Glass Jaw
Glass Jaw by Michael O’Reilly was first shown to me in art school. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since my recent hospital stay.
Stolen Instruments (Public Service Announcement)
This is of primarily local (Chicago) import and is not your typical clusterflock post, but what happened makes me so blistering mad that I want everyone I know to know about it and to keep their eyes and ears open.
STOLEN INSTRUMENTS alert! Violin and 2 guitars stolen from trunk of car outside The Whistler on Milwaukee on Sat night:
VIOLIN — Handmade, bears label: “Samuel Giovanni Casco in Örebro Anno 2010 For Ethan Adelsman”. The back has these measurements: 35.2 cm, 16.5 cm, 11.1 cm, 20.3 cm. The linseed oil-based varnish is a warm orange-brown color on a golden ground. The bow: Handmade by E. Herrmann of Brazilian pernambuco wood with silver mounted hardware. The bow bears inscription: E. HERRMANN *** Violin & bow were in a Bam Lotus case, black with grayish stripes on the top and black backpack-style straps.
from the comments
I know a guy from Ohio who worked as a long-haul trucker for a good while after high school. Then he did other things and we wound up working at a library together and after a time he became a big wheel at the MacArthur Foundation.
He claims to have met Patty Hearst when she was on the lam, and he told me that she stole his drugs, but I know he was just spoofing me.
The Mother Courage of Rock
She was skinny, quick-witted, disarmingly unprofessional, alternating between stand-up patter, bardic intonations, and the hypnotic emotional sway of a chanteuse, and she was sexy in an androgynous way I hadn’t encountered before. The elements cohered convincingly; she seemed both entirely new and somehow long-anticipated. For me at nineteen, the show was an epiphany.
Springtime 1976, I was living in the cinderblock building on the glorified median strip there where they split Highway 13, and one day I went over to this one girl’s apartment, she lived right by the guy who dealt me speed, and she said, “Hey, you know who you remind me of? You remind me of Patti Smith!”
Gave her a possum grin I’m still grinning.
headline of the day
Couple caught trying to blow up car with flaming TAMPONS
Not my super-heroine persona,
but I am thinking that somebody should assume the mantle of The Sanitizer.
headline of the day, IV
North Korea To Punish Mourners Who Were Insincere
headline of the day II
Beezow Doo-Doo Zopittybop-Bop-Bop arrested
Harry Potter and the New Year at Hand
Just finished the marathon, a little while ago. Potter was Becky’s call, her birthday is the 31st. Doing such over New Year’s eve/day has been a tradition for four or five years. Potter won. In case you wonder. Ho-hum.
We said good-bye to our guests and watched an episode of The Riches. Only 20 episodes to watch, but it is delicious.
I don’t know what to expect of 2012, but I hope to lift my ass off the couch and start moving around tomorrow.
headline of the day
Man steals Greyhound bus to meet friend for Christmas
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
headline of the day, II
Portland police arrest man after alleged ‘Star Wars’ light saber assault at Toys’R'Us
(this happened about half a mile from my house)
One of these things is not like the other
No fewer than eight Ferraris and a Lamborghini Diablo were among the victims of Sunday morning’s collision, while the other victims were two top-of-the-range Mercedes-Benz, a Nissan GT-R and a Toyota Prius hybrid.
headline of the day
Miami’s Federal Prison Plagued By Strippers Posing As ‘Legal Assistants’
headline of the day
Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future
Question
Do you think I’m to blame for the death of Natalie Wood? Should I be worried the LAPD are re-opening the case?
dear clusterflock
What have you stolen?
Dear Clusterflock: Are You Tricking or Treating?
Danny and I had good intentions. We bought candy, have it in a big bowl. We opted to go dark. Turned off all the lights. Sitting in. Watched an episode of “Once Upon a Time.” (Quick review? Not so good. Maybe even sucked.) Then an episode of “Grimm.” (Better? Maybe. Maybe also sucks.)
I’m in a mood. Prolly better lil chiren don’t see me tonight.
We ate some candy from the bowl. Tasted like a poisoned apple…or peanut butter and chocolate.
headline of the day, III
Italian man gets $44,500 parking ticket that dates to 208 AD
headline of the day, II
Bad Handwriting Foils Bank Heist
Mullet the Amish Barber, or more Amish mugshots
Sam Mullet said he didn’t order the hair-cutting but didn’t stop two of his sons and another man from carrying it out last week on a 74-year-old man in his home in rural eastern Ohio.
Previously, on clusterflock.
Most damaging, however, was her obstinate faith in the kindness of strangers
A good overview of the Amanda Knox case, at least from what has become the American perspective:
Their list of grievances was long: incompetent police work, leading to the mishandling of evidence. The lack of any physical trace of Knox in Kercher’s bedroom. Italy’s carnivalesque judicial process, where there is never order in the court, the lawyers and defendants constantly interrupting the proceedings with groans and catcalls and wild gesticulations, while the press in the gallery yammers away like the kids in the back of the classroom. The prosecution’s failure to establish motive or intent (“We live in an age of violence with no motive,” said one prosecutor). And the fact that prosecutors did not immediately drop the case against Knox and Sollecito after the bloody fingerprints and footprints came back matching a 20-year-old petty thief named Rudy Guede.
(via marginal revolution)
In a perverse way, his work for the government only encouraged his criminal behavior and pushed his wayward ambitions into the stratosphere
Only 25 years old, with little more than a high school education, Albert had created the perfect bubble, a hermetically sealed moral universe in which he made the rules and controlled all the variables — and the only code that mattered was the loyalty of his inner circle. He even had an insurance policy, one designed to keep him a step ahead of the federal agents charged with tracking cybercrime: For the past four years, Albert had been working as an informant for the Secret Service, helping federal agents to identify and bust other rogue hackers. His double life as a snitch gave him an inside look at how the feds try to safeguard the nation’s computer data — and reinforced his own sense of superiority. “Psychologically,” his sister later told a judge, “it was feeding an obsession that in the end would become my brother’s downfall.”
I felt like the outcome of the story was less interesting than the details, but if you’re fascinated by psychology, and crime, and the internet it’s still worth a read.
We write to you today with the overwhelming concern that an innocent person could be executed in Georgia tonight
Six former corrections officials wrote Georgia Corrections Officials and Governor Nathan Deal asking that the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles reconsider the execution of Troy Davis:
We write to you as former wardens and corrections officials who have had direct involvement in executions. Like few others in this country, we understand that you have a job to do in carrying out the lawful orders of the judiciary. We also understand, from our own personal experiences, the awful lifelong repercussions that come from participating in the execution of prisoners. While most of the prisoners whose executions we participated in accepted responsibility for the crimes for which they were punished, some of us have also executed prisoners who maintained their innocence until the end. It is those cases that are most haunting to an executioner.
As of now, the execution has been postponed pending review from the Supreme Court.
Update: The Supreme Court Rejects the stay of execution.
(thanks, Tim)
Unlike Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Minority Report” or the film inspired by the novel, the program relies on algorithms, and not mutants to predict the likelihood of something happening
The police department in Santa Cruz has employed predictive algorithms to reduce burglaries and car break-ins.
The heart of the program is the belief that criminals often commit a second or third crime in the same location and the same time as a first successful crime. For example, if a burglar is successful breaking into a home at 2 p.m. in a certain neighborhood because no one is home, the criminal will use that experience to do it again to another house in the same neighborhood around the same time.
In the case of Santa Cruz, on California’s central coast and home to a University of California campus, that would be about four days later.
The algorithm knows this because Mohler has fed eight years of data on crimes in Santa Cruz into the algorithm.
Now you know, and I guess, so do the criminals.
