Archive for December, 2021

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Brief memo from the legal beat.

Thursday, December 9th, 2021

There’s a guy in Houston named Dennis Laviage. I have not heard of him previously, but he’s supposedly a well known scrap metal dealer “best known for buying Houston’s scraps with $2 bills”.

Mr. Laviage is engaged in a lawsuit against a former Houston Police sergeant, Jesse Fite. Mr. Laviage accuses Mr. Fite of withholding evidence from a judge, leading to a wrongful arrest.

In Texas, scrap metal buyers like Laviage are required to report purchases to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). The city of Houston also requires they send reports to a national database called Leads Online. This is, in part, so law enforcement can trace potential metal thieves who sell stolen scraps to unsuspecting buyers.
In 2015, C&D Scrap Metal was using a program called Scrap Dragon to fill out the proper forms and send them off to DPS and Leads Online. In the summer of that year, a glitch in Scrap Dragon withheld a handful of C&D’s reports from DPS, but all of the reports were still being filed with Leads Online. Once Laviage became aware, he notified police and insisted that he would file reports with DPS manually until the software issue was resolved.

…

Still, Fite continued his pressing until March 2016, when he filed for criminal charges against Laviage. In an application for Laviage’s arrest warrant, Fite accused the scrap metal dealer of “intentionally and knowingly” failing to report those scrap metal purchases to DPS. In the application, nowhere did it state that Laviage contended he knew about the issue and was actively trying to correct it.
A judge found probable cause for Laviage’s arrest based on the application. Several Houston police officers arrested him at his now-shuttered Heights location soon after. In September 2018, a jury found Laviage not guilty of the misdemeanor charge, and the case was expunged from his record. In December that year, Laviage filed a lawsuit in Harris County against Fite for false arrest and malicious prosecution, which was eventually moved to the federal court in the Southern District of Texas.

What’s interesting about this case to me is: last week, a federal judge ruled that Mr. Fite cannot raise a “qualified immunity” defense in this case. In theory, “qualified immunity” states that law enforcement can’t be sued for doing things within the scope of their employment. (I Am Not a Lawyer, and I am oversimplifying here.) In practice, “qualified immunity” has been used to cover a wide range of questionable behaviors: Reason has run a lot of stories on qualified immunity abuses.

Generally, a rejection of a QI defense is rare, so this story is noteworthy on that basis alone. But it also gives me a chance to throw in something absolutely unnecessary, but I think semi-relevant to metal theft:

Posted in Cops, IANAL, Law | 4 Comments »

Quick firings watch.

Monday, December 6th, 2021

Manny Diaz out as head coach of the Miami Hurricanes.

21-15 in “nearly three seasons”, 7-5 this season.

Diaz faced intense pressure from disgruntled fans, former players and some inside the administration who lamented the direction in which the Hurricanes were heading. Before he was fired, James told the Miami Herald on Oct. 22 in a phone interview that Diaz, like every other coach, was being evaluated with each passing game. James at that point declined to ensure that Diaz’s job was secure through the end of the season.

Alain Vigneault out as head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers. That’s a hockey team, in case you were wondering.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

“I feel blessed to live in such times.”

Monday, December 6th, 2021

That was a comment from a friend of mine when I sent this story around last month.

I didn’t blog it at the time because it was all rumors and I had no reliable or semi-reliable sourcing on it. But ESPN published an article over the weekend, so now it can be blogged.

Jeff Banks, who is an assistant coach at UT, and his girlfriend are being sued.

Why?

Their monkey allegedly bit a child.

According to the lawsuit, the child, identified as C.C., was trick-or-treating with two friends on Halloween and was invited to attend a haunted house. The lawsuit says that, after completing the haunted house, the child and his friends were taken to a monkey that Thomas kept in the backyard. According to the complaint, the child was told the monkey was trained to give high-fives.
“Instead of giving a high five, Danielle Thomas’s monkey aggressively bit down on C.C.’s hand and refused to let go,” says the lawsuit, a copy of which was obtained by ESPN on Saturday. “C.C. was forced to manually pry the monkey’s jaw open. There was so much blood that C.C. was unable to see the full extent of the injury.”

…

According to the lawsuit, “Instead of showing any semblance of care for an injured child, Danielle Thomas was instead worried about the risk of her monkey being taken away. … Danielle Thomas stated to the physician that the monkey had bitten her before and that she was fine, implying that the monkey therefore did not have rabies.”

The family claims that Ms. Thomas has not yet provided vaccination records for the monkey. It isn’t clear from the article if C.C. had to go through the whole series of rabies shots.

Interesting side note:

Thomas is also identified as “Pole Assassin” in the lawsuit, her stage name as a dancer. She once appeared on “The Jerry Springer Show” with the monkey.

Posted in Law, Mammals, Monkeys, Primates, Sports | Comments Closed

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…

Sunday, December 5th, 2021

…and I’m getting into the spirit.

Again this year, Daddy didn’t drink all the Xmas money, or have to spend it on car repairs. Daddy got his car inspected (they didn’t even want to replace the windshield washers) and has renewed his registration online.

I don’t want it to sound like everything is coming up Millhouse. A close family member has been in the hospital since before Thanksgiving. I’m hoping that, if the doctors can get them up and walking, we might be able to get them out on bond the later part of this week. Which will be welcomed by me. And their little dog, which we will call “Toto” to protect the innocent.

(On the slightly positive side, this gives me a chance to make onion dip. Or hot buttered rum. Or real eggnog.)

And work is still giving me tsuris. The good news is, after December 17th, I will be officially out of the office and on leave until January 10th. I probably will check my emails from time to time, mostly for the “fiddling while Rome burns” feeling of it all.

But I got to go to a Christmas party/appreciation dinner last week. And today I got to meet up with the members of what Lawrence likes to call my “shadowy criminal conspiracy” for the first time in a while. I missed the last meeting because of Tulsa, then we took two weeks off for Thanksgiving…

…and then after I finished running errands, I went by Sportsman’s Finest. They’ve decided to open on Sundays for the month of December. Which makes sense, right?

Turns out, the gun I had bought in Tulsa and had to have shipped to a transfer dealer had come in. (There were some issues that delayed the process. Nothing criminal or anything, just a shipping foulup and a couple of other little things.)

I don’t know if my readers who are not People Of the Gun understand this, but: when you get a gun transferred to a dealer for you to pick up, the dealer has to open the package and log the gun onto their own record books. So they know what you’re getting when it arrives. Which is significant in this case because…

…the owners of Sportsman’s Finest happened to have a bunch of stuff lying around the shop for this particular gun, and gave me over $100 worth of stuff to go along with it. Free. Gratis. No charge. Seriously. (I’m being kind of coy about the gun here because I’ve actually been working on a post about this specific gun: I just had to wait until it arrived so I could take photos. If I’m lucky and the weevils don’t get into the eggnog, I might be able to post that this week. I will say, it is a really old gun that isn’t made any longer, but is still held in high regard.)

(Not a Garand, Borepatch. Sorry. But you got me thinking about that as a possible next purchase. I believe I meet all of the CMP qualifications, and they aren’t getting any cheaper.)

And they also didn’t charge me for the transfer.

None of this was stuff that I was expecting. I was fully prepared to pay the transfer fee, and thought about arm wresting one of the owners over it. But I decided to do something else instead. The spare parts were just an unexpected, surprising, and honestly quite moving bonus. I wouldn’t expect them to do this for just any random murder hobo. I guess it just happens that I’m one of the murder hobos that they like for some reason.

Made my heart grow five sizes, it did. Not three, because fark the Grinch, stealing the roast beast like that and tormenting that poor dog, but five sizes.

(Mike the Musicologist: “You should see a doctor about that.”)

Anyway, if you need guns or ammo or fishing gear or other outdoorsy type stuff during the holiday season, please consider shopping at:

Sportman’s Finest
12434 Bee Cave Road
Austin, TX 78738
(512) 263-1888
9:00 AM – 7:00 PN Monday-Friday
9:00 AM – 6:00 PM Saturday
11:00 AM – 5:00 PM Sunday during December

Don’t expect free stuff until you get to know them, but they’re really nice people, even if you’ve never been in before.

Posted in Christmas, Endorsements, Guns, Mammals | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 5, 2021.

Sunday, December 5th, 2021

Bob Dole, for the record. WP. Battleswarm.

I don’t have much to add to any of these, but I am glad he’s getting credit for his honorable service during WWII.

Stonewall Jackson.

That’s Stonewall Jackson, the Grand Ole Opry singer, not the Confederate general.

Posted in History, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 13, 2021.

Sunday, December 5th, 2021

So I had checked on the Detroit game earlier in the day while running some errands, saw that the Vikings were down (I think 20-6 at the time), sighed, and went on with my life…

…came home a bit after 3 PM, checked again to see if Detroit had actually won, saw that there were about eight seconds left and Minnesota was up 27-22, clicked over to the play-by-play…

…and watched in horror as Detroit scored a desperate last second touchdown to make it 29-27.

NFL teams that still have a chance to go without a win this year:

None.

Thus ends this feature for the NFL season this year. If we’re still here, we plan to return in 2022.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

En fuego.

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Neil Olshey out as general manager and “president of basketball operations” for the Portland Trail Blazers.

According to the Blazers’ statement, the decision came after an “independent review of concerns and complaints around our workplace environment at the practice facility.” That led to the Blazers to terminate Olshey effective immediately for violating the franchise’s code of conduct.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Other people lead more interesting lives than I do.

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

At least, it seems that way according to the New York Post.

This bride went from blushing to barfing in a matter of seconds.
Wife Hollee Lynnea-Kolenda Darnell unintentionally put her groom’s “in sickness and in health” loyalty to the test when she passed out, puked and got pooped on during their wedding ceremony.

…

A woman who took a Delta flight recently wasn’t kitten around when she whipped out her breasts and started feeding her hairless cat.
The unidentified female flew from Syracuse, NY, to Atlanta, GA, where she was caught breastfeeding her feline on the plane. A flight attendant told her repeatedly to stop and put her cat back in its cage, however, the woman refused.

As a person with a strong cat allergy, hey, at least it was hairless. Also, what did she do wrong? Other than not obeying a flight attendant, but it isn’t clear to me what she was doing wrong. Delta policy allows cats on planes, and allows breastfeeding on planes…

A Florida mother was arrested after she allegedly fired a gun at her front door and left her infant home alone in his crib while she went out to a bar on Thanksgiving night, officials said.

The name of the bar is “Paddywagon Irish Pub”, which sounds like a fun place to go drinking on Thanksgiving night.

Posted in Bagatelle, Mammals | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 3, 2021.

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Alvin Lucier, “experimental composer”.

In “I Am Sitting in a Room,” Mr. Lucier began by quietly reading a short statement describing what he is doing. “I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now,” the text begins. “I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed.”
The room’s acoustics, as well as audio distortions that occur when a tape is rerecorded over and over, yields a gradually changing sound in which, after 10 minutes, the spoken text is buried in reverberation and overtones, and unintelligible. During the final section, high-pitched overtones coalesce into eerie, slow-moving melodies.

I used to have a CD of “I Am Sitting in a Room”, back when I was in my “difficult listening” phase. It was not something I spent a lot of time listening to, though I was happy to have it.

(See also.)

NYT obit for Curley Culp.

Eddie Mekka. Most famous as Carmine Ragusa on “Laverne & Shirley”. Other credits include guest shots on “The Love Boat”, “Fantasy Island”, and one of the “Rockford Files” TV movies.

Posted in 1970s, Music, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Christmas trivia.

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Not too long ago, I found a used DVD of “The Detective” at Half-Price Books.

“The Detective” is a movie I’m kind of interested in, and I only paid $5 for the DVD. It is based on a novel by Roderick Thorp, and stars Frank Sinatra as a NYPD detective named Joe Leland.

Most of what I’ve read about the movie says that it was well regarded: it was praised for being a more mature approach to movies about police work, as well as dealing with non-mainstream subjects. (And check out that supporting cast.)

I think I’m going to end up watching it by myself, as I suspect it will be a tough sell to the Saturday Night Movie Group. (We’ve already watched one Sinatra detective film, “Tony Rome”, which was…not great.)

What does this have to do with Christmas?

In 1979, 13 years later, Roderick Thorp published a sequel to The Detective called Nothing Lasts Forever, also featuring Joe Leland (affiliate links). By this time, Detective Leland has retired from the NYPD, and decides to go visit his daughter in Los Angeles for Christmas.

While he is waiting for his daughter’s Christmas party to end, a group of German Autumn–era terrorists take over the skyscraper. The gang is led by the brutal Anton “Little Tony the Red” Gruber. Joe had known about Gruber through a counter-terrorism conference he had attended years prior. Barefoot, Leland slips away and manages to remain undetected in the gigantic office complex. Aided outside only by Los Angeles Police sergeant Al Powell and armed with only his police-issue pistol, Leland fights off the terrorists one by one in an attempt to save the 74 hostages, and his daughter and grandchildren.

Yeah, you guessed it. As I understand it, there were initially discussions about having Frank Sinatra play Joe Leland again (he was 64 when the book came out) but he turned the role down, and they eventually wound up with Bruce Willis. Also, the book sounds like it is a lot darker, just based on the Wikipedia summary.

Two of Thorp’s other novels were adapted for film, but none of those is set in the Die Hard Cinematic Universe (DHCU). (“Rainbow Drive” sounds like it could be interesting, but it is hard to find.) Thorp died in 1999.

And now you know…the rest of the story.

Because it’s just not Christmas until we see Hans Gruber fall from the Nakatomi Tower.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Christmas, Movies | 1 Comment »

Firing watch.

Thursday, December 2nd, 2021

Steve Addazio done at Colorado State.

4-12 in two seasons: 1-3 in 2020, 3-9 in 2021. They lost the final six games this season, including getting beat 52-10 by Nevada last week. And Addazio was ejected from that game in the second quarter.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 1, 2021.

Wednesday, December 1st, 2021

This is a couple of days old, but I was waiting for an obit from a reliable source: Jim Warren, one of the early figures in personal computing.

In the 1970s, Mr. Warren was a leading figure in the community that sprung up in the San Francisco Bay Area around the emerging personal computer industry.
He was a regular at monthly meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hobbyist who gathered to share ideas, design tips and gossip. He was the editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, an irreverent yet influential publication in that nascent field.

…

Computer conferences, where these fledgling companies showed off their wares, were just beginning to emerge when, in 1977, Mr. Warren staged the West Coast Computer Faire (the spelling a playful nod to the medieval spectacles of Elizabethan England). He calculated that the event, a two-day affair at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, might break even if it could attract 60 exhibitors and perhaps 7,000 people.
But to his surprise nearly 13,000 people showed up, and the lines of people waiting to get in circled the building.

…

His interest in the social and political impact of computer technology continued later in his life. In 1991, Mr. Warren founded and chaired the first Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, an annual academic gathering.
In 1993, he worked on a California law — a model for other states — that required most computerized public records to be freely available. He conferred with legislators, rallied public support and even drafted some of the law’s language.

Mark Roth, pro bowler. Noted here because:

Roth’s most famous spare — knocking down the remaining pins with the second bowl thrown in a frame — was during a tournament in 1980 in Alameda, Calif. He became the first bowler to convert the notoriously difficult 7-10 split — knocking down the two pins in the opposite corners of the back row — on national television.

Adolfo, Nancy Reagan’s designer.

Posted in Geek, History, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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