Your tax dollars at work

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The ATF and DEA just love using fake entrapment cases; see:

Federal judges appear to be tiring of the government’s long-running entrapment programs. One of the federal law enforcement’s favorite “enforcement” efforts is creating crime in order to bust “criminals.” Agencies like the ATF and DEA find someone in need of cash — usually a minority someone — and use undercover agents and confidential informants to convince them to raid a drug stash house for some easy money.

The twist is the drug stash house is fake. There are no drugs. There are no armed guards protecting the drugs. Once the mark arrives with a weapon and a plan of attack, the ATF arrests the person for thinking about robbing a fake stash house to steal nonexistent drugs.

The other twist is the prosecution. Since the drugs never existed, the ATF is free to claim the targeted stash was large enough to trigger mandatory minimum sentences.

The LEOs here are literally creating a fake crime just to sting some hapless and down-on-his-luck type. They’re doing nothing to improve safety, or pursue actual predatory criminals — I mean, that takes work! — but they still get to crow about convictions.

As noted above Federal judges are getting tired of it.

Dept. of Heathen Cultural Archeology

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So, the insanely talented bandleader on James Corden’s Late Late Show is a guy named Reggie Watts. Astute readers of Heathen should note that the first mention here of Watts or his output is actually in the long-ago era of 2002, when I hipped you all to Watts’ prior band Maktub; here’s a YouTube clip of one of their songs.

Watts came up again in as a solo performer in 2007 here; that video link is dead, but the clip is available at YouTube.

Somewhere along the line, Watts pivoted to comedy; you can see he’s there already in his 2012 TED talk, which I just saw (again) on a “best of 2010s” list, and so here we are.

Josh Marshall Lays It Out

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You should go read this piece, which ends:

[T]he President isn’t really on trial here. His guilt is too obvious and established. The question here is whether the GOP, his party, will take any step to restrain an obviously bad acting President. The answer to that is pretty obvious at this point. But it’s that more than the President’s guilt that needs to be elucidated, proven. This may be a subtle distinction. But it’s an important one. Getting it right can, I believe, put right what seems intuitively out of balance in these proceedings.

Democrats are going through the motions of trying to convince their GOP colleagues, even if in practice they know this is not going to happen. They need to shift gears. This isn’t about convincing their Republican colleagues. It’s about showing them up, indicting them for the decision they have very clearly made. Frustration, outrage, befuddlement are all in their way expressions of weakness. Republicans are committed to defending President Trump at all costs no matter what he does. That’s not something to try change. It’s what you’re trying to demonstrate.

This Just In

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No greater honor has this humble blog ever received than the news from longtime Heathen Ear O’Corn that this site is blocked at Shell due to “adult content.”

Here’s something we missed

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A while back, the longstanding Mac developer and blogger Brent Simmons noted that his site, Inessential, was now 20 years old.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that, well, MiscHeathen hit 19 years on 29 November.

In that first short month, I posted only one other time; it amuses me greatly that this first proper entry is actually about Lindsey and her journey to Russia. Lindsey was then the (relatively new?) girlfriend of my longtime best pal Eric. 19 years later, she’s been his wife for 13 years, and is mother to Heathen Godchild E. B., with whom we trimmed a Christmas tree on Sunday.

Obviously, I post way less in these days of social media than I did before, but as folks realize what a cesspool Facebook is I’m endeavoring to share things here more often.

“I will neither help nor hinder you. My friends and family will assist you and my enemies will find you soon enough.”

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Oh, definitely go read this. The title is a quote from Beckett, as told by his biographer Deirdre Bair.

The linked article begins:

“So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am.” It was the first thing Samuel Beckett ever said to me on that bitter cold day, November 17th, 1971, as we sat in the minuscule lobby of the Hôtel du Danube on the rue Jacob. I had gone to Paris at his express invitation, to meet him and talk about writing his biography. We were originally scheduled to meet on November 7th, and for ten days I had no idea where he was, because he never showed up and never canceled.

Go. Read. It’s an excerpt from Bair’s new book, Parisian Lives, about Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and herself, which may go on my to-read list.

The Brimley/Cocoon Line

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This Twitter feed will inform you when certain parties pass what they refer to as the (Wilford) Brimley / Cocoon Line, which means they are now as old as Brimley was when he starred, as an “old person,” in the 1985 film of the same name.

Here’s a clip.

At that time, Brimley was 18,530 days old, which is about 50 years and 8 months. (You may be surprised he was that young at the time; I know I was.)

Some recent entries:

  • Jennifer Aniston
  • Bobby Brown
  • Mo Rocca
  • Patton Oswalt
  • Jason Bateman
  • Dave Grohl (as well as every member of Pearl Jam)
  • Marilyn Manson
  • Brendan Fraser
  • Lucy Liu

Also, Lenny Kravitz is 4 years older than Brimley was. Keanu Reeves is a year older than that.

(Before you ask: Quick match suggests I’ve got about 13 months; Mrs Heathen is even farther.)

While you weren’t looking, everyone else got old

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This excellent performance of Bowie’s “Five Years” by the Cowboy Junkies is worth your time.

But if you haven’t seen them in a long while, you may — as I was — be taken aback by Margo’s white hair. You shouldn’t; Timmons was born in 1961, just like plenty of the musical idols of our shared youth (I mean, she’s younger than all the members of R.E.M., for example).

The Trinity Session is, of course, over 30 years old now.

And then there’s this: Have you looked in the mirror lately? Odds are, you’re getting older, too.

Things Nobody Remembers But Me

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Everybody remembers the juggernaut that NBC’s long-running ER was, but NOT everyone remembers the short-lived sitcom by the same name from the mid-1980s (don’t click these yet).

What’s fun about this is that George Clooney had roles in both of them. Obviously it’s his turn in the later show as Doug Ross that made him GEORGE CLOONEY; in the sitcom, he was a mere (recurring! not regular cast!) ER tech (which makes sense – he was only 23 at the time).

The question I put to you, anonymous reader, is this: What other famous actor appeared in multiple episodes of both ERs?

(The Wikipedia link for the 80s show gives it away, so think hard before clicking.)

Today in Pop Will Eat Itself

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Ric Ocasek, of course, has died. He was 75.

His age is only one of the several surprising things I learned about him in the wake of his passing. The Cars were an earlier, more established band than most of what I listened to growing up, so I understand they’re likely to be older (ie, born in the 1940s, like the members of Blondie, not the 1950s or 60s, like bands that hit in the mid-80s), but still: Ric Ocasek was 75? I mean, damn; that puts him in the same age cohort as folks who hit in the early 60s, like the Stones. (Benjamin Orr, who died of cancer in 2000, was only a little younger (b. 1947).)

The second surprising thing is this: though estranged for about a year or so, he and Paulina Porizkova were still married. Rock musicians and supermodels aren’t the sort of folks you think of when you say “thirty year marriage,” but here we are.

Finally, I found this morning that the song I most wanted to see — well, the video I most wanted to see — was “Magic” from 1984’s Heartbeat City. You know it: it’s the one where Ocasek appears to walk on water in a fancy swimming pool behind an even fancier home.

Here’s the fun part: That house is the west coast family home for Richard and Kathy Hilton, i.e. Paris’ parents. Paris, born in 1981, would’ve been about 3 when they shot this video.

Weird.

Set the Wayback Machine to September, 1998: Lawyers, Guns, & Money

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In 1998, I went dove hunting with some pals from Dallas.

I wrote about it for my own amusement, and ran the piece on my web site at the time (the ancestor to Miscellaneous Heathen, which didn’t go online until two years AFTER this piece was written).

It’s fall again, and I realized that it’s utterly criminal that this little bit of fun has been offline for quite some time, so I present it here, again, for your amusement. Enjoy.

Lawyers, Guns & Money

Return of the Native: Wherein our Intrepid Texas Correspondent Rediscovers His Hunting Roots

I am part Cracker, though you wouldn’t know it to look at me. I grew up in Mississippi, where my family has lived for generations. I hunted, camped, and fished; I drove a pick-up truck to high school; I owned boots. It was something of an oddball combination, though, at least – certainly – to outsiders. Weekends might begin in a field west of town shooting at birds and end with dinner at the Country Club, all with the same assortment of bankers, lawyers, doctors, and real estate developers. There’s an odd sort of gentility to these things in the South, so it never struck me as odd that Larry Foote would drive his Porsche to both dove hunt and dinner, or that Cadillacs matched pickups at most expeditions.

Somehow, I lost much of this in college. I left for Alabama at 18 and promptly became a tortured (okay, mostly just drunk) intellectual type, perfectly willing to discuss the meaning of life or the existence of God until 4:30 in the morning during the week as long as the other side of the conversation was cute enough or there were drugs enough to make it interesting. Both if I was lucky. I stayed in Tuscaloosa most of the time, venturing home rarely, and lost – to some degree – a bit of the old-school Faulknerian whiskey-soaked hunting ambiance of my youth. I should have known, however, that this wasn’t to be a permanent state.

By 1994, I’d moved to Houston. Houston is hotter, flatter, and more muggy than anything in Alabama or Mississippi, but I fell in love with it anyway. The combination of international business, flabbergasting amounts of eighties-style oil money, and old-fashioned Texas-dialect Southernism agreed with me, and still does. Slowly, I noticed I was becoming more like home than I had been in Alabama, and I didn’t mind. My drawl returned with a vengeance, particularly with alcohol. I bought boots again. I drank local beer. So when a pal from Dallas invited me on a dove hunt – my first since high school, easily – it didn’t surprise me at all that I jumped at the chance.

What follows is a rough chronology. The participants were Patrick, a college pal who has ended up in Dallas married to a local; Dwayne, his brother-in-law; and Richard, his father-in-law. Both in-laws are attorneys; Patrick is an administrator with a local college in Dallas. The events transcribed occurred over August 31-September 1, 1998, and are represented here more or less accurately. As best I remember.

Monday:

12:30 Leave office. Drive to Academy Sports to purchase Hunting License I didn’t buy over weekend because wallet location became a problem; one must have photo ID for a hunting license in Texas.

1:00 Leave Academy. Express dismay to any listening deities at amazing process required to obtain state permission to shoot things from the air.

1:30 Arrive Hobby Airport. Attempt not to look suspicious carrying gun case into airport.

1:45 Check gun into loving arms of Southwest Airlines. Casually inquire as to insurance coverage for firearm.

2:50 Plane departs; order cocktail in response to somewhat exuberant toddler.

3:30 Arrive Dallas-Love Field. Encounter remaining members of hunting party. Wave goodbye to toddler with outstanding lung capacity.

3:50 Accidentally notice that my luggage – and gun – merrily riding the carousel for flight 119, not flight 34. Pounce on luggage while attempting to NOT step on aforementioned toddler.

3:55 – 4:15 Attempt, with 2 lawyers and a college administrator, to get shotgun, briefcase, and suitcase into already-capacity-loaded Pathfinder. Express wonder at the sheer volume of equipment required for 1-day hunting expedition.

4:20 Depart Dallas for wonderful downtown Brownwood, Texas. This will take 3 or 4 hours, so we stop for beer. Driver abstains. Lawyers and consultant do not, and continue to fail to abstain well into West Texas.

5:00 Remember, with college administrator, that Warren Zevon once sang of “lawyers, guns, and money.” Express pleasure that all three are present in at least token quantities, so no bad things can possibly happen.

6:00 All terrain for miles now visible. No meaningful trees present, though cactuses and scrub are plentiful. Toast landscape with beer.

7:00 Stop for restaurant suggestions at somewhat vague looking minute mart in Comanche, Texas. Elect younger lawyer to “work the clerk” for information re: culinary adventures in Comanche. Upon discovering all food in Comanche apparently unacceptable, purchase snacks at said store.

7:05 Convenience Store declared to be “lucky” by younger lawyer. All parties purchase Lotto tickets.

Dialog:

Younger Lawyer: “Has anybody won here yet?”

Karla-Faye-Tucker-lookalike-Clerk: “This is Comanche.”

This, apparently, explains it all.

7:45 Arrive Brownwood, Texas. Locate Tuesday’s rendezvous point (the Section Hand Restaurant and Boot Store). Select alternative cuisine for dinner.

8:00 Narrowly avoid Golden Corral dinner in favor of Blue Cactus. Everything is still fried, but at least a little spicier. And they serve beer. In theory. Waitress unable to serve beer for reasons unspecified but probably linked to age, so manager does. Several times.

8:45 Locate liquor store for purchase of after-dinner cigars.

9:00 Adjourn to Best Western poolside lounge area, still blissfully unaware of stock market gyrations. Enjoy cocktails and hunting stories. Return to hotel room for A&M v. FSU football. Note that all is right in the world, as the Trinity of Hunting, Football, and Cocktails are present. Express belief that this trumps earlier hat trick of Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

9:30 Channel change during commercial leads to discovery of stock market gyrations. Mix another drink. Remind self that investments are long term in nature.

10:30 Remind self again that investments are long term in nature. Advised by attorney to mix additional beverage.

11:45 Sleep.

Tuesday

05:00 Annoyingly cheery clerk delivers wake-up call. Stumble into clothing, gather firearms, and reload truck. A total of 7 degrees still required to shoehorn everything into vehicle. Collective need for coffee reaching fever pitch.

05:30 Arrive at Section Hand restaurant. It does not open until 0600. They are, however, serving coffee.

05:40 Purchase local newspaper.

05:42 Complete local newspaper. Opt for second paper.

05:50 Over discussions of market with other hunters, drink at least as much coffee as you did beer the night before. This is viewed as karmic balance, at least in terms of hangover reduction.

06:15 With addition of biscuits, sausage, eggs, and grits, begin to feel almost human despite the hour. Lawyers and administrator agree. More coffee administered.

06:35 Caravan of well-armed personnel leaves Section Hand restaurant for parts unknown. Guide wonders out loud which of 2 waitresses he should give his cell phone number to for late arrivals; another local opines “It don’t matter; they’re both stupid.”

06:45 Paved road ends. Caravan continues.

06:50 Now officially in the Middle of Nowhere. Gather ammunition (50 rounds) for first phase of hunt. Privately certain this is more than enough.

07:00 Discover Timberland boots not nearly as waterproof as advertised. Vow to never eschew more thematically correct Red Wings again.

07:10 Select position on east fence row under small mesquite tree.

08:00 Return to truck for additional ammunition with 1 for 10 record. College administrator by this point certain his initial stash of shells loaded with blanks, a theory shaky at best as same shell pool fueled aforementioned 5-bird hour.

09:30 Birds wisely decide field to be questionable. Appear to dining elsewhere. This, combined with additional supply shortages (e.g., shells) send hunting party back to hotel, 19 birds in hand (Sr Lawyer: 9; Jr Lawyer: 4; Consultant: 5; Administrator: 1). An average of three boxes of shells per hunter were consumed, however.

10:00 Return to hotel for much needed shower and nap.

12:45 Depart hotel for Wal-Mart for additional provisions. Attempt to not be stereotypes of city folk in Brownwood Wal-Mart almost certainly a failure, though markedly more successful than the prior year, when Senior and Junior Lawyers and Administrator made trip in Jaguar.

1:30 Return to Section Hand to sample lunchtime offerings and attempt to corner market on coffee. Chicken-fried steak deemed most appropriate meal.

2:45 Guide rendezvous at Section Hand; depart again for field after much discussion of temperature (now hovering in mid-90s). Provision check reveals almost certainly enough shells, beer, and Gatorade.

3:00 Arrive at same field. Guide informs hunting party that birds are probably 2 hours away, if tradition holds. Guide departs.

3:05 Upon hearing this news, junior lawyer strips to boxers and hunting boots and settles in the sun to drink beer and review Wall Street Journal.

3:30 Birds arrive, apparently hoping for a sneak attack. Junior lawyer continues mode of dress, perhaps not the best for running through tall grass and weeds to retrieve birds.

4:00 MORE birds arrive. Logistical problems ensue. Am unable to return to selected (and shady) post after bird retrieval due to continued bird overflights and subsequent retrievals. Crouching in weeds amid the field becomes de facto post despite lack of cover.

4:30 After taking a double, note that limit for group is likely looming large. Suggest inventory. Creative accounting brings group total to 59, though this fails to include the 9 birds total lost in brush and the 5 or so simply discarded as uncleanable due to unfortunate proximity to firearm barrel. Shotgun shell consumption at this point no longer worth examining. Express dismay at number of birds still eating in far end of field, occasionally fluttering up several hundred at a time.

5:15 Load truck. Again.

6:00 After gas, food, and beer, depart Brownwood. Consultant and lawyers resume lack of abstention.

10:30 Arrive Dallas. Purchase antihistamines to make up for squatting in weeds all day.

10:45 Arrive Patrick’s home. Collapse on couch after cursory hello to his lovely wife, who finds this all terribly funny.

UVA is taking their house.

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This story is horrific.

For example:

The $164,000 billed to Waldron for intestinal surgery was more than twice what a commercial insurer would have paid for her care

Oh, and it gets even more awful, because not only are they taking houses. In another case:

Nacy Sexton, who is in his 30s andl ives outside Richmond, hoped he might get a break on his medical bills as a student enrolled at the University of Virginia. He was close to finishing a bachelor’s degree in 2015 when he was hospitalized for lupus. When he was unable to cover the reduced bill offered by the hospital, the university blocked his enrollment.

You can’t get blood from a stone, but by god they’ll do everything possible to keep you poor!

Fuck these bloodsuckers.

“No amount of antipathy for the hollowness of fashion can prepare you for how powerfully uncool Phish is.”

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This is a really great piece on Phish from an outsider’s perspective.

So I went to a Phish show. It was a big deal, not because I love Phish, but because my partner Leah loves them, and I emphatically do not. In our nearly 14 years together, this hasn’t been a problem (apart from the time she tried to make the case that a band I like is similar to Phish, and I, uh, did not respond well), but after I reluctantly agreed to finally go to a show with her, it started to feel increasingly consequential: If ever an event could shatter any notion of our fundamental compatibility, it would be this one. And ending a long-term relationship surrounded by 25,000 people whose collective drug haze effectively constitutes its own microclimate seemed less than ideal. So I decided to do everything I could to approach the live Phish experience as gracefully as possible.

Ha!

And

Phish culture’s preppie-infused hippie essence is equally off-putting. Maybe it’s because punk happened; or because we’ve internalized the war on drugs; or because Don Henley saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac; or because Phish’s music generally has no discernible message; or because it all seems so anachronistic and naive and lazily escapist. Whatever the reason, ingesting an assortment of psychedelics and blissfully writhing along with a 30-minute Trey Anastasio guitar solo while wearing a donut-patterned beach towel as a cape is the kind of behavior that might make you more enemies than friends.

And (my favorite):

This was the baggage I brought with me to Camden, New Jersey’s BB&T Pavilion, where we set up a blanket on the lawn about 20 minutes before showtime. There were six of us: three fans and three non-fans, which sounds like a nice even split until you remember that my two pseudo-anthropologist compatriots and I were actually outnumbered by about 8,000 to one. And let me tell you, those many thousands of Phishheads were very, very happy to be there. When the first few notes of the poetically named “Mike’s Song” kicked off the show, the crowd reacted as if Prince had returned from the dead and announced he’d be producing new episodes of The Wire.

Reader, I lol’d. (Emph. added.)

Conan was a Texan

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I don’t remember why I opened this tab, but clearly it’s STILL open because, in the Wikipedia article about Conan author Robert Howard, we find this:

Early 1932 saw Howard taking one of his frequent trips around Texas. He traveled through the southern part of the state with his main occupation being, in his own words, “the wholesale consumption of tortillas, enchiladas and cheap Spanish wine.” In Fredericksburg, while overlooking sullen hills through a misty rain, he conceived of the fantasy land of Cimmeria, a bitter hard northern region home to fearsome barbarians. […]

It was also during this trip that Howard first conceived of the character of Conan. Later, in 1935, Howard claimed in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith that Conan “simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in a little border town on the lower Rio Grande.”