Archive for May 6th, 2013

Municipal corruption watch.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Hey, remember the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania? Sold bonds to build a new trash incinerator? Then sold more bonds to pay off the earlier bonds? Remember some jackass saying

If you or I did this, they’d call it a Ponzi scheme, and we’d be going to Federal pound you in the ass prison.

Good times, good times. Guess what?

In the first such settlement ever agreed to by a U.S. city, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, has agreed to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges accusing the city of securities fraud for making “misleading public statements” as the cash-starved city’s finances deteriorated in the late 2000s and debts piled up in the wake of a failed public incinerator project and other questionable borrowing.

Yeah. That wasn’t an individual charged with securities fraud, that was the city itself. Noted:

Under the settlement agreement, Harrisburg didn’t admit it did anything wrong, and agreed to stop doing it.

This comes to our attention by way of Shall Not Be Questioned, which also points out that Mayor Linda Thompson (who is running for re-election) is a member of Criminal Mayors Who Don’t Want You To Have Guns.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Awards season.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Pop quiz:

Fäviken: Understanding the Genius Behind the World’s 34th Best Restaurant

Is that a headline from the Onion, or a real article from a food blog?

Answer: That’s a real article in the current “issue” of Dark Rye, which won the James Beard Award for “Best Group Food Blog” this year.

In conclusion, we introduce the RITUAL edition of Dark Rye, which is to say CIRCLES – that’s where it’s at. The essence of ritual. It all begins when we rise once again to make the perfect cup of coffee. We scramble eggs. Butter toast. Breakfast preparation as meditation.

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

Sorry. Where were we?

Again. Always again. Days as snakes that swallow their tails. Months, moon cycles. The ceaseless rotation of seasons. From Big Bang to apocalypse. From the eruption and destruction of every single moment – now, now, now. We’re born. We die. Who doesn’t dig a juggler?

I’d write more on the subject of “Dark Rye” (Why does the design make me stabby? Why are they endorsing the crank theory of Ayurveda?) but Ryan Sutton over at “The Bad Deal” has already made about as pithy a comment as I’ve seen.

(I know there are some people in my audience who feel that New York in general, and New York dining specifically, is overblown in the food news/food blog scene. I kind of agree with this in general: when it comes to Sandy, though, that was one of the most important food stories of the year, and there were lots of real food blogs that covered it well.)

In better news, the Edgar Award winners have been announced. I like Dennis Lehane a lot, so I’m pretty happy Live by Night won. I have a copy somewhere, I think, but I haven’t read it yet; or, for that matter, the other nominated novels. (I am also kind of happy that Ace Atkins got a nomination for a non-Spenser book.)

True crime: I didn’t read any of this year’s nominees. Midnight in Peking looks interesting, but I never got around to picking it up. I probably will next time I’m at Half-Price. The other book people were talking about was People Who Eat Darkness. My problem with that is: I’ve already read about the Lucie Blackman case in Jake Adelstein’s excellent Tokyo Vice, and I’m just not all that damn interested in reading about the case again.

Critical/biographical: I hope The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics is a swell book. I thought Books to Die For was a worthy nominee and a delightful book, so Scientific Sherlock darn well better be an even better book.

I finally got my hands on a copy of In Pursuit of Spenser just this past Friday, so I can’t comment on it yet. I suspect I will be writing a longer review/appreciation once I do finish that book. But it is a promising sign to me that three of this year’s nominees for best novel were also contributors to Pursuit. (Lehane, Atkins, and Lyndsay Faye, in case you were wondering.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

Can’t afford it.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Have no practical use for it.

Camera is not included.

Want one anyway.

(I wonder if you could build a business around this device.)

Posted in Photography, Planes | Comments Closed

Chester, Chester…

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Eric Toth is allegedly a bad guy. He stands accused of being a child molester and child pornographer. (I use the word “alleged” because he has not been convicted yet, though the evidence against him appears to be pretty strong.)

Toth was indicted on these charges in 2008 and went on the run. He managed to avoid capture, even though he was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and made the FBI “10 Most Wanted” list, until a few weeks ago. Authorities found him in Nicaragua and shipped him back to the US to face charges.

Why do I note this here? Because there’s an Austin connection: Toth lived here for a while…

Colleagues knew the speaker under a different name as an Austin-based tech writer and computer technician they described as brilliant and friendly.

More:

The man people identified as Toth seemed to grow bolder. A few months earlier, he freelanced his first blog post for SMBNation, a small-business technology company, under an assumed name, according to people at the company and entries on the blog. In the months that followed, he contributed regularly to the blog on everything from Facebook’s initial public offering to cloud computing and wrote magazine articles.
An online biography says he was a “banker once upon a time” but didn’t much like it. The biography hints that “there’s even more to his story.”

He was invited to speak at a SMBNation conference in October, but skipped the country instead.

One of the big questions on my mind (and I’m sure other people in Austin are asking the same thing): did I ever meet this man?

Paul Mullen, the owner at the time [of P.C. Guru, where Toth worked – DB], said he had no reason to suspect the man, because his driver’s license and Social Security number checked out. Toth allegedly used bogus papers and stole identities during his time as a fugitive. The Post is withholding the name the man in Austin used because the identity may have been stolen, too.

I’m just going to point out that if you do a carefully crafted Google search using the phrase “banker once upon a time” and using the “site:smbnation.com” parameter, you’ll get results. And those results match the last name Toth was using when he was captured. (In Nicaragua, he was going by “Robert Shaw Walker“.)

I share some of the qualms the WP has, which is why I’m not directly linking to the bio on SMBNation. But I want to point out to the Posties that they’re not quite as clever as they think they are; the art of crafting Google searches like that is hardly arcane or mysterious.

(Also, SMBNation? You might want to address this somewhere on your site.)

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Week of Gatsby: Day 1.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

In honor of the forthcoming movie, I am declaring this week the “Week of Gatsby” on WCD. Mostly for my own personal amusement.

Today’s entry: The Great Gastby for NES, a browser based game in which you wander around Gatsby’s party, throwing your hat at various targets and searching for the titular character.

(Yes, I am planning to see the movie. Yes, in 3D. “Argo” was the last thing I saw in a theater, and I figure I could use the diversion. Even if it is a pile of crap.)

(And, yes, as it happens, I do like the book. A short defense of it is here.)

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Geek, Movies | Comments Closed