This has become embarrassing. Of course it’s not Fall anymore. It’s now almost Spring and I’m just getting around to another post. It’s not because I don’t have a lot to say. It’s just that a lot of my time is spent on this court case against the web sites that were built by copying searchsystems.net. The good news is that websherlock.com, datahounddetective.com, skiptools.com, and detectivechoice.com have all settled and we now own those and all their affiliated URL’s. We also have have a $780,000 judgment against courtsonline.org and Mark Musselman (who is now in an Ohio Prison for 12 years for Internet fraud and identity theft). But the war isn’t over, and I expect it to go on for a while. There just isn’t a whole lot I can say about an ongoing case. When it’s done though, do I ever have a story to tell of theft, greed, foreign interests, and a faked suicide to run away to Mississippi with a stripper.

Two stories for today. The first is from my friend Jennifer at Hyundai Public Relations. We invited her to join us in a Lakers luxury box that we’d won for a night through a charity auction for the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Here’s her story:

“Hi Tim-

I have a good story for you that relates to the fun night with you, Prudence and everyone else at the Laker game….

I somehow managed to lose my wallet at the Staples Center and of course I did not notice it until the next day when I went to pay for something. I called over to the Staples security department and while they were very nice, they did not have my wallet. I thought, great, now I have to remember what the heck was in the damn wallet and then cancel it, get a new one and I just did not feel like dealing with it. I called my credit card company and bank and nothing odd was happened with my account. So I blew the whole matter off as I just could not deal with the hassles.

Fast forward 4 hours and I get a phone call from AAA. They have a lady with a very heavy accent on the phone with them and she has my wallet. They patched me through and yes, her brother found it at the Staples Center last night and she went through my wallet and very smartly called AAA to find me. I went to South Central LA, to her soccer store on 6th street and met her whole family. Very nice people.

She could barely speak English, but took the time to locate the owner of a missing wallet? I know college graduates who have lived here in the U.S. all their lives who cannot figure out how to find a member of the media’s contact information in a media database….

Thanks again,

Jen”

I love this story. First of all, it’s amazing that someone would pick up a wallet at Staples Center and NOT take the money. I’m so impressed that this woman would take the time and make the effort to contact Jennifer and return her wallet. It makes me think of all the people who have made our lives miserable by stealing from our web site– for the most part they are white, middle-class Americans.

The next story comes from Karen Manners Smith, who is co-editor of “Time It Was” and teaches at a small University in Kansas:

“It looks as if some frat boys are stealing the posters for this year’s production of The Vagina Monologues. I spent part of the weekend repainting the big hinged plywood sign (think of a standing sandwich board), and yesterday morning Chris and I drove it to campus and set it up in the public square outside the student union, the busiest spot on campus. This morning it was gone. I filed a report with the campus police and this nice cop came to my office to take my complaint. Then he went off to see if they had thrown it in the lake. It wasn’t there; not surprising; I’m sure it’s on display in the front hall of one of the fraternities. Unless–and I remind myself that this is Kansas–someone was so outraged by seeing the word vagina in public that they felt compelled to remove the sign and destroy it. Hmmm….”

I could just picture it– Beavis and Butthead sitting in front of the poster going “heh… heh heh… heh… It says ‘vagina’.”

Karen then wrote:

“My missing signboard was spotted in one of the dormitories but when I sent two students to retrieve it it had been moved again. Tomorrow I’ll send out the campus wide request for its return.”

Then today:

“The signboard was found. I got a call from the campus police this morning saying it was back in place. It had been spotted in the hallway of a dormitory Tuesday night, then disappeared again. Turns out the custodian for the dorm had put it in a closet. I am grateful to kindly officer Moore (an old fashioned policeman if ever I saw one) for tracking it down and moving it back into the plaza outside the student union by himself (that thing is heavy!)”

I find that all amazing. The dorm students took it, but didn’t deface it. The custodian knew that it was probably stolen, and therefore put it away to protect it. The kindly police officer tracked it down and moved it into the plaza himself. That’s a true small college town story. None of that would have happened here where we are in California. The students would have “tagged’ it, the custodian would have called for a truck to cart it away to the dump, and the police would have only taken a report.

What would happen in your town?

I love this shot– October 2004 in the Adirondacks. Here it is again:

Were the Sixties all sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll?

The Sixties: The Way We Really Were
Where: UMass Amherst, Cape Cod Lounge, Student Union Building
When: Tuesday, October 30th, 3-5 p.m.
As part of its annual Colloquium on Social Change, the Department of Special Collections and University Archives of UMass Amherst presents a panel discussion and readings from a new book, Time it Was: American Stories from the Sixties, a set of short memoirs written by people who participated in a wide variety of Sixties-era movements and events. Join us for speakers Johnny Flynn (American Indian Movement), Sheila Lennon (Woodstock), Tim Koster (Draft Lottery “Winner” and Conscientious Objector), Leah O’Leary (Red Cross, Vietnam), and Karen Manners Smith, who spent five years in a religious cult.

Fifty Years of Radical Activism: An Evening with Tom Hayden
Speaker: Tom Hayden
When: Oct. 30th, 7.30 p.m.
Where: UMass Amherst, Cape Cod Lounge, Student Union Building
For nearly fifty years, Tom Hayden’s name has been synonymous with social change. As a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1961, he was author of its visionary call, the Port Huron Statement, the touchstone for a generation of activists. As a Freedom Rider in the Deep South in the early 1960s, he was arrested and beaten in rural Georgia and Mississippi. As a community organizer in Newark’s inner city in 1964, he was part of an effort to create a national poor people’s campaign for jobs and empowerment.

When the Vietnam War invaded American lives, Hayden became a prominent voice in opposition, organizing teach-ins and demonstrations, writing, and making one of the first trips to Hanoi in 1965 to meet with the other side. One of the leaders of the street demonstrations against the war at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, he was one of eight organizers indicted — and eventually acquitted — on charges of conspiracy and incitement.

After the political system opened in the 1970s, Hayden organized the grass-roots Campaign for Economic Democracy in California, which won dozens of local offices and shut down a nuclear power plant through a referendum for the first time. He was elected to the California state assembly in 1982, and the state senate ten years later, serving eighteen years in all, and he has twice served on the national platform committee of the Democratic Party.

We were looking at new database to add to searchsystems.net and came upon an interesting collection of food safety licenses from the Oregon Department of Agriculture:
http://oda.state.or.us/dbs/licenses/search.lasso?&division=fsd

Among the categories of licenses are Egg Handlers and Egg Breakers. I’m assuming that you have to be a licensed egg handler before you can be an egg breaker– you have to handle an egg in order to break it.

They also have stationary and custom mobile slaughter licenses– which makes me think of the old “chicken crossed the road joke,” but also of the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” which should have required a custom license.

Dana pointed out the licensing for Milk Stabilization Handler — he saves lives every day with his heroic work… stabilizing milk.

I’ve been checking the sales rank for “Time It Was.” Monday it was the two-something-millionth most popular book on Amazon.com. By Wednesday someone must have bought a copy and the ranking jumped up into the 80,000 range. Today it’s down to 287,494. This makes me curious as to how the rankings are determined– is that a daily sales total, weekly, or is there someone in the back room at Amazon rolling bones?

I’m also curious as to how they come up with their recommended items. Today they say that based on my previous searches that they recommend that I buy “Nicotinic Receptors in the Nervous System” and “The Myth of Inevitable US Defeat in Vietnam.” Both intrigue me. But why this particular combination?