You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#110 in a series)

September 28th, 2023

This isn’t a normal flaming hyenas watch, as the subject isn’t quite a politician. But I think the exceptional circumstances justify this.

Jose Torres used to be a politician. At one point in his life, he was the mayor of Patterson, New Jersey. Fortunately, he was convicted of using city workers and city money to renovate a warehouse being leased by his daughter and nephew.

The workers’ labor was marked as overtime and paid for by Paterson’s taxpayers — a move that landed Torres in front of a judge, who later sentenced him to five years in state prison.

He spent 13 months in the joint. But that’s not why he’s a flaming hyena.

After the plea, Torres agreed to a forfeiture order that banned him from ever holding public office or employment in the Garden State. If he broke the agreement, he’d face a contempt charge.

Would you like to guess what happened next?

If you guessed “he tried to run for office again” take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square. Last year, he filed to run for mayor.

But it gets better.

When the Paterson city clerk rejected his petition, Torres sued, according to a statement from state Attorney General Matthew Platkin.

Yes! Not only did he try to violate the order, he actually sued when he was told he was violating the order.

Mr. Torres is now facing a criminal contempt of court charge.

“It takes remarkable brashness to flout a state court order and then attempt to strong-arm the city clerk, via civil litigation, into allowing an impermissible campaign to proceed,” [State Attorney General Matthew] Platkin said.
“That is bold. And, according to the grand jury, it is also indictable.”

I’m not sure “brashness” is the word I’d use. I think I’d call it “stupidity”. But oddly, it’s only the second most stupid thing I’ve seen this week.

(I’m still trying to decide if I want to link to the most stupid thing I’ve seen this week. It does relate to some of this blog’s areas of coverage – cocaine and aircraft. But the details are pretty R-rated, and I actually sort of feel bad for the subject.)

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Firings watch update.

September 27th, 2023

Mel Tucker officially out at Michigan State University “for cause”. (Previously.)

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 27, 2023.

September 27th, 2023

Brooks Robinson.

In his 23 seasons with the Orioles, from 1955 to 1977, Robinson became known as the Human Vacuum Cleaner for his ability to snare just about anything hit his way.
Charging topped grounders or bunts, backhanding smashes, ranging to his left or his right, he won 16 consecutive Gold Glove awards as the American League’s leading fielder at third base. Only the pitcher Greg Maddux, with 18 Gold Gloves, has exceeded Robinson’s total.Robinson played on four pennant-winning teams, two of them World Series champions. He was the most valuable player of the 1970 World Series, in which the Orioles beat the Cincinnati Reds in five games, for his spectacular plays and for his hitting: He had a .429 batting average and hit a pair of home runs. (The Orioles also beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in four games in the 1966 Series.)
Robinson had 2,848 hits, 268 home runs and a career batting average of .267. He was the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1964, when he hit 28 homers, had a league-leading 118 runs batted in and batted .317, all career highs. But he was best known for his fielding.
Robinson was named an All-Star every season from 1960 to 1974. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1983, his first year of eligibility, with almost 92 percent of the votes.

Edited to add: Dave Barry on Brooks Robinson.

Phil Sellers. He was a dominant player for Rutgers in the 1970s:

He was called “Phil the Thrill,” and, with Sellers leading a team that also included Eddie Jordan, Mike Dabney and Hollis Copeland, Rutgers kept improving. During Sellers’s junior year, when he averaged 22.7 points and 9.4 rebounds a game, Rutgers had a record of 22-7 and played in the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, losing in the first round.
Rutgers was undefeated in 26 games during the 1975-76 regular season, Sellers’s senior year. Late in a conference tournament game against St. John’s University that preceded the start of the N.C.A.A. tournament, Sellers clashed with his coach, Tom Young.
“Give me the ball,” Young recalled Sellers saying when he described the incident to The New York Times in 1983. “I said, ‘Phil, we’re going to run our offense.’ He said it three times, ‘Give me the ball.’”
Sellers scored six points in the next 90 seconds, and Rutgers won.
Rutgers then won its first three games in the N.C.A.A. tournament, despite subpar scoring performances from Sellers, to raise its record to 31-0. But the Scarlet Knights lost the semifinal game to Michigan, 86-70, with Sellers scoring only 11 points against the strong defense of Michigan’s Wayman Britt.
Sellers’s college career totals of 2,399 points and 1,115 rebounds are still Rutgers records.

Terry Kirkman, of the Association. This is another one of those groups that was a little before my time – though I have heard of Terry Kirkman – so I’m going to leave comment on this up to my music consultant.

Posted in Music, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 26, 2023.

September 26th, 2023

David McCallum. THR. Tributes from Deadline.

I was a little young for “UNCLE” first-run (and I don’t recall it being in re-runs on any of the Houston stations) and I’ve never been a big fan of “NCIS”. But I did kind of like Mr. McCallum. I have no idea what his politics were, which I think is worthy of praise in the current era.

And this kind of made me choke up a bit:

“After returning from the hospital to their apartment, I asked my mother if she was OK before she went to sleep. Her answer was simply, ‘Yes. But I do wish we had had a chance to grow old together.’ She is 79, and dad just turned 90. The honesty in that emotion shows how vibrant their beautiful relationship and daily lives were, and that somehow, even at 90, Daddy never grew old.”

So did this:

Donations can be made to the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation.

Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation.

(Mr. McCallum served in the British military. But his second wife’s father was a Marine who fought at Iwo Jima.)

Other credits include “The Master”, “Babylon 5”, “Hell Drivers” (which I have to admit sounds interesting: check out that cast), “A Night to Remember”, and “The Six Million Dollar Man: Wine, Women and War”.

Dick Clark, one-term Democratic Senator from Iowa. He was famous for walking 1300 miles during his 1972 campaign.

Matteo Messina Denaro, Italian Mafia boss.

In 2020, Mr. Messina Denaro was convicted in absentia for his role in the high-profile murders of two of Italy’s top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992, and for deadly bombings the next year in Milan, Rome and Florence that prosecutors believe were part of a Cosa Nostra strategy against the state.
He also received a life sentence for his involvement in the kidnapping and death of the 12-year-old son of a Mafia turncoat after the boy was strangled and his body was dissolved in acid, and in the death of a police officer.

He’d been “underground” since 1993, but was still running the “family business”. The authorities tracked him down because he was being treated for cancer:

Since he was not treated under his real name, they used national health service records to identify patients with similar conditions and narrow it down.

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 3, 2023.

September 26th, 2023

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:

Denver
Minnesota
da Bears
Carolina

70-20? That sounds more like a score from a low-scoring college basketball game, not a NFL one.

In other news, the worthless Chargers won, as did the Texans. But we still have Carolina.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 22, 2023.

September 22nd, 2023

Stephen Gould, tenor best known “as a leading interpreter of the operas of Richard Wagner”.

Bayreuth Festival website.

Mr. Gould established himself as a reliable heldentenor, a singer who takes on heroic roles, mostly in the German repertory, requiring a particularly powerful voice. Such roles are among the most demanding in opera.
He first appeared at Bayreuth in 2004, performing the title role in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser,” a production that dazzled Olin Chism of The Dallas Morning News.
“One of the heroes was American tenor Stephen Gould, who sang the title character,” Mr. Chism wrote. “This was his Bayreuth debut, and by the end of the evening he had become a festival favorite.”
He remained so over the next 18 years, performing in 20 Bayreuth productions; he regularly sang the title role in “Siegfried” and Tristan in “Tristan und Isolde.” He also performed in leading opera houses around the world, including with the Metropolitan Opera, where he made his debut in 2010 as Erik, the hunter, in Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman.”

Posted in Music, Obits, Wagner | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#109 in a series)

September 22nd, 2023

I had to go to the eye doctor this morning, and the Robert Menendez story broke while I was there. My eyes are still a little messed up, and I’m kind of behind on this story – at this point, everyone and his brother is on it like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation – so some short random observations.

I’m impressed he was taking payoffs in gold as well as in cash, though I wouldn’t have left so much cash lying around the house. I absolutely believe you should diversify what you accept for bribes: cash, negotiable securities, precious and/or strategic metals, etc. I’m not yet sold on cryptocurrency as a bribery mechanism, though.

Sen. Menendez is actually a repeat hyena: I noted his indictment back in 2015, though I missed that the jury in that case hung and he wasn’t retried for reasons.

Speaking of the previous charges, the tabloid of record has an amusing run-down of those, complete with photos of “Bob’s Babes”.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Public statement for the record.

September 21st, 2023

While I am a Cisco employee, I have no additional information about the Splunk acquisition beyond what has already been made public.

If I did have such information – which, again, I do not – I could not legally discuss it here anyway.

Just sayin’.

Posted in Admin | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: September 21, 2023.

September 21st, 2023

Rose Gregorio, actress. Other credits include “Harry O”, “The Rockford Files”, and “The Rookies”.

Pete Kozachik, VFX guy. (Hattip: Lawrence.) He did a lot of work with Tim Burton: “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, “James and the Giant Peach”, “Corpse Bride”.

Kozachik also did commercials featuring the Pillsbury Doughboy, Scrubbing Bubbles, Mr. Clean and other characters; was an advanced scuba diver and underwater photographer; and built his own airplane engine.

Posted in Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 20, 2023.

September 20th, 2023

I didn’t find out about this until late last night, so I’m a bit behind. Apologies.

Two pilots, Nick Macy and Chris Rushing, were killed in an accident at the Reno Air Races on Sunday.

According to the reports I’ve read, both pilots had been competing in what’s called the “Gold Race” in the T-6 Class. The race had completed, and the pilots were in the post-race recovery period when they collided in mid-air.

Preliminary analysis from the Air Safety Institute. Reno Gazette Journal coverage. As the linked articles note, the remainder of the races was cancelled after the crash: this was the last year for the Reno Air Races in their current form.

Buddy Teevens, football coach at Dartmouth. He was badly injured in a bicycle accident in March, and died of complications from his injuries.

JoAnne Epps, acting president of Temple University. She was attending a memorial service when she collapsed. Ms. Epps was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

James Hoge, noted journalist.

Few editors at major American newspapers have been as young as Mr. Hoge was when he rose to the top at The Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid aimed at a working-class readership. He became the city editor at age 29, editor in chief at 33 and publisher at 44.
He shook up the staff, strove for sprightlier writing and, like other newspaper editors in the 1970s, introduced new sections on business, food and fashion. “I am always agitating,” he said.
The payoff was six Pulitzer Prizes on his watch: two each for feature photography and criticism and one each for spot news reporting (concerning violence by young radicals in Chicago) and local news reporting (on new evidence in the 1966 murder, still unsolved, of Valerie Percy, a daughter of Charles H. Percy of Illinois, then making his first United States Senate race).

He was also behind the Mirage Tavern investigation, and went on to become publisher of the New York Daily News and the journal Foreign Affairs.

Aware that some council members fretted over his tabloid background, he had some fun with them, offering a mock magazine cover with the model Cindy Crawford and teasers like “sexiest ethnic rivalries.”

Roger Whittaker, British musician.

Burning in Hell watch: Billy Chemirmir. I’d never heard of him, but he was convicted twice of capital murder, and was suspected of 20 more murders. His MO seems to have been smothering old folks.

Most of Chemirmir’s alleged victims lived in apartments at independent living communities for older people. The women he’s accused of killing in private homes include the widow of a man he had cared for while working as an at-home caregiver.

You could also classify this as part of the “fool around and find out” watch:

Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot told WFAA that Chemirmir was killed after apparently making inappropriate comments sexual in nature towards his cellmate’s children. According to Creuzot, the cellmate allegedly beat Chemirmir, dragged him out of his cell and killed him while other inmates watched. No one intervened and Chemirmir may have been stabbed with a pen, Creuzot said.
“Even though they are on lockdown, apparently [the cellmate] somehow opened the door and dragged [Chemirmir] into the hallway and there were other prisoners who saw it and not one intervened and no one called for help,” Creuzot told WFAA. “He was basically there for 15 to 20 minutes before anybody with authority could figure out what happened. When they got there, they tried to revive him, but he died.”

Posted in Cycling, Law, Media, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch (sort of).

September 19th, 2023

This is only sort of a firings watch because Mel Tucker isn’t out as head coach of Michigan State yet.

But the school has notified him they intend to fire him “for cause”. Which means no contract payout.

This is a weird story that I’ve been following from a distance, but have had trouble finding a way into that treats everyone involved with respect. Mr. Tucker is accused of sexual harassment. I’m just going to quote from the ESPN story:

Prominent sexual assault awareness speaker Brenda Tracy filed a sexual misconduct complaint against Tucker in December 2022. She claims that Tucker made unwelcome advances after she was hired to speak to the Spartans football team about sexual misconduct and her experience as a rape survivor. She said Tucker also masturbated without her consent during a phone call in April 2022. Tucker admitted to masturbating, but said in a statement last week that it was part of a consensual intimate relationship.
Tracy told USA Today that after she raised concerns about Tucker’s conduct, he postponed and eventually canceled a speaking engagement at the university. Because she had an ongoing professional relationship with the athletic department, she was able to file a claim under the school’s sexual misconduct policy.

Mr. Tucker has seven days from yesterday to respond to the termination letter.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 2, 2023.

September 19th, 2023

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:

New England
Cincinnati
Houston
Denver
Los Angeles Chargers
Minnesota
da Bears
Carolina
Arizona

Still a little early for any predictions on who will win the Owen 17 award this year, but I am kind of wondering if this could be the year for Houston. Or even better, the worthless LA Chargers.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

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