You Can Take the Kid Out of Middle School...

Eve Fisher

I was driving over to one of South Dakota's state parks last week, and I spotted a blue car with the following South Dakota licence plate:

FCK YOU

I instantly thought: Well, they seem nice.

No I didn't. Instead, I thought about going to the local Walmart to buy a paintball gun and, when I saw that car again, drive up and spray it heavily. Deeply satisfying.

But I didn't.

It's all so middle school, and I've already been there. The days of 12-13 year olds going on 18 (we thought). Pimply, snarly, sarcastic, selfish little know-nothings trying desperately to learn only the bad stuff in order to grow up fast, hard, tough... Ready to throw a riot or a fit, doing anything (especially insulting the teacher - if you could get a rise out of the teacher, that just made everyone's day) - to just get attention. And betraying each other for a laugh, a sneer or just more attention. Periodically someone would burst out in tears and storm out of the room, screaming at everyone. Generally after insulting the total crap out of someone who turned around and handed it right back to them (which of course was NOT the idea).

I remember we were reading "Lord of the Flies", and almost none of us were horrified at the behavior in it. The teacher asked what would have been different if it had been all girls instead of all boys? A lot said, oh, it would have been really different, girls don't do that kind of stuff. I disagreed and said so: that it would have been pretty much the same, and in some ways worse. Mean girls start young and stay late. 

Basically, the middle school motto is FCK OFF and/or this Famous Coat Message:

But they did care, they do care, and what they really wanted / want was to piss everyone off around them and / or get them in trouble. "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate all of you - WHY IS EVERYBODY MAD AT ME???"  

Or, as Thornton Wilder put it in "The Skin of Our Teeth":

HENRY: What did they ever care about me? 

SABINA: There's that old whine again. Always thinking you're not loved enough, that nobody loves you. Well, start being lovable and we'll love you. 

HENRY: [Outraged.] I don't want anybody to love me. I want everybody to hate me! 

Sabina: Yes, you've decided it's second best...

The depressing part is so many people are still there.  

For example, How dare you do something I don't want you to do?

Sergeant Dusten Mullen showed up at the ICE protest run by Hamilton High School students masked and fully armed with an exposed handgun in a holster and two extra handgun magazines. (my emphasis added) Mullen said, "My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me and you guys arrest them all, and I’ll keep it on film. I also have other people filming from a distance." According to police, Mullen also said that more protesters in support of him were on the way, some armed with rifles (my note - this apparently wasn't true), going on to say his goal was to "get all these kids in jail if they want to break the law." (LINK)

Ahem:  (1) It's not against the law to protest peacefully - it's one of our First Amendment rights.  and  (2) In these times of endless school shootings there's nothing legitimate about an unknown (remember, Mullen didn't announce who he was) armed masked man at a school doing his best to incite violence.

Some other interesting ways to twist real events to one's own reality:

"How dare you do what we tell you to do, you warlike heathens?"

Wounded Knee Massacre:

Back in the 1890s, the US Army / Government was convinced that the Ghost Dance spreading among the Lakota would destroy the U.S. government’s decades-long effort to “civilize” the Lakota, i.e., get them settled on the reservations (the size of which kept getting smaller every day), and take up farming like good civilized people. Things reached a head on December 29, 1890, after a group of 350 Lakota had been called to the Pine Ridge Agency and went, as ordered, with a detachment of the 7th Cavalry to a camp on Wounded Knee creek. At daybreak, the troops demanded all the guns (which BTW, were the Lakota's only way to hunt food, since their rations had been cut to the bone). There are differing reports of what happened next - other than the fact that it was a massacre, and the soldiers lost all control: nearly 300 of the original 350 - men, women, children and babies - were killed or wounded, with a blizzard preventing immediate search following the massacre.

One of The Mass Graves of Wounded Knee

"If you had just obeyed the orders you never got, you wouldn't have been killed"

The Amritsar Massacre:

This one happened when Asian Indians were mobilizing the Indian Independence Movement. Naturally, the British Raj was totally opposed to it, and passed the "Rowlatt Acts", which gave power to the police to arrest any Indian person on the basis of mere suspicion. And keep them arrested. 

On April 13, 1919, a large Asian Indian crowd gathered in the beautiful garden of Jallianwala Bagh, which unfortunately had only one exit. The local commander of Indian Army forces, Brigadier General Dyer had ordered that no Indian assemblies were allowed, but had only told his troops. Without warning, Dyer ordered his troops to block the exit and shoot toward the densest sections of the crowd. They shot for approximately ten minutes. Unarmed civilians, including men, women, elderly people and children were killed. A cease-fire was ordered after the troops fired about one third of their ammunition. He stated later that the purpose of this action "was not to disperse the meeting but to punish the Indians for disobedience." There's nothing like killing them all to get them to obey, is there?

"How dare you not accept the deal I'm offering you, no matter what it says?"

The Destruction of the Summer Palace:

At the end of the Second Opium War, on October 18, 1860, Lord Elgin ordered the destruction as a "solemn act of retribution" to target the Qing Emperor personally and force the signing of the Treaty of Beijing. British and French forces burned the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) and destroyed the gardens, the treasures, everything. Total destruction.  It worked, but at the cost of something that was, according to Stuart McGee, then chaplain to the British forces, "arguably the greatest concentration of historic treasures in the world, dating and representing a full 5,000 years of an ancient civilization". Charles "Chinese" Gordon, who was no stranger to slaughter in China (he fought for the Emperor / Empress in the Taiping Rebellion), wrote "You can scarcely imagine the beauty and magnificence of the places we burnt. It made one's heart sore to burn them; in fact, these places were so large, and we were so pressed for time, that we could not plunder them carefully. Quantities of gold ornaments were burnt, considered as brass. It was wretchedly demoralising work for an army."

BTW, the treaty literally gave foreign ambassadors have immunity for any and all actions and legalized the British sale of formerly illegal opium in China.  Most opium sellers instantly became foreign ambassadors.  And a few other things...

And a couple of more modern examples:

The Godfather

Recently:

"Some of the previous [Iranian] leaders are now no longer on planet Earth because they lied to the United States and they strung us along in negotiations, and that was unacceptable to the president, which is why many of the previous leaders were killed."  Karoline Leavitt, March 30, 2026.

BTW, classic middle school, all the way:   

The spat between the President and the Pope because Pope Leo spoke out in favor of peace.  Actually, that's the pope's job - back during the Gulf War, Pope John Paul II spoke against it, repeatedly, to President Bush, et al.  "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God."  (Matthew 5:9)  

Meanwhile, Pete Hegseth praying at the Pentagon:

"They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17.  'The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherds the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother, and you will know my call sign is Sandy 1 when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.'"  (Actually, it's from Pulp Fiction.)  (Link)

The original version:  

NOTE: There's nothing more middle school than trying to out-tough Samuel L. Jackson.

Oh, and just last week, Chicago police had to investigate because there was a bomb threat made against the Pope's brother.  We really are in middle school, and all the nosepickers are out.  (Link)

Social media right now is just a stew of on insults, invective, lies, damn lies, statistics, and bullshit – specifically in order to get another party to react and punch back. Preferably harder. Threats are rampant.  And the trouble with threats is that sooner or later the threatener must either fulfill it or back down, and either way someone (at least metaphorically) is going to end up stuck to the flagpole with a frozen tongue thanks to a triple-dog-dare.  That's middle school.

Sigh...

Look, what I want is a return to a country, a world of adults, who actually know things, like history, science, mathematics, literature, the arts, and who have probity:  integrity, honesty, moral uprightness, goodness, virtue.  

Who really do want and work for peace, human rights, liberty and justice for all. Not profit for some.

Who really do know how fragile this planet is, and even more, how fragile we are on this, our only home.

Image taken by Atemis II Commander Reid Wiseman 

from the Orion spacecraft's window

Avignon and All That

"During a January closed-door meeting at the Pentagon, a Trump administration official reportedly warned a Vatican ambassador that America had the military power to do whatever it wants in the world, and that the Catholic Church had better take its side.
While the sourcing is limited, the American government confirms the meeting happened (if not the wording used) and Christopher Hale confirms that “some Vatican officials were so alarmed by the Pentagon’s tactics that they shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later this year [for the celebration of America’s 250th].” All of which certainly puts the Pope's comments against American violence in Iran in a different light.
But what’s getting a ton of attention is both the worst sourced, and most intriguing, piece: that an American official in that meeting invoked the Avignon Papacy." (LINK)

Why does that matter? Well, bringing up the Avignon Papacy to a Pope – any Pope – is pretty much a direct threat.

Back in the High Middle Ages, before the Calamitous 14th Century (and thank you, Barbara Tuchman, for one of the greatest histories ever written), i.e., the 1300s, there was only one official church in all of Western Europe, the Church, catholic and Catholic. Everyone was born into it, and it was integral to everything. The Church told you what was right and what was wrong, how to get to heaven, how to love your fellow man, how you should work, how you should live, how you should treat each other. All the social services that government and various non-profit organizations do today were then done by the church and the (often forced) largesse of the wealthy: welfare to widows and orphans, hospitals, asylums, orphanages, schools, etc.

The Church was like breathing, it was all around you. And that was fine with most people. The High Middle Ages, from 950 to 1300, has been called the Great Age of Faith. Cathedrals were built. Crusades were fought. And it helped that it was what's known as the Medieval Warm Period, a/k/a the Climatic Optimum: perfect weather, good harvests, often great harvests, fat bellies...

And then it all went to hell in a handcart, thanks to the Hundred Years' War (between England and France), the Black Death (where a third of the world OR MORE died, and that was just the first go-round), and the Avignon Papacy (a/k/a the Babylonian Capitivity of the Church) and the Great Schism. These three things shattered everything.

AVIGNON AND WHAT CAME NEXT

The papal palace in Avignon

Jean-Marc Rosier from http://www.rosier.pro

So let's start off with a problematic Pope, Pope Boniface VIII (r. 1294-1303): He was from the Gaetani family, wealthy Italian nobility. (Back then, it was pretty normal for a Pope to be elected from among wealthy Italian families and would be so for a very long time.) And it had been expected that he'd be elected to the papacy, but it didn't happen.

Instead, a monk named Pietro Angelerio, a hermit monk was elected by a fluke of frustrated cardinals (who were tired of wealthy noble Italian families running everything, and this was way before the Borgias). Pope Celestine was extremely holy, and wept when he was dragged from his cell to Rome. He was easily persuaded to resign a few months later, probably by Boniface, who was immediately elected Pope.

NOTE: Celestine had been promised he could return to his hermitage, but instead Boniface had Celestine arrested and imprisoned until he died.

Pope Boniface accomplished a lot, including the Regulae Iuris, a collection of legal principles, which is still used as a source for deciding matters of canon law. But his most infamous achievement was the papal bull Unam Sanctam – which declared the pope's jurisdiction over both temporal and spiritual powers: "We declare, announce and define that it is altogether necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff."

This wasn't new: it was pretty much believed throughout Western Europe. Not in Eastern Europe, where the Orthodox Church still considered the Bishop of Rome as just another Patriarch among many. The Catholic/Orthodox schism over papal authority goes back a very long way...

The King of France was Philip IV a/k/a "the Fair" (apparently he was handsome), and did his best to expand French lands. He spent a lot of time at war with England, also with Spain, Flanders, etc., while setting up an alliance with Scotland (the "auld alliance" began with him), conquered Flanders, and made contact with the Mongols with the idea of future military alliances. The trouble is, all that cost money. He was always scrambling for money, and got it a variety of ways, such as arresting bankers and seizing their money.

(Later, under the next Pope, Philip IV pitched a huge fight with the Knights Templar, who had financed most of his war with England, and sent troops to arrest all the Templars in France, accusing them of sacrilige, idolatry, homosexuality, financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. And seized all their large assets…)

But then Philip IV levied taxes on the French clergy of one-half their annual income. Neither the Church nor the papacy would put up with that... Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Clericos Laicos, forbidding the transference of any church property to the French Crown.

So between the two bulls, Philip IV of France saw a threat, and held a little assembly of his own in Paris in April 1302. Nobles, burgesses and clergy met to denounce the Pope and pass around a crude forgery*, Deum Time ("Fear God"), in which Boniface supposedly claimed feudal suzerainty over France, an "unheard-of assertion". Boniface denied the document and its claims, but – insanely – reminded Phillip that previous popes had deposed three French kings. (Also a few English ones, including John Lackland.)

*I know, you thought social media and fake news were modern, right?

And that ticked Philip IV off enough to call for a council to depose Boniface on charges of heresy, blasphemy, murder, sodomy, simony, and sorcery. Boniface prepared to excommunicate Philip, and in order to stop him, Philip hired some thugs who attacked Boniface and imprisoned him for three days without food or water. Boniface was rescued by a group of Italian nobles, but the pope died of his treatment within a month.

Depiction of the death of Boniface in a
15th-century manuscript of Boccaccio's De Casibus

Pope Clement V (r. 1305-1314)

With Boniface's death, King Philip IV promptly bribed the college of cardinals, and Boniface's successor was a Frenchman who revoked Unam Sanctam. And in 1309 King Philip IV moved Clement and the papacy to Avignon, France. Clement brought with him all the French cardinals, papal bureaucracy, etc. In exchange, Philip promised him protection from anything like what happened to poor Boniface.

And there the papacy stayed, at Avignon until 1377, a period that's known as the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.

In case you're wondering, this was a disaster for the Church, because the church expenses skyrocketed. Why? Well, they're in France, and the papal states are in Italy, and the papal states are where a lot of the papal wealth comes from. And the money isn't flowing regularly, so papal taxes went up even more. And, since the pope and his court were in France, and dependent on French support, they rubber-stamped all of the French king's policies and decisions. Especially since, of the 134 cardinals that were created during these 70 years, 113 of them are French.

But it really helped French royalty. A nice, tame Church that could pretty much be controlled…

Gennadii Saus i Segura

A map of Rome, showing an allegorical figure of Rome
as a widow in black mourning the Avignon Papacy

But that's medieval history - why does it matter that someone brought that up to today's representative for the Pope?

The big deal is that the Avignon Papacy began with a king sending a bunch of thugs to capture the Pope, and then setting up his own pope on his own land and controlling the church for 70 years.

Anyone in the Vatican would, and probably did, see "mentioning" it as a threat.

BTW, back in the day, things got worse. Eventually a pope returned to Rome, but instead of things getting back to normal, the French contingent elected yet another Pope in Avignon. So now there were two Popes, one in Avignon, one in France, each excommunicating the other, and all of the others' followers...  Eventually there were three popes...  Briefly... But that's another story, for another time.

Ripped From the Headlines of Science Digests!

Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a Venatrix.  (And the rest of you, get your minds out of the gutter!)

The newly analyzed drawing, on a third-century mosaic, shows a huntress fighting a leopard with a whip, i.e., a venatrix.

In the Roman Empire, beast hunters put on shows in arenas, where they would battle wild animals, such as boars and bears. Unlike gladiators, they fought beasts rather than people. Like the female gladiators, it seems female beast hunters would "always fight topless, with bare breasts, because [otherwise] spectators from the stands would have had problems to notice that they were actually women, and [to] arouse an erotic effect on those spectators, to excite them sexually, was one of the aims sought by their performance."   (LINK)  

BTW, Romans approved of gladiators and beast hunters because the games reinforced essential cultural values: "martial courage, stoicism in the face of death, and the superiority of Roman power."  And the people loved it because it was exciting, stimulating, exciting... and they got fed for free, thanks to aristocrats and rich folks who were always jostling for popularity.  

Bad news for the permanent space stations:

Turns out that sperm cells, egg and embryos all like gravity. "This human, mouse and pig study, published Thursday (March 26) in the journal Communications Biology, revealed that sperm became disoriented, mouse eggs had fewer successful fertilizations, and pig embryos experienced developmental delays, all due to microgravity.

The findings have big implications for building a lasting human presence off Earth. The long-term settlements planned for the moon and Mars depend not just on keeping astronauts alive but on whether people can eventually reproduce there."  (LINK)

And another shock in the world of biological reproduction:

So if you can't produce your own offspring, clone them!  EXCEPT:

"You can't clone yourself forever, 

You can't make yourself all the time.

At some point you mutate, 

Especially vertebrates,

You can't make yourself 59 times."  

Seriously, the limit is 58 successive clones.

Michael Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, who was not involved in the study: “In any kind of animal breeding, once you have the optimal genome, the best way to keep it is by cloning — except for this mutation problem.”  

Cats Can't Taste Sugar - this doesn't mean that your cats will never go after your chocolate, or knock it down onto the floor. It just means they can't taste it.  

The weird part (to me) of the study of taste in animals is that “The super-tasters among the animal world are goldfish,” says Finger. “Goldfish and catfish have way more taste buds than anybody else.” They have poor vision, and their taste buds, including those on their whiskers, could help them sense their way to a meal in murky water, he adds. (LINK)

Goldfish?  Goldfish?  So now I'm pitying all the goldfish swimming in their bowls, getting the same damn fish food day after freaking day... I'm amazed they don't leap out of their bowls and go for the hand that feeds them.

Little Mysteries From Science: WARNING:  Solutions have not yet been found for all.


Why are humans the only species with a chin? (LINK)


Why can't you tickle yourself? (LINK)


What's the deal with blushing?

Charles Darwin described blushing blushing as "... the most peculiar and most human of all expressions."

“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” Mark Twain

"Blushing may be a part of the automatic arousal you feel when you are exposed and there is something that is relevant to the self," lead study author Milica Nikolic said. (LINK)

Why do animals have different pupil shapes? (LINK)

The Ig Nobels are moving to Europe! 😭😭😭

Winners have for the past 35 years traveled to the United States to collect their prizes — and be showered with paper airplanes. Last year, winners included a team of researchers from Japan studying whether painting cows with zebralike stripes would prevent flies from biting them. Another group from Africa and Europe pondered the types of pizza that lizards preferred to eat.

The year’s winners, honored in 10 categories, also include a group from Europe that found drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak a foreign language (as well as Pure Gibberish) and a researcher who studied fingernail growth for decades.

But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

And so... off to Zurich it goes! (LINK)

Ig Nobels, we barely knew thee...

LIPS!

Back on March 9, I participated in my own scientific medical experiment regarding the swelling of lips, specifically my bottom lip.  Here's the deal: during an examination my ENT physician found a papilloma in the back of my throat.  Did a biopsy.  Squamous tissue, i.e., we've got to take it out because it might become cancerous if we don't.  So, on March 9 they did, having wisely given me total anesthesia (I have a kick like a mule), using a (portable) laser.  

Anyway, all went well, I came home that night feeling like a zombie, and the next morning I got up, looked at my face, and said, "What the hell...?"  Now in order to get the laser down where it needed to be, they had to hold my bottom lip down with something (I really don't want to know with what), and this was the result:  Basically, I got a not-so-free non-filler Mar-A-Lago filler job on my bottom lip.  

It lasted for about a week.  During this time I reached the strictly scientific conclusion that anyone who has this done on purpose is certifiably insane.  For one thing, it turned meal-times into an adventure, because the lip simply would not behave itself.  It was just there, and not happy about being used, because it hurt.  And since I wasn't 6 months old anymore, I no longer enjoyed the feeling of food spilling down my face.  Also, it completely blew up the trope that the hero (or in my case, heroine) can get in a fist fight (or a surgery) and then have deep  passionate kisses afterwards.  I certainly couldn't:  it hurt.  

I'm back to normal, and I am happy to announce all was benign.  And that I will never pursue the Mar-A-Lago look on a permanent basis.  I'd rather be a female gladiator any day.

What About Innocence

Back in 1993, The United States SCOTUS ruled on Herrera v. Collins. "The issue in that case was whether an inmate could present new evidence to make a claim of habeas corpus, the ancient legal vehicle by which prisoners can seek relief from unlawful imprisonment."

Nine years after his conviction for shooting and killing two police officers, Herrera produced writs stating that he was innocent, and that his deceased brother had actually committed the murders. Herrera's last-ditch effort failed, but his case was then used by the Supreme Court in order to decide whether any inmate could use claims of new evidence to argue that their imprisonment violated their Constitutional rights. They decided no. In other words, a claim of innocence based on newly discovered evidence — according to this decision — didn't provide grounds for habeas corpus relief.

Scalia concurred with the court's 6-3 decision that a claim of innocence should not serve as the sole grounds for habeas corpus relief, stating in his written opinion that sufficient legal relief already existed for people presenting new evidence of innocence (to be fair, Scalia also said 'not that factual innocence was irrelevant') and "that ruling otherwise would impose an unmanageable burden on lower courts to review newly discovered evidence." (LINK)

ME - Which seems to be basically saying, it would be too damned much trouble and costs too much money to check one more time before executing someone to see if they are indeed factually innocent. Which is where I blow a gasket and start screaming.

Lest you think this is a problem solely in the United States, Lord Denning, the most celebrated English judge of the twentieth century, said in 1988, “It is better that some innocent men remain in jail than that the integrity of the English judicial system be impugned.” Denning was discussing the Birmingham Six, a group of Irishmen who were convicted of bombing two pubs and then spent more than a decade protesting their innocence. The Court of Appeal had dismissed their case, and Denning himself had thrown out allegations of police corruption, because even the idea of the police could be corrupt was “such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right.” (More screaming from me.) After activists and journalists took up the issue, Denning complained that it would have been better if the men had all been hanged. “They’d have been forgotten and the whole community would be satisfied,” he said. (New Yorker)

Anyway, it turned out that the police had been corrupt and fabricated evidence against the Birmingham Six. They were finally freed in 1991. Their case was one of several – the Tottenham Three, the Bridgewater Four, the Maguire Seven - in the eighties and nineties that eroded faith in the British justice system.

As a public outcry grew over wrongful convictions, the Criminal Cases Review Commission was formed and started operating in 1997. The CCRC was designed as an independent check on the Court of Appeal, but it was never given full freedom. It was allowed to refer cases only if there was a “real possibility” that the Court of Appeal would overturn them, and defining that limited the cases severely.

In 2021, a cross-party inquiry issued a damning report, concluding that the CCRC was “too deferential to the Court of Appeal.” Wrongful convictions in the U.K. were repeatedly traced to failures by police or prosecutors to hand evidence over to the defense (see, it doesn't just happen here), but the CCRC didn't look into it very often, and its work was 'routinely hampered by officers’ destruction of forensic evidence.'

A classic example of police 'officers’ destruction of forensic evidence' is the Whitehouse Farm murders, "The U.K.'s Most Infamous Family Massacre".

Late at night on August 7, 1985, Jeremy Bamber called the police to Whitehouse Farm, where they found Jeremy's parents, Nevill and June Bamber, his sister Sheila and her six year old twins all shot to death in different rooms of the house.

At first everyone believed it was Shiela, diagnosed with schizophrenia and was often threatening, who'd shot everyone and then herself. But then other things came up.

Like the police.

Detective Inspector Ron Cook, the lead crime-scene officer, was known as "Bumbling Ron." The night of the murder he picked up the Bible that was either on Sheila's body or by her side - no one will ever know for sure - and started flipping through it. Without wearing gloves. He also moved the murder weapon without wearing gloves, and no one checked for fingerprints until weeks later. And he actively disposed of bloody carpets and bedding. Cook died several years ago, but his deputy, Detective Sergeant Neil Davidson, revealed that after Bamber was declared the prime suspect, “The shit hit the fan, big time."

“ ‘What can we salvage? Who can we blame?’ ” Cook spent weeks “chasing about, red in the face,” trying to find scraps of evidence, Davidson told me. “He was trying to dig himself out of the hole. The whole forensic thing was really a shambles, because nothing was preserved.” Watching the chaos unfold had left him conflicted about the case. “I would not be surprised if, one day, someone comes along and says, Here’s definitive proof that he didn’t do it.”

And then there's the crime-scene photographs, including ones which were not made available to the original defence. Let's just say that in these photographs, dead bodies move and things come and go. Some show Sheila's right arm and hand in slightly different positions in relation to the rifle, which is lying across her body. The rifle itself also appears to have moved, more than once. (I think Bumbling Ron probably struck again.) Former DCS Mick Gradwell, shown the photographs by The Guardian, said in 2011: "The evidence shows, or portrays, Essex police having damaged the scene, and then having staged it again to make it look like it was originally. And if that has happened, and that hasn't been disclosed, that is really, really serious."

Much of the trial revolved around a silencer, which had been photographed (?) on the rifle. Somehow the police failed to secure it at the time, and it vanished. But then 3 days later, David Boutflour, Jeremy's cousin, found it in the gun cupboard and took it home, where he and his parents, etc, handled it freely for three days before giving it to the police. Boutflour said it felt sticky, and they found red paint and blood on the silencer. When the police did collect the silencer on August 12, five days after the murders, an officer reported seeing an inch-long grey hair attached to it, but this disappeared by the time the silencer arrived at forensics. There a scientist, John Hayward, found blood on the inside and outside surface of the silencer, but not enough to permit analysis. Later, the blood inside was found to be the same blood group as Sheila's, although it also could have been a mixture of Nevill's and June's – or David Boutflour's.

Speaking of David Boutflour, there was a second silencer, identical to the first, which was his. The police eventually took that one away too, which didn't just muddle the waters, it pretty much turned them to sludge. To this day, no one knows which silencer was actually tested, or both. There are three exhibits, titled "SBJ/1", (because it was handed over by Detective Sergeant Stan Jones), "DB/1" after David Boutflour had found it, and another labeled "DRB/1" because there was also a Detective Constable David Bird. Which what where? No one knows.

BTW, the whole point of the silencer – and it was the major point of the prosecution - was that the rifle was short enough that Sheila, who was also short, could not have killed herself with the rifle if the silencer was on it. So, my question: If the silencer was on the rifle, why were they looking for it in the guncase? Why are there pictures with the silencer and without it? And how did Boutflour find the silencer (a silencer) there 3 days later?

NOTE: David Boutflour's family inherited Whitehouse Farm after Bamber was convicted.

But details, details. The prosecution argued that if Sheila's blood was inside the silencer, it supported the prosecution's position that she had been shot by another party, but if the blood inside the silencer belonged to someone else (and later tests indicated that it was her mother June's), that part of the prosecution case collapsed.

NOTE: Bamber's defence brought this up in an appeal after later tests indicated it was probably Sheila's mother June's blood. "The judges' conclusion was that the results were complex, incomplete, and also meaningless because they did not establish how June's DNA came to be in the silencer years after the trial, did not establish that Sheila's was not in it, and did not lead to a conclusion that Jeremy's conviction was unsafe." (Wikipedia) In other words, screw you, we're sticking with our decision.

More cock-ups: Officers did not take contemporaneous notes; those who had dealt with Jeremy wrote down their statements weeks later.

The bodies were released days after the murders, and three of them (Nevill, June and Sheila) were cremated.

Jeremy's clothes were not examined until one month later.

Ten years later, all blood samples were destroyed.

Oh, and there's Jeremy's girlfriend Julia Mugford, with whom he'd broken up before the murders. She said that he'd planned and done the murders. The police promptly arrested him, and at the station, Bamber insisted that Mugford had invented the story after he broke off their relationship. “If she could put me behind bars then nobody else could have me,” he said. (Apparently she also tried to kill him at one point, literally telling him, "If you're dead, no one else can have you!")

About a month after the murders, Mugford testified against Bamber. Later, during appeals, Jeremy's lawyers argued that a 26 September 1985 letter to Mugford from John Walker, assistant director of public prosecutions, raised the possibility that she had been persuaded to testify in the hope that charges against her would not be pursued. You see, during her police invterviews, Mugford had confessed to drug offences, burglary, and cheque fraud, and in the letter, Walker had suggested to the Chief Constable of Essex Police, "with considerable hesitation", that Mugford not be prosecuted for any of it.

Also, after Bamber's conviction, Mugford sold her story, complete with semi-nude photos, to a tabloid and got enough "blood money" as she called it, "to buy a flat."

Despite all of this and more, Bamber was convicted and sentenced to five life terms. He's been appealing ever since, based on the unbelievable incompetence and general 'mucking about' of the police – and so far the CCRC has rejected all appeals.

In July 2025, the CCRC announced that they had reviewed four of Bamber's latest ten grounds for appeal and had decided they should not be referred to the court of appeal. The other six grounds remain under review… But I wouldn't hold my breath.

 

'Michael Naughton, a scholar of sociology and law at the University of Bristol, said that the C.C.R.C. had come to serve the opposite of its intended purpose—it was effectively insuring “that miscarriages of justice don’t come to public attention, because they diminish confidence and trust in the criminal-justice system.” In 2004, Naughton began launching innocence projects at universities across the U.K., emulating a movement that has exonerated hundreds of convicts in the United States. The network closed down after eleven years, having overturned just one conviction. “People tend to say terrible things about America, but they have this real commitment to innocent people not being convicted,” Naughton said. “We don’t have that focus on innocence in this country.”' (My emphasis added.)

Sources: (The Guardian, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Wikipedia Jeremy Bamber)

I've sat in at a lot of parole hearings to testify on the behalf of inmates. All too often, the State's Attorney of the case shows up, claims they're not there to relitigate the case, and then promptly relitigate the case with a venom that has to be heard to be believed. Most of them simply don't want any inmate who was convicted under their watch to get out. Even if they might be innocent.

And I've seen inmates who have been granted commutations linger for years in limbo, waiting for the Governor to sign the commutation papers. Again, even if they might be innocent.

Is the majesty of the law more important than the accuracy of the law?

Is the majesty of the law more important than finding out the truth?

Should there be a limit to the costs (financial and time) to the state to prove whether someone is innocent or not?

As a human being, I would reply "NO" to all three of those questions.

But, "The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy."

— Ronald Reagan

Words Haunt Me

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford – I've written about this one at length before.  See my blog post on it HERE.  All I can say is that I've never read another novel like it.  Twists and turns?  Try corkscrews and wormholes.  I still read it once a year, just to see how he did it.  

The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead (1940)

Meet the almost most dysfunctional, chaotic, insane family that has ever been, or at least written about.  Sam Pollitt is what would have happened if Alden Pyle from Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" had come back home, married, and had children.  They're both American bureaucrats, egoistic idealists, who love mankind, but...

(I can't help but compare Pollitt's mission in Malaya to Pyle's in Vietnam: disastrous, although Pollitt survives his.) 

The Pollitts have too many children (and Sam always wants more, and the question is why), too little money, too little love, devotion, faith, warmth or peace - and complete chaos.  It's a complete shit-show in lyrical prose.  

Jonathan Franzen said of it, "Its prose ranges from good to fabulously good — is lyrical in the true sense, every observation and description bursting with feeling, meaning, subjectivity — and although its plotting is unobtrusively masterly, the book operates at a pitch of psychological violence that makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond. And, worse yet, can never stop laughing at that violence!. . .The book intrudes on our better-regulated world like a bad dream from the grandparental past. Its idea of a happy ending is like no other novel’s, and probably not at all like yours."  Then again, maybe it is.

MY NOTE:  I can say that last line because years ago, I met a family straight from hell.  They were the parents of the man I'd left Los Angeles with, and they explained so much.  A family where the parents were both alcoholic drug addicts who were in their 60s and looked at least 30 years older than that.  The parents regularly took off, abandoning their 4, maybe 5 children.  The state would come get the kids, eventually, put them in orphanages and/or fostercare, and then the parents would come staggering back, semi-sober, pick them up, and it would all start over again.  By the time I met this monstrous couple, they were actively trying to kill each other, and their lack of success was a deep disappointment to many, including me.  All of this is absolutely true, and it's not even the worst.  I wrote a very long story called Grace about them which I've never been able to find a market for.  Probably just too damned dark.  Some things no one wants to hear...

Rift by Liza Cody (1988).  

This is actually the first coming-of-age book of a young woman I ever read and it doesn't involve love and/or romance.  (Huzzah!  Passed the Bechdel test!)  Fay is working on a film shoot in Kenya and decides to drive to / through Ethiopia, and agrees to deliver a letter across the border from a writer to his estranged lover, Natasha Beyer. She ends up in a nightmare, from the famine, epidemics, armed insurrections, crime(a), and intrigues that take her far too long to catch on to.  But Fay finds out that she's willing to do anything to survive, absolutely anything, and she does it.  And then she "gets" to live with it.

"It's based on a trip I made myself at a time of famine and revolution. All the places are real, as are a lot of the characters and some of the events. I should not have been there, because to witness events like those and yet be able to do nothing to help made me part of the problem. I thought about it for over 10 years before I dared write about it. But even after 10 years, the trip was, in memory, still so catastrophic that I needed to face it and try to make sense of the experience.

I don't actually believe that writing a novel was the appropriate response, but it's the only skill I can use to remind people about other, godforsaken parts of the world where ordinary folk, just like you and me, endure or die in unbelievable suffering." - Liza Cody, July 2008  (Link - Robert Davis' comment)

My note:  To me one of the hallmarks of adulthood is to recognize and admit that you have done something wrong and irreparable:  and then learn to live with it, without inflicting the pain and/or self-pity on others, without falling into the too-handy illusion that it really wasn't that bad, and/or diving into any of the many substances or distractions provided by our world to make you even worse...  Fay manages that hat trick.  That's a reason to read it right there.  

Nemesis by Agatha Christie (1971)

This is my personal favorite of the Christie canon, and I feel the most literary of her works.  There is far more style and mood in the writing than Christie usually provided.  

“It was a neglected garden, a garden on which little money has been spent possibly for some years, and on which very little work has been done. The house, too, had been neglected. It was well-proportioned, the furniture in it had been good furniture once, but had little in late years of polishing or attention. It was not a house, she thought, that had been, at any rate of late years, loved in any way.”  (Which sounds to me almost like Shirley Jackson in my favorite of hers, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.)

The message from the dead.  A quest with justice in view.  An unspoken crime.  An unknown victim.  An unknown murderer.  The garden tours.  Three strange sisters.  Two unknown women.  Two victims.  

BTW, there are some modern essays on Nemesis about the lesbian angle, but I disagree with their negative tone. Christie did write about gay people in a positive way: in A Murder is Announced Miss Hinchcliffe and Amy Murgatroyd are a couple and no one thinks twice about it.*  Christie actually wrote quite a bit about the dangers of obsessive / possessive love, and what terrible things a person can and will do in order to keep someone... forever. Even if that doesn't mean alive.  I see Nemesis as Christie's meditative masterpiece on that danger.  I've often wondered how the ancient Egyptians managed to live with all those mummies, when what they really wanted was their loved ones back.  But then again, perhaps mummification wasn't so much about eternal life as eternal possession...  

*There's a similar couple in Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire Chronicles, only neither gets murdered.  

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Won the Pulitzer Prize 1988

Just read it.  Just read it.  Just read it.  

The Roots of Heaven by Romain Gary (1956)

Winner of the Prix Goncourt

Probably the first novel truly about environmentalism, set in Chad in the 1950s. But even more it's about the search for dignity and freedom in a world that regularly vomits up war, cruelty, concentration camps, destruction of humans, the natural world, etc., and justification for all of it.  The hero Morel is a French WW2 concentration camp survivor, whom everyone talks about (and mostly get wrong) but doesn't actually show up in person until late in the novel.  

“This was what he stood for: a world where there would be room enough even for such a mass of clumsy and cumbersome freedom. A margin of humanity, of tolerance, where some of life’s beauty could take refuge. His eyes narrowed a little, and an ironic, bitter smile came to his lips. I know you all, he thought. Today you say that elephants are archaic and cumbersome, that they interfere with roads and telegraph poles, and tomorrow you’ll begin to say that human rights too are obsolete and cumbersome, that they interfere with progress, and the temptation will be so great to let them fall by the road and not to burden ourselves with that extra load. And in the end man himself will become in your eyes a clumsy luxury, an archaic survival from the past, and you’ll dispense with him too, and the only thing left will be total efficiency and universal slavery and man himself will disappear under the weight of his material achievement. He had learned that much behind the barbed wire of the forced labor camp: it was our education, a lesson he was not prepared to forget.”

But this is the quote that haunts me the most:

Morel, talking about a stray dog he'd picked up in Berlin which vanished one day.  "He wandered all over looking for her, qeustioning people, but it was not a time when people were interested in lost dogs.  Finally, someone advised him to go to the pound.  He went.  The man led him in.  It was a place about 50 yards by 10, surrounded with barbed wire.  Inside it were about a hundred dogs, mostly mongrels, the kind one saw on every road of Europe or Asia, animals with no pedigree...  They gazed at him intensely, hopefully, all except the most discouraged ones, who seemed to know their fate and who did not even raise their heads to look at you.  But the others - they had to be seen to be believed, the ones who still hoped to be rescued, and who pricked up their ears and looked at you as if they knew how you felt..."  (p. 212)*

And this one seems very timely:

"That someone may simply be fed up with them and their ways and may want to look for another company, that just cannot enter their heads.  They can't believe it.  There must be a trick about it, a dishonest trick, something crooked, something political, something they can understand.  They're so used to sniffing their own behinds that when someone wants to get a breath of fresh air, to turn at last to something different, and more important, and threatened, something that's got to be saved at all costs, it's quite beyond them."  (P. 264-265, and always timely)

NOTE:  Romain Gary is the only person to have ever won the Prix Goncourt twice, first for Les Racines du Ciel (Roots of Heaven) and in 1975 for La Vie Devant Soi (The Life Before Us).  Madame Rosa, the film version of La Vie Devant Soi starring Simone Signoret, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1978.  I recommend reading him.  

*The first time I read that paragraph, I instantly thought of a scene in Fellini's Satyricon, when Encolpius and Ascyltus wander into an abandoned villa and spend the night with an African slave girl who was left behind, abandoned.  She sings, but she doesn't talk.  When they leave, she doesn't run after them.  There's something missing in her:  hope. Which is what happens, over time, to the homeless, the abandoned, the stateless, the orphans.  

Which is why we long for stories where (most) villains get their comeuppance, (most) victims get their revenge, and there is always a new beginning and a sure place for the lost and abandoned. Today there's too damned many Successions, Billions, House of Cards,etc. where all that happens to rich villains is that they die of old age in a cushy bed. We want a lot more than that. 

The great masters were the Victorians, both in England and in France.  

Dickens, except that he would keep killing off someone young and helpless like Little Nell, or abandoned and crippled like Smike, etc., to ram home how bad the baddies were.  

Robert Louis Stevenson could get pretty damn dark, too, what with Jekyll and Hyde and The Master of Ballantrae - but oh, Kidnapped (I fell so hard for Alan Breck) and Treasure Island.  Loved them both.

Alexandre Dumas:  The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo are my two favorites.  (I tried the later D'Artagnan stories, but... not that good.)  Anyway, we're having the time of our lives watching the new production of The Count of Monte Cristo on PBS.  Let's face facts, there's nothing like watching someone betrayed, abandoned, and almost destroyed rise from the ashes and work out complete revenge on all those who did them wrong.  

"All human wisdom is contained in these two words – Wait and Hope”

Ripped From the Headlines!

Chelsea, MI police looking for woman who donated a human skull at Goodwill

(LINK)  Possibilities:

1. She was tired of it lying around the house.
2. It was the last of her grandfather's belongings, and she didn't want it.
3. Someone gave it to her (I hope not for Valentine's Day).
4. She'd picked it up at the town dump / local bar / the back of an Uber.
5. Well, she had to get rid of it somewhere.  
6. Nobody knows.

Scientists Recreate What a Mummy's Voice Would Have Sounded Like

(He doesn't sound that enthusiastic to me, but he got his wish.)

Firefighters Rescue Swan in the Connecticut River  (Link)

"Crews also rescued a duck and a dog, but said saving the swan also gave them a valuable opportunity to train for future ice rescues."

Serial underwear thief at New Zealand school identified as...  (LINK)

"A serial thief who has been stealing items including towels, shoes and underwear from a New Zealand school for over a year was finally caught on camera and identified as a literal cat burglar."  As in meowy kind.  Nobody yet knows why the cat was enamored by objects smelling of sweat and a hint of chlorine.

Swimmer's lost prosthetic leg washes up 10 months later, 14 miles away  (LINK)

So... jealous mermaid?  A hoarding octopus?  A kinky surfer?  My favorite part is that it was found with the sock still on it...  

Texas big game hunter killed while stalking African Cape buffalo (Link)

I like to think of it as Animals 1: Humans 0.  

Australian Mushroom Murderer Finally Sentenced:   (LINK)

Mrs. Patterson, a 50-year-old mother of two, was sentenced in early September, weeks after she was convicted of killing three of her estranged husband's elderly relatives with poisonous mushrooms in a home-cooked meal. 

The menu:
"...individual portions of home-made beef Wellington, a steak dish wrapped in pastry, usually with a paste of finely chopped mushrooms. And, as Patterson herself acknowledged during the trial, that paste contained death cap mushrooms, which are among the most poisonous in the world." 

Also, Pro Tip:  If you're going to host a toxic meal, do not, I repeat do not, serve your portion on different tableware than that of your guests.  It raises suspicions.

An Upteenth Case of Child Porn in South Dakota

"James Allen Frank, a 36-year-old man from Spearfish, has been arrested for possession of child pornography, according to a ticket and probable cause affidavit obtained by KELOLAND News.  Frank’s address, listed on the court documents, matches the address listed on business filings for an unlicensed in-home child care center run by his wife...  The tip from NCMEC included three videos depicting the sexual content involving prepubescent and pubescent girls.  He has since been sentenced to eight years in prison."  (I would think this rated a little longer sentence, like... 20 years?)  (LINK)

Boxer Loses Hairpiece in the Ring.  (LINK)

Before:  

After:  

(NOTE:  The bout was eventually scrapped because he failed a drug test.)

From News of the Weird:  (Link)

"Shepherd Dieter Michler had no real answers for why 50 members of his flock split from the 500-sheep herd and made their way into a Penny supermarket in Burgsinn, Lower Franconia, Germany, on Jan. 5. Shoppers and employees quickly took to higher ground, climbing atop the conveyor belts of the checkout lanes to make way for the ovine interlopers, who left broken bottles, droppings and strewn products in their wake when they were eventually removed from the store. Michler told the Main-Post newspaper that he suspected the wandering sheep became distracted by acorns as he led the herd across the industrial area, and, after losing contact with the rest of the group, meandered into the store's parking lot."

"Skip Cunningham, 70, was asleep on his couch on Jan. 13 when a car crashed into his home and landed on him, WWNY-TV reported. "I woke up and blood running down my head and a car laying on top of me," Cunningham said. "The guy's running around saying, 'Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.' I says, 'Well, call 911.'" An ambulance took Cunningham to the hospital, where he got 13 staples in his head. But on the way, trying to play out his amazing "luck," he asked the ambulance driver to stop so he could buy a lottery ticket. "But they wouldn't stop," he said. Cunningham has lived in the house for 50 years and said cars have run into his home five times." 

Dear Skip, MOVE. Sincerely, Concerned.

And my favorite:

"Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into a Frog." Source

“The body cam software and the AI report writing software picked up on the movie that was playing in the background, which happened to be ‘The Princess and the Frog,'” police sergeant Rick Keel told the broadcaster, referring to Disney’s 2009 musical comedy. “That’s when we learned the importance of correcting these AI-generated reports.”  

Yeah, right...

"I got better."

Secret Mall Apartment and Other Dives

Okay, this is my new favorite documentary:

https://www.impawards.com/2025/secret_mall_apartment.html

Trailer here:  LINK

Available on Netflix

"In 2003, eight Rhode Islanders created a secret apartment inside a busy mall and lived there for four years, filming everything along the way. Far more than a prank, the secret apartment became a deeply meaningful place for all involved."

Ahem.  They were eight Rhode Island artists, led by Mike Townsend, who had been living and working in cheap slum housing (haven't we all...) all of which was knocked down and replaced by the Providence Place Mall and Marketplace.  To quote Townsend, 

"the only mantra they [the developers] have is if you see a space that’s underdeveloped, you have a God-given responsibility to develop it. And it was basically like having a complete stranger be like, “We’ve been thinking about it, and we think we want to knock your house down and make it a parking lot, if it’s cool with you.”"...

"Oh, our actual home? Oh, yeah, they [BLEEP] leveled that. They came in with bulldozers and cranes and knocked that sucker flat... I’m like, “Oh… Really? Game on.”"

Back when the Mall etc. was being built, Townsend had noticed "an accidental room–a remainder left over by the long division of the mall’s architecture" in the guts of the mall, only accessible by crawling up inside the walls of the mall. 

So... while their homes and studios were gone forever, this room, this underdeveloped space, was there, and no one knew about it but them.  After all, they had a God-given responsibility to develop it, and they did.  (Wait until you see how they moved the furniture in.)  

*****

Squatting is artful expression?  Sounds like a bunch of homeless trespassers

- Comment on a website about SMA.

I disagree.  

For one thing, Townsend's a hell of a good artist:  starting at 23:08 on the video are the sculptures he built in the tunnel under the railroad tracks (another hidden space) that are... haunting, to put it mildly. 

Secondly, while we live in a country that remembers with pride homesteaders and explorers, mountain men and hunters... there's no free space left to do any of that in.  Every scrap of land in this country is owned and controlled by somebody: private citizens, city/county/state/federal governments, Native American tribes, corporations.    

BTW, most farms in America are "family farms" - but as you can see, the top 4%(which earn $1 million+ and are structured like corporations) account for most of the production.  

And if you're homeless - OMG.  There's no place for the homeless to go, which gets hugely ironic when a city/corporate deal knocks down 32 acres of urban shops and housing to build a mall, without making any arrangements for relocating the people who used to live there. Oops! You're out! Good luck finding a new place to live! And how dare you hang around here and muck up our new upscale image?  

Similar stuff's happening here, too. The Sioux Falls City Council decided to build a Convention Center downtown, and in order to do that demolished the Sioux Falls Department of Social Services (DSS) building, moving it to a new, consolidated "One Stop" building way out on the perimeter, hard to get to for people who don't own a car and/or are disabled. 

Now the idea was that a Convention Center will bring in lots of revenue, decrease crime, and get rid of the pesky homeless who live on the river in the summer.  I find this hilarious, because conventions generally come with an increase of crime, especially prostitution, theft, assaults, DUIs, etc. After all, one of the major reasons people go to conventions is to get away from their home territory and let their hair down, not to mention their pants. Why do you think Grindr breaks down every time a convention hits a town? Look it up.  

And the idea that you can go out into the wilderness and live off the land - a favorite fantasy, BTW, of inmates and I don't blame them a bit – Well, you can't.  What wilderness? You can't even pull over to the side of the road in your car and crash out anymore, which is what my parents did when we used to travel cross country in the 1960s. Some law enforcement personnel is going to stop and ask you what you're doing and how intoxicated you are.  There is no more homesteading.  And even in the Alaskan wilderness, if you go out and build a cabin miles from anyone anywhere...  well, if the government finds it, they'll take it down.

Now let's talk rent: A 2 bedroom apartment in Providence, Rhode Island ran around $570+ in 1994, but then again, minimum wage was $4.25/hr = $170 a week = $680 a month.  That leaves $110 for food, clothing, utilities, etc.  Not much to actually live on, was it?  

Same when I was sharing a 4 bedroom house (old, with cockroaches, in what was basically a slum) with a bunch of artists in Atlanta back in 1973 - rent ran around $400 a month, while minimum wage was $1.60/hr = $64 a week = $256 a month.  You damn well better share to split the rent.  

BTW, we turned the place into a 6 bedroom simply by making every room except the bathroom, kitchen, and living room a bedroom.  Mine was the back porch, which had wrap-around windows and a gas space heater I lit with a match. I loved it - my sanctuary, where I wrote like a maniac, read like an opium addict, dreamed... oh, how I dreamed...  And with six of us (not to mention sleepovers), there was always someone available for talking, dreaming, drinking, laughing...   

So I'm all in favor of survival.  No one was using that room that was so well hidden that the mall administration and security guards themselves didn't know it was there. No harm, no foul in my book. Because if you're not born rich, you've got to be creative to stay alive in this world. 

Especially if you're becoming an artist. It takes a lot of work, obsession, talking, arguing, partying, debating, cooperating, and more work to get from the dream to the reality.  Every city has had and still has its neighborhood.  Some are more famous than others:  Left Bank!  Montmartre!  Greenwich Village!  Chelsea!  Florence!  Soho!  Tribeca!  Little Five Points!  And so many more.  

There's a reason Murger's Scènes de la vie de bohème of starving artists and their muses has been translated into dozens of languages, made into movies, operas, musicals, etc. Because right now, there are a group of artists in your city that are living in a run-down section of town, working crap jobs and staying up all night to do the work to become their dream... Whether in a slum or a house or a Secret Mall Apartment.

I hope you enjoy it. I sure did. Both the documentary, and in real life.