Reprise of "Jury Duty – A nun, a security guard, and a writer walk into a jury room"

I'm going to write a detailed book review that I'll try to submit to a magazine. In the meanwhile, here is a reprise of a previous post. The only thing that needs correcting is that the underground tunnel no longer has buses go through, only light rail. 

NZ if you're out there, if you find the web version of this, you'll see a contact form on the right. 

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So I was on jury duty for the past two days. Here’s a hint: bring plenty to read and/or a laptop. It mainly consists of sitting around, waiting to see if you’ll be called in to be part of a jury pool. But first, let’s look at the scenery. First a friendly picture, then a scary one.

The tunnel also handles light rail

which accounts for the tracks

A Metro bus went from near my home all the way into the Seattle underground bus tunnel, where there was a stop right below the courthouse. After climbing the stairs (or using the elevator) one emerged with the King County Courthouse less than half a block away. That was handy today, since it was raining.

Now look at the structure below. Does it look like a huge rectangular block is connecting two tall buildings? You’re right. It’s a skybridge, but with no windows. It goes from the courthouse on the right, beyond the building on the left, and ends at the County Jail one building beyond. This is like Con Air, but without the planes. Prisoners can be frogmarched back and forth without using squad cars. This saves time, since downtown traffic can be bad, but it also prevents the prisoners from escaping during laborious loading and unloading from vehicles. If something bad happens in the skybridge, massive steel doors can be slammed shut, trapping the prisoner inside.

Why so serious?

If this doesn’t make you imagine interesting scenes, maybe you shouldn’t try being a writer.

Here’s Seattle City Hall, about a block from the Courthouse. It really looks beautiful during sunny weather, and sometimes they have people selling fresh produce—an offshoot of the famous Pike’s Place Market. Alas, it’s December, so the only noteworthy thing was me taking pictures.

Just beyond it is the Columbia Tower. It’s the tallest building in the state of Washington. It has numerous little restaurants on the first floor, so if you do jury duty in Seattle, I highly recommend it for a fast lunch. I had a nice turkey pot pie at JJ’s Gourmet Burgers.

I call it the Dark Tower

Guess why

So on to jury duty itself. Something like a hundred and forty of us waited around to see if we would be called to a jury pool. The waiting can take hours at a time, so I got a start on a new novel on my laptop (I won’t reveal the title yet). Then forty of us get called in to a jury pool. The lawyers take turns asking us questions to see if we’re biased.

On the way in, the potential juror in front of me recognized someone who happened to be sitting on a bench outside the courtroom. They were so jovial about being in the Courthouse I thought, “Oh great, they’re fellow criminals.” But after he sat down to the right of me in the jury pool, it turned out he was a security guard. They can be asked in a lot to be witnesses to altercations, so his friend waiting outside the court was probably also in security. I felt better.

As the lawyers tried to weed out biased people, they asked questions that didn’t apply to me, such as whether any of us had ever been shot at, would we use a gun in self defense, whether we had bad experiences with police officers. You can probably guess at some of the arguments they were preparing for trial by these questions.

A woman behind me said in a soft voice that she could not imagine using a gun under any circumstances, even if someone was shooting at her. Based on short bios we had filled out on ourselves, the defense lawyer asked her if she was a nun. I wondered what he meant, then he went on to say that he had trouble recognizing her as a nun, since she wasn’t wearing a habit. This was somewhat ironic, since I had watched the stage musical version of The Sound of Music last week and had just ordered the soundtrack.

Based on the answers to the questions, each attorney is allowed to excuse a certain amount of jurors, each hoping to end up with a jury beneficial to his side of the case. Enough people before me were excused that I ended up in the top twelve. Then, even though I replied to none of these general questions, the prosecuting attorney decided to excuse me from jury duty. That puzzled me until I guessed that he wanted the security guard to be on the jury, thinking he would be more likely to convict the defendant. I didn’t see him afterwards in the jury waiting room, so I think he stayed on and became part of the jury for the trial. 

As a last note, in the waiting room for potential jurors, I saw what I thought was a whiteboard for people to write on. It turned out to be some sort of art. If you see some rectangles on the lower left and some blotches of color in the upper right, you’re correct.

I still don’t see why I can’t write on it

There was another piece of art that was simply a photo of a door slightly ajar. Really, that was all there was to it. I wanted to take a picture of it, but since it’s near the entrance to the ladies’ room, I thought would get accused of being a pervert trying to take pictures of women inside. In that case I would have stayed longer in the King County Courthouse, but not as a juror. 

Iced Tea

Yesterday in my part of the Seattle area, the high was 22 degrees. We are not used to that sort of temperature in these parts.

I forgot my McD’s ice tea in my car overnight. This is what it looked like today, near noon.

Eclipse of the Sun in Seattle

I live in the Seattle area, and I was surprised that most of the people I told that there would be an eclipse today didn’t know about it. I used my NASA-approved dark plastic lenses to watch. It started out looking like a chunk had been taken out of the sun. At the maximum, 95% of the sun was covered. I definitely felt the wind pick up, since the decrease of heat in our area of the atmosphere caused unequal air pressures.

I tried a few times to get a picture, but my phone would just show a bright blur of light—that’s how bright the sun is, even during a partial eclipse. I finally got a picture. But it looked impossible. The eclipse was reversed! How could that happen?

I first thought the phone had somehow picked up a reflection of the dark lenses I was using. But the camera was aimed away from me, at the sun.

I finally realized it was some internal reflection inside the camera, caused by the brightness of the sun. The blur in the upper right is the real eclipse. The image in the lower left is the internal reflection.

But that was my fun in the partially-eclipsed sun.

4th of July—Bellevue Park

As usual, I went to the Bellevue Downtown Park, on the south side of Bellevue Square (a suburb of Seattle). It was very subdued this year: not many food trucks, not much music playing, no portable climbing wall so young people could show their astonishing skills.

The ducks were still there.

Where are they going?

Very skillful. They perch on the edge of the waterfall.

For context, this is what the waterfall looks like. (The white railing at top is waist high.)

As a nice touch, the trees were festooned with Japanese lanterns.

I didn't stay to see the fireworks or hear the music afterwards, since it's a school night, as the saying goes. 

Worldcon—War Memorials

This will be the last of the Washington, DC photos from my Worldcon trip for a while. You may wonder why I’ve strung them out over time. If you are familiar with The Hobbit (the book), you might review why Gandalf introduced Bilbo and the dwarves gradually to Beorn.

Here is the World War II Memorial for the war in the Atlantic.

You can get a feel for the scale of it by seeing the pedestrians near the curved wall.

Here is the memorial for the war in the Pacific.

When I was on my way back from the Jefferson Memorial, my driver took a detour near the Lincoln Memorial. On the way out, I saw figures for what I recognized as the Korean War Memorial, so I planned to visit there.

While approaching, it became obvious how lifelike the statues were.

Immense research was put into getting the soldiers’ garb correct.

Remember that much of the war was fought under extremely cold conditions.

Here are the statues for the Vietnam War Memorial. They startled me with their realism.

As many of you know, the Vietnam War Memorial is in the form of a gigantic black V. Here is one side of one branch of the V.

 

The people in the center are a camera crew setting up. They interviewed a couple of elderly men who were obviously veterans. I kept a respectful distance.

This is a different shot, including the Vietnam War Memorial and the Washington Monument in the distance.

 

I don’t take many selfies. But here is one, to show I was really there.

Worldcon—Supreme Court, Capitol, and Washington Monument

As I mentioned before, my itinerary for Washington, D.C. was a little different. One of the top two sites I wanted to visit was the Library of Congress. But the top site I wanted to visit was the Supreme Court of the United States!

If you don’t know why this third branch of government has been so important in the past few years, and what is going to happen in the next few months, maybe you should watch some news.

To get some perspective on how large the statues up front are, notice the black railing in back of one. It is waist height. That’s right, they are much bigger than life size.

Here is the statue on the right, looking at the court.

I know there is a lot of symbolism here, but I don’t know how to interpret it.

The one on the left also has a mini-statue.

I wasn’t there at a time when I could get in, but a friend who does tours says the inner chamber looks like a church, complete with wooden pews.

Here are the bronze doors at the front of the Supreme Court.

I was surprised the Supreme Court was across the street from the Capitol, where Congress meets. The back of it faces the Supreme Court.

As usual, I’m not satisfied with the typical tourist shot. Here is a forced perspective view of it.

Trying to get a nice angle, I ended up walking around the whole building. It is gigantic, and I tired myself from the huge walk. I told this to Cass Morris during the Kaffeeklatsch at Worldcon, and she said that on some occasion she decided to just walk up to the Capitol from some other site. She misjudged the distance because she didn’t know how large it was, and ended up doing quite a hike!

                                                          

Now here’s the Washington Monument, across the Tidal Bay on a sunny day.

I visited it on a less sunny day. You know by now I like unusual perspectives. Here it is when I stood three feet away from the base.

Worldcon—Lincoln Memorial

Here is my tourist photo of the Lincoln Memorial. It is bigger than the back of a penny.

This view of the steps shows how huge the pillars are.

The statue is gigantic. The detail is amazing, down to the folds of the coat and the fingernails.

I managed to get a closeup that shows how lifelike the eyes are.

click to enlarge

Not satisfied with the usual touristy photos, I tried for an unusual angle that no one else in the crowd seemed interested in. This shows Lincoln’s cloak draped over the side of his chair. Notice how much detail the sculptor added, in an area where most people would not look.

That picture and this one showed a detail I had been ignorant of. I had assumed the two hands would be about the same. But the left hand is in a fist.

My next post will be of the building I was most eager to see.

Worldcon—Library of Congress

Believe it or not, one of the two top buildings I wanted to see in my Washington, D.C. trip was the Library of Congress. Here’s a rather typical tourist shot of it.

Note the three alcoves at ground level. They contain bronze statues. Just to warn you, they have some nudity, which is typical of the city’s statues. So let’s take a look.

Wait, these aren’t the statues yet.

And here is the back.

Here is Poseidon. Don’t know who he is? Read a book.

To the left and right of him are sea nymphs, or nereids. A little nudity is okay, right?

Oh, the right one is really . . .

So going inside the Library itself, I was determined not to take pictures. (They prefer having visitors make appointments first.) The visit is different if one is thinking of taking pictures, instead of just experiencing the moment. But they recreated Thomas Jefferson’s library inside the library, including some of his original books.

This is his copy of The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith published in 1776. This was the historic book that argued for free market economics. These are the volumes Jefferson actually read.

The Library of Congress has a complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible. These were the first books ever printed on a printing press. The exact date varies, but the first copies could have been printed in 1454.

click to enlarge

They also have the first printed book on astronomy.

As a final shot, here is a view of the Washington Monument and the Capitol from the Library of Congress.

I was tempted to post that photo by itself and let you guess if I were floating in air, but nah.

I can’t begin to tell you what else was in the Library of Congress. It’s like an art museum. I encourage you to visit if you take a trip to Washington, D.C.