How stupid do you have to be to test positive for five banned substances?
Obit watch: Robert Hegyes, best known as Juan Epstein on “Welcome Back, Kotter”. (FARK already did the “Epstein’s Mother” joke so I don’t have to.)
Random notes: January 27, 2012.
January 27th, 2012Today’s literary fraud update…
January 26th, 2012…comes to us by way of our great and good friend Earl Cooley III on Google+.
It starts with the arrest of Mitchell Gross on charges of wire fraud and money laundering. According to the indictment, Gross defrauded a woman he met online of $3 million.
Okay, so? Mitchell Gross is also known as “Mitchell Graham”; he published fantasy books with HarperCollins and mysteries with Tor and Forge.
And then this is where it really starts to get weird. Gross claims to be a championship fencer (there are some questions about that claim; it seems clear, at the very least, that he was not on the US Olympic fencing teams in 1984 and 1988). Gross also claimed to have been a practicing lawyer for twenty years, and that he quit practicing in order to go back to school and earn a doctorate in neuropsychology. (Gross was actually disbarred in 1990, and convicted of practicing law without a license in 1992.)
And then it gets weirder. Gross may have set up his own fake writing contest, complete with judging by Ben Bova, and used that to get published. (“Mr. Bova told us that he had indeed been hired as a contest judge–the only one, so far as he was aware. He was a bit surprised to discover that there was also only one finalist, but went ahead and did as he was asked–to read the manuscript and judge if it was fit to win.“)
The best roundup of this is at the Writer Beware blog. Be sure to read the comments, as people seem to be digging up more information on Mr. Gross. There’s also a lot of good stuff in the linked AJC article.
Speaking of traffic lights…
January 26th, 2012Battleswarm was doing a better job of covering the red-light camera issue in Houston than I was. However, I ran across an item (by way of Overlawyered) that I thought was worth sharing.
When the referendum outlawing the red light cameras was being litigated before District Court Judge Lynn N. Hughes, Judge Hughes blocked Francis and Randy Kubosh, the people behind the referendum, from participating in Houston’s lawsuit against American Traffic Solutions (ATS). The Kuboshs (and other people) were concerned that Houston was going to go into the tank for ATS, “especially after ATS and Houston’s lawyers sat together at the same table during oral arguments.”
Yeah. Well. The Fifth Circuit ruled on Tuesday that, no, Judge Hughes, you can’t do that.
Meanwhile, the city settled with ATS for $4.8 million. Noted:
Obit watch: January 26, 2012.
January 26th, 2012Legendary actor Nicol Williamson passed away on December 16. However, his death was apparently not reported until yesterday.
And:
(In addition to playing Hamlet and Macbeth, he was also Sherlock Holmes in “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution”.)
Traffic.
January 25th, 2012The city of Galveston has placed all twelve members of the city’s traffic division on “paid administrative leave”. Apparently, there’s some sort of investigation going on.
Note: these are not Galveston PD officers, and don’t issue traffic tickets. These are the folks who maintain the city traffic lights and suchlike. Which kind of makes this a full on “WTF?!” moment. (As the HouChron notes, there is a budget for the division, but they don’t collect money from the public, so you’d figure the chances for skimming and embezzlement are slim.)
Obit watch: The final countdown…
January 25th, 2012…for James Farentino.
I really wish someone would put “The Bold Ones” (or even the individual “wheels” within the series, such as Farentino and Ives’s “The Lawyers”) out on DVD. From what I saw back when I could get RTN, that was actually a pretty good series.
Sentiment.
January 24th, 2012My opinion of baseball is well established.
My opinion of the New York Yankees is perhaps less well established; in brief, I consider them as an organization to be the representatives of Satan on Earth.
That being said…
Lot of cedar pollen in the air today. That must be why my eyes are watering.
(Hattip: His Grubes.)
A quick one that kicked over my giggle box.
January 24th, 2012I’m particularly fond of this one. (Yes, that is a real status code, although it is technically HTCPCP, not HTTP. See RFC 2324. Yes, there are documented implementations of this.)
This obit watch does not compute. Warning! Warning!
January 24th, 2012The Onion A/V Club is reporting the death of Dick Tufeld, noted television announcer and voice actor, perhaps most famous as the voice of “Lost in Space”‘s Robot.
TMQ watch: January 24, 2012.
January 24th, 2012Before we jump into this week’s TMQ, we thought we’d mention D.J. Gallo’s list of the worst college basketball blowouts in Division I history. “Long Island 179, Medgar Evers 62″. It took all of Long Island to defeat one guy? And “Texas 102, San Marcos Baptist 1″. “San Marcos Baptist Academy was — and is — a boarding school for teenagers.”
After the jump…