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LOVELAND, Colo., March 12 - Richard Albers, who is eighty-five, evidently is a man of consistent habits.
Nearly every morning for sixteen years, Mr. Albers parked in a particular spot in the lot of the McDonald's in Loveland, Colo. (pop. roughly 55,000). Although news reports don't specify, it is fair to assume that, after parking and likely locking his vehicle, Mr. Albers would walk into the restaurant and avail himself of the many delectable delights on display.
Sometime in 2008, or perhaps earlier, this bucolic, not to say halcyon, existence was shattered when a man named Vernon Brandt, who is now fifty-one, parked in the spot Mr. Albers had, as do so many people, come to think of as his own.
This began to happen with increasing frequency, and Messrs. Brandt and Albers apparently had words, over time, about this, well, travesty.
It all came to a head on July 29,2008, when Mr. Brandt parked his truck and trailer in a way that, intentionally or not, blocked what can only by this point be called the Albers spot.
Mr. Albers, arriving for his customary, oh, maybe a Happy Meal, or a simple milkshake (with, on his more sinful days, a side of fries?), couldn't help but notice that, once again, Mr. Brandt had prevented him from parking in the place where he, Mr. Albers, felt happiest.
Well, life is full of sorrow and a man's pleasures are few. So it makes sense that, perhaps swearing under his breath (news reports are vague), Mr. Albers climbed down from his sport utility vehicle, walked over to Mr. Brandt's truck and tapped on the driver's side window in order, presumably, to initiate a conversation.
Mr. Brandt, who later claimed he was startled, opened the driver's door with terrific force. It toppled Mr. Albers, who, at the time, remember, was roughly eighty-three years old, more than thirty years older than Mr. Brandt.
A witness at Mr. Brandt's recent trial for third-degree assault testified that Mr. Brandt then grabbed Mr. Albers, cocked his fist, and said (growled? shouted? hissed? Details are sketchy), "You want to fight, you son of a bitch?"
The Ft. Collins Coloradan reported on March 7 that it took a jury less than three hours to convict Mr. Brandt, a local contractor, of a single charge of third-degree assault.
Whatever his transgressions, Mr. Brandt should be lauded for selecting, in defense attorney Tony Krenning, a creative lawyer not averse to engaging in a little bit of creative lawyering.
During the trial, Krenning told the jury that Mr. Albers' tapping scared Mr. Brandt, who merely opened his door quickly to escape. Mr. Krenning added that the testimony about the threat (you know, the "you son of a bitch" comment) was merely "salt and pepper" added by the witness.
"It didn't happen," Mr. Krenning told the jury, referring to the contretemps between Messrs. Brandt and Albers (you know, the fist cocking, and etcetera), "but it makes a good story now."
And then Mr. Krenning waxed philosophic: "It's so incredible because we're talking about a parking space. At a doggone McDonald's. It's tragic."
Too true. Too, too true.
Well, wait. No. The Haiti earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, young lives cut short on the fields of battle - those are tragedies. A parking lot quarrel? That's more of a quandary.
On the stand, Mr. Brandt claimed he didn't know whether the window tapper was, as ace Coloradan reporter Trevor Hughes wrote, "a 9-year-old child or a man with a gun outside."
Upon hearing that, prosecutor Greg Biggers may have chuckled a little; Hughes's report didn't say. We do know, however, that Biggs, referring to Brandt, said to the jury, "His own words: 'Could have been a 9-year-old.' That's reckless, folks."
One is hardly a legal expert, but it seems reasonable to assume that, more than anything else, that folksy "folks" absolutely sealed the case for the prosecution. People who are just plain folks, and proud of it, like to have their proud plain folks-ness recognized and affirmed, and any prosecutor worth his salt knows this in the marrow of his bones.
Mr. Brandt will be sentenced next month. He faces up to two years in jail or prison. (The Coloradan, coyly, didn't specify which. Hughes, the reporter, only used the phrase "behind bars," which, technically, could mean Mr. Brandt might spend up to twenty-four months out back of a few saloons.)
--30--
LAS CRUCEZ, New Mexico, March 11 - A woman from Las Crucez, N.M. (pop. roughly 95,000) has been charged with three counts of aggravated battery against a household member, and a separate battery count, for allegedly stabbing her ex-husband after she looked through the call history of his cellular telephone.
A March 7 Associated Press story declined to say what she discovered in in the phone. A cursory Google search - one never clicks past the first page, because one has better things to do, such as napping - shows that other news outlets, including Las Crucez television stations, are as lazy as this reporter: all ran the AP story, so details about the telephone's contents remain sketchy all across the World Wide Web (www.).
The story is full of suggestive details, however, each of which seems a perfect springboard for a novel (or, these days, a Twitter posting).
"According to police," the AP writes,"[the woman] and her 29-year-old ex-husband were at her home late Thursday when she became upset after looking through his cell phone's history."
(This information appeared in the second graf - that's newspeak for paragraph - of the AP story. The AP did not write "[the woman]." They wrote "Shaw," indicating that this was the woman's Christian name. But the first graf does not give her full name. This is an oversight of monumental proportions, and points to the appalling state of American journalism. If you can't trust the AP, whom can you trust?)
Why, one wonders, were they at her home? They are, for goodness sake, ex-husband and -wife. One would think it prudent, not to say preferable, to maintain a good deal of distance between oneself and a second party under those circumstances. Alas, those enjoying, or who have enjoyed, "a union between a man and a woman" have their own ways, some of which are mysterious in the extreme.
The AP quotes detectives as saying that the mysteriously one-named Shaw, who was mysteriously enjoying (enduring?) the company of her ex-husband, became enraged at the mysteriously un-reported, and deeply mysterious, contents of her husband's portable telephone. Not altogether mysteriously, she drew a knife "and started swinging at her husband, striking him at least three times."
His injuries were, according to the AP, "not life-threatening." Perhaps if the couple had still been married, the woman would have tried harder to do serious damage to the man she had taken for better or worse, in sickness and health, till death did them part. After all, if death did them part, the contents of his carry-around telephone would be moot, now wouldn't they?
Plainly, heterosexuals take seriously the institution of marriage. Even after disrespecting the sacred institution by bailing on it, they are so drawn to the one to whom they pledged their troth that, when the loved one disobeys, they feel compelled to stab the shit out of them.
Gays and lesbians waiting for the blessed day when same-gender marriage rights become available should take note.
PATERSON, New Jersey, March 11 - A fifty-one-year-old New Jersey man is preparing to stand trial five times, one for each of the daughters he allegedly raped repeatedly, three of whom he impregnated and who gave birth to a total of six children, the Associated Press reported today.
According to the man's wife, he was sure the world would soon end, and therefore thought it prudent to create a "pure bloodline" by impregnating his daughters. Prosecutors in Passaic County told the AP that one of the daughters was raped as late as 2002, shortly before the wife left the man and took the children with her. The daughter was in her early teens at the time.
In testimony, one daughter, the AP reports, "described experiencing and witnessing beatings administered with wooden boards and steel-toed boots." She added that the man would punish even the most trivial transgressions by withholding food.
The children were home-schooled and not allowed to socialize with peers.
The man faces twenty-seven charges, including many related to sex crimes. His first trial is scheduled for April. More sordid details - there's only so much one can write without becoming dispirited - are in the AP story.
This situation calls into question the notion, promulgated by conservative social critics and lawmakers, that for marriage to remain "a union between a man and a woman" is better for the children. Plainly, some heterosexual men see "family" as their own personal cult.
This point should be noted by gays and lesbians eager to enter the sacred institution of matrimony.
--30--
NOTE (March 12, 2010): This story is updated here.
We just read Nicholas Lemann's Dec. 7, 2009 New Yorker review of the autobiographical My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, by former London Sunday Times editor Harold Evans. (Yes, Dec. 7. First of All is catching up on its reading. So sue us.)
The piece contains a startling passage sure to jolt the deadened nerve-ends of any seasoned journalist. Contextualizing Evans' early-1970s ascension to the Sunday Times editor's chair and his encouragement of assiduous investigative journalism, Lemann writes:
All this was happening at roughly the same time as Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the early glories of magazine "new journalism" in the United States. Evans and the people he worked with were major contributors to a super-charged new conception of what journalism could be: at once powerful and devoted to the powerless, literary and intellectual, glamorous and dutiful, quasi-governmental in its status but in perpetual opposition to government. "No intelligence system, no bureaucracy, can offer the information provided by free competitive reporting," Evans exclaims at one point [in the book].
We put down the magazine and wiped a (glycerine crocodile) tear from our eye. So there was, after all, a reason that tons of us entered journalism in the mid- to late-seventies. (Four words: All The President's Men.)
Well, whatever. Things change. As Lemann later rightly points out, "One can think of 'My Paper Chase' as a potent exercise in escapist nostalgia - as an intoxicant that's bound to produce, at least in journalists, the irresistible high of revisiting the halcyon era of the mainstream media." He adds, "Surely, if [Evans] were young today, he would be operating in the digital world, and surely that world is still full of nascent Harold Evanses, as determined to rise as he was."
Four words: Drudge Report Huffington Post
An Ohio man man has been charged with arson, burglary and other crimes after police apprehended him at the scene of a mobile home fire by following tracks in the snow from the home to his car, which had become stuck in the snow when he'd tried to flee.
In a Feb. 22 report in the Beaver County (Pennsylvania) Times, reporter Robert Poole writes that Robert Lee Armstrong, thirty-three, of 608 Oak Knoll Ave. Southeast, Warren, Ohio (small-area newspaper stories still give home addresses, in case you want to send Christmas cards or burn down the house of the person who torched your mobile home), had once rented the trailer, at 1035 State Line Road, in North Beaver Township, from Lloyd Bruce Clevenger, forty-eight, of Cameron, N.C. (Plainly, the charmingly named North Beaver Township is urbane enough to draw people from as far away as the Midwest and the South.)
Armstrong told police he broke into the trailer to claim items he'd left behind when he moved, and found that some were missing. He said that Clevenger, as Poole of the B.C. Times so succinctly puts it, "had lied to him about the location of those items."
Distressed, Armstrong set fire to the curtains in the trailer's bedroom.
He then walked to his car, leaving footprints in the unplowed snow. Police found him there when they arrived.
Neither police nor the B.C. Times identify the "items" Armstrong was trying to claim.
Amon Carter IV has a totally hot butt.
At least he did on January 8, according to news reports, when the Texas Christian University sophomore had Greek symbols from his fraternity and a sorority branded onto his buttocks. It happened during a frat/sorority party trip to Breckenridge, Colo. (Carter's face and charred assets are shown here. Why is this man smiling?)
Breckenridge investigators said that no charges will be filed, as Carter willingly participated in the stunt, which was not a fraternity initiation ritual. Carter will require multiple surgeries on the second and third degree burns covering the cheeks in his lower forty.
Incidentally, and tangentially, Carter is the great-grandson of Amon G. Carter, Sr., who founded the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Carter family is one of the most prominent in Ft. Worth. Carter, Sr., obviously lived in a simpler time, when branding was reserved for the backsides of cattle, not heirs.
And then Mr. Krenning waxed philosophic: "It's so incredible because we're talking about a parking space. At a doggone McDonald's. It's tragic." 
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