Daily Archives: October 31, 2006

Sugar Land SWAT

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swat_icon_narrowweb__200x270.jpgAfter the questionable police conduct during the incident at Walter’s, I noticed this ABC-13 news blurb from last week, but have seen no follow-up news report since the incident:

A Sugar Land woman says police went too far when they burst into her home and arrested her boyfriend and son on drug charges. The raid left her dog dead and caused thousands of dollars in damage.
“It was bang, bang, bang, then there was a boom as they broke the door in, threw the fire grenade, and then shot the dog,” said homeowner Margot Allen. “This all happened in anywhere from five to fifteen seconds.”
That’s how Allen’s son and boyfriend describe what happened that day. Sugar Land police acted on a tip. They say they found traces of marijuana and cocaine in her trash after a month-long investigation.
“There’s no crack done in my house,” she said. “There’s occasional marijuana in my house. I don’t do it because I don’t happen to like it.”
Based on the evidence in the trash, a regional SWAT team arrived at the home. Police say they knocked, waited 30 seconds, and then broke in with guns and a concussion grenade. The house suffered $5,000 damage and one officer shot and killed Margot’s golden lab, Shadow, when police say it charged toward one of the officers. What did officers find inside?
“A joint half the size of my pinky fingernail and then one about this big,” she said, showing a length on her finger. “And not anywhere near this big around.”

Let’s see here. A SWAT team is deployed to a citizen’s house because “traces of marijuana and cocaine” were found in the trash after a month-long investigation? Then, the citizen’s house is heavily damaged and the citizen’s dog is killed in the process of arresting a couple of fellows who enjoy smoking a joint in their home? Although a couple of potheads do not generally evoke a great deal of sympathy, is this what the citizens of Sugar Land truly want from a new police growth industry?

Big Tuna’s World

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parcells.jpgIn this NY Sunday Times article, Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame profiles Dallas Cowboy Head Coach MisÈrables, Bill Parcells:

Right now he is living alone in what amounts to a hotel room in Irving, Tex., whose sole virtue is that it is a 10-minute drive to both the Cowboysí practice facility and Texas Stadium. Itís just him and whatever it is that keeps him in the game. For the longest time he pretended that he didnít need it. He walked out of two jobs without having another in hand, and he has played hard-to-get with N.F.L. owners more times than any coach in N.F.L. history. After he quit the Jets, in 1999, he said at a press conference: ìIíve coached my last football game. You can write that on your little chalkboard. This is it. Itís over.î Now, even as his job appears to be making him sick, he has abandoned the pose. ìAs you get older,î he says, pointing to a screen, where the play is frozen, ìyour needs diminish. They donít increase. They diminish. I need less money. I need less sex. But this ó this doesnít change.î
What this is, he canít ó or wonít ó specify. But when your life has been defined by the pressure of competition and your response to it, thereís a feeling you get, and itís hard to shake. You wake up each morning knowing the next game is all that matters. If you fail in it, nothing youíve done with your life counts. By your very nature you always have to start all over again, fresh. Itís an uncomfortable feeling, but itís nonetheless addictive. Even if you have millions in the bank and everyone around you tells you that youíre a success, you seek out that uncomfortable place. And if you donít, youíre on the wrong side of the thin curtain that separates Cyclone Hart from Vito Antuofermo. ìItís a cloistered, narrow existence that Iím not proud of,î says Parcells. ìI donít know whatís going on in the world. And I donít have time to find out. All I think about is football and winning. But hey ó î He sweeps his hand over his desk and points to the office that scarcely registers his presence. ìWhoís got it better than me?î

I’m convinced that a part of the fascination with Parcells is similar to the enchantment that some folks have in going to auto races in anticipation of a spectacular wreck — they just want to be there when he finally blows his stack. Based on Lewis’ article, it probably won’t be too much longer until Parcells does.

Calorie restriction and longevity

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weight scales.jpgAll the rage these days in longevity circles is calorie restriction, so this Julian Dibbell/New Yorker article reports on Dibbell’s two-month test on the the ultra-extreme Calorie Restriction Diet — an 1,800 calorie daily diet:

Iíve been starving for the past two months, actually, and thatís precisely what the party is about: My dinner guestsófive successful urban professionals who for years have subsisted on a caloric intake the average sub-Saharan African would find austereóhave been at it much, much longer, and Iíve invited them here to show me how itís done. They are master practitioners of Calorie Restriction, a diet whose central, radical premise is that the less you eat, the longer youíll live. Having taken this diet for a nine-week test drive, Iím hoping now for an up-close glimpse of what it means to go all the way. I want to find out what it looks, feels, and tastes like to commit to the ultimate in dietary trade-offs: a lifetime lived as close to the brink of starvation as your body can stand, in exchange for the promise of a life span longer than any human has ever known.
Seat belts, vaccines, clean tap water, and other modern miracles have dramatically boosted average life expectancies, to be sureóreducing annually the percentage of people who die before reaching the maximum life spanóbut CR alone demonstrably raises the maximum itself. In lab studies going back to the thirties, mice on severely limited diets have consistently lived as much as 50 percent longer than the oldest of their well-fed peersóthe rodent equivalent of a human life stretched past the age of 160. And it isnít just a mouse thing: Yeast cells, spiders, vinegar worms, rhesus monkeysóby now a veritable menagerie of species has been shown to benefit from CRís life-extending effects.

The WSJ chimes in with this article ($), which focuses on a group of scientists who are attempting to mimic calorie restriction’s antiaging effects with medicines. At the same time, this NY Times article reports on a Wisconsin-based research project that indicates that rhesus monkeys on a calorie restricted diet are much healthier than their counterparts that are eating a normal diet. Meanwhile, this NY Times article reports on a researcher’s work that indicates that the 65% or so of Americans who are overweight or obese got that way, in part, because they didnít realize how much they were eating.
After all this, please excuse me while I go get a gelato. ;^)