[BRIEF NOTE] Byron Carr

A while ago, I was surprised to see a couple of articles on CBC Prince Edward Island (1, 2) describing how local police were reopening the case of the 1988 murder of Charlottetown schoolteacher Byron Carr and reaching out to the local GLBT community for help. Katie Smith's article in The Guardian, "Posters next step in Carr murder investigation", neatly summarizes the situation.

On Saturday, members of the Charlottetown police force teamed up with members from the Island’s gay community to put up posters with Byron Carr’s picture, asking the public to bring forward any information they might have.

Carr was 36 when he was found strangled and stabbed in his Charlottetown home in November 1988.

The lead investigator for the case said there wasn’t an initial catalyst that led police to re-open the case this past September.

“It’s been our only outstanding homicide,” said Const. Brad MacConnell. “Advances in sciences have allowed us to eliminate a large portion of the population and we’re going to use that to our advantage to try to do that. Our department’s always been committed to having this solved, it’s just a matter of having the right basis to start from and advances in DNA have given us that opportunity.”

Carr, a former school teacher, was gay. At that time members of the gay community were worried about coming forward with information.

Jim Day's two article in The Guardian, a 24 November article titled "On the hunt" and a 26 November article titled "A double life" go into greater detail on the case. Setting Wild conspiracy theories on discussion boards to one side, it looks like Carr was murdered by a trick one lonely night in Charlottetown. That might explain why I remember the local print news media to have been somewhat reticent in talking about the case.

It's funny, but until I ran into those articles I never thought of that sort of thing happening on Prince Edward Island. Ah well, we're human after all.

[REVIEW] David W. McFadden, An Innocent in Cuba

I enjoyed David W. McFadden's pleasant enough travelogue An Innocent in Cuba, a much more linear and more attentive Tristram Shandy, until I came to his treatment of imprisoned writer Raul Rivero Castañeda. After taking Castañeda to task for his "oddly sarcastic, bitter, humourless but hot-blooded writing style," his opposition to the Cuban regime, and arguing that he was compromised by the United States because he accepted payments from American newspapers for his articles, McFadden ambivalently concluded that it would probably be best if he was released.

His name seems to have been hijacked by those calling for an invasion of Cuba, so it might be better for Cuba if he were given his freedom. There's a good case for keeping him in jail and a good case for releasing him. But forty years in prison doesn't sound right for a poet opposed to the system. How could any poet worth his tropes not be opposed to the system? I don't know, I just don't know (279).

Would McFadden have written the preceding if he had been talking about an Argentine writer imprisoned during the Dirty War, or perhaps a Chinese dissident in the People's Republic? It's all the same. I was surprised to find out that his work's ambivalent respect for tyranny spoiled the book for me.

[LINK] "Many Earth-like planets may exist in Milky Way"

From the New Scientist:

As many as 60% of Sun-like stars in the Milky Way may form rocky planets similar to Earth, according to recent findings from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The findings suggest that other worlds with potential for life might be more common than previously thought.

Astronomers used the infrared telescope to look for signs of warm dust around 309 distant stars grouped together by age.

They found that younger stars -10 to 20 million years old - had dust around them at temperatures suggesting the dust disks lay at distances from the stars where planets would be likely to form. The farther away from a star the dust lies, the colder it gets.

"We detect the heat radiation of dust grains," says Michael Meyer of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "From those observations, we infer the presence of colliding larger rocky bodies that bang together and generate dust."

[. . .]

The dust grew less abundant as they looked at older stars until it disappeared almost entirely around stars that were 300 million years old or older, suggesting that the dust is likely to have been accreted into the form of planets. The time frame corresponds to the time it is likely to have taken for Earth and other planets in our solar system to form through the collision of smaller bodies. The amount of dust found around different ages of stars suggests that between 20-60% of stars similar to the Sun are candidates for forming terrestrial planets.