Two new cactuses were added to my online collection of plants this last week. One was the fishhook cactus and the other was the old man cactus. Both are interesting cacti, but while creating the information pages to go with these plants, I found out that the scientific name for old man cactus had been recently changed. Formerly known as Opuntia erinaceae ursina, old man cactus is now known as Opuntia polyacantha along with three other varieties of prickly pear cactus that had previously been regarded as separate. Further, it turns out that chollas are no longer included in the Opuntia genus and now are listed as Cylindropuntia.

The featured video this week is called "Dancing Fingers" and the song used in the video first showed up on YouTube on November 13, 2007 in a video on the Nalts channel called "My Writers Are on Strike." The video I made for the song was posted on May 30, 2010. My intention was to create a funny video using multiple sets of fingers and utilizing a green screen, but instead I wound up making a moody video that just showed my fingers engaged in common activities that involve fingers in one way or another.

The Tonya Craft story has called attention to prosecutorial misconduct once again. In fact, it prompted me to watch a couple movies on that topic. One movie is called Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995). This movie tells the story of the McMartin fiasco of the 1980s and shows how unqualified experts and out-of-control prosecutors can make a mockery of the justice system. The other movie is a documentary narrated by Sean Penn called Witch Hunt (2008) which tells a similar story of how inept law enforcement officials in Bakersfield ruined the lives of individuals falsely accused of misconduct. The entire case against Tonya Craft should have been opened and closed in less than a few days, but instead it dragged on for several years. What we wound up with instead was an extravagant waste of public funds and Tonya Craft has now filed a $25 million lawsuit and there is little doubt that she will be awarded at least a few million dollars for what incompentent detectives, prosecutors, and judges have put her through! The Tonya Craft case, the McMartin case, and the Bakersfield cases underscore the importance of ensuring that sane and qualified individuals serve as detectives, social workers, prosecutors, and judges and all three of these cases demonstrate that often unfit individuals serve in these positions.