Sunday, February 28: The A.D.D. Detective
A MONTH of SUNDAYS
by Leigh Lundin
Some days you wonder what to write about. Last week’s article on Tom Dooley took forever to piece together and the week before that, I was dealing with neighborhood crime, dreadfully dull. Cops and criminals must be watching the Olympics because weird crime stories are thin. The truth is the last few weeks have been tough, testing stamina and cojones.
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And yet a couple of days ago, a reader wrote about visiting a new crime writing blog and praised how organized we are, mentioning JLW by name (actually initials). We set up compliments via IV drips to steady the ups and downs of blogging.
Collaborating with a colleague, I’ve been working on a three part series on rape and false rape reporting. The story necessitates my fellow writer reliving trauma and is taking time, though she was heroic and beat absolute monsters at their own game. If ‘monsters’ sounds like multiple males, that would be incorrect. But if things work out, the articles should see the light of day later this year.
Aww! Oww! Ohh! Ahh!
I occasionally drop in on an addictive web site that thrives on its lack of organization. Most of us visit YouTube or Hulu where videos are organized and easily searched. A funky web site called wimp.com takes the opposite approach: They store videos and when you click on NEXT or PREV, the only guarantee is you’re likely to find their offerings entertaining.
(Their sister site for (mostly) still images called dump.com has an animated GIF image of bombers blowing chaff I found interesting.)
Wimp.com contains none of the fancy graphics or sophisticated user interfaces, nor does it have the shock value, outrageousness, political belittling, outré sex, disturbing ridicule, or exploited animals seen on dozens of competitors. Instead, its videos may be funny, educational, silly, or simply curious, and they work out much better. Of interest to crime writers, the site has a typist who makes my keyboarding seem glacial and a British remake of the basketball passing experiment often used to demonstrate how poor eyewitnesses are.
Pick one of the links below watch, and then click PREV or NEXT. Most clips are short, but if your resistance is low, be prepared to waste a little bit of your day clicking to see what’s next.
Examples
Have a great week!
. . . a reader wrote about visiting a new crime writing blog and praised how organized we are, mentioning JLW by name (actually initials)
Thanks for passing that on, Leigh. I’m just living up to the motto of the Diction City Police Department: “To Serve and Correct.”
Cajones – a man’s testicles . . . What? As opposed to, say, a woman’s?
No, but as opposed to, say, a squirrel’s—-men aren’t the only animals that have testicles.
And is cajones where the slang term ‘jones’ comes from?
No. First of all, “jones” in a sexual context relates to the membrum virile and not to the testes, so there’s not a direct anatomical connection. But the term was originally drug-related rather than sexual, a synonym for an addict’s habit. From that, it came to mean a fixation, and from that, a compulsive desire, which in turn evolved into the sexual usage. As a verb, it originally meant to experience withdrawal. It first appeared in 1960s African-American slang, but its exact origin is unknown.
. . . the opposite approach: They store videos . . .
You obviously subscribe to the O’Connor School (see yesterday’s comments), but I still love you.
Lawrence Block used the word cajones as a clever clue in one of his Matt Scudder novels… EIGHT MILLION WAYS TO DIE, I think.
Gives a whole new meaning to keeping up with the Jones’s
By the way, it should be spelled “cojones”, and not “cajones”. The singular is cojón. Variants exist in other Romance languages than Spanish: coglione (Italian), couillon (French). They are all derived from the Latin coleus, which was “the obscene word for ‘testicle'” according to J. N. Adams’ The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Johns Hopkins, 1982).
Thanks Leigh for giving me one more reason to spend more time on the Internet. I tried the sites and now have bookmarked wimp.com and dump.com.
You’re welcome, Louis and Deborah. Thank you!
Spelling cojones right in the article and wrong in the information box reflected poorly on the Oxford Electronic Dictionary when it was my mistake and not theirs. For some reason, my Latin teacher never mentioned coleus in class unless it was under her breath. Thanks, James, that’s now patched.
But, are you saying squirrels don’t have cojones? Florida squirrels can tear the hell out of attics here.
I think I subscribe to the John Floyd school of colonoscopy. I bet he didn’t know he had a school.
You got real cojones, boy.
You know, in Texas anyway, we eat calf fries. Some call them mountain oysters. I suppose in reality they are cow cojones.
But, are you saying squirrels don’t have cojones?
No, I’m saying that the Oxford Electronic Dictionary says that squirrels don’t have cojones. Out here in California, the squirrels are all gangstas.
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