Crazy horse woman took a plea.
As part of the plea, she’s taken a stipulated sentence of three years and eight months, but it isn’t clear to me if she has a chance at parole or some other form of early release.
Archive for the ‘Horses’ Category
Crazy horse people update.
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024Obit watch: November 20, 2023.
Monday, November 20th, 2023Rosalynn Carter obit roundup: NYT (archived). WP (archived).
I’ve had one person complain to me that they can’t access archive.is links, and I’ve seen reports of this on Hacker News as well. The problem from what I’ve read is a DNS issue between archive.is and CloudFlare, and I don’t know how to tell folks to resolve it. I would love to be able to use another archiving service, but I’m not aware of another one. I feel like my choice is: knowingly post paywalled links (which has gotten me griped at in the past) or post archived links and take the complaints on that. If someone knows of another archiving service, please leave me a comment or drop me a line, and I’ll try switching to that as an alternative.
And I’m not linking to the Atlanta newspaper because, you guessed it, they’re excessively aggressive about ad blockers.
Bobby Ussery, jockey. Mostly noted here because I don’t get to use the “horses” tag as often as I would like, but he did win the 1967 Kentucky Derby (on Proud Clarion, a 30-1 shot). He won a total of 3,611 races between 1951 and 1974.
Joss Ackland, actor. Other credits include “K-19: The Widowmaker”, “The Hunt for Red October”, and “The Apple“.
I do love a good classical reference.
Wednesday, September 13th, 2023Shot:
Chaser:
Look, I know this is a story of mostly local interest. I know this is from a second-rate tabloid newspaper, which has been covering it to excess.
But, wow, these people sound…bats–t crazy. I find it hard to pick out just one element to highlight how bats–t crazy they sound, though the horse’s head in the bed is certainly a favorite of mine. Then there’s the mysterious house fire.
Two is one, and one is none. But what is four? I guess four equals two plus two, so four is two. And does she have back problems from carrying four loaded guns in her purse?
(I’m reminded of the old joke with the punchline, “Not a damn thing in the world, Officer.” If you haven’t heard that one, leave me a comment.)
I have to wonder if the “elephant gun” was a real elephant gun, or if we need an “elephant gun” entry for the Journalist’s Guide to Firearms Identification, alongside the AK-47.
Also, is it just me, or are horse people as a general rule just…bats–t crazy? Not that I hang around the horsy set a lot, but I’ve seen more than a few horse cases on the TV court shows…
Obit watch: August 10, 2022.
Wednesday, August 10th, 2022Taiki Yanagida, Japanese jockey. He was trampled during a race a week ago, and had been hospitalized since.
Ryan Fellows. He was on a show called “Street Outlaws”, which airs on Discovery, and seems to involve drag races on closed public roads.
Gene LeBell, noted stuntman. 252 credits in IMDB.
During taping, it was reported that Lee was beating up on the stuntmen, prompting stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins to bring in LeBell to help set the actor straight by “putting him in a headlock or something.”
In his 2005 autobiography The Godfather of Grappling, LeBell remembered grabbing Lee, who then “started making all those noises that he became famous for … but he didn’t try to counter me, so I think he was more surprised than anything else.”
He then hoisted Lee over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you.”
If that rings a bell, yeah, Quentin Tarantino says that Mr. LeBell influenced the Cliff Booth character in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. Apparently in more ways than just the Bruce Lee bit.
Here’s a PDF of a vintage NYT article about the Hall murder, if you want to start down that rabbit hole.
A horse is a horse, of course, of course…
Tuesday, July 19th, 2022…and no one should flee from a horse, of course,
Especially (of course) if the NYPD owns that horse.
All of your NYPD officers are involved in crime reduction, even the four-legged ones.
Saturday evening, a male robbed a sunglass vendor in Times Square, but a @NYPDSpecialops Mounted officer was hot on his trail. With assistance from nearby officers an arrest was quickly made. pic.twitter.com/5ANbLKdYSI
— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) July 19, 2022
Somebody in the thread responded with a still, but what the heck, let’s go to the ‘Tube:
(Jessica Walter! Damn!)
Obit watch: June 1, 2022.
Wednesday, June 1st, 2022Lester Piggott, one of the great British jockeys. I don’t know a lot about British horse racing (or Irish horse racing, for that matter, though I can tell you who Shergar was) but even I’d heard of him.
…
“The way he rode, with an unusually short length of stirrup for a relatively tall man and his bottom high in the air, must have made the horses feel there was no weight on them,” Luck said in a phone interview. “People said to him, ‘Why do you ride with your butt in the air?’ And he said, ‘Well I have to put it somewhere.’”
Luck added, “Piggott ushered in a golden generation of riders in Europe; he was the one they all aspired to.”
Kenny Moore. He sounds like an interesting guy: he was an Olympic marathon runner, an early tester of Bill Bowerman’s shoes (which went on to become Nike), an All-American in cross-country…
…and a long-time Sports Illustrated writer, specializing in track coverage.
…
George Hirsch, a former publisher of Runner’s World magazine, which Mr. Moore wrote for after he left Sports Illustrated, said that Mr. Moore’s athletic past had enhanced his access to his subjects.
“I can remember when he interviewed someone like Bill Rodgers or Joan Benoit,” Mr. Hirsch said in a phone interview, referring to two elite marathoners, “and he would run with them and see who they were in ways that he couldn’t have done if he had not been an elite runner.”
Charles Siebert, actor. Other credits include “Xena: Warrior Princess”, “Mancuso, FBI”, “And Justice for All”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye” (and of course “The Rockford Files”), and “Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo”.
Important safety tip (#22 in a series)
Wednesday, January 19th, 2022Lawrence brought up an important safety tip the other night, based on two documentaries the Saturday Movie Group has watched. (“Barry Lyndon” and “Gone With the Wind”.)
Don’t buy a horse for your child.
It never ends well.
(Did you know IMDB has a “riding accident” keyword?)
Bagatelle (#44)
Wednesday, August 11th, 2021I did not give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about the Olympics. As a matter of fact, I believe they should have been cancelled this year, they should remain cancelled for all time, and cities should use the money to provide free guitar picks for the poor.
So I missed this story last week, but you know it is the kind of thing I can’t pass up, and I don’t think it got a lot of attention.
The coach of the German modern pentathlon team was disqualified on Saturday.
As it happens, “modern pentathlon” is one of the few Olympic sports I care much about: how can you not like a combination of swimming, fencing, running, horses, and shooting? (Plus: Patton. Minus: they are apparently using laser guns these days, instead of real pistols.)
But that’s not why the story is interesting. She was disqualified because…
I believe we have video of the event.
Okay, I’m sorry, that was a cheap joke, but it never gets old. Here is the actual footage:
Bundestrainerin Kim Raisner: "Hau mal richtig drauf. Hau richtig drauf!" Dann schlägt sie selber noch mit der Faust zu (Sekunde 23).@DOSB Das muss Konsequenzen haben.#ARD #Fünfkampf pic.twitter.com/JIBpqEGR6M
— Max Möhrike Ⓥ (@der_veganer) August 6, 2021
Obit watch: June 4, 2021.
Friday, June 4th, 2021Bailey was a giant. Notwithstanding the good he did for his clients, perhaps the best thing he did for America was to promote the notion that everyone is entitled to a vigorous defense, and to remind us of the presumption of innocence. And he did it during dark times. https://t.co/T4a0g5Nqwa
— Reinstated President Dawg (@PresidentDawg) June 4, 2021
One of the ways Rome stands out in the ancient world is that the Romans, unlike the Greeks, considered defending the accused an honorable profession, a fitting career for an educated gentleman. https://t.co/0RDNDpz9Am
— Reinstated President Dawg (@PresidentDawg) June 4, 2021
What a career:
And props to him for honorable service in the military:
The NYT obit hits all the high points of his legal career: Dr. Sam Sheppard, the Boston Strangler, Patty Hearst, Capt. Ernest L. Medina, O.J….
In 1977, Mr. Bailey, a master of turning simplicity into complexity, successfully defended a racehorse veterinarian, Mark J. Gerard, from two felony charges in a notorious racetrack fraud at Belmont Park. The defendant was accused of switching two look-alike horses — a top 3-year-old, Cinzano, for a long shot, Lebon, that the New York Times sports columnist Red Smith said “couldn’t beat a fat man from Gimbels to Macy’s.”
The switch produced 57-to-1 odds, and Mr. Gerard won $80,000. But the strands of the case proved too hard for prosecutors to untangle in Nassau County Court on Long Island, and Dr. Gerard, who had tended Secretariat and Kelso, got off with a misdemeanor and a few months in jail. “The record,” an appeals court said, “reveals a factual scenario that might have been authored jointly by an Alfred Hitchcock and a Damon Runyon.”
I have a vague memory of seeing F. Lee Bailey’s “Lie Detector” when I was younger. And this is a good story:
Lawrence also mentioned that he voiced himself in an episode of the animated “Spider-Man” series.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 231
Monday, November 16th, 2020I’ve got an eye doctor’s appointment today, so I’m being a little lazy again. I thought I’d dabble a bit in true crime.
This is an odd one, as it is from that Canadian program “The Fifth Estate”, but deals with a case in the United States: Dixon Illinois, to be exact, which is a little far south to be considered Southern Canada.
The town’s Comptroller, Rita Crundwell, embezzled an estimated $53 million between approximately 1990 and 2012 (when she was indicted). That seems to me to be an astonishing amount of money, especially for a town with a population of about 15,000. (That’s close to $2.5 million a year.)
And did she spend it on moving to a country without an extradition treaty? Nope. She spent it on…quarter horses. Supposedly, she became one of the leading quarter horse breeders in the US: at least, until she was indicted, tried, and sentenced to 19 1/2 years in prison.
I personally am kind of baffled by this: there’s nothing wrong with raising horses (though stealing money from taxpayers is objectionable) but if you’re going to do it, why not raise whole horses? Why raise just a quarter of a horse? What can you do with a quarter horse?
(Yes, I will be here all week.)
Bonus: True confession, I have not watched this yet, but “All the Queen’s Horses” is a longer documentary about Rita Crundwell and the Dixon fraud.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 170
Wednesday, September 16th, 2020Today, I wanted to put up something that pushes a few of RoadRich’s hot buttons (and my own).
The California Highway Patrol has a YouTube channel. I thought it might be interesting to look at some aspects of operations that are common to both the Austin Police Department and the CHP. These are things that APD devotes presentations to in their Citizen’s Police Academy (which is on-hold at the moment), so why not take a look at how a department outside of the United States handles these things?
First up: “Air Operations”. This is a two-parter: Part 1.
(Can I note here that I hate “vlog”? I would say I hate the word, but it isn’t even a word.)
Part 2: this covers CHP’s fixed-wing (that is, not helicopter) operations.
You know what else CHP has? The mounted police.
You know I had to do that.
Anyway, the CHP mounted patrol.
Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.
Wednesday, September 16th, 2020I would completely have missed this if it were not for Hacker News, but: today is the 100th anniversary of the Wall Street bombing.
…
There’s an interesting book by Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (affiliate link). He views the Wall Street bombing as the first car bomb, even though it wasn’t really a “car” bomb.
FBI page. There’s an “American Experience” documentary that you can apparently stream for free if you’re a PBS station member or have Amazon Prime.