Quick follow ups.

February 23rd, 2019

You may recall the Schlitterbahn case from last year, where a 10-year old boy was decapitated on a water slide and the owner and designers were charged with various crimes, including second degree murder.

Well.

The Kansas City Star reports that Wyandotte County Judge Robert Burns found Friday that state prosecutors showed grand jurors inadmissible evidence in dismissing second-degree murder charges against Schlitterbahn owner Jeff Henry and designer John Schooley. The judge also dismissed an involuntary manslaughter charge against operations manager Tyler Miles.

Here’s the coverage from the KC Star, which clarifies things a bit for me:

[Judge Robert] Burns sided with defense attorneys who argued that lawyers in Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt’s office showed a Wyandotte County grand jury evidence that would not have been admissible in trial — clips of reality television, misleading expert testimony and references to an unrelated death from years ago — that improperly influenced the grand jury in handing down criminal charges.

…

For now, Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeff Henry, Verruckt designer John Schooley and former Schlitterbahn operations manager Tyler Miles face no criminal charges in Caleb’s death. The Kansas Attorney General can seek criminal charges again, either through another grand jury, through a preliminary hearing or seek an appeal of Burns’ decision. Or they could just walk away from the case.

Interesting side note:

Since the Kansas Attorney General took over the case from the Wyandotte County District Attorney, county taxpayers have paid {Kansas AG Derek] Schmidt’s office more than $125,000 in reimbursed expenses through November. The office’s work has resulted in two defendants being acquitted at trial last year and now five dismissed indictments.

One of Grits For Breakfast’s round ups this week contained a little more information on that Lubbock medical examiner mess I mentioned previously. This situation is even weirder than I initially thought it was. You have Dr. Andrews saying “the previous ME was a drunk, he used county facilities for private business, and he took bribes to change results”. But then you have the guy who supposedly made these claims to Dr. Andrews saying, “No, I never said any such thing.” Keep an eye on this one.

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Obit watch: February 22, 2019.

February 22nd, 2019

For the historical record: Peter Tork, of The Monkees.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Important safety tip tweet of the day.

February 21st, 2019

Because, sometimes, it just needs to be said:

Posted in Law, Safety | Comments Closed

Lord Nelson.

February 21st, 2019

Item #1: the Circuit of the Americas is not going to get money from the state of Texas for last year’s Formula One race.

The stunning development means the track in Southeast Austin will forfeit $25 million or more in state funds through the Major Event Reimbursement Program. The state reimbursed the racetrack $27 million through the program after the 2017 U.S. Grand Prix, $26 million for the 2016 F1 race and $22.7 million for the 2015 U.S. Grand Prix.

Why are they being cut off? Would you believe…they didn’t file their anti-human trafficking paperwork in time?

According to an October 2018 letter from the governor’s office that was obtained by the Statesman, CELOC [Circuit Events Local Organizing Committee – DB] missed the deadline to submit a required human trafficking prevention plan by 30 days before the 2018 U.S. Grand Prix. Bryan Daniel, the governor’s executive director of economic development and tourism, wrote that because CELOC failed to meet the deadline, its application for reimbursement had been rescinded.
The plan was due Sept. 19, but CELOC did not submit it until Oct. 3.
“In this case, the law is clear that if a human trafficking prevention plan is not submitted 30 days prior to an event, a reimbursement from the Major Events Fund cannot be issued,” Abbott spokesman John Wittman said in an emailed statement. “The State of Texas and COTA have a productive partnership that has had a tremendous economic impact on the city of Austin and the state as a whole, and our office is already working with COTA on next year’s race.”

As much as I enjoy seeing these people cut off from their state subsidy, I have a feeling we haven’t seen the end of this, and that somehow somebody’s going to figure out an end run to get them their $25 million.

Item #2:

At a murder trial last week in Travis County, a defense lawyer for a woman accused of fatally shooting her fiancé approached the witness stand and began asking questions to an empty chair. The attorney, Brian Erskine, was expressing disbelief that forensic examiner Dr. Sam Andrews did not show up to testify about his autopsy on 37-year-old victim Bradley Sullivan.

Did the Honorable Mr. Erskine think he was Clint Eastwood? And why wasn’t Dr. Andrews in court?

Turns out…

…Andrews no longer is welcome in Travis County courtrooms. The district attorney’s office recently decided it will not sponsor his testimony amid an ongoing Texas Rangers and Texas Medical Board investigation into his work at his new job as the chief of the Lubbock County medical examiner’s office.

…

The basis for the investigation has not been revealed. However, a Lubbock County commissioner might have given hints in a letter to a judge Monday in which he alleged that Andrews had improperly harvested excessive body tissue from deceased children for research. The letter from Commissioner Jason Corley to County Judge Curtis Parrish also states that another doctor in Andrews’ office, Evan Matshes, had performed autopsies despite not being licensed to practice medicine in Texas. Similar allegations are outlined in a lawsuit against Andrews and Matshes by a former employee of the medical examiner’s office.

According to the Statesman, the DA’s office doesn’t think this is a huge problem: Dr. Andrews did a total of ten autopsies in cases that are still pending. But in eight of those, “the cause of death could not be reasonably disputed by the defense“.

However, prosecutors must appoint a second medical examiner to review Andrews’ autopsy reports in all pending cases. If the second examiner affirms Andrews’ previous findings, that doctor will then be permitted to testify at trial in place of Andrews.

Posted in Law, Politics, Schadenfreude, TCDA, Texas, Travis County | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 20, 2019.

February 20th, 2019

Don Newcombe, noted pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

An imposing right-hander, at 6 feet 4 inches and 225 pounds, with an overpowering fastball, Newcombe claimed a string of achievements: National League rookie of the year in 1949; four-time All-Star; the league’s Most Valuable Player in 1956, when he also won the first Cy Young Award as baseball’s top pitcher. Moreover, he was the first black pitcher to start a World Series game.

…

While Newcombe was proud of his accomplishments as a pitcher, he was gratified as well to have played a role in the civil rights struggle by helping to shatter modern baseball’s racial barrier after the arrival of the Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson and catcher Roy Campanella.
He once said that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King came to his house in the weeks before his assassination in 1968 and told him, “I would never have made it as successfully as I have in civil rights if it were not for what you men did on the baseball field.”

Also among the dead: Karl Lagerfeld, fashion designer.

Guy Webster, album cover photographer.

Mr. Webster’s work with the Rolling Stones — including the photo for the bucolic cover of the United States release of the anthology “Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)” (1966) — began with an unusual offer in 1965 from Andrew Loog Oldham, their producer and manager: Take photographs, but don’t expect to be paid because it’s an honor simply to work with the band.
“And I said, ‘Well, it’s an honor for you that I take these pictures,’ ” Mr. Webster said at the Annenberg event. “He paid me for one album cover. Three of them came out during the years using my photographs.”

For Exposure, call your office, please.

Posted in Music, Obits, Photography, Sports | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

February 19th, 2019

Obligatory:

Posted in Mixology | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 19, 2019.

February 19th, 2019

George Mendonsa has passed away at the age of 95.

Mr. Mendonsa was the man in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square after the Japanese surrender.

At least, maybe he was. Eisenstaedt didn’t record the names of the sailor or nurse, and at least three women and 11 men have claimed they were one or the other.

But Mr. Mendonsa was adamant that he was the one. He sued Life in the 1980s when the magazine would not definitively acknowledge that he was the sailor, though nothing came of the lawsuit.

…

Mr. Mendonsa eventually received recognition from most parties after extensive testing. Among other efforts, in 2005, Richard Benson, a photographer and printmaker at Yale, scrutinized the photographs in the early 1980s and determined that Mr. Mendonsa’s specific features, like a cyst on his left arm and a dark patch on his right, matched those of the sailor in the photo.
Mr. Mendonsa’s face was painstakingly 3-D mapped, then reverse-aged, to show that it matched the sailor’s in Eisenstaedt’s picture. Four years later Norman Sauer, a forensic anthropologist at Michigan State University, analyzed the photo and said he could not find a single inconsistency between Mr. Mendonsa’s face and the sailor’s.

Greta Friedman, who may have been the nurse, passed away in 2016.

Posted in History, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 18, 2019.

February 18th, 2019

From the Department of Brief Round-Ups, a couple of obits that people mentioned to me over the weekend:

Lee Radziwill, sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Patrick Caddell, prominent political pollster.

Betty Ballantine, wife of Ian Ballantine. The Ballantines basically pioneered paperbacks in this country:

With a $500 wedding dowry from Ms. Ballantine’s father, the couple established Penguin U.S.A. by importing British editions of Penguin paperbacks, starting with “The Invisible Man” by H. G. Wells and “My Man Jeeves” by P. G. Wodehouse.

…

They left Penguin in 1945 to start Bantam Books, a reprint house. Having purchased the paperback rights for 20 hardcovers, their first round of titles included Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi,” John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.”
They started Ballantine Books in 1952, publishing reprints as well as original works in paperback.

And:

While Ian Ballantine, who died in 1995, was the better known of the publishing duo, Betty Ballantine, who was British, quietly devoted herself to the editorial side. She nurtured authors, edited manuscripts and helped promote certain genres — Westerns, mysteries, romance novels and, perhaps most significantly, science fiction and fantasy.
Her love for that genre and knowledge of it helped put it on the map.
“She birthed the science fiction novel,” said Tad Wise, a nephew of Ms. Ballantine’s by marriage. With the help of Frederik Pohl, a science fiction writer, editor and agent, Mr. Wise said, “She sought out the pulp writers of science fiction who were writing for magazines and said she wanted them to write novels, and she would publish them.”
In doing so she helped a wave of science fiction and fantasy writers emerge. They included Joanna Russ, author of “The Female Man” (1975), a landmark novel of feminist science fiction, and Samuel R. Delany, whose “Dhalgren” (1975) was one of the best-selling science fiction novels of its time.
The Ballantines also published paperback fiction by Ray Bradbury, whose books include “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451”; Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey”; and J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Hobbit” and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 16, 2019.

February 16th, 2019

The late great Bruno Ganz.

In the Wim Wenders drama “Wings of Desire” (1987), he played an angel whose job was to spend time on earth, make himself visible to the dying and to comfort them. But the character saw such beauty in human life that he wanted it for himself.

…

Most of Mr. Ganz’s more than 80 films and television movies were European productions, among them Mr. Wenders’s film noir hommage “The American Friend” (1977), with Dennis Hopper, in which he played a German with a terminal-illness diagnosis who agrees to be a hit man; Volker Schlöndorff’s “Circle of Deceit” (1981), as a war correspondent in Beirut; Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu” (1979), as the innocent Jonathan Harker; and Barbet Schroeder’s “Amnesia” (2017).
But he did appear in American films, including “The Boys From Brazil” (1978), the drama about Nazi war criminals starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier; Jonathan Demme’s all-star 2004 remake of “The Manchurian Candidate”; and “The Reader” (2008), with Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

A wonderful team is the Pelicans…

February 15th, 2019

Dell Demps out as GM of the New Orleans Pelicans.

I don’t follow the NBA much, so I’m missing a lot of what’s going on here. (Then again, I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been “missing” it, Bob.) The sources I read say this is fallout from Anthony Davis wanting to be traded, and New Orleans pushing back on offers from the Lakers.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Principles.

February 14th, 2019

The anarcho-capitalist side of me thinks Alexandra Occasional Cortex is an idiot.

The less anarcho-capitalist side of me thinks a 100% marginal tax rate sounds like a great idea, as long as it’s applied only to people who purchase $1,475 sterling silver weed grinders and $950 bongs.

Posted in Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 14, 2019.

February 14th, 2019

Lyndon LaRouche, one of the 20th Century’s greatest cranks. LaRouche PAC.

Defining what Mr. LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, the composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.

…

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — he saw rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

…

In Mr. LaRouche’s view, Mr. Johnson continued, “true Platonists believe that industrialization, technology and classical music should be used to bring wealth and enlightenment to the citizens of the world.”
He added: “The Aristotelians are trying to stop them by using not only sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll but also environmentalism and quantum theory. With their bag of brainwashing techniques, they hope to trick civilization into destroying itself, bringing on a new dark ages in which the world’s riches will be firmly in the hands of the oligarchs.”

…

After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Mr. LaRouche warned that the new president was in “grave and imminent danger” of being assassinated by the “British Empire,” a familiar target of Mr. LaRouche’s.

…

But Mr. LaRouche was heartened by the election of President Trump, though he perceived a British conspiratorial hand reaching into the United States to foment efforts to “politically paralyze” the president and bring about his impeachment.

He was rather oddly obsessed with the British royal family. From a recent editorial on the LaRouche PAC web site calling for his exoneration:

The frame-up and jailing of LaRouche, facilitated by years of lying media vilification of LaRouche and his movement, which continues to this day, was carried out by the same British-run political apparatus—in many cases, by the same individual hit-men, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller—that today is out to topple the President of the United States.

…

Because LaRouche’s proposed war on drugs against London’s Dope, Inc. banking apparatus was never implemented, a drug epidemic today is poisoning our nation and the world.

They don’t make them like that any more.

Posted in Law, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Tweet of the day.

February 14th, 2019

Technically, from last night:

Posted in Music | Comments Closed

Flaming hyenas update.

February 13th, 2019

Good news: Carlos Uresti has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for bribery.

Bad news: this sentence will run concurrently with his existing 12 year sentence from last year, so he won’t actually be doing any additional time.

Posted in Law, Politics, Texas | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 13, 2019.

February 13th, 2019

Rick Schmidt, former owner of Kruez Market in Lockhart.

Kreuz Market first opened in 1900. Rick’s father, Edgar “Smitty” Schmidt, purchased it in 1948, and Rick and his brother Don Schmidt bought the legendary Lockhart barbecue restaurant from their father in 1984. Don retired from the family business in 1997, and in 1999, Austin-native Rick relocated Kreuz Market from its previous location on Main Street to Colorado Street, near Town Branch creek, following a public dispute with his sister, Nina Sells, who inherited the old brick building on Main Street.
Sells converted the original Kreuz Market location into Smitty’s Market, while Schmidt opened his massive, red-brick building about a mile up the road. The family feud made headlines in Austin and landed the family on an episode of the CBS newsmagazine “48 Hours.″

Posted in Beef, Food, Obits | Comments Closed

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