You’ve gone down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#144 in a series)

February 26th, 2025

Mike the Musicologist asked me if this qualified. Technically, I’m not sure it does, as I usually reserve flaming hyenas for criminal indictments.

But this is noteworthy, and since I suspect criminal indictments are coming…

There was a Democratic primary in Cook County, Illinois, yesterday. (There may have been primaries elsewhere, but I’m not that up on Illinois politics.)

Cook County includes Dolton, home of Mayor Tiffany Henyard.

How did Tiff do?

She lost. Badly.

With 17 of 17 precincts reported and 100% of the vote counted, per the Cook County Clerk website, [Jason] House won the primary with 3,896 votes (87.91%), compared to Henyard’s 536 votes (12.09%).

I think we can call that a landslide. As a matter of fact, I think we could even call that an avalanche.

For those who are unfamiliar with Ms. Henyard…I wish there was one central source for her that wasn’t Wikipedia. She’s served one term as mayor of Dolton, and that term has been chaotic. Fights at council meetings, the town running out of money, allegations of misuse of public funds, and the list goes on and on.

I note that NBC5 Chicago has a “Dolton” tag. And an hour-long documentary about Dolton and Mayor Henyard. This is one of those stories where, just when you think it can’t get any crazier, it does.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 25, 2025.

February 25th, 2025

Clint Hill.

You may not recognize the name, but I think you’ll recognize him from the photos.

He was the Secret Service agent who jumped on the back of the limo when JFK was shot, and kept Mrs. Kennedy from falling out.

Thirteen days after the assassination, in a ceremony attended by Mrs. Kennedy, Mr. Hill received the highest award bestowed by the Treasury Department — the agency that oversaw the Secret Service at the time — for his “extraordinary courage and heroic effort in the face of maximum danger.”

…

When he retired from the Secret Service in 1975, he was the assistant director responsible for all protective forces.
In December 2013, the Secret Service honored him at its James J. Rowley Training Center in Maryland, erecting a bronze plaque next to a street it named Clint Hill Way.
But the accolades and his ascendancy in the agency could not overcome Mr. Hill’s feelings of guilt. He blamed himself for not reacting a split second faster to the sound of gunfire, becoming convinced that he had missed a chance to save President Kennedy’s life. His emotional turmoil resulted in his retirement in 1975 at age 43, at the urging of doctors.

Posted in Heroism, History, Obits | 3 Comments »

Bagatelle (#128).

February 24th, 2025

I shared this with Lawrence on Saturday, and he was amused (in the “WTF?!” sense):

“Georgia man sentenced to 20 years for bombing woman’s home, planting python to eat her daughter”.

In case you were wondering: 20 years. Federal time, so there’s no parole.

(Also on the “WTF?!” front, a very quick review of David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”: pretentious navel-gazing crap.)

Posted in Bagatelle, Explosives, Law, Movies, Reptiles, Snakes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 24, 2025.

February 24th, 2025

Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC.

MSNBC’s president suggested Sunday that blindsided staffers of liberal host Joy Reid’s canceled show can apply for other jobs within the progressive network as she confirmed the group of employees would be canned, according to a report.

Just gonna slide in here before Lawrence does…

Lynne Marie Stewart. Other credits include the animated 1995 “The Tick”, “The Running Man”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Son of the Beach”.

Roberta Flack.

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Tom Fitzmorris, who was the food guy in New Orleans for many years.

Mr. Fitzmorris had a corny sense of humor, which often involved jokes about the phrase “soup du jour.” (A customer asks what the soup du jour is; the waitress says, “I don’t know. They change it on me every day.”) He also liked to play elaborate April Fool’s pranks. He once made up a new restaurant that he said was opening near Commander’s Palace and described the fictitious competitor with such detailed admiration that Ella Brennan, then an owner of Commander’s Palace, dispatched her daughter, Ti Martin, to investigate.
Ti Martin, now one of the restaurant’s proprietors, remembered him as a particularly harsh critic, not out of meanness but because he wanted things done in a way he perceived as proper. When she ran out of iced tea at a restaurant she had just opened, he went on about it on his show for what she said seemed like an hour.
“But he was right,” she said. “Who runs out of iced tea?”

Posted in Food, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Gun books, not so much gun books, and other tales of recent library additions.

February 21st, 2025

If I make a small push here, I can get the last of the gun books out of the living room. That will leave me with one on the kitchen table (which is there waiting for me to do the combination gun crankery/gun book post) and a few new additions upstairs. (Plus the backlog. We don’t talk about the backlog.)

Some of these books I can cover relatively quickly, so maybe it is worth making that push. All of them are interesting to me, but for varying reasons.

Shall we get on with it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Food, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#143 in a series)

February 20th, 2025

There was an interesting report in yesterday’s NYT. Because I want to be more than a Times digest service, I’ve tried to add additional context from the local news.

Hanceville is a city in Cullman County, Alabama. The 2020 census population was 3,217, and the town employs eight police officers.

Five of the police officers, including the chief, were indicted by a grand jury on Wednesday. The grand jury also recommended the complete abolition of the police department, and stated the department is “a threat to public safety”.

So what’s the backstory? It seems that, either due to malice or incompetence, the police department has trouble securing and accounting for evidence.

“One of the most concerning things that we discovered in this process was that Hanceville Police Department’s evidence room was not secure,” said [Cullman DA Champ] Crocker. “Criminal evidence must be secured in order to have that evidence for prosecution and to ensure due process. This evidence room was anything but secure.”
During the news conference, Crocker showed a photo of the evidence room, pointing out a hole in the door and a broom against the wall.
“This is someone who works there, and you can see this individual has this stick in his hand and is pushing it in the door, in the hole to jimmy open the door, and the grand jury watched a lot of videos, this is from security camera footage, showing this evidence room was routinely accessed by individuals who were not authorized to do so, going in and out using the stick through the hole in the wall,” explained Crocker.

One of the people who accessed the evidence room was a 911 dispatcher. He was found dead in his office the same day. “Evidence” was found in his office, and the autopsy showed he overdosed on “fentanyl and other drugs”.

The chief is charged with “two counts of failure to report ethics crime and tampering with evidence.” The other officers are charged with:

* “two counts of computer tampering, two counts of using office for personal gain, tampering with evidence, and two counts of solicitation to commit a controlled substance crime.”
* “two counts of computer tampering, two counts of using office for personal gain, tampering with evidence, and two counts of solicitation to commit a controlled substance crime.”
* “tampering with evidence.”
* “four counts of unlawful distribution of controlled substance and two counts conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance.” That officer’s wife (who is not employed by the department) is also charged with “two counts of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance and two counts conspiracy to unlawfully distribute a controlled substance.”

It sounds like the officer and his wife had a thing going where they were supplying anabolic steroids to two of the other indicted officers. One of the officers used his department issued cell phone to get steroids from those two, and went to the hospital while on duty to get steroid shots from Mrs. Indicted Officer. He also allegedly misused law enforcement databases to get information on two “Does”. Another one of the officers illegally accessed law enforcement databases to get information on a murder investigation, and also got steroid shots from Mrs. Indicted Officer while on duty.

NYT coverage (by way of archive.is).

Coverage from AL.com.

Posted in Cops, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Audit time!

February 19th, 2025

There’s an idea in the science-fiction community called steam-engine time, which is what people call it when suddenly twenty or thirty different writers produce stories about the same idea. It’s called steam-engine time because nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it.

Audit time is like steam engine time, except more boring to watch from the outside, and more interesting from the inside. Especially when you get what the late Neptunus Lex referred to as “short but exciting” conversations.

Getting around to the point, though, two smart people have written smart things about audits and auditing.

LawDog:

While most people think of “audit” in the financial sense, there are actually about nine different kinds of audit — at least — most of which don’t need the services of an accountant.

Larry Correia:

You do NOT need to be an accountant to be an auditor. Anybody who says this is a total dumb ass with zero grasp of how any of this shit works in real life. The people who make up your audit team are recruited from whatever skill sets are necessary to audit that particular system. I (the accountant) have been on audit teams with IT guys, programmers, lawyers, and even machinists. (why machinists, because I was auditing a factory, and I could count the parts, but I couldn’t tell you if the parts were bullshit or not)

I commend both of these gentlemen to your attention, while I work on pulling together some other things and try to stay warm.

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

Short art, damn it! Art! watch.

February 18th, 2025

This is not something I regularly get a chance to cover, especially since 2020. So when it comes up, I can’t help but make note of it.

“‘The Gates’ was a huge art sensation 20 years ago — and it wasn’t the only vision Christo and Jeanne-Claude had for NYC”.

The NYPost article includes concept art for some of their other proposed, but never completed, projects for NYC.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude had an obsession with oil barrels. “They were so easy to stack and you could paint them all these different colors,” said Yavachev. “You could use them almost like pixels.”

Posted in Art, Bagatelle, Christo | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 17, 2025.

February 17th, 2025

Eleanor Maguire passed away in early January. She was 54. Cancer got her.

I think this is a fascinating obit. She was a cognitive neuroscientist who did a lot of early and influential work using MRI scanning to study the brain, especially the hippocampus.

Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.
“She was absolutely one of the leading researchers of her generation in the world on memory,” Chris Frith, an emeritus professor of neuropsychology at University College London, said in an interview. “She changed our understanding of memory, and I think she also gave us important new ways of studying it.”

She was watching TV one night and came across “The Knowledge“, about London taxi drivers and their qualifying exams. (That’s a rabbit hole worth going down if you’re unfamiliar with it.)

In the first of a series of studies, Dr. Maguire and her colleagues scanned the brains of taxi drivers while quizzing them about the shortest routes between various destinations in London.
The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.
But that didn’t solve the mystery of why the taxi drivers were so good at their jobs.
Dr. Maguire kept digging. Using M.R.I. machines, she measured different regions in the brains of 16 drivers, comparing their dimensions with those in the brains of people who weren’t taxi drivers.
“The posterior hippocampi of taxi drivers were significantly larger relative to those of control subjects,” she wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And the size, she found, correlated with the length of a cabby’s career: The longer the cabby had driven, the bigger the hippocampus.

…

She followed up with other studies. One showed that the hippocampi of bus drivers — whose routes were set rather than navigated from memory — didn’t grow. Another showed that prospective taxi drivers who failed their tests did not gain any hippocampus volume in the process.
The implications were striking: The key structure in the brain governing memory and spatial navigation was malleable.
In a roundabout way, Dr. Maguire’s findings revealed the scientific underpinnings of the ancient Roman “method of loci,” a memorization trick also known as the “memory palace.”
This technique involves visualizing a large house and assigning an individual memory to a particular room. Mentally walking through the house fires up the hippocampus, eliciting the memorized information. Dr. Maguire studied memory athletes — people who train their brains to memorize vast amounts of information quickly — who used this method, and observed that its effectiveness was “reflected in its continued use over two and a half millennia in virtually unchanged form.”

…

In studying patients with damage to the hippocampus, including those with amnesia, Dr. Maguire found that they couldn’t visualize or navigate future scenarios. One taxi driver, for instance, struggled to make his way through busy London streets in a virtual-reality simulation. Other amnesiacs couldn’t imagine an upcoming Christmas party or a trip to the beach.
“Instead of visualizing a single scene in their mind, such as a crowded beach filled with sunbathers, the patients reported seeing just a collection of disjointed images, such as sand, water, people and beach towels,” the journal Science News reported in 2009.
The hippocampus, it turns out, binds snippets of information to construct scenes from the past — and the future.

(See also.)

Jim Guy Tucker, former governor of Arkansas. You may remember him from such hits as Whitewater.

He had been among the most promising figures in Arkansas politics and a rival to Mr. Clinton in Arkansas’s Democratic Party. But he was forced to resign as governor in July 1996, after serving less than two years of his term.
Two months earlier, he had been convicted in a federal court in Little Rock. He had been prosecuted by independent counsel, a team led by Kenneth W. Starr, for receiving a fraudulent loan from a small business development company, Capital Management Services, in the mid-1980s.
In August 1996, Judge George Howard Jr. of Federal District Court in Little Rock sentenced him to four years’ probation — Mr. Tucker avoided jail because of testimony about a serious health condition — and ordered him to pay $294,000 in restitution to the Small Business Administration. By then Mr. Tucker had already quit the governor’s mansion; he would never hold office again.

…

The loan — for $150,000, according to the historian Jeannie M. Whayne of the University of Arkansas — should never have gone to Mr. Tucker’s water and sewer services company. Other sources say nearly $3 million was lent to Mr. Tucker and his co-defendants, James B. and Susan McDougal, who were also convicted in May 1996.
Capital Management Services “was supposed to make loans to companies where at least half the owners were ‘disadvantaged’ in some way,” the veteran Arkansas journalist Ernie Dumas, described as the dean of the Arkansas political press corps by the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, wrote in an unpublished manuscript.
But David Hale, the banker who ran Capital Management Services and was the key witness for Mr. Starr’s prosecution team, “never told any of his borrowers that, and few, if any, of them would have qualified,” Mr. Dumas wrote. “Tucker and the McDougals learned of the special designation, for disadvantaged people, at the trial.”

…

At the end of 1996 he received a liver transplant, which he credited with saving his life. Two years later, Mr. Starr was after him again, and Mr. Tucker pleaded guilty to tax fraud “to avoid going to prison,” Mr. Dumas wrote.
“The Justice Department and the I.R.S. eventually acknowledged that Starr had charged Tucker with violating a section of the federal bankruptcy code that did not even exist at the time of a cable-television transaction in the 1980s,” Mr. Dumas added. “The government eventually concluded that it might owe Tucker money but could not discern how much. It sent him and his wife a check for $1.44, which he framed and put on his wall.”

Ron Travisano, noted advertising guy.

FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Kevin Lacey, “pilot, philanthropist, businessman and Discovery Channel character”. He was part of the cast of “Airplane Repo”.

Rich met him a few times at fly-ins (and sent over a photo, which I don’t have his permission to reproduce here), and says he was a really down-to-earth guy with a lot of stories. As Rich put it, he was the kind of person you could just walk up and talk to.

Facebook.

Posted in Law, Neuroscience, Obits, Planes, Politics, TV | 2 Comments »

Back on the gun book train…

February 13th, 2025

…with one oddity that’s not really a gun book.

This was bought in one lot from Callahan and Company, so there was $8 shipping on top of these prices.

The jump goes here…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Hoplobibilophilia, Mammals | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 10, 2025.

February 10th, 2025

Tom “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” Robbins.

Alongside works by Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins paperbacks, dog-eared and torn, were common sights on the bookshelves and bedside milk crates of the late hippie era, between the tail end of the Vietnam War and the rise of Ronald Reagan’s America. He became one of the rare writers to achieve both a cult following and mega-best-seller status.

Noted for the W&L alums in the audience:

As a teenager he told his parents he wanted to be a novelist. His father, hoping to push his son toward a more practical career, persuaded him to enroll at Washington and Lee University, a Virginia school known for its journalism program. As a sports reporter for the campus newspaper, he was edited by Tom Wolfe.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#142 in a series)

February 7th, 2025

Information about this one has been hard to find. Mike the Musicologist sent me a press release from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the stories I turned up in Internet searches seem to be lightly rewritten from that.

Pearson, Georgia is a small town, with a population of 1,821 per the 2020 census. Robert “Buster” Johnson is the mayor.

“Buster” was busted yesterday.

I’m just going to quote the list of charges here:

  • Criminal Attempt to Commit Hindering or Apprehension or Punishment of Criminal
  • 3 counts of Influencing Witnesses
  • Criminal Solicitation to Commit False Statements and Writings
  • Criminal Solicitation to Commit False Official Certificates or Writings by Officers or Employees of a State and Political Subdivision
  • 2 counts of False Statements and Writings
  • Criminal Attempt to Commit Theft by Taking
  • Conspiracy in Restraint of Free and Open Competition
  • 4 counts of Conspiracy to Defraud State and Political Subdivision
  • Theft by Deception
  • 3 counts of Bribery
  • 2 counts of Theft by Taking
  • Fraud, Forgery, and Theft in Connection with Registration of Title to Land
  • Filing False Documents
  • 4 counts of Violation of Oath of Office by Public Officer

Go big or go home, you know? Also, “Violation of Oath of Office by Public Officer”? Didn’t know that was a crime in Georgia, or anywhere else, but I fully support the existence of this as a criminal charge.

Any public officer who willfully and intentionally violates the terms of his oath as prescribed by law shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than five years.

So what the heck happened? As I said previously, details are hard to come by, but the GBI press release says:

The investigation began when the Alapaha Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office received complaints of Mayor Johnson participating in fraudulent activities. The District Attorney subsequently requested the GBI to look into these allegations. During the investigation, agents uncovered a scheme to have an incarcerated person released from jail through fraudulent documentation, obtaining kickbacks from city contracts, theft of municipal land, and bribery of city employees.

Here’s a story from WALB, which doesn’t add much, except that some folks don’t like Buster.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

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