According to the timeline at the Texas Tribune, Michael Morton was convicted on February 17, 1987, and released from prison on October 4, 2011. Microsoft Excel tells me that is 8,995 days. (I am not taking into account time Michael Morton served while awaiting trial, since I can’t find a good figure for that.)
Perhaps one of the worst things about committing a crime, or even being charged with one, is all the background stuff that tends to leak out about you. Your tastes in porn, booze, interior decoration…all of those things come out at trial.
You may beat the rap, but you can’t beat the embarrassment of everyone knowing that you scammed money to pay for cheap vodka or lap dances from low-end strippers or Michael Jackson memorablia.
Surely you would think that these folks could afford to pay for their own weight loss and baldness treatments. But they didn’t, and now everyone knows.
(And to be clear, I don’t throw stones at people who get hair plugs or go to weight loss resorts. I throw stones at people who scam money from the taxpayers to do those things. “Tax-fattened hyena”, indeed.)
What does this have to do with corruption in Bell? Well, Spaccia texted that photo to Randy Adams, the former police chief, and it was introduced as evidence during Adams’ testimony yesterday. I think the prosecution’s intent is to establish that the Adams/Spaccia relationship went beyond the bounds of “professional”: not necessarily romantic, but perhaps a closer friendship than either one is letting on. (In turn, I guess this is intended to make the jury question Adams’ testimony for Spaccia.)
Daring Fireball had twolinks yesterday to stories about the shutdown of Everpix.
I hadn’t heard of Everpix, either, but Gruber praises it pretty highly: “Everpix is how photo storage should work.” It might have been something I would have tried, if I had known about it. But I’d never seen even a mention of it anywhere until Gruber’s posts yesterday. This might explain why they are shutting down.
I guess that demonstrates how effective sponsoring the RSS feed of a notorious Yankees fan is. Seriously, why were they not advertising on places like the On Taking Pictures podcast as well?
I don’t want to rub it in. It is sad that these people are losing their jobs and their money, especially if Everpix is all that and a bag of chips. But I do want to note one other thing from one of Gruber’s linked articles:
They got $15 million out of investors for this? I have got to work harder on schemes for separating fools from their money. Hmmmmmm…maybe a cross between Groupon and Second Life?
Edited to add: Ooooooh! Ooooooh! I know! Warcraft meets Google Offers! You kill monsters, and when they die, they drop special offers like “$15 for $30 worth of food at Mom’s“!
VC investors, the email address is on my contact page.
“Longtime councilwoman” Wendy McCammack. This is interesting because Ms. McCammack was also the top vote-getter in the San Bernardino mayor’s race. However, there were a total of 10 candidates, and she got “just under” 25% of the vote. I wonder how many of the eight other candidates are going to throw their support to her, and how many will support “Carey Davis, an accountant and political newcomer”.
City attorney James Penman. City attorney is an elected rather than appointed position? Interesting.
Robert Jenkins, “charged with more than 30 felony and misdemeanor counts related to allegedly posting ads on Craigslist for sex partners and directing them to a former partner and another man”.
I haven’t been giving much attention to the Angela Spaccia/Bell trial. Most of what I’ve seen in the LAT has been the usual back and forth we’ve seen in the other trials: “City council approved!” “Did not!” “Did too!” “Rizzo’s a big poopy head and it was all his fault!”
(There have been a few amusing bits I missed covering. Among them:
The contracts in question being those for Spaccia and Robert “Ratso” Rizzo. This is interesting: while I can’t find the story now, I do recall reading that former Bell finance director Lourdes Garcia slipped contracts for Spaccia and Rizzo into stacks of other documents that were signed blindly by city officials.)
I never ate at a Trotter restaurant, though I did watch some of “The Kitchen Sessions” on PBS. I think you can make an argument that Trotter was among the first, if not the very first, in the new wave of “celebrity chefs”. My perception is that he was in the public consciousness earlier than Thomas Keller or Grant Achatz, for example. Certainly I was aware of Trotter before I’d heard of Anthony Bourdain (who I’d argue isn’t really a “celebrity chef”, but that’s a digression).
He was 54 years old, which seems awfully young to me. I don’t have any evidence to support this theory, but I wonder if he knew his time was short and wanted to wind things down gracefully.
Edited to add: tribute from Jonathan Gold in the LAT:
(You know, I’d read about Mantango in one of the Golden Turkey books, but it wasn’t until I read the Wikipedia entry that I became aware it was based on a William Hope Hodgson short story.)
So Robert “Ratso” Rizzo, former city manager of Bell, is going to prison. He’s expected to be sentenced to somewhere between 10 to 12 years (the actual sentencing is scheduled for March), and he’ll probably do about half that time.
Ratso also has to pay compensation to the city of Bell. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a final decision on the amount (I’m guessing that will be part of his sentencing) but it could be up to $3.2 million.
Where will that money come from? Rizzo sold his house at a loss, and it looks like the same thing is happening with his ranch.
Two places the money won’t come from: Rizzo’s retirement account, and his pension of $116,628 a year.
I was looking at my “Squid” tag the other day (no, really, I am not making this up) and thinking “I don’t use this tag nearly enough”.
Well, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI for short) has their own YouTube channel. And they have a tradition of posting themed videos for Halloween.
This year’s video is “Spooky Eyes”, and it is chock-full of squidly goodness. (There are also some non-squid creatures in it.)
I also kind of like the music in this video. It sounds a little like a toy piano or maybe a child’s keyboard. The title of the piece is “Halloween Sputnik” by Richard Desilets, in case it catches your ear as well.
There’s a playlist of MBARI’s other Halloween themed videos, including “Big Teeth” and “Predators and Scavengers”.
It rained pretty hard last night. The Lower Colorado River Authority actually opened floodgates on Tom Miller Dam, which caused Lady Bird Lake to rise like excessively yeasted bread dough.
Reagan Hackleman, who used to work for KXAN and is a freelance photographer, went out and got some photos.
His gallery is here. I won’t even hotlink; just go over and look at the photos, especially that first one.
Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it in action. But even if this does turn out to be real, and not a hoax, I still think it is a damn stupid idea. (Anyone remember the iSmell?)
Dean Karlan lives in New Haven, Connecticut. He gets a lot of trick-or-treaters in his neighborhood: “Residents say the area’s popularity is because the houses are so close together, minimizing the door-to-door travel time for trick-or-treaters.”
Dr. Karlan is also a behavioral economist. So why not combine the two and do science experiments on children?
In other experiments, Karlan has found that the more generic the costume is, the more likely it is that the child will choose a see-through bag with candy in it over a non-transparent bag. Karlan has also found that…
I’d like to see a follow-up to this experiment where children get equal amounts of candy, but those who identify as Democrats have more of their candy confiscated by the researchers.
One more thing I’d like to know: why isn’t Dubner interviewing Karlan, instead of doing a re-run this week? With all due respect, guys, it seems like you’ve been doing a lot of re-runs recently, and that doesn’t really motivate me to give you money.
(This also reminds me that my youngest niece has gotten to the age where I can start doing science experiments on with her. She’s still a little young for the economics based ones, though.)