Archive for January 30th, 2017

Thud.

Monday, January 30th, 2017

That’s the sound of the other shoe dropping.

Remember the great Houston Astros hacking scandal of 2015? If you don’t, that’s okay. Briefly: the St. Louis Cardinals were accused of hacking into the Astros computer system and stealing information on players. Christopher Correa, the Cardinals “director of player development” pled guilty to federal charges and was sentenced to 46 months in prison (plus restitution).

MLB has issued their decision on how they plan to punish the Cardinals. Good news: the Astros will get their top two draft choices, plus two million dollars.

Bad news: those draft choices are number 56 and 75 overall.

MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred ruled the Cardinals are “vicariously liable” for Correa’s conduct despite finding the evidence “did not establish that any Cardinals’ employee other than Mr. Correa (who was the only individual charged by the federal government) was responsible for the intrusions into the Astros’ electronic systems.”

Off the top of my head, I think I would have liked to see a more severe penalty, but I’m not sure what would have satisfied me (other than Correa’s head on a pike outside of Minute Maid Field). Correa, who “declined to answer questions or cooperate with MLB” has been placed on the “permanently ineligible” list. (Yes, that is the same list that includes Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe Jackson.)

Interesting (to me) fact that I found while looking up the list: Correa is the second person banned by Commissioner Manfred in the two years he’s had the job. The other one is Jenrry Mejía, who was a pitcher for the Mets until he tested positive for drugs “three times in less than a year”. In contrast, Bud Selig banned one person during his time as acting commissioner and commissioner (1992-2015).

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Obit watch: January 30, 2017.

Monday, January 30th, 2017

I didn’t become aware of this until I saw it on the NYT obits Twitter feed, but: J.S.G. Boggs, one of my favorite visual artists, has died.

..he painstakingly reproduced British pounds, Swiss francs and American dollars, with quirky deviations.
On American currency, for example, he might use the signature “J. S. G. Boggs, Secret of the Treasury,” or inscribe “Kunstbank of Bohemia” on a $5,000 bill, or append the motto “In Fun We Trust.” At first he created the notes one by one, a time-consuming process. Later he ran off limited-edition prints.

…

In the mid-1990s, when Worth magazine asked him to design a note using the Treasury Department’s new guidelines, Mr. Boggs produced a $100 bill with the image of Harriet Tubman as a young girl, anticipating by 20 years the announcement that Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson as the new face of the $20 bill. In 2001, he ran off a series of 100,000 plastic Sacagawea dollars, stamped with his own mint marks and paid for with a $5,000 Boggs bill.

A very quick Google search does not turn up any indication of how much the Boggs dollars are currently going for. Which is a shame: I’ve always figured I’d buy a Boggs artwork when I got filthy rich.

(On a side note: Canadian Tire money is available for surprisingly reasonable prices on eBay.)

The obit mentions Lawrence Weschler’s Boggs: A Comedy of Values, which I think is a fine (though dated) book. But I’d also put in a plug for Weschler’s Shapinsky’s Karma, Bogg’s Bills: And Other True-Life Tales, the essay collection that was my first introduction to Boggs.

Speaking to ARTnews after Mr. Boggs’s death, Mr. Weschler said, “He was just short of being a con man, but no more than anyone in the art world, or for that matter in the world of finance — which, of course, was his whole point.”

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