Archive for June 3rd, 2014

Experiments in composition.

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014

My great and good friend Marty recommended a Chinese restaurant named Moy’s to me. This is just a tiny hole-in-the-wall place near the Ohio State campus, but Marty was right; it was pretty darn good, and the people were very friendly. If you’re in Columbus, I urge you to give it a try.

It turns out that Moy’s was also just straight up High Street from my hotel. Waze had it at about two and a half miles; I took a cab up to the restaurant. I was going to flag one down when I left, but it was a nice night, so I decided to walk back to the hotel. The walk down High Street takes you along the fringe of Ohio State. I almost want to say High Street is to Ohio State what Guadalupe is to the University of Texas.

I didn’t bring the Nikon with me, but I did take a couple of photos with the iPhone that I thought were compositionally interesting. You might not agree, which is fine with me. I’m just messing around, trying to get better.

Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio.

Wexner Center for the Arts

law

Those black spaces actually have quotes on them; if you zoom in far enough, you should be able to read them. I can’t find a site that transcribes them, or I’d link it here. But I do like this one from Edmund Burke: “Law and arbitrary power are at eternal enmity.”

Edited to add: I cropped the Wexner Center photo some, but the law school photo is untouched. I didn’t do anything to the exposure on either of those.

Flames, hyena, etc. (#13 in a series).

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014

Patrick D. Cannon, the former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, has pled guilty to one count of “honest services wire fraud”. (Previously.)

The court filing, known as a bill of information, said that for more than four years, as a City Council member and as mayor, Mr. Cannon solicited and accepted bribes from the owner of an adult club whose business was threatened by the planned extension of Charlotte’s light rail system. In turn, Mr. Cannon spoke with officials involved in zoning, planning and transportation.

Strippers. Always with the strippers.

And this has the potential to be epic for more than one reason:

A New York City Department of Investigation inquiry has implicated Charles J. Hynes, the former Brooklyn district attorney, in the improper use of money seized from drug dealers and other criminal defendants to pay a political consultant more than $200,000 for his work on Mr. Hynes’s unsuccessful re-election campaign last year.

There’s the whole “prosecutor going to jail and being disbarred” thing. There’s the whole circus surrounding any NYC political figure being charged with a crime. And then there’s the whole “misuse of asset forfeiture funds” aspect, about which Radley Balko and others have written so eloquently.

…Mr. Hynes potentially violated the City Charter and conflict of interest board rules; violations of the City Charter can be charged as misdemeanors. Mr. Hynes’s conduct may have also violated the state penal code section on official misconduct. And payments from the office to the consultant, Mortimer Matz, may have violated the larceny provisions in the penal code. Under the code, any larceny of more than $1,000 is a felony.