#john mulvaney

[pineconecowgirl]

this demanded to exist

[psychologistmimi]

If you heard that spoon drop it's 'cause I'm eating a bowl of fruit loops

I was recently, at midnight, watching a stand-up comedy special to try to help me sleep.  I specifically was watching John Mulvaney’s latest stand-up special. The one after his rehab stint.  It was funny. It was self-deprecating. It was timely. I think, in many ways, there are a ton of people who could relate to his journey to sobriety.  Even though his story contained a story about a $10,000…

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[showbizjunkies]

Big Mouth Scores an Order for 3 Additional Seasons

The adult animated comedy series Big Mouth has earned three additional seasons ahead of its third season premiere.

[communicationczar]

Bernie Williams Brings Arts to Schools The disgraceful new budget outline as presented by the Director of the Office of Budget Management…

[shootingvictoria]

Jane Clouson, the Metropolitan Police, and Jack the Ripper

     The murder of Jane Clouson in the spring of 1871, and the murders seventeen years afterwards of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—the known victims of Jack the Ripper—certainly seem to be crimes without any connection, short of the facts that they were brutal murders, they did occur during the reign of Queen Victoria and in London, and the murderers never paid for their crimes. (I do recall seeing on a well-known Jack the Ripper website that someone posted the speculation that Jane might have been a very early victim of the Ripper. But there is virtually nothing to support that claim, and a great deal to oppose it.) And yet at the end of the nineteenth century one journalist did claim a substantial connection between the crimes: specifically, that the failure to establish the guilt of Jane Clouson’s murderer led to the failure to catch the Ripper.

    Writing in the January 1898 issue of London Society, Halboro Denham raised a serious question about the Detective Branch of the Metropolitan police in the title of the article: “Is the C. I. D. a Failure?” His answer was an emphatic yes. Looking back at murder cases in London over the previous half-century, Denham cited over two dozen, including the Whitechapel Murders, that the police had been unable to solve. The very first of these Denham called “the mystery of Shooter’s Hill, also known as the Eltham murder”: Jane’s murder. Denham noted the poor prosecution of the case, and the natural result: the acquittal of Edmund Pook for the crime. “We have selected this memorable trial,” Denham wrote, “for the beginning of what we have called ‘a series of failures,’ not simply because the establishment of Pook’s innocence, left the case an unsolved problem, but rather because it would almost appear as if the break down of the prosecution had had a permanently discouraging effect on Scotland Yard. In one word, excessive caution has perhaps operated as unfavourably of later years, as over zeal did in the attempt to hang young Pook.”

     In other words—the police and Scotland Yard had tried too hard to convict Edmund Walter Pook for Jane’s murder. And after the wave of criticism that burst upon them—from the press, from the public, even from politicians in Parliament—they learned their lesson: they learned to temper their zeal to convict. And so, according to Denham, they repeatedly failed to find or convict murderers: among the many, the murderer of Harriet Buswell in 1872, of Sarah and Christine Squires, mother and daughter, the same year; of Charles Bravo in 1876—and of the Ripper’s five known victims in 1888.

     Did Halboro Denham have a point? Certainly, the failure of the Pook prosecution and the revelations of police blundering at his trial did lead to a great public revulsion at police methods in that case, and to the public shaming of its two leading officers. Detective Inspector John Mulvaney of Scotland Yard and Superintendent James Griffin of Greenwich Division became in a sense models of how not to conduct a murder case. To be fair, however, if in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century the Metropolitan Police failed to catch a number of murderers, including the most notorious one of all, they did succeed in catching quite a few. One officer who certainly could have given Denham a more positive view of the Metropolitan police was, of all people, the son of the detective assigned to Jane Clouson’s case. John Mulvaney Jr. joined the force in opposition to his father’s wishes in May, 1871, the very same month that Jane Clouson died. By 1892, Mulvaney Jr. was Superintendent of Police of H, or Whitechapel District, Jack the Ripper’s stalking-grounds. He came to Whitechapel too late to participate in the Ripper investigation, but he did take part four years later in the successful hunt for one of Victorian London’s more notorious serial killers, Thomas Neill Cream: caught, tried and hung for poisoning a number of women. Mulvaney was one of several officers given a financial reward for his role in the case. If the senior Mulvaney’s failure did create a malaise within the Metropolitan Police, then Mulvaney’s own son, for one, showed himself able to overcome it.

[archaeologicalnews]

Australia's 'father of archaeology' dies aged 90

The man described as the father of Australian archaeology, Emeritus Professor John Mulvaney, has died aged 90.

Professor Mulvaney was the first university-trained prehistorian to study Australia.

He worked at the Australian National University and pioneered the study of the pre-history of Indigenous people.

Professor Colin Groves, who worked with Professor Mulvaney, said one of his greatest legacies was the respect he gave to Indigenous people in Australia.

"He was of course a person who treated Indigenous people as people, not as just study subjects," he said. Read more.

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