Archive for March 27th, 2025

You’ve gone down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#145 in a series)

Thursday, March 27th, 2025

Some people might say that Robert Farley, the police chief of North Bergen, New Jersey, has an unusual sense of humor.

Other people might say that he’s an a–hole. Including some of his own officers, who are planning to sue the department.

The chief’s sense of humor includes such hits as:

Michael F. Derin, who worked as a special captain in an administrative role, accused the chief of chasing him around the office before cornering him and poking him with a hypothermic needle through his jeans and into his penis in August 2024.
“When I told chief Farley I was unhappy with his actions, he told me that I didn’t know how to take a joke,” Derin wrote in a notice of claim – the precursor to a lawsuit.

And:

“Chief Farley has, on several occasions, pulled his pants down and defecated on the floor in front of his entire office staff,” Guzman wrote in his notice of claim.
One time he even pooped in the trash can of an office he was moving out of so the next police official moving into the space would find it, Guzman alleged.

And:

“Chief Farley has also tampered with office coffee by adding prescription medications such as Adderall and Viagra, causing staff to inadvertently experience the effects of these substances without their consent,” Guzman wrote.

And:

Farley was also accused of sneaking hot peppers into officers’ food, sending sex toys and gay pride flags to the home of a cop and tossing eggs “in fits of anger” in the legal documents.

And:

Derin, a former detective in the department, also claimed Farley shaved his body hair over people’s property and their food.

These are just allegations, of course. And there are more of them, but those are relatively minor: the usual retaliation and harassment.

North Bergen stood by its police chief amid the accusations, telling NBC News the town “has full confidence in Chief Robert Farley’s leadership.”

Edited to add 3/28: The NYPost has a follow-up story. While these are still allegations, the story includes some photos that would tend to support the claims.

Warning: I don’t usually have to put a content warning on flaming hyenas. But these photos include a shirtless Chief Farley shaving himself (or pretending to shave himself) over a subordinate’s desk. These photos also include a pile of poop, allegedly from the chief, though it is unclear to me if any DNA testing was done to establish that.

Obit watch: March 27, 2025.

Thursday, March 27th, 2025

Carole Keeton.

She was the first woman to serve as mayor of Austin, served as state comptroller, and served on the Texas Railroad Commission. The obits right now seem kind of short, but I remember she was a big deal in Austin and Texas politics when I first moved to Austin.

Clive Revill. Other credits include “Babylon 5”, “Pinky and the Brain”, “Let Him Have It” (which I highly recommend), and a spinoff of a minor SF TV show from the 1960s.

Oleg Gordievsky. He was a Commie spy.

Except he actually wasn’t. He was a double agent for British Intelligence.

In 1985 he was recalled to Moscow, given drugs and interrogated. Someone, it seemed, had tipped off the K.G.B. to the presence of a high-ranking mole in London.
Lacking solid evidence, the Soviets placed him on leave. A few days later he appeared at 7 p.m. on a Moscow street corner, holding a shopping bag. A man soon passed, eating a candy bar. They locked eyes.
That was the signal to activate Operation Pimlico, an emergency extraction. Mr. Gordievsky shook his K.G.B. tail and then hurried to the Finnish border. Two British agents, a man and a woman, along with their baby, awaited him there in their Ford Sierra.
They placed him in the trunk, wrapped in a foil sheet to confuse heat detectors. When dogs at the border grew suspicious, the agents began to change the child’s diaper, filling the car with odors that threw the canines off Mr. Gordievsky’s scent.
When they were finally across, they played Jean Sibelius’s “Finlandia” symphony on the car’s sound system, a signal to Mr. Gordievsky that he was safe.
Back in Moscow, he was sentenced to death in absentia. That sentence has never been rescinded.

L.J. Smith, author. I probably would not have noted this, but she had an interesting career.

She published her first book (The Night of the Solstice, for young readers) in 1987. It wasn’t a bestseller, but it did attract the attention of Alloy Entertainment, “a book packaging and production company that has since been acquired by Warner Brothers”. They hired her to write “The Vampire Diaries” series, and she wrote four of those books between 1991 and 1992.

But Ms. Smith — whose first agent was her typist, who had never represented a client — told The Wall Street Journal that she had written the trilogy for an advance of only a few thousand dollars without realizing that it was work for hire, meaning she did not own the copyright or the characters.

She also wrote other YA series books. In the late 1990s, though, she stopped writing for a time due to family health issues.

During her fallow period, though, vampire books soared in popularity, lifted on the success of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series. By 2007, sales of “The Vampire Diaries” had increased, and Ms. Smith was contracted to continue the series by writing a new trilogy for Alloy Entertainment, for which she was entitled to half the royalties.

Yes, this is “The Vampire Diaries” that became the CW series. Which may have been part of the problem: Ms. Smith was fired as the writer in 2011. She stated that she thought the publisher wanted “wanted shorter books more closely associated with the TV series”.

But wait, there’s more! She started writing “The Vampire Diaries” fan fiction!

In 2013, Amazon created Kindle Worlds, an online service that gave writers of fan fiction permission to write about certain licensed properties, including Alloy’s “Vampire Diaries” series, and to earn money for their ventures.
In 2014, Ms. Smith became the rare celebrated author to produce fan fiction as a way to recoup characters and story arcs she had lost, publishing a novel and novella in an informal continuation of the “Vampire Diaries.” (Kindle Worlds was discontinued in 2018).

I had actually never heard of “Kindle Worlds”. But I don’t follow fan fiction.

In addition to “The Vampire Diaries,” Ms. Smith wrote three other popular series for young adults: “Night World,” “Dark Visions” and “The Secret Circle,” which also became a series on the CW, lasting one season.