How unfair is it to use Enya to make jurors want to put a murderer to death?

The Supreme Court declines to hear 2 cases about "victim impact" evidence in death sentencing, and 3 Justices protest:

In the cases denied review on Monday, the evidence was composed of a 20-minute videotape in one case, and a 14-minute videotape in the other. In each case, the... 20-minute presentation included dozens of still photographs and video clips depicting the victim’s life, set to the music of recording star Enya, with a voice narration by the victim’s mother. The 14-minute display included 118 photographs of the murdered couple, with a narration by their children....

Justice Stevens described the videos as “a far cry from the written victim impact evidence at issue” in the Court’s two prior rulings on such evidence. “As these cases demonstrate, when victim impact evidence is enhanced with music, photographs, or video footage, the risk of unfair prejudice quickly becomes overwhelming."

Is it unfair to stoke emotions with Enya?

While the video tributes at issue in these cases contained moving portrayals of the lives of the victims, their primary, if not sole, effect was to rouse jurors’ sympathy for the victims and increase jurors’ antipathy for the capital defendants.”

The test, under the existing Supreme Court case law -- from Payne v. Tennessee -- is whether the evidence "is so unduly prejudicial that it renders the trial fundamentally unfair." What sort of music/video presentation would cause you to take leave of your senses?

"Space smells like a 'burned almond cookie.'"

Space blogger.

One night, [Anousheh Ansari] discovered her toes were bruised from gripping bars along the walls of the space station. She informed readers that she uses her big toe to hold herself in one place....

That's a news story about the blog. Here's the blog. Excerpt:

I looked out the window a lot and thought to myself, “I don’t know when I will see this view again.” I tried to play some of my favorite songs. This morning at breakfast I played “Only if you want to” by Enya. It energized me. Throughout the day I kept whistling “Somewhere over the Rainbow” and “My Favorite Things.”

I tried to focus on the positives… Tomorrow I will see my Husband after a long time… I miss him so much. It has been a hard six months for both of us… He is my soul mate. We had been inseparable up until this trip… He has been trying to be the strong tough guy who is the anchor of my life… but I know inside he has been burning up....

My trip is coming to an end but my dreams have just started....

Live long, prosper and be happy my friends…

Selling CDs, making lists, being too big to be snarky.

Amazon has made its own "Hall of Fame" for musicians, based on who's sold the most CDs on Amazon. Though the Beatles are number 1, some of the others in this list of 25 artists seem funnily out of place. Elvis is only number 25, bested by Van Morrison, Jimmy Buffet, Enya, Eva Cassidy, Josh Groban, Santana ... ah, I can't go on. I'll just say probably all the Elvis fans built their CD collections before 1995.

They've written a short blurb for each artist and they didn't bother to write these paragraphs in a distinctive, engaging style. It's all generic blather like: "Rock's truest iconoclast, [name] follows no trends and answers no commercial call." Guess who that is. If you do, it's only by chance.

But there's one exception: Enya, who's described as "[f]illing the studios of massage therapists around the globe."

Amazon: too big to be snarky -- except about Enya.