe thirty seconds would be fit for family broadcasting. Mr. Kirk…who was blind…said he did not want to see us anyway, because we were too ugly. He said that Stevie Wonder wanted to make a lot of money, so he could have an operation and see again.
The next day, Mr. Nixon got in a helicopter and left Washington. The Music Hall stayed open a few more years, and Sidney Marcus Boulevard was paved. Rahsaan Roland Kirk had a stroke in 1975. He struggled to be able to perform again. On December 5, 1977, a second stroke ended his career. He was 41 years old. This is a repost

A facebook friend had a post about the color of his aura. PG has always been vaguely aware of auras, but never curious enough to learn much. Here was a chance to go to google city, see some non facebook linked quizzes, and write a colorful post about auras. Black and white pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”
Quizilla, which sounds like a Japanese horror movie made for Lifetime, cops the top spot. The page has an ad for something called…no, the banner ad at the top just changed, now they are flogging the Toyota Sienna, only to swap out for the Amazing savings this week only at Staples.
The first question shows a problem with internet quizzes. “How do you view life? Life is full of creativity and adventures. Life is nurturing and taking care of others. Life is passion and excitement. Life is peaceful and full of nature. Life is…… blah. Life is wonderful! It’s joyous and all laughter.” At some time or another, PG has felt all six of those answers. To choose one is not going to be accurate. Maybe the best thing to do is live in the moment, and answer how you feel now.
After seven multiple choice questions, the verdict was in. PG has a green aura. The text about this cannot be copied, but it would not be out of place in a new age coffee house.
Blogthings is the next stop on our tour. The ad is for a dating service, that will “MAKE HIM ADDICTED TO YOU”. After a few multiple choice questions, we learn the answer. “Your Aura is Violet. Idealistic and thoughtful, you have the mind and ideas to change the world. And you have the charisma of a great leader, even if you don’t always use it! The purpose of your life: saying truths that other people dare not say. Famous purples include: Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony. Careers for you to try: Political Activist, Inventor, Life Coach.” The ad next to this answer is for Geek2Geek. “Why can’t I find a date? Maybe because you’re looking in the wrong places. Try Geek2Geek.”
Squidoo does not have a quiz. They do have an ad, from a lady who will read Tarot cards for free. The page is devoted to information about the different colors that auras have, and what they tell us. There is a video about cleaning auras.
Allthetests is advertising a Betty White movie called “Hot in Cleveland”. When you answer the first multiple choice question, a pop up ad for digital doodahs runs screaming onto your desktop. This test is a doozie. The answer was 40% green, 30% yellow, or 30% violet. “If you want to know correct answers, please click on the button on the right ‘The correct answers for this quiz’. If you don’t see this button, it is not possible to view the correct answers! If you want to receive this test results per e-mail, please enter your e-mail address here: “
Quibblo joins the popup party, featuring an ad from the publishers clearing house. The first three questions deal with what happens when you go to town with a friend, who is wearing a fashion tragedy. The answer is “Black Possitive Traits: Strong and independant. Negative Traits: Can be unforgiving, ruthless or very cold. “
Thiaoouba Prophecy does not offer a quiz. They have a page of information, with the slogan “Believing is not enough;you need to KNOW.” There are drawings of Buddha and Jesus, both of whom sport auras. You have the opportunity to buy the workshop notes, and expanded version of the information on this page. Rev. Cassandra Anaya has a similar vibe in her 1999 era website. She gives instruction in aura reading. “You may also wish to take nonliving objects, like rocks and such, and try to see their auras as well. This can be very good practice for you.”
Suite101 continues the information only trend, with an ad for the flat belly diet. A guest left this comment: “im 12 and im really confused because i keep following this step by step thing i downloaded off the internet for seeing your aura and i dont know if im doing it wrong or if i dont have one so now i think im going to seek psychic help”
Pamala Oslie chimes in with her Personal Aura Colors Quiz. It is an extensive set of questions, designed to narrow your personality down to a couple of life colors. There is an ad for a Dating service, run by Pam, based on Aura colors. After what seemed like a thousand questions, we find out that PG has the highest score for Magenta as a life color.
Once, there was a radio station giving away tickets to a concert by Portishead. The question to win the tickets was, what color is the disc jockey’s hair. PG answered Magenta, and won the tickets. According to Wikipedia, magenta is another word for fuchsia.