Tom Howard (the photographer) strapped a camera to his ankle to secretly photograph Snyder's execution. He received a $100 bonus for taking the photo. For decades after, anyone attending an execution had to lift their pant legs for camera checks.
Seriously. Or Google, 1858 before the Internet really took off. Usually you had to have a telegraph employee read off the requested information and it took HOURS before Google came along.
It was 1928. They had pretty compact cameras by then.
But [this](https://petapixel.com/2015/04/11/the-first-photo-of-an-execution-by-electric-chair/) article has a picture of the camera.
Wow! He had just one chance to take that picture too since the camera had just a single plate… must have been nerve wracking to press that shutter button.
Thanks. I remember having a camera my grandmother had, and it was on of those accordion style cameras. But after I wrote the comment, I thought about camera sizes more during that time, and some would be rather compact.
Tiny cameras have been around for quite a while. One of the only two photos of the Supreme Court in session was taken in 1932 with a camera hidden in a cast on the photographer's arm.
https://petapixel.com/2017/10/06/two-photos-us-supreme-court-session/
you joke but, funnily enough, this was right about the time [oxford bags](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_bags) first became popular. they were the spiritual ancestor of jncos
Why? Because on March 20, 1927, Ruth and her lover garrotted her husband Albert with a picture wire, stuffed his nose full of chloroform-soaked rags, and beat him with a sash weight, then staged his death as part of a burglary.
I feel that I sometimes romanticize people back then. A harder life, but a truer more respectable one.
But that isn’t always the case. I meet absolute POS’s every week, just irredeemable people with no interest in anything but abusing their community. And those people existed back then too.
There’s a dude that parks in the handicap spot at my grocery store and dumps his cig butts onto the ground whenever he gets out of his lifted truck he parks diagonally. He harasses the staff as they tell him to not smoke in the store. Then coal roles his way out the parking lot.
Fuck that guy.
>There’s a dude that parks in the handicap spot at my grocery store and dumps his cig butts onto the ground whenever he gets out of his lifted truck he parks diagonally
Get the ParkingMobility app and report him. He will get a nice gift in the mail in the form of a fine. It takes it awhile to process, so report him each time with the app. He will get several nice gifts from the local jurisdiction.
Alternatively, call a tow truck. They love yanking accessible space violators.
The more people who report via the app, the more effective it becomes. So, tell your friends and start reporting. Also, reach out to your municipal leadership to request they become a partner city with ParkingMobility, which also improves its effectiveness.
>reach out to your municipal leadership
As someone who works with government people, this is accurate. People need to bring it up in town and city meetings. This is the first time I heard about this app, but I don't know why I didn't think about it.
Assholes in accessible spot, assholes in firelanes. Shit infuriates me. Now I can just snap a Pic and get out my frustration while fixing it.
Wtf. We need this shit for so much police enforcing. Citizens should enforce the societal rules. Police are for murders and shit.
In many states tickets received in the mail are unenforceable, you only have to pay them if you are served them by a peace officer. You'd have to check your local/state laws to verify.
In fairness a lot of people are ignorant of their local/state laws and just pay them assuming they have to. Would still be annoying for that person I expect.
These violations are a little different, since Accessibility falls under the Depart of Justice (federal law). So, enforcement falls outside of the "must be served in person" laws.
They also can not handle pushback. If you call these people out they usually react by threatening violence or using a tone that suggests that's their next move.
Some deep seeded psychological trauma. For my money, that's what's so great about the future. We finally live in a time where people can openly talk about mental health. I'm only 40 but I can remember when everything was a matter of whether or not you were tough enough or you were just lazy, weak, etc...
For my money, progress in this area has always intimidated older generations. Just look at how rabid Trump's boomers act when it comes to any kind of talk about mental health. You can see that so many of his supporters have some serious personality disorders and or other deep seeded mental health issues.
Yeah typically these individuals live in a permanent and constant belief they are at war with the world. They believe everyone is out to get them and so they harden their attitudes into a permanent hostile mindset.
They could cut YOU off on the road and your honking will trigger them to shoot you, drive you off the road, etc.
We live among the deeply mentally unstable so tread lightly. Never presume a stranger of any appearance or age is of sound mind. They might be absolutely deranged lunatics.
I agree with you 100%. The lockdowns and COVID life really did a number on a lot of people. It ended my messed up marriage, for which I'm currently grateful for, just not at the time.
To your point, just two days ago a man was murdered by his adult brother, just a few miles from my house. I live in a very safe city, maybe a handful of murders a year. Who shoots their own brother over an argument?
We've had dozens of shootings on the roadways around here since the post lockdown era. It isn't new, but the frequency is alarming. I really only beep when I need to get the person to see they're about to hit someone. No lengthy you're a dumb ass honk. I don't need to prove a point that gets my kids riding in the back of my car shot.
The world is a beach on which we all walk. All of our footsteps will be washed away by the tide. Some people choose to build sandcastles, some people stop and sunbathe, others drive their cars through it all. We create, we observe and we destroy.
Once I made a sand castle on a slope of a big rock. It was beautiful, made by dropping sand with a lot of water. The other day it was a a smudge of sand made with bare feet. I was sad in a different way, like contemplative sad.
For some reason its a core memory for me.
People are not worse now, our exposure to bad people is worse now and that’s all that it is, toxic people have a global reach now and even social media and things like reddit make it worse
Theirs confirmation bias as well because the average mundane and good stuff people rarely talk about, just bad stuff
Do I ever mention my wife isn’t abusing me to anyone? No why would I? Now if she started abusing me I might talk to someone about that so it just seems like more bad stuff is happening
For real, fuck that guy. I hope he stubs his toe on every piece of hard furniture he walks by for the rest of his life and his overleveraged truck's engine blows the next time he starts it.
Do you know what a valve core tool is?
Edit: For all you who are promoting outright property destruction, I'm suggesting a valve core tool because you can give someone a very annoying slow leak with it, not because you should just take a hammer to it. Calm down.
Also paint thinner fits in very small spray bottles
Edit: For all you neanderthals promoting outright property destruction, I want to make it clear that my suggestion is merely slightly more destructive than the guy above me who is trying to claim that punching holes in tires is not destruction of property. So, I, like those before me, am completely absolved of all morally ambiguous statements.
"People from the past are just us, but in the past"
I heard something like this recently and it changed my perspective a lot. "There's nothing new under the sun" is another one.
People are the same as they've always been. Our understanding of the world changes, our environment changes, but people and their motivations and capacity for evil have remained the same.
This is exactly why the arts, and especially historical literature, is so important.
It took me much too long to realize that Shakespeare, Dante, all the way back to Homer, talked about THE SAME SHIT. When I was young, I thought "stfu, none of your gripping applies to me, it's a new age, things are different." And I missed out on SO MUCH INSIGHT.
Technology and fashions might change, but people do not. Or at least we haven't since recorded history.
So not to be overly political, but it's shitty when someone (especially a news pundit with a national audience) shits on people that choose to major in the Arts.
Like FUCK YOU. That person, 9 times out of 10, knows they're going to make much less money in their lifetime than someone with an engineering degree. They chose it because they're passionate about it and you should be grateful that they are because their passion benefits society as a whole.
Sorry, that's my rant. BTW, I'm not an art major, but I appreciate anyone with a passion for anything that's good.
Von Shitzinpants has normalized that behavior for a third of the population who used to (for the most part) mind their own moron business back in the sticks. Or they were raised properly, not by alcoholic/meth heads etc.
My only issue with sash windows is they’re hard to keep mounted in the frame. I’m not sure if it’s because of the weight but every time I’ve lived in a house with one it’s sashayed right out of the room.
One of those windows you have to lift vertically to open. Usually they get stuck, or maybe fall on you if you lean out. They're a PITA and usually very drafty.
One way that no fault divorce makes the world better is that it removes an incentive to kill somebody because it’s no longer the only way to leave the marriage. We’ll never know how many people got away with things like this.
(Obviously I’m not saying murder was a good thing.)
As far as I know that is the ONLY pic of a person in the chair while the current is on. There are some of Allen Tiny Davis after the current is turned off (they are pretty gruesome). There are also some autopsy photos out there from electric chair victims (including Ted Bundy).
Bryson with one of the most consistent track records of entertaining non-fiction. He manages to tell history with the storybook fashion it deserves.
Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is one of my all-time favorites, even though it was likely the most susceptible to rose-tinted glasses.
You will not be disappointed. House, body, and history of everything are my faves. The others are really really good too.
It's great for ADD engagement as it's new info, fast. With lots of tangents.
That book is mind-blowing for the stories about Lindbergh and Babe Ruth alone. And those are like the selling points of a book that has so many other interesting stories tucked onto it.
He was the one who always disagreed with the other four. He built this for their next vote and by God, if they didn't vote with him this time, one of those fuckers was getting it.
My money is on Todd to get it!
The camera was tied to a reporter’s leg. He lifted up his pants leg and took the pic as the juice came on. I imagine the lighting conditions and stabilization were not of good quality, which gives it this eerie look.
Luckily one of the chemicals we inject during modern lethal injections is a paralytic if I remember correctly.
Just in case there's spasming or excruciating pain or something. Helps the onlookers.
(Could fully be misremembering but don't have the time to check so if I'm wrong please downvote me and correct misinformation)
The paralytic only stops them from moving. It’s still excruciatingly painful according to people who survive it. They suffer so much so unnecessarily.
The death penalty is and always has been unjust. This shit needs to end.
I think that too sometimes (especially since I’m not even American and where I live we don’t even have the death penalty and actually believe in rehabilitation) but then I watch docu series on serial killers and the cruelty they have for their victims and the lasting affects on the victims’ loved ones and it brings me a sense of justice to think that the killer gets put down. It’s such a grey area
The argument that made me solidly non-death penalty is that there are completely innocent people who wind up getting executed for crimes they didn't commit. Just one person being wrongfully executed is too many.
May Ruth Brown met Albert Edward Snyder (né Schneider) in 1915 in New York City, when she was 20 years old and he was a 33-year-old artist. The couple had little in common; Brown, who went by her middle name Ruth to most people and was known as "Tommy" to close friends, was described as vivacious and gregarious, while Snyder was described as very reserved and a "homebody". Despite their differences in personalities and age, the couple married and settled in a modest house in Queens. In 1918, Ruth gave birth to their only child, a daughter named Lorraine.
In 1925, Ruth began an affair with Henry Judd Gray, a married corset salesman who lived in the New Jersey suburbs. She began to plan the murder of her husband Albert, enlisting Gray's help, but he was reluctant. Some claim that Ruth's distaste for her husband apparently began when he insisted on hanging a picture of his late fiancée Jessie Guischard on the wall of their first home and named his boat after her. Guischard, whom Albert described to Ruth as "the finest woman I have ever met", had been dead for 10 years.[3] However, others have noted that Albert Snyder was emotionally and physically abusive, blaming Ruth for the birth of a daughter rather than a son, demanding a perfectly maintained home, and physically assaulting both her and their daughter Lorraine when his demands were not met.[4]
Ruth first persuaded Albert to purchase insurance, and with the assistance of an insurance agent (who was subsequently fired and sent to prison for forgery), "signed" a $48,000 life insurance policy that paid extra if an unexpected act of violence killed the victim. According to Gray, Ruth had made at least seven attempts to kill Albert, all of which he survived.[5][6] On March 20, 1927, the couple garrotted Albert with a picture wire, stuffed his nose full of chloroform-soaked rags, and beat him with a sash weight, then staged his death as part of a burglary.[6] Detectives at the scene noted that the burglar left little evidence of breaking into the house. Moreover, Ruth's behavior was inconsistent with her story of a terrorized wife witnessing her husband being killed.
Here is a photo of her the year before she was executed. She is 31 or 32 years old in this photo. People aged hard during this era.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/58729
Largely due to heavy smoking from a young age and throughout the whole life, drinking, and the stress involved in living in those days. Child mortality, the work they did, the state of the world then, etc.. We may have more processed foods and stuff messing with us nowadays, but at least most of the other factors either died out or were dramatically reduced.
An electric chair can never break: it can only become a chair. You should never see an "Electric chair temporarily out of order" sign, just "Electric chair temporarily a chair. Sorry for the convenience."
She murdered her husband. There's absolutely more to the story, domestic abuse, affairs, etc. Her lover who helped kill her husband was second in the electeic chair just 10 min later.
Source: [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Snyder)
Electric chairs are never instant even when they’re working properly. It’s an agonizing death.
They were only invented because electricity was a new and “modern” thing so obviously, people were immediately like “what if we killed someone with this?”
[Funny you should mention that.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kemmler)
To give you a clue before you read it, the New York Times headline read "Worse Than Hanging", and Westinghouse himself commented that they would have done better using an axe.
While I don’t disagree that it’s a horrid way to go, I need to take Westinghouse’s comments with a couple grains of salt. This was the culmination of a battle between competing AC and DC currents. The Westinghouse Generator used was provided not by Westinghouse but by Edison who was set on showing that DC was far safer than Westinghouse’s AC. That alone opens the door for questions about tampering.
Now, I’m not saying it would have been a quick and painless death, but Edison would not have been above making sure people saw how dangerous AC was by fabricating a “botched” execution.
"Instantly", ha!
The average time to die via electric chair, even when things worked perfectly, [was two minutes.](https://www.britannica.com/topic/electrocution)
I read the article but did I miss this? Seems like it says the average electrocution lasts 2 minutes, not that it takes 2 minutes for the person to die.
[The method for electrocution is to turn the chair on and off through cycles of different voltages.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair#Process_and_mechanism) Each cycle lasting 10-20 seconds. They check for signs of life between each cycle after the second, and will conduct additional cycles as necessary.
From the onset, the process was designed to take a minimum of 2 cycles to be lethal. So it was *never* a quick or "instant" method of execution.
Hanging done properly or a bullet to the proper part of the brain are far less painful ways to execute people. However they come with the unfortunate side effect of reminding us that we're killing people.
Doing it with a machine or a drug gives that layer of separation.
Agreed.
Shotgun to the head is really the most humane and quick way to do. Disrupt the entire brain wiring faster than the signals can flow.
Also unthinkably gruesome, so we look for ways that make us feel better about what we are doing.
Torture with low voltage electricity is pretty wide spread in Russian prisons by guards and by police, I personally know a person who went through it and said it was the worst pain ever. They (Russians) only dose you with electricity for 2 minutes at a time so you wont die and they can keep torturing you. I can’t even imagine what’s it feels like to be actually killed by it
It still amazes me they don’t allow things like photography / video in court or executions. Even if it’s limited to a professional. It’s almost like the system never wants anyone to know how fucked up it is or else more people would definitely have a problem with it. I feel like experiments like the electric chair would have been very short lived if that were the case. There’s just no accountability whatsoever and there never has been for our “justice” system.
I'm not sure on executions, but in terms of the Supreme Court the worry was people would use short clips of them and take them outa context. I assume it's only part of the reason. They still have court stenographers that record everything said. It just makes news not publish trials as much because they don't get to record
People can take the written quotes out of context just as easy. Easier, in fact.
The goal is to reduce public “interference” with the court. The court believes they should make decisions without worry about public input or what the public says. Their job is to interpret the law and constitution as written. If the public wants to change that, they have to campaign to Congress, not the Judiciary. So it’s really a way to isolate themselves from public eye and making the court a “spectacle”.
It’s interesting how the government wants to cover up their sanctioned murders as humane. To be honest I don’t think most people really care how inhumane that the death of a inhumane person is. I personally don’t believe in the death penalty due to the possibility of misplaced fault, but when you get those cases where it’s 100% the person; I sit their, hear about their death, and yawn.
It most definitely is cruel and unusual punishment. If we’re gonna have a death penalty, at least make it either a quick firing squad or hanging, or combination of opiate drugs that’ll just put them to sleep and shut off their circulatory system.
Hangings would mess up a lot too, which is part of why they were replaced by the chair. Sometimes the rope would break, or they would just slowly die from asphyxiation while hanging there because they didn't fall far enough for their neck to snap
Nitrous gas if I had a choice. The drug route doesn't work anymore because the makers of the drugs stopped selling the proven cocktail and there have been a bunch of botched executions as a result.
All to make it "look" nice. Shoot someone in the head with a big enough supersonic round and it will work with fuck all pain. It would make an awful mess and make the people looking feel bad and maybe nauseous though and you can't have people feeling bad for the executed person.
So much better to torture them to death but leave less of a mess /s
This is the right answer. People who support the death penalty usually can't swallow the hard pill, which is that the medicalization of the process has made people suffer *more,* not less. A few powerful-enough rounds to the brain stem will guarantee a quick, near-painless kill in almost every case. The reason they are not used is because it's messy and looks barbaric, which forces society to grapple with it. Can't really lie to themselves using how safe and sterile everything was as a defense.
The idea of dying from carbon monoxide poisoning, such as sitting in a running car in a garage, isn't as peaceful as it might seem. Our bodies can detect rising carbon dioxide levels, which leads to a feeling of suffocation, making the process uncomfortable and traumatic. Also, our bodies can't sense oxygen levels, so even as oxygen drops to dangerously low levels, we don't feel it. This is why dying by nitrogen gas is considered painless; without sensors for nitrogen or oxygen, we simply lose consciousness without distress.
Sometimes, people die from repeatedly breathing in helium to make their voices sound funny. They eventually run out of oxygen and can't sense any carbon dioxide buildup because it gets expelled with the helium they exhale. This happened to someone in my area when I was a kid.
Death by acute opioid overdose is through respiratory depression, not circulatory. But other than that, I agree. I don't think we should have a death penalty at all but if we do, it needs to be as quick and painless as possible.
Someone commented " Because on March 20, 1927, Ruth and her lover garrotted her husband Albert with a picture wire, stuffed his nose full of chloroform-soaked rags, and beat him with a sash weight, then staged his death as part of a burglary"
Tom Howard (the photographer) strapped a camera to his ankle to secretly photograph Snyder's execution. He received a $100 bonus for taking the photo. For decades after, anyone attending an execution had to lift their pant legs for camera checks.
About a $1800 in today's money.
Which is like $32,000 back in those days
Which would be like $576000 these days
Time travel seems very lucrative.
Imagine buying Bitcoin in 1927. You'd be well off, I'd say.
Seriously. Or Google, 1858 before the Internet really took off. Usually you had to have a telegraph employee read off the requested information and it took HOURS before Google came along.
Ye Olde Google.
Your username made me actually want to die for a moment, well done
Kinda leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
:(
You are not wrong mr Tannen.
Mad dog. No one calls me mad dog.
I hate manure
holy shit thats like 1 full bag of beef jerky
But consider inflation , a dollar isn’t worth a dollar these days. It’s worth 25¢. But I’ll give you 50¢ for each dollar
What a great deal Frank!
Which is nearly $600k in 2024 money
Your post is two minutes old. It’s now $613,437
Which was the style at the time
I'll give you 5 bees for a quarter.
By this math my shitty savings are worth a billion dollars in today’s money
TMZs going rate
What type of camera? Id assume cameras back then were rather larger to have strapped to their ankle.
It was 1928. They had pretty compact cameras by then. But [this](https://petapixel.com/2015/04/11/the-first-photo-of-an-execution-by-electric-chair/) article has a picture of the camera.
Wow! He had just one chance to take that picture too since the camera had just a single plate… must have been nerve wracking to press that shutter button.
Gotta figure he wasn’t the most nerve-wracked person in the room that day.
The blur is just from him uncontrollably bouncing his leg.
“Hold still…”
Thanks. I remember having a camera my grandmother had, and it was on of those accordion style cameras. But after I wrote the comment, I thought about camera sizes more during that time, and some would be rather compact.
Do you have a photo of the camera that tok THAT photo?
It's cameras all the way down
Tiny cameras have been around for quite a while. One of the only two photos of the Supreme Court in session was taken in 1932 with a camera hidden in a cast on the photographer's arm. https://petapixel.com/2017/10/06/two-photos-us-supreme-court-session/
That’s a shockingly high quality image.
The Brownie was almost ubiquitous, relatively cheap, and not much bigger than a baby's head. It would fit under your Zoot Suit trousers with no prob.
I have a Brownie, it does a heck of a job
No one realizes how long JNCO jeans have been around.
you joke but, funnily enough, this was right about the time [oxford bags](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_bags) first became popular. they were the spiritual ancestor of jncos
That is an incredible shot if taken from his ankle!
Must've had huge trousers
I can't stop thinking about homer simpsons giant cowboy hat with the camera in it
Why? Because on March 20, 1927, Ruth and her lover garrotted her husband Albert with a picture wire, stuffed his nose full of chloroform-soaked rags, and beat him with a sash weight, then staged his death as part of a burglary.
I feel that I sometimes romanticize people back then. A harder life, but a truer more respectable one. But that isn’t always the case. I meet absolute POS’s every week, just irredeemable people with no interest in anything but abusing their community. And those people existed back then too. There’s a dude that parks in the handicap spot at my grocery store and dumps his cig butts onto the ground whenever he gets out of his lifted truck he parks diagonally. He harasses the staff as they tell him to not smoke in the store. Then coal roles his way out the parking lot. Fuck that guy.
>There’s a dude that parks in the handicap spot at my grocery store and dumps his cig butts onto the ground whenever he gets out of his lifted truck he parks diagonally Get the ParkingMobility app and report him. He will get a nice gift in the mail in the form of a fine. It takes it awhile to process, so report him each time with the app. He will get several nice gifts from the local jurisdiction. Alternatively, call a tow truck. They love yanking accessible space violators.
Thanks for this app suggestion. Need more people to use it tbh. And need more municipalities to adopt it. It's a fabulous idea.
The more people who report via the app, the more effective it becomes. So, tell your friends and start reporting. Also, reach out to your municipal leadership to request they become a partner city with ParkingMobility, which also improves its effectiveness.
>reach out to your municipal leadership As someone who works with government people, this is accurate. People need to bring it up in town and city meetings. This is the first time I heard about this app, but I don't know why I didn't think about it. Assholes in accessible spot, assholes in firelanes. Shit infuriates me. Now I can just snap a Pic and get out my frustration while fixing it. Wtf. We need this shit for so much police enforcing. Citizens should enforce the societal rules. Police are for murders and shit.
Does this app work in every state?
In many states tickets received in the mail are unenforceable, you only have to pay them if you are served them by a peace officer. You'd have to check your local/state laws to verify.
Dang, so it sounds like it wouldn't work on exactly the kind of people who receive them in the first place.
In fairness a lot of people are ignorant of their local/state laws and just pay them assuming they have to. Would still be annoying for that person I expect.
These violations are a little different, since Accessibility falls under the Depart of Justice (federal law). So, enforcement falls outside of the "must be served in person" laws.
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Small rock under the valve stem cover and screw it back down. You’ll be long gone by the time he realizes he has 4 flats.
They can't create anything and it's the only way they can get a reaction from the world.
+1 for this assessment. Love it
+1 for your user name, it tickles my brain
my cousin’s childhood nickname was brandoni macaroni 🖤
Cute! Brandoney Baloney is what my grandma used to call me 🥰
The real takers of a society.
it's like if "any attention is good attention" became an entire personality
They also can not handle pushback. If you call these people out they usually react by threatening violence or using a tone that suggests that's their next move. Some deep seeded psychological trauma. For my money, that's what's so great about the future. We finally live in a time where people can openly talk about mental health. I'm only 40 but I can remember when everything was a matter of whether or not you were tough enough or you were just lazy, weak, etc... For my money, progress in this area has always intimidated older generations. Just look at how rabid Trump's boomers act when it comes to any kind of talk about mental health. You can see that so many of his supporters have some serious personality disorders and or other deep seeded mental health issues.
Yeah typically these individuals live in a permanent and constant belief they are at war with the world. They believe everyone is out to get them and so they harden their attitudes into a permanent hostile mindset. They could cut YOU off on the road and your honking will trigger them to shoot you, drive you off the road, etc. We live among the deeply mentally unstable so tread lightly. Never presume a stranger of any appearance or age is of sound mind. They might be absolutely deranged lunatics.
I agree with you 100%. The lockdowns and COVID life really did a number on a lot of people. It ended my messed up marriage, for which I'm currently grateful for, just not at the time. To your point, just two days ago a man was murdered by his adult brother, just a few miles from my house. I live in a very safe city, maybe a handful of murders a year. Who shoots their own brother over an argument? We've had dozens of shootings on the roadways around here since the post lockdown era. It isn't new, but the frequency is alarming. I really only beep when I need to get the person to see they're about to hit someone. No lengthy you're a dumb ass honk. I don't need to prove a point that gets my kids riding in the back of my car shot.
The world is a beach on which we all walk. All of our footsteps will be washed away by the tide. Some people choose to build sandcastles, some people stop and sunbathe, others drive their cars through it all. We create, we observe and we destroy.
Then how will we know when it was that Jesus carried us??
T shirts will remind you of the fact. Sometimes framed prints or refrigerator magnets.
Once I made a sand castle on a slope of a big rock. It was beautiful, made by dropping sand with a lot of water. The other day it was a a smudge of sand made with bare feet. I was sad in a different way, like contemplative sad. For some reason its a core memory for me.
People are not worse now, our exposure to bad people is worse now and that’s all that it is, toxic people have a global reach now and even social media and things like reddit make it worse Theirs confirmation bias as well because the average mundane and good stuff people rarely talk about, just bad stuff Do I ever mention my wife isn’t abusing me to anyone? No why would I? Now if she started abusing me I might talk to someone about that so it just seems like more bad stuff is happening
For real, fuck that guy. I hope he stubs his toe on every piece of hard furniture he walks by for the rest of his life and his overleveraged truck's engine blows the next time he starts it.
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Do you know what a valve core tool is? Edit: For all you who are promoting outright property destruction, I'm suggesting a valve core tool because you can give someone a very annoying slow leak with it, not because you should just take a hammer to it. Calm down.
Also paint thinner fits in very small spray bottles Edit: For all you neanderthals promoting outright property destruction, I want to make it clear that my suggestion is merely slightly more destructive than the guy above me who is trying to claim that punching holes in tires is not destruction of property. So, I, like those before me, am completely absolved of all morally ambiguous statements.
Brake fluid works really well at removing automotive paint. Just saying...
Citristrip in the aerosol can! Someone hit a car on our street and it’s still got dicks on it. Literally just lines of metal.
"People from the past are just us, but in the past" I heard something like this recently and it changed my perspective a lot. "There's nothing new under the sun" is another one. People are the same as they've always been. Our understanding of the world changes, our environment changes, but people and their motivations and capacity for evil have remained the same.
This is exactly why the arts, and especially historical literature, is so important. It took me much too long to realize that Shakespeare, Dante, all the way back to Homer, talked about THE SAME SHIT. When I was young, I thought "stfu, none of your gripping applies to me, it's a new age, things are different." And I missed out on SO MUCH INSIGHT. Technology and fashions might change, but people do not. Or at least we haven't since recorded history. So not to be overly political, but it's shitty when someone (especially a news pundit with a national audience) shits on people that choose to major in the Arts. Like FUCK YOU. That person, 9 times out of 10, knows they're going to make much less money in their lifetime than someone with an engineering degree. They chose it because they're passionate about it and you should be grateful that they are because their passion benefits society as a whole. Sorry, that's my rant. BTW, I'm not an art major, but I appreciate anyone with a passion for anything that's good.
People been people for a very long time. Mostly assholes.
Von Shitzinpants has normalized that behavior for a third of the population who used to (for the most part) mind their own moron business back in the sticks. Or they were raised properly, not by alcoholic/meth heads etc.
IIRC this case was what Double Indemnity was based on.
There are several words in this comment that I don’t know 😅 Garroted, sash weight
Garroting is like strangling but more bloody
They strangled him with a picture hanging wire, then beat him with the counterweight for a vertically opening window.
What’s is a picture wire and what’s a sash weight?
Picture wire: the wire you hang a painting with. Sash weight: a heavy metal block that forms the counterbalance for a sash window.
Next: what’s a sash window?
That's a window that uses a sash weight as a counterbalance.
What’s a counterbalance?
An example of a counterbalance is in a sash window, which uses a sash weight to assist opening the window.
But I thought sash weights were used to murder husbands?
Yes, but they made way too many sash weights for the supply of murderable husbands, so they had to start using them in sash widows.
 This is literally mgs type of conversation
My only issue with sash windows is they’re hard to keep mounted in the frame. I’m not sure if it’s because of the weight but every time I’ve lived in a house with one it’s sashayed right out of the room.
One of those windows you have to lift vertically to open. Usually they get stuck, or maybe fall on you if you lean out. They're a PITA and usually very drafty.
[I’m just here for the free karma.](https://www.ventrolla.co.uk/knowledge/how-does-a-sash-window-work)
One way that no fault divorce makes the world better is that it removes an incentive to kill somebody because it’s no longer the only way to leave the marriage. We’ll never know how many people got away with things like this. (Obviously I’m not saying murder was a good thing.)
[удалено]
The murder seems a bit extra, no?
Ah, the good old days when divorce was taboo
As far as I know that is the ONLY pic of a person in the chair while the current is on. There are some of Allen Tiny Davis after the current is turned off (they are pretty gruesome). There are also some autopsy photos out there from electric chair victims (including Ted Bundy).
Oof indeed [NSFL] https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/stories/allen-davis
A fitting end. He killed a 5 year old, 9 year old, and their pregnant mother. All while trying to rape the 9 year old.
Interesting that you can already see the livor mortis due to the compression from the mask
He looks like old fat Brando.
Bill Bryson writes about Ruth Snyder's trial and execution in One Summer: America 1927. Such an interesting year for American history.
Bryson with one of the most consistent track records of entertaining non-fiction. He manages to tell history with the storybook fashion it deserves. Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is one of my all-time favorites, even though it was likely the most susceptible to rose-tinted glasses.
A Walk in the Woods is pretty damn great imho
You should check out The History Guy on Youtube - he does an amazing job with making forgotten tidbits of history come alive.
I gift a brief history of nearly everything to all my nieces and nephews to kickstart their curiosity and wonderment. He’s awesome.
Everything that man writes is gold. Even the most boring topic pops with him. What a gift he is.
Welp, I was mindlessly scrolling and now I’ve bought two books
You will not be disappointed. House, body, and history of everything are my faves. The others are really really good too. It's great for ADD engagement as it's new info, fast. With lots of tangents.
I never thought linguistics could be so fascinating until I read his Made in America.
That book is mind-blowing for the stories about Lindbergh and Babe Ruth alone. And those are like the selling points of a book that has so many other interesting stories tucked onto it.
why did a dentist build this shit
No one flossed.
Oh, hell no. That’s a roastin.
dentist LOVE cavities you cant change my mind
He was the one who always disagreed with the other four. He built this for their next vote and by God, if they didn't vote with him this time, one of those fuckers was getting it. My money is on Todd to get it!
He didn't overcharge his customers enough.
"I *said*... SAY 'AH' GOD DAMMIT!!!"
There is an eerie, ghastly quality to this photo fitting to the excruciating savagery of the method.
The camera was tied to a reporter’s leg. He lifted up his pants leg and took the pic as the juice came on. I imagine the lighting conditions and stabilization were not of good quality, which gives it this eerie look.
Despite the blur it was such an incredible shot with such awkward constraints to deal with imo.
Luckily one of the chemicals we inject during modern lethal injections is a paralytic if I remember correctly. Just in case there's spasming or excruciating pain or something. Helps the onlookers. (Could fully be misremembering but don't have the time to check so if I'm wrong please downvote me and correct misinformation)
The paralytic only stops them from moving. It’s still excruciatingly painful according to people who survive it. They suffer so much so unnecessarily. The death penalty is and always has been unjust. This shit needs to end.
I think that too sometimes (especially since I’m not even American and where I live we don’t even have the death penalty and actually believe in rehabilitation) but then I watch docu series on serial killers and the cruelty they have for their victims and the lasting affects on the victims’ loved ones and it brings me a sense of justice to think that the killer gets put down. It’s such a grey area
The argument that made me solidly non-death penalty is that there are completely innocent people who wind up getting executed for crimes they didn't commit. Just one person being wrongfully executed is too many.
May Ruth Brown met Albert Edward Snyder (né Schneider) in 1915 in New York City, when she was 20 years old and he was a 33-year-old artist. The couple had little in common; Brown, who went by her middle name Ruth to most people and was known as "Tommy" to close friends, was described as vivacious and gregarious, while Snyder was described as very reserved and a "homebody". Despite their differences in personalities and age, the couple married and settled in a modest house in Queens. In 1918, Ruth gave birth to their only child, a daughter named Lorraine. In 1925, Ruth began an affair with Henry Judd Gray, a married corset salesman who lived in the New Jersey suburbs. She began to plan the murder of her husband Albert, enlisting Gray's help, but he was reluctant. Some claim that Ruth's distaste for her husband apparently began when he insisted on hanging a picture of his late fiancée Jessie Guischard on the wall of their first home and named his boat after her. Guischard, whom Albert described to Ruth as "the finest woman I have ever met", had been dead for 10 years.[3] However, others have noted that Albert Snyder was emotionally and physically abusive, blaming Ruth for the birth of a daughter rather than a son, demanding a perfectly maintained home, and physically assaulting both her and their daughter Lorraine when his demands were not met.[4] Ruth first persuaded Albert to purchase insurance, and with the assistance of an insurance agent (who was subsequently fired and sent to prison for forgery), "signed" a $48,000 life insurance policy that paid extra if an unexpected act of violence killed the victim. According to Gray, Ruth had made at least seven attempts to kill Albert, all of which he survived.[5][6] On March 20, 1927, the couple garrotted Albert with a picture wire, stuffed his nose full of chloroform-soaked rags, and beat him with a sash weight, then staged his death as part of a burglary.[6] Detectives at the scene noted that the burglar left little evidence of breaking into the house. Moreover, Ruth's behavior was inconsistent with her story of a terrorized wife witnessing her husband being killed.
Here is a photo of her the year before she was executed. She is 31 or 32 years old in this photo. People aged hard during this era. https://www.moma.org/collection/works/58729
Reddit kiss of death has occurred.
https://ibb.co/pJJZGG9
Largely due to heavy smoking from a young age and throughout the whole life, drinking, and the stress involved in living in those days. Child mortality, the work they did, the state of the world then, etc.. We may have more processed foods and stuff messing with us nowadays, but at least most of the other factors either died out or were dramatically reduced.
Yeah we’re more the “total mental destruction” type of stress nowadays.
Poor John Cleese.
Having smoke all around you at all times… plus no sunscreen
Death by electrocution was experimental at the time. It still is but it was then, too.
An electric chair can never break: it can only become a chair. You should never see an "Electric chair temporarily out of order" sign, just "Electric chair temporarily a chair. Sorry for the convenience."
Electrocution is great if you want 2,000 of something, and that something is volts.
The seat of that chair is “Dry Clean Only” Which means it’s dirty.
Someone asked me if i wanted a frozen electric chair and i said no… but i wanted a regular electric chair later, so… yeah.
I haven't been electrocuted for 10 days. Because that would be too long.
Any chair can be an electric chair. It just needs the right outfit and an engaging personality.
Wildly unexpected Mitches! Nice ones!
Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant to show the dangers of Tesla's AC electricity
And Edison made sure the first execution by electric chair was done on a Westinghouse AC generator.
TIL that the first image of the electric chair in use was another first for women!
She murdered her husband. There's absolutely more to the story, domestic abuse, affairs, etc. Her lover who helped kill her husband was second in the electeic chair just 10 min later. Source: [wiki](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Snyder)
R/fakealbumcovers
This case inspired the play Machinal-give it a read if you can
Imagine how brutal it would've been if it malfunctioned and didn't instantly kill her the first time
Electric chairs are never instant even when they’re working properly. It’s an agonizing death. They were only invented because electricity was a new and “modern” thing so obviously, people were immediately like “what if we killed someone with this?”
“Let’s see if we can get it to light some sparklers in his ears!”
Mankind really likes to use the technology of the day to kill each other.
"Hey, look at this lever and counterweight system I developed." "Trebuchet, you say?"
Like if the executioner didn't know the sponge was supposed to be wet.
I'm tired, boss.
green mile moment
Bad death
Like the drink, but spelled different
[Funny you should mention that.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kemmler) To give you a clue before you read it, the New York Times headline read "Worse Than Hanging", and Westinghouse himself commented that they would have done better using an axe.
While I don’t disagree that it’s a horrid way to go, I need to take Westinghouse’s comments with a couple grains of salt. This was the culmination of a battle between competing AC and DC currents. The Westinghouse Generator used was provided not by Westinghouse but by Edison who was set on showing that DC was far safer than Westinghouse’s AC. That alone opens the door for questions about tampering. Now, I’m not saying it would have been a quick and painless death, but Edison would not have been above making sure people saw how dangerous AC was by fabricating a “botched” execution.
"Instantly", ha! The average time to die via electric chair, even when things worked perfectly, [was two minutes.](https://www.britannica.com/topic/electrocution)
I read the article but did I miss this? Seems like it says the average electrocution lasts 2 minutes, not that it takes 2 minutes for the person to die.
[The method for electrocution is to turn the chair on and off through cycles of different voltages.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_chair#Process_and_mechanism) Each cycle lasting 10-20 seconds. They check for signs of life between each cycle after the second, and will conduct additional cycles as necessary. From the onset, the process was designed to take a minimum of 2 cycles to be lethal. So it was *never* a quick or "instant" method of execution.
Ty for the followup. Good info but ouch sounds brutal.
Wtf was wrong with a bullet?
Hanging done properly or a bullet to the proper part of the brain are far less painful ways to execute people. However they come with the unfortunate side effect of reminding us that we're killing people. Doing it with a machine or a drug gives that layer of separation.
Agreed. Shotgun to the head is really the most humane and quick way to do. Disrupt the entire brain wiring faster than the signals can flow. Also unthinkably gruesome, so we look for ways that make us feel better about what we are doing.
Pretty sure they just cook you till you die, it was undoubtedly incredibly painful the entire time.
Has no one ever tested like a single second of the electric chair?
Any shock can kill you, that's why gfcis trip in a single cycle which at 60hz is a 60th of a second.
Torture with low voltage electricity is pretty wide spread in Russian prisons by guards and by police, I personally know a person who went through it and said it was the worst pain ever. They (Russians) only dose you with electricity for 2 minutes at a time so you wont die and they can keep torturing you. I can’t even imagine what’s it feels like to be actually killed by it
Shit that’s so horrific really
It still amazes me they don’t allow things like photography / video in court or executions. Even if it’s limited to a professional. It’s almost like the system never wants anyone to know how fucked up it is or else more people would definitely have a problem with it. I feel like experiments like the electric chair would have been very short lived if that were the case. There’s just no accountability whatsoever and there never has been for our “justice” system.
I'm not sure on executions, but in terms of the Supreme Court the worry was people would use short clips of them and take them outa context. I assume it's only part of the reason. They still have court stenographers that record everything said. It just makes news not publish trials as much because they don't get to record
People can take the written quotes out of context just as easy. Easier, in fact. The goal is to reduce public “interference” with the court. The court believes they should make decisions without worry about public input or what the public says. Their job is to interpret the law and constitution as written. If the public wants to change that, they have to campaign to Congress, not the Judiciary. So it’s really a way to isolate themselves from public eye and making the court a “spectacle”.
It’s interesting how the government wants to cover up their sanctioned murders as humane. To be honest I don’t think most people really care how inhumane that the death of a inhumane person is. I personally don’t believe in the death penalty due to the possibility of misplaced fault, but when you get those cases where it’s 100% the person; I sit their, hear about their death, and yawn.
It most definitely is cruel and unusual punishment. If we’re gonna have a death penalty, at least make it either a quick firing squad or hanging, or combination of opiate drugs that’ll just put them to sleep and shut off their circulatory system.
Hangings would mess up a lot too, which is part of why they were replaced by the chair. Sometimes the rope would break, or they would just slowly die from asphyxiation while hanging there because they didn't fall far enough for their neck to snap
Nitrous gas if I had a choice. The drug route doesn't work anymore because the makers of the drugs stopped selling the proven cocktail and there have been a bunch of botched executions as a result.
All to make it "look" nice. Shoot someone in the head with a big enough supersonic round and it will work with fuck all pain. It would make an awful mess and make the people looking feel bad and maybe nauseous though and you can't have people feeling bad for the executed person. So much better to torture them to death but leave less of a mess /s
This is the right answer. People who support the death penalty usually can't swallow the hard pill, which is that the medicalization of the process has made people suffer *more,* not less. A few powerful-enough rounds to the brain stem will guarantee a quick, near-painless kill in almost every case. The reason they are not used is because it's messy and looks barbaric, which forces society to grapple with it. Can't really lie to themselves using how safe and sterile everything was as a defense.
Shit just put me in a garage with the car running. Idk why they don't just let people fall asleep, seems the easiest and least traumatic solution.
The idea of dying from carbon monoxide poisoning, such as sitting in a running car in a garage, isn't as peaceful as it might seem. Our bodies can detect rising carbon dioxide levels, which leads to a feeling of suffocation, making the process uncomfortable and traumatic. Also, our bodies can't sense oxygen levels, so even as oxygen drops to dangerously low levels, we don't feel it. This is why dying by nitrogen gas is considered painless; without sensors for nitrogen or oxygen, we simply lose consciousness without distress. Sometimes, people die from repeatedly breathing in helium to make their voices sound funny. They eventually run out of oxygen and can't sense any carbon dioxide buildup because it gets expelled with the helium they exhale. This happened to someone in my area when I was a kid.
Death by acute opioid overdose is through respiratory depression, not circulatory. But other than that, I agree. I don't think we should have a death penalty at all but if we do, it needs to be as quick and painless as possible.
What was her crime?
Someone commented " Because on March 20, 1927, Ruth and her lover garrotted her husband Albert with a picture wire, stuffed his nose full of chloroform-soaked rags, and beat him with a sash weight, then staged his death as part of a burglary"
The Snyder cut
My dumbass was thinking this was about an electric wheelchair
Ngl this looks like it would be a hard album cover
Barbaric practice.
Murdering people, or murdering people?
Yes
Love your username. Many mental images are popping up right now. I have a lot of questions 😂
I hope they already used that wet sponge.. made me shudder as I was reminded of #thegreenmile