There is a picture of this "bullit" at http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/12/28/nyregion/28anar184.2.jpg

It appears to be quite large. Not hard to recover.
 

No, I noticed that too, but it still seems improbable to me.

To be fair, though, I'll concede that I've never had a rubber bullet fired at me, so perhaps there's something about their trajectory I'm missing.
 

It's possible it's not the right bullet; I was understandably a bit startled and disoriented right after the thing hit my head (we'd just been pepper-bombed too behind the barricade, which was improvised out of sofas and doors and things that local people had apparently salvaged from their basements. The pepper goes right through your gas mask; they do that so you have to stand up to breathe and then they shoot you with the plastic bullets. Anyway, a friend of mine who was next to me at the time - we'd both been reporting on the scene for the local Independent Media Center - ran back and gave me the bullet, saying he was pretty sure it was the one that had hit me. He could have been wrong (there were a number of them lying around) but I've always assumed it probably was the one that hit me. For some weird reason the bullets were all different colors so it made it easier to pick out which was the one most recently rolling along.

Incidentally: it's amazing how consistently wrong all this coverage is about the basic facts of the case. It wasn't a tenure case. It's extremely unlikely that any junior faculty member will get tenure at Yale. The point was they cut off my contract during what's normally a routine pre-tenure promotion without giving any reason - all of which is extremely unusual. So the comments by Linda-Anne that you cite are utterly irrelevant - she was just pissed because _she_ didn't get tenure despite the department pushing her as hard as they could, even while they were trying to make sure I never came up for tenure at all. As for being late for class: yes, just about all classes at Yale start five minutes late. I've never heard of anyone getting fired for it. Other accusations against me consisted of my supposedly having told a grad student that some professor had voted against his prospectus (if I had been allowed to respond to any of these accusations I could have reminded the faculty members that the vote had been by secret ballot and I had no idea who had voted for or against the prospectus, but at Yale you are not only not allowed to face your accusers, you are not even allowed to know what the accusation was, except when secretly whispered to you after the fact on condition you don't tell who told you), and most interestingly, that I had "intimidated" the Director of Graduate Studies by taking notes at a committee meeting when she summoned a brilliant graduate student who was also a union organizer to tell her that she was unfit for academic life and had to leave the program. (This is how Yale works. You can have a meeting where powerful senior faculty members tells a grad student "you're no good, get out of anthropology!" - one junior prof dares to say "I think she's a good student, surely we must be able to work something out" - and _he's_ the guy who gets accused of intimidation.

I could go on - about vulnerable international students who were first told they were in danger of failing their qualifying exams and then asked to write negative evaluations of me, and other shockingly unethical behavior - but you get the idea. I first went by the book: I informed the department chair what was happening. He pretended to be utterly sympathetic, and then ended up supporting the people trying to kick me out because he felt that was the easist and most convenient way to get rid of the problem. I went to the dean and he made an appointment, then suddenly called in mysteriously sick that day. I went to the provost's office and they said I could file a grievance, and then only later explained that actually, the grievance committee didn't have the power to reverse the decision and could only look at procedural questions and still wouldn't tell me any of the accusations against me or allow me to address them - apparently the best they could do was write a secret report to the provost who could then ask the department to take the vote again - in other words, it would be like asking an accused sexual harrasser to vote on whether the victim gets redress. It became quite apparent, anyway, that the entire system is set up to guarantee that if you are senior faculty, no matter what you do, no matter how systematically you violate even the most basic ethical standards, Yale's only reaction will be to hush it up and guarantee that nothing happens to you.
DG