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…
Like Saunders through the hourglass…
January 24th, 2012…so go the Washington Wizards.
Flip Saunders out as coach. 51-130 over three seasons, but the Wizards started 2-15 this season.
(Thanks to Lawrence for the tip.)
Noted.
January 24th, 2012Today is “Bad Website Day” over at Lawrence’s.
We’re talking really bad. Awesomely bad. Eyeballs bleeding bad.
So bad that I’m linking to his posts, rather than the websites themselves, just for your protection.
See how kind and caring I am?
I hope they get tongue prints.
January 23rd, 2012LAT headline: “Gene Simmons look-alike robs stores in Sacramento“.
(First comment: “That’s Paul Stanley you morons.” How can you tell from that photo?)
Happy dance!
January 23rd, 2012The Supreme Court has handed down their decision in the case of United States v. Jones, the case involving attaching GPS tracking devices to vehicles.
The court held that, yes, attaching a GPS tracking device to someone’s vehicle is a search under the Fourth Amendment, and yes, this does require a search warrant. The decision is here.
Even better: it was a 9-0 ruling. (Five of the justices signed on to the majority opinion; the other four wrote a separate concurring opinion.)
Here’s preliminary coverage from Wired‘s “Threat Level” blog. I haven’t had a chance to review the full ruling yet; I may have additional links or commentary later.
Edited to add: Correction. According to the WP, there were two concurring opinions; I missed one in my quick skim of the ruling. Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan signed on to one concurrence; Sotomayor wrote a second concurrence, and also signed on to the majority opinion.
Edited to add 2: Discussion at the Volokh Conspiracy. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Still wading through this, but part 2 makes a good point; the Court did not actually rule per se that GPS tracking requires a warrant, but that it is a search under the Fourth Amendment. Not all searches require a warrant (see Terry v. Ohio or Chimel v. California) but, in general, the types of searches that the Court has held do not require a warrant involve “exigent circumstances” and are highly limited in scope. I find it hard to see the Court applying an “exigent circumstances” exception to GPS tracking in just about any case.
ETA3: And one of Volokh’s commenters makes a good point: the police apparently had a warrant, but botched the execution of it (“The warrant authorized installation in the District of Columbia and within 10 days, but agents installed the device on the 11th day and in Maryland.”) and then tried to argue that they didn’t need no stinking warrant anyway.
Very interesting indeed, Mr. Bond.
January 22nd, 2012One might go so far as to say “Damn Interesting”.
Many of my friends and some bloggers seem to be regular followers of this site:
- Lawrence sent me a link a while back to the story of William Rankin, who spent 40 minutes inside a thunderstorm after ejecting from his F-8 Crusader. (I actually own a copy of The Man Who Rode the Thunder
, which is not easy to find.)
- Roberta X linked earlier today to the story of a motley crew of mountain climbers and other folks who were enlisted by the CIA to plant equipment on Nanda Devi in order to monitor Chinese nuclear tests. Basically; imagine climbing Mount Everest. Now imagine climbing Mount Everest with a bunch of heavy equipment, including an RTG.
- The most recent “Damn Interesting” posting is on a little known, and frightening event, in aviation history: the attempted takeover of FedEx flight 705 on April 7, 1994. (Speaking of “Gun Death“, Weer’d, there’s a prototype for you; though nobody was actually killed, it was a damn close thing…)