Coffee heat rising

w00t! Vacated!!

by

So this morning I get back on the phone to the county attorney’s office. First the woman I reach can’t find the cases…turns out she hit a wrong numeral in her search. Then we discover the perps have got NEW case numbers. She succeeds in tracking down all four case numbers…and, it develops, they’ve been vacated!

“Soooo,” say I, ever suspicious, “what does that mean?”

“Well,” says she, “probably they took a plea deal.”

“So I don’t have to show up at all?”

“Nope!”

Hooo-rah!

“Thank you very much,” I say. “And if there’s anything I can do to help out if needed, let me know,”

“Bake us some cookies?” she says. “Just kidding!”

🙂

How to Be a “Victim”

by

As you may recall, after the late, great garage invasion Sheriff Joe and the county prosecutor’s office declared me a “victim” of a couple of gang-banging thugs. The county has an involved victim assistance program, supposedly designed to reassure, protect, and aid victims of crimes.

Yeah.

Beginning way back in November, Sheriff Arpaio’s office started issuing subpoenas — consistently sent to the wrong address, despite repeated corrections from me — demanding that I show up at the trial of one or the other of these two guys. He even sent a deputy to my door to serve one of these papers, all of which inform me that if  I’m not there at 8 in the morning on thus-and-such a day, I will be jailed, and that I have to sit there until a judge dismisses me. Each one has to be answered, by return mail, in the affirmative, to the effect that yes, I have received the latest piece of paper and yes, I promise to show up there, and yes, I know I will be thrown in jail if I don’t show up. I’ve probably received about a dozen of these, partly because they send two or three at a time and partly because the trial has repeatedly been postponed.

It looks like the trial is finally going to happen this Wednesday.

At this point, they’re trying two of the thugs…interestingly, last fall they said one of them had copped a plea. So why we’re having to jump through double hoops is unclear. But that’s far from the most ridiculous aspect of the interminable series of subpoenas.

Silliest aspect? I can’t even begin to identify either of these characters.

One never came anywhere near me or my house, and so I’ve never seen him in my life. The other hunkered down in my garage, on the other side of a dead-bolted door. Two dead-bolted doors, actually, since I locked myself inside my office when it became clear the gent was out there. The only glimpse I got of him was of the back of his head, seen from way across the street as they dragged the guy, kicking and biting, to the paddy wagon.

The only help I can give the prosecutor is to say whether the shirt, the rubber gardening shoes, and an old straw hat that he used to try to disguise himself as a lawn man actually belong to me. This identification could easily be done with a deposition, without dragging me into the courtroom and without exposing me to the attention of the two thugs’ fellow gang-bangers. And without making it obvious, in public, that I live here alone.

The subpoenas punctiliously delete the “victim’s” address. As though they didn’t already know where I live! Hey, folks…they were here. And the night after our boy was released from jail, he came back to retrieve his gun from my back yard — he left the back gate hanging open as a calling card.

Try as I might, I cannot get a straight story from the prosecutor’s office as to how much of my time this fiasco is going to consume. Am I going to be down at the court all day Wednesday? Can I expect this will go on for several days? How much is it going to cost me to park my car downtown all day long? Can I bring a computer so I can do some work while I’m killing time down there? Will they let me take a computer into the courtroom?

I’m supposed to give a presentation at 7:30 on Thursday morning. And since I’m standing in for the group’s president while he recovers from bypass surgery, I have to be there with the organization’s checkbook so as to pay for the Thursday breakfast.

At this point, I have no idea whether I’ll be able to do that or not.

It’s better than last November’s subpoena, which would have had me docked for at least a day of teaching pay — and since my classes met twice a week, that would have meant loss of a fourth of a two-week paycheck. But it’s still a nuisance.

Today I’m going to call the prosecutor’s office again — they’re very nice people; they just don’ t know anything — and if I can’t get a straight story, I guess I’ll have to cancel the presentation and try to get one of the other group members to emcee the meeting and pay for breakfast.

I’m starting to lose patience with this. It’s gone on and on, and it shows some potential to put me at risk, since you can be sure anything I say about either one of the two sh!theads, even “yes, that’s my shirt,” is not going to be appreciated by his fellow sh!theads. And whether they care about their pal or not, they will now know I’m an elderly woman who lives alone, making me a prime target for burglary and possibly other mayhem.

Obviously, the prosecutor’s office needs to get crime victims and witnesses to show up at the courtroom to testify against perps. And that’s fine — I’m happy to be present and to help out to the extent that I can. The issue here is that I can’t help much, or possibly even at all. And the endless badgering from the sheriff’s office has begun to annoy. I’m tired of the threats. And really, I’d like to get a straight story about how much of my time will be absorbed by this — that shouldn’t be too much to ask.

It’s beginning to feel like victimizing the victim. I’m not looking forward to whatever happens next…

A New Trend We Could Do Without

by

In this week’s round-up, 101 Centavos comments on the nasty diatribes recently promulgated at not one but two PF blogsites, Financial Uproar and Control Your Cash. I’ll refrain from dignifying these bullies with links, but if you’d like to read the offending posts, Centavos does link to them in the current Monday Morning Fish Wrap.

Financial Uproar proprietor Nelson is offended because he feels Finance Fox’s often derivative style amounts to plagiarism. What sets him off is a series of poorly done paraphrases that lack links back to their apparent sources. He works himself up into a fine state of high dudgeon, growing nastier and nastier as he gets more excited.

Much of the resulting rant is unjustified: you can’t copyright an idea, and so unless the person has lifted a very distinctive, original concept, simply rehashing the same thought is not really plagiarism. In the case of the passage Nelson thinks Finance Fox plagiarized from Financial Uproar, the accusation is specious: the allegedly lifted idea that you can have fun without spending money is so commonplace as to be an eye-glazer. Here in Editorland, we call that a cliché. If you’re going to spew clichés, you can’t be surprised when you run across the same clichés somewhere else. That something is commonplace is what makes it a cliché.

The name-calling rant is graceless and uncalled-for — to say nothing of potentially actionable. It makes for an unpleasant read, and it reflects as badly on its author as it does on its target. Actually, IMHO, it reflects worse on the classless author than on the victim.

However, in the Classless Department, Control Your Cash easily outclasses Nelson. Spewing mean-minded epithets, this site’s proprietor, one Betty Kincaid, slavers on and on and interminably on about an obscure blog called Plunged in Debt. Why? Well, she doesn’t like it that the site’s author, Catherine, went deep into hock to get a degree in biology (a subject Ms. Kincaid, a real estate lady, believes is worthless, evidently never having heard the term “pre-med”) (yes, I do use the word “lady” in a deprecating way here…wanna make something of it?). Nor, speaking of PC Nazism, does she like it that Catherine uses “hubby” as an affectionate sobriquet for her husband.

Having set up the flimsiest of all possible straw men, Ms. Kincaid proceeds to waste 1,724 words in tearing it down.

Her endless rant gets nastier and meaner and more pointless as  it rambles on. One wonders if its author has had her rabies shot.

Then, as if to add further annoyance to this tedious exercise, she wraps it up with a plug for her own self-published book!

LOL! How cheesy can you get?

It is entirely true, as Mochimac has observed, that the PF blogosphere has pretty much run out of things to say. There are, after all, only so many ways one can repeat things like “get a job,” “get out of debt and stay out of debt,” “work hard,” “have a budget,” “live frugally,” “prepare for the unexpected,” and “save for retirement.” Those things have now been said in as many ways as it is possible to say them, thank you.

Those of us who wish to keep blogging in perpetuity do need to find some new subject matter. But thuggery is not that subject matter. This kind of behavior is nothing more nor less than mean-minded bullying. It’s not useful and it’s not funny. It’s just plain abuse.

Who needs it?

The Identity Thief at the Doorstep

by

So I’m wending my way to physical therapy through the neighborhood when I stop at the stop sign at the corner of Picturesque Lane and North Feeder Street. The garage for the house at on the southeast corner of Picturesque and North Feeder flanks the living quarters, so that there’s no windows on the west side.

The homeowners leave their big plastic garbage bin and their big plastic recycling bin in the front yard on that side of the property, out of their sight and mind…but not out of anyone else’s.

A garbage scavenger — putatively — had dropped his bicycle on its side, along with the wire crate he’d fashioned into a bike “trailer” for carrying salable junk. He was going through the recycling barrel…and he wasn’t look for tin cans.

The blue barrel was chuckablock full of loose papers. As I paused at the intersection, I could see that he was leafing through pages, looking at them closely. Obviously, he was searching not for metal he could sell but for data he could sell.

shredder_F’r cryin’ out loud, folks!  Don’t toss intact personal and financial papers in the trash! Grind them up! Dumpster diving is a major source of riches for identity thieves.

A shredder just isn’t that expensive. It sure costs less than an identity theft, which can haunt you for years.

 

Watch Television? Why?

by

Channel 3: Inside some prison, Asian guys sweat. “You can run, but you can’t hide!” {yawn}

Channel 5: YoPlait ad: “It is so good!” Well. No.

Channel 8-1: Some woman singing some syrupy song. PBS is in the throes of another of its interminable beg-a-thons; apparently they think this sort of thing stimulates the well-heeled to cough up money.

Channel 8-2: Some nerd is going on about the glories of broccoli. OMG! Broccoli is a natural food!!!! Moving on.

Channel 8-3: Another nerdly looking fellow is going on about some physical or mental ailment “JOIN OR RENEW ONLINE 480-965-8800″…ah…it’s one of the current fad ailments. Give me a break.

Channel 8-4: Treacly lite classical Muzak with slideshow of stills.

Channel 10: Ad for American Idol (how much longer is that thing going to last??). Ad for TMZ. Ad for AAA. Ad for…

Channel 12: Ad for Microsoft. Very expensive-looking ad for Microsoft. Really? Excruciating.

Channel 15: “I’m very aware of what 3XK is capable of, Detective Tyson!” (…apparently, of extreme, graphic, and intensely boring violence…)

Channel…OFF!

Is there anything on? Anywhere?? Apparently not on the public airwaves.

In other precincts, one of my clients is selling one of her e-books bundled in with a package of diet and health-care books: 53 e-books, an $800 value, retail, for only $39.97. You need to move quickly, though, because this offer ends on Thursday. Check it out!

Check out her new book on cooking with coconut flour, too.

Meanwhile, Funny’s beloved Web Wrangler, Jesse Michelson, has launched a new blog called AntiNecktie, a paean to freedom from the hamster wheel. He reports that last year was not a junket through the Best of All Possible Worlds, but apparently things are looking up.

Hufflepup works hard at training the humans. Refractory critters, but over time he succeeds in getting his way. 😉

At Blue Collar Workman, TB has landed a new job. Sounds pretty strenuous…but a great way to work off your frustrations before you knock off at 5:00!

Wait…what? A miracle! An airline company caught in the act of being nice to a customer! Been a while since we’ve heard a story like this one.

After the January from Hell, Evan and The Wife finally seem to be having a chance to catch their collective breath.

Money Beagle contemplates the best ways to keep bread from going stale.

I’m forwarding Nicoleandmaggie’s “Academia Is Just a Job” to all my friends! Isn’t it interesting how long it takes people on the tenure track to figure that out?

Crystal is trying to figure ways around the Dictatorship of Big Cyberbrother. Should be interesting to see how that goes.

ohhhhhhh it’s the middle of th’night! And so, to bed…

 

Evernote and the Enterprising Hacker: When Dinosaurhood Isn’t Such a Bad Thing…

by

ApatosaurusNice little flap going on over the Evernote hack: 50 million customers asked to reset passwords.

Evernote is a cool program, and if you used it to its fullest, a hacker could do a lot of damage. It allows you to save notes on every topic the human mind can conceive, nab e-mail pages, synch your stuff between computers, and share said stuff to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and your email. And, evidently, to share stuff with the occasional hacker.

iphonesThe Evernote app is installed on my iPad. But between the nuisance factor of having to haul a machine around everywhere you go and the never-ending learning curve — I grow more averse to climbing learning curves as I age — I’ve hardly used it…just put a few grocery notes in there, and that’s about it.

Minimal use notwithstanding, the latest flap spurred me to change the password, even though I haven’t even looked at the program in months. This required me to dig out the coded hard-copy list of passwords, hidden under stacks of debris in the office, and then try to figure out which dummy e-mail account I used to deflect the nuisance messages one expects to get from outfits that demand an e-mail address, go to another list to find and decode the password for that, get into G-mail to click on the link Evernote sent to that account, then jump through the hoops to change the password. And then click “deactivate account.” ’Bye!

I find trying to type on the iPad to be exceptionally nuisancey. My fingertips apparently don’t generate whatever static electric charge is needed to make the iPad register my presence, and so I have to tap over and over and over or else dig out the stylus thing to make it work; then you have to keep shifting keyboard “views,” as it were, to get numbers and punctuation. Who on earth has time for that? Translate that time-consumption to a broad note-taking & communication program and…well. 🙄

Soon after I’d installed the Evernote app, it dawned on me that a notepad and a pencil magneted to the fridge are a lot faster and a lot easier and one heckuva lot more convenient than poking messages, character by character, into an iPad. And it’s a heckuva lot easier to tear a shopping list off the notepad and stick it in your pocket than it is to haul a tiny computer to the grocery store and fiddle with an app to see what you need to buy this week.

At least, it is for a dinosaur.

And if somebody steals your scrap of paper, at least the thief doesn’t have the secret codes to half-a-dozen other applications, some of them a great deal more private than a grocery list.

Images:
Funny in her callow youth: Public domain.
Original iPhone 8GB, iPhone 3GS 16GB and iPhone Purple 800 32GB: Yutaka Tsutano. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.