开云体育

Akio Kashiwagi was a crafty soul. He wheeled and dealed for rebates and credit on a scale available only to those willing to risk millions of dollars on each trek to the tables. He also seemed to have all sorts of side deals going with casino hosts, like cashing in chips obtained on credit, which turned the paper risk of a marker into real exposure for the casino because the gambler had obtained hard dollars. And he tried to buy chips with instruments that some casinos found were not readily convertible into cash, ones that could only be cashed at a particular bank and only if Kashiwagi was standing there. Still, every casino executive worth his comping privileges wanted Kashiwagi, wanted to bag his wallet and have as their own trophy a story of how they had faced, and bested, the world's most fearless gambler. They wanted to tell stories like Dennis Gomes's favorite tale.

Gomes was a straight-laced regulator with an extraordinary reputation among others in law enforcement and among reporters, to whom he leaked some of the best crime stories to come out of Las Vegas. He came to New Jersey before it started casino gambling to show how regulation could be done. But his precise, unannounced raid on Resorts' Bahamas operation, which turned up file drawers full of evidence tying Resorts to Meyer Lansky's gang, and his insistence on following the letter of the law were rewarded by orders chaining him to his desk. Gomes quit and returned to Nevada, where he eventually ran the Dunes, which he leased from its Japanese owner. Gomes had most of his money, a million dollars, sunk in the Dunes, a broken-down excuse for a casino located on the incredibly valuable fourth corner where Caesars Palace, the Barbary Coast and Bally's Grand meet on the Strip. One week he lured Akio Kashiwagi to his table. For hours Gomes watched the play from his television monitor in his office, sweating as Kashiwagi's bankroll grew and grew by one hundred thousand dollars per bet.

When Kashiwagi was $5 million ahead he got up, stretched, and announced it was time to return to Kashiwagi Palace, his $80 million home near the foot of Mount Fuji, the home Japanese tourists kept mistaking for a temple because it was built with huge Japanese cypress logs common to Shinto shrines.

If Kashiwagi left the Dunes would close, because the cash he would demand would wipe the place out. Even if Gomes had the slot machines emptied of their winnings, the Dunes might not be able to cover all its outstanding bills. No matter what, Gomes told his Asian marketing guy, don't let that guy get away.

When the limo brought Kashiwagi and his host to the private jet at McCarran Airport, the pilot came back to say that he felt unlucky and did not want to fly.

"You're just trying to get me to come back so I'll lose," Kashiwagi replied to his host in Japanese.

"Well, you can fly, but I'm not going to die," the host said, heading for the door.

That did it. Kashiwagi said he would fly commercial. Inside the terminal he was taken to the Delta gate and told that the only remaining flight to Los Angeles would arrive too late for him to connect to the plane for Japan. That was sort of true. It was the last Delta flight that night. Kashiwagi, who did not read English, did not ask about other airlines.

The host recommended that Kashiwagi return to the Dunes and fly out the next morning.

"No, you're just trying to get me back to gamble," Kashiwagi said. "Go to Los Angeles and it's going to cost you two thousand dollars


for rooms and food for you and your companions," the host told Kashiwagi, knowing he was a tightwad when it came to expenses. That did it. Kashiwagi agreed to stay the night at the Dunes for free.

On the short limousine ride back the host suggested they have dinner together and then go see one of Norbert Alemain's naked girl revues. They shared a bottle of wine at dinner, but it was empty long before the late show would start so the host suggested that Kashiwagi gamble to fill the time.

"No," Kashiwagi said, "you just want me to lose my money." "Not at all," the host said. "Just bet ten thousand dollars." Kashiwagi sat down, put out ten thousand dollars and won. Gomes knew he had him. "He was thinking that he had shorted himself ninety thousand dollars because if he had bet his usual hundred thousand dollars that's how much more he would have won."

On the next hand Kashiwagi bet $100,000 and he stayed for hours chasing that $90,000. By dawn he had lost the $5 million cash and had signed markers for $5 million more. Gomes not only escaped ruin, he was a multimillionaire, even after giving Kashiwagi a 30 percent discount on his marker.

Stories like this abounded about Kashiwagi, stories about how he had broken or made careers, how he had negotiated for credit and discounts, how he wanted the best suites and then ate bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches. How he made deals governing how long he would play in return for credit and broke them. How he would quit when he was ahead. Stories about where he got all that money.

Kashiwagi appeared to have limitless wealth and yet he was not among the top thirty taxpayers in his prefecture. His Tokyo office was modest, with an apartment upstairs, though luxury cars filled the parking spaces out front. A business research firm showed that Kashiwagi's company had just five employees and sales of $15 million, yet Kashiwagi told casino executives he was a billionaire with an income of $100 million a year. Gomes and other casino executives figured he was a sarakin, a Japanese loan shark, with connections to the yakuza, the Japanese mob. That Kashiwagi was said to be part Korean, a serious detriment to business success in Japan, added to these suspicions.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

Thomas began to ask her out socially three to five months after she began working for him in July 1981, according to Hill. His approach was unusual. Rather than asking her to join him for a specific date or event, like a movie or dinner, he expressed his interest as a casual command, saying, "You ought to go out with me sometime." She turned him down firmly, she recalled, explaining that she enjoyed her work and believed it "ill advised to date a supervisor." But he would not take no for an answer. Instead, she testified, "In the following weeks, he continued to ask me out on several occasions. He pressed me to justify my reasons for saying 'no' to him."

According to notes taken by a former Senate aide, James Brudney, of a private conversation he had with Hill weeks before she accused Thomas publicly, Hill acknowledged that from the beginning, and throughout Thomas's alleged harassment of her, she never took the obvious but impolitic step of telling him directly that she was not romantically interested in him. Instead of risking the chance of insulting her boss, she avoided confrontation by erecting a professional barrier; impersonal and inoffensive, her response was likely to do little damage to her career. As Brudney's notes show, Hill acknowledged that when turning Thomas down, she, "cited work, didn't cite not liking him." She blamed herself belatedly for not being more forceful: the notes also show that Hill described herself as having been "pretty naive, stupid," at the age of twenty-five.

In using the workplace as a shield, Hill was displaying her preference for privacy and polite relations. But her social niceties may have been misinterpreted by Thomas at first. He offered a very different view of events. He testified both to the Senate and in his interview with the FBI that he never once asked Hill out. Rather, he said that he thought of Hill and his other staff members as just like "my kids" - and he added emphatically, "I do not commingle my personal life with my work life."

However, according to Hill, Thomas's behavior soon became almost insufferable. She told Brudney that Thomas "never said, 'Date or I'll fire you.' " But the pressure was such that before long, in her words, "I found it impossible." "Thomas," she testified, "began to use work situations to discuss sex. On these occasions he would call me into his office for reports on education issues and projects, or he might suggest that because of time pressures we go to lunch at a government cafeteria." But after a brief discussion of work, "he would turn the conversation to a discussion of sexual matters. His conversations were very vivid. He spoke of acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts. On various occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess" - mentioning at one point that he had "measured his penis, which he said was larger than most."

These private conversations, from Hill's standpoint, were "offensive and disgusting, and degrading." Hill recalled that as they became increasingly upsetting to her in the winter of 1981 and early spring of 1982, she became slightly more aggressive toward Thomas. Although she continued to refrain from telling him that she had no interest in him, she expressly told him that she did not want to talk about what she discreetly called "these kinds of things." According to Brudney's notes, Hill tried lamely to change the subject. She also described trying to dismiss such disturbing gambits as Thomas's boast about how "all my friends say they don't do oral sex - I do - I'm into oral sex" by blandly suggesting in her best Sunday school manner that "everyone is interested in different things."

Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)

Bossie, now Bannon's deputy campaign manager, was involved in the day-to-day management and hundreds of daily decisions and quickly learned who had the real authority. He would be in a meeting with Bannon, Conway and Kushner, where a decision would be made: for example, on the next three TV spots.

Bossie would pass the decision to the person running digital ads, but then see that they didn't run. "What the hell!" he said. "I came in here. I told you what to do. We had a meeting, we decided."

"Oh, no, no," he would be told. "Jared came in after you and said, 'Don't do that.' "

This was a "very important light bulb moment." If Kushner didn't fully buy in, things wouldn't get done. So after decision meetings, Bossie approached Kushner to make sure he understood what Jared wanted. Kushner, without the title, was running the campaign, especially on money matters. He knew that his father-in-law considered it all his money and Jared had to sign off on everything.

Kushner scoffed at Bannon's suggestion that Trump put $50 million of his own money into his presidential campaign. "He will never write a $50 million check," Kushner told Bannon in August.

"Dude," Bannon said, "we're going to have this thing in a dead heat." They would soon be tied with Hillary. "We need to finally go up on TV with something." They needed to contribute to the ground game. "We're going to need at least $50 million. He's going to have to write it."

Under election rules and law, the candidate can make unlimited personal contributions to his or her own campaign.

"He'll never do it," Kushner insisted.

"It's about being president of the United States!"

"Steve, unless you can show him he's a dead lock" - a certain winner - "I mean a dead lock, up three to five points, he'll never write that size check."

"Well, you're right," Bannon agreed.

"Maybe we can get $25 million out of him," said Kushner, adding a caveat: "He doesn't have a lot of cash."

After the final presidential debate in Las Vegas on October 19, Trump returned to New York. It was now the three-week sprint to election day!

Bannon, Kushner and Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs executive, presented Trump with a plan for him to give $25 million to the campaign.

"No way," Trump said. "Fuck that. I'm not doing it." Where were the famous Republican high-donor guys? "Where the fuck's the money? Where's all this money from these guys? Jared, you're supposed to be raising all this money. Not going to do it."

The next day they came up with a new proposal for $10 million and presented it to Trump on his plane. This wouldn't even be a loan, but an advance against the cash donations coming in from supporters. These were the "grundoons" or "hobbits" as Bannon playfully and derisively called them. And he had a deadline: They had to have the $10 million that day.

The supporters' donations "will keep coming in, win, lose or draw," Bannon said. "But I say you're going to win."

"You don't know that," Trump snapped. "We're three points down." It showed how little confidence Trump had in victory, Bannon thought.

After two days of pushing for the $10 million, Trump finally told them, "Okay, fine, get off my back. We'll do $10 million."

Steve Mnuchin handed Trump two documents to sign. The first was a terms sheet outlining how he would be paid back as money came into the campaign.

"What's this?" Trump asked about the second document. "Wiring instructions." Mnuchin knew that every Trump decision was tentative and open to relitigation. Nothing was ever over.

"What the fuck," said Trump. The wire order should be sent to someone in the Trump Organization.

Mnuchin said no, it needed to be done right' then. Trump signed both documents.

Bob Woodward, "Fear: Trump in the White House" (2018)

The deputy director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service testified before a Senate committee in 2003 that the United States imports more than 200 million fish, 49 million amphibians, 2 million reptiles, 365,000 birds, and 38,000 mammals in a single year. With fewer than 100 U.S. inspectors monitoring traffic nationwide, even if they worked 24/7, this would allow less than one second to inspect each incoming animal.

Whether for exotic pets or exotic cuisine, imported animals transported together under cramped conditions end up in holding areas in dealer warehouses, where they and their viruses can mingle further. The 2003 monkeypox outbreak across a half-dozen states in the Midwest was traced to monkeypox-infected Gambian giant rats shipped to a Texas animal distributor along with 800 other small mammals snared from the African rainforest. The rodents were co-housed with prairie dogs who contracted the disease and made their way into pet stores and swap meets via an Illinois distributor. One week the virus is in a rodent in the dense jungles of Ghana, along the Gold Coast of West Africa; a few weeks later, that same virus finds itself in a three-year-old Wisconsin girl whose mom bought her a prairie dog at a 4-H swap meet. "Basically you factored out an ocean and half a continent by moving these animals around and ultimately juxtaposing them in a warehouse or a garage somewhere," said Wisconsin's chief epidemiologist. Nobody ended up getting infected directly from the African rodents; they caught the monkeypox from secondary and tertiary contacts inherent to the trade.

The international pet trade in exotics has been described as a "major chink in the USA public health armor." As one expert quipped, "It was probably easier for a Gambian rat to get into the United States than a Gambian. Previously, monkeypox was typically known only to infect bushmeat hunters living in certain areas of Africa who ate a specific species of monkey. "Nothing happens on this planet that doesn't impact us," notes the chair of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "We're wearing clothes that were made in China. We're eating foods that were grown in Chile," he said. "Could there be a more poignant example than this [monkeypox outbreak]

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

Nothing succeeds like success

The week's good cause.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am appealing to you today on behalf of that selfless and dedicated body, the World Center for Hangover Research.

I know that hangover is not one of those illnesses that people like to talk about publicly, but if the Center is to succeed in its noble work then the first step must be to clear awaysome of the myths about hangover.

In the first place, hangover is not infectious. Nor can you pick it up off a barstool seat. For that reason its treatment does not require isolation of the patient. The barbarous practice of refusing to speak to him and making him get his own breakfast, sending the children off to stay with the grandparents.

The sad fact of the matter, my friends, is that there is no known cure for hangover. That of all the illnesses, for the sufferer few inflictions are more incapacitating, debilitating, and downright humiliating.

On opening the eyes the first sensation is an immediate and overwhelming conviction that one's body has been taken over by an alien lifeform.

To the very extremities of one's nerve endings, all one is conscious of is the massive THUD THUD THUD of the kitten walking across the carpet. Downstairs.

Then, trying to dismiss the feeling that one's tongue is wearing a full-length coat, one makes one's way to the bathroom feeling extremely titubant, and one inspects one's face in the mirror.

All right, you say it is all very well harrying us with these awful details, but hope can you offer us? What research is being done to wipe out this distressing and widespread complaint.

Well, my friends, mankind's ONLY hope lies with the Hangover Research Center. Here, a small band of dedicated boozers are laboring ceaselessly and selflessly. Every night from opening time onwards, they fill themselves with booze.

Then, the following morning, gin leaking out of their ears, the temples throbbing like a schoolboy at a Swedish film, they sample every known antidote.

And yet no government subsidy attends them. It is all done by voluntary contributions.

This, despite the fact that if the hangover figures continue their upward spiral it could mean the end of drinking as we know it.

So therefore, my friends, may I appeal to you to give generously to give to this cause. I know you have many other calls upon your resources but DO consider this. There is nothing is the whole world that looks for outside assistance more desperately than an unwell drunk. Or, as the proverb so succinctly abbreviates it, nothing seeks aids like sick souse.

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Denis Norden 588b

The mean matron (played by Grace Coppin) also kills a pet bunny. Delicate Dolores (whose name means sorrows) can't take the abuse; in the film's climactic scene, she is found dead by hanging - a suicide. Cut down by Paul Henreid with what was supposed to be noble regret, I am sorry to report that the great actor used the scenes of cutting down my dead body as an excuse to run his hands over my breasts. We did many takes, and, of course, being dead, I could not even flinch, let alone protest. The subtext was funny: Paul Henreid never seemed to realize I was wearing falsies, and he was sneaking feels of foam rubber. An undercurrent of unwholesome desire runs-unintentionally, I am sure-through Paul Henreid's performance. Sometimes the camera reveals more truth than the actors intend: There is a close-up of him looking down at Anne Francis that definitely borders on lechery.

Rita Moreno " Rita Moreno" (2012)

Experts have long wondered who wrote "Could only have been painted by a madman!" on the painting. Now, they think it was the artist, Edvard Munch. The message could have been aimed at critics.

Experts have long wondered who scribbled on Edvard Munch's classic painting "The Scream." The faintly penciled words on the canvas translate to, could only have been painted by a madman. Turns out the graffitists was most likely Munch himself. Experts say the handwriting checks out. It's probably a shot at critics who questioned his mental state after laying eyes on the painting

An Indiana man who has a tattoo with the words crime pays on his forehead might want to think about getting it removed. Donald Murray was wanted in connection with a vehicle chase. Police shared a mugshot from one of his prior arrests, got a bunch of tips on his whereabouts - possibly because it's easy to spot a guy with crime pays tattooed on his face. Murray turned himself in, and he's being held on bail. Crime doesn't pay.

Jailed For Being In Debt

By Chris Serres and Glenn Howatt

Minnesota's leading newspaper, following up on a tip that the number of arrest warrants was rising, discovered in 2011 that collection agencies used sheriffs deputies to arrest people with unpaid debts, many of whom were released after posting bail equal to the debt. Since the three-part series by Minneapolis Star Tribune reporters Serres and Howatt ran, newspapers in Arkansas, Georgia, and other states have shown how widespread this practice is.

As a sheriff's deputy dumped the contents of Joy Uhlmeyer's purse into a sealed bag, she begged to know why she had just been arrested while driving home to Richfield after an Easter visit with her elderly mother.

No one had an answer. Uhlmeyer spent a sleepless night in a frigid Anoka County holding cell, her hands tucked under her armpits for warmth. Then, handcuffed in a squad car, she was taken to downtown Minneapolis for booking. Finally, after sixteen hours in limbo, jail officials fingerprinted Uhlmeyer and explained her offense - missing a court hearing over an unpaid debt. "They have no right to do this to me," said the fifty-seven-year-old patient-care advocate, her voice as soft as a whisper. "Not for a stupid credit card."

It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the nineteenth century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.

Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to forty-eight hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona, and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt, and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.

Whether a debtor is locked up depends largely on where the person lives, because enforcement is inconsistent from state to state, and even county to county.

In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January, a judge sentenced a Kenney, Illinois, man "to indefinite incarceration" until he came up with $300 toward a lumberyard debt.

"The law enforcement system has unwittingly become a tool of the debt collectors," said Michael Kinkley, an attorney in Spokane, Washington, who has represented arrested debtors. "The debt collectors are abusing the system and intimidating people, and law enforcement is going along with it."

How often are debtors arrested across the country? No one can say. No national statistics are kept, and the practice is largely unnoticed outside legal circles. "My suspicion is the debt collection industry does not want the world to know these arrests are happening, because the practice would be widely condemned," said Robert Hobbs, deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center in Boston,

Debt collectors defend the practice, saying phone calls, letters, and legal actions aren't always enough to get people to pay.

"Admittedly, it's a harsh sanction," said Steven Rosso, a partner in the Como Law Firm of St. Paul, which does collections work. "But sometimes, it's the only sanction we have."

Taxpayers foot the bill for arresting and jailing debtors. In many cases, Minnesota judges set bail at the amount owed.

In Minnesota, judges have issued arrest warrants for people who owe as little as $85 - less than half the cost of housing an inmate overnight. Debtors targeted for arrest owed a median of $3,512 in 2009, up from $2,201 five years ago.

Those jailed for debts may be the least able to pay.

"It's just one more blow for people who are already struggling," said Beverly Yang, a Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance Foundation staff attorney who has represented three Illinois debtors arrested in the past two months. "They don't like being in court. They don't have cars. And if they had money to pay these collectors, they would."

THE COLLECTION MACHINE

The laws allowing for the arrest of someone for an unpaid debt are not new.

What is new is the rise of well-funded, aggressive, and centralized collection firms, in many cases run by attorneys, that buy up unpaid debt and use the courts to collect.

Three debt buyers - Unifund CCR Partners, Portfolio Recovery Associates Inc., and Debt Equities LLC - accounted for 15 percent of all debt-related arrest warrants issued in Minnesota since 2005, court data show. The debt buyers also file tens of thousands of other collection actions in the state, seeking court orders to make people pay.

The debts - often five or six years old - are purchased from companies like cell-phone providers and credit-card issuers, and cost a few cents on the dollar. Using automated dialing equipment and teams of lawyers, the debt-buyer firms try to collect the debt, plus interest and fees. A firm aims to collect at least twice what it paid for the debt to cover costs. Anything beyond that is profit.

Portfolio Recovery Associates of Norfolk, Virginia, a publicly traded debt buyer with the biggest profits and market capitalization, earned $44 million last year on $281 million in revenue - a 16 percent net margin. Encore Capital Group, another large debt buyer based in San Diego, had a margin last year of 10 percent. By comparison, Walmart's profit margin was 3.5 percent.

Todd Lansky, chief operating officer at Resurgence Financial LLC, a Northbrook, Illinois-based debt buyer, said firms like his operate within the law, which says people who ignore court orders can be arrested for contempt. By the time a warrant is issued, a debtor may have been contacted up to twelve times, he said.

"This is a last-ditch effort to say, 'Look, just show up in court,' " he said.


GO TO COURT - OR JAIL

At 9:30 A.M. on a recent weekday morning, about a dozen people stood in line at the Hennepin County Government Center in Minneapolis.

Nearly all of them had received court judgments for not paying a delinquent debt. One by one, they stepped forward to fill out a two-page financial disclosure form that gives creditors the information they need to garnish money from their paychecks or bank accounts.

This process happens several times a week in Hennepin County.

Those who fail to appear can be held in contempt and an arrest warrant is issued if a collector seeks one. Arrested debtors aren't officially charged with a crime, but their cases are heard in the same courtroom as drug users.

Greg Williams, who is unemployed and living on state benefits, said he made the trip downtown on the advice of his girlfriend who knew someone who had been arrested for missing such a hearing.

"I was surprised that the police would waste time on my petty debts," said Williams, forty-five, of Minneapolis, who had a $5,773 judgment from a credit-card debt. "Don't they have real criminals to catch?"

Few debtors realize they can land in jail simply for ignoring debt-collection legal matters. Debtors also may not recognize the names of companies seeking to collect old debts. Some people are contacted by three or four firms as delinquent debts are bought and sold multiple times after the original creditor writes off the account.

"They may think it's a mistake. They may think it's a scam. They may not realize how important it is to respond," said Mary Spector, a law professor at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law in Dallas.

A year ago, Legal Aid attorneys proposed a change in state law that would have required law-enforcement officials to let debtors fill out financial-disclosure forms when they are apprehended rather than book them into jail. No legislator introduced the measure.

JAILED FOR $250

One afternoon last spring, Deborah Poplawski, thirty-eight, of Minneapolis was digging in her purse for coins to feed a downtown parking meter when she saw the flashing lights of a Minneapolis police squad car behind her. Poplawski, a restaurant cook, assumed she had parked illegally. Instead, she was headed to jail over a $250 credit-card debt.

Less than a month earlier, she learned by chance from an employment counselor that she had an outstanding warrant. Debt Equities, a Golden Valley debt buyer, had sued her, but she says nobody served her with court documents. Thanks to interest and fees, Poplawski was now on the hook for $1,138.

Though she knew of the warrant and unpaid debt, "I wasn't equating the warrant with going to jail, because there wasn't criminal activity associated with it," she said. "I just thought it was a civil thing."

She spent nearly twenty-five hours at the Hennepin County jail. A year later, she still gets angry recounting the experience. A male inmate groped her behind in a crowded elevator, she said. Poplawski also was ordered to change into the standard jail uniform - graywhite underwear and orange pants, shirt and socks - in a cubicle the size of a telephone booth. She slept in a room with twelve to sixteen women and a toilet with no privacy. One woman offered her drugs, she said.

Joy Uhlmeyer, who was arrested on her way home from spending Easter with her mother, said she defaulted on a $6,200 Chase credit card after a costly divorce in 2006. The firm seeking payment was Resurgence Financial, the Illinois debt buyer. Uhlmeyer said she didn't recognize the name and ignored the notices.

Uhlmeyer walked free after her nephew posted $2,500 bail. It took another $187 to retrieve her car from the city impound lot. Her eighty-six-year-old mother later asked why she didn't call home after leaving Duluth. Not wanting to tell the truth, Uhlmeyer said her car broke down and her cell phone died.

"The really maddening part of the whole experience was the complete lack of information," she said. "I kept thinking, 'If there was a warrant out for my arrest, then why in the world wasn't I told about it?"

The next day, Poplawski appeared before a Hennepin County district judge. He told her to fill out the form listing her assets and bank account, and released her. Several weeks later, Debt Equities used this information to seize funds from her bank account. The firm didn't return repeated calls seeking a comment.

"We hear every day about how there's no money for public services," Poplawski said. "But it seems like the collectors have found a way to get the police to do their work."

THREAT DEPENDS ON LOCATION

A lot depends on where a debtor lives or is arrested, as Jamie Rodriguez, forty-one, a bartender from Brooklyn Park, discovered two years ago.

Deputies showed up at his house one evening while he was playing with his five-year-old daughter, Nicole. They live in Hennepin County, where the Sheriff's Office has enough staff to seek out people with warrants for civil violations.

If Rodriguez lived in neighboring Wright County, he could have simply handed the officers a check or cash for the amount owed. If he lived in Dakota County, it's likely no deputy would have shown up because the Sheriff's Office there says it lacks the staff to pursue civil debt cases.

Knowing that his daughter and wife were watching from the window, Rodriguez politely asked the deputies to drive him around the block, out of sight of his family, before they handcuffed him. The deputies agreed.

"No little girl should have to see her daddy arrested," said Rodriguez, who spent a night in jail.

"If you talk to fifteen different counties, you'll find fifteen different approaches to handling civil warrants," said Sgt. Robert Shingledecker of the Dakota County Sheriff's Office. "Everything is based on manpower."

Local police also can enforce debt-related warrants, but small towns and some suburbs often don't have enough officers.

The Star Tribune's comparison of warrant and booking data suggests that at least one in six Minnesota debtors at risk for arrest actually lands in jail, typically for eight hours. The exact number

THE SECOND SURPRISE

Many debtors, like Robert Vee, thirty-six, of Brooklyn Park, get a second surprise after being arrested - their bail is exactly the amount of money owed.

Hennepin County automatically sets bail at the judgment amount or $2,500, whichever is less. This policy was adopted four years ago in response to the high volume of debtor-default cases, say court officials.

Some judges say the practice distorts the purpose of bail, which is to make sure people show up in court.

"It's certainly an efficient way to collect debts, but it's also highly distasteful," said Hennepin County District Judge Jack Nordby. "The amount of bail should have nothing to do with the amount of the debt."

Judge Robert Blaeser, chief of the county court's civil division, said linking bail to debt streamlines the process because judges needn't spend time setting bail.

"It's arbitrary," he conceded. "The bigger question is: Should you be allowed to get an order from a court for someone to be arrested of such arrests isn't known because the government doesn't consistently track what happens to debtor warrants.

"There are no standards here," said Gail Hillebrand, a senior attorney with the Consumers Union in San Francisco. "A borrower who lives on one side of the river can be arrested while another one goes free. It breeds disrespect for the law."

Haekyung Nielsen, twenty-seven, of Bloomington, said police showed up at her house on a civil warrant two weeks after she gave birth through Caesarean section. A debt buyer had sent her court papers for an old credit-card debt while she was in the hospital; Nielsen said she did not have time to respond.

Her baby boy, Tyler, lay in the crib as she begged the officer not to take her away.

"Thank God, the police had mercy and left me and my baby alone," said Nielsen, who later paid the debt. "But to send someone to arrest me two weeks after a massive surgery that takes most women eight weeks to recover from was just unbelievable."

Jailed because they owe money? You've got to remember there are people who have the money but just won't pay a single penny."

If friends or family post a debtor's bail, they can expect to kiss the money goodbye, because it often ends up with creditors, who routinely ask judges for the bail payment.

Vee, a highway construction worker, was arrested one afternoon in February while driving his teenage daughter from school to their home in Brooklyn Park. As he was being cuffed, Vee said his daughter, who has severe asthma, started hyperventilating from the stress.

"All I kept thinking about was whether she was all right and if she was using her [asthma] inhaler," he said.

From the Hennepin County jail, he made a collect call to his landlord, who promised to bring the bail. It was $1,875.06, the exact amount of a credit-card debt.

Later, Vee was reunited with his distraught daughter at home.

"We hugged for a long time, and she was bawling her eyes out," he said.

He still has unpaid medical and credit-card bills and owes about $40,000 on an old second mortgage. The sight of a squad car in his rearview mirror is all it takes to set off a fresh wave of anxiety.

"The question always crosses my mind: 'Are the cops going to arrest me again?'" he said. "So long as I've got unpaid bills, the threat is there."

This article first appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on June 6, 2010.

David Cay Johnston "Divided" (2014)

There is also reason to believe that in addition to frequenting Graffiti, [Clarence] Thomas was an avid consumer of sexually explicit magazines while Hill was working for him at the EEOC. Kaye Savage, the White House appointee, recalled visiting the chairman's first real bachelor pad in the summer of 1982, not long after Hill had moved to the agency and toward the end of the period that she identified as the hiatus in Thomas's attentions. It was a junior efficiency apartment in a high-rise building in southwest Washington, where he had moved after leaving Gil Hardy's spare bedroom.

Savage was friendly with both Thomas and Hill. Having learned that Savage was a jogger like himself, Thomas had offered to go shopping with her over a weekend for special running shoes designed for city pavements. Since becoming chairman of the EEOC that May, Thomas had relied on the agency's car and driver for official business, but this left him stranded on weekends. So Savage had agreed to pick him up at his apartment.

He had only recently set up housekeeping, and the place, as she recalled, was still underfurnished: there was little more than a mattress on the floor and a stereo. But one other feature made a lasting impression on Savage. Thomas had compiled and placed on the floor "a huge, compulsively organized stack of Playboy magazines, five years' worth of them, organized by month and year." The walls of the apartment were also memorably covered. There was only one main room, but all of its walls - as well as the walls of the little galley kitchen and even the bathroom door - were papered with centerfolds of large-breasted nude women.

Savage recalled staring awkwardly about her; the, display seemed so out of character with everything else she knew about Thomas. He was a fanatic about discipline and a daily churchgoer. He was serious about his career and honest to the point of indiscretion about his ambitious plans for the future. (Thomas had told her, as he had told others, that he planned to replace Thurgood Marshall on his retirement from the Supreme Court.) But his evident enthusiasm for pornography suggested to Savage that Thomas had a private side that was very different from his public persona. To her the contrast seemed, as she later put it, "a little crazy."

Savage couldn't contain her curiosity, so she asked Thomas why he had so many sexually explicit magazines. "I don't drink, and I don't run around," he replied, implying that the magazines were his one recreational vice. In fact, she later told a congressional investigator, Thomas said that the magazines were the only possessions he had deemed worth taking with him from his collapsing marriage.

It was a little unusual, Savage believed, for a man of Thomas's age to remain so absorbed by girlie magazines. As it happened, she thought it odd enough to mention in passing one day to Hill, with whom she occasionally went shopping in consignment stores on weekends.

"Yeah," she remembered Hill's saying wearily, without a flicker of surprise, "that's Clarence."

Jane Mayer "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas" (1994)

When Stanley slogged through the Congo on his Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, Casement accompanied him for a week. "A good specimen of the capable Englishman," noted the explorer in his journal, not noticing that Casement was Irish. Casement was a better judge of Stanley, for although the explorer remained something of a hero to him, Casement recognized Stanley's sadistic streak. After seeing that Stanley's dog lacked a tail, he learned to his horror that Stanley had cut off the tail, cooked it, and fed it to the dog to eat.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

The World Health Organization sets the number of people killed worldwide from food borne microbial diseases at 20 million a year, with animal products topping the list of causes. The WHO attributes the global rise in food borne illness not only to the "greater consumption of foods of animal origin, but the "methods of intensive production" required to supply such a demand." About half of all known foodborne pathogens have been discovered within just the past 25 years.

In industrialized countries, the incidence of reported infectious food- and waterborne illnesses has more than doubled since the 1970s. According to the best estimate of the CDC, an astonishing 76 million Americans come down with food borne illness annually. That's nearly one in four every single year. Remember that "24-hour flu" you or a family member may have had last year? There's no such thing as a 24-hour flu. It may very well have been food poisoning. In today's food safety lottery, each year Americans have approximately a 1 in 1,000 chance of being hospitalized, and about a 1 in 50,000 chance of dying, simply from eating.

It may be from E. coli O157:H7 in hamburgers, Salmonella in eggs, Listeria in hot dogs, "flesh-eating" bacteria in oysters. or Campylobacter in Thanksgiving turkeys. According to the executive editor of Meat Processing magazine, "Nearly every food consumers buy in supermarkets and order in restaurants can be eaten with certainty for its safety - except for meat and poultry products.

The latest comprehensive analysis of sources for food borne illness outbreaks found that chickens were the premiere cause overall. In fact, poultry and eggs caused more cases than red meat, seafood, and dairy products comblned. This British analysis showed that fruits and vegetables carried the lowest disease and hospitalization risk, whereas poultry carried the highest. The researchers conclude, "Reducing the impact of indigenous food borne disease is mainly dependent on controlling the contamination of chicken. Good luck. In the United States, the overwhelming majority of the 9 billion chickens raised each year are stocked in densities between 10 and 20 birds per square yard, unable even to stretch their wings. Under the avian carpet is a fecal carpet of filth most of the birds spend their lives upon.

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

Chacun a son gout
(French proverb)

It means to each his taste. Never more so is this true in food. Is it not? I mean really food is very much a question of taste. Chacun a son gout.

This was borne home to me a couple of days ago when my wife was going off to lunch with a rich cousin who was taking her to some French restaurant.

I don't like that sort of food and when my wife went off with her rich cousin to this restaurant I decided to, come lunch time, to cook myself the sort of food. . . ; I normally I cook my own food. I can do this. I have a usually a good lunch of an inch and a half of cheddar and a banana.

But I thought I really have myself a go and do myself eggs and bacon. So I got a book, which my wife doesn't know I've got, called Cooking for Bachelors. It tells you how to do eggs and bacon.

And I got the nonstick frying pan. And it said butter's better for frying. So I got a packet of butter and took it out of its paper and put it in the frying pan and lit the thing and it was smashing.

I figured I'll do about ten minutes and a quart of this hot bubbling butter and lovely sort of blue smoke which is terribly attractive.

And I got this rasher of bacon and put it in this hot bubbling smoking stuff. And this extraordinary effect. After about five seconds it was though there were about seventy tiny, invisible miniature wasps were biting the backs of my hands and my forehead. And this damn stuff was fighting back. Spitting. Like a hysterical cat. And was spitting hot fat at me. it was just a bit worrying.

So I thought I'm not going to get ruined with my hands. So I nipped next door and got this chap's motor scooter. And it's got one of those plastic things at the front to save him from the wind. And I parked this in front of the gas cooker.

So I got a couple of eggs and put them on top of the fridge and went over to look at the book and when I came back the eggs had gone

Apparently top of the fridges aren't necessarily horizontal. And the things roll down and fall off. So I thought I'd put them on the draining-board because there are ridges on the draining-board of the sink. And they sort of rolled even faster down that.

So I got eggs numbers five and six. And it said to tap them against the side of the pan, the frying pan. I don’t see why they tell you to do that because if you do that, half the shell goes into the pan and the other half of the shell AND THE EGG drop into the hinterland of the cooker underneath that kind of barrier bit.

And it says another way of doing it is to crack it very lightly and gently urge both thumbs into the crack and pull slightly apart and never get the egg out without breaking it. Which it did.

I must give the chap credit. It did that.

Looking back, I think I should have done it over the pan. And I found that the easiest way, in fact, with eggs, is to just crush them with your hands because the runny stuff, which is not all that runny is quite sort of thick, seeps between the fingers. You can hold the egg. And if you let that run into a bowl, you can make an omelet.

So I whisked the thing up, as indicated, and put a splosh of milk in, and some salt.

Anyway I finally finished and it was curious. It was kind of burned and raw. And I put it inside this kind of tiny decayed, dead oakleaf in auturmn, which is my bacon. And the omelet was rather like a half rotten black and yellow handbag.

And I'd made it. I'd made it and it was good simple plain food. And I enjoyed it.

And my wife came back and said, "I'd had the most marvelous lunch and I ended up with crepe suzette. And the waiter came beside me with a hospital trolley and a bunson burner."

And she said to him this lovely thing and he flamed it and all the flames roared up and I said, "Rubbish. Rubbish. Ridiculous food."

Mind you, it's everyone to his own taste. Everyone to his taste. But my taste is for simpler, picking away at a bit of fried eggshell from between your teeth. I had a most beautiful simple lunch. Now the food you're talking about, I said the French have an expression for that. That, where the waiter slings on half a bottle of brandy, sets the whole table on fire. And you end up with a tiny bit of soggy mess. I said the French expression for that is
Chuck on . . . arson . . . goo.

741119
Frank Muir
588a

I've known another who has deliberately kept a whole cast and crew waiting all morning to make a point. I was working on a movie with a male star who was very jealous of his time while he was shooting. One day he was called to the set and kept waiting around. I forget why: the light was wrong, or the weather changed or something. One of those things that happen a lot. The following morning he sent a message to say, "Because you kept me waiting for four hours yesterday, I'm going to be four hours late today." There was nothing we could shoot without him so we, the entire cast and crew, sat twiddling our thumbs for four hours. When he finally turned up, everyone looked at me to see what I would do. I think they were hoping I'd have a big row with him, and it's true, I was absolutely furious. But instead I pointedly took him into a corner, put my hand on his shoulder and said, "I just want to say thank you. I was out all night last night and I hadn't learnt my dialogue. Now I've had a fabulous nap, I've learnt my lines and I'm feeling great. In fact, it just occurs to me: I'm going to a party tonight so can you be late again tomorrow? That way I won't be the one getting into trouble." He wasn't late the next day, or any other day.

The irony of all this is that I have a terrible temper myself. But these days I never lose it and I never allow anyone else to lose theirs either.

The last time I blew my top on a movie set was in 1970 when I was making The Last Valley, directed by James Clavell and costarring Omar Sharif. The Last Valley was, like many others of that era, a war movie, but with a difference: it was set in the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years War. I was playing the captain of a mercenary force and, unfortunately for me, that meant horses.

My daughter Dominique was by now an expert horsewoman and, knowing my unhappy history with and sheer terror of horses after my Zulu debacle, had given me some advice: I should ask for a docile mount and stipulate that it should be a mare. Imagine my surprise and delight when I was shown to my horse - the biggest I had ever seen and very obviously a stallion. His name was something Germanic that was translated for me to "Fury." "No, no," I was assured, when I raised a query. "He's as quiet as can be and was chosen with you in mind." I had a few practice rides and Fury did indeed seem to be a gentle soul. Until the first day of shooting, that was. I had got into my costume and thought Fury and I would go for a little trot. The trot quickly became a canter, and the canter became a gallop. Hanging on to Fury's mane for dear life, I really thought I was going to die. Eventually we were brought to a screaming halt (it was me doing the screaming) by a jeep from the unit, about two miles from the set.

As soon as I got back to the set I went ape shit at everybody, yelling and screaming until my voice was hoarse. Jimmy Clavell waited until I had shouted myself out, then dismissed the crew for two hours, sat me down and gave me one of the most useful lessons of my life. "I was a prisoner of the Japanese during the war," he said to me, very quietly and calmly, "and the reason I survived and others did not is that I never lost face. If you lose your temper in front of people you do not know, you are displaying a most intimate emotion in front of strangers. You look a fool and you feel a fool. You lose their respect and it is almost impossible to win it back. You must keep control. If you cannot control yourself, you look weak, and you have no chance of controlling others. And, by the way, the reason your horse ran away was that your sword was slapping against his side. Every time he felt that sword on his side he thought you were urging him to go faster. Now, you are going to have to apologize to everyone on set."

He was right. I did apologize and from that time on I have never lost my temper on a set, no matter what happens. I have also never got back on a horse and nothing and no one could tempt me to do so.

Actually, I did lose it just once recently. Daniel Radcliffe was doing an interview a couple of years ago about Now You See Me 2, a very fun heist movie where the robbers are brilliant magicians. When he was asked what it was like working with me, he said I still seemed to love my job despite my advanced age, and that "the only time he got remotely irate was when a camera smacked him in the head." Even then I only got angry with an inanimate object. I would never, ever shout at anyone less powerful than me. It is not just about losing face: it would be hideously unfair.

If you anger me, or cross me, you will never see me lose my temper. James Clavell taught me that. In fact, you will never see anything, because you would just disappear from my life. My parents taught me that. My dad taught me never to let anyone have two goes at me. And my mum taught me that the worst thing you can do to an enemy is to ignore him. To be angry is to be a victim. To move on is the only victory.

Michael Caine "Blowing the Bloody Doors Off" (2018)

A national park in Thailand is tired of trash ruining the scenery and harming the animals that live there, so they are enacting revenge on people who dare to litter. You toss trash in the park, authorities will register you with the police - not great. They will also mail your garbage back to your home, along with a note that reads, you forgot these things at Khao Yai National Park.

Al Glasgow, Trump's loyal casino consultant, shook his head in disbelief at the costly warfare, which he called "disorganized crime," among the Trump executives. "Instead of bringing in the business and making money they're all stabbing each other in the back, all busy trying to figure out how to fuck the other guy and get on Donald's good side," said Glasgow, himself a skilled veteran of the in-fighting whose sensitive antennae detected early on which executives were rising and which were heading for the door.

In such a battle a novice like Ivana, working with the Castle, ordinarily would be no match for the competition at Trump Plaza, which was run by the experienced and steady hand of Steve Hyde. But ordinary was poison in the Trump Organization, where ability or even success at bringing money to the bottom line was sometimes less important than one's relationship with Donald. Minor talents sometimes rose to great heights, briefly, before Donald abandoned them. When it came to intimacy with Donald, Hyde was no match for Ivana, at least not at first.

Trump planted stories that Ivana had been on Czechoslovakia's Olympic ski team. She had not, nor had she ever made such a claim. He called her a top Canadian fashion model. She had been an anonymous runway model. He did not mention that Ivana Zelnickova Winklmayr Trump had married before.

After Norman Vincent Peale married them in 1977, Ivana used Donald's growing income and desire for media attention to make them both Manhattan society charity-ball regulars. Now, in the summer of 1985, she reigned over Trump's Castle and the depth of her management talent quickly became apparent.

David Johnston "Temples of Chance" 1994

The president, though, was more comfortable with his new "chief operating officer" than with almost any previous staff member. The two men swapped jokes like locker room buddies. Many of them were off-color in an old-fashioned sort of way. The two elderly men, for instance, were observed on one occasion elbowing each other like schoolboys after savoring an intelligence report detailing the improbably active sex life of the octogenarian Tunisian president, Habib Bourguiba. Even in jest, however, Regan had ulterior motives; he once confided to an aide that he had stumbled on a key to Reagan's heart: "I always let him tell his joke first." By Easter, Regan got the supreme compliment of being invited socially to the ranch. "Reagan admired Regan," said Deaver, "because, in a sense, he was exactly what Reagan wasn't: hands on."

In fact, an unspoken dividend of "letting Reagan be Reagan" was that this allowed the president to delegate so much to Regan. Reagan was fond of telling his staff, "Don't bring me problems - bring me solutions," and Regan was happy to comply. Before long, critics began to believe that Regan had cast himself in the role of prime minister. As Ed Rollins saw it, "He figured, if Ronald Reagan didn't want to be president all the time, he would be. Probably eighty percent of the decisions made during his era were made by Regan."

This concentration of power put a great strain on Regan and his staff, a staff not particularly adept or experienced. Regan methodically filled crucial While House posts with loyalists, many from his Treasury staff. Observers like Max Friedersdorf, who had worked with five chiefs of staff before Regan, described the staff as "obsequious yes men" who would laugh at all his Jokes. It was just sickening." A more generous view was that they were a well-meaning and able enough group of mostly young men who were simply cast in the wrong roles. They inherited a second-term White House badly in need of fresh political thinking but, in the words of one of their own members, Christopher Hicks, "we were implementers, organization guys not policymakers." Moreover, Regan didn't like being contradicted.

Jane Mayer "Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984-1988" (1988)

Most Belgians had paid little attention to their king's flurry of African diplomacy, but once it was over they began to realize, with surprise, that his new colony was bigger than England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined. It was one thirteenth of the African continent, more than seventy-six times the size of Belgium itself.

To make clear the distinction between his two roles, the King of the Belgians at first considered calling himself "Emperor of the Congo"; he also toyed with the idea of outfitting loyal chiefs with uniforms modeled on those of the famous red-clad Beefeaters at the Tower of London. Then he decided to be merely the Congo's "King-Sovereign." In later years, Leopold several times referred to himself - more accurately, for his main interest in the territory was in extracting every possible penny of wealth - as the Congo's "proprietor." His power as king-sovereign of the colony was shared in no way with the Belgian government, whose Cabinet ministers were as surprised as anyone when they opened their newspapers to find that the Congo had promulgated a new law or signed a new international treaty.

Adam Hochschild "King Leopold's Ghost" (1999)

The American Protein Corporation is the largest spray-dryer of blood in the world and advertises blood products that can even be fed "through the drinking water" to calves and pigs. The majority of pigs in the United States are raised in part on spray-dried blood meal. According to the National Renderers Association, although young pigs may find spray-dried blood meal initially unpalatable, they eventually get used to it.

Dateline NBC quoted D. Carleton Gajdusek, the first to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on prion diseases, as saying, "[I]t's got to be in the pigs as well as the cattle. It's got to be passing through the chickens. Paul Brown, medical director for the U.S. Public Health Service, also believes that pigs and poultry could be harboring mad cow disease and passing it on to humans, adding that pigs are especially sensitive to the disease. "It's speculation," he says, "but I am perfectly serious."

Since 1996, the World Health Organization has recommended that all countries stop feeding remains of cows to cows, yet the U.S. government still allows dairy farmers to feed calves gallons of a mixture of concentrated cow blood and fat collected at the slaughterhouse. Industry representatives continue to actively support this practice. "It was the farmers' fault," one young victim whispered to her mother from the bed where she waged and lost a painful, prolonged battle against vCJD.

Since 1996, the World Health Organization has recommended that all countries test their downed cattle - those animals too sick or crippled even to walk - for mad cow disease, yet the U.S. government tests but a fraction of this high-risk population. The beef industry calls U.S. surveillance "aggressive" and doesn't think more testing is necessary. Stanley Prusiner, the world's authority on these diseases, calls U.S. surveillance "appalling."

Michael Greger "Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching" (2006)

A nightingale in the sycamore
(Underwoods by Robert Louis Stevenson)

I wish I could remember the name of that pub. I can't even remember the area it was in. Somewhere around Labroke Grove or Shepherd's Bush.

It's terribly annoying. I've been asked to write an article in the series The Most Unforgettable Character I've ever met.

I can't remember him. No. I can remember HIM. I'll never forget HIM.

It's where he was that I can't. It'll come back to me.

I know it was at a pub. Because I'd just bought this drink. I was astonished to see this elderly man at the other end of the bar holding an umbrella.

I know you're thinking what was astonishing about that. What was astonishing about that is that the umbrella was UP.

This old bloke was sitting at the end of the bar holding an open umbrella over himself. And what's more it was one of those new type of umbrellas which come right down over your shoulders, you know the kind, like sort of plastic dome of St. Pauls.

And there he was, sitting inside it. And the remarkable part. This is the remarkable part. He was puffing at a pipe.

Can you visualize what happens when a man smokes a pipe inside one of these transparent umbrellas? The whole upper half of his body simply disappears from view. The smoke just PILED up inside the dome 'till eventually it was just like looking at cumulous formations on type of the pair of gray flannel trousers.

That was nothing to what happened next.

When the umbrella was completely full of smoke, he ducked out of it, then holding the umbrella so that none of the smoke escaped, he took from a carrier bag a large round plastic sheet with a little hole in the middle. And he slipped the hole over the handle of the umbrella. Then he gradually worked the plastic circle up the dome and sealed it to the ends of the umbrella spokes. You understand what I mean? So that all the smoke was now sealed inside this umbrella dome.

And he put the whole thing on the floor and just sipped his beer as though nothing had happened.

I don't know if you could have kept quiet to this affair. I couldn't. I said, "Excuse me, sir. I wonder if you could tell me. What's your racket? To what purpose do you intend to put that umbrella full of smoke?"

And he was kind enough to explain. It all sort of fell into place. The point of the whole thing was many many years ago he had been unfortunate enough to get married to one of those kind of women whose only response to any statement you make to her is some homely old saw or axiom.

If you were to rush in and say, "Oh darling, we've lost all of our savings. The baby has fallen out of the pram. And the bathroom's just caught fire." What she'd say was something like, "Oh no, no use crying over spilled milk. Every cloud has a silver lining. Least said soonest mended."

"Thirty-five years I've lived with that," This old man said to me, "It's been like co-habiting with the Oxford Book of English Quotations. So the day I retired from work I made a vow, sir. I vowed I would dedicate the rest of my life to finding answers to them proverbs of hers. Now, this." And he patted the umbrella, "This is for the next time she comes out with, 'there is no smoke without fire'. As soon as she says it, out I'll go to my shed bring in the umbrella, shove it in her face, say 'What about this, eh'?"

I said, "I see. I see. Do you have other sort of ammunition in that shed?"

I've got a few things, sir. There's a small round stone with a bit of moss on it. There's the two dozen eggs that I DID manage to teach my grandmother to suck. And they are all in one basket, I might add. Well, it's been nice talking to you, guv. I must be shoving off. I'm making the wife a birthday present at the moment. A little purse.

I said, "That'll be nice."

He said, "Pricey though. You wouldn't credit the cost of those sows these days."

And I watched him leave. The most unforgettable character that I've ever met. But where that pub was. Was it at Maider Vale, in the Red Lion. No. I've got it. I've got it. It was exactly where that quotation of Robert Louis Stevenson indicated. It was at Nottinghill. In the sycamore.

Dennis Norden 574b