By now you know about Diane Schuler. If you don’t, just google and start reading. She’s the woman who wiped out herself and seven others on the Taconic Parkway in New York on July 26.

It was determined through toxicology tests that she had drunk the equivalent of ten shots of vodka, so recently that some of it had yet to metabolize. She’d been drinking while driving her two children and her brother’s three daughters home from summer camp.

Something very disturbing turned up yesterday, and it makes one thing clear: from the first moment of this tragedy, the family has been orchestrating a cover-up.

The only question is: Why? What do they know that they don’t want us to know?

Here’s the proof: From the very start, Schuler’s brother and the father of the three lost daughters, Warren Hance, told police and the media that his sister had called him from the road, complaining that she was disoriented and could not say where she was, and that he had told her to wait for him to come and get everybody.

We of course know that she failed to heed that advice, that in fact her cellphone was found discarded near the area where the call had been made.

And, as of yesterday, we know that the initial contact was a phone call from Hance’s daughter:

Emma Hance called her father at 12:58 p.m. and said, “Daddy, there is something wrong with Aunt Diane and she is having trouble seeing and she is talking funny, she is slurring,” Mr. Ruskin said. That call was dropped after three minutes and Mr. Hance called back at 1:01 p.m., in a conversation that lasted nine minutes.

Kind of a hard detail to overlook, wouldn’t you say?

So, the chronology now looks like this:

9:30 AM - Schuler and the children leave the campground in Schuler’s Ford Windstar minivan.

10:00 AM - Schuler stops at McDonalds.

10:30 AM - Schuler leaves McDonalds.

11:37 AM - Schuler calls her brother to say that the trip has been delayed by traffic, but that she should have the daughters home in time for a rehearsal later that day.

12:08 PM - Schuler received a call. It is not yet known from whom.

12:58 PM - Emma Hance calls her father to discuss Aunt Diane’s condition. The call lasts three minutes.

1:02 PM - Hance calls Schuler. The call lasts nine minutes.

1:15 PM - Schuler’s phone, now apparently discarded, begins to log missed calls.

1:35 PM - Schuler, having turned onto an exit ramp of the Taconic Parkway two miles back, slams head-on into a Chevrolet Trailblazer in the passing lane, killing all three occupants of the truck as well as herself, her daughter and her three nieces. Her five year old son survives with critical injuries.

And by sheer logic, Schuler had been sipping from the vodka bottle the entire time.

She had also recently smoked marijuana. The toxicology report indicates that the level of the active ingredient in marijuana was sufficient to suggest recent use.

Anybody want to guess what a combination of vodka and pot will do to your senses? Especially a high level of vodka.

There has been rampant speculation that Schuler must be an alcoholic, and that her family must have known. I don’t see enough evidence, yet, to support that logic. If Schuler was indeed an alcoholic, she was clearly a functioning alcoholic. Functioning alcoholics are experts in not only hiding, but regulating their intake. Schuler went on a binge. If she was indeed used to drinking such a quantity of alcohol, then doing so on this day would not have been especially disorienting. If, however, this was an unusual amount for her to ingest, then it wasn’t the act of an alcoholic so much as it was the act of a person trying to get quick results.

And why would a seemingly normal suburban mother be looking to get drunk quick?

The early reports of her condition mentioned that Schuler had an untreated abcess in her mouth.

Well, that might do it. I think if I had an abscess in my mouth, I might be looking to kill the pain, especially with a car full of kids.

Some disturbing things, though: that’s a lot of alcohol, and Schuler had to be conscious of what she was doing while she was doing it. That suggests a reckless streak that, one would think, would be known to her closest associates.

And, of course, the fact that her brother did not admit, at first, that his daughter called him out of concern for Schuler’s condition. Why leave that detail out?

The implication is that Hance knew very well that his sister was drinking and probably drunk, and he was desperate for her to just pull over and let him come get them. One can only surmise that Schuler did not intend to let her brother rescue her from herself. One can only wonder if this scene had been acted out before.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Husband Defends His Wife in Crash (nytimes.com)
• City Room: Driver in Deadly Crash Was Drunk, Officials Say (cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com)

Are Netbooks the next big thing?

Maybe.

Woot was selling them pretty cheap recently so I ordered one. The thing’s about the size of a hardcover notebook, you know, the paper kind. The screen is incredibly small; mine’s about 8 inches. The system comes with Linux installed with a GUI interface and a set of applications, including Firefox. It’s not very peppy, but the theory goes that all we intend to use if for is internet related activity, so who needs much power?

In other words, is this the future? Small devices that get us online quickly and cheaply?

I say it is. There are so many advantages to being online instead of pinned to a specific computer, such as:

- any work I do is right where I left it
- a disk crash is not the end of my world
- I can use any internet-capable device to do my thing; if my device breaks, just replace it

Here’s the thing: souped-up PCs cost a bundle, as do full-power laptops. If it breaks or gets stolen, you’re out a chunk of dough. If the hard drive crashes, your world sucks. And you have to be where it is, or it has to be with you. Laptops are not small.

On the other hand, there is middle age.

Forget about reading the screen without magnification in the form of reading glasses. My fingers always seem to hit 3 keys at once. And after a lifetime of this key being here and that key being there, a netbook keyboard is a combination rubik’s cube and jigsaw puzzle. Function-Control-Down Arrow is “End”? Likewise for “Home” and almost any other function you can think of. So for a guy like me, it is a big step down or backward or whatever, but just plain frustrating. Everything takes too long.

So it’s not for me.

But how about the kids? I have five of them, from age 11 through age 19, and the 19-year old won’t touch it (same issues that I have except the eyesight problem), but the younger ones love it. It’s cute, it’s portable and it does what they need it to do.

So, the future? I say, based on my observations, that it is definitely the future, and the future is here. You can get a nice netbook for under $200.

So ask the kid: You want a PSP or a netbook? You might be surprised at the answer.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Quick Look: HP Mini 5101 (crunchgear.com)
• Linux Notebooks Selling Well On Amazon Germany (linux.slashdot.org)

I have a lot to say about what I see as the “slacker generation”, by whom I mean young adults who have not yet chosen a path for their lives, and are either still in school or are wandering aimlessly about the job market.

Back in my youth, in the 1970s, we had our kids who had no ambition, and generally 3 or 4 of them could be found hanging out here or there, not really doing much of anything and not really bothering anybody. We made minimal note of their existence and paid them little mind. They had their world, we had ours.

Today’s slackers have a thousand more ways to pass the time, a thousand ways to fool themselves into thinking that there just might be a point to their lives. One of the all-time great social experiments will be bearing all sorts of demographic statistical booty for decades to come. If we ever wonder why each decade our productive output shrinks on a per capita basis, we may one day wander back to these days, when so many people came of age and said “Eh.”

Which brings me back around to UCLA, about which I wrote yesterday.

James Franco, the up and coming actor and recent UCLA graduate, had been invited to speak at the commencement for the UCLA College Of Arts And Letters. One student put up a Facebook page in protest at Franco’s youth and inexperience. I took umbrage at both the insinuation that Franco was inadequate, and at he heavy-handed way the students went about taking him down, when all the man had done was accept an invitation.

This left the college in a bind, with commencement a  week away. They solved this problem by inviting Brad Delson, Linkin Park guitarist, who readily accepted.

Suddenly, the issue was no longer youth and inexperience. After all, Delson and Franco are both 31. And it could not be about the shallowness of his career path: both guys are in show biz. No, now it was about, well let’s see: Delson got his degree in 1999, while Franco dawdled and did not get his until 2008. Delson is raising a family; Franco is single. Delson has begun to develop his philanthropic side; Franco, as far as the world knows, has not.

Suddenly, a “contemporary” was OK under certain circumstances. Such as: “We got our little protest on, got somewhere with it…what’s next?”

In other words, the Great UCLA Slacker Protest was just their flavor of the week.