November 16, 2010 at 1:32 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
David Russell Williams, 47, who:
•commanded the Canadian Forces Base Trenton (the country’s largest and busiest airbase),
•was a decorated military pilot who had flown Canadian Forces VIP aircraft for Queen Elizabeth ll, Prince Philip, the prime minister and other Canadian dignitaries,
•was considered a “model military” man with degrees in economics and political science,
•served for two years as an instructor at the 3 Canadian Forces Flying Training School,
•obtained a Master of Defense Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada,
•was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and commanding officer of the 429 Transport Squadron at CFB Trenton, Ont.,
•was commanding officer of Camp Mirage(a secret logistics facility believed to be located at Al Minhad Air Base in Dubai, and
•has been described as an elite ...
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November 16, 2010 at 1:31 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Alcoholic victims of the month:
The shareholders of Walgreen’s, who could suffer as a result of an alcoholic Chief Financial Officer, Wade Miquelon, arrested on suspicion of DUI for the 2nd time in little more than a year. While the company can’t comment on “personal” matters, DUI is a material factor in whether or not a person can be trusted. We really want to be able to trust a CFO. If I hadn’t already sold my Walgreen’s stock, I’d sell it now. (I’ve long felt the ideas promulgated here and in my books could be used in buy and sell decisions of publicly-traded companies, but it’s rare so far for CFOs or CEOs to be outed and hence not particularly helpful ...
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November 16, 2010 at 1:30 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Co-dependents of the month:
The fans, producers and everyone else involved with “American Idol,” which announced that Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler will join Jennifer Lopez and Randy Jackson to form the three-judge panel for the upcoming season. According to The Washington Post, Tyler “seemed somewhat dazed” and “looked as though he had unhitched his brain to let it rest a spell” during the press conference in which the new judges were unveiled. Tyler was “fresh out of the Betty Ford Center.” Considering the risk of relapse is so high for addicts in early recovery, the upcoming season could be particularly interesting.
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November 16, 2010 at 1:29 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Enablers of the month:
Virginia Thomas, who left a phone message for Anita Hill, asking her to apologize for testifying against her husband, Clarence Thomas, 19 years ago during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Hill told reporters she has no intention of apologizing for accusing Thomas of making lewd and harassing comments when they were colleagues in the 1980s because she simply “testified to the truth of [her] experience.” Considering the fact that according to Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker (November 12, 2007) Thomas admitted in his memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, to “using alcohol to deaden the pain and anger that dominated his life” until he “stopped drinking cold turkey during his tenure at the E.E.O.C.” (where he and Hill ...
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November 16, 2010 at 1:27 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Quotes of the month:
“He had been warned of the dangers of drinking and driving by a court, by friends and by family.”
So wrote a reporter on the conviction of Andrew Gallo, 23, in the death of the Los Angeles Angels’ promising young rookie pitcher Nick Adenhart, 22, in a crash that also killed two others. The trouble is, once an addict gets high he thinks he’s invincible. Countless addicts have told themselves they’d never (again) drink and drive, only to (yet again) get behind the wheel while under the influence. Gallo, like so many before him, didn’t plan on driving, but after a night of heavy drinking, like so many other alcoholics, he did. He even had a designated ...
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November 16, 2010 at 1:26 pm ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Sometimes, it takes an addict:
Actor Tony Curtis, dead from cardiac arrest at age 85. Curtis’s screen credits included “Houdini,” “The Boston Strangler,” “The Defiant Ones,” and two of my favorite movies ever, “The Great Race,” and “Spartacus.” Curtis, married six times, was scared into sobriety after almost dying in 1984 of liver cirrhosis, after which he went to the Betty Ford Center and, reportedly, stayed sober for the rest of his life. My appreciation goes out to him for having helped teach me that alcoholism can take form in countless ways, including those that pit addict v. addict: Curtis was infuriated over having to gnaw on a chicken leg 42 times in 42 retakes of one scene in “Some Like ...
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November 16, 2010 at 1:24 pm ·
Filed under 6 - Public Policy Recommendations
Workers’ Compensation awards should not be given to those who act recklessly.
Illinois state trooper Matt Mitchell was on his way to a traffic accident.
Along the way, he lost control of his patrol car and jumped a median, colliding head-on into a car in which Kelli and Jessica Uhl, ages 18 and 13, were killed.
Tragic and sudden adverse events, commonly called accidents,* can occur despite careful thinking unclouded by a damaged neo-cortex, or human part, of the brain. However, they are far more likely to occur in individuals with such damage, since the impulses and instincts of the basal ganglia, or pre-mammalian brain, can and often do impel the person to act recklessly when unimpeded by the rational part of ...
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November 16, 2010 at 1:23 pm ·
Filed under 4 - Alcoholic Myth of the Month
“Being drunk doesn’t change who you are; it just reveals it.”
So said Dr. Remy Hadley in the 5th Season episode of “House,” entitled “House Divided.” Many reviewers loved the episode, which was described by one (who thought it was the best “House” ever) as “House” meets “X-Files” meets “Twilight Zone.” Unfortunately, it contained one of the great myths of alcoholism.
Olivia Wilde’s character Hadley, also known as “Thirteen,” repeated what most non-alcoholics believe, because the statement is true for non-addicts. However, for that 10% of the U.S. population with the disease of alcoholism, the statement is a myth: the effect of the chemical on the brain fundamentally changes the personality (think: Jekyll and Hyde). And that small fraction is by far ...
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November 16, 2010 at 1:22 pm ·
Filed under 4 - Alcoholic Myth of the Month
My friend, the doormat
Dear Doug:
My friend has been married for 11 years to a man who drinks daily and comes home and picks fights with her. She used to verbally take him on, but now seems numb and acquiesces to his every demand. I’ve suggested she leave him and offered her a place to stay, but she refuses and instead only complains about him. Is there anything else I can do?
Signed,
Concerned friend
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Friend of Codependent,
Other columnists might tell you that you cannot compel your friend to change her life, but should continue to offer to help her break her free of the abuse. They’d suggest you offer to attend an Al Anon meeting with her. Such columnists would be ...
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November 16, 2010 at 1:19 pm ·
Filed under 5 - Amazing Alcoholic Antics
Story from “This is True” by Randy Cassingham, with his “tagline:”
“DEADBEAT DOLT: Ronald McIntyre was such a deadbeat father that a warrant was issued for his arrest for failure to pay child support. He had accumulated a bill of $5,979.66, and sheriff's deputies in Chicago, Ill., heard he was staying at a friend's apartment. They went to serve the arrest warrant but McIntyre, who goes by the nickname "Boobie", wasn't inside. A child pointed to the window, and a deputy looked out to see that McIntyre had jumped out to avoid capture. There were two problems with the tactic: the apartment is on the third floor of the building, and the landing area, while it looks like grass, is actually ...
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September 27, 2010 at 10:05 am ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Serial Murderer Elias Abuelazam: Alcoholic? (but of course)
Serial murderers are often charming and almost always alcoholic: the case of Elias Abuelazam, a classic Jekyll and Hyde alcoholic.
Elias Abuelazam, 34, was considered God-fearing by his mother, who told reporters he would always assist those needing help. A neighbor commented Abuelazam was “really quiet and real nice. You wouldn’t even know he was there.” The manager of a store next to a market he worked at said, “He was very nice to the ladies and walked them to their cars at night.” A former class-mate called him a “nice guy” and an ex-mother-in-law said he was “such a nice person as far as we knew.” A co-worker at a behavioral health center ...
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September 27, 2010 at 9:59 am ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Runners-up for top story of the month:
Flight attendant Steven Slater, 38, who was described by his attorney, friends and family as a likeable sort who did his job well, until he didn’t and used a JetBlue plane’s emergency chute to leave his job—permanently, with two cans of beer in hand. Slater claimed a gash on his head occurred during the flight, but several passengers said the gash was there before the flight took off and told reporters he spoke rudely and used expletives during the flight. As clues 4 and 7 under "Supreme Being complex" ("regularly uses foul language" or, in this case, uses such language in an entirely inappropriate setting, and "has a 'rules don't apply to me' attitude") ...
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September 27, 2010 at 9:56 am ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Alcoholic victims of the month:
The thousands of passengers who were delayed while the JetBlue plane’s emergency chute was put back where it belongs, along with the likely extensive maintenance it had to go through due to flight attendant Steven Slater’s inconsiderate actions. (You might think “hundreds,” but consider how many planes are readying for take-off on the typical tarmac.)
Alcoholic could-have-been serious-victims of the month:
The passengers aboard the JetBlue flight, starring flight attendant Steven Slater. As a number of observers pointed out, deploying the emergency chute could have caused a panic, ground personnel could have been seriously injured or killed had they been in the way and can you imagine how inappropriately he might have handled an emergency occurring during the ...
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September 27, 2010 at 9:49 am ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Co-dependents of the month:
California taxpayers, who according to radaronline.com, are or will soon be supporting “Octo-Mom” Nadya Suleman by giving her welfare checks. Having become a tabloid sensation after giving birth to octuplets in January 2009 (and for which California taxpayers already paid an estimated $1.3 million plus), she pitched her story to publishers and television executives, who have apparently lost interest. In the February-April 2009 top story, she is quoted telling NBC’s Ann Curry she was “not seeking a public handout.” As I said then, she is the center of her universe, and of ours. While she was spending her money on lip and breast augmentation, she was spending ours having children—and now “raising” the octuplets, along with the ...
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September 27, 2010 at 9:48 am ·
Filed under 1 - Top Stories
Enablers of the month:
The 100,000 or so people who joined a Facebook page supporting the actions of flight attendant Steven Slater, who slid down the emergency chute of a JetBlue airplane after instigating at least one confrontation with a passenger. We’ve honored many famous addicts to their deaths, from Marilyn Monroe to actor Health Ledger; I suppose it’s only fitting an unknown becomes known for his alcoholic antic and that we honor and enable him. As pointed out in "Drunks, Drugs & Debits: How to Recognize Addicts and Avoid Financial Abuse," we need to learn to “uncompromisingly disenable,” before tragedy happens.
Some 300 protestors at the LAPD’s Rampart Station, along with a similar number at a community meeting the next night, ...
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