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Random crap: October 2, 2012.

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

Man, time flies when you’re having fun. The first of the Austin nightclub trials started yesterday. (Previously.) It doesn’t seem that there’s much to report yet, but I’ll try to keep an eye on the trial for any sensational revelations.

Ah, “Rebecca”. We hardly knew you. Ben Sprecher’s attempt to round up additional financing didn’t pan out, and the musical has been cancelled. (Previously.)

In an interview Mr. Russo, a longtime criminal defense lawyer, said that Mr. Sprecher’s computer might have been hacked and confidential e-mails stolen “as part of some kind of plot to scare off investors and doom the show.” He said that Mr. Sprecher had turned over hundreds of e-mails to investigators. But Mr. Russo declined requests for several pieces of corroborating information that might shed light on one of the most troubled productions in recent Broadway history.

Also in the NYT: yet another story about fishing tournament fraud. I really do not get why people are surprised by this, or why the media finds it newsworthy. Where there’s money, there’s going to be fraud. If you’re talking six figure money, there’s going to be six figure fraud. And if someone defrauds someone else of a six-figure sum of money, why shouldn’t that be a felony, just because fish are involved?

If four new books are any indication, Mr. Zuckerberg is the decidedly nonmacho, non-pickup-driving embodiment of a new breed of American hunter. These young memoirists have loaded their rifles and shotguns for complicated reasons, including culinary one-upmanship. Nothing wows jaded dinner guests like a braised shank of calf moose that you’ve recently “harvested” and “dressed” — hunting euphemisms for killed, skinned and disemboweled — before bringing it to the table.

I haven’t read any of the new books mentioned by the NYT, but I did read Mr. Rinella’s previous book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine. That was 51% interesting, 49% “throw across the room” annoying. I liked large parts of it – for example, his visit to an eel harvester and seller, and his trip to Alaska. What really set me off was the end of the book, in which Mr. Rinella cooks a large wild game Thanksgiving dinner for friends and family….and one of the guests is a vegan who insists on (metaphorically) crapping all over his elaborately prepared meal.

Sorry, but if I’m in Mr. Rinella’s position and someone pulls that <stuff> on me, I’ll take them aside and tell them politely: “This is your one warning. You are a guest in my house. If you continue to badmouth my food and complain about it not being vegan, I will physically throw you out the front door and see how many times you bounce. If you can’t deal with that, walk out now under your own power.”

Anyway, I don’t feel any real compulsion to read Mr. Rinella’s new book, or any of the others mentioned by the paper of record.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Guns, Law, Sports | 1 Comment »

Well. Well well well well. Well.

Monday, October 1st, 2012

The significance is not that I happened to stumble across this:

(This being Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up, if you can’t read the cover in the photo taken with CrapCam 2.0!)

The significance is where I found it: on a register endcap at my local H.E.B., where they usually keep magazines, best-selling books (like King and Patterson) and impulse purchase items.

(Edited to add before someone points it out me: H.E.B. is a large local grocery store chain.)

And while my readers outside of Texas may think that this is a particularly conservative state…well, you’d be right, but Austin, and especially the part of Austin I live in, is an Obama stronghold. Seeing this get such prominent display is a bit surprising.

Posted in Books, Guns, Politics | Comments Closed

We do the legwork so you don’t have to.

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Since I posted twice about the auction that included some of Bonnie and Clyde’s guns, I felt that I owed it to my loyal readers (all four of them) to give some final results. All of these are by way of Invaluable.com, which notes that these prices have not yet been verified.

Bonnie’s Colt Detective Special went for $220,000.

Clyde’s Colt in “Fitz Special” style went for $37,000.

A 1911 that Clyde had in his waistband during the ambush went for $200,000.

The S&W Hand Ejector went for $41,000, against a pre-sale estimate of $75,000 – $100,000.

The “Baby Face” Nelson S&W “Safety Hammerless” went for $17,000, against a pre-sale estimate of $40,000 – $50,000.

I’m not sure what to make of these two Smiths. It may be that “Baby Face” Nelson associational items don’t have the same draw as Bonnie and Clyde, but I’m not sure why Clyde’s S&W didn’t meet expectations. Perhaps the fact that it has been re-finished had something to do with that…

And the Emmett Dalton .44 Russian top-break went for $15,000, against a pre-sale estimate of $25,000 – $30,000.

(Edited to add: Invaluable.com requires you to have an account and be signed in before showing prices, so if you don’t see prices at those links, that’s why.

Also, thinking about it some more, the 1911 and Bonnie’s Colt were probably big money guns because they were actually recovered from Bonnie and Clyde’s bodies after the ambush. The S&W was apparently in the car, but not found on either of them, and the “Fitz” was recovered from a car stolen by Clyde. So that may explain the pricing. Maybe. What do I know?)

(Edited to add 10/2: Here’s the report direct from RR Auction, which gives the prices including bidder’s premium. Invaluable’s prices apparently did not include that figure.)

Posted in 1911, Clippings, Guns, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

When earth-moving equipment is outlawed…

Friday, September 28th, 2012

…only outlaws will have earth-moving equipment.

When banners purportedly signed by Velazquez recently appeared in various cities — accusing rival Miguel Trevino and his followers of being traitors — Trevino reportedly sent steam shovels and earth-moving equipment to smash one of Velasquez’s homes in the Zacatecas city of Fresnillo.

Hey, at least Trevino didn’t try to kill Velasquez with a forklift… (Edited to add 10/1: What, none of you people noticed I screwed up the link? Fixed now.)

This reminds me, in turn, of something I ran across a few days ago. I was searching for the Latin translation of “the ram has touched the wall” (“Murum aries attigit”, if you’re curious) and found this quote, attributed to Seneca: “Quemadmoeum gladis nemeinum occidit, occidentis telum est”. Or, “A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in a killer’s hand.” Sound…familiar?

(N.B. I have not been able to personally track down the attribution to Seneca.)

Posted in Guns, Law | Comments Closed

PSG, WSP.

Friday, September 28th, 2012

For those of you unfamiliar with that abbreviation, that’s Jay G’s rendering of “Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes“.

Police say an argument erupted in the parking lot between the ex-boyfriend, his brother and the bouncer about why the bouncer was helping the woman get her personal items.
The bouncer grabbed a shotgun and fired one shot into the ground. The ricocheting buckshot or debris dislodged by the blast hit the ex-boyfriend’s brother in the leg.

This is why you don’t fire warning shots, people!

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Guns up!

Friday, September 28th, 2012

Remember the auction we noted earlier in the week? The one that included some of Bonnie and Clyde’s guns?

Well, by way of SayUncle, we learned that there was a bit of a kerfuffle. One of the guns in the auction is a Colt Detective Special that was found taped to Bonnie’s thigh. Frank Hamer, the man who led the posse that reduced Bonnie and Clyde to “a bunch of wet rags” [*], took that gun (and many, if not all, of their other guns) as spoils after the ambush, and it got handed down from Hamer through a couple of other folks before ending up in the auction.

So what’s the problem? The serial number on Bonnie’s gun was obliterated, and BATFE doesn’t much like people selling guns with altered or obliterated serial numbers.  Serial numbers, as I understand it, were actually not required until the Gun Control Act of 1968, so there are guns out there without serial numbers. But if the gun did have a serial number, like Bonnie’s did, and that serial number is defaced or altered, you can’t legally sell the gun.

What to do, what to do? If you’re the auction house, you contact your friendly local BATFE branch. I will now pause for a moment so you can laugh at the juxtaposition of  “friendly” and BATFE.

In this case, though, BATFE issued a new serial number for the gun, and had the gun re-stamped, making it all nice and legal for the auction. SayUncle and some of his commentators seem a little bent out of shape about BATFE doing this; personally, I’d rather have them do this than have the gun confiscated and melted down.

While I was writing this entry, Lawrence sent me an actual link to the auction. Bonnie’s Colt is here.

The “Fitz Special” that I wrote about previously is here. Looking over the auction description, a couple of things jump out at me. There are three documents giving the gun’s provenance, from various law enforcement officers, but there’s no Colt factory letter documenting the gun. The price of a Colt letter, according to their website, is $75; that’s a small percentage of the estimated auction price, and I’d personally like to see one of those letters with the gun before I bid (were I planning to bid; yeah, like I have $50,000). It might help document the story that Clyde stole this gun from a Texas Ranger. I strongly suspect (and the auction notes seem to confirm) that this is not an actual Fitzgerald modified gun, but one done in his style.

Why, yes, as a matter of fact, there is a Smith and Wesson Hand Ejector in this auction. And it has “a copy” of a factory letter. There’s also a “Baby Face” Nelson Safety Hammerless (Third Model) with a S&W factory letter, too. And a .44 Double Action First Model top-break carried by Emmett Dalton, also with factory letter. Except for those three, it seems that choosy gangsters chose Colts.

[*] That description, and some of the other background in this post, comes from Jeff Guinn’s stunning Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, the definitive work of Bonnie and Clyde scholarship and a book I enthusiastically recommend.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Guns | 1 Comment »

And speaking of grits…

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

…the breakfast kind, that is, we learn by way of Mr. Henson and the Waco Tribune Herald that there’s an auction this weekend that includes some of Bonnie and Clyde’s guns.

We don’t have that kind of money to throw around, but we are intrigued by the event. The Waco paper’s writing is a bit sloppy; when they refer to “a fine Colt Fitzgerald revolver”, we’re pretty sure they mean a Fitz Special. But we’d really like to know how one of those wound up in Clyde Barrow’s hands; our understanding is that the Fitz Specials were all custom orders for law enforcement, and it is hard to imagine J.H. FitzGerald building one for Barrow. We wonder if there’s a Colt factory letter on that gun…

Posted in Clippings, Guns, History | 2 Comments »

Maybe they should have done “Gaslight” (and more random notes for September 25, 2012)

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

Ben Sprecher is a theatrical producer. Most of his work has been off-Broadway, but he’s trying to put on a Broadway musical version of “Rebecca”. (I know what you’re thinking, but according to the NYT, this was done in Vienna in 2006, and played well.)

Anyway, Mr. Sprecher estimates that he needs $12 million for this. Mr. Sprecher had an investor – a man named Paul Abrams – who was putting up $4.5 million. That’s a lot of money for one person to invest in a Broadway show. But wait, it gets better!

Reports in August of his sudden death in Britain of malaria — yet no obituaries, no death notices. A representative for the Abrams estate surfaces, a person identifying himself only as “Wexler” who refuses to speak by phone and uses an e-mail address created just last month.

But wait, it gets even better: Mr. Sprecher never met or spoke to Mr. Abrams at all. There are questions as to whether Mr. Abrams ever even existed.

“I’ve never heard of a situation where you didn’t at least meet the person raising 30 percent of your show budget,” said Robert E. Wankel, president of the Shubert Organization, one of the big three Broadway landlords and a six-figure investor in “Rebecca” as well as the owner of its intended theater, the Broadhurst.

Mr. Sprecher is trying to raise money to fill the gap. But if he fails and the musical doesn’t open, he’s on the hook to his other investors.

Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, bat cave!

Obit watch: Edwin Wilson. Remember Edwin Wilson? Former CIA guy? Convicted of shipping plastic explosives to Libya? Spent 20 years in prison?

A federal judge threw out his conviction in 2003, ruling that prosecutors knowingly used false testimony to undermine his defense.

Yeah. That guy.

Debacle? That seems strong. But I didn’t watch the game. “Debacle” may not be strong enough.

Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do? Well, they can register domains. But Donuts, Inc. has close ties to Demand Media…

Industry watchdogs have long criticized Demand Media as a leading provider of services to spammers and a host to sites that commit “cybersquatting.”…
Garth Bruen of the industry watchdog group KnujOn said Demand Media has not replied to any of the many spam complaints he has submitted to the company.
“They are looking the other way,” he said. “I’ve sent them tons of information. They never respond. They have this one address, legal@enom.com, and you never get a person.”

The current theory on convicted sex offender and fugitive from justice Prakashanand Saraswati seems to be that he’s in India now, having been spirited out of the country by his followers. And the US Marshals don’t have an office in India.

Maybe they could send some BATF guys from Reno to India.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Guns, Law, NFL, Obits, Theatre | 1 Comment »

Some random stuff for the morning of September 20, 2012.

Thursday, September 20th, 2012

There hasn’t been much in the news the past couple of days, and I’ve been depressed and upset for various reasons that the readers of this blog won’t care about.

I don’t have a lot to say about the DOJ report on “Fast and Furious”. I haven’t had time to go through the report myself, and I’m expecting that a lot of people who are smarter than I am will have smarter things to say than I do, once they’ve had a chance to go through it.

The Astros have crossed the 100 loss barrier, and are still on track for 110 losses. Woot.

Today’s NYT has two articles I found kind of interesting. One is about problems with the United Network for Organ Sharing and kidney allocation:

…many experts agree that a significant number of discarded kidneys — perhaps even half, some believe — could be transplanted if the system for allocating them better matched the right organ to the right recipient in the right amount of time.

Story number two is about the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation in North Dakota:

The man who plays Santa Claus here is a registered child sex offender and a convicted rapist. One of the brothers of the tribal chairman raped a child, and a second brother sexually abused a 12-year-old girl. They are among a number of men convicted of sex crimes against children on this remote home of the Spirit Lake Sioux tribe, which has among the highest proportion of sex offenders in the country.

And:

Federal agencies, however, have sought to minimize the extent of the problem, including disciplining employees who have spoken publicly about sexual abuse and questioning the competence of others, according to federal and tribal officials.

And the mayor of Central Falls, Rhode Island, resigned yesterday. He’s also agreed to plead guilty on federal charges that “he took illegal gratuities from a friend and political supporter who received lucrative work from the city boarding up abandoned buildings”.

Some homes were boarded up even though people were still living there. Others were re-boarded by Bouthillette at Moreau’s direction, even though the owners had already had their own contractors board the building.

“Some homes were boarded up even though people were still living there.” In completely unrelated news: gee, I really miss Buddy Cianci.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law, Loser, Rhode Island, Sports | Comments Closed

Score!

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

This weekend was the grand opening for the new Half-Price Books in Round Rock.

As they usually do, Half-Price was distributing coupons: 40% off one item on Thursday, 30% off on Friday, 20% off on Saturday, and 50% off on Sunday. (I heard one clerk complain that those coupons were only supposed to apply to the Round Rock store, but they made them valid for all the stores in error. I think that clerk was full of it, but that’s just my opinion.)

Anyway, I picked up a few interesting things Thursday through Saturday, including a copy of An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies (at 40% off of half cover price) and Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (which I didn’t burn a coupon on, as the copy I found was marked down to $4.99).

Today was 50% off day. I had some things I was thinking about picking up, but then I got lucky. Fortunately, I had two coupons…

The new (2010) of Bill Warren’s magnificent book, Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, The 21st Century Edition, complete with Howard Waldrop introduction. Cover is $99, so take half of that, and then take 50% off of that with the coupon…

Hoglegs, Hipshots and Jalapenos, the other collection of Skeeter Skelton’s work from Shooting Times. Some of you may remember me mentioning I found a copy of Good Friends, Good Guns, Good Whisky in a Las Vegas bookstore last year and paid (mumble mumble) for it. This was in a locked glass case at HPB and I nearly walked past it; I’m glad I didn’t. I won’t say how much I paid, but with the coupon, it was about half of the (mumble mumble) price I paid for volume one in Vegas, and nowhere near the asking prices on Amazon.

Squee!

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Movies | 5 Comments »

How many rules were broken here?

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

The Saturday evening mock cannon fight was meant to simulate the spectacle of a historic battle on the high seas. This year, however, a crew member inadvertently veered from the script, which called for the Amazing Grace to fire blanks at the schooner Bill of Rights.

(Insert obvious joke about shooting at the Bill of Rights here.)

Onward. According to the LAT, one of the crew members accidentally “grabbed a box of buckshot ammunition after the Amazing Grace ran out of blanks”.

Two people were injured, apparently not critically.

So off the top of my head:

This appears to be the Amazing Grace’s website. I was trying to figure out what kind of guns it had, and how they worked; it kind of sounds like they may use commercial shotgun cartridges, instead of muzzle loaders like you’d see in the movies. The site isn’t helpful, but the “Ship’s Log” is good for a chuckle.

It sounds like this was part of the Toshiba Tall Ships Festival. “Back by popular demand again this year, children can take part in Cap’n Jack’s School for Scallywags. Watch as your young buccaneers learn to walk, talk, and sing like a pirate!” That sounds like it would get annoying. Fast.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Safety | 1 Comment »

Good taste: you can’t afford it.

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

Ramiro Pozos Gonzalez, a “founding member” of the La Resistencia drug gang, has been captured.

Ordinarily, I don’t note the capture of every cartel member that comes down the pike. But the HouChron article includes a charming photograph of Mr. Gonzalez’s gold-plated “AK-47”, which was also captured with him.

I can sort of, vaguely, understand plating the gun. But the magazines? That’s just a waste of money. Magazines are disposable items. You should be prepared to trash them if they don’t feed; gold-plating them just makes the decision that much more difficult.

(Previously.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

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