Back up on my soapbox

I am a supporter of the death penalty.  So don't get me wrong when I go off on the media coverage of the execution of Saddam Hussein. 

My beef is this;  the difference between seeing people blown away, eaten by sharks, and sawed into little bits and pieces in the movies and seeing someone about to die for real on screen, big or little, is the emotion that humans feel.   I feel that Hussein deserved to die for his crimes.  I also feel that the U.S. is doing the death penalty a huge injustice by 1) delaying a death sentence for 6,10, or 20 years before carrying it out and 2) not allowing the general public to view it.    Then I turned on today's news. 

While the broadcasts I have seen stop short of actually showing Hussein hanging, MSNBC shows everything up until that exact moment.  That is some serious shit.  Then MSNBC gives a warning that they are about to show a picture of a dead Hussein and if you don't want to see it, look away.  The picture of him dead was NOTHING compared to the video of him about to die.  The warning should come before the process of the execution, not before the picture of a dead guy.  My reaction was definitely from the pre-execution and to a human being about to loose their life.  The picture of him dead was nothing.  If I, a proponent of the death penalty, had this reaction, then chances are this is going to play on the emotions of some of the American public who are going to turn around and say that he shouldn't have been executed.  Unable to separate feeling bad for a person who is about to die from the fact that they deserved it.  

I asked myself if I would have felt differently if it wasn't a hanging, but lethal injection.  I don't know for sure, but I think I might have.  Maybe because lethal injection sort of has the feel of a medical procedure rather than an execution.  If he was put to death via Guillotine, I would have probably felt the same as I did about the hanging.  Just seems barbaric.  I suppose that is the point though, right?  That is probably one of the reasons why the death pentaly in the U.S. isn't a deterrent.  

It's a tough call, I guess.  But in the mean time, how about if the U.S. started public caning?  Talk about a deterrent!  Hoo ah!

Scrubs, whales and Scrubs again

I am watching Scrubs again.  The best show on TV.  It reruns on TBS and I didn't watch it when it first came out so now it's all new to me.  But more about Scrubs later... A commercial came on just now that was for one of those new cell phones.  It had two people floating under the ocean and they were talking about the phone.  Then a woman floats up to them and says "nice phone" and this big honkin' whale swims down on her from above and eats her!  It completely freaked me out.  That was one f**ked up commerical.  I may have nightmares.

Back to Scrubs.  Best show on TV.  Yesterday I was watching an episode and Dr. Dorian (Zach Braff) was trying to diagnose a patient and he comes up with this diagnosis that is a remote disease that only people in the Congo get and has been eradicated since the late 18th century or something like that.  Dr. Cox's character starts on one of his truly priceless tirades about Dr. Dorian "looking for zebra's".  It was hysterical.  What made it even funnier was that when my brother was in medical school he told me a story about exactly that.  Med students, who have only learned enough to be dangerous, that come up with these remote diagnoses for people who have something simple and common.  But they are so eager to save the world and see something they learned about that they will look for "zebras" in a field of horses.

Reading it over, I realize that it looses a little something in the relay of the story.  But I don't care.  My blog.  Neener neener.

Goin' to the chapel...yo

Not me of course.  I would never go to the chapel for the purpose of getting married.  However, my oldest friend, Cindi, sure did.   I just returned from her wedding in NY.  It was really amazing.  A wedding right out of "The Sopranos".   Aside from the fact that the wedding took place on the first night of Hanukkah and was a full Catholic Mass ceremony which was ironic only to my Jewish ass, it was truly something wonderful.  For several reasons...

To begin with, I was a first time bridesmaid.  All kinds of cool stuff comes along with that.  We get to wear really beautiful dresses (although I am told that we lucked out and that most bridesmaid dresses are these lacy, poofy, taffeta numbers that no person who isn't a pre-op transexual would be caught dead in), we get to ride in the limo, just us girls and the bride!  Although the limo, in this case, was a stretch Ford Explorer, and we get to sit in the 'bride room' during the cocktail hour portion of the reception and get fed and liquored up by a private wait staff.  I tanked on Shirley Temple's.  Bring on the grenadene and marachino cherries!

If I forgot someone's name during the course of the week, all i had to do was shout out "Joey" "Tony" "Anthony" "Johnny" or "Bruno" and I was bound to be right.  Italian Catholic wedding.  Being that the wedding took place in my home town in NY, i found myself wondering on many occasions if I ever sounded like that when I spoke?  Ay yo. Yo ay.  I was laughing most of the time which was really great, and when I wasn't laughing, I was scarfing on the best Italian food in life. 

Overall the trip was a great success.  I suppose that this means I need to learn how to spell Cindi's new last name.  It's some Italian number that starts with an "M" and ends with an "i".  You'd think that since her and her now husband have been together for almost 8 years that I would have tried to figure that part out sooner.  Who knew?

Here are some pictures!