The blood drive is 4 days away and we only have 12 spots left! If you have already signed up, thank you! If not, now is the time. Feel free to invite friends and family.
San Jose Fire Captain Ray Trevino needs our help. After years of donating blood, Captain Trevino is in urgent need of plasma to help support his treatment. Unfortunately, Captain Trevino’s blood type is rare, found in only about 5% of the general population.
San Jose Fire Fighters, IAFF Local 230, has been working hard to encourage blood donations and has asked us to support their blood drive this Saturday. Details are below:
Ray’s strength lies in his resilience and kindness. Now, it’s our turn to show our support. By donating blood, we can make a tangible difference in Ray’s recovery and countless other lives. Every drop counts!
For more information or questions about the blood drive, contact Brendan Buller at 415-378-6869.
Sincerely,
Ray Storms
President
| Assoc. of Retired San Jose Police Officers & Firefighters |
STAY CONNECTED
Association of Retired San Jose Police Officers & Firefighters | PO Box 28041 | San Jose, CA 95159-8041 US
When Mr. Ed was tired of working, he would simply walk off the set. The horse would only respond to his trainer, Lester Hilton, and ignored his co-stars. As a result, Hilton had to be present on set at all times, issuing commands either verbally or through hand signals. Mr. Ed’s voice was kept a well-guarded secret, but it was actually provided by Allan Lane, a former cowboy star.
This show was one of the rare television series to begin in syndication before being picked up by a major network. In an interview, Alan Young mentioned that his natural hair color was dark blond. However, in black-and-white film, his hair blended too much with Mr. Ed’s color. To make him stand out, the makeup artist had Connie Hines’ hairdresser dye his hair dark. Once the show ended, Young allowed his hair to return to its natural shade. The theme song was originally sung by Jay Livingston as a demo, with the intention of having a professional singer re-record it.
SAPEAKING OF MR. ED, REMINDS ME: President Joe Biden appeared in public Wednesday for the first time in three days, joining his wife Jill Biden for a day on the beach in Rehoboth, Delaware:
Secret Service agents provide security as US President Joe Biden walks to his vehicle after spending some time at the beach in Cape Henlopen State Park, in Lewes, Delaware, on August 28, 2024. (Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP)
1985: Fatal Police Shooting of Melvin Truss Sparked Public Outcry
By Ken Yeager
The fatal police shooting of Black teen Melvin Truss sparked public outcry as many called into question the conduct of the officer responsible for his death and the handling of the case by the grand jury, law enforcement and city officials.
SJPD’s version of events
On May 4, 1985, San Jose police officer Paul Ewing was on duty in the Street Crimes Unit, wearing civilian clothes and driving an unmarked police car. Around 6:45 pm, Ewing claimed he saw Melvin Truss dressed in women’s clothes and jewelry, soliciting drivers at Second and San Carlos streets, according to a city memo authored by San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara.
Truss approached Ewing’s car and asked if he was looking for a date, the memo continued. Ewing drove Truss first to a Highway 280 overpass, then to San Jose Bible College, and finally to Olinder School.
According to McNamara’s memo, Truss then began to act agitated and took a steak knife out of a rolled-up windbreaker on his lap, demanding Ewing’s money. Ewing said he distracted Truss and drew his .357 magnum service revolver, pointing it at Truss in hopes that he would retreat. As Truss came toward him, Ewing fired five rounds and jumped out of the car without any injuries.
Truss was transported to San Jose Hospital, where he died at 9:05 pm the same night, according to records from the Human Relations Commission of the County of Santa Clara. He was 17.
(It should be noted that Truss weighed 115 pounds while Ewing was 6’1″ and weighed 200 pounds.)
Public uproar followed as community members and Truss’s family disputed police accounts. While a police spokesman labelled Truss a “transvestite,” Our Paper reported that advocates denounced police for waging a slander campaign against Truss.
A community fights back
Family and friends knew Truss as a shy but polite kid, a fan of Michael Jackson, Metro reported. “Melvin was the kind of person anyone could read like a book. By that I mean he did not carry any false pretenses” said Sharon Youngblood in a statement to Santa Clara County’s Human Relations Commission. Youngblood, a business instructor at James Lick High School who knew Truss for over two years, also noted: “You could look into his eyes and read his ‘soul.’”
Constance Carpenter, a lawyer with the Attorneys Committee on Police Practices, pointed out to the Human Relations Commission that police attempted to find the rest of Truss’s set of steak knives but found no matches.
In addition, in an attempt to try to identify him as an armed robbery suspect, the police pulled 380 reports of armed robberies, grand thefts, and aggravated assaults in the city, Carpenter detailed: 66 cases were investigated further and none of the victims identified Truss as the suspect, according to Carpenter’s statement to the commission.
A grand jury voted in May 1985 not to indict Ewing for fatally shooting Truss. Ewing returned to regular duty.
After the grand jury result, Laura White, an aunt who helped raise Truss, told the Mercury News: “If this is allowed to stand, the people in San Jose and this society had better watch out. Because every month, these trigger-happy police officers who have taken the oath to preserve and protect are going to be dropping people in the street right and left.”
Despite calls for an independent citizens committee to investigate the shooting, in June 1985 the San Jose City Council voted against the proposal after nearly two hours of testimony from attorneys, friends of Truss, and several police officers. According to the Mercury News, one of Truss’ classmates testified that Truss would never hurt anyone, “especially someone older than him and a lot bigger than him.”
During the council meeting, police in full uniform lined the walls of city hall, opposing the proposed independent investigation, according to Metro reports. White was especially angered by Assistant Police Chief Stan Horton, who said Truss “died because of his lifestyle.”
The legacy of Truss’s death
“No one will ever know what really happened at the time of the shooting,” stated Ken Yeager, a spokesperson for BAYMEC, said at the time “But it isn’t difficult to imagine the circumstances that created the situation in the first place, nor the attitudes of the policeman involved. This is what we find very frightening.”
“Our focus now is to call attention to the fact that police in San Jose seem to believe anyone who might be Lesbian or Gay is a criminal or in the process of committing a crime, notably solicitation or prostitution,” said Wiggsy Sivertsen, BAYMEC’s vice-president. “The ramifications of this are enormous.”
Upon request from BAYMEC, the San Jose City Council approved a program in June 1985 through which San Jose police officers would receive training on gay and lesbian lifestyle. The move was met by opposition from the police, as reported in the Mercury News. The training was done by Sivertsen,
Responding to community concerns, the Santa Clara County Human Relations Commission held a public hearing in August 1985. Youngblood, an advisor for James Lick’s Black Student Union, recalled the time when Truss participated in the group’s fall fashion show.
“He was scared to death on that stage and it was written all over his face, but he knew it was for a worthwhile cause and it was exciting for him too,” Youngblood told the commission. “Melvin was not capable of violence.”
In 1989, a federal jury cleared officer Paul Ewing of violating Truss’ civil rights in a civil suit brought by Truss’s mother.
Hilarious! 1. When one door closes and another door opens, you are probably in prison.
2. To me, “drink responsibly” means don’t spill it.
3. Age 60 might be the new 40, but 9:00 pm is the new midnight.
4. It’s the start of a brand new day, and I’m off like a herd of turtles.
5. The older I get, the earlier it gets late.
6. When I say, “The other day,” I could be referring to any time between yesterday and 15 years ago.
7. I remember being able to get up without making sound effects.
8. I had my patience tested. I’m negative.
9. Remember, if you lose a sock in the dryer, it comes back as a Tupperware lid that doesn’t fit any of your containers.
10. If you’re sitting in public and a stranger takes the seat next to you, just stare straight ahead and say, “Did you bring the money?”
11. When you ask me what I am doing today, and I say “nothing,” it does not mean I am free. It means I am doing nothing.
12. I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days, but whatever.
13. I run like the winded.
14. I hate when a couple argues in public, and I missed the beginning and don’t know whose side I’m on.
15. When someone asks what I did over the weekend, I squint and ask, “Why, what did you hear?”
16. When you do squats, are your knees supposed to sound like a goat chewing on an aluminum can stuffed with celery?
17. I don’t mean to interrupt people. I just randomly remember things and get really excited.
18. When I ask for directions, please don’t use words like “east.”
19. Don’t bother walking a mile in my shoes. That would be boring. Spend 30 seconds in my head. That’ll freak you right out.
20. Sometimes, someone unexpected comes into your life out of nowhere, makes your heart race, and changes you forever. We call those people cops.
21. My luck is like a bald guy who just won a comb.”
This week’s 101-word tale is a silly yarn that was originally created two years ago. Since that time, my writing’s improved a bit (at least I hope it has). When I looked at the original version, I liked the concept but not the execution, so I opened up the hood, did quite a bit of tinkering, and came up with something I think works much better. Well, as you’ll see, it’s all a matter of taste.
Thanks to anonymous donor, SSC, who generously provided the prompt used to inspire the tale. I hope she doesn’t mind me only identifying her by her initials, right Mrs. Corn?
Without further delay, here’s the Story of the Week.
Meat the New Faith
In the heart of Vegas (a town not known for its churches) a new religion appeared. Its followers practiced “Baconian Theology.” They worshipped bacon. Naturally, their leaders were friars.
Since the Baconite religion was new, their sanctuary (The Church of the Sizzling Strip) often led to embarrassing misunderstandings. Tourists waving dollar bills stomped off, severely disappointed by not finding even a single stripper pole, although they often said no other church ever smelled this delicious.
The Baconites were even tolerant of non-believers, such as vegetarians who begrudgingly respected the carnivores.
As Baconite prophet Abra-ham wrote, “Everyone’s on the side of bacon.”
Novel News & Notes: Questionable Characters, the little novel that could (I hope), continues to chug along.
First, a mea culpa moment. Nobody (other than me) probably even knows that I had set a deadline for myself. I wanted to have my second draft finished by August 26th—of this year! That didn’t happen. Not even close. Instead of having a completed draft, I have zero pages of the next draft, but what I do have (I hope), is a very solid and detailed outline that will make writing the next draft not only easier, but structurally very sound. My upcoming editor meeting in a few weeks will determine that.
One of my recent happy discoveries was deciding to do everything I can to lean into an ever-increasing amount of tension in the third act. I know—that’s not a novel idea (pardon the pun), but the a-ha moment came when I decided to modify my use of chapters in the final scenes. Instead of keeping each chapter approximately the same size as they’ve been throughout the book, when it gets to the finale, I’m going to shrink each chapter down to a page or two, and each one will alternate between my protagonist and his partner. I have them in separate locations, each one discovering key pieces of evidence that lead to solving the case. Naturally, things are going to get more than a bit dicey as the runaway train hurtles toward a resolution neither one sees coming. Hopefully, the reader won’t either.
We’ll see.
Next week, I’ll fill you in on what’s in store as I get ready for the next part of the journey.
As always, thanks for listening.
Scotty out
STATE OF THE UNION
C’ya
Meme’s Best Friend: The Rise of ‘Doggo’
How a possibly-Australian bit of slang came to dominate your social media feeds.
hello hooman frens, i is an inturnet fee-nom. it is h*ckin cool. sory kittehsGetty Images
The only way to explain the reaction to Merriam-Webster’s year-end announcement that “doggo” was one of the dictionary’s “Words We’re Watching” is to use another colloquialism: Twitter lost its damn mind.
The announcement was also a recognition by Merriam that its original entry for “doggo”—defined as “in hiding—used chiefly in the phrase to lie doggo”—was out of step with its more current incarnation. “The nature of lexicography in general is that it always lags behind language, and that’s the case with doggo,” says Merriam-Webster associate editor Kory Stamper. “The real swell of the modern doggo wave came in 2016 and 2017 with the popularization of the WeRateDogs Twitter account.”
Actually, there’s a strong case to be made that the word originated in Australia. To start, doggo first gained traction on a Facebook group called Dogspotting, a 10-year-old community that became quite popular in Australia, says internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch.
“Australian English has this tendency to make cute pet-names, what’s known in the literature as hypocoristics,” McCulloch says. “Like ‘afternoon’ becomes ‘arvo,’ or ‘avocado’ becomes ‘avo,’ or John becomes ‘John-o’.”
Ben Bergen, a cognitive science professor at UC San Diego, also notes “the -o suffix is much more common in Australia and Great Britain. Like ‘boy-o’ or nicknames for people, like ‘Jim-o.’”
“It’s possible the [Australians on Dogspotting] were just using this slang and it caught on as an internet thing because people encountered it in the group,” McCulloch says.
McCulloch’s research on doggo led her further down under, to a 1966 document titled “Industrial and intellectual property in Australia, Volume 3” in which the word was referenced as an affectionate term for a dog. (Doggo as a term for dog also made an appearance in a 1994 novel set in Sydney called the Weston Men’s Tennis Club.)
But if the term has been around awhile, why did the internet just recently latch on to it?
The worldwide popularity of the terms “pupper” (red) and “doggo” (blue) since January 2004.
There are a couple of explanations for this. The first is that it was circumstantial, that the term happened to hit at a moment when the collective craved something cute. “I would say the term ‘doggo’ caught on because of the rise of the wholesome meme,” McCulloch says. “In the aftermath of the election, and even in 2016, there was this idea that the internet is becoming a more hostile or less friendly place. So here’s this kind of feel-good meme that’s becoming popular because no one can disagree with the fact that this doggo is cute.”
That would track with at least part of the reason M-W added it to its list. “There was no precipitating event that led to its being highlighted on the feature, though I’ll confess I’m a big fan of @dog_rates on Twitter,” Stamper says, “and it’s pretty likely the dog-picture sanity breaks I take while mired in defining work might have led to me thinking more about the word ‘doggo.’”
But McCulloch has another theory, one that often explains any shift in internet behavior: the rise of smartphones. “Back when I had a digital camera, first, I didn’t always have my digital camera on me. And, if I did, to get those photos off of the digital camera, I had to plug it into my computer, I had to find the cable, upload them, etc. And I wasn’t going to do that for someone else’s random dog!” she says.
“But now, you have a camera with you at all times that has internet connectivity and you can take photos of stuff in your environment and easily share them with people. And sometimes, those photos are of dogs.”
(The rise of the smartphone camera could also partially explain a longstanding internet trope: the early internet is for cats and the social internet is for dogs. Felines dominated when people could only upload pictures from their homes, where kittehs rule. But dogs, especially other people’s puppers, can be photographed and shared with Instagram or Facebook from almost anywhere.)
The question now is, will doggo stick around? WeRateDogs’ Nelson has seen a fall in the term’s popularity and has subsequently curtailed his own use of it. “I’d say within the past six months, I’ve started to use doggo a little bit less because it doesn’t invoke the same reaction that it once did.”
The term’s best chance of survival is its potential internet-to-IRL crossover appeal. “It definitely has all of the characteristics of a word that could very easily go from online to offline,” McCulloch says. “It started as an offline word; it’s very pronounceable; it doesn’t rely on punctuation or capitalization or any sort of typographical tricks to make it legible. And, anecdotally, people are less self-conscious about the kind of language they use to talk to their dogs, so they’re probably more willing to use slang or cute terms or affectionate terms. That being said, the sharper something rises, the sharper it can fall.”
Plus, in the pantheon of persistent palabras, a word like “selfie” had staying power because it defined a new cultural construct: the now-ubiquitous act of pointing a camera at yourself and snapping a pic. Doggo has the misfortune of competing in a crowded “marketplace of words,” Bergen notes. Synonyms, it would seem, are, ahem, a bitch.
1. When one door closes and another door opens, you are probably in prison.
