Prologue
It’s warming up around here, 78 this morning at feeding time. The foals, Puck and Hannah, greet us at the gate each morning now, expecting their morning scratching. Hannah, the Calamity Jane of the duo, after gashing her leg the day she was born, somehow managed to bung up her right eye a few days later. In between these events, she got kicked by her mother, Wanda, who makes Joan Crawford look like Mother Theresa. Hannah is none the worse for wear.
Elf went evenly in her last two-minute-lick, getting the three-eighths in 42.2 and galloping out in 58. She’ll have her first real work next Tuesday. Juno, over her abscess woes, will two-minute-lick the following Saturday. Wilson is galloping well. Cosmic Song goes tomorrow in the 9th at Calder, a non-winners-of-a-race-other-than at six furlongs.
We bred Zip to Wanda yesterday. Considering the polar opposite dispositions of the two, if we get a baby we might have to name it Jekyll & Hyde. Dot has been bred to a stud named J Be K, who started off his stallion career in Kentucky for a $10,000 fee, got an unsatisfactory number of mares in foal, and now stands here for $3000 (or $2000 if you’re Siobhan, the Mexican bargainer).
Here Come De Jurist
Siobhan got called in for jury duty the other day. That’s what she gets for bragging about never being called. I, on the other hand, get called all the time. They always bounced me in Gainesville, certain that I’d be sympathetic to the defense since I often was the defense, but they did take me in Ocala. I was on the jury of a wife-beater. The jury foreman was Big Ron of Big Ron’s Yoga Academy, so you know this was a hell of a jury. Anyway, I was the only juror who thought the wife-beater was guilty (take that, you Gainesville States Attorneys). The wife wouldn’t testify, probably because she was terrified, but her little sister came to court and bravely told her tale. The rest of the jurors were put off by the wife’s disinclination to appear and voted the scumbag innocent. Hey, I’m used to being in an 11-1 minority. Siobhan’s trial involved the burglary of three women by a man with a knife. Sounds like you’d want to get all the females you could off that jury. Anyway, Siobhan made several new friends in her jury pool, none of whom we’ll be having over for dinner.
Happy Birthday To You
A shout out to our neighbor, Allen Morgan, who was 86 Tuesday. Allen still drives and goes to the UF softball games, where he complains about the umpires and also our right-fielder, a prodigious power hitter.
“She never gets a hit when I’m here,” he griped the other day, shortly before the girl blasted one over the trees past the outfield fence, astonishing even Allen.
“Never mind,” he squeaked, in his best Rosanne Rosannadanna voice.
We like to talk about Allen because he’s one of the few people extant who is older than Bill. He calls me a kid. You can’t find guys like that every day.
Bill’s Rant Of The Week—Trump And The Birthers
H. L. Mencken once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public and that was never more true than today. Only 38% of Americans feel comfortable that Barack Obama was born in this country and Republicans, by a margin of 43% to 38%, think he was not, despite reams of newspaper columns and hours of TV newscasts proving otherwise. Think about that. Is there any hope for an electorate which can’t even decipher the simplest of questions? Maybe we should move to France with Gilbert Shelton, although that would mean we’d have to put up with Frenchmen. Anyway, now comes Donald Trump, gutterball extraordinaire, to add fuel to the fire. Realizing that the only way he can jump to the top of a sorry heap of Republican candidates, Trump has played the birther card. Yesterday, Obama provided the birth certificate evidence Trump was looking for and, instead of hightailing it back to the swamp of misinformation and prevarication he arose from, Trump announced he was “proud” he had been able to bring this issue to a close, “Nobody else has been able to do it,” he exclaimed.
Despite the sudden whirlwind of publicity, Trump has an unshakeable problem: nobody, as in nobody, really likes him. If he has any political future at all, it’s as Governor of Florida. We’ll take anybody here.
Dead Man Walking. Still.
Maybe it was the chanting. Or the demonic rites performed by our readers. Maybe, it was a simple lack of self-confidence on his part. But for some reason, the Grim Reaper has so far failed to gather in our old pal, Stuart Bentler, apparently ripe for the picking. We’re thinking of taking credit for this. Earlier, we instructed everybody out there to gather up their implements of resistance to delay the respective demises of Pat Brown and Marilyn Todd, our Texas girls afflicted with mortal wounds. Today, if not bouncing around on shiny trampolines, they are leading happy unimpaired lives. And when Stuart’s daughter, Katherine, went to visit him the other morning at the One Step Forward, Two Steps Back Memorial Hospital in Broward County, he was sitting up! And hungry, even. Stuart’s doctors, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, have finally affirmed that he does, indeed, have amyloidosis, but that’s just this week’s diagnosis. They’re quite the kidders, so next week he could have leprosy. Anyway, turns out the Mayo Clinic, a for-real hospital, has a particular affinity for amyloidosis cases so Stuart will be travelling to the clinic in Jacksonville if he can ever get a bed. So, whatever you’re doing out there, keep it up. We accept all credit cards, including witchery and satanic shenanigans. This is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their Bentler.
Urban Mythology
If you were to meet my sister, Kathy Scanlan, you would think she was the nicest person in the world. Friendly, hospitable, loyal to a fault, intelligent about most things, despite being a devoted Red Sox fan. But last week she sent me a letter warning that hotel room keys contain credit card information that can be harvested by miscreants if those cards are not erased or destroyed. And I was willing to believe it, having been the victim of ID theft shortly after a visit to a questionable Miami hotel (and I am still sure my credit card info was misused there even if it was not taken from my room card).
Shortly after the column was printed, however, two of our readers/detectives, first Kathleen Knight in Gainesville and, soon after, Mary Kline in Pennsylvania, advised me that this information was inaccurate, another in a long line of Urban Myths foisted on a public in love with conspiracy theories. Since I have earlier admonished Marty Jourard to take responsibility for his lack of gustatory self-discipline, I find it necessary to do the same in this case, so I will be standing in a corner for ten minutes a day for the next week. I would like to mention that my more enlightened Sister, Alice, was wise to this tomfoolery—maybe because it apparently originated in California, where she lives—which proves that there is at least one person in the family who’s on the ball.
Anyway, according to Snopes.com, which makes a business of ferreting out this kind of information:
The notion that hotel key cards are routinely encoded with all sorts of personal information began in 2003 when an overzealous detective with the Pasadena, California Police Department sent around a warning e-mail based on a misunderstanding of something she’d heard:
“One of our investigators was at a meeting with other fraud detectives,” says Ronnie Nanning of the Pasadena police. “Someone there happened to say that they heard that it was possible to put this information on this key card.”
The detective notified other detectives as a “heads-up” to the possibility. That information was shared with others in the police department, who then passed it on before the risk could be evaluated, she says. It took on a life of its own.
Nanning says her department contacted major hotel chains at that time and “were told time and again that this was not the policy.”
In a nutshell, during a presentation about current fraud techniques, a hotel keycard that had been wiped clean then reused by identity thieves to store a target’s banking and other personal information was shown to those present. The detective in question took that to mean that all hotel keycards were routinely encoded thus by the hotels that had issued them, rather than what was really being said, which was that any sort of magnetic swipeable card could be used as a blank on which identity thieves could store such information. Said presentation could just as easily be used as a grocery store loyalty card, a casino’s slot card or any generic keycard used to enter an office building or access an elevator. The nature of the card, itself, didn’t matter, nor did the information it had previously contained when it had been issued for its intended purpose—what mattered was that it was reused as a blank onto which information stolen from other sources was placed.
The misinformation wave created by the detective’s erroneous e-mail was so large the Pasadena police eventually issued a retraction explaining that the information it contained was based on a single incident from several years earlier and that they had no evidence the warning reflected a current or ongoing issue.
In January of 2006, Computerworld investigated the key card rumors by collecting and examining over 100 hotel cards and found no personally identifiable information on any of them.
We also purchased our own MagTek card scanner and have scanned several dozen magnetic room keys we acquired during our various hotel stays over the last few years and likewise found not a single key with any personal information stored on it.
Okay, then. I guess we can all be happy about our little room keys. But call it paranoia, I’m still not sure I’m giving mine back. At least we know that in the future when we have these scary warnings we can check in with our crack detective firm of Knight & Kline and get to the bottom of things.
More Urban Myths
Everybody is aware, of course, of the alligators in the Manhattan sewer system. This story dates back to the 1930s, when sensationalist newspapers started reporting endless incidents of alligators, allegedly brought north from Florida as tiny pets by tourists, being found in and around New York City. Nearly all of these stories are false and the few that are true almost certainly concern animals which escaped from local zoos.
Then there’s the one about Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen, hoping for a later return to life when future technology made it possible. If that were true, Walt probably would have advised his heirs not to cremate him when he died in 1966.
One of the oldest and most often repeated urban legends is of the Vanishing Hitchhiker. The most popular version involves a man who picks up a young hitchhiker (usually a girl) on a deserted country road. He drives her back to her house, but when he turns to say goodbye he finds that she has inexplicably disappeared from the back seat of the car. Confused, the man rings the doorbell of the house and learns that the girl has been dead for years, killed on the very spot where he picked her up that night. Yet another reason to refrain from picking up hitchhikers.
The Good Samaritan legend has also been around for years. It has been associated to a number of rich people, from Bill Gates to Nat King Cole. As the story goes, a motorist stops to help a man change a flat tire. The man thanks the benefactor and asks for his address. A few weeks later, the motorist receives a thank-you note and a check for $10,000 signed by whatever famous celebrity. One popular version claims that Donald Trump paid off a helpful stranger’s mortgage and Trump, himself, has lent credence to this. This one is an obvious phony, however, as that weasel Trump isn’t giving $10,000 to anybody.
Since the 1970s, an urban myth has been making its way across college campuses. It avers that any college student whose roommate commits suicide will automatically receive a 4.0 grade point average for the semester as part of the college’s bereavement policy. We know that this can’t be true, however, since there has not been a rash of murders by roommates disguised as suicides to get that grade point average up.
Although it’s more folklore than urban legend, The Bloody Mary story is so old and well-known it could be a peripheral qualifier. A common game at children’s slumber parties, the story states that the ghost of Mary Worth (not the newspaper cartoon lady), a woman supposedly executed for being a witch, will manifest when summoned. This usually involves going into a darkened room and shouting her name three times, at which point her face will appear in a mirror. There are a number of variations on the story, with some claiming that the face of Satan appears. By far the scariest possibility, however, is that you go into a darkened room, intone three times, look into the mirror and suddenly see the face of Donald Trump.
That’s all, folks….
