Many of the must-have homeowner amenities considered an essential feature are no longer to be found on modern homes. No longer are buildings including such once-essential features as coal cellars, lightning rods, fallout shelters or murder tunnels.
And remember: A murder tunnel is completely different than a corpse hatch.
Remember the spider man of Denver and the Japanese woman that secretly lived in a man’s cabinet for a year without him knowing?
Well, the wackiest state in the union manages to one up that one:
A Louisiana man has been arrested after a 15-year-old Florida girl’s parents found he had been living in their daughter’s bedroom closet for more than a month after he met the teen online two years ago and traveled to meet her for sex.
Jonathan Rossmoine, 36, was arrested and charged with multiple sex crimes Sunday after the child’s parents learned he had been secretly living in her bedroom at their family home in Spring Hill, Hernando County.
Rossmoine allegedly confessed to traveling from Louisiana to Florida on multiple occasions to have sex with the child, who described the 36-year-old as her boyfriend.
Police said he then moved into the girl’s room in August, where he would hide out from her parents in the closet and emerge when they left the house.
Even creepier: It’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened, a father found a 42-year old man hiding in his 12-year old daughter’s closet:
See also: Jack Vance’s Bad Ronald.
So they next time your children ask you to check their closet for monsters, remember that there are some in human form…
A new National Book Auction/Worth Auctions notice came in via email, and it made me wonder what happened to the legal case against owner David Hall for defrauding a consignee. It turns out he pled guilty back in February:
Local auctioneer David Hall was again in court on Monday to accept a plea for cheating a Tompkins County man out of $227,000.
Hall, a resident of Spencer, plead guilty to second-degree Grand Larceny, a class C felony, for taking items on consignment valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars and not paying out the proceeds to the consigner after the items sold at auction.
The victim in the most recent case, as part of a saga of lawsuits brought against the auctioneer for defrauding customers, consigned thousands of his late brother’s items to Hall’s Freeville-based company Worth Auctions and National Book Auctions back in Feb. 2017.
Hall was indicted on the second-degree grand larceny charge in August. Though there are sales records from auctions throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Hall allegedly only ever paid out the seller $50,000 of the $325,000 he made selling the items. As part of the plea, Hall must pay full restitution in the sum of $227,100 to the victim.
Hall faces a heavy financial penalty, as well as possible jail time. Grand Larceny in the second degree carries a maximum possible period of incarceration of 15 years. Hall is due for sentencing in Tompkins County Court on April 2, at 1 p.m.
In May, Hall was ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution after it was found that he had defrauded more than 100 consumers since 2015 following a case prosecuted by the New York Attorney General’s Office.
I cannot find any update on sentencing. Maybe that’s another thing delayed due to the Wuhan coronavirus…
It looks like we have another massive book piracy site, https://full-english-books.net.
Here’s the WhoIs information:
Domain Name: FULL-ENGLISH-BOOKS.NET
Registry Domain ID: 2298584626_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.namesilo.com
Registrar URL: http://www.namesilo.com
Updated Date: 2019-06-10T04:26:19Z
Creation Date: 2018-08-17T17:40:19Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-08-17T17:40:19Z
Registrar: NameSilo, LLC
Registrar IANA ID: 1479
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@namesilo.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.4805240066
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Name Server: ARNOLD.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
Name Server: ZITA.NS.CLOUDFLARE.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned
Among the writers they appear to have ripped off are:
Among many, many others.
I’m no longer a member of SFWA, but those who are may want to pass this on to the legal committee…
This was bought up by a commenter on an older thread, but I thought it worth a post on its own, even if it falls into the “old news is so exciting” category.
National Books Auction owner David Hall was arrested for fraud by the New York State Police late last year:
David Hall, the long established auctioneer who runs National Book Auctions and Worth Auctions in Freeville, New York near Ithaca, has been arrested and charged with second degree grand larceny. This comes on the heels of persistent reports over the past several years of non-payment to consignors. On Ithaca.com a story on this development describes the indictment as “adding credence to the growing number of people in Tompkins County and across the country who say they’ve been cheated by his business.”
Such issues are hardly front page news as auction houses in every generation encounter such disputes as they maneuver between consignors and buyers, changing markets and occasional problems collecting from winning bidders. Almost all such issues are settled privately. It is rare for auctioneers and auction principals to be arrested.
Mr. Hall was taken into custody on November 19th on the charge that he handled the sale of an estate valued at over $500,000 and subsequently failed to fully pay the consignor.
He was remanded to the Tompkins County jail after arraignment and held on $100,000 cash bail or $200,000 property bond.
The investigation into Hall by the New York State Police began late last year, in which he was accused of selling an estate valued at over $500,000, but failed to pay what was owed to the original owner after the auction sale. Eventually, he began to pay back the money but by Monday afternoon [November 19th], when he turned himself in, he still allegedly owed the consignor over $200,000.
I didn’t hear about this when it happened, but it does explain why a lot of recent NBA auctions have seemed to have been filled with “junk lots” of little real interest.
I sent an email to NBA asking if there were any additional news on the case, but they haven’t written back, and their news page hasn’t been updated since January 3, 2016…
This is not exactly breaking news, but I stumbled across it looking for something else, and it ties into previous posts on Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints head Warren Jeffs.
Last year, his son, Lyle Steed Jeffs, skipped town before trial for food stamp fraud. The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for him.
So if you see this guy around:
Contacting the FBI would be very much worth your time.
Try not to kill anyone over cutting in line for a taco trick.
Just after bar-close at 2:38 a.m. on Sunday, May 8th, the Austin Police Department responded to a report of gunfire at what appears to be the Tortillas Hecha a Manos taco truck in Lanier Village, just south of Peyton Gin and North Lamar. When police arrived, they found 39-year-old Rigoberto Jose Castillo dead and three others injured, one critically.
You may be asking, what could have caused all this mayhem? As the story goes, it all began when someone allegedly cut in line for tacos.
According to witnesses, a fight started over who was in line for tacos first. Nobody appreciates the wait for a taco, but police say that Mr. Castillo took special exception to the alleged line-cutting when two men, Osiel Benitez Benitez, 44, and Juventino Benitez Carbajal, 38, allegedly attempted to order out of line.
Things escalated to fisticuffs between Rigoberto and Osiel Benitez, the police report says, leaving Benitez unconscious on the ground, before all hell broke loose. Police go on to claim that a moment later Carbajal went to his truck, pulled out a gun, and began firing into the group of patrons. In addition to Castillo’s death, three women were also injured.
It’s also a bad idea to try and cut in line for a taco trailer. Upside: You get your taco faster. Downside: Getting shot to death over tacos. Plus it’s just not polite…
(Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
Glancing through the top 25 films in the the IMDB Top 250 list, it occurred to me that most involved crime as the central subject, and a few more peripherally:
That’s 15 of the top 25 films which involve crime as either a primary or secondary feature.
Surely crime dramas offer plenty of conflict, but so do war movies, but none of them (save the SF/F entries, and Schindler’s List) make the list, nor do any sports films. (Perpetual favorite Casablanca, which would qualify as a war film, comes in at 30, while Saving Private Ryan comes in at 31.)
Anyone care to speculate on why crime dominates the top of the list?
Lee Israel has died. Who? She published a number of biographies, but that’s not what she’s best known for:
In the early 1990s, with her career at a standstill, she became a literary forger, composing and selling hundreds of letters that she said had been written by Edna Ferber, Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, Lillian Hellman and others. That work, which ended with Ms. Israel’s guilty plea in federal court in 1993, was the subject of her fourth and last book, the memoir “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” published by Simon & Schuster in 2008.
The techniques of her illicit craft sound quite interesting:
In a rented storage locker on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the writer Lee Israel kept a cache of antique typewriters: Remingtons and Royals, Adlers and Olympias. Each was tenderly curated, hung with a tag whose carefully lettered names — Edna, Dorothy, Noël, Eugene O’Neill, Hellman, Bogart, Louise Brooks — hinted at the felonious intimacy for which the machines were used.
When dealers started to suspect her she switched tactics.
By dealing in typed letters, Ms. Israel was obliged to copy only the signatures. This she did by tracing over the originals, first covertly in libraries and later in her Upper West Side apartment, originals in hand. For over time, after whispers among dealers about the authenticity of her wares made composing new letters too risky, Ms. Israel had begun stealing actual letters from archives — including the New York Public Library and the libraries of Columbia, Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities — and leaving duplicates in their place.
“She would go into these libraries and copy the letter in question, go back to her home and fake as best she could the stationery and fake the signature, and then she’d go back to the institution and make the switch,” David H. Lowenherz, a New York autograph dealer, said on Monday. “So she was actually not selling fakes: She was substituting the fakes and selling the originals.”
She was also a “feisty” alcoholic who couldn’t hold a day job.
Dead at 75.
(Hat tip: Elizabeth Hand’s Facebook page.)
From the annals of inexplicable crimes, here’s news that two 12-year old girls tried to murder a friend as a sacrifice for Slenderman.
You know, the entirely made-up CreepyPasta horror character.
It’s bad enough to be offered up as a human sacrifice to a real dark god, much less an Internet meme. It’s like a deranged bassist attempting to murder Harry Shearer so he can take Derek Smalls’ place in Spinal Tap…
(First video yanked, replacement inserted.)