#IfIEverSeeZimmerman.

The trending hashtag.

Frankly, I think these are Twitter idiots who don't represent much of anything that real people are actually even thinking of trying to do. It's Saturday night, and the country is swamped with drunks. And a lot of the tweets with that hashtag are using it to say that it's stupid/evil.

Note: No one is rioting. I heard predictions that there would be riots, and I always thought these predictions were unseemly (if not actively racist). After the verdict was announced, CNN had a reporter in the crowd outside the courthouse, seemingly looking for angry black people to interview — and not finding any.

Verdict reached in the Zimmerman trial: Not guilty.

Watching now.

UPDATE: Not guilty.

ADDED: Earlier this evening, I went back over all of my posts on this case, because I wanted to check my work and see that I had been careful and consistent. Here's the first post. And I said a lot of what I wanted to say back on March 31, 2012, in this diavlog with Bob Wright — resisting the political exploitation and excessive emotion around the case:

"You vandal."

So reads the caption...



... under the fox painted on the pillar that holds up the highway...



... under which we passed as we biked the Capital City Trail today.

"If Zimmerman is convicted, there should not be inappropriate celebrations because a young man lost his life."

"If Zimmerman is not convicted, avoid violence because it only leads to more tragedies. Self-destruction is not the road to reconstruction."

Said Jesse Jackson, shedding some new light on the problem of exulting at a conviction. There's been much speculation — some of it stupid and ugly — about how Zimmerman's antagonists will react if he's acquitted. But think about how they'll react if he's found guilty. That could produce video that will be used to embarrass and attack those who pushed for the prosecution. It will be hard for people like Jackson to deal with the outcome they sought. I suspect that an acquittal will provide them with the better material for future political enterprises.

"3 Mammals That 'Choose' Their Babies’ Sex."

Yes, one of the 3 is the human being.

Interesting use of the word "choose." I assume that's intended to resonate with the right to choose, and the argument is something like: The vaal rhebok and the francois’ langur are doing it too, so we ought go all out with the sex-selection technology — abortions and all. Don't let the beasts get the jump on us!

We used to try to rise above the animals — they also "choose" infanticide and other murder — but that's been turned around. Now, we fuzzily yearn to emulate what we see in the natural world.

And by "see," I mean seeing what we want to see — typical human style. Any other animal indulging in our kind of see-what-you-want-to-see perceptions would have gone extinct long ago.

On the wings of giant ants, high above the 9th-floor rough-hewn floorboards, the first shall be last in order to be first again and other contra-Jesus notions.

"Rodriguez and the other bug mongers of San Juan offer their wares as 'pre-Hispanic' foods, a nod to the Aztecs, Mixtecs and other civilizations that flourished for millennia here on diets rich in grubs, grasshoppers and other edible invertebrates."

Insect-eating was long regarded with shame and disgust by elite Mexicans who viewed the practice as a vestige of rural backwardness. But bugs have crawled onto the menus of some of the country’s most celebrated eateries in recent years, as top chefs seek out esoteric regional ingredients for cuisine known as “alta mexicana” (high-end Mexican).

“These are foods that were eaten in pre-Hispanic times because there wasn’t meat, but now they’re seen as luxurious,” said Lesley Tellez, a food writer who leads tours of Mexico's markets and kitchens....

What is lowly will become lofty. What is lofty lowly. When the common people have beef and pork, the high-class people will pay $225 a pound for giant winged ants (chicatanas). When the masses of workers are sitting at desks, reading and writing, the literary writers will angst and relocate their elite enterprise onto the floor, back in that corner:

"Screw Your Standing Desk!"

Hey, that felt personal! Because I've been conspicuous with all the "Look at me at my standing desk."

So here's Ben Crair in The New Republic with his "sitter's manifesto." But he's not saying "screw your standing desk" to people like me who like our own standing desks. He's talking to the health engineers and government nannies who would take away other people's chairs and declare that henceforth all must work standing up. He says:

"We have become a world of squares."

David emails, answering my question "What has rectilinearity done to our minds?" (My question was based on an article about how modern life is beset by rectangles — buildings, rooms, tables, beds — unlike ancient human life which was full of circles.)

"Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining, and Other Affairs of Plain Living."

Subtitle of "The Foxfire Book," which was published in 1972, collecting the best of Foxfire magazine (which was famous enough to make me forever incapable of remembering the name of one of my internet browsers, Firefox).

I'm noticing the book this morning because it's one of the things that readers of this blog bought using my portal to Amazon (which is always at the top of the blog, in the banner).

"The market has this natural tendency to commoditize things. There’s no longer a face, a place, it’s just quinoa."

You have to understand why that's supposed to be a problem, and how people are scampering to fix it.

"We’re at this inflection point where we want people to know where their quinoa is coming from, and the consumer actually is willing to pay them a little more so they do put their kids through school."

"They" = Bolivian farmers, who after centuries of eating something that was just the only grain they could grow find the whole world clamoring for the stuff as if it's special.

There's a shortage now, but there's a glut coming, as farmers in other places — like Canada — start growing quinoa, using modern farming equipment. Will the Bolivan farmers update their farming methods? Or will their dealers succeed in convincing you that ancient Bolivian artisan-grown quinoa is worth twice as much?

"As protesters came to the Capitol building in Austin on Friday, bottles of urine and feces, and even tampons..."

"... were confiscated by state troopers as they tried to prevent anything from disrupting the debate."

Those attending the debate were searched, and any item that could potentially be thrown from the gallery, including tampons, were confiscated, according to the Washington Post.

A senator later stopped security officials confiscating tampons, calling the move 'bone headed.' However, Texas Department of Public Safety officers were reported to have found one jar suspected to contain urine, 18 jars suspected of holding feces and three jars suspected to contain paint.

The photos — at the link — of the protests over abortion restrictions look like the old 2011 Wisconsin protests. There was even the chanting of "Shame! Shame! Shame!"


Note how the word "suspected" is slipped into the text further down. [ADDED: It's not in the quote in the post title.] Are we to wonder what was in those jars? 18 of them makes it sound like a coordinated plan. Were the jars opened and sniffed?

Something has an off smell.

Getting there.

"Really? Really?"

Could someone make a video clipping together every time Mark O'Mara said "Really? Really?" sarcastically during his 3 hours of closing argument in the Zimmerman case today? The first "really?" got a high pitch, and the second one got a low pitch. An awful lot of argument was made in the form of stating some contention of the prosecutor's and then saying "Really? Really?" in a style that I would associate with an annoying 20-year-old woman. I'm waiting for middle-aged lawyers to adopt creaky voice.

"A kind of madness is pushing us to the future, in a good way."

"This is a book of the future, now. I didn’t know that until it was done. People say that this new generation is so used to the Internet that their heads are already different. They can’t read a book from beginning to end. That is not a tragedy. The book changes form.... It is short enough that you don’t have to think about reading a whole page, because there is no whole page."

Said Yoko Ono, promoting her new book "Acorn," which is like "Grapefruit," a book I think is quite wonderful.

"They went on to endure a violent rainsquall, stinging nettles that wrapped around their legs, and an agonizing five-hour wait..."

"... while John Franklin Riggs struggled against the tides and wicked currents in Tangier Sound to swim for help. There was also the sight of blue phosphorescent jellyfish, called sea combs, clinging to their hair and skin...."

"Frankly I had enjoyed the war."

Quote that ends "The best opening paragraph on Wikipedia."