I’ve been enjoying reading fic written for this year’s SPNJ2BB when it caught my attention that this submission (A Little Bear and His Wolf) was accompanied by embroidered artwork by Meesasometimes. What followed was a brain implosion that derailed all other projects.
6. When did you get your first cell phone? What was it like? (Did it have a screen? Could you text? Was it a brick or flip?)
I got my first cellphone in… 1997. My ex’s work gave him 2 and so I got the other one. Most people I knew did not have cell phones. Instead, we relied on those little wallet-sized pagers with a ring repertoire of a newly hatched screech owl. My first cell was a Motorola. It was neither a brick nor a flip, but kind of an unnatural hybrid combo thereof:
Reception was for shit. It had a battery life of a gnat. And let me tell you, your conversations were short out of necessity. 2/3rds of it was battery. You could fry an egg on that thing if it was on for more than 20 minutes. You knew if someone had been on the phone because their ear was bright red.
15. Did you or your family own a Betamax?
I did not. By the time VHS/Betamax war was hot and heavy, I was already in college. My family were early computer adopters, but slow to adopt TV innovations.
My early computer history is more interesting. My dad is one of the original computer nerds. He bought a TRS-80 (Tandy-Radioshack 1980) one Xmas.
See those black slot-like accoutrements on the right side? They may look like floppy disk slots, but they are not. No. The only way to play a computer game was to get a BOOK and TYPE in the BASIC program LINE by LINE into the computer, and save it to a cassette recorder. One of these:
Now, I want you to imagine the tape slooooooowly unspooling as it loads your game into your computer’s memory and never ever complain about how slow your computer is ever again.
The upside is that you inevitably made typos when you were transcribing your 4 page computer game. So, you got good at programming in BASIC, too. It made coding incredibly accessible.
Imagine a day when college students were intimidated by computers. Let me repeat that: College students. Were intimidated. by computers. I taught advance stats and programming when I was in grad school. The very first thing I did on the first day of class was take the students all down to the computer lab and make them push random buttons until they had locked themselves up with errors… and then figure their way out of it. We had a lot of fun, and learned a lot about how the operating systems worked.
Civil Rights Attorneys Sue Ferguson Over ‘Debtors Prisons’ Joseph Shapiro In a new challenge to police practices in Ferguson, Mo., a group of civil rights lawyers is suing the city over the way people are jailed when they fail to pay fines for traffic tickets and other minor offenses. The lawsuit, filed Sunday night on the eve of the six-month anniversary of the police shooting of Michael Brown, alleges that the city violates the Constitution by jailing people without adequately considering whether they were indigent and, as a result, unable to pay. The suit is filed on behalf of 11 plaintiffs who say they were too poor to pay but were then jailed — sometimes for two weeks or more. NPR got an advance look at the lawsuit, filed by lawyers from Equal Justice Under Law, ArchCity Defenders and the Saint Louis University School of Law. It charges that Ferguson officials “have built a municipal scheme designed to brutalize, to punish, and to profit.” In 2013, Ferguson collected $2.6 million in court fines and fees, mainly on traffic violations and other low-level municipal offenses. That was the city’s second-largest source of income, or about 21 percent of its total budget. The lawsuit challenges the practice of jailing people when they can’t afford to pay those fines. When tickets go unpaid, people are summoned to court and usually offered a new payment plan. If they fail to show up or make the new payments, the city issues an arrest warrant. In 2013, Ferguson, a city with a population of 21,000, issued nearly 33,000 arrest warrants for unpaid traffic violations and other minor offenses. Many of those were for people who lived outside the city. READ MORE (and prepare to be filled with rage…)
If you think Ferguson is the only city this kind of injustice is occurring in, think again. It’s probably happening in your own city, if you live State-side. The criminal justice system has been increasingly criminalizing poverty over the last 3 decades, and with the boom of the private prison system, it’s only going to get worse. The time for action is now. More than just protesting, we have to start attacking the laws and policy that allows these miscarriages of justice to occur. #staywoke #farfromover
Upfront: I am passing white so my situation wasn’t nearly as bad. But I got a speeding ticket in bumfuck Texas ten years ago, 2 days after my insurance had lapsed due to non payment. The highway patrolman also pointed at a solitary orange cone and said I was in a construction zone so it came out to over $3k with all the multipliers. I was a waitress living paycheck to paycheck with no way to pay that. So I attended the trial date they set for me to try to contest the ticket.
At the courthouse I waited in line for an hour to have a judge tell me “nope you are at fault and since you still haven’t renewed your car insurance—” (with what money???) “you’re paying the ticket.”
Outside, I was ushered to a line at the cashier window. Once I got up there I explained myself to the woman. Said I wasn’t contesting that I was speeding and I know my insurance was lapsed because I couldn’t afford it but I had to use my car to get to work. So I was willing to pay the ticket off, but I told her I need some sort of payment plan.
She then told me there was no such thing, no payment options. You just had to pay in full. I argued that I know for a fact they have payment plans because I had driven friends and family to this very courthouse to make payments on tickets. Then she looked me over and said “you don’t look like someone on welfare, so you don’t qualify. You options are jail time or payment in full.” I was upset and nearly crying at that point. She told me I had 30 days to come up with the money or I would be arrested.
So of course I didn’t make $3000 in 30 days (remember I had to eat and pay bills and still get myself to and from work). If I knew how to make extra money that fast, I would have. And all my friends and family are broke. So I came in, turned myself in and served 3 days in jail. It was humiliating and degrading and yes, it was 100% because I was broke. It felt so wrong that I was literally being punished for being poor.
On one hand I feel relieved knowing I wasn’t alone in this, because at the time I did feel alone. I didn’t understand why some people were allowed to make payments and I wasn’t. And no one would talk to me or explain. But on the other hand, I got off easy. 3 days was nothing compared to what PoC have had to deal with. Classism alone is painful. But racism and classism together ruins lives every day.
Stewart, who has gone after politicians for eating pizza with a fork, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle and, perhaps most fiercely, the media, will step down later this year, NBC News confirms.
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Hearseeno 