Archive for March, 2013

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Crime of the century!

Friday, March 8th, 2013

Somebody, or a group of somebodies, stole eight – that’s right, eight – school buses from a Chicago area bus yard last night.

The people who stole the buses drove them to a scrapyard, where they were shredded.

“There was a pile of shredded school buses about two-stories high,” one police official said. Some pieces were large enough that police could see the “Sunrise bus logo,” the official said.
Engines and transmissions from the buses had already been cut in half, and the seats tossed in a “big pile of scrap.”

(The linked article includes some photos of the pile of scrap.)

Apparently, the buses were stolen sometime between 7 PM last night (when the yard was closed) and 5 AM this morning (when the theft was discovered). So are scrap yards typically open after 7 PM on a weeknight? And wouldn’t you figure that someone would ask questions when eight school buses were driven in for scrap? Or was there more going on?

When officers arrived, several people who apparently worked in the scrap yard ran into a building, police said. Officers initially apprehended one person and later took two others into custody. The owner was arrested in the afternoon.

(This could also double as important safety tip #18 17:

The buses were all equipped with GPS tracking devices, and police were able to track “their entire movement” to the scrap yard on the West Side, police said.

Don’t steal stuff with GPS tracking devices, or stuff that you might think has GPS tracking devices. Among the things that you might think have GPS tracking devices, if you’re a criminal mastermind:

  • Airplanes.
  • Expensive cars.
  • Government vehicles, including police cars.
  • School buses that carry children.

That’s just a partial list. I’m sure others can think of more examples, but those should suffice for the crackheads in my audience.)

Posted in Clippings, GPS, Law, Safety | Comments Closed

Important safety tips (#15 and #16 in a series)

Friday, March 8th, 2013

Three in one day? I know. But there’s a story in the NYT that offers some instructive lessons.

Chris Huhne was a British political figure. The NYT describes him as “a fast-rising politician with fashionably left-of-center views on social issues and a background in high finance that had yielded a multimillion-dollar fortune“.

He also had a lead foot. He was caught speeding by a roadside camera back in 2003, and he had three previous convictions prior to that. If he had been convicted on the 2003 charge, he would have been banned from driving and fined.

So he got his wife to say she was driving instead.

Safety tip #15: the cover-up is always worse than the crime.

Had he pleaded guilty at the time, he would have faced a $100 fine and been barred from driving for six months to a year; by lying in the case, he ultimately lost his cabinet post, the first politician in British history to be forced from office by a criminal prosecution, as well as his parliamentary seat, and, British pundits say, any prospect of a future political career.

Huhne pled guilty to a charge of “perverting the course of justice”. He hasn’t been sentenced yet, but the judge in his case has indicated Huhne will probably serve time.

Vicky Pryce, Mr. Huhne’s wife at the time, was convicted of the same charge, and will probably serve time as well.

How did things fall apart?

Ms. Pryce stuck with the deceit over the speeding ticket for more than seven years until Mr. Huhne, faced with the imminent exposure of an extramarital affair with one of his political aides by a London tabloid, abruptly walked out of the 25-year marriage.
The court heard that Ms. Pryce learned the news from her husband when he confronted her during a halftime break in a Saturday-afternoon telecast of a World Cup soccer match in 2010, announcing that he needed an immediate separation to save his cabinet post.

Tip #16: if you’re going to ask your wife to cover-up your crime, treat her well. Don’t plan on divorcing her, unless you’re sure the statute of limitations has run out. And I’d check with a lawyer first, just to make sure you haven’t overlooked some crime that you could possibly be charged with.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Safety | Comments Closed

Be careful out there.

Friday, March 8th, 2013

Sutchi Hui, a 71-year-old San Francisco resident, was walking with his wife through the busy intersection of Castro and Market streets when he was hit by Bucchere in March 2012. He died of his injuries four days later at San Francisco General Hospital.

Chris Bucchere, the man who hit Mr. Hui, is being charged with felony gross vehicular manslaughter.

People get hit by cars every day, and the drivers sometimes face charges, yes? So why am I picking out this case?

Because Mr. Bucchere wasn’t driving a car: he was riding his bicycle when he hit Mr. Hui.

“Court testimony indicated that [Bucchere] was going at least 30 mph and that he ran two red lights and a stop sign prior to going through the intersection where the collision occurred,” said San Francisco Assistant Dist. Atty. Alex Bastian, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Important safety tip (#14 in a series)

Friday, March 8th, 2013

I don’t care how good looking you are, or how handsome you think you are.

I don’t care how lonely you are after your divorce.

I don’t care how beautiful the bikini model is, or what her cup size is.

Don’t check luggage that belongs to other people.

Because the best thing that can happen to you is that they’ll find the cocaine hidden in the suitcase, and you’ll wind up doing hard time in an Argentinian prison.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Safety | Comments Closed

All local, all the time.

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

A Round Rock police officer shot himself in the right foot Tuesday. I’ve avoided blogging this until now because the Statesman didn’t have much detail beyond that. But this is interesting:

A Round Rock police officer who accidentally discharged a gun into his right foot Tuesday was attending a workshop to become an instructor for Glock firearms, said Dee Carver, a police spokeswoman.

Also, it gives me an excuse to embed this video, which never gets old:

And the case of the dog with no nose? The ownership question has been resolved:

The dog, a bearded collie that rescuers named “Victory” will remain in the care of Austin Pets Alive which will place it in a foster home.

The Statesman does not report a judicial ruling on the question of “how does it smell?”.

(Previous coverage.)

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Old Man Yells At Cloud.

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

This has come up in conversation twice in the past seven days. I believe that is a sign that I have to make a blog post out of it.

“Django Unchained” is currently number 41 on the IMDB list of top 250 movies.

Here are some movies that the IMDB top 250 voters think “Django Unchained” is better than:

  • “Citizen Kane” (#46)
  • “Lawrence of Arabia” (#69)
  • “Return of the Jedi” (#80)
  • “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (#86)
  • “Heat” (#120)
  • “The Maltese Falcon” (#122)
  • “Fargo” (#129)
  • “The Wizard of Oz” (#151)
  • “Network” (#169)
  • “The Exorcist” (#204)

Feel free to go through the list and post your own “Django Unchained is better than…WTF?” moments in the comments. I, personally, promise not to refer to you as Grandpa Simpson, though I can’t say the same for other people.

Posted in Movies | 1 Comment »

Is it just me?

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

…or are there other folks out there who see the Pocket Hose commercial and say to themselves “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn“? (I can’t get the video to start where I want it to, even with YouTube’s embed link, so fast-forward to about 56 seconds in to see what I’m talking about.)

(And how have I gotten by for this long without a “Cthulhu” tag? Fixed now.)

Posted in Cthulhu, TV | 1 Comment »

Right turn, Clyde.

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

One of FARK’s ongoing tropes is the idea that NASCAR is the sport of white male rednecks. So the story of Tia Norfleet should push some buttons: she’s not just a woman, but she’s the first African-Amercian woman to race in NASCAR, or so she says on her website.

In speaking engagements with students and in news media interviews, Norfleet has for several years portrayed herself as an accomplished driver in the sport. She has sought sponsorships and has a PayPal account on her Web site, which includes articles and videos about her achievements.

Her website also says that she plans to run a “full schedule” in the NASCAR Nationwide series, “one rung below the top-tier Sprint Cup series”. At least, that’s what the NYT says: I can’t find this claim on her actual website. She does have a schedule, but the schedule appears to be just a list of NASCAR races this year, with links going back to the race pages on NASCAR.com. She does not appear in the results for the Dollar General 200, or the DRIVE4COPD 300. I am unable to find any mention of Tia Norfleet on the NASCAR Nationwide drivers page.

You see where this is going, don’t you?

But Norfleet is not licensed to compete at that level [the Nationwide series level – DB]. In fact, the only sanctioned race that Norfleet has entered, according to the sport’s officials, was a low-level event last year at the Motor Mile Speedway in Radford, Va., where she completed one lap before driving onto pit road and parking her racecar.

More:

For the past four years, Norfleet has purchased a license to race at the lowest level of stock-car racing. There is no vetting process for such a license; individual racetracks must approve drivers for competition.
To move up to a higher level of competition — a regional touring series like the K&N Pro Series East or the K&N Pro Series West — a driver must earn approval from Nascar. Norfleet has not done that yet.

And more:

Norfleet had indicated that she planned to race in an Arca event at Daytona International Speedway last month. But she had not completed an application to race for Arca; had not bought an Arca license; and had not participated in a test at Daytona in December, which was required to race there.

In addition, Ms. Norfleet may have a bit of a criminal record for assault and “crossing a guard line at a jail with contraband and possession of marijuana“. That’s not necessarily a disqualifying factor, in my humble opinion: I’d certainly be willing to give someone a shot at redemption in NASCAR with that kind of record. But when you put that together with the other pieces, it raises alarm bells.

Noted without comment:

…publications and Web sites like The Washington Post, The Huffington Post and ESPN have heralded her ascent.

Edited to add: Ms. Norfleet has posted an Instagram photo purporting to prove she does have a license. I am not a NASCAR expert, but there are three things I wonder about:

  1. Is there anyone out there who has seen an actual NASCAR license and can vouch for the fact that the photo looks correct? There’s no driver picture on it. I’ve never seen a NASCAR license and Google Image Search isn’t helpful.
  2. If I am reading it right, the license is for the “Whelen All-American” series, which I am not familiar with, but which looks (from NASCAR’s website) to be a step or two down from the K&N Pro Series (which, in turn, is below the Nationwide series). I wonder if this is one of those series where you can purchase a license from an individual racetrack.
  3. Ms. Norfleet does not show up in the top 500 drivers in that series through last September.

Posted in Cars, Clippings, Media, Sports | Comments Closed

The Spiders from Cleveland.

Thursday, March 7th, 2013

By way of Borepatch, I found this rather amusing post on the 1899 Cleveland Spiders.

For those who don’t follow baseball history (or loser history) the Spiders were a major league baseball team. But you would have been hard pressed to tell in 1899: the team went 20-134, the worst record ever in baseball history. (That’s a .130 winning percentage.)

They finished 84 games out of first place. They lost 40 of their last 41 games.

(I would actually kind of like one of the hats, but I’m not sure it is a $49 hat. And the J. Thomas Hetrick book MISFITS! Baseball’s Worst Ever Team is not just available from Amazon, but actually has a Kindle edition.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Loser, Spiders, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 6, 2013.

Wednesday, March 6th, 2013

My two favorite tributes to the late Hugo Chavez: here and here.

Both the NYT and the LAT are reporting arrests and confessions in the Bolshoi acid attack. (Previously.)

Investigators said that they believed that the dancer, Pavel Dmitrichenko, hired two men to accost Mr. Filin outside his apartment building late on Jan. 17. As Mr. Filin punched in an entry code, the police said, a masked man called his name and tossed the contents of a jar of sulfuric acid at his eyes.

The NYT says one of the men has confessed: the LAT says both men and Dmitrichenko have confessed.

“I organized the attack, but not to the extent of the damage that happened,” Dmitrichenko said, stone-faced, to Russian news Channel One. The dancer, who has performed such roles as the Evil Genius in Swan Lake and Russia’s brutal ruler Ivan Grozny in a ballet of the same name, planned the assault for “personal resentment related to his work,” police said, according to Russian media reports.

Roy Brown Jr. has died. Mr. Brown was a car designer for Ford. This was one of his designs:

Come all without, come all within. you’ll not see nothing like Mighty Quinn’s.

(Sorry.)

Posted in Art, Beef, Cars, Clippings, Food, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update.

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

With the exception of my yearly $5 bet with Lawrence on Gonzaga, I don’t give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about college basketball.

However, the remarkable achievement of the Grambling men’s basketball team must be noted here: “…at 0-27, they became the only men’s basketball team in Division I to finish the regular season without a victory.”

How bad is Grambling?

Nineteen of the Tigers’ 27 losses came by 20 points or more. They have not lost a game by less than 10…
…They rate last among 345 Division I teams in offense, the only one with an average below 50 points a game (49.6), and 340th in defense, having allowed 77 points a game. They struggle to score when the clock is running, shooting a 342nd-best 36.3 percent, and when it is stopped, hitting a 343rd-best 58.5 percent of their free throws. Shots are hardly plentiful to begin with; they have been outrebounded by 7.2 a game, making the Tigers better than only three teams in the country.

To be fair, Grambling has been hit hard by NCAA penalties tied to their low academic progress rate. Grambling also has funding issues, which have lead the team to adopt the role of “cupcake opponent” for hire:

Grambling played just nine home games, all against other teams from the Southwestern Athletic Conference. In one arduous span, Grambling lost at Houston, Texas Tech, Oregon State, Auburn and Southern Mississippi by an average of 41 points.

And this is amusing:

Time has not run out on the Tigers’ season. They play Alabama A&M again Wednesday in the conference tournament, part of a seven-team field shrunk by the absence of other academic progress underperformers and a rules violator.

At least, it’s amusing to Lawrence and I and anyone else who remembers the “Charlie Tuna Oceanographic University” series of strips from “Tank McNamara”. (CTOU ended up playing in the Rose Bowl because every other team in the conference had been sanctioned by the NCAA.)

Posted in Clippings, Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 4, 2013.

Monday, March 4th, 2013

At various times over the last year, Olbermann and his representatives have expressed interest in his return to the employer that made him famous: ESPN.

The drop in deaths from firearms and in slayings overall — over the past two decades, homicide declined by 80 percent in the District and overall crime fell by 75 percent in New York City — has come even as the economy has tanked, the number of guns owned by Americans has soared and the number of young people in the prime crime demographic has peaked.

Well, you don’t say. More guns. Less crime. And the WP admits it. Interesting.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Tales to make you cry. (#X in an ongoing series)

Sunday, March 3rd, 2013

On October 5, 1973, a four year old boy named Josh Miele was horribly burned when his next-door neighbor poured acid on him.

Colonel Pruitt ran the Brooke Army Medical Center from 1968 until 1995, and still practices today in Texas. He had thousands of patients in those years but remembers Josh and his family quite vividly. “For such a devastating injury, they were very realistic about what to expect,” he said. Josh was burned over 17 percent of his body, with 11 percent third-degree burns, mostly to his face. Colonel Pruitt said his chief goal was to save the boy’s sight. But he knew right away that this was hopeless.

Wendell Jamieson was 7 at the time, and lived just around the corner from the Miele family in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. He vividly remembered his mother’s warnings after the incident. Nearly 40 years later, Mr. Jamieson is a writer for the NYT: he decided to track down Josh Miele.

Josh Miele is now Dr. Josh Miele. He’s married and has two kids.

Josh has a degree in physics and a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from the University of California at Berkeley. He took several breaks, years long, while getting his undergraduate degree, and worked full time for the technology company Berkeley Systems on software to help blind people navigate graphics-based computer programs.
He worked for NASA on software for the Mars Observer. He is the president of the board of directors of the San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind. He plays bass in a band. And he works as an associate scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, a nonprofit research center.

He’s also designed maps of the BART system for blind people. His latest project is the “Descriptive Video Exchange”…

…It’s a kind of crowd-sourced service that would allow, for example, a Trekkie to describe a “Star Trek” episode in a way that other devotees would appreciate. The first version, out this month, will work for any video on YouTube.

Nuts:

“It’s not that I don’t want to be written about,” he said. “I’d like to be as famous as the next person would, but I want to be famous for the right reasons, for the work I’ve done, and not for some stupid thing that happened to me 40 years ago.”

And:

“I never doubted that it was all going to work out,” he said. “It was a foregone conclusion that it was going to be O.K.”

Posted in Clippings, Law | 1 Comment »

“Free” booze!

Sunday, March 3rd, 2013

It seems that there is a “bar” called the White House in downtown Austin. I’d never heard of the White House before today; it opened “late last year” according to the paper.

I put “bar” in quotes because they don’t have a liquor license. So how do they sell alcohol?

They don’t. They give it away.

Signs on the walls of the bar, in an old frame house at 95 Rainey St., provide instructions to customers. They are directed to contribute money in exchange for tokens that they drop into a box to vote for one of 108 charities.

How do they make money if they are giving booze away? Volume, volume, volume! Actually, individual “setups” (which I assume consist of ice, cups and mixers) go for $5-$7 each, or as much as your average mixed drink goes for around here, and a “bottomless cup” is $20-$30.

More:

Thomas said she didn’t need a permit because White House sold only the cup, mixer and ice. The bar provided the liquor, wine and beer for free, she said.

TABC, of course, disagrees with this position, and has raided the White House. But they can’t shut it down:

Thomas “does not hold a TABC permit, so we don’t have any specific authority to shut down the location like we might with other TABC-permitted business,” Beck said in an email. “There is a legal way to conduct that business: by giving the drinks away for free without a required donation. For that reason, we can’t assume that because it’s still open means she is still violating the law.”

Mad props to the people behind the White House for figuring out a clever loophole, but I’m not sure I’d want to drink there.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Deep fried.

Saturday, March 2nd, 2013

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo kind of snuck up on me this year.

I actually don’t care that much about the musical acts at the rodeo, or the rodeo itself. But with the rodeo comes…rodeo food. I’ve been waiting for the HouChron‘s yearly slideshow of rodeo food items.

Turns out they published it a few days ago, but didn’t link it from anyplace I could find it until today. Here you go. Note that there’s a handy “View All” link, too: thanks, HouChron!

(I found out my nephews are going down to Houston for the Rodeo. I’ve made them promise to try the rodeo food; I already have a funnel cake commitment from one of them.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, On a stick | Comments Closed

Banana republicans on trial: March 1, 2013.

Friday, March 1st, 2013

I know I haven’t been posting updates on the Bell trial, but there’s a reason for that: the jury has been deliberating for the better part of a week.

Yesterday morning, the jury sent a note to the judge stating they were deadlocked. And another juror sent a note to the judge stating that one of the jurors had been doing “outside research” on the case. This is a Bad Thing.

The same juror made a tearful request Monday to be removed from the panel because she felt others were picking on her. Kennedy told the woman that although discussions can get heated, it was important to continue deliberating.
On Thursday, however, the juror again broke into tears and said she had spoken with her daughter about “the abuse I have suffered.” She said her daughter told her, “Mom, they’re trying to find the weak link.”
The woman said she had turned to the Internet to better understand the rules about jury deliberations and came across the word “coercion.” After her daughter helped her look up the word’s definition, she wrote it down on a piece of paper and brought it with her to court. When the judge asked to see the paper she went into the jury room to retrieve it.

That juror, known as “Juror #3”, has been dismissed and replaced with an alternate juror. The judge has told the jury to restart deliberations, and to pretend that the earlier deliberations never happened.

It kind of sounds like #3 was leaning towards acquittal, but nobody knows for sure.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 1, 2013.

Friday, March 1st, 2013

Obit watch: Bruce Reynolds, the man who planned the Great Train Robbery.

In the early morning of Aug. 8, 1963, a gang of 15 men stopped a Glasgow-to-London mail train about 45 miles short of its destination by tampering with a signal. The train, which usually carried large quantities of money in the second car behind the locomotive, was loaded even more heavily than normal because of a just-completed bank holiday in Scotland, and the thieves escaped with about 120 bags of cash, mostly in small bills, totaling about £2.6 million, or about $7 million at the time — the equivalent of about $60.5 million today.

I remember the murder of Jonathan Levin: it was a big deal at the time, mostly because his father was the chairman of Time Warner. Instead of going into business, Levin chose to teach high school:

The killing of Mr. Levin (pronounced luh-VIN) on May 30, 1997, sent his students and colleagues into waves of grief. His body was discovered, bound with duct tape, in his apartment on the Upper West Side. The police said he had been tortured with a knife for his bank card number and shot in the back of his head. At his funeral, some of his students propped a cardboard sign atop his plain wooden coffin with the words: “We are his kids.”

The Department of Education created the…

…Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications in the same South Bronx building where he had taught, declaring it “a living tribute” to the English teacher’s “spirit, values, commitment and impassioned belief” that every child has a right to a quality education.

Sadly, things haven’t worked out:

But in the past few years, a quality education at Levin High School became harder to come by. Money for a college scholarship in Mr. Levin’s name dried up. A ball field that a Mets official helped pay for fell into disrepair. Computers sat untouched, applications to the school fell and the graduation rate sank to 31 percent, the fifth-lowest in the city.
Now, just a decade after it opened, New York has deemed Levin High School a failure, and is preparing to close it down.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

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