Woody Ray Densen, a state district judge in Houston, was indicted on June 18 by a Harris County grand jury on a felony charge of criminal mischief after he was captured on video tampering with his next-door neighbor's car. According to the Houston Chronicle, Densen was recorded on a surveillance camera walking by his neighbor's 2006 Range Rover and making contact with the vehicle twice on May 23. The next-door neighbor, Adam Kleibert, discovered a series of scratches made by a key to the rear door of his vehicle. The damages totaled nearly $3,000, Kliebert said. Click here for the Houston Chronicle story, which includes the surveillance video allegedly showing Densen in the act. Check it out, LB readers; it's really pretty remarkable. (Hat tip: ABA Journal).
Of cities with 500,000 people or more, Baltimore reported the most homicides in 2008. With 234 homicides - 37 per 100,000 city residents - Maryland's largest city outpaced Detroit, which reported 33.8. Or did it? A Detroit News story claims that the Motor City's police department intentionally underreported its number of homicides. The story suggests that was intentional on the part of city officials. The article, which accuses Detroit police of an intentional “chronic undercounting” of homicides, pointed out that police there count murders differently than almost every other major city in the U.S.
Rather than report anything and everything that might classify as a homicide, Detroit police take a wait-and-see approach on killings that they think may have been accidents, suicides or acts of self-defense.
Most other cities--New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Philadelphia included--simply follow what the medical examiner says and reports them to the FBI as homicides. Detroit police dispute that method. “There's homicide and there's murder,” said Detroit Police Dep. Chief James Tolbert. “Now when the medical examiner still says it's a homicide and we go on about our investigation and (in the course of) our investigation we present documents to the prosecutor's office, they can say it's self-defense. It's ruled medically a homicide. But in the eyes of the prosecutor's office they will not charge anybody with this.” Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy disagrees with that approach. “It is very, very clear in the language,” Worthy said. “Lawful self-defense is still a homicide and it still has to be counted as a homicide and it still has to be reported to the FBI.” WSJ Law Blog June 18, 2009

OpenCongress Project Launches Project RaceTracker
"The RaceTracker project on the OpenCongress wiki tracks every election for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives and state governor. RaceTracker is a free, open-source, fully-referenced, and non-partisan public resource. It is coordinated by the crew at the SwingStateProject."

Monarchs of Britain—some surprises—there is a Danish Line and three different Plantagenet Lines http://www.britannia.com/history/h6f.html

Silent letters
Comb, climb, exhibit, hour, light, sign, scene

Q. What does the prefix hemi mean?
A. It is Greek for half. http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa052698.htm

There are dozens of words starting with hemi—you know about hemisphere. More unusual words are hemidemisemiquaver, a musical note having the time value of a sixty-fourth of a whole note---and hemistich, half a poetic line of verse.

The music for "On, Wisconsin!" was composed in 1909 by William T. Purdy with the idea of entering it in a Minnesota contest for the creation of a new university football song. Instead, Carl Beck persuaded him to dedicate the song to the University of Wisconsin football team, and Beck collaborated with the composer by writing the lyrics. The song was introduced at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in November 1909. It was later acclaimed by world-famous composer and bandmaster, John Philip Sousa, as the best college song he had ever heard. Lyrics more in keeping with the purposes of a state song were subsequently written in 1913 by J. S. Hubbard, editor of the Beloit Free Press, and Judge Charles D. Rosa. Hubbard and Rosa were among the delegates from many states convened in 1913 to commemorate the centennial of the Battle of Lake Erie. Inspired by the occasion, they provided new, more solemn, words to the already well-known university football song. Although "On, Wisconsin!" was widely recognized as Wisconsin's song, the state did not officially adopt it until 1959. Representative Harold W. Clemens discovered that Wisconsin was one of only 10 states without an official song. He introduced a bill to give the song the status he thought it deserved. On discovering that many different lyrics existed, an official text for the first verse was incorporated in Chapter 170, Laws of 1959, and it is contained in Section 1.10 of the statutes. http://www.50states.com/songs/wisconsin.htm

Find your state symbols and songs at: http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/
http://www.50states.com/ohio.htm

June 19 is the birthday of novelist Salman Rushdie, (books by this author) born in Bombay (now Mumbai), India (1947). He was born just two months before India gained independence from Great Britain. His family loved literature and oral storytelling. His grandfather was an esteemed poet who wrote in Urdu, the language of Pakistan. His father had studied world literature at Cambridge in England, and his mother, Rushdie says, was "the keeper of the family stories. She has a genius for family trees; forests of family trees grow in her head, and nobody else can possibly understand their complexity." He's never published the first novel he wrote, and calls it a failure. The first to be published was Grimus, in 1975, and though he got a nice advance for it, the book didn't sell well. He decided to use the money from the advance to travel in India, he said, "as cheaply as possible for as long as I could make the money last, and on that journey of fifteen-hour bus rides and humble hostelries [his next novel] Midnight's Children was born." After he completed the manuscript for Midnight's Children in 1979 and sent it to his editor, he learned that the first reader had reported after reading the thick manuscript: "The author should concentrate on short stories until he has mastered the novel form." But the second reader was more enthusiastic, and the book was published in 1981 to great acclaim. It won the Booker Prize and marked Rushdie as one of the most important fiction writers of his generation. The Writer’s Almanac