Daily Archives: November 3, 2008

Stevens Juror: She Was Off Playin’ The Ponies (Audio)

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McClatchy Washington Bureau | 11/03/2008 | Stevens juror left for horse race, not her father’s funeral
WASHINGTON — Juror No. 4 in Sen. Ted Stevens’ federal corruption trial, otherwise known as Marian Hinnant, didn’t leave the trial to attend her father’s funeral in California, as she told the judge at the time.

Instead, Hinnant had a plane ticket to see the Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita Park near Los Angeles and didn’t want to miss it, she told the judge Monday. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan had ordered her to court to find out why she’d left town and lost contact with him, forcing him to replace her just hours before the jury found the Republican Alaska senator guilty last week.

“I just wanted to go to the Breeders’ Cup,” she told reporters outside the courthouse in a rambling and at times incoherent interview.

Rambling and incoherent is right; there’s a consistent “clop-clop” sound as people walk along with her to the nearby Metro stop in Washington DC. It sounds like they walked down the escalators (they’re often out of service, necessitating a long walk down several levels to the tracks). Late in the recording, you can hear the hollow, “wooooooooosh” of an approaching subway carriage. And at the end she says “you have a good day now” or something and the tape cuts off.

She’s an Avis customer service agent who sometimes works at the airport, sometimes works at Avis’ Union Station branch. It’s hard to hear and she contradicts herself a few times, saying at one point that Stevens was guilty, or not guilty and she didn’t say that, but then that he’s just as guilty as all other Congressmen. Then she goes on to include a number of other Presidents and politicians in her rant, including Reagan and Jimmy Carter.

She says in the recording that a former employer started the Breeder’s Cup in Santa Anita, CA, apparently John R. Gaines. He seems to have been very prominent in horse-racing but I wonder what the heck this lady’s connection with him and why she felt she had to mention his name as part of her “excuse.”

Her main argument is that she just really needed to be there, having bought plane tickets. It’s an odd, odd recording. No telling why she veers into a rambling discussion of how she wasn’t the one that took the marijuana or the drugs, but she denied being “on medication.”

Honest, there seems to be a massive disconnect between her ears, her brain, and her mouth. They seem to work independently of each other, at random intervals. It’s disturbing.

Oh, and she’s not the juror that was known for making loud or violent outbursts that made it difficult for the jurors to deliberate. That was apparently Juror No. 9.

A weird bit of trivia is that the current chairman of the Breeders’ Cup, William Farish Jr, was a former aide of George H.W. Bush’s. I guess at those rarefied levels, you’re not that far from the reins of power.

Teppanyaki Woo-Woo!

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Oh, yeah! PvPonline! I used to read the strip a lot more consistently. I should try and get that set up in Google Reader, I had it when I was reading via Bloglines.

This reminds me of a wacky experience we had at our favorite sushi-teppanyaki joint, Kampai (which is conveniently located close to O’Hare, visitors stranded at the airport!). They have a very large location, with the floaty-boat sushi bar at the left hand end (with its own entrance) and the steakhouse/”hibachi place” restaurant at the right hand. They actually had two full-size dining rooms on the main restaurant side, one of which has now been converted over to a more expensive “Asian Fusion” style restaurant. But about 3 or 4 years ago, my husband David and I managed to eat in both dining rooms in the same evening.

Our friend Steve wasn’t with us for this memorable dining experience; it’s kind of become legendary in the telling and re-telling in our small circle of friends and it’s hard to separate fact from embroidery. But the gist was this: we decided to eat on the steakhouse side and were seated in due course. The restaurant had just done a big remodel on that end of the eatery, and it was all freshly redecorated and repainted, with fancy new fans over each cooking surface to deal with all the smoke and vapors that result from doing stir-fry on big, flat, hot cooktops. There were even silk flowers wound around the brand-new fire retardant-spraying nozzles situated at each corner of each table-sized griddle – and there were probably 8 or more full-size tables in the main room, each seating 8 people.

All the tables were full that night, with chefs cutting and slicing and making salt shakers go clackety-clackety, and doing the flaming volcano/smoking choo-choo trick. They were clearly competing with each other, showing off to see who could get their volcanoes to flame up higher and higher. And that’s where the problem lay, because they weren’t used to the new smoke units. Just because they were actually “hoodless,” without a low-hanging flange around the fans, didn’t mean that the fire-detection sensors were thus farther away from the surface of the cooktops. No, the new units must have been more sensitive, to make up for the increased distance between the peak of each Onion Volcano and the intake grille of the smoke fan.

Fwoosh! Fwoosh! The crowd was loving it at each table as the flames reached eyebrow-endangering heights. Several tables were at roughly the same point in the meal, so there was some serious competition, and the guests were egging them on with shouts, laughter, and yes, people overdoing the jocularity and making with the “woo-woo!”

Which is when the fire alarm went off.

And then the fire-retardant foam sprayed out of the delicately flowered nozzles from the table at Ground Zero, and from several of the other nearby tables around it. It went all over partially sliced, diced, grilled food, including some sad little Onion Volcanoes. And all over the unfortunate chefs, and their guests. Oh, calamity!

We were a couple of tables away, toward the door, so our foam-nozzles never went off, and we were just going through the “fried rice” part where the chef does the tricks with the egg on his spatula.

Everything stopped and we waited to see what would happen next. Nobody ran for the exits or anything, there was just this crowd sound that was a combination of dismay (people whose food and clothing got doused) and hilarity (people whose food and clothing were unscathed).

The fire department came, made us move outside for formality’s sake (it was darn cold) and then waved us back in when they determined there was no fire, once the smoke cleared.

The amazing thing was that the restaurant had enough room in the secondary dining room (which they used for overflow or catered parties, I guess) for everyone to pick up their drinks and move in (although the heat wasn’t turned up and it was really cold at first). The crew brought out fresh set-ups for everybody’s dinner orders and within about 10 or 15 minutes of moving over, the chefs were starting everybody’s dinners. Everyone got free drinks in the meantime. The manager, rather than tearing his hair out and firing the flamebug(s) on the spot, remained calm and philosophical, even laughing at the absurdity of his situation, as he had a huge mess to deal with in his brand-new main dining room. It was all very organized and there was very little chaos.

Everyone left smiling and talking about the experience, and I’m sure lots of people told their friends about how the new dining room at Kampai got… “seasoned.” So they probably made up for it within a week or so. And every time we go back, we make with the “woo-woo” and watch to see how high the volcano flames go.

Condolences to the Families

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The narrative of this election moves me to tears sometimes, sometimes to open sobbing. No, I’m trying not to give in to the angstyness that’s sweeping the Democratic blogosphere. Now and then I just get blubby, because there’ve been a lot of really emotional highs and lows. A lot of news stories that make my moods swing constantly, like a weather vane pointing first east, then west.

There’s no story more moving than the news that Madelyn Dunham, Sen. Barack Obama’s grandmother, has died. It seems like it was bad enough when Studs Terkel passed, but I had really hoped that “Toot” would be spared long enough to see her grandson victorious. She worked so hard and upended her life to ensure that he had a stable home in Hawaii while he went to school, and she was so proud of him.

She wears a lei in Heaven tonight. The official statement from the family:

“It is with great sadness that we announce that our grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died peacefully after a battle with cancer. She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. She was proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and left this world with the knowledge that her impact on all of us was meaningful and enduring. Our debt to her is beyond measure.

“Our family wants to thank all of those who sent flowers, cards, well-wishes, and prayers during this difficult time. It brought our grandmother and us great comfort. Our grandmother was a private woman, and we will respect her wish for a small private ceremony to be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, we ask that you make a donation to any worthy organization in search of a cure for cancer.”

I totally lost it at the end of the day – the news broke during the normal Monday rush of calls and stuff to get done, but as I sat in the car after leaving the office, listening to NPR’s afternoon coverage, I just broke down into sobs (no, I wasn’t driving at the time).

How terrible a thing to be on the brink of winning the race, and to get this news? And to go out and make the stump speeches and carry on for one more interminable day of campaigning. It just breaks the heart.

And it’s sad that both our lllinois Senators have lost someone dear to them just before the election. First Durbin’s daughter Christine, and now this. It adds a sombre note that makes all the electioneering seem completely artificial and pointless.

Via Pam’s House Blend:: Obama’s Grandmother Has Died on the Eve of the Election