If you wash all your clothes at once, and you can’t put them all away neatly, you have too many.

Purge.

So Burning Man, for those out of the loop, is a week-long art festival held in a barren wasteland in Noonooland, Nevada every year.  Many think of it vaguely as a bunch of hippies running around naked and doing drugs.

It’s not a completely unfair characterization.  Instead of “hippie,” it’s more appropriate to say, “open-minded.” There are families and retirees, but most attendees are in their 20s to 40s.  Drug use was minimal and discreet.  The drug of choice was alcohol, and I didn’t see a single person overimbibe. The only drug I actually saw consumed was nitrous oxide, which is apparently legal there.  I smelled marijuana a couple of times, but a lot less than the average rock concert, and I never saw a joint or a bong.  I won’t say I was disappointed, but I was at least surprised by the lack of excess in this area.

Nudity, on the other hand, was there in abundance.  The uniform of a typical female attendee was boots, a comfortable thong, a silly hat, and lots of sunblock.  Not unlike a beach in Europe. Back here in Prudeland, America, that seems shocking, but it was so normal there that the women could all feel comfortable and didn’t feel like objects of ogling.  Refreshing and eye opening.

I’ve been delaying writing this post because there’s so much to be said.  I’ll post more over the next few days, talking about the sheer scale and logistics, the gift economy, the art, and the gestalt.

One interesting and unusual aspect of the trial was that the judge allowed the jurors to submit questions.  While a witness was being examined, we could write our own submissions.  After the main questioning was done, the judge and lawyers would take our little slips of paper into the back room, and some of them would be asked of the witness.

Sometimes it helped cover an obvious gap in the interrogation, and sometimes it cleared up something confusing.  In any case, it let the jury feel a little more in control of the process.  Pretty cool idea.

I always thought of questions after the witness left the stand.  Too late.

This was the first time I was ever selected to be in a jury.  In my past efforts, I either waited around all day without being called to a courtroom at all, or I was called as one of the 40 potential jurors, but not enough were called to get down to me.  Once, the DA withdrew all charges halfway through the jury selection process.  (Talk about wasting people’s time!)

The case was a DUI.  The defendant (who I’ll call “Hank,” just for fun) was driving home at 3AM and bumped into the car stopped in front of him at the stoplight.  (Minor damage to the Hank’s bumper, no damage to the other vehicle.)  The police were called to do an accident report, and the officer smelled alcohol on Hank’s breath.  Hank uses a cane, so the officer skipped most of the standard sobriety tests, but the PAS breathalyzer showed alcohol, so he arrested Hank and took him to the station.  There, they used the fancy Draeger breathalyzer, which showed .08% blood alcohol.

A slam dunk, mostly.  2 charges:  Driving Under the Influence, and driving with a .08% or higher blood alcohol content.  It seems to me that’s a lot like two charges for the same offense in this case, but whatever.

The defense:  The field breathalyzer was’t logged or tested properly.  The field report showed that Hank didn’t fail the walking and balance tests. (Since he’s disabled, he would fail them cold sober.) And the key:  Hank wears top and bottom dentures, which were not removed for the breath tests. The instructions for the devices say to remove foreign objects from the mouth, and it was admitted that objects in the mouth could absorb or trap alcohol, skewing the results.

The defense did a decent job of instilling doubt.  He called Hank to the stand mostly for the showy pulling out of the dentures that none of the officers had been aware of when they were administering the breathalyzers.  Alas, when the prosecutor asked Hank how much he’d had to drink, and when, Hank said, “Oh, I don’t know — three beers, four, maybe.  I don’t watch the time or count my drinks.”  Ouch!

That said, aside from the breathalyzer, the evicence of intoxication was really weak.  No slurred speech, no aggression or stupidity, no unusual balance issues, no red eyes or flushed face.

We debated for a while about whether the machines should be considered accurate, even though no tests had been done on it with denture wearers. We complained that the testing procedures for the machines tested the positive — does the machine correctly read a test bottle with 0.1% alcohol? — but never checks the negative — does the machine correctly read a test subject with 0.0% or 0.7% alcohol? There was little detail on the relation between breath alcohol (tested) and blood alcohol (inferred).

Hank had no chance whatsoever of a not guilty verdict.  Two of the women on the jury, it turns out, believe that if I have one sip of beer, wait two hours, and get behind the wheel, then I’m drinking and driving and should go to jail.  Period. Even if the breathalyzer reads 0.00%.  (The law says the driver must have the caution of a sober person, and they figure if I’m only 99.999% sober that’s not enough.)  The very presence of people on the jury with these extreme (and obviously wrong) attitudes made me go 12th angry man a bit, keeping us for hours extra trying to convince them that this interpretation was insane.

In the end, though, it wasn’t relevant, and we couldn’t conjure up enough doubt about the breathalyzer, and the stupid wreck (in addition to the breathalyzers) was enough to demonstrate alcohol influence.  The DA asked for him to be sentenced to a 48 hours of community service.

I did find it odd that we were instructed not to do any research on the law or evidence presented.  One juror even asked for a dictionary to look up the meaning of one of the words used in the trial, and the request was denied.  It’s difficult to see how willful ignorance can improve the accuracy of the results.

The defense attorney tried to get a study that showed that dentures can skew breathalyzer readings into evidence, but he was prevented from submitting it.  And my research (since verdict) tells me that if the lawyer mentions the fact that the correlation between breath alcohol and blood alcohol varies from person to person (sometimes substantially), he can be jailed.

Overall, I found being on a jury interesting and fun — though kind of time-consuming.

I’m on jury duty all week.  Whee.

I don’t mind jury duty, but it does bug me how little respect the government shows for the time and effort of the potential jurors.  “Please show up for ten hours, in which we will totally waste your time and do nothing.  Oh, and by the way, you’re not eligible for that whopping $15 per day stipend.”

I bet if the District Attorney had to pay potential jurors $2 an hour each out of his own budget, their time would be more efficiently used.

I’m from Alaska, and I know Sarah Palin a bit more than the average American.  She’s not perfect (who is?), but she’s probably the best governor Alaska has had in 30+ years.  She ran as an antidote to the horrible entrenched cronyism that Alaska politics had become, and she’s actually made a little headway there.  She’s popular in Alaska both among Republicans and Democrats.  She’s smart, charismatic, and hardworking.

Six months ago, I was considering suggesting her as Obama’s running mate. Her youth reinforces his “change” message, and her opposition to government as usual is a good thing. And picking a veep from the other party would lend immense credibility to claims of willingness to be post-partisan.

The deal-breaker was that she appears to be strongly anti-abortion, which is a no-go for democrats. I didn’t back then know that she advocates teaching creationism in schools.

I still reserve judgment on her.  I don’t find her complete lack of experience to be a massive problem. Nobody really has experience for the job of president, except somebody running for a second term — and that hasn’t proven too valuable recently.

While many on the right and left tout her super-Christian ideology, I’m not yet convinced about it. For me, that’s a positive. When she talks about teaching creationism or banning books, I hope she’s merely pandering to religious folks and not stating a deep appreciation of superstition and ignorance.  Pandering I forgive — all politicians must do it to a certain extent.

We won’t really know the answers to these questions until people, you know, get to ask her questions. I don’t blame her handlers for keeping her away from public scrutiny until she’s had a little training, but the election is in less than two months.  Shouldn’t we get to test her out a little before then?