Dragnet - Single Episodes : Old Time Radio Researchers Group : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Dragnet - Single Episodes : Old Time Radio Researchers Group : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

An absolute classic, but with a much hard boiled edge that the television version with the same actors.   If the plot hadn't resolved in about 30 minutes they were probably going to shoot the suspect.

Gunsmoke - Single Episodes : Old Time Radio Researchers Group : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Gunsmoke - Single Episodes : Old Time Radio Researchers Group : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

An absolute classic.  Conrad's radio Marshall Dillon didn't mess around.  If there was no resolution to the story after about 50 minutes you cold figure the bad man was going to get show shortly.

Sherlock Holmes --> 125+ episodes, properly titled and tagged : smurfmeat : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Sherlock Holmes --> 125+ episodes, properly titled and tagged : smurfmeat : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

I really don't care for the written versions of these stories much.  Not sure why, and perhaps I would now (I last read them in my teens).  But the radio version is oddly amusing and captivating.

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar - Single Episodes : Old Time Radio Researchers Group : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar - Single Episodes : Old Time Radio Researchers Group : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

One of my favorite old radio shows, I picked up a fondness for it traveling for work.  It follows the investigations of hard boiled insurance investigator Johnny Dollar, "The man with the action packed expense account."

Cheesy, but addictive.

25 greatest law novels…ever! - ABA Journal

25 greatest law novels…ever! - ABA Journal

Interesting  list.  Some of these I wouldn't have considered law novels.  Given that, I suppose, I'm actually surprised to see that I've read a few of them. For example, I love the novel The Ox Bow Incident, but I wouldn't have considered it to be a legal novel.  I guess it is, however, given that its central them is the nature of justice.

The Caine Mutiny is another great one.  I read that one many years ago after having seen the movie numerous times and the filed version of the play (which is also great). To Kill A Mockingbird is as well, but I likewise wouldn't have thought of it as a legal drama, even though I can see why many do.

Bartleby the Scrivner, on the other hand, I hated.   I know its supposed to be a classic, but I don't like it.

I've never read Anatomy of a Murder, but I've always thought the film is the single best legal drama ever filmed. Really great.  And I've often commented that it must have been written by a lawyer, which I see it actually was.  I'm surprised, however, that the lawyer was a judge, but that must explain why the judge really steals the show in the film.

Today In Wyoming's History: July 30

Today In Wyoming's History: July 30:


1918. Poet Joyce Kilmer, U.S. Army sergeant, killed in France.

TREES

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree .

 

Holscher's Hub: Yours faithfully, P. M. Wickham

Holscher's Hub: Yours faithfully, P. M. Wickham:

My great grandfather, Patrick Martin Wickham, in 1897.

Ipad?

Does anyone here have an Ipad, and if you do, what do you use it for?

I keep seeing them in the hands of lawyers and other businessmen, but I'm not sure why.

Today In Wyoming's History: July 25 The Bannock War.

Today In Wyoming's History: July 25:

1895 Bannock Indians surround 250 settlers in Jackson Hole but are dispersed by the 9th Cavalry.  This was part of the Bannock War of 1895, which was spared by the State of Wyoming prohibiting the killing of elk for their teeth and the subsequent arrest of several Bannock hunters that year.

Bannock Indians in Jackson's Hole by Frederic Remington.

What an amazingly late Indian War.  And frankly, I wasn't even really familiar with the Bannocks being in Wyoming.

Horse Trailer

Horse Trailer:

An example of what they once looked like, although this one been in a pretty bad wreck.

Today In Wyoming's History: The British in Wyoming

Today In Wyoming's History: The British in Wyoming: Some time ago I did an entry here on the Irish in Wyoming , which has turned out to be one of the most popular threads on the blog.  People...

British Royal Baby Name Watch: Æthelred the Unready

Right now, the American press is camping outside the hospital in the UK where the "royal baby" is in residence, in part waiting for the announcement of what he'll be named. British bookies (the British bet on everything) are taking bets on that topic.

It seems that the royal baby is always given a name of a prior British monarch. That's fine with me, but I think this go around they ought to reach back and get a nifty one from antiquity. Which is why I'm backing a name rich with English history: 

Æthelred.

Now that's a good Saxon name.

It hasn't been used since 1016, in part because the last monarch named that was, well, unready. Also, the Normans came in and spoiled the whole thing just 50 years later and everybody started getting much blander names, like William or Henry.

Enough already.  Let's go back to the monarchy's beginnings, even if the current occupants of the English throne descend from Germans who didn't have anything better to do when the English tossed out one of the occupants of that position.  Time to bring back 

Æthelred.

The British Royal News: Why?

I know that Prince William and Princess Kate having a baby is some sort of news, but can anyone explain to me why it is receiving the same level of news attention that Neal Armstrong landing on the moon, or the Fall of Baghdad gets, at least here in the US?

I get that it impacts the line of succession of the British royal throne, but why do Americans care. Didn't we reject all that gold plated plush silliness in 1776? 

And it isn't as if they're the only monarchy still around.  Sweden, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands all have European royal families who retain thrones.  At least France, Spain and Greece still have royals who can be identified, even though their countries aren't constitutional monarchies.  Even the Russian imperial line has identifiable descendants, in spite of the disaster of the Russian Revolution.  Jordon and Saudi Arabia have monarchies that actually rule, if people like to observe that sort of thing.  Japan's imperial crown has been occupied by the same family for much, much longer than the English throne has.  Indeed, England has a pretty pronounced history of having booted royal families out, or having their lines die out, and whatnot so that the current group of monarchs, who descend from a family imported from Germany, haven't really been on the throne all that long, in historical terms.

Maybe its just television, which likes big flashy shows, which most European monarchies seem to have grown out of, but the whole thing is a mystery to me.  They aren't, after all, our kings and queens. 

A Natrona County Homestead

A Natrona County Homestead:

I'm not sure of the vintage of this one, but it was occupied for a long time, probably as late as the 1970s.

The Oregon Trail in Converse County.

Above is an Oregon Trail marker, placed in 1913, south of Douglas Wyoming. The Oregon Trail itself is visible directly behind it, being the strip of green sagebrush that's grown up over it in the prairie.

The white marker on the top of the hill is a marker used to mark the course of the trail.

 

 Looking down on the trail.

 The trail is visible in this photo, across the highway, where it goes up the side of a hill.

Erosion in the path of the trail.

An Albany County High Country Homestead

An Albany County High Country Homestead: 

 Note the horses in the abandoned barn.

This homestead is clearly a 20th Century homestead, and quite near the one pictured in the thread immediately below.  It has a surprising number of outbuildings, so the ranch that was headquartered here must have employed some cowboys in addition to employing the rancher and his family.

Both of the homestead pictured in these two thread are quite high altitude, and were probably late homesteads.

A 1910 Homestead

A 1910 Homestead:

A high country homestead in the Laramie Range, in Albany County.  A  sign indicates that the homestead was filed in 1910, which would explain the high altitude nature of the homestead.  This one must have been occupied until fairly recently, and might still be during part of the year, given the modern plate steel sign.  At least one of the outbuildings appears to probably date from at least as recently as the 1950s.

Contempt of Court

I don't follow the news of criminal trials, or even civil trials, that occur outside of the local area.  I suspect that's surprisingly common for lawyers.  You work at law all day, so you probably don't enjoy the shallow news accounts that the media provides on these events elsewhere.  But, like everyone else, I did pick up a bit of the recent Florida v. Zimmerman trial.

I don't know that there's a really newsworthy story in this trial, other than to the extent that the news media and fractionalism made one.  From the very beginning, the story was basically about a person who exercised the ancient doctrine of self defense against a perceived threat. The right to defend your person is an ancient legal one.  English Common Law always recognized it, and Roman Law also did.  And it happens more often than we might suppose.

The only reason that this story hit the press in the first place is that Florida has a "Stand Your Ground" law, Zimmerman was carrying a concealed firearm, and the decedent was a black teenager.  In other words, the story was tailor made to be misconstrued.  From the onset the subtle theme was that Treyvon Martin was shot because he was a black teenager wearing a hoody, and Zimmerman was a while racist taking advantage of Florida's laws on carrying firearms (which the media hates) and Florida's Stand Your Ground laws (which the media hates) to commit a murder.

There was never any evidence of that story to start with, and even those witnesses sympathetic to a conviction of Zimmerman really didn't support it. Zimmerman, to start with, turns out to be ethnically Hispanic, so in the terms of the slippery fictional definitions of race, he isn't "white" by ethnicity.  There wasn't anything to suggest he targeted Martin because he was black teen as much as it seemed that Martin was in the neighborhood in odd conditions.  There's no evidence of which I'm aware that Martin was in the neighborhood for nefarious purposes, and I'm not suggesting that he was, but apparently there's some evidence that Martin misinterpreted Zimmerman as a homosexual predator and may have doubled back to assault him in some sort of misguided proactive effort to keep him from following him home.

A person, at least in most places, is generally entitled to defend yourself, even up to the point of using deadly force if necessary (but only if necessary) in order to keep yourself from serious bodily harm. That's been very modified here and there over the eons, and it's not a safe assumption anywhere.  It probably never was really a safe assumption anywhere.  But the evidence to charge Zimmerman was wholly lacking, and it shouldn't have occurred.

Indeed, the original prosecutor wouldn't charge him, and somebody else was brought in who did largely as a result of political pressure.  

That Zimmerman was acquitted under these circumstances is s stunning triumph of justice.  I can be pretty cynical about such things, but in this instance, the jury system worked perfectly.  For those who argue about t he jury system being the best protection for the innocent, this case is a modern shining example.  The verdict will be unpopular and criticized and came in a politicized and racially charged atmosphere. That the system worked is absolutely stunning.

That the charge was made in the first place, however, and that such contempt is being shown for the verdict, should be worrisome in the extreme.  The charges fit into a worrisome and developing class of political charges on crimes that should not be prosecuted or shouldn't even exist.  This harkens back to Athenian democracy when individuals could be condemned to death just because the crowed could vote to do it, and in modern terms, we should begin to pause when we criticize the mob in Cairo, as we're beginning to heed the mob in our streets as well.  The mob knows nothing of the law, and acts on emotion.  Here, the mob did, and is, acting on emotion.  In recent years we've seen businessmen and politicians similarly charged with crimes, and often convicted, partially on the basis that their actions were unpopular, which is not a crime or shouldn't be.

And the ongoing criticism is appalling.  Justice Holder even opined that Stand Your Ground laws should be repealed, when he should well know that this event should have come out with the same verdict under the Common Law.  Shame on you, Holder.  And to suggest, as is now being done, that Zimmerman should be now prosecuted for a Civil Rights violation is absurd.

The entire event is a tragedy. But to suggest we toss out the law in order to make a social justice point does violence to the very concept of social justice, and is a disturbing trend indeed.

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

A Man for all Seasons, by Thomas Bolt.

USDA Blog » Digitizing Our Agricultural History; 77 Years of Annual Statistics Now Online

USDA Blog » Digitizing Our Agricultural History; 77 Years of Annual Statistics Now Online

Wyoming Roundup: More than Meets the Eye: I-80 Has Many Worthy Stop...

Wyoming Roundup: More than Meets the Eye: I-80 Has Many Worthy Stop...: By Dina Mishev I loved most everything about Wyoming from the moment I moved to the state nearly 20 years ago. With the exception of I-80....