6.11.2021

It's Friday -- Let's Get Out of Here

at 2:30 PM

Random Friday Morning Thoughts





This was a case where an Illinois lawyer moonlighted as a prostitute. For the best I can tell, she pled guilty to a misdemeanor with 24 months of probation. It also looks like she agreed to a three year suspension of her license (a little harsh), but there are other reports that didn't happen although she was disciplined somehow. But it also got wild. She sued her defense lawyer and a prosecutor (who ended up together as a law firm, no less) for distributing nude pics of her.   

  • Come on, man. If you are going to try and sucker in the most gullible people in Texas, at least come up with an original bit.  You can watch the crowd's ridiculous reaction of glee to Abbott's pandering to them here.

    • The final numbers for Trump's Wall, which Mexico never paid for, were 47 miles of new barriers where none previously existed and 351 miles of replaced barriers.
    •  If Abbott ever loses re-election, his replacement should fire DPS Director Steven C. McCraw. He rarely seems to work and just follows Abbott around to be used a prop for his election campaign. He was there yesterday. 
  • According to this story, Martin Marietta is building a new "plant" by Chico. This part of the article got my attention because we share the road with the trucks coming in and out of there: [I]t currently takes about 22 minutes to load a customer truck, but once the new plant is completed, customers will be in and out of the site in about 10 minutes. The impact is expected to result in more than 500 additional trucks moving through the facility each day."

  • It seems like the cases of Improper Relationship cases involving Student/Teacher have slowed down (even before COVID), but we have a plea bargain involving a Denton Guyer chemistry teacher: 10 years deferred adjudication probation. 

  • A teenage girlfriend of a client who met me for the first time yesterday told me, "I thought you'd be taller." Me too, sister. Me too. 
  • Harris County Sheriff's Office cars. You kidding me?! Would anyone feel safe seeing a Camaro with ghost letting trying to pull you over? 

  • You've probably seen it, but here is the dashcam footage of an Arkansas state trooper flipping a car of a pregnant woman by using a "pit maneuver". He was trying to stop her for speeding although she had put on her hazard lights as she was looking for a safe place to stop. She was doing exactly what the  “Driver License Study Guide” issued by the state police tells drivers to do. 



  • As President Biden travels overseas, Jill Biden decided to troll Melania Trump by wearing a jacket with "LOVE" on the back. 


  • Baylor University released a survey on who is most likely to believe The Big Lie and the results were those who believed the Bible was "literally true" and considered themselves "very religious." The results were similar to those who also believe  “top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings” and “a vaccine for COVID-19 should not be trusted.” 

  • Random dumb thought as I read this story about the architect who designed Jerry World, Globe Life Park, and others:  How can you be an architect without being an engineer? I mean, just drawing what you want to see built seems pretty easy.  Drawing something that structurally won't fall apart seems to be the critical part. 

  • Dak Prescott did have a deal with Adidas but has now signed a new deal with "Air Jordan" of Nike.  This is really smart on Nike's part. Do you have any idea the number of times the cameras will focus in on his shoes when the announcers talk about his recovery from his ankle break? 
  • The proposed new 12 team college football playoff is a little confusing. 
    • There are 10 conferences in the FBS. 
    • Under the proposal, you first look at the 10 conference champion. Of those 10, however, only the top six in the rankings will be guaranteed a spot (with the top four receiving a first round bye.)  
    • The big boys, the winners of the Big 12, SEC, Pac 10, Big 10, and ACC will almost certainly be in that top six. 
    • The remaining sixth spot will come from the remaining conferences of what has historically been referred to as the "Group of Five": The American Athletic Conference (American), Conference USA (C-USA), Mid-American Conference (MAC), Mountain West Conference (MW), and Sun Belt Conference (Sun Belt).
    • The remaining six other teams to fill out the 12 team bracket will be the highest ranked teams whether they won their conference championship or not. 
    • Oddity: Since Notre Dame is not in a conference, it can never get a first round bye. 
  • Time which has passed since the Wise County Sheriff's Office has failed to solve the murder of Lauren Whitener in her home at Lake Bridgeport: 707 days.
  • Messenger: Above the Fold (Suicides in the county have traditionally never been mentioned.)



at 8:36 AM

6.10.2021

Random Thursday Morning Thoughts




The player was Johnathan Taylor out of the University of Georgia who suffered a neck injury in a head-to-head collision with teammate in March earlier that year.   He is still in a wheelchair. 

  • Breaking. That retirement didn't last long. If the Republicans were smart, they would fall in line behind her to guarantee that crazy Tim O'Hare doesn't win.

  • There was a jury panel called in for a felony trial in Decatur this week,  and I heard that the number of people that showed up was abysmal. Something like 40 out of the 200 who were called. (I need to double verify this.) 
  • There is a 100% chance that nothing will become of this.  If Paxton had dressed up in face paint and put on Viking horns and stormed the Capitol building on January 6th, the State Bar still wouldn't raise a finger.  

  • They finally charged the guy with capital murder. And I still think there will be a weird revelation in this case at some point. 

  • TCU is woke.

  • I really don't understand the purpose of this article yesterday. Even if you have a secret kid (confirmed by DNA and quietly acknowledged by Charlie Pride for years), you still get to cut him out of the will if you want to. 

  • It was right about one year ago when we had that strange summer COVID surge. That was the weirdest part of the whole ordeal. 

  • Bad cop: So he detains the lady after an auto crash, goes through her phone, find some risqué pictures of her, and then texts them to himself. How those actions were discovered is pretty interesting. Although he deleted the texts to himself from her phone, the iPhone was synced up to her home iMac and she saw the deleted text messages later. 

  • OU and Florida State meet today in the softball College World Series for a winner-take-all game. Game 1 had 1.86 million viewers which was up 37% from 2019.  So why on God's green Earth are they playing today at 2:00 p.m. instead of prime time?!
    From last night's game. There's a ball in that glove already.

  • Random graphic of schools losing football players to the very hiply named Transfer Portal.

  • Very random observations about 287 in between Rhome and I-35:
    • That North Star residential entrance is well done. There's eventually going to be 2,200 homes in there. (It's right on the county line but I'm not sure any of it is in Wise County. That's probably no accident.) 
    • There are two huge churches being built which will add to the ton of churches which have popped up along the freeway over the last five years. And none of them are traditional Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, etc. 
    • That is one huge apartment complex which is sandwiched in way too tightly in between Dickies and big self-storage facility. 
    • I know Wise County people who will go to the huge Walmart at the Saginaw cutoff area before they will go to the Decatur Walmart.
    • I still think Eaton High School looks like a sports complex instead of a school.
    • How much that stretch of highway has changed. Anyone remember when the only sign of life was Jeterville? (Which reminds me that I once received an email from the son of the owners of Jeterville when he described how in 1977, when he just happened to be at the store while just a boy, a bus pulled up for gas and snacks. It turned out that it was carrying Fleetwood Mac. It is reprinted here, and it's first person account of the experience is really great. Spoiler: He got kissed on the forehead by Stevie Nix.)
  • Long term Southern Baptists will have a hard time learning they've changed the name of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to Texas Baptist College.



at 8:32 AM

6.09.2021

Random Wednesday Morning Thoughts




Another story lost to history.  A tip by a self-professed psychic that bodies were buried at a farm caused the Liberty County (Texas) Sheriff's Office to go crazy and search the property. It made national news. Of course, nothing was found.  The craziest part of the story was what was really buried: A judge granted a search warrant based upon the psychic tip.  Amazing. 

  •  Public postings on Facebook are expressing concern for a missing lady out of Boyd.  She's the niece of former Ticket host Greg "The Hammer" Williams. (Thanks to a faithful reader for pointing this out.)


  • I'm hearing the Decatur School Board, or at least one person on the Board, has a high profile employee in his/her figurative cross-hairs. 
  • This, posted yesterday, is from the service road off southbound I-35 leaving Denton at the Robson Ranch exit. 

  • Good. That's inexcusable for any health care worker. 
  • Watch: A Pittsburg Pirate has a home run taken away from him last night because he didn't touch first. 

    • Someone had a great thought about the requirement of the well established rule requiring the batter to run the bases after a home run: If that rule were to be invented today, we would never go for it. After all, what's more disrespectful to the pitcher after a home run? A bat flip or having the batter run a slow and leisurely complete circle around him? 
  • Somewhere along the line, U.S. Attorneys turned into TMZ with the way they promote themselves. In this case, the defendant skated for Slovenia, in one event, in 1992. Yet we get this sensationalized tweet:

  • While most of us are at work, Fox News is going hard during the day. Video. Note: He says that these "people" -- not the jobs -- aren't worth $15 an hour.  

  • Legal nerd stuff in increasing levels of nerdiness:
    • Watch an appellate lawyer realize he is arguing the wrong case before three judges.  The judges are incredible nice to him, but the lawyer revealed a bit of sorriness regarding his character because he blamed the screw up on his staff  -- twice. Don't do that.  (The good stuff starts at the 4:00 mark.)

    • Check out this footnote in a dissenting opinion issued yesterday in a Texas case. This Q and A is taken from the testimony of a state's DNA expert. Oh, my. 
    • Very legal nerd stuff for criminal practitioners only: The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals yesterday, which never takes any public action on a Monday, granted a PDR on a case where a trial judge refused to grant a PR bond for a defendant who had been in jail for 90 days without an indictment. Instead he reduced the bond to $1.5 million. Under the law, the judge had to either grant a PR bond or reduce the bond to any amount a defendant can "afford." 
  • Lockheed Martin acknowledged that 1,024 of its employees have gone through training courses to bring awareness to White male culture. That should get some people riled up. 

  • An image of Tank Man, which long time readers know I'm a big fan of, was blocked by Microsoft's Bing internet search engine on Friday -- the anniversary of the event. Microsoft blamed "human error." 

  • The Aggies just stole TCU's very, very good baseball coach. He had been with the Frogs for 18 years.

     
  • Messenger: Above the Fold

at 8:31 AM

6.08.2021

Random Tuesday Morning Thoughts




And he actually died shortly thereafter.  A few months earlier, he had run into a bit of trouble:

  • The Internet broke this morning, but it seems to be up and running again.


  • This is really horrifying and about as far from conservatism as you can get. “Patriotic education” mandated by the government isn’t education; it’s propaganda.  


  • Will the "1836 Project" teach that:
    • Every person coming to Texas for land had to swear their allegiance to Mexico and to convert to Catholicism because Texas was, after all, Mexican territory? 
    • That immigrants who made that promise turned around and broke it and then took up arms against Mexico because Mexico didn't allow slaves? 
    • That completely broke and unable to fend for themselves, the Republic of Texas begged the United States to annex them only to take up arms against our country 16 years later in the Civil War?
    • That the first Constitution of Texas specifically legalized slavery? (Art. 8 Section 1.)
    • That Texans stole land and slaughtered the Comanches and Kiowas? 
    • What about the Lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco? The Slocum Massacre? The Lynching of Henry Smith in Paris?
    • No. Little Johnny will only be given a "Patriotic Education." 
  • And he's flat out lying below.  No, the law does not prohibit "any business" from requiring a "vaccine passport." Private businesses can require it all they want. It only applies to the very few businesses with state contracts. This is very Trumpesque of him.

  • The FBI recovered millions of dollars of money extorted via ransomware from Colonial Pipeline? I'm skeptical about this. You just don't "have" an address of a Bitcoin account. 
    (And that's not how you spell affidavit)

  • What a team! The "Grab 'em by the P" guy joins forces with a guy who harassed women so badly that even Fox News fired him and then had to pay the victims $32 million.  They will be in Dallas on December 19th when mistletoe will be abundant.


  • This resignation is a little weird. She only had 18 months left on her term.  

  • Wise County seems to have settled in with 1 in 4 of us fully vaccinated. 

  • Mint Dentistry has leased all 14,000 square feet of the very top floor of the Green Monster in Dallas.  The article, sadly, didn't give a price tag.

  • As an afterthought, I thought I'd look at the Mint Dentistry website. Oh, my.  Their office could be a TV series like Nip/Tuck only with dentists. 

  • Thamel is pretty reliable. "A pair of CFP meetings are expected to decide a specific recommendation, with a final decision, details and television contract determined later in the fall." Link.

    • Interesting:

  • A Fort Worth police officer got in a foot chase yesterday and left his car on the railroad tracks. A train came by and hit it. (You can click on the link if you want, but that's basically the whole story. No pictures.) 

at 8:30 AM
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