(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

On Friday, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed The Alabama Human Life Protection Act, another blatantly unconstitutional anti-choice law that even Ivey admits, in the statement accompanying her signing the law, is “unenforceable.” But it is going to be right there on the statute books waiting to be activated when the Supreme Court finally gets around to “letting the states handle it.” What made this interesting was that, the night before signing the Human Life Protection Act, Ivey allowed Alabama to execute someone who very likely had not committed the crime for which Alabama killed him. From Newsweek:



Prosecutors said Woods had "conspired" with Kerry Spencer to kill police officers Carlos Owen, Harley Chisholm III, and Charles Bennett when they arrived at a drug house in June 2004. But Spencer, who is on death row, said he shot the officers in self-defense after one officer pointed a gun at him and insisted that Woods had nothing to do with it. Under Alabama law, Woods was deemed an accomplice and convicted. Kimberly Chisholm Simmons, sister of Harley Chisholm, had pleaded with the Alabama governor to intervene and to allow more time for the courts to investigate evidence. She said in a statement, "I do not think that Nathaniel is guilty of murder. ...

My conscience will not let me live with this if he dies. I beg you to have mercy on him," criminal justice website The Appeal reported. Just before Thursday's execution, she told local investigative journalist Beth Shelburne in a phone conversation, "He did not kill my brother. This is so unjust. I don't understand.”



Nobody does. Not really.

We lost the great jazz pianist McCoy Tyner on Friday. While a magnificent musician in his own right—his left hand was a steam engine—Tyner made his deepest impression on me as part of John Coltrane’s great quartet. In fact, here they are playing something called..."Impressions."



RIP.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "I’m Gonna Take Care Of Your Dog" (Rosie Ledet): Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: In celebration of International Women’s Day, here’s what happened in 1913 when some suffragettes got fed up with Parliament. Arthur du Cros, whose “residence” got pretty well barbecued by the suffragettes, was quite the operator. He became the managing director of Dunlop, the tire company, in which capacity he regularly confused the company money with his own. Later, he paid off a woman who blackmailing King George V with proof of his father’s adultery. As a politician, he was pretty much the basic fin de siecle money-grubber. History is so cool.

As a longtime devotee of what is now called Star Trek: TOS, I gradually lost interest as the different iterations of the franchise rolled out. But Star Trek: Picard, the latest CBS streaming production, has brought me back in a big way. The hook was the Qowat Milat, an order of Romulan Warrior Nuns with whom Picard at some point became allies. I mean, really, Romulan Warrior Nuns! You can’t go wrong. And Picard has engaged the sworn loyalty of Elnor, the son of one of the Romulan Warrior Nuns. Some alien goon calls him, “Sister Boy.” He cuts off the dude’s head. Classic.



Is it a good day for dinosaur news, National Geographic? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!



The study, published last week in National Science Review, takes a close look at two juvenile skull bones from the hadrosaur Hypacrosaurus stebingeri, a plant-eating dinosaur that lived in what’s now Montana about 75 million years ago. Inside the tiny fossils, researchers can see what appear to be cells, some frozen in the process of dividing. Others contain darkened balls that look just like nuclei, the cellular structures that store DNA. And one cell even seems to contain dark, tangled coils that resemble chromosomes, the condensed strands of proteins and DNA that form during cell division.



Uh, oh.



Does the discovery mean we can sequence dino DNA? Not even close. The researchers haven’t tried extracting DNA from the fossil cells, so they haven’t confirmed whether the material is unaltered DNA or some kind of fossil byproduct of genetic material breaking down. Scientists also caution that if DNA is present within the dinosaur cells, it’s probably in tiny fragments, chemically altered, and tangled up with what was once protein.



Whew. That’s a relief. I’m not sure I want hadrosaurs raiding the bird feeders or the compost bin. I have enough trouble with squirrels. They lived then to make us happy now. Not sure I want to be that happy, though.



The Committee always likes Top Commenters who bring knowledge to the table, so it was very impressed by Top Commenter Wendy Belgard Hanawalt, who had something to add to the NYT’s weird story about Bernie Sanders and Burlington’s Russian sister city.



Stonehill College, a nice Catholic college in southern Massachusetts, had a reciprocal education program with Yaroslavl. No comrades there, for sure. I‘m not a big Bernie fan, but all this “commie” bs without, as you said, context, is just plain sloppy journalism, or worse. What’s the deal with the New York Times, anyway?



A question well worth asking, but well-nigh unanswerable for a few election cycles now. No matter, for getting Stonehill into the shebeen, WBH is awarded 91.11 Beckhams. Go Skyhawks!



I’ll be back on Monday as we all get psyched for the Battle of the Septuagenarians. This reminds me of the embarrassing brawl between old Laurence Olivier and old Gregory Peck in The Boys From Brazil. No, really, it does. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and keep the hadrosaurs out of the corn crib.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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