"[capital punishment] is said to be a deterrent. I cannot agree. There have been murders since the beginning of time, and we shall go on looking for deterrents until the end of time. If death were a deterrent, I might be expected to know. It is I who have faced them last, young men and girls, working men, grandmothers. I have been amazed to see the courage with which they take that walk into the unknown. It did not deter them then, and it had not deterred them when they committed what they were convicted for. All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder."
-- Albert Pierrepoint (autobiography)

That said, there appears to be some dispute over his eventual position on capital punishment.

I'm in complete agreement, although there are some edge-case limits. I lost an uncle (well before I was born) to one of them.

Kansas winters are cold and dry. My grandmother liked to deal with both problems by putting a pot to boil on the stove. In the 50's, my father's 3-4 year old brother managed to get enough of a grip and yank on the handle of the pot to pull it over the edge and didn't survive the burns from the scalding water.

Burned fingertips? Lesson learned, will heal. Boiling water or oil? Better keep it out of reach.

Yup. His real grandmother.
http://www.modbee.com/news/article160021149.html

Your video, Macklemore celebrates his Grandmother's 100th, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

And you're actually not exactly 50% of both parents! You get a mixture of both but not exactly 50/50. Both of my grandmothers were 100% Norwegian, so both my parents thought they were 50% Norwegian, so my brother and I thought we were 50% Norwegian. I did the ancestry test and it turns out I'm 73% Norwegian! 11% Irish/Scotch, and the rest is European! Craziness!

Being an American in Canada I'm a bit removed from the whole thing. It didn't really hit until I called my mom who just cried the entire time.

My grandmother was in the Holocaust and my older brother had called my mom and asked her, "When did the Jews know it was time to leave?"

That hit home. It's easy to see that we have not learned anything from history. We're not better than we were 70 years ago. This can happen again so easily.

I'm honestly scared.

1. I tend not to like lists like these, so I always ensure that at least some answers are completely made up. In protest I will not reformat this list to make it more readable.
2. I was quite good at fencing. I was Irish national sabre champion, but that's a lot less impressive than it sounds.
3. I won Miss Fencing Intervarsities 3 years running. I'm male.
4. I'm a Monty Python fan to an unhealthy degree. I co-wrote the first Python FAQ online, based on actual questions that were asked frequently.
6. I have called every living member of Monty Python 'Michael' except Michael Palin. I called him Terry. None of them called me on it.
7. I have what amounts to a secret crush on someone here on the sift. They always say what I'm thinking, but far more eloquently than I ever can. I grin when they upvote me.
8. I have a Scaramanga-style extra nipple.
9. I have a son. My girlfriend's waters broke while I was watching Alien. I'm more proud of the second part than the first... lots of other people have tiny pet humans.
10. I was once kicked in the head by Armand Assante (a b-list-ish actor).
11. I can sing the names of about 20 particularly nasty diseases.
12. I'm batman.
13. I've been online since the 80s, but at this stage the web is pretty much read-only for me. I'm more active here on the sift than anywhere else, and that's not saying much.
14. I was in Russia during the 'invasion of Georgia' in 2008. In fact, I was in the mountains bordering the two countries and saw the situation almost first-hand. Before then I had little confidence in the news we get here in the west; now I have almost none. Stuff broadcast as fact was (to me) easily proven false at the time, and the subsequent UN report backs up my side of the story.
15. I teach tai chi.
16. One of my happiest memories is not sleeping with a hot (and very cool) Norwegian woman.
17. I once ran a marathon backwards. It's not as easy as it sounds.
18. My grandmother owned race horses, including one who holds a significant record in Cheltenham. She's quite famous here in Ireland (to a certain generation at least).
19. Online (and sometimes off) I tend to use anagrams of my name. The idea is that it's hard to find Noims from my real name (until someone ruins that), but not too hard to go the other direction. My avatar is based on the same principle. There are at least 3 other Noimses online, but I was the first.
20. My favourite piece of software is the vi editor (specifically gvim). I have no idea what my favourite book, music, or non-python film are.
21. I'm a keen gamer, but most offline. I hate Steam. I've been playing Nethack since the 80s, and still play in the devnull competition yearly... it's the longest running online game tournament there is.
22. I think one of the worst facts in the world is that marketing works.
23. I was in a metal band called the Bubonic Duck-Fuckers from Hell (BDF).
24. I used to be big into RPGs (role playing - not rockets). I once got first prize in 3 games in a single weekend convention with 4 game slots.
25. I love the number 12, and know all the powers up to 12^12. Consequently I dislike the number 5. I strongly tend to favour multiples/powers of 12 over those of 5.

1. My family was considered to be a 'organized crime' family by the police in Tucson, AZ.
2. I've committed 2 crimes in my life. My first was when I was 13, I shoplifted a Gen 1 Transformer from Kmart and was banned from the store until 18. The second was helping a friend load an illegally poached deer into his truck.
3. My first car was a 1974 Dodge Challenger
4. When I was 19, I almost ran away from my future wife to go to Dallas and open one of the first ink cartridge refilling companies with a friend.
5. My mother never married and let my Grandparents raise me.
6. I started smoking at 14, rolling my own from my Grandfather's Bugler tobacco.
7. I smoked for many years, quitting twice. Once when my Grandfather died from Emphysema and then for good when my Grandmother died of lung cancer.
8. I worked for Texas Instruments, Dell, and Apple. Their stock allowed me to retire early.
9. I've had a mental breakdown that lead to me retiring early.
10. I still suffer from depression and anxiety.
11. Online I can interact with people much better than I can in real life. I find it very hard to deal with people in person.
12. My wife embarrasses me in public because she is very outgoing.
13. I hate doing dishes. I mean I really loathe doing them.
14. I have two dogs.
15. I don't like cats very much.
16. I sometimes have weird dreams that my best friend is still alive.
17. I prefer being indoors vs being outdoors.
18. Other than my mother, my family is all dead or estranged.
19. I am a video game enthusiast.
20. I don't want children.
21. I once had a 4-wheeler roll over on top of me and pin me under creek water.
22. I used to use twilight as my online handle until Stephenie Meyer ruined that for me forever.
23. My favorite animated cartoon was the 1990's Batman animated series.
24. I used to be a huge Stephen King fan until he was hit by that vehicle and his writing suddenly started sucking.
25. I have very poor eyesight without my glasses.

I am so firmly in driver category #1 that I printed my own T-shirts that have the road sign most people ignore that says "slower traffic keep right" and on the back they say "keep right except to pass".
I used to get upset at my grandmother who would drive 40mph on the freeway to be "safe". I would repeat 'How is it not a wreck if we get rear ended by someone going the speed limit? You know we get hurt MORE being hit unexpectedly from the rear, right?' It never helped.
Thank you Vox, for explaining it well.

In the first place as to the house they had bought, it was not new at all, as they had supposed; it was about fifteen years old, and there was nothing new upon it but the paint, which was so bad that it needed to be put on new every year or two. The house was one of a whole row that was built by a company which existed to make money by swindling poor people. The family had paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, and it had not cost the builders five hundred, when it was new. Grandmother Majauszkiene knew that because her son belonged to a political organization with a contractor who put up exactly such houses. They used the very flimsiest and cheapest material; they built the houses a dozen at a time, and they cared about nothing at all except the outside shine. The family could take her word as to the trouble they would have, for she had been through it all--she and her son had bought their house in exactly the same way. They had fooled the company, however, for her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry, they had been able to pay for the house.

Grandmother Majauszkiene saw that her friends were puzzled at this remark; they did not quite see how paying for the house was "fooling the company." Evidently they were very inexperienced. Cheap as the houses were, they were sold with the idea that the people who bought them would not be able to pay for them. When they failed--if it were only by a single month-- they would lose the house and all that they had paid on it, and then the company would sell it over again. And did they often get a chance to do that? Dieve! (Grandmother Majauszkiene raised her hands.) They did it--how often no one could say, but certainly more than half of the time. They might ask any one who knew anything at all about Packingtown as to that; she had been living here ever since this house was built, and she could tell them all about it. And had it ever been sold before? Susimilkie! Why, since it had been built, no less than four families that their informant could name had tried to buy it and failed. She would tell them a little about it.

The Jungle - Upton Sinclair 1906

*******************
Nothing new under the sun folks. Poor people always get fucked.

Sit back???

Those grandmothers are hardly going to come to me now, are they? I'm going to have to work for it.

Agreed, but it would probably help limit the number of accidental deaths or injuries, and it would hopefully stop a lot of those "toddler shoots grandmother" stories.

Side note: you really don't need to "sign" every post with
"-scheherazade" at the end. It already says your name at the top of each post.

I was always told that the guy should pay for the first date.

I've never been in an abusive relationship; which is odd, since I was raised by an alcoholic and very abusive (to my grandmother) grandfather. Statistically I should be a person that abuses women, but instead I have nothing but the deepest disgust and contempt for someone who abuses their partner.

I married a girl I went to high school with, I was a Junior and she had just graduated. She prefers that I pay and hold doors for her, but then we sort of grew up when that thing was still in fashion.