Archive for February, 2012

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Important safety tip (#9 in a series).

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Let us say, just for the sake of argument, that you are a police officer.

Let us say, also just for the sake of argument, that you like to go to bars in your off-duty hours and meet women (or men, depending on your particular gender bias).

Let us also say that you are at a bar one night, meet an attractive person of the appropriate gender, and you’d like to get their phone number and address.

Now, as a police officer, you have extraordinary access to look this kind of thing up. You may be tempted to make use of that access. You might want to wait until your next shift and then run your subject through police databases, the way the Mafia Cops did. If you’re desperate enough, you may think you can call up someone who is on duty, tell them you’re investigating a crime, and get information that way.

Julie Fisher told The Spokesman-Review that she was working as a waitress at Sullivan Scoreboard the night Edwards came in. She described his actions as “crazy.”
Fisher said Edwards made advances on almost every woman in the business. She said she found him in the women’s bathroom harassing “a woman trying to use the toilet” at closing time.

Yeah, that kind of desperate. Anyway, all of this may sound like a good idea at the time. It isn’t.

Because when the police department gets a complaint from the woman whose door you were banging on early in the morning, they are going to fire your ass.

Extra bonus point 1: It also doesn’t help if you’ve spent 10 months on suspension, with pay, while the police department looks into your relationship with an “unlicensed bounty hunter”.

Extra bonus point 2: Guess the city and police department. Go on, guess.

I’m not generally a big fan of Justice Department supervision of police departments, but Spokane is starting to look like a place that needs adult supervision for their police department. Or maybe they just need to fire everyone and let the National Guard police the city while they rebuild the department from scratch?

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Safety, Stupid | Comments Closed

Ah, Spokane.

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

Garden city of Washington state.

Brad Thoma was a sergeant with the Spokane Police Department up until 2009. That year, he was charged with driving while intoxicated and hit and run: apparently, he hit a pickup with his personal vehicle and fled the scene.

Thoma received “deferred adjudication” in the case, which basically meant that if he kept his nose clean for a certain amount of time, the charges would go away. As part of the agreement, he had to have an ignition interlock installed on any vehicles he drove, according to state law at the time. This would be awfully inconvenient to put on a police car, so Thoma was offered a non-driving desk job. He turned down that offer, so the Spokane PD fired his butt.

Now we’re in 2012. Thoma, of course, complained after he was fired, and the “Washington State Human Rights Commission” negotiated a settlement in which Thoma would be rehired as a detective and get $275,000 in back pay.

The Spokane City Council, in their infinite wisdom, rejected the settlement.

And Thoma is suing, claiming he was discriminated against due to his disability, namely alcoholism.

If you want to read the FARK discussion, I’d recommend hitting yourself repeatedly with a ball peen hammer until the urge goes away. If it doesn’t go away, the thread is here.

And, yes, I usually don’t cover stuff that is on FARK, but:

1. Mike the Musicologist sent it to me as blog fodder, and

b. It reminded me of another former Spokane police officer that I hadn’t checked on recently. So how’s Karl F. Thompson Jr. doing these days? (You remember former officer Thompson, don’t you? He beat Otto Zehm to death.)

Well…

Here is a particularly noteworthy quote:

Although the state’s top police trainer concluded that the fatal 2006 confrontation with unarmed janitor Otto Zehm was indefensible, the department’s own instructors and the city’s legal advisers have insisted that Spokane police officers were justified and handled the encounter appropriately.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | 1 Comment »

Skippy the Therapy Kangaroo.

Wednesday, February 29th, 2012

This one goes out to Mike the Musicologist, who was a big fan of Skippy when he was younger.

So there’s a family in the Spring area (near Houston) that has a special needs child. (According to the press coverage, the child is 16 years old; the nature of her special needs is unspecified.)

In order to assist the child, the family got a service animal for her.

A service kangaroo.

And now the family’s HOA wants the kangaroo gone, asserting it is “not a household pet.”

I have a hard time deciding who to side with here. I don’t have a high opinion of most HOAs, but I figure they’re a choice you make when you buy a home. However, I question whether this is an enforceable requirement; what defines a “household pet”, and does Federal law trump the HOA restrictions when it comes to “service animals”?

On the other hand, getting your special needs child a vicious Australian animal (yes, I realize “vicious Australian animal” is redundant) as a “service animal” doesn’t exactly strike me as being the smartest thing in the world, either.

(Here’s the opening of “Skippy the Bush Kangaroo”. Apparently, you can get the first season on DVD, at least in some parts of the world.)

Edited to add: Actually, you can get the entire series on DVD, but it won’t do you much good unless you live in Australia or have a region-free DVD player.

Posted in Clippings, IANAL, Law, TV | Comments Closed

The latest news from Bell.

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

A judge has tossed out one of the felony charges against a former mayor of the city of Bell, and two felony charges against a former council member.

Both Oscar Hernandez and Luis Artiga, however, still face felony charges for allegedly collecting excessive pay for sitting on city boards and commissions that rarely, if ever, met.
Hernandez and Artiga are among six former council members in Bell who were charged in a massive public corruption case that left the city near bankruptcy. One charge was dropped against Hernandez. Two charges were dismissed against Artiga, who had accepted two cash loans.

According to an earlier LAT piece, Robert “Ratso” Rizzo was also asking for the charges against him to be dropped; I can’t tell from this article if the judge turned down that request, or simply hasn’t ruled yet.

Edited to add: Update: Ratso and Angelia Spaccia lost their bids to have the charges dismissed.

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

Oh, dear.

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Tommy Tuberville, head football coach at Texas Tech, is being sued for investment fraud:

A federal lawsuit filed Friday in Montgomery, Ala., names Tuberville, John David Stroud and eight investment entities as defendants, claiming the two men “employed devices, schemes, and artifices to defraud” seven plaintiffs from Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee.

The linked HouChron article doesn’t add much beyond that. As always, please keep in mind that these are just the plaintiff’s allegations in a law suit, and that there are two sides to any lawsuit. But this comes at a bad time for Tech, no matter what turns out to be true.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Sports | Comments Closed

Noted.

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

Lawrence has a pretty swell writeup on the Piper Alpha disaster. I’m a little surprised that NASA hasn’t covered that in their System Failure Case Studies series yet.

My sister’s latest post over at the Park City Snowmamas site: “8 Items To Pack In a First Aid Kit For Travel”. I think there’s some good stuff in there, even for non-skiers (you might want to think about throwing some of this stuff into a range bag, for example). However, I do have to throw the yellow flag and assess the standard 15-yard penalty for an over sharing violation. Unfortunately, I don’t make the rules; I’m just a neutral ref.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Guns, Sports | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#26 in a series)

Tuesday, February 28th, 2012

A 340-ton boulder is expected to begin its difficult trek Tuesday night from a Riverside County quarry, rolling to a stop 11 days later in a new art exhibit at LACMA.

I’m sure folks have all sorts of questions, including: how do you move a 340-ton rock? The LAT story includes a nifty interactive graphic that shows how the transport works.

During the day, the rock — expected to be shrink-wrapped for protection — will have to park in “the middle of the road, the only place big enough,” Rick Albrecht, the project’s logistics supervisor, told The Times last year.

“shrink-wrapped for protection”? Protection from what? It’s a rock!

At LACMA, the granite will be placed on its new home, resting atop a ramp-like slot in the ground through which visitors will pass, making it appear that the rock levitates above them. It will form the center of artist Michael Heizer’s enormous sculpture “Levitated Mass.”

Other questions you may be wondering about: the total cost of the project, including the rock moving, is estimated at “up to $10 million” according to the LAT.

Other questions you may not be wondering about: the rock has a Twitter feed, and is currently following 235 people. That kind of sounds like a bad horror movie, doesn’t it? “I’m being followed by a 340-ton rock that’s moving at 5 MPH.”

Posted in Art, Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed

Book blogging.

Friday, February 24th, 2012

I generally don’t blog recent book acquisitions. While doing so would probably give me fodder for at least one post every three days or so, most of what I purchase wouldn’t be of interest to other bloggers; I do buy some SF and mystery firsts, but not as many as other people I can name. Most of what I do buy is primarily of interest to me.

That being said, I did pick up a couple of books recently that might tickle the fancy (or the funny bones) of some folks; I’m thinking specifically of Lawrence and Tam here.

Yes, you are reading that correctly: the title of the book is They Were Murdered In France. This is a fairly old (1957) true crime book consisting of 15 vignettes involving British citizens who were….murdered in France. I haven’t started reading it yet (I just got it out of the PO Box) but judging from the jacket copy, it appears that Mr. Harry J. Greenwall did not have a high opinion of the French police, or of Interpol.

A few weeks ago, there was an interesting discussion over at Tam’s place about gun porn in adventure fiction. On the one hand, you have the guy carrying a generic revolver. On the other hand, you have Tam’s Jock Studright example. (Stephen Hunter falls in the “just right” position for me. For example, in Havana, he has Earl carry a Super .38, and there’s a key scene where Earl explains exactly why. But that scene, while lovingly describing the advantages of the Super .38 (known today as the .38 Super), also serves to advance Earl’s characterization; Hunter uses that discussion to show what kind of person Earl is, and how he thinks.)

Anyway, the two most notorious exemplars of the way over the top weapon description school of writing are Jerry Ahern in The Survivalist books (“…two stainless-steel Detonics Combat Master .45s carried in an Alessi double-shoulder rig”) and Don Pendleton in the Mack Bolan/Executioner books (“The AutoMag, however, had a mind of its own. It roared out fire and massive disgust, hurling 300 grains of splattering death…”)

The Executioner’s War Book is almost the Platonic ideal of Jock Studright. It isn’t a book in the “Executioner” series, per se: rather, it consists of a biographical sketch of Pendelton, fan letters from readers, notable excerpts from the previous books (“notable” in the sense of either giving insight into Bolan’s character, or involving particularly bloody Mafia deaths, or both), a summary of the series to that point…

…and pretty much right in the middle, a catalog of Bolan’s weapons and equipment, including lovely line drawings of such things as his “War Wagon” and the scope-sighted Marlin 444 lever action, a paen to the AutoMag, exploded drawings of the M2 and the Uzi, and so on. This works out to about 45 pages of weapons porn in a 201 page book. I’ve never been a huge Bolan fan, but this was just so weird I had to pick it up.

Posted in Books, Guns, Law | 2 Comments »

Unintended consequences.

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

We previously noted New York City’s “roll your own tobacco shops” which were not much more than a blatant attempt to get around cigarette taxes. (I thought I linked to this at the time, but I can’t find the link now; the shops reached a settlement with the city and closed down, last I heard.)

Well, now the Indian tribes have gotten into the act. You see, the tribes used to buy smokes wholesale from distributors and resell them, tax free. But the state of New York went to court, and got a ruling that requires the wholesalers to collect taxes.

Now the Indian tribes are making their own brands of cigarettes.

The tribes argue that because they are sovereign nations, the cigarettes they make are exempt from the state’s $4.35-a-pack excise tax, the highest in the United States. But the tobacco industry and owners of other convenience stores say tribal cigarette manufacturing is just an elaborate form of tax evasion.

And there’s rent seeking:

The New York Association of Convenience Stores, which had urged Mr. Cuomo to collect taxes on name-brand cigarettes sold by tribes, is now pushing the governor to target Indian brands. “There remains an enormous tax-evasion problem to be addressed,” James Calvin, the association’s executive director, said.
David Sutton, a spokesman for Altria, the parent company of the country’s largest cigarette maker, Philip Morris, said, “All cigarettes sold to non-Native American New Yorkers need to be tax-paid — regardless of who manufactures them — or New York State will continue to lose legitimate and significant tax revenue, and law-abiding retailers will continue to be impacted by cigarette tax evasion.”

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Speaking of cops…

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

There are two things that amuse me about the NYPD’s secret “Newark, New Jersey Demographics Report”:

  1. The number of “Identified Locations” that are fried chicken places. “Newark Fried Chicken”. “Kansas Fried Chicken”. “Utah Fried Chicken”. Utah Fried Chicken? “Detroit Fried Chicken and Pizza”: hey, mad props for diversification. “Chicken Holiday”? Not much of a holiday for the chicken after you cut it up and fry it, is it?
  2. The NYPD managed to find the Dunkin Doughnuts (page 52). The jokes, they just write themselves.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Listen all y’all, it’s an arbitrage…

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Nothing to see here, just me being silly. And yes, it is true that I do my own stunts.

Posted in Music, Photography, Wordplay | 5 Comments »

Obit watch: February 23, 2012.

Thursday, February 23rd, 2012

Barney Rosset, Grove Press publisher.

Rosset brought the court cases that allowed “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, “Tropic of Cancer”, and “Naked Lunch” to be published in the United States. He was also behind the distribution of “I Am Curious (Yellow)” (yet another court case) and “Titicut Follies” (yet another court case, and the most horrifying movie I’ve ever seen).

Joe Bob Briggs’s write-up of “I Am Curious (Yellow)” in Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History goes into more detail about Grove Press and some of the colorful incidents in Rosset’s history (the Cuban exile bombing, the unionization attempt, etc.)

And:

Mr. Rosset turned down J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” saying he “couldn’t understand a word”

Posted in Books, Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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