Sunday, December 13, 2009

'Family Ties' Actor Bonsall Facing Assault Charge - Denver News Story - KMGH Denver: Alexander Rozhenko, son of Worf of the House of Mortak, is either letting his Klingon instincts get the better of him or is a meth addict. The real-world money, if you click through to see the mug shot, is on "meth-head".

Labels: crime, TV

18:56 cdogzilla

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

There Goes Whatever Respect I Had for Some Pretty Talented Directors
Lynch, Mann, Wenders, Gilliam, Scorsese, Allen and tons more just made it impossible for me to separate watching their movies from the fact they apparently don't think it's that bad to drug and rape a 13 year old girl.

Labels: crime, movies

19:28 cdogzilla

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

BBC - Earth News - Scale of gorilla poaching exposed: "An undercover investigation has found that up to two gorillas are killed and sold as bushmeat each week in Kouilou, a region of the Republic of Congo."

Labels: crime, gorillas

20:30 cdogzilla

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Merciless: "This blog is not only my [Charlie Stross] personal soapbox, it's my public face. Folks who read what I post here may or may not thereafter buy my books. Consequently, these days I try to avoid writing about stuff that is likely to be controversial. Call it the chilling effect of capitalism; I can say what I want if and only if I'm willing to do without that portion of my book royalties that comes from the folks I piss off.

There are some folks I can do without, mind you. (If you're a BNP member or voter you can fuck off right now. I don't care if you don't buy my books; I don't want your bloody money.)

However, this comes at a cost. I don't like biting my tongue continuously. I have strong opinions on a number of subjects — including politics — and what use is a soapbox if I can't use it from time to time? ...

This brings me to my topic of the day: mercy, and the lack of it.

I've been suppressing the urge to explode angrily ever since Thursday, when Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was officially released from prison and flown home to Libya. His release — on compassionate grounds, as he is suffering from terminal cancer and has weeks to live. Mr Al Megrahi was serving a life sentence, handed down by a rather oddly constituted Scottish court for his part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988 — the biggest aviation disaster ever in British airspace, and one of the biggest acts of terrorism of that decade.

What am I angry about?

Let's leave aside the fact that many people (including the UN observer at the trial) consider Al Megrahi's conviction to be a serious miscarriage of justice. (The allegations of fabricated evidence should to be taken seriously; the Flight 103 investigation took place in the middle of a very chilly period in US/Libyan relations, and we have seen since then that the CIA is a pliant tool in the hands of those who want to fabricate evidence justifying action against uncooperative Middle Eastern nations. The CIA is an intelligence and covert operations agency under political direction, not an independent investigatory/detective bureau; its emissions should be considered with the utmost skepticism.)

What makes me angry ... Well, to start with it's worth noting that the loudest denunciations came from the White House — an entity with no legal standing whatsoever in the Scottish judicial system. But we expect external interference from the White House: it's what the Imperial Presidency is there for.

What bugs me is the complete lack of comprehension of the quality of mercy that seems to have crept over the US political class this century.

Even if Al Megrahi is a mass-murderer, the fact remains that he is dying. It is long-standing policy in Scotland to exercise the prerogative of mercy when possible; in general, if an imprisoned criminal is terminally ill, a request for release (for hospice care, basically) is usually granted unless they are believed to be a danger to the public.

That's because the justice system isn't solely about punishment. It's about respect for the greater good of society, which is better served by rehabilitation and reconcilliation than by revenge. We do not make ourselves better people by exercising a gruesome revenge on the bodies of our vanquished foes. Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Minister, did exactly the right thing in sending Al Megrahi home to die.

Meanwhile, the angry spectators who're throwing scat come from a country where prison rape is endemic and tolerated to the point where it's a subject for cheap jokes.

American attitudes to crime and punishment are unspeakable; disturbing, mediaeval, and barbaric are some of the adjectives that spring to mind. But above all, the word that most thoroughly applies is merciless. The commission of a crime is taken as an excuse to unleash the demons of the subconscious, however dark, however disproportionate, upon the perpetrator. Once labeled a criminal, an individual's right to fair treatment is utterly expunged, and any violation or degradation, however grotesque, is seen as something that they brought on themselves.

Why?

Well, let's pan across the political landscape and look at another current cause celebre that provides a window into the darker corners of the American psyche; the issue of healthcare reform.

I've been watching the war of words with increasing disbelief for the past month, trying to get my head around the reason why so many loud, vocal citizens seem to be so adamantly opposed to something that's in their own best interests — the US healthcare system is utterly dysfunctional, even for those with health insurance costs are spiraling out of control, and the current system is becoming a major drag on economic productivity — many business start-ups abort because the founders can't obtain healthcare, many novelists of my acquaintance are in serious financial trouble or are terrified of giving up the day job (that comes with insurance), and so on. The current mess is responsible for 22,000 avoidable deaths per year — a 9/11 scale catastrophe every six weeks.

And yet we hear rhetoric about death panels, idiotic allegations that Stephen Hawking would be dead if he lived in the UK and was dependent on the NHS (this just in: Stephen Hawking is British and, er, alive because of the NHS), and so on. What's going on?

What's noticable is that the 'debate' isn't about the need for healthcare, or about actual medical issues. It's about ideology, and outlook ...

Near as I can work it out from over here (caveat: I've spent somewhere between four and eight months of my life in the USA — this doesn't make me an expert) there is a small but significant proportion of the US population who hate the poor and want them to die. (Or at least to go somewhere where they're invisible and can't act as a perpetual reminder to the haters that their own security is at best tenuous.) I'm not sure why there's this hatred — my personal feeling is that it springs from numerous sources: from prosperity theology (if you're poor it's because you're ungodly and deserve to suffer), insecurity, lack of empathy, or a combination of these factors in different people. Other observers have different theories: M'Learned Friend opines that it's because the American conservative movement rejects Rawls's preconditions for justice. (That doesn't go far enough for my taste; they also seem to want to reject the entire concept of the Social Contract.) And then there's the growing tendency towards eliminationist rhetoric against socially sanctioned out-groups. (Arguably the endorsement of maltreatment of convicts is an emergent part of this trend, feeding into and normalising it.) .

The subjects vary — crime and penal policy, healthcare, don't get me started on foreign policy — but there is an ideological approach in America that is distinguished by one common characteristic: words and deeds utterly lacking in the quality of mercy.

There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.

Calls for revenge on a sick and dying man are part and parcel of the pathology, as are shrieks of outrage against the mere idea of subsidizing healthcare for the indigent or unlucky, or rough talk about 'every now and again ... pick[ing] up a crappy little country and throwing it against the wall just to prove we are serious'.

Mercy, it would seem, is a scarce commodity in the Empire.

Are you ashamed yet? If not, you're part of the problem.

(And by the way, I don't want your money.)"

Labels: crime, Obama

22:13 cdogzilla

Thursday, August 20, 2009

There will be a time when all the jokes we made about the Bush administration will no longer be jokes but just facts before we knew with certainty that they were facts.

Tom Ridge admits the White House used terror alerts for political gain.

It's only a matter of time before the "Cheney Kept Alive on Diet of Puppy Blood" headline.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime

14:35 bone daddy

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Perhaps There Aren't Any Grown-Ups Anywhere
The Nobel laureate Sir William Golding, whose novel Lord of the Flies turned notions of childhood innocence on their head, admitted in private papers that he had tried to rape a 15-year-old girl during his teenage years, it emerged today.

Golding's papers also described how he had experimented, while a teacher at a public school, with setting boys against one another in the manner of Lord of the Flies, which tells the story of young air crash survivors on a desert island during a nuclear war.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/08/16/william-golding-lord-of-t_n_260674.html

--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Labels: Books, crime

19:57 cdogzilla

Saturday, July 18, 2009

Who Owns the Moon? The Galactic Government vs. the UN

Dennis Hope, head of the Lunar Embassy Corporation, has sold real estate on the moon and other planets to about 3.7 million people so far ...

As his customer base grew, he said, buyers wanted assurances that their property rights would be protected.

So Hope started his own government in 2004, which has a ratified constitution, a congress, a unit of currency—even a patent office.

"We're now a fully realized sovereign nation," Hope said.

via Dusty Trice

Labels: crime, science

21:14 cdogzilla

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Arrest Made In Connection With East Hartford Shooting - Courant.com: East Hartford, so much to answer for. The old hometown keeps making the news for all the wrong reasons. Murder on Tuesday followed up by a murder on Wednesday at the vigil for Tuesday's victim.

Labels: crime, local flavor

20:27 cdogzilla

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Obama Endorses Indefinite Detention Without Trial for Some Now at Guantanamo - washingtonpost.com:

"President Obama acknowledged publicly for the first time yesterday that some detainees at Guantanamo Bay may have to be held without trial indefinitely, siding with conservative national security advocates on one of the most contentious issues raised by the closing of the military prison in Cuba."

No. No. No. It was wrong when W. and Cheney were doing it, and it's still wrong. If the detainees did something wrong, prove it. If they're conspiring to do something wrong, prove it. If you can't prove it, that doesn't mean you get to lock them up and throw away the key. In fact, it means the opposite. I thought Obama got it and this was all understood. This is discouraging.

Labels: Conservative Goons, crime, Obama

22:38 cdogzilla

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Regift, Please!:

"A decade ago, I and the other two co-authors of the 'Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot' devoted a chapter to refuting the historical and ideological fallacies contained in Galeano's tract, which we called the 'idiot's bible.' Everything that has happened in the Western Hemisphere since the book appeared in 1971 has belied Galeano's arguments and predictions. But I guess Chavez has given it the kiss of life and, since people are asking, here I go again."

I opened Galeano's Century of the Wind to a random page and read:

1980: Santa Marta
Marijuana
Out of each dollar of dreams that a U.S. marijuana smoker buys, barely one cent reaches the hands of the Colombian campesinos who grow it. The other ninety-nine cents go to the traffickers ...

... [T]he drug mafiosi live in ostentatious mansions. In front they like to display on granite pedestals the small planes the used in their first operation. They rock their children in gold cradles, give golden fingernails to their lovers ...

The mafiosi habitually fumigate their forces. Four years ago they machinegunned Lucho Barranquilla, the most popular of the traffickers, on a streetcorner in the city of Santa Marta. The murderers sent to the funeral a floral wreath in the form a heart and took up a collection to erect a statue of the departed on the main plaza.

It was pretty easy to find something relevant and topical in Galeano's 20+ year old writings. I'm not familiar at all with Open Veins, and maybe it is bad, but I'm inclined to give Galeano the benefit of the doubt here.

Labels: Books, crime, history, Obama

16:56 cdogzilla

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Robert Mugabe hoards long-lost Dr. Who episodes thought to be in Zimbabwe. The man's evil knows no bounds.

Labels: crime, doctor who, TV

14:13 HD

Sunday, February 15, 2009

The Last Hustler

Over his long and, more importantly, profitable career, John "Fast Jack" Farrell has lived by two rules: Get the money and get out alive.

The first has always been a cinch, easy as breathing for a knock-around kid from Manchester [CT] who became, arguably, the best card and dice hustler on two continents.

And he's still around. That proves he hasn't missed yet on the second rule, even if there have been close moments.

He's been chased by a mob of bat-swinging highway workers. He has been gouged, slashed, stripped, beaten, drugged, dumped in the snow and shot at. He once was warned, as he prepared to beat a mob dice game in Queens, that a "leak" — a slip of his crooked dice — could leave him hanging from a hook in a meat locker. He walked away four hours later, buzzed on adrenaline and thousands of dollars ahead.

There's a movie in the works.

Labels: crime, local flavor

09:55 cdogzilla

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

2008 in Books
I took up the 888 challenge this past year and succeeded, although with much less ambition that I intended. I tracked my books through my LibraryThing, which was a blast even while it managed to show me just how middle and lowbrow so much of my reading has become in the past year. In the 888 challenge, you read eight books in eight different categories and are allowed eight repeats. My initial categories were things like politics, history, over 25 years old and books I've been avoiding (generally meaty classics). By the end of the year, poker had its own category, I had split crime and pulp into two separate categories while combining history and politics into one and filling it out with a history of the World Series of Poker, and those books I'd been avoiding? Still generally avoiding them.

That said, my reading has always had more than its share of comics, sci-fi and crime. I shouldn't be shocked by how it looks in cover view.

Two of my favorite books of the year were admirably lowbrow. I can't say enough good things about Lucky at Cards and Grifter's Game, both reprinted by Hard Case Crime. Both are long on obsession and cons and short on meandering. Someone once described a good novel as being like a Ramones song. Bang! Bang! Bang! and you're done. Grifter's Game was initially published as Mona, but you should get the reprint because the cover of the original, while much more lurid, gives away the shocking and poetic ending. And Lucky at Cards features my favorite tag line of the year - "He could handle cards like a master. But could he handle her?" If that doesn't crack you up, go read James Patterson.

My political reading of late has been largely depressing. I'm sending Worst President Ever off with a bunch of anti-Bush books. Trainwreck:The End of the Conservative Revolution (and Not a Moment Too Soon)by Bill Press (and researched by Kevin at Ghost in the Machine) bookended the year nicely with Paul Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal. Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy spends no time establishing that W was a horrible president - you already knew that - but tries to explain the possible psychological/Shakespearean family dynamics that lead to W's awful mental make-up. It's a slightly rude poke in the brain of the president. (Excuse the word brain there.) It does contain a lot of personal and Bush family information that may be new to you.

For complete and utter depression, however, I recommend The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How America's War on Terror Turned into a War on America's Ideals by Jane Meyer. It exhaustively details our inexcusable rendition and torture program. Dick Cheney is the star of the book, to his eternal shame. I'm glad I read it, but it truly made me sad.

Kid's books did not. I proudly used children's literature as one of my 888 categories. Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing was even better than I remembered. Peter is a true character, in every sense, and by the end of the book I disliked Fudge just like one might dislike a younger sibling - and this comes from someone who is but does not have a younger sibling. I'm too old to have read Holes as a kid, but I can easily see why it is heading for classic status. It will be read by generations of subversive kids. Tightly plotted and funny.

Nothing blew me away in 2008, the way Watership Down did in 2007. Although with two strong Lawrence Block novels, a new name may have achieved "Grab at Any Library Sale" status. I'll start 2009's 888 challenge conceding that poker, crime and children's literature may as well be categories and we'll see where it goes.

Labels: 2008, Books, Bush, crime, Lists, poker

14:49 bone daddy

Friday, October 24, 2008

McCain Campaign Coming Apart at the Seams
Less than two weeks to Election Day and Palin's giving depositions in her abuse of power scandal, Joe McCain is illegally harassing a 911 operator, and we're finding out the highest paid staffer in the campaign is Palin's hairdresser (nice follow up to the $150K shopping spree news), and ... what a shock ... Ashley Todd turns out to be a race-baiting fraud.

Fox News' John Moody:

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain's quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.

At least that hack Drudge has the decency to fess up to his shoddy reporting ... well, it's currently under the huge banner that reads, "JOE THE PLUMBER 'SCARED FOR AMERICA' IF OBAMA PRESIDENT"

Is this not the most surreal election season we've ever lived through?

Labels: Conservative Goons, crime

23:31 cdogzilla

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Nutmeg News
The All-Bad Edition
So everyone has probably seen the video of the hit and run in Hartford of Angel Torres. If you type "Hartford" into YouTube search, about four of the suggestions lead you to it. Nothing else you'd want to see in Hartford, I guess. Or you probably saw it on your local news. (So no, I don't feel like linking to it.) What's shocking is after two cars race into the wrong lane and one of them hits the 78 year old nobody does much of anything for forty seconds or so. None of the bystanders reach him and not one of the ten passing cars stop. Of course it's the existence of video that turned Hartford into the latest example of man's inhumanity to man.

Colin McEnroe, as usual, has the thing worth reading about this. Sometimes, we want to believe the worst about ourselves. Or hey, not ourselves, we're good people. I'm talking the worst about people who live in cities. There's a reason the legend of Kitty Genovese (referenced by Colin) has lasted for so long. Εnd if you think none of this has anything to do with race, you're welcome to visit the Hartford Courant's reader forums, which have gotten pretty ugly, even by Internet standards. So ugly that Mayor Perez has complained to the Courant. Meanwhile, the police chief has complained about our "toxic relationship with ourselves." Okay guys, maybe you could do something better with your time, like catch a hit and run driver or something.

I won't excuse the people in the video who do nothing except to point out that four people called 911 within a minute, a fact being dropped from almost all reports.

Forgive me for thinking this is mostly an excuse to call blacks and Hispanics "sub-human" and "savages." I don't remember this rhetoric being quite this heated for the college students responsible for the fatal hit and run of a 19 year old. Heck, the parents chipped in after the fact to help cover it up so you have some man's inhumanity to man there too and for longer than 40 seconds.

Meanwhile, the Mark Twain House and Museum is in financial trouble, despite some recent state grant help. The Twain house is much more than just a house he happened to live in. Twain designed it and the house remains imbued with his personality and life story. It's a literary and architectural landmark. I've taken the tour three times now and each one was different (except for the "tainted money" line, which was included on all three). Most of the trouble comes from a visitor's center built a few years ago. It is impressive, but seems in size and design better suited to a convention center and it's probably a monster to heat, even in reasonable times.

There are also layoffs and news page reductions coming at the Hartford Courant, which does not currently exactly overflow with news coverage.

Also, what the Courant calls "possibly the state's single most recognizable product" (Hey, not an insurance form!), the United Technology spacesuit, will now be made in Texas by a deep sea company with no space experience. Thanks for forty years of problem-free performance, too bad you HQ in a blue state. At least the company that won the bid isn't named Halliburton Space & Sea.

Also making us sad around here is the news that UConn recruit and national player of the year Elena Delle Donne has left the summer program after two days to return home. I take the statements at face value that this has nothing to do with UConn or her teammates. I'd guess that if she plays basketball it will probably be for UConn. While it would be a shame for someone so talented to give up the sport, you just have to wish her the best and hope things work out for her.

Meanwhile, Dodd looked like he wouldn't be a VP candidate, now maybe he will be. I like Dodd and he certainly didn't get a chance to shaw what a good campaigner he can be during his bid, still I'm not sure what he adds politically to the Obama ticket. Connecticut is certainly in Obama's column and Dodd is nothing if not a Beltway insider. Still, I think he'd be a far better campaigner than the miserable performance turned in by our other senator in 2000. I was rooting for Webb, but that's not to be.

I will be posting even less than usual around here because I'm going on vacation for the week. Any wonder why?

Labels: Books, crime, local flavor, Obama, sports, uconn

23:11 bone daddy

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Mike Huckabee will not be our next president. He will probably never be president. But just in case you encounter anyone suffering from Huckabee fever, familiarize yourself with the name Wayne Dumond. Dumond is a serial rapist who had his sentence commuted by Huckabee at the urging of anti-Clinton freaks. Bear with me, this is fairly sordid. See one of Dumond's victims was a seventeen year-old named Ashley Stevens. Because Stevens is a distant relative of Bill Clinton, Dumond is innocent.

Did your brain just make a TWAAANG sound like a rubber band stretched aaall the way across the kitchen? Good. You're still sane and not a conservative activist. See, Dumond became a cause celebre among right wing types. As a new governor Huckabee was petitioned by many anti-Clinton types to grant Dumond parole. Huckabee was also advised by the parole board and several of Dumond's victims not to release him. Guess who he listened to? I need to know nothing else about Mike Huckabee.

Read the articles. I apologize for dragging something so depressing here, but I don't really see who the Republicans will eventually stagger behind. It really could be Huckabee and everyone should know the name Wayne Dumond. You've probably already guessed but yes, when released, Dumond raped again and this time murdered one of his victims.

Labels: 2008, Conservative Goons, crime

22:21 bone daddy

Friday, November 16, 2007

Bonds
I guess it was only a matter of time before the indictment came down. Now it has. I don't like Bonds. Don't know if anyone outside of his immediate family and San Francisco does? But is it really the result of a "witch hunt" as Sir Charles claims? I don't know. I hope that he wasn't the "big fish" the government has been after, as has been discussed by guys like Stephen A. Smith on ESPN. A user, no matter how prominent, shouldn't be the big fish. The suppliers, the doctors who write bogus scripts so guys can get them -- these are the guys that should be the big fish. I'm hoping that the roll of Bond's personal trainer (as it appears) turns into Bonds rolling over on someone else, someone up the supply chain.

You know it's sad, I don't even know what the number is. In my mind it's still 755. (And 61 for that matter.)

Labels: baseball, crime

12:31 cdogzilla

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

I'm getting my family-values, anti-gay Republicans caught seeking gay sex confused. It's reached a tipping point. When I first heard the Larry Craig story - this was before GOP'ers started calling for his resignation and before his "Really, I'm still not gay" press conference - I thought it was a late reference to the McCain Florida campaign chair caught soliciting in a park.

I knew it wasn't Vitter, because he was totally straight with his prostitutes, and I knew it wasn't Ted Haggard, because that guy's a Reverend, not to mention he's totally cured of his gayness. I also remember the name Foley (because of the catheter) so I knew it wasn't him. I also remember Jeff Gannon, the gay prostitute who posed as a White House reporter on behalf of the totally straight Karl Rove, because it's one of the most mind-bending examples in the game "How would this scandal have played out for a Democrat?"

See how easy it is to get confused? Anyway, which excuse is worse:

1) "I have horrible luck. There's always been these rumors that I cruise for guys, even though I'm totally straight. Then I wind up in a bathroom where this kind of thing goes on and I happen to have a medical condition that causes me to give the signal for 'I want some sex,' even though I really don't AND I'm cursed with an easy-going nature that made me plead guilty to the thing I didn't do." - Larry Craig

2) "I offered to give him $20 and a blowjob because he was black and I figured that's what he wanted." - Bob Allen

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime

22:14 bone daddy

Monday, August 13, 2007

Karl Rove to Leave White House, Spend More Time with Coven

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime, Iraq

16:50 bone daddy

Thursday, July 26, 2007

I get a double shot of depression from the Michael Vick story>. The first shot is obvious - the stupid brutality of dog fighting. The debate around this story also depresses me. The question should not be "Should the NFL suspend him?" The question should be "Should the NFL suspend him after he gets out of jail?" (And the answer is yes.)

Labels: crime, sports

21:58 bone daddy

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

We're already hearing - for those who couldn't figure it out - that we will fall far short of the goals Bush laid out for the surge/escalation, meeting "not a single goal." First Bush rejects anyone else's (already low) standards or expectations and, in fact, sneers at them. Then he proposes his own (corrupt and artificial and lower) goals as superior. Then he fails to meet them and will probably retroactively creat a third set of goals that he will have to lie to pretend to have met better than expected. I couldn't come up with a better motif of the W years.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime, Iraq

16:07 bone daddy

Chewbacca impersonator accused of assaulting Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Question: is there an instrument sensitive enough to measure the amount of dignity lost?

Labels: crime, movies, sci-fi

08:35 bone daddy

Monday, July 02, 2007

Who wipes away Libby's prison time? The accountability president. The "restore integrity to the White House" president. The Fitzgerald prosecution, already sort of empty in my book because it did not charge as criminals Rove and Cheney, just got a little emptier.

W and Libby partisans will moan about how he still has the guilty verdict and the fine and lost his job, etc. Still, it occurs to me that Valerie Plame lost her job through the actions of Libby, Cheney and Rove and her job - helping to keep the country safe from WMDs - was a hell of a lot more important than Libby's job of propping up the worst administration ever.

Anyway, only complete scandal fatigue and the absolute fanatical devotion of the right-wing base can keep W above 25% now.

Labels: Bush, Conservative Goons, crime, Iraq

22:14 bone daddy

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Worrisome
Residents of one New Haven neighborhood have formed armed patrols.

Labels: crime

07:31 cdogzilla

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

I met a guy at the barber shop last night, an older gentleman, who (as the discussion in the shop made it's way to moneymaking schemes and pyramids) claimed to be Charles Ponzi's nephew. Yeah, that Ponzi, of Ponzi Scheme fame. Frankie the Barber is quite a character in his own right, and I hear a bunch of interesting stories every time I'm in there among the North End's Italian element. Fioremonkey's people. I keep going back as much for the atmosphere as the convenience of having a barber who knows what I want so I can just sit down without having to try to describe a haircut ... not to mention he only charges $10. Anyways, in the course of learning way more than I probably needed to about Frankie's credit situation, past bankruptcy, gambling problems, battles with drug addiction, etc. the guy next me perked up when Frankie started giving his pitch on some miracle drug he and some of his hustler buddies were peddling.

I got the whole story of how this product has been mentioned on Oprah, how Papelbon and Clemens are selling it, how it helped his buddy recover from cancer, how it battles free radicals in your body and is (ostensibly) the "number one food source" in the world -- I let that last bit go, having no idea what that could possibly mean. I couldn't catch the name of this wonderful snake oil pill ... Motiv8, or something like that? So as Frankie's giving the pitch and describing how you get involved in selling it and recruiting other sellers to work under you, this guy cautions Frankie how you don't want to get involved in these pyramids because his uncle invented them and they're a scam. I'm sitting there thinking, "What? You're going to tell us now you're uncle was Charles Ponzi?" and no sooner do I think it than he says, "my Uncle Charlie screwed a lot of people, people in my family, with his stamp scam."

He then described how Ponzi tried to take over the Hanover Bank and outlined roughly what's outlined in the Wikipedia article linked above. I didn't press him for names and dates or anything, but I think he really was Ponzi's nephew. Not exactly a brush with fame, but I thought it was kind of cool anyways. Mildly relevant given Cianci's release into halfway house today. It's Italian Heritage Day here at TC.

Labels: crime, local flavor, six degrees of separation

10:39 cdogzilla