The U.S. Supreme Court halted Banks' execution 10 minutes before he went to the needle.

AP reports that the Texas parole board has refused to consider death row inmate Delma Banks' appeal claiming ineffective counsel, because Banks' paperwork was filed a week late. So tomorrow, during the SXSW Music Awards, Banks will die by lethal injection. Apparently his lawyers � working pro bono � weren't punctual enough to satisfy the parole board, whose members don't even meet in the same room when deciding the fate of the convicted. They just give their votes ��usually "no" � and immediately go back to their lives, apparently comfortable with the fact that they've personally contributed to another state-sanctioned murder.

Former FBI head William Sessions and other federal bigwigs have intervened on Banks' behalf, saying that killing Banks will create even more doubt about capital punishment and the fairness of its application. No matter � Texas, the state you don't mess with, has already had to deal with one stayed execution this year. Stopping the killing machine just doesn't work for the leaders of Texas.

Banks, who is black, allegedly killed a white teenager in 1980. Weird thing is, that at the time of the murder Banks was in Dallas, about a three-hour drive from Nash, where the murder was committed. Racial discrimination during jury selection was allowed and took place. Banks' lawyer did nothing to help him during the trial, as his current lawyers point out.

Yet another thing wrong with this picture � the desire for revenge, which drives this whole barbaric process in the first place. Larry Whitehead, the father of the victim, told AP, "All the attention and all the focus is on Banks right now and how much of a raw deal he's getting. Yet he's lived 23 years longer than my son lived. Our son got the raw deal." If only Whitehead looked at the big picture and questioned whether justice is truly being served here. If and when Banks dies on the cot, as I assume he will someday, someone else's son will be dead, too.

If I were Whitehead-the-deceased and I heard my dad say "Our son got the raw deal," and not mention all the atrocious injustices that Banks' case represents, I would come right down from heaven to earth just to kick my misguided father in the ass. If heaven existed, of course.

Hot Humor This Season: Duct Tape

"Duct tape" now has its own yahoo.com category. With nine entries devoted to it, duct tape beats out "traffic cones," which has just one.

Twenty-seven

That's how old I am now. The last post was written last week, when I was 26. Happy birthday.

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My brain isn't working. For the past few days I've been feeling like a tourist in a tower, just staring out of the windows and looking but not knowing what to say. You can't do much with just a view.

Well, some provocative things have happened recently. Today I called this composting facility � for work, not for pleasure � to ask how its name was spelled. The name had some hyphens and I needed to know where to put them. And the secretary who answered the phone said, "If you hold on, I'll get the owner."

"You don't know how to spell the name of your employer?"

"Well, yes, but ... here he is." She promptly disconnected me. I called back.

"You disconnected me," I said.

"Sorry." This time it worked. Yet it kind of bothers me that the receptionist didn't tell me how to spell the name of the composting facility. I wanted to hear her spell it. But I won't call tomorrow to ask her "how do you spell the name of your company?" because in the end it's really not that important whether she tells me or puts me on hold again to wait until the boss gets off his phone and is ready to take my call. No, in the grand scheme of things, it's not important at all.

Happy Colon Day

Apparently it's Cancer-free Colon Day. Every time I click on yahoo.com, Wayne Newton or Fred Dryer's face pops up, with some admonition to get my colon checked. Wayne voted for Bush, so I wouldn't do anything he says. But Fred Dryer's another story � as is Colon-Conscious Connie Stevens.