Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind

The Case of the Fake Fed

The town of Gerald, Missouri was one of many small towns struggling to overcome the scourge that is methamphetamine. So when a stranger with a Federal badge came to town, the higher-ups welcomed him with open arms and the arrest rate went up. WAY up. Then everything came crashing down, as the NYT reported yesterday:

Those whose homes were searched, though, grumbled about a peculiar change in what they understood — mainly from television — to be the law.

They said the agent, a man some had come to know as “Sergeant Bill,” boasted that he did not need search warrants to enter their homes because he worked for the federal government.

But after a reporter for the local weekly newspaper made a few calls about that claim, Gerald’s antidrug campaign abruptly fell apart after less than five months. Sergeant Bill, it turned out, was no federal agent, but Bill A. Jakob, an unemployed former trucking company owner, a former security guard, a former wedding minister and a former small-town cop from 23 miles down the road.

Mr. Jakob, 36, is now the subject of a criminal investigation by federal authorities, and he is likely to face charges related to impersonating a law enforcement officer, his lawyer said.

There are a ton of questions, like why Jakob would go to such lengths to impersonate a federal agents, how so many were taken in, and who gets first dibs on turning this into a novel. (Thanks to SP for the link)

This is the Wrongest Thing Ever

Okay, so I am a negligent hockey fan who doesn't even live in Canada anymore. But HOW HOW HOW can "Hockey Night in Canada" exist without its theme song? This is an outrage!

A "saddened" CBC formally announced Friday it is dropping the popular theme song to Hockey Night in Canada because of a contract dispute with its composer - but the death knell for the country's "second national anthem" hasn't sounded just yet.

Shortly after issuing a statement expressing his "huge disappointment" that no deal could be reached with composer Dolores Claman and her Toronto agent John Ciccone before a 5 p.m. deadline, CBC Sports executive director Scott Moore told Canwest News Service the network would "never say never" to restarting negotiations if there was a chance of keeping the famous trumpet fanfare on the air.

"If, in a future time, they would like to come back to the table . . . I guess it's an important enough cultural icon that we would consider it," Moore said. "You can never say never."

And so the long-running feud over the theme's use on the country's flagship sports program appears to be headed for overtime - even after the CBC declared an end to the 40-year tradition that has produced what is probably the country's second best-known tune after O Canada.

So with the theme song allegedly gone, now CBC can go ahead with some new contest inviting prospective songwriters to come up with a new theme. I predict the network will magically find some money to pay Claman and the theme will be back on the airwaves by October. The Winnipeg Sun's Tom Brodbeck agrees:

It's not a matter of if the pointy-headed bureaucrats will sign a new deal to ensure Canada's second national anthem is used to open CBC's first televised NHL game next season, it's a matter of when.

Canadians don't rally around many issues with the kind of rage required to effect change at the national level.

We're a lethargic, accepting lot most of the time, not easily moved to storm the Bastille with pitchforks and baseball bats.

But take away our hockey sticks -- or cancel the Hockey Night in Canada theme song, same thing -- and a March of a Million Hockey Nuts sporting Don Cherry masks will descend upon Parliament Hill with more vengeance than an angry mob of Winnipeggers about to lose their NHL franchise.

Cancelling the HNIC theme song is like telling Canadians they can't drink beer anymore. You might as well try to ban street hockey.

Except, um, they did in my hometown....but the sentiment still applies.

You cannot top this headline

But the story comes damn, damn close:

A JAPANESE man puzzled by food mysteriously disappearing from his refrigerator got a shock when he discovered a woman had been living in his home for months without permission, police said today.

The 57-year-old man who lives alone - or so he thought - in the western city of Fukuoka installed a security camera and called the police when he saw images of someone walking around his home while he was out.

"We searched the house in the man's presence. We found the woman in the closet," said a local police spokesman.

The woman, named as 58-year-old Tatsuko Horikawa, was found in a flat storage space only just big enough for a person to squeeze into lying down.

And the kicker? She had been there a year, more or less, "but not all the time." Uh, yeah...

Department of Twisted Logic

The Joseph Fritzl case in Austria is a horrifying train wreck that I can't stop reading about. But today's story takes the cake, what with Fritzl complaining about poor media coverage from jail:

His criticism of the international media's reporting was published in the German tabloid Bild Zeitung.

"I could have killed them all," reads the front page headline of today's Bild Zeitung. And Fritzl, dubbed a monster by the Austrian media, told his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, "I'm not a monster," according to today's report.

Fritzl is sharing his prison cell with another man who is serving time for taking part in a shooting incident. The men have a TV set and a radio available to them in their cell.

Ah, the delusions of psychopathic grandeur...

Scam Artists in the Literary World

Or, to get all 1337-speak, my reaction upon reading this LA Times article by Scott Timberg was on par with OMGWTFBBQ!!!!111!!!:

With the explosion of computer viruses, identity theft and Nigerian e-mail scams over the last few years, it may have been inevitable that bookstores got a part of the action. And slowly but surely, stores are being contacted by people claiming to be someone they're not and trying to persuade the bookstore staff to send them money. It's bewildering to a community that operates largely on trust and personal relationships.

"It's an annoyance," said Jennifer Ramos, who handles the more than 300 author events a year at Pasadena's Vroman's Books. "It was funny at first, but it seems wrong now."

This tale is typical: [Skylight Books manager Kerry] Slattery was heading out of the store, not long ago, to see a movie down the street when a staffer handed her the phone. The caller addressed her like an old friend: "Oh -- thank God I got you before you left," he began.

The call came from someone who said he was the Los Angeles blogger and first novelist Mark Sarvas, who was reading at the store in a few days and seemed to be in a pinch. His car had been impounded, he needed money to get it back and he needed it right away.

"I thought, 'Why isn't he calling his wife?' " recalled Slattery. "But maybe he can't reach anybody, maybe he had an extra drink. . . . It never occurred to me that it wasn't him.

Well, it wasn't, but Slattery was thisclose to wiring $200 to the resourceful scammer, just one of several hitting West Coast bookshops. "We all think that we're smart about things,"Slattery tells Timberg. "There is this sense that bookstores have this special relationship with authors, that they help them out. And if it had really been Mark Sarvas I definitely would have done it."

The baby with two faces

Yes, I love these kinds of stories. And this one is both a doozy and heartwarming:

A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali's facial features are duplicated — she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

"My daughter is fine — like any other child," said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.

Lali has caused a sensation in the dusty village of Saini Sunpura, 25 miles east of New Delhi. When she left the hospital, eight hours after a normal delivery on March 11, she was swarmed by villagers, said Sabir Ali, the director of Saifi Hospital.

"She drinks milk from her two mouths and opens and shuts all the four eyes at one time," Ali said.

Naturally the story is being linked all around the blogosphere, but this post, from Fracas, struck me as particularly appropriate:

I couldn’t help but think to myself, how different things would be had she been born here in Canada or the United States. Chances are, the first thought would have been horror, followed by an immediate, “Who and where can we have this surgically corrected?” We who worship celebrity, perfection and a media that insists on impressing upon our own young that if their nose is less than perfect, they must fix it; if their boobs are not big enough they must inflate them… and we who choose to irrationally believe that all the “beautiful people” on magazines are actually that perfect without any help from the re-touch artist, would no doubt be traumatized to have given birth to a child with two sets of eyes, two noses and two pairs of lips.

No kidding. It remains to be seen how healthy Lali will remain but right now, she's pretty damn beautiful.

Good Thing No Foul Play Was Involved

Because if this was fiction it sure as hell would be:
 

Terry Cottle and Sonny Graham never met, but the two men shared two very important things -- a heart and a wife.

They also died the same way: Cottle, 12 years ago from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the Summerville home he shared with his wife, Cheryl; the 69-year-old Graham died the same way last week outside his Vidalia, Georgia, home that he shared with his wife, Cheryl.

When Cottle died at age 33, his organs were donated. Graham got Cottle's heart and nine years later, he married Cottle's widow. Harvey says the former golf tournament director had used a shotgun and no foul play was suspected in his death.

I fully expect to see this on either Law and Order or in a crime novel, stat.

Somehow Appropriate

I've been on a bit of an international pop star kick of late, and the recent death of Jules Dassin had me hunting around on YouTube for clips of his son Joe, a massive star in France in the 1970s whose life was cut short in 1980 at the age of 42 thanks to heart attack number five.

Anyway, chances are "Les Champs Elysees" stuck in your head at some point in your life, but this is my kitschy fave of Joe Dassin's work right now: Something tells me Freddy Mercury saw this...

Beware of Nude

Though the story's headline is far, far funnier:

LANCASTER, Pa. (AP) - Police in Pennsylvania say they've arrested a naked man who ran amok on Friday, attacking businesses near a resort area.

A supermarket and the nearby Willow Valley Resort hotel are assessing the damage. Authorities say some office space at the hotel was trashed, a forklift was driven into an interior wall, and an overhead sewer pipe was damaged. Police say the man then entered a nearby market, and threw a 300-pound pizza oven to the floor. Among other equipment damaged in the incident -- which was captured on surveillance cameras -- was a $90,000 meat-wrapping machine.

The 28-year-old suspect had reportedly been a guest at the resort.

Pictures of his, ah, misdeeds are here.

I Blame Daylight Savings Time for This

Normally I don't blog much about politics and current events, but I'm still picking up my jaw from the Spitzer scandal, like just about everybody else. For example, it was topic one among those working at the mail drop where I make regular visits to pick up books that have just arrived and they never talk about political-related stuff. But when the story is about variations on a theme of "Spitzer WTF", no wonder people are paying attention (not to mention that "Client Number Nine" has now been instantly enshrined as a phrase, with a Searchers-like parody in store, no doubt.)

News stories will be appearing round-the-clock for the next few days and I hope some of them answer my burning question: what's Spitzer really hiding? Because his quick admission smacks of a McGreevey-like smokescreen, where sex scandal may well mask greater financial improprieties. And will the NYT's vigilant sniffing uncover the whole story, or is this destined to stay a tawdry, if highly addictive story with many more twists and turns in store?

UPDATE: This is why it is good to have an older brother who can write rhyming song lyrics at a near-instant.