What Happens In Atlantic City, Stays… On The Front Page

According to the Atlantic County, New Jersey prosecutor it is better to intentionally beat your wife than to accidentally carry a firearm into the state. Something seems a little off with that logic. I don't know what but there is something that doesn't quite make sense. Oh, that's right, one is a crime and the other was an innocent mistake. But recent events have proven that delusional fact as the cases of Ray Rice and Shaneen Allen have caught the attention of the media and the public at large.

In the case of NFL running back, excuse me, former NFL running back, Ray Rice he was caught on camera knocking out his then fiancé, now wife, inside an elevator at a hotel in Atlantic City seven months ago. While most of this is fairly recent new, the case has, in fact, been going on for months. As it turns out, New Jersey Superior Court Judge Michael Donio and New Jersey District Attorney Jim McClain agreed to put him in a diversion program for 1st-time offenders to keep him out of jail. That’s right, he may not be playing in the NFL at the moment but he also isn’t sitting in a jail cell like he should be.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, the New Jersey judicial system hasn’t been as understanding with Shaneen Allen. From The Huffington Post (yes, the Huffington Post):

Allen, a mother of two from Philadelphia, was driving in New Jersey last fall when she was pulled over by a police officer. She informed the officer she had a handgun in her purse and a Pennsylvania license-to-carry permit, at which point the officer arrested her and charged her with a felony for unlawful possession of a weapon, because New Jersey does not recognize out-of-state gun permits.

Allen tried to avoid a trial and jail time by applying to a pre-trial intervention program in New Jersey for first-time offenders… But Atlantic County prosecutor Jim McClain, the same prosecutor who allowed Rice to avoid prosecution, denied Allen's application to the program…

Without question, she should have known the law but the dichotomy in the judicial system seems a bit out of whack. While one is a famous football player making millions of dollars and the other is a single mother trying to protect herself and her children, the same opportunity should be given to each of them. As it stands, the prosecutor and judge seem to think that gun owners, however innocent and naïve they may be, are flat out criminals who don’t deserve a second thought while a little boy (I can’t call him a man because of what he did) who knocks out his fiancé deserves a second chance.

I don’t remember reading about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of your wife into the elevator so you can beat the crap out of her”. Did I miss that passage? Was a recent amendment passed? However, I do recall the second amendment which many seem to have forgotten. Interesting how that works.

Technology Abuse

Growing up I remember playing Nintendo for hours. From Mario Brothers and Zelda to RBI Baseball and Golf, I played them all at one time or another. However, sometimes the game consul didn’t want to cooperate. Sometimes the color would be off, other times the screen would be fuzzy or only half read the data, and there were also times when it would just be a blank screen. Whenever one of these problems would occur, there were certain methods that would be used to fix the issues.

Some of them were very simple and gentle solutions like blowing the dust out of the game or making sure the game was in all the way. When those didn’t work things would get a little more aggressive which usually consisted of jamming the case above the game to hold it down, tapping the sides of the consul, and shaking out the game. When the issues persisted, the real aggression came out which usually ended up with the consul and game having the ever loving crap beaten out of it! Eventually, the Nintendo would succumb to the beating and give up, allowing us to play whatever game we wanted.

What ever happened to the technology you could beat the crap out of to make it work again?

This week that question kept running through my mind with the satisfying memories of slamming my fist into the Nintendo. It wasn’t really coming to mind earlier in the week with the snow, ice, power outages, and lack of internet. It was after all that when my email decided to be uncooperative and evaporate all correspondences since mid-November. In addition to the disappearance of my existence from the past three months, my computer did not want to talk to the server or let excel work properly forcing me to redo the same edits over and over again about three or four times.

It is amazing to think how limited you can be by technological difficulties. Even being sick and working at half the capacity of what I knew I could do, I wasn’t limited as much as when my computer turned against me. While I can fix many things I never experimented or had any desire to work on computers. Of course, I never had the patience for them either because when situations happen like this week is when they would need to be fixed but this is also when I wish I could just smack the crap out of the computer to make it work again.