The miniature goat named Lenore – owned by a the family of actor Jake T. Austin, 13, of Wizards of Waverly Place – was discovered missing on Thursday morning.

This happened a few houses down the street from my home in West Nyack. I didn’t know that any celebrities lived that close.

West Nyack family’s goat reported stolen

A few months ago my Mom had her wallet taken from her pocketbook while shopping. This was very traumatic for my mother who felt that it was her own fault. She felt that she was old and a little scattered and not paying attention. When the thieves bumped her to get her wallet she even apologized. I told her at the time that stupid thieves like this will eventually get caught. They keep repeating the same risky act and sooner or later their luck will run out. I told her that it was not a bad thing to go through life without a paranoid attitude. She shouldn’t spend her whole life worrying about being cheated or robbed. An occasional stolen wallet is a small price to pay for enjoying your life.

Sergeant Cummings of the Clarkstown Police was very nice to my mother. He followed through with her on every stage of the investigation. Last night Sergeant Cummings called Mom last night to tell her that the pickpockets had been caught and were in Jail in Union City New Jersey. They were on video tape stealing from my mother, but were also on tape doing the same thing at a mall upstate and in several New Jersey malls. They were tracked down because the detectives in these communities worked together, pooling their information. The thieves were arrested and large amounts of drugs were confiscated at the same time. These bad guys will certainly spend some time in vacation at the State’s expense.

It is a bad thing to be the victim of a crime. You feel violated. Knowing that the bad guys will pay for their violation, though, takes a little of the sting out of it. My mother is thrilled and feels vindicated. Sergeant Cummings and the other law enforcement people that put this case together have made her very happy. Good Job!

My good friend and colleague Koch (I can’t pronounce his real name) graduated with PhD Doctorate in Professional Science (DPS) in Computing last weekend. His picture was in the paper. He’s the one having a good time. Koch works on the other side of the partition and we often have coffee together.

Here is the page from the Westchester Paper.

I did another Squidoo Lens today. It is a rehash of one of my blog earlier entries.

You know the drill. Click on the link below even if you don’t give a hoot about buying a flat screen TV. I need the clicks in my insane quest to make a million dollars on the internet.

Buying a New Flat Screen TV

Just a reminder. The Heinlein Short Story Contest closes one minute after midnight June 1. If you have a story, ship it off NOW!!! They take email entries. (That means that you have to press the send button in May.)

I sent off a story, The Window Washer Murder, that I’d almost forgotten about. When I started writing stories, about five years ago, I wrote a number of stories about a robot detective named Mark Denker. One of these appeared in Aoife’s Kiss and several others wound up eventually on low end zines. Robot detectives are a tough sell, it seems. I gave up on this story, although it was the best of the bunch. It is full of ideas borrowed from Heinlein, in fact I found a line in the story that was lifted (unintentionally) from The Door Into Summer. I reworded it to keep the Heinlein-esque idea without being a direct quote.

The Heinlein contest will report by the end of the year, so I expect I will have a summer and fall of chewed fingernails. Some big name authors have entered, so my own little story probably won’t be able to climb out of the slush. Luckily, Spider Robinson will probably be a judge, so my story won’t have to compete with one of his. No one writes more like Heinlein than Spider.

Centennial Short Story Contest

Someone at St. Jane’s registered more than 50 stars for their graduating class. I home that this is a trend. I don’t make any money off of these, but the word of mouth advertising is priceless.

St. Jane is a coed Pre-K-8 Catholic school in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

This is a job for Systems and Network Analyst/Programmer, something that I could do. It is for the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, based nearby. The hitch is that it requires approximately 5 months per year at sea with 2-3 month cruises.

I am afraid that I might be seasick. I don’t think I would like being away from home for two and three months at a time. I have never been on any boat for more than a few hours. My brother tells horror stories about fishing junkets where he was deathly sick the whole time.

I almost pressed the “apply for this job” button. It was tempting. I have read many a seafaring yarn and I would love to try it, but this is no yarn. I did apply for a similar landlubber job and if I were to get that job, I might just volunteer for a trip once I scoped things out.

My Dad used to laugh when people talk about the panic caused by Orson Wells’s dramatization of the War of the Worlds. He would listen to Mercury Theater with his Father, brother and sister. When the dramatized news flashes about the Martians landing in New Jersey, not far from where he lived, were broadcast no one thought for a moment that it was real. He told me that the poor individuals who panicked were idiots.

There is a “Cold Case” episode on TV right now that claims that there was widespread panic. According to my father, the show was not even that believable. Wells had a tendency to be overly dramatic and the broadcast was so over the top that nobody would have believed it. Only a handful of people actually panicked and they were very embarrassed when they realized the truth.

“We really thought it was the end of the world”, says a character in the TV show. That’s because you are an idiot, my father would have said.

Erica bought this at a garage sale. I am keeping it!

I’ve been downloading these fan built Original Series Star Trek episodes as torrents and burning them to DVD and then bringing them to Poker. The poker boys demanded that I stop it before their eyes burned out of their sockets. These episodes are way beyond dreadful with some of the worst direction and acting that I’ve ever seen.

They are, however great fun, and I can overlook the poor production to see the underlying love that went into them.

You can view them online now at scifi.dragonfly.com. Warning, you must have a good fast line to watch them. They are BIG. You need a big pipe to keep the video moving smoothly. I watch them at work, but I have to use earphones and keep some legitimate project on the screen so people can’t tell what I am doing.