Steve sends an E-Mail regarding Debra Knowlton, who starred in DMTC shows, principally in the early 90's:Not sure if I told you, but she unfortunately passed away March 17th of cancer. Her family donated all her costumes to us and said it was ok to post this on your blog. She was born Aug 20, 1953...include her shows in the post.
Steve
(exactly one year older than me to the minute...freaky)
ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - A crash attributed to a road-rage incident shut down northbound Interstate 25 near Rio Bravo Boulevard for nearly three hours today.
The crash occurred about 11:15 a.m. just north of the Rio Bravo on-ramp to I-25 and closed the lanes until about 2 p.m.
...The driver of a Silver Saturn told police the driver of a truck pulling a 31-foot travel trailer became enraged when the Saturn passed him as I-25 squeezed into a one-lane construction zone south of Rio Bravo.
From there the truck driver is alleged to have ridden the Saturn's bumper until he hit the car and sent it into a guardrail north of Rio Bravo.
At the same time the truck and trailer rolled over blocking all three traffic lanes. Water from a septic system also apparently spilled, and officers were initially concerned about propane tanks attached to the trailer.
Witnesses told investigating officers the truck driver seemed to be trying to kill the Saturn driver by driving aggressively and making had gestures before the crash.
The truck driver, Michael Waltenburg, about 64, was charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon (motor vehicle).
FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) - Two cousins charged with accidentally causing the largest wildfire in Arizona history have pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges after reaching an agreement with prosecutors.Today, Daily Kos remembered John McCain's comments last summer about illegals setting fires, and mocked him:
Caleb Malboeuf and David Malboeuf each face up to a year in jail and a $10,000 fine after entering pleas Tuesday in federal magistrate court.
John McCain's Mexican arsonists turned out to be not-so-MexicanI replied (in Daily Kos comments):
I think John McCain's comments may have been directed at the Monument fire, which was burning at the border in June, 2011, and not the Wallow or the Horseshoe 2 fires, which weren't. McCain deliberately stepped into the border controversies with his 'inflammatory' comments, so boo on him, but that's not say there aren't fire dangers created by illegals (among others, like militiamen) who set fires and light cigarettes in tinder-dry landscapes.Ah, well! You know politics! Never fail to club your opponent, whether for reasons justified, or off-point, or not even related.
Every weekday at noon inside a North Dallas shopping mall, the 43rd president of the United States sits down at his usual table in the food court with two plates of magic fries, a jumbo Mello Yellow and a grande chimichanga with extra queso. “When he first started showin’ up at the mall, people would always come over and ask for his autograph or whatever,” said Daryl Vanderveen, a 19-year-old cashier at Sbarro Pizza. “But now that he’s here so much nobody even looks up from their lunch.”
Sources interviewed for this article said that Mr. Bush spends at least eight hours of each day at the Preston Hollow Shopping Center, a popular retail destination near his home in suburban Dallas. “Other than that chimichanga lunch he doesn’t really have a set routine,” said one source. “Sometimes he’ll hang around Lenscrafters trying on glasses or head over to Abercrombie & Fitch and watch the girls fold pants. Last week I saw him inside Pottery Barn sleeping in a leather recliner.”
...When the president left office nearly three years ago, it was announced that he would establish a “Freedom Institute” and work full-time toward promoting democracy and human rights throughout the world. But some close friends and former advisors admit privately that Mr. Bush has not made progress on either front. “He told me he was going to dedicate the rest of his life to confronting tyranny,” said one prominent GOP fundraiser. “I’m not sure how you do that by hanging around the mall challenging strangers to games of Ms. Pac-Man.”
Los Angeles has a new, um, distinction.
It’s the No. 5 city in the world for sugar daddies – wealthy older men seeking “mutally beneficial relationships” with younger women, according to a poll released Tuesday by SeekingArrangement.com, a matchmaking website for the rich and randy.
And Los Angeles is No. 1 in the amount of money that sugar daddies lavish on their “sugar babies.” The average Angeleno shells out a generous $5,710 a month on his inamorata – or “sugar addiction,” as it’s known on SeekingArrangement.com.
According to the survey, 2.31 of every 1,000 men in Los Angeles is a sugar daddy, sporting an average income of $313,536 and a net worth topping $8 million.
San Francisco is the No. 1 sugar daddy city, with 3.51 of every 1,000 men laying claim to that status, according to SeekingArrangement.com, which says there are hundreds of thousands of active sugar daddies worldwide.
A friend goes to prison
In all the years I’ve been in journalism, I’ve never personally known a person who went to prison. This has given me the freedom to think the worst of such miscreants.
Of course they committed the crime. Of course they deserved to be locked up. Hurrah for the criminal justice system.
Only now there’s a twist. A friend of mine, Ned Roscoe, is going to the federal slammer.
When I first met Ned at a church social function nearly a dozen years ago, he was already notorious. His family owned the Cigarettes Cheaper! chain. Yes, Ned, an avowed non-smoker, was a high-volume tobacco merchant.
Worse yet, a libertarian tobacco merchant. For years, Cheaper! stores had assaulted customers with libertarian screeds printed on their shopping bags.
Ned Roscoe in the flesh did not come with an exclamation point. He was soft-spoken, impish, given to conversational flights of fancy that I found fascinating.
When Ned ran for governor of California in 2003 (this sounds improbable, but improbable is what you get with Ned), I spent a day as a reporter covering him on the campaign trail. We drove from one Cheaper! to another with Ned talking the whole time about public policy, classic literature and sundry musings.
Ned did not become governor — Arnold Schwarzenegger did — but our relationship evolved. We’d talk at least monthly after Sunday service.
About 10 years ago, the Cheaper! stores, of which Napa had two, disappeared overnight. Later, from news reports, I learned that the discount chain — 805 stores in 26 states —had financially imploded. Poof. They were all gone.
About the same time, Cheaper! was losing an expensive legal battle against the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. The ciggie behemoth crushed the discount vender.
I caught only bits and pieces in our Sunday sidewalk chats. Bad things were happening to Ned, but he remained outwardly unflappable, the devout father and family man.
Then came the federal indictment, followed last year by a guilty verdict of jaw-dropping proportion: 13 counts of bank fraud, 14 counts of false statements to a bank, one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud.
What the hell, Ned?
Ned knew what everyone in Napa was asking: Did you do it?
Just what was the “it”? Ned was found guilty of signing his name to inflated inventory evaluations that were submitted to a bank that had loaned millions to Cheaper! The effect was to prevent the bank from calling in loans as Cheaper!’s economic problems worsened.
While Ned was losing his home and facing years away from his wife and their three children, he continued to share shards of his life with me and many others. Not with bitterness, but philosophically and with humor.
In early February, Ned was sentenced in federal district court in San Jose to 60 months in prison. Improbably, the next day — the day after Armageddon — he and I went hiking in Tilden Park above Berkeley with a ranger whose forte was pointing out coyote scat.
The highlight of our outing? That was the moment Ned told the ranger he’d just been sentenced to prison. This news stopped the ranger in his tracks.
Ned does not feel guilty. A complex business-bank relationship went bad, but this should have been a civil matter, not criminal, he says. Further, no money was embezzled.
Because of his brash libertarianism and lifelong questioning of authority, Ned thinks forces conspired to finally put him in his place. “Someday you’ll get yours, Ned,” he quotes a childhood friend as saying.
When coming to terms with Ned and his legal smackdown, people split in their assessment of him. “There’s ‘nice Ned,’ but there’s also ‘nefarious Ned,’” he says. The FBI went with “nefarious Ned.”
I believe in nice Ned, the dedicated church volunteer and scoutmaster. The Ned who does Napa River cleanups on Earth Day. The Ned whose commitment to his family is inspirational.
To get ready for prison in May, Ned has read Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” While locked up, he plans to study engineering so when he gets out “I can speak with our Chinese overlords.”
This is a classic Ned line. Is he joking? Serious? A little of both?
If he’s a model prisoner, Ned’s 60-month sentence will shrink to 51 months. He’ll be out in August 2016.
I hope to be here to greet him.
DUBLIN — As an emblem of the modern Irish condition, Frank Buckley is almost too apt. Dead broke, he lives in a house made of money.
...Mr. Buckley, 50, calls the apartment — built from thousands of bricks of shredded, decommissioned cash (each brick contains, roughly, what used to be 50,000 euros) — the Billion Euro House. He reckons that about 1.4 billion euros actually went into it, but the joke, of course, is that it is worth simultaneously so much and so little.
...The house has lights — a company moved into the office upstairs and let Mr. Buckley tap in to its electric lines — and is surprisingly warm, despite having no heat. Money makes for good insulation, Mr. Buckley said.
He calls himself a hustler, and he seems to have a knack for personal reinvention. In the go-getting 1990s, he worked as a tour manager for musicians. Then he founded a charity — Sport Against Racism Europe — that received an 80,000 euro award from the government. The bottom fell out, the financing dried up and now he is on the dole, living on 188 euros a week — about $250 — in unemployment benefits.
...Living and sleeping amid all this money while having little himself has given Mr. Buckley plenty of time to ponder his, and Ireland’s, predicament.
“I’m one of many, many people,” he said. “I wouldn’t be on the same level as people in business, who owe millions. But the money I owe is the same as owing millions. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it.”
It was dubbed Arturo’s Desert Eagle, after 12-year-old Arturo Valdenegro, on whose model it was based, and was designed and built by Art Thompson, who previously helped design the B-2 stealth bomber. It boasts a 24-foot wingspan and may well be the largest paper airplane ever constructed.
A 15-foot test model was launched successfully in February and on March 21, after some problems with the larger model buckling under its own weight, a reinforced version was released at a height of 2703 feet by a Sikorsky helicopter. It reached speeds of up to 100 mph on its way down before crash landing.
Part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation empire employed computer hacking to undermine the business of its chief TV rival in Britain, according to evidence due to be broadcast by BBC1's Panorama programme on Monday.
...The witnesses allege a software company NDS, owned by News Corp, cracked the smart card codes of rival company ONdigital. ONdigital, owned by the ITV companies Granada and Carlton, eventually went under amid a welter of counterfeiting by pirates, leaving the immensely lucrative pay-TV field clear for Sky.
The allegations, if proved, cast further doubt on whether News Corp meets the "fit and proper" test required to run a broadcaster in Britain.
...Panorama's emails appear to state that ONdigital's secret codes were first cracked by NDS, and then subsequently publicised by the pirate website, called The House of Ill Compute – THOIC for short. According to the programme, the codes were passed to NDS's head of UK security, Ray Adams, a former police officer. NDS made smart cards for Sky. NDS was jointly funded by Sky, which says it never ran NDS.
...He says Adams sent him the ONdigital codes so that other pirates could use them to manufacture thousands of counterfeit smart cards, giving viewers illicit free access to ONdigital, then Sky's chief business rival.
Gibling says he and another NDS employee later destroyed much of the computer evidence with a sledgehammer. After that NDS continued to send him money, he says, until the end of 2008, when he was given a severance payment of £15,000 with a confidentiality clause attached.
...Gibling says that when fellow pirates found out in 2002 that he was being secretly funded by NDS, THOIC was hastily closed down and he was told by Adams's security unit to make himself scarce.
"We sledgehammered all the hard drives." He says he was told to go into hiding abroad.
...In 2002 Canal Plus, which supplied ONdigital with its smart card system, sued NDS in a US Court, alleging that NDS had hacked its codes. But no evidence about a link to ONdigital emerged: the case was dropped following a business deal under which Murdoch agreed to purchase some of Canal Plus's assets.
The dialogue: "If you're not wearing women's clothes, you shouldn't be using women's shampoo either. Here it is. A real man's shampoo. Biomen. Real men use Biomen."
The Sacramento Valley drought forecast is improving, but with the storm track largely staying to the north, the San Joaquin Valley drought forecast isn't. I liked the storm that came in on Sunday, because it spread itself out over most of the state, so at least everyone got something, but there is no assurance that pattern will continue.
Self, why is it that Awesome Sacramento Dancer Krystle Morales doesn't rule YouTube? She is Awesome, but she's hard to find online. Is life unfair, or what?It turns out that I wasn't looking hard enough. Here is Krystle (clearly identifiable at 0:18, and again at 4:43, with a trademark Red Rose on her sternum) dancing with her Awesome Crew, ICE Dance Company. I like everything she does, because she is Awesome!
Cheney, 71, had surgery Saturday at Inova Fairfax Hospital in Falls Church, Virginia.
He had been on the cardiac transplant list for more than 20 months, a statement from his office said.
"Although the former vice president and his family do not know the identity of the donor, they will be forever grateful for this lifesaving gift," it said.
The first of six meetings of Tyehimba's workshop at Step One Dance Studio was held on Saturday afternoon (2:30 - 4:00 p.m.). There's room for more folks: come down if you are available!
Tyehimba started with a kind of multi-media show, trying to compact 400 years of song, legend, and history into an hour and a quarter (with the remaining 15 minutes devoted to the drums). I don't think I could be tested on the material - more a welter of visual impressions than anything else - but one could begin to get a sense of the pastoral folks of West Africa and their traditions.
