The crank who wrote a letter to the paper calling me a disloyal Democrat a few weeks ago has now written a second letter to the editor, in which I am harangued for being a bicycle loving elitist who wants to get rid of cars downtown. I didn't respond the first time, but this time he's using my name.

I really, really don't want to get into it with this guy in public, but if I don't respond, is he just going to keep sending letters?

Can you photoshop his face on one of the guys from the competitive anal plugging scene of Everything Everywhere All at Once?

On the other hand, you're an elected official. Maybe you should be communicating with your unhappy constituents? You almost certainly write a lot better than he does, so responding in the letters allows you to publish a little position paper on whatever he's griping about.

Probably both raises your profile with and entertains voters, too.

Moby's idea is probably more sensible.

I'm not sure if it's feasible without an effects budget though.

Oh, he's not my constituent. He's from the suburbs and doesn't pay taxes in my city. He sure like to park here, though.

I'll probably end up doing what you say in 3, but it burns me to give the guy the satisfaction. He's mad at me because I called him out for sending menacing tweets about his Smith and Wesson to a Muslim woman and it got him in hot water with the county Dem party.

Do we really live in a world where you have to respond to a crank writing letters to the editor? Maybe "we" is doing too much work there.

Did I ever mention that my dad once was criticized by name on the radio for having a shitty yard. Which was true, because I was the one doing the yard work. But the critic's argument was that the poorly kept lawn proved general failure and thus an inability to serve a judge.

Anyway, probably not connected, but my dad made me spent a bunch of time watering the stupid lawn and then got a big promotion a couple of years later.

Shitty yard, nepotism, and child labor? Sounds like Judge Hick is unfit for the bench.

[spam removed]

Khaaaaaaaaaaan!

a bicycle loving elitist who wants to get rid of cars downtown

And the problem is?

The NYT wrote a long-ish article about the romance novelist/fake suicide discussed here a week or two ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/16/health/fake-death-romance-novelist-meachen.html

And the problem is?

I'm not a fucking elitist.

I went to my first rehearsal for trans choir last night (it's in San Francisco, and pretty brilliant to have it for people whose gender presentation and vocal range line up who knows how), and the first piece we sang, or squalled, was Duetto buffo di due gatti.

We got the sad and shocking news last night that a friend had been found, dead, in an area (rural, woods) in town that doesn't make any particular sense. Shocking but also I guess it should not be this shocking because: former colleague whose alcoholism (and later drug use though I don't know much about that) had led to him in his early 40s losing his job (professor in business school), his family (I'm guessing his kids are middle-school aged now), his home and all that. We were still vaguely in touch (he would send messages on Facebook or forward posts to me, but not, now that I check, for the last month). He was in the area still and rarely we would run into him in person so while we weren't close recently everyone kept hoping he could overcome his addictions. I think last spring was maybe the last time I ran into him in person. But before the turn in his life, we'd go camping together on local rivers and stuff like that. One of maybe 20 people at the university that I'd call a friend both inside and outside of work. We don't know any details and there's nothing in the papers. From the time frame of when people started posting "where are you" on his facebook page I would guess he died more than a week ago. We heard because the coroner had notified his father and people passed it on to us. I'm very much in the disbelief stage right now.

Very sorry for your loss, chill.

Oh god, how awful. I'm sorry.

Thinking of you, chill.

I'm sorry to hear about your friend. My thoughts for you and his family.

My furnace stopped working. To make matters worse, the super reliable and inexpensive repair person is out of town. The only thing that is making this not so terrible is that it is bizarrely warm for January in Columbus. Hurray for global warming!

LB, are you at all familiar with the 250 Water St case? Is the judge's decision that the Landmarks Board's action rose to the level of arbitrary-and-capricious defensible?

22: Our furnace stopped working last night, but it only needed a new battery in the thermostat.

So, someone pretending to be my uncle is trying to get me to buy $300 of Amazon gift cards.

Should my uncle or I do anything?

Apparently, my uncle's AOL account was hacked. Also, apparently AOL still has tech support.

23: I'm familiar and I've thought about the question, but I don't know the answer. The key point in the reasoning is that it's arbitrary and capricious for an agency to do one thing one time and a different thing the next time in the same situation, unless they express a reason for the change. That's what the judge says is his reason for making his decision, and he's right on the law.

It looks as if the commission did change its mind, so that's the first part of the facts; the question is whether the commission really didn't give any reason for the change, and that I don't know without reading the administrative record myself. It seems unlikely (to the unjaded layperson) that anyone could fuck up something that simple, where they just had to state a reason for their actions and there was a clear standard saying they had to. But agencies fuck that up all the time. On the other hand, NYS judges get the facts of cases before them wrong all the time too -- there could perfectly well have been a sufficiently stated reason in the determination that the judge chose to ignore. So I genuinely don't know.

(This is precisely the question I am best fitted to answer, except that I don't know. If I've ever said "I'm not that kind of lawyer" about a different sort of legal question? This, almost exactly, is the kind of lawyer I am. The only thing that could point it more squarely at me would be if the facts were about shellfish or sewage, and then I couldn't answer because I'd be working on the case.)

Is there a way to see the count of paid substack subscribers a writer there has? Someone mentioned an estimate for MY that seemed high after looking at this, I was looking for Ted Gioia, who I like. Shocking and disappointing to see that M Tracey looks to be doing OK there, what a turd.

28: Thanks. It looks like these are the specific findings of the LPC. Two pages but a lot of text crammed in, mostly explaining that the development fits with the historic character of the area and does not constitute a high-rise incursion. ISTM the judge focused on "they always rejected high-rises in the past and don't say why the change", and rejected their action because they didn't explicitly say "we rejected high-rises before but this one is different because A, B, and C," even though they did write A, B, and C, just without comparing and contrasting to past decisions.

If I'm right, an appeals court could easily find a way to overturn if they feel like it.

I was just coming here to say that I overcame my laziness and looked up the findings, and I think you're right, and the judge was wrong, but it was a close call. If the commission were my client, I'd be cursing them for not having explicitly distinguished the prior decisions, but a judge without his thumb on the scale should have found those reasons sufficient. That is, prior decisions were "no, because the skyscraper will visually overwhelm the historic district", this determination said "this specific skyscraper will not visually overwhelm the historic district" and that should have been enough. What will the First Department do on appeal? No idea.

Speaking of weird New York law things, is there some state-specific reason that Hochul suing the state senate to force a floor vote on LaSalle makes sense?

Not that I know of. On the other hand, Jake, it's Chinatown New York State, so it might work through some weird behind the scenes pressure mechanism.

Thanks. It certainly doesn't seem to make sense, but then nothing about this nomination does.

Hey, Minivet, are you familiar with the California Planning and Development Report? (Or is anyone else?)

I don't know how much national play this has gotten but our local crime drama is a woman who disappeared and it's become more and more obvious the husband is the prime suspect and also that he's a fucking moron. I present to you the list of google searches the prosecutor claims he made around the time she disappeared:

Dec. 27

"What's the best state to divorce for a man"
Jan. 1

4:55 a.m.: "How long before a body starts to smell"
4:58 a.m.: "How to stop a body from decomposing"
5:20 a.m.: "How to embalm a body"
5:47 a.m.: "10 ways to dispose of a dead body if you really need to"
6:25 a.m.: "How long for someone to be missing to inherit"
6:34 a.m.: "Can you throw away body parts"
9:29 a.m.: "What does formaldehyde do"
9:34 a.m.: "How long does DNA last"
9:59 a.m.: "Can identification be made on partial remains"
11:34 a.m.: "Dismemberment and the best ways to dispose of a body"
11:44 a.m.: "How to clean blood from wooden floor"
11:56 a.m.: "Luminol to detect blood"
1:08 p.m.: "What happens when you put body parts in ammonia"
1:21 p.m.: "Is it better to throw crime scene clothes away or wash them "
Jan. 2

12:45 p.m.: "Hacksaw best tool to dismember"
1:10 p.m.: "Can you be charged with murder without a body"
1:14 p.m.: "Can you identify a body with broken teeth"
Jan. 3

1:02 p.m.: "What happens to hair on a dead body"
1:14 p.m.: "What is the rate of decomposition of a body found in a plastic bag compared to on a surface in the woods"
1:20 p.m.: "Can baking soda make a body smell good"

36: He was arrested and he,d without bail. His father was chief of neurology at MGH which feels kind of salacious. Also, he sought psychiatric treatment at an expensive psychodynamic long-term hospital and then stiffed them. The lawyers sued; I can't help thinking that the shrinks must have missed his sociopathy.

Whoops - the Brigham , not MGH,

12:01 a.m.: "If I told investigators you had a beautiful body, could it be held against me in a court of law"

"Can baking soda make a body smell good"

That's written right on the box. Anyway, our local doctor who murdered his wife with cyanide that he purchased through his university credit card seems stupider.

39: Depends on whether the Bellamy Brothers are on the jury.

35: No. At a glance it looks like it might have some useful stuff, but it also looks geared to planners which is a bit of its own culture. (I'm sour on the whole profession's raison d'etre, but there are plenty of good ones of course.)

cpdr is a longstanding paid subscription publication geared at planners and land use lawyers. they are developer slanted bc that is who pays for subscriptions but they are solid re: content - ignore any whiff of editorializing and in the balance they are accurate reporters.

36 is darkly hilarious, but, honestly, what sort of person doesn't know all that sort of thing already?

https://abc7chicago.com/brian-walshe-arraignment-walsh-charged-with-murder-arrest-cohasset/12715849

There was blood in the basement of the Walshes' Cohasset, Massachusetts home, along with a bloody knife and second knife, prosecutors said. Police also found a heavy duty large tarp and plastic liners. Police recovered 10 trash bags, containing blood-stained items including towels, rags, slippers, cleaning agents, carpets, a Prada purse, a COVID-19 vaccine card in the name of Ana Walshe and a hacksaw.

Ze criminal, n'est-ce pas, always makes one mistake of ze most tiny, but ze most fatal.

The vaccine really does kill.

If Walshe wasn't a middle-class white guy, he'd probably be in real trouble now.

36 explains the reddit clip that I couldn't play because kids always come running over to snoop anytime I play something with sound. (I think it was r/WatchPeopleDieInside and the caption was something about the defendant while his list of search queries is read outloud.)

My favorite was the "...if you really need to" because that probably gives different results from "10 ways to dispose of a dead body when it's not really essential but would still be fun"

OMG. We have a senior faculty member that bullies our lecturers. I always want to go raging pitbull on him, but the lecturers explicitly ask me not to because they are worried about retribution. Here is what happened on the first day of class:

Lecturer is teaching her class - first day, remember. Introductions, forming impressions, trying to bond. Senior faculty member interrupts with his entire class in tow. Says he doesn't like his classroom and wants this classroom instead. Points out some empty rooms that she can move her class to. I'm guessing she politely protested and offered up some other outcomes, but it quickly became clear that the only option that would minimize disruptions was to gather up her entire class, log out of the computer, etc etc, and go to a new classroom and re-establish the flow on the spot.

WHAT THE UTTER FUCK.

(For the record, every single semester I have classrooms that I don't like, because I require lots of extra boards. I always go to the registrar, where the super nice employee there looks over the classrooms and finds me something more suitable. This is an easy-to-solve problem that does not involve displacing anyone else, and certainly not during their first class actual meeting time.)

That seems like he should be quietly killed for the good of the school, his students, and humanity generally.

I am apparently on a list of Pennsylvania voters who answer the phone. I just got a poll about how enthusiastic I would be about a national unity ticket with a Democratic candidate and a Republican one on the same ticket.

||

SP - I'm going to e-mail you about something this evening. Probably won't be from my BG account at yahoo.

|>

OT: two people, Alec Baldwin and the armourer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, just got charged with involuntary manslaughter over that thing where the cinematographer got shot a couple of years ago. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64337761
I think the subject came up here back when the shooting happened but I can't find it...

He really should have stopped after Pearl Harbor.

53: Was just coming to say. NMM to... I was going to say Baldwins' criminal record, but he pled guilty to a harassment charge in 2019.

54: He did that too? I didn't realize he was that old.

Will be interesting to find out what happened, I'm really surprised that Baldwin is being charged and I wonder what the facts are that lead to that decision. You'd think that this wouldn't really be the responsibility of the actor, but this is an unusual situation where he's also a producer so I can certainly imagine his role here is not that of a typical actor. But still it's a big surprise to me.

Involuntary manslaughter just requires negligence, not intent. They're charging the armorer with the same.

Ah ok, reports seem to be saying the charges are around his role as producer and unrelated to him happening to be the actor holding the gun.

Though as someone says on Reddit: "It's odd that 0 of the 10 other producers have been charged though."

Really? That seems super weird if he was the only producer charged. Even if there's some sense in which he had management responsibility, I can't imagine that Alec Baldwin was genuinely the person actually managing events on the set -- I'd think if you were charging producers you'd be charging all of them.

Crossed with 60. Yeah, I bet it's either as the trigger puller, there's some specific management thing he did (like he's the guy who brought live ammo on set or something, not that I have any reason to think that's true), or the prosecutor is celebrity-hunting.

One really important bit of extra info: "the film's first assistant director David Halls has agreed to plead guilty to the charge of negligent use of a deadly weapon." I wonder whether they all had the chance to plead out or not? Does this mean Halls was the least responsible (and hence offered a lower charge) or most responsible (and hence least likely to want to go to trial)? I do remember when we discussed it at the time that a lot of people thought that the first assistant director was the point person for these kind of safety issues.

63: At least compared to Baldwin, probably didn't think he could afford the kind of lawyers that he would need? Maybe also not as confident he could charm a jury?

64: I was also thinking about the comparison with the armorer, Gutierrez-Reed, who is facing the same charges as Baldwin.

This also seems odd:

"Film director Joel Souza was also wounded in the shooting, but prosecutors said no charges would be filed in connection with that."

I mean, presumably negligent wounding is also a crime.

Maybe not in New Mexico.

If you have a situation where A negligently loads a weapon with live rounds and gives it to B, and B negligently shoots someone with it, there might not be much room for A or B to plead down to a lower charge. C, who just negligently didn't put proper safeguards around weapons and ammo on set, might be a bit further removed from the act?

Perhaps they found sufficient testimony that Baldwin was personally warned the gun safety standards were too lax.

I hadn't realised that Souza was actually shot first. The bullet went through him and killed Hutchins, not the other way round.

There's also an aside in the CNN report saying that there will be no charges against Souza either. Maybe they thought it would be just too complicated to get into an argument about whether Souza could be guilty of negligently wounding himself.

66: Now I wish I could remember the one weird thing I once knew about NM law, which is that they have a different take on double jeopardy than most states. I remember that the story involved this case: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/nm-court-of-appeals/1440575.html

Interesting:

"He's being charged as both. He was the actor that pulled the trigger, so certainly he's charged as an actor, but also as a producer he also had a duty to make sure that the set was safe," said Carmack-Altwies, noting that people on set had complained about the lax safety and there had been accidental misfires prior to this fatal incident.

It seems to me you should have a duty to not point a gun at someone else except in a scene, so that makes sense.

Anyway, I lost $10 because I had "Stephen" in the office pool for which Baldwin would shot someone first.

I guess sometimes you can do worse by not googling and just going with what you know.

Between this and them arresting that guy who was shooting at Democrats' houses in Albuquerque, it's been a big week for New Mexico criminal justice stories.

I don't think they ever caught the guy who attacked a local Democratic PA House candidate.