You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#140 in a series)

January 18th, 2025

Remember Sheng Thao? The former mayor of Oakland? “Former” because she got tossed out of office in a recall election in November?

She was indicted on Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her “boyfriend”, David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.

Patrick D. Robbins, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said on Friday that Ms. Thao in October 2022 had agreed to extend a city contract with the waste company, California Waste Solutions, buy housing from the Duongs and use her influence to help them in exchange for a campaign mail effort and side payments that would benefit her and Mr. Jones.
California Waste Solutions then spent $75,000 on an attack mailer that helped Ms. Thao’s campaign in the 2022 mayoral election, prosecutors said. After Ms. Thao took office, the company paid $95,000 to Mr. Jones for a “no-show” job and had promised additional payments to the couple in exchange for Ms. Thao’s influence at City Hall, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors alleged that Ms. Thao followed through by taking steps to help companies owned by the Duongs and by appointing a high-level city official that they had selected.

The charges against her are pretty much standard. You got your mail fraud, you got your wire fraud, you got your bribery and conspiracy.

Efforts to remove Ms. Thao from office had begun long before she was publicly linked in June to a federal investigation. Early in her tenure, residents of Oakland, often regarded as a gritty and soulful alternative to San Francisco, had become increasingly frustrated with the city’s high crime rates, a widening budget deficit and the loss of major league sports teams. Ms. Thao’s decision to fire a popular police chief also rankled her critics.

…

But the efforts by Ms. Thao and labor allies to fight the recall were ultimately unsuccessful. In November, less than two years into her term, more than 60 percent of voters chose to remove Ms. Thao from office. Pamela Price, the district attorney for Alameda County and another progressive Democrat, was also recalled on the same ballot.

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

Obit watch: January 18, 2025.

January 18th, 2025

Jean Jennings, automotive writer. I remember her from back in the day when I was reading Car and Driver (she went by Jean Lindamood at the time).

Mrs. Jennings was hired at Car and Driver by David E. Davis Jr., a renowned figure in automotive journalism. In 1986, he took her with him after Rupert Murdoch offered to support a new type of car magazine, Automobile, which was aimed at more discerning readers and featured writers like P.J. O’Rourke, David Halberstam and Jim Harrison. Mrs. Jennings proved more than capable of keeping up with them.
“She and David were the only ones writing anything other than fanboy notes,” Kathleen Hamilton, a childhood friend who later worked for her at Automobile, said in an interview. “It was enthusiast writing, and she brought adventure to the car-world reader.”

I sort of halfway read “Automobile”, by which I mean I mostly thumbed through it on the newsstands but never bought an issue. I think I had checked out of the car magazine scene by the time she became Mrs. Jennings.

She was 70, which seems awfully young to me these days. Alzheimer’s got her.

Posted in Cars, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 17, 2025.

January 17th, 2025

As promised, David Lynch. NYT. This is the same THR obit link from yesterday, but I think they’ve substantially updated it since I originally posted.

David Lynch PSA for the New York City Department of Sanitation. (Hattip: NYPost.)

Roger Ebert’s one-star review of “Blue Velvet”.

Joan Plowright, actress. IMDB. I feel bad that I don’t have more to say about here, but I just don’t.

Nathalie Dupree, cookbook author and personality. She’s actually someone I’d heard of, but didn’t really have a lot of context for. The obit makes it sound like she would have been a fun person to know, more so in her Diet Coke days.

Ms. Dupree had a particular blend of Southern hospitality and risqué charm. Over the course of her career she was called “the Julia Child of the South,” “the queen of Southern cooking” and “the anti-Martha Stewart.”
She shocked the host Katie Couric by ending an elegant entertaining segment on the “Today” show, in which she prepared an entire pork crown roast, by presenting a supermarket chocolate cake. She filmed episodes of her television show with a red AIDS ribbon pinned to her apron, a bold move in the 1980s, when conservative suburban women made up much of her audience.
“She is one of the few people in my life who seems more like a fictional character than a flesh-and-blood person,” the novelist Pat Conroy wrote in “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life” (2009), after taking one of Ms. Dupree’s classes. “You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.”

…

Her early television shows, orchestrated solely by Ms. Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company. Ms. Dupree wanted the kitchen segments to run with no edits. With a smear of flour on her face, she might leave ingredients half prepared or forget to add them altogether. She wiped her hands on her apron a lot and once searched around for her diamond ring that had fallen off as she cooked.
“Whatever happens to me is going to happen to you,” she’d tell audiences after a mistake.
“She was a hot mess, and that’s what people loved her for,” Ms. Graubart, who coauthored “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” in 2012 with Ms. Dupree, said in a phone interview.

Posted in Food, Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Random crankery (mostly gun books, a little gun stuff, a little electronic stuff).

January 16th, 2025

I didn’t manage to get everything done that I wanted to get done during my extended vacation from work. In particular, gun crankery and gun books kind of went by the wayside, for reasons of time and weather.

The gun crankery is still coming. And a thought occurred to me the other day: I can actually do some quick gun book crankery, because I have three new gun books in the stack and can just point folks to those books online. Don’t need to pull out the bibliographies or take pictures. Yes, it is lazy, and yes, there will be less lazy gun book crankery coming. Consider this a stopgap.

More seriously, I do think these new books are worth writing about and promoting to my readers.

In order to avoid disappointing my gun book buddies, I’m going to put the gun books up front. After those, I’m going to talk about one new gun-related item, and one new non-gun related item, so anyone who wants can skip over the non-book parts (or can skip to the non-book parts).

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Christmas, Geek, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Smith and Wesson, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 16, 2025.

January 16th, 2025

This is breaking news, but: David Lynch. I wouldn’t ordinarily post anything this early, but I happened to be writing this obit watch when the news broke. Expect more tomorrow.

Bob Uecker. ESPN. IMDB. Baseball Reference.

Uecker proved himself undistinguished during his six seasons as a major leaguer in the 1960s. He eked out a career batting average of just .197, hit 14 home runs and drove in 74 runs. A career reserve player, he never started more than 62 games in a season for the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves, the St. Louis Cardinals or the Philadelphia Phillies.

“Anybody with ability can play in the big leagues,” he once said. “But to be able to trick people year in and year out the way I did, I think that was a much greater feat.”

The sight of Uecker perched at such a distance became so much a part of his image that, in 2014, a statue of him was installed in the faraway reaches of the upper deck of Miller Park in Milwaukee.

“I can’t think of a better place to put it,” he said. “It’s great for the fans and even better for the pigeons.”

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Administrative note.

January 16th, 2025

For the record, my plan is to update the various politician lists (city council, commissioners court, reps, senators) sometime after, but close to, January 20th.

I know some of these folks have been sworn in already, but waiting until after the 20th gives people a chance to get their web sites updated and things in order.

Posted in Admin, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 13, 2025.

January 13th, 2025

Leslie Charleson, actress.

Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “Emergency!”, “Search”…

…and “Mannix”. (“A Chance at the Roses”, season 3, episode 16.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

January 13th, 2025

This is still breaking, but: Mike McCarthy is supposedly out as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

ESPN, who is attributing this to “a source”.

McCarthy’s contract with the Cowboys expired last Wednesday but the team held an exclusive negotiating window with the coach until Tuesday at midnight. However, the sides have not had any negotiations regarding a new deal, sources told Schefter on Monday.

The Cowboys compiled a 49-35 record in McCarthy’s five seasons. Tom Landry and Jason Garrett are the only coaches in franchise history with more victories.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 11, 2025.

January 11th, 2025

Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave.

At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers. When “Soul Man” topped the R&B charts and crossed over to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967 (it also won a Grammy), its success helped open doors for other Black acts to connect with white audiences.
Sam & Dave’s live shows were so kinetic — they were known as the Sultans of Sweat and Double Dynamite — that even as charismatic a performer as Otis Redding was hesitant to be on the bill with them, for fear of being upstaged. Mr. Moore once spoke of his need to “liquefy” the audience before he considered a show a success.
“The strength of Sam & Dave,” he said, “was that we would do anything to please the audience.”

…

Working with the producers and songwriters Isaac Hayes and David Porter, the house band Booker T. & the M.G.’s and the crisp horns of the Mar-Keys, Sam & Dave were soon enjoying the benefits of stardom, including their own tour bus and plane, plus an entourage of women and hangers-on. They also both became addicted to heroin.

…

While still in high school, Sam was shot in the leg by the jealous husband of a married woman he was seeing. He later served 18 months in prison for procuring prostitutes. But music lifted him. He sang in a Miami Baptist church, then with an a cappella group called the Majestics and a gospel group called the Mellonaires, before teaming up with Mr. [Dave] Prater.

(Dave Prater died in a car accident in 1988.)

Burning in Hell watch: James Arthur Ray. People who have been reading this blog for a long time may remember that name, as I covered his actions and the resulting criminal case early on.

Mr. Ray was a “self-help guru” who killed three people in a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona.

Mr. Ray packed about 50 people into a temporary structure made of a round wood frame covered in tarps, measuring about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet at the center. He poured gallons of water over fire-heated rocks, filling the lodge with hot steam.
Though he told participants they could leave at any time, many said later that they felt pressured by him to stay. Eventually the conditions inside grew unbearable, and the crowd flooded out; many people collapsed on the ground.
Someone called 911; one first responder later said that the scene looked like the site of a mass suicide. Twenty-one people were taken to the hospital.
Three of them died — James Shore and Kirby Brown were declared dead on arrival, while Liz Neumann died nine days later. Mr. Ray was arrested shortly afterward on manslaughter charges.

Mr. Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years in prison.

“I am responsible,” he said about the sweat-lodge disaster.
At the end of the film, he added: “It had to happen, because it was the only way I could explore and learn and grow through the things that I’ve done. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”

Am I reading that right? Three people had to die in great agony so James Arthur Ray could “explore and learn and grow”?

Hell is too good for him.

(Obligatory note that it was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.)

(James Arthur Ray’s website.)

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its “self-help” section: “For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”

–Roger Ebert

Posted in Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

January 10th, 2025

On Tuesday, the Las Vegas Raiders fired Antonio Pierce as head coach.

Yesterday, they fired Tom Telesco as general manager. One season, 4-13.

In other news, Sean Dyche is out as manager of Everton. Everton is apparently a soccer team.

Everton are 16th in the Premier League, having scored just 15 goals in 19 games. Only bottom-placed Southampton have managed fewer.

(I would have sworn I posted this yesterday, but I just found this in my drafts. Apologies.)

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Noted.

January 10th, 2025

This came across Greg Ellifritz‘s “Weekend Knowledge Dump” a few weeks ago, and I thought it was worth sharing:

“46 Things (and Counting) a Young Man Should Know”.

I’ll check back in when I figure out #47.

47. Carry a sharp knife, unless precluded by law or venue policy. It doesn’t have to be a machete or Bowie knife: even a small Swiss Army knife or pocketknife is worthwhile.

48. Carry a small flashlight. You can get ones that clip on your keychain and throw a surprising amount of light, and you have no idea how handy they are until you start using them.

Also by way of Mr. Ellifritz: “52 Things I Learned in 2024”.

And by way of Mike the Musicologist: “Big Pistols vs. Small Pistols”, by FotB (and official trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn.

Posted in Bookmarks, Guns | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 10, 2024.

January 10th, 2025

Anita Bryant.

In 1990, Ms. Bryant married Charlie Hobson Dry, an Oklahoma native and former NASA test crewman. He spent the next decade trying to revive her career, opening the Anita Bryant Music Mansion in Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn., but financial problems plagued both ventures. The couple moved back to Oklahoma, where they operated Anita Bryant Ministries International.

The NYT obit wants to attribute her career decline to her anti-gay views. But was that really the case? Or did her career go into eclipse because American musical tastes changed? I honestly don’t know.

Posted in 1970s, History, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#138 and #139 in a series)

January 9th, 2025

Mike the Musicologist tipped me off to an interesting story from Louisiana.

Tyrin Truong is the mayor of Bogalusa. He’s 23, which makes him the youngest mayor in Bogalusa’s history, and one of the youngest ever in the state.

And he got busted on Tuesday for drug trafficking.

Investigators determined that members of a drug trafficking organization in the Bogalusa area were using social media to distribute opioids, high-grade marijuana, THC products and MDMA, State Police said. Profits from the drug sales were used to purchase firearms. Some of the firearms were “funneled” to individuals prohibited from legal possession and some were linked to crimes in the Bogalusa area, State Police said.

But, apparently, no blow. Which is kind of disappointing, because:

Northshore District Attorney Collin Sims, whose agency is involved in the investigation, said Truong allegedly “organized entertainment with a prostitute” at an AirBnB while attending a mayor’s conference in Atlanta. The AirBnB had been rented using public money, Sims said.

…

Truong, now 25, was booked into the Washington Parish Jail in Franklinton on counts of transactions involving proceeds from drug offenses, unauthorized use of a moveable and soliciting for prostitutes, State Police said in a news release.

“unauthorized use of a moveable”?

Even before officially becoming mayor, Truong did not shy away from political battles and controversies. As mayor-elect, he pushed for the resignation of the Bogalusa police chief after a Black man died in the department’s custody.
During his tenure he encouraged law enforcement to patrol more in Bogalusa, but also suggested the city could dissolve its 33-officer police force and transfer responsibilities to the Washington Parish Sheriff’s office to save money.

Meanwhile, Thomas Clasby, the former director of the Quincy Department of Elder Services (that’s in Massachusetts), has been charged with “embezzlement, mail and wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property”.

Starting in 2019, Clasby used the city’s purchasing power to pay for personal expenses and make money for himself.

What kind of expenses?

Clasby arranged for the city to pay $8,950 to a music studio to produce recordings of him singing, $2,236 to food service vendors for 153 pounds of bourbon steak tips, $4,800 for a Toyota Prius and $1,658 for a self-portrait, federal prosecutors said.

The articles don’t specify if that was a down payment on a new Prius or an outright purchase of a used one. I did run the numbers, and that works out to $14.61 a pound for the bourbon steak tips. I don’t know if that’s a good price or not: my H-E-B app does not list steak tips (with or without bourbon) at my local store. I also can’t find “bourbon steak tips” online – I was thinking that might be something Omaha Steaks sells – but I did find lots of recipes for “bourbon” and “honey bourbon” steak tips online. Might be something worth trying.

Clasby also arranged for the city to pay over $38,000 to a New York consulting company owned by his friend, federal prosecutors said.
The consulting company didn’t provide any goods or services to Quincy, federal prosecutors said. Instead, Clasby’s friend cashed the city’s checks and gave Clasby the money at three separate places: A rest stop in Framingham, a ferry terminal in Bridgeport, Connecticut and at the friend’s New York apartment.

Okay, now you’re just being scummy instead of amusing. But we’ll always have the “signed, lacquered, framed portrait” and the studio recordings of his singing. Not that I’ve found those anywhere yet, but I’m sure prosecutors will be entering those into evidence and playing them for the jury.

Posted in Beef, Food, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 8, 2025.

January 8th, 2025

Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front party in France (now the National Rally).

An arm-waving reactionary with the swagger of a circus pitchman making outrageous claims, Mr. Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, making it to a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising specters of a new fascism as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants — anyone he deemed to be not “pure” French.
Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of his party, the National Front, in 2011 and rose to prominence on a tide of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential elections three times — in 2012, placing third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 percent, losing to the centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 percent, defeated again by Mr. Macron.
But that year’s elections also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to the lower house of Parliament — 89 in all — testimony to the success of Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and moderate its message in some regards.
By then it had became the leading opposition party, no longer an outcast widely viewed as a threat to the republic, and in 2023 the National Rally backed Mr. Macron’s bill restricting immigration, an embarrassment for the French president.

Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

The classics.

January 7th, 2025

There was a story in the NYT the other day that I thought was interesting, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.

Yujin Choi was a rising young prosecutor in the Denver district attorney’s office.

In 2021, Ms. Choi made her first allegation against Dan Hines, a criminal investigator in the district attorney’s office. She told supervisors that he had made an inappropriate comment to her.
Mr. Hines, who joined the office in 2019 after spending 10 years in the military and 20 years with the Pennsylvania State Police, retiring as a troop commander, denied the allegation.
“The investigation was closed as unsubstantiated,” according to the ruling, but Mr. Hines was transferred within the office and was ordered not to contact Ms. Choi.

…

In October 2022, Ms. Choi said that Mr. Hines sent her four inappropriate text messages.

So what makes this story interesting? Turns out…

While she provided screenshots of the messages, questions about their authenticity quickly surfaced.
The first text had a time stamp that was about 40 minutes after Ms. Choi had already reported it to her superiors, according to the ruling.
She said that she did not want a formal investigation and did not cooperate with it, the ruling said, but the prosecutor’s office felt obligated to move forward with an inquiry.
When confronted with the new allegations, Mr. Hines immediately demanded a polygraph test and offered his phone for inspection. A forensic search of his phone did not show any communication between his number and Ms. Choi’s, according to the ruling.
The investigation further revealed that Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself. In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them.
The investigation found that Ms. Choi downloaded and altered a spreadsheet containing her Verizon message logs before she provided those records to investigators.

Yes, it is the all-time, but not often seen, classic “B—h set me up!” story. And it seems like she was singularly inept at the “setting up” part. But wait, there’s more.

The weekend before her phone and laptop were to be examined for evidence of the alleged misconduct by Mr. Hines, Ms. Choi told investigators that her phone had fallen into her bathtub after she had drawn herself a bath and put her phone on a tray.
She said that she dried it right away but found that it was not working. She then went to her desk to make a video call to a colleague, according to the ruling. After the call, still in a panic over her phone, she knocked over a bottle, spilling water on her laptop, and leaving that disabled as well.

…

“In our view, this narrative is not plausible,” the court office said, finding that Ms. Choi had destroyed both electronic devices.

Ms. Choi has been disbarred.

“Unremitting honesty must at all times be the backbone of the legal profession,” the ruling said. “When a lawyer repeatedly employs deceit and dishonesty to harm another person, that lawyer corrodes the integrity of the profession and threatens to compromise public confidence in the legal system.”

…

Ms. Choi told the disciplinary office that she did not intentionally harm Mr. Hines because she did not make any formal statement against him until the office forced her to participate in its investigation.
In asking for leniency, she said that she was under financial stress and that she had been a lawyer only for a short time. The court office noted in its ruling that Ms. Choi’s repeated deception and lack of remorse persuaded it to go beyond suspending her law license and to seek disbarment.
Mr. Hines said he was livid about the way the internal investigations were handled, and the damage done to his reputation and mental and physical health. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the district attorney, Beth McCann, the city and county of Denver and the prosecutor’s office.

In case you’re wondering, the DA’s office says that “Ms. Choi’s casework was later found to be in ‘excellent order,’ with no evidence of fabrications.”

Posted in Law | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »