It’s Thanksgiving and I spent the morning helping Janna get on a Continental Airlines flight from Newark, New Jersey to Council Bluffs, Iowa via Omaha, Nebraska, so she can bury her father.
Continue reading → The Continental Airlines Bereavement Fare Scam
Are we required to join? Are we made to create? It is necessary for us to belong to someone other than ourselves?
What happens when we are carved from each other and caved in a culture from which there is no escape?
It has always been treacherous to be Black in America — and if you’re a Black Man in America — your chances for even average survival are slimmer than your White peers.
Continue reading → Crimes of Birth: Dying Black in the Urban Core
Handguns are made to kill people. We know this in our bones because of murders in Far Rockaway and Fulham and Orange and now, once again, in Newark. The bloodshed in New Jersey, spewed Gangland style, killed three kids and injured another on an abandoned schoolyard in a tonier part of Newark — where this sort of thing doesn’t happen — called Ivy Hill.
Orange, New Jersey Detective Kieran Shields was pronounced dead on Tuesday at University Hospital in Newark. A shotgun blast, aimed from above in an ambush-style slaying, penetrated his neck and shattered his collarbone just missing the protection of his bullet-proof vest.
Two Jersey City police officers, Shawn Carson and Robert Nguyen, were killed on Christmas night when they were called to the Lincoln Highway Bridge over the Hackensack River to help set up road flares to protect drivers from motoring off the middle of a unique “vertical-lift” bridge that had its safety features disabled by a truck crash two days earlier.
Repairs would take two weeks of intensive construction so during that time police officers were called in to shield the public from the dangers of the bridge as it was raised for boat traffic. Some call this kind of bridge an “elevator bridge” because the center of the bridge rises straight up into the sky to allow boat traffic to flow below. Maritime law requires preference be given to commerce boats over motorists. The bridge is raised only at the radio request of boats and not on a predictable schedule. There are no angled ramps to indicate the bridge deck is no longer fit for cars and trucks — the middle of the bridge just disappears up into thin air.
If you are female, which term do you prefer if you had to be labeled by one of these words: “Girl” or “Woman” or “Female” or doesn’t it matter?
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln I was educated, roughly and roundly, by certain forces in the English Department that one must never call a female a “girl” if she has had her period — how one determines if menstruation has happened or not was never explained — and the correct term for the rest of her life was “woman” but never “lady” because “lady” was an Olde Englishe synonym for “bitch.”
Ladies and gentlemen rightly translated to the modern ear, I was told, as Bitches and gentlemen and it was an unfortunate, but culturally accepted, put-down of women who fought to advance their self-worth beyond being seen merely as property.
If you could look at a similar Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Map of New Jersey counties that charts Chlamydia infections, you would see intensive clusters centered in urban centers and around major hospitals and few infections in wealthy counties.
Chlamydia is a curable sexually transmitted infection (STI), which is caused by bacteria called Chlamydia trachomatis. You can get genital chlamydial infection during oral, vaginal, or anal sexual contact with an infected partner.
It can cause serious problems in men and women, such as penile discharge and infertility respectively, as well as in newborn babies of infected mothers. Chlamydia is one of the most widespread bacterial STIs in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that more than 3 million people are infected each year.
With less than three months before the end of the year, here is an update on killings in Hudson County in New Jersey compared with numbers from Essex County in New Jersey and New York County in New York. All homicide rates are per 100,000:
I have been called a Pasty White Boy from Nebraska (my skin is so pale my friends tease me I actually look green) more often than I like and ever since I moved to the East Coast I have become, against my will, a Personal Information Servant.
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