Jezebel post on LaVena

Reprised from the LaVena site: An email from a reader at Jezebel alerted me to today’s post there on LaVena Johnson.

This is Private First Class LaVena Johnson of Missouri. An honors student who nonetheless didn’t quite know what she wanted to do with her life, she enlisted in the Army right out of high school in 2003 and was sent to Iraq, where she died. When the Army returned her mutilated body to her grieving parents as a suicide, her dad, Dr. John Johnson said to himself and the Army coroner, “Somebody murdered my daughter and you picked the wrong person to fuck with.” Fucking right.

Megan Carpentier draws on the recent Salon post by Kate Harding, Tracey Barnett’s article in the New Zealand Herald, and the June 3rd story at St. Louis-based KMOV-TV.

Not reprised from the LaVena site: Regular readers (I do have a few) will recall that I am very fond of Nick Denton’s fine Gawker Media products. That the LaVena story was spotlighted by Jezebel warms my heart of hearts. When I called LaVena’s father today to tell him about the post, I read him the excepted paragraph, right down to the “fucking right.” Wherever you are, Megan Carpentier, thank you.

Midsomer Murders, dead tree style

When I last wrote about the wonderful Brit mystery series, Midsomer Murders, I barely remembered to mention that the show is based on novels by Caroline Graham, and that I intended to seek out some of the books for M. This has been done; my wife is now engaged in the print adventures of the estimable Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby. The novels on the shelf:

The Killings at Badger’s Drift (1987)

Death of a Hollow Man (1989)

Death in Disguise (1992)

Written in Blood (1994)

M is well-pleased with the Inspector Barnaby books. They naturally provide a somewhat different take on storylines with which she is already familiar through the TV show, but the wonderful characterizations found in the show are obviously drawn from the novels, which is healthy and neat. She is working on Book 4 right now, so I guess it’s incumbent on me to order up the remaining three novels.

Landis loses doping appeal

Sports Illustrated: Hardly a surprise, but certain to make Greg LeMond very happy.

Way to go out on a limb, Washington Post

WaPo: “Could?”

Beijing doesn’t much like protests

WaPo: Next time, the Chinese government will just roll out the 27th Army to quash the protest.

Diablo III

There was a time when news of a third installment in the Diablo franchise would have left me teary with gratitude. What time, precisely? Ten fucking years ago. Way to get around to it, Blizzard.

However: the gently animated image of the enigmatic angel Tyrael - silent and waiting on the D3 intro page - set a tremor in my heart. Of course.

Grumble. We’ll see.

Salon Broadsheet post on LaVena

Writer Kate Harding - founder of Shapely Prose, contributor to Shakesville and Fatshionista - posts today on Salon’s Broadsheet on the tragedy surrounding the death in Iraq of PFC LaVena Johnson.

Salon has published quite a bit about how American women in the military sometimes face more danger from their fellow soldiers than from their enemies, but the stories never seem to stop. And all too often, they go largely ignored by the media, as with the case of Pfc. LaVena Johnson.

In July 2005, 19-year-old Johnson became the first female soldier from Missouri to die in Iraq. She was found with a broken nose, black eye and loose teeth, acid burns on her genitals, presumably to eliminate DNA evidence of rape, a trail of blood leading away from her tent and a bullet hole in her head. Unbelievably, that’s not the most horrifying part of the story. Here’s what is: Army investigators ruled her death a suicide.

Harding draws parallels between LaVena’s little-heard story and the widely-known similar tragedy of Cpl. Pat Tillman’s death in Afghanistan. The post also draws upon Tracey Barnett’s story on LaVena which appeared this week in the New Zealand Herald.

I can’t thank Kate enough for bringing news of LaVena Johnson to the readership of Salon. Every article, every blog post, every mention of the Johnson family’s effort to prompt a new investigation of their daughter’s death brings us that much closer to some kind of justice.

New features added to Waveflux

It came to me recently that a dedicated contact page would serve blog readers (and me) much better than a simple mailto link. Contact pages are clear and terribly professional-looking, or so I’m told. Replacing a mail link also provides me with a bit of security; one less place where harvesters can scrape up my email address (even though I’d pretty well munged my address, it’s better to remove it altogether). After trying a couple of options, I decided on the richly-featured cforms II plugin from Oliver Siedel. Works well in testing. Access this page by clicking the Contact link at the top right of each page.

I finally got around to implementing a couple of features that came bundled with The Morning After, the excellent layout theme in use here: legible printing of posts is now available here, as is convenient emailing of same. These features may be accessed via the print and email icons located in the byline of each individual post. Thanks to Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan for the great plugins.

A brief word about accessibility: I chose the cforms contact page plugin in part because it allows for a text-based, question-and-answer challenge to weed out bot spammers, as opposed to an image verification challenge. This allows sight-impaired visitors to use the feature. Lester’s email plugin, quite fine in all other respects, uses image verification, which is obviously a barrier to the sight-impaired. I will ask Lester if it’s all possible to implement a text-based alternative.

I also added the traditional “previous” and “next” (think of them as “adjacent,” as I do) links to the end of each post.

And…I created a second slot under Highlighted on the home page so that the two most recent posts in the Highlighted subcategories - Consumed, Fluxed, Perused, Scribbled, and Viewed - would appear. One slot seemed like not enough; more than two seemed too many. So, ah, two.

Anything else? Some boring security stuff which wouldn’t interest you in the least, I’m sure.

I’ll close this with a brief public service announcement guised as irritating brag and boast: I upgrade WordPress each time a new version is made available. I perform the manual upgrade, which really isn’t hard at all. And I back up this weblog every day. These are habits that all bloggers should adopt, unless they really don’t like their blogs. Just sayin’.

More bombings, more deaths in Iraq

NY Times: Three US Marines and more than thirty Iraqis killed, eighty Iraqis wounded in two bomb attacks.

Off to Rome

St. Louis’ archconservative Archbishop Raymond Burke is moving up in the world and out of town. On the religion beat for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Tim Townsend reports that Burke has been appointed to head the Vatican’s supreme court. His modest new title: Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signature. As such, Burke will doubtless rule on matters of canon law with the same warm, human touch that has endeared him to so many here in St. Louis.

Patricia Rice, former religion writer for the P-D and now with the St. Louis Beacon, provides some background on Burke’s new position:

The Signatura is the court of last resort within the church, its Supreme Court. Its prefect is its administrator and something like a chief justice who has one vote along with the 20 other judges. Appointing an American to that post seems like common sense. Since 2002, many of the cases being appealed are brought by priests from the U.S., Ireland and Australia. They are men whose bishops want to laicize them - take away their rights of ministry - because of sexual abuse of minors. An English speaker who has seen how the scandal has ravaged the church and dispirited both the clergy and laity would have an advantage.

The post is an important Vatican desk job. Unless there is rare hullabaloo over a case the leader is not much in the public eye.

One big unanswered question: when Burke leaves, will he get to take with him the several souls he excommunicated in his brief tenure here, or will he be compelled to open the Mason jar on his nightstand and release them back into the wild?

Back at the P-D, social media director Kurt Greenbaum has set up a Talk of the Day blog post where readers can share the love on Burke.

Note: I had heard a rumor to this effect a month or so ago, from someone who shall go nameless here. Wasn’t sure how much weight to give it at the time. Now I know.

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