Self-Isolationist By Another Name

Well, you can read this one all you want, but — SPOLIER ALERT — the answer to its riddle remains unknown. Enter (and never leave) Ida Wood — faker extraordinaire, and successful gold-digger. Problem is, she never enjoyed her spoils in the way Hollywood typically fantasizes. Instead, she chose the Howard Hughes meets The People Under the Stairs approach in dealing (or not dealing) with reality. What drove her to that end? The lies and coverups? Her malformed "daughter"? Greed? Guilt? It's hard to say. I've met some curmudgeony seniors before, but this one...

Prof. Alex Taylor's column originally appeared in the Gainesville Times, June 28, 1988.

Additional info and insight follow the column.

Insert Paul Harvey's famous tagline...
And so the column ends with a few unanswered questions; mainly, what became of her estate?
If you checked the Wikipedia article, it mentions that over 1,100 people filed estate claims. What it doesn't say is how many of those succeeded. Answer? Err...None? According to this Smithsonian article's commentary (verifiable, certainly! ;), a group of honest bloodhounds tracked down Ida Walsh's most immediate kin and distributed the estate among nine of them. Believable? Maybe. I suppose limitation statutes and other litigation issues may have prevented Benjamin's family from contesting her estate on the basis of marital fraud. After all, faker Ida said she had an agreement, so her portion of his winnings were legitimate gifts.
Calling Marty Byrde...

It's Unpredictable

Some say chance, others attribute karma...
This week, the Professor of Crime discusses the one thing that cannot possible be planned

— chance. 

Funny about that, and you might write this off as coincidence, but some of the words on this column just so happened to strike a personal chord upon setting up this article on a rainy Monday morning some 30+ years later. Dad utilized an oncoming car as an example of assumed predictability, yet it was just that — an oncoming car — which, without warning, suddenly crossed the center line (and the entire lane) to smash head-on into my vehicle just a few months after the ink dried in 1988. Chance, or was I the victim of my father's karma? Hmm...

The column below first appeared in the Gainesville Times, June 21, 1988. As a liner note, it is printed in the former "NE Georgia" section ("B"), alongside local topics. Apparently, most of Georgia was suffering a severe drought at the time, and the adjacent article covered the devastation to Georgia's marijuana crops.
Father Time is amused.

Hollywood's Groundhog Day?

Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle

This week, Prof. Taylor shines light on the criminal shenanigans of celebrities. If the read feels all too familiar, well... insert worn-out history adages here.

Taylor's column first appeared in the Gainesville Times, June 14, 1988. Try to keep that in mind when you cross a sentence that, by today's standard's, might be fingered as homophobic. I'll nip that right now by the following insight. Being that my father was a sociology and deviant behavior professor, dinnertime discussions involving societal folkways, mores, taboos, etc, would inevitably occur. Homosexuality rarely made the table, but his scientific views on it were often repeated. Although unpopular, especially in the part of the country where we resided, Dad knew homosexuality was not a choice, attributing it to a certain part of the brain exhibiting a different proportion than heteros.
"Born that way," in the popular verbiage. 

One more item that bears mention is Fatty Arbuckle's media treatment during the rape scandal that essentially ruined his career. William Randolf Hurst's questionable campaigns are the stuff of legend and lampooning, yet "yellow journalism" continues to plague the industry to this day. (Untimely choice of words?) As luck would have it, Dad called while I was typing this (Two weeks in a row? I think he has my schedule. Hmm...)(Two parentheticals in the same paragraph. Optics.. optics! Wait...this is three.. gah!). Anyway, in discussion, he mentioned all the recent #MeToo scandals, Assange, Madoff, and the college admissions bribery dragnet, among several others. He hasn't seen Tiger King yet, but I'm sure it will be worthy of a two-hour lecture when he does.
The more things change... Oops, that belongs at the top.

Criminal minds... he shoulda copyrighted that one.

Not Quite a Snickers Commercial

Before anyone mentions it, YES, I skipped a week.

The explanation is that Prof. Taylor's column for 5/24/1988 is a Memorial Day piece, and felt out of place given the timing. It has been pushed back to coincide with this year's Memorial Day.

Originally appearing in the Gainesville Times, June 7, 1988, Det. Sgt. Alex Taylor (ret), starts a conversation on the physical state of criminal perpetrators. More to the point, this week's column deals with hypoglycemia. 

We've all witnessed someone go full-on diva, but the candy commercials skylark a potentially dangerous condition. How dangerous? Read on...

MAY be causing fits of rage? Ya think?