Category: Written Media / Books
Indeed!
And now for something different-
It’s linked in the daily US Guardian newsletter, so you may have seen it. But, while I prefer fictional mysteries to true crime, this piqued my interest, so maybe it’ll interest you, too, if you haven’t read it yet.
Journalist Jeff German was stabbed to death. Las Vegas watches as the accused politician goes on trial
German had written about workplace harassment by Robert Telles, a county lawyer, before he was killed
Jeff German was a doggedly old-school investigative reporter in Las Vegas who didn’t care what mobsters or tainted politicians he offended. After more than 40 years on the job, he had received so many threats and angry phone messages he stopped paying attention to them.
“I get that stuff all the time. It’s not a big deal,” he told his editor at the Las Vegas Review Journal.
It was the summer of 2022, and the editor, Rhonda Prast, had seen threatening texts and social media messages from a local politician who German had been writing about and considered reporting them to upper management.
German saw no particular reason to fear the politician, a short, bullet-headed lawyer named Robert Telles who headed an office that settles the estates of county residents who die without a will. At the time, he had two much more chilling messages on his voicemail from hard, angry men calling him every name in the book and threatening to come after him.
Even those didn’t bother him. Earlier in his career, German had stared down Tony Spilotro, a notorious, cold-eyed mafioso who was memorably portrayed by Joe Pesci in the Martin Scorsese movie Casino, and came away unscathed. Prast, too, did not think Telles meant her reporter physical harm. “I thought he was going to sue us,” she said.
Yet, as a murder trial now underway in Las Vegas has revealed, there may have been more to Telles than met the eye. According to the prosecution, Telles became so exasperated with the stories German was writing about him – stories depicting him as a nightmare boss who harassed and bullied his staff and conducted an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate – that he drove to German’s house on 2 September 2022, and stabbed him to death in broad daylight after learning that his electronic communications with the subordinate were about to be made public.
German, who was 69, was left to die in a row of bushes along the side of his house. It was 24 hours before neighbours, alarmed by the fact that he’d left his garage door open and was not responding to messages, walked around his house and discovered the body.
Once police arrived, however, it took just four days to gather enough evidence to arrest Telles. Security video footage gathered between Telles’s house and German’s showed a maroon GMC Yukon Denali travelling between the two and a man dressed improbably in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a reflective orange jacket walking to and from German’s house with a grey bag slung over his shoulder. (snip- More )
Ray Bradbury Explains Why Literature is the Safety Valve of Civilization (in Which Case We Need More Literature!)
Watch on the page, here’s the text (not the 4 minute video transcript):
Ray Bradbury had it all thought out. Behind his captivating works of science fiction, there were subtle theories about what literature was meant to do. The retro clip above takes you back to the 1970s and it shows Bradbury giving a rather intriguing take on the role of literature and art. For the author of Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, literature has more than an aesthetic purpose. It has an important sociological/psychoanalytic role to play. Stories are a safety valve. They keep society collectively, and us individually, from coming apart at the seams. Which is to say–if you’ve been following the news lately–we need a helluva lot more literature these days. And a few new Ray Bradburys.
Funny
Super-Fun-Pak Comix by Ruben Bolling for August 15, 2024
To Inclusion and Integration
tRump’s and his supporters including the republican media arm Fake news Fox. And other weird republians stuff
Trump Spox: J.D. Vance Will Need To “Deep Clean” Air Force 2 To Get Rid Of The “Smell” From Kamala Harris
Bolton: Trump Doesn’t Even Know That He’s Lying
Jesse Watters: Walz Hugs His Wife In A “Weird” Way
MN Paper Debunks The Cult’s “Tampon Tim” Claims
The real cover:
“The law…forbids teachers from raising gender identity and sexual orientation issues with younger students.”
Excuse me, but every time a straight teacher mentions his or her heterosexually-married husband, wife, or kids, the issue of sexual orientation gets raised, because as we all know, whenever straight people mention their spouse everyone immediately goes straight to thinking about the two of them having sex and that makes everyone else feel uncomfortable, and we can’t have that. Oh, wait…no, that’s only the way it works for gay people.
zhera The goal is to shove kids so far into the closet they will never find their way out.
Scottie's Playtime 