May 09, 2005
Wanted Man Found in Closet
"A Lee's Summit man, who prosecutors have accused of stealing pickup trucks taken for test drives, was found hiding inside his mother's closet this week." Mom was apparently out of town, poor dear. Link from the Kansas City Star, free registration required.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 21, 2005
Hotel Hanger Thief Explains Business Model
eHotelier.com offers snippets from the 2002 trial of a British man charged with stealing 40,000 hotel hangers--for clients. Excerpt below but the rest is well worth reading.
Counsel: And people come to you, do they, asking you to make special wardrobes so that they can use stolen clothes hangers?
Accused: It isn't so much the fact that they are stolen that makes them attractive. You have to remember that many top businessmen spend more of their time in hotels than in their own home. They become used to hotel life. They think of hotels as home. Therefore they become used to hotel hangers and think of them as normal, and on the rare occasions when they spend some time at home they can't stand these fiddly things with hooks which you and I may think of as normal but which the business traveller thinks of as loose-fitting and badly designed. So they come to me and get me to make a hotel-style wardrobe.
Counsel: Are you seriously suggesting that there are people who prefer hotel life to home life?
Accused: Certainly. A lot of businessmen would never go home if they had the chance. So when they get home they like to recreate the hotel experience in their own house. Many of my clients have their own mini-bars in their bedrooms. They have TV sets at the end of the bed on a raised shelf, often with an adult sex channel on it. All their bathroom products come in wrappers and are thrown away each day. I have even known people in their own home put out "Do Not Disturb" notices on the door of their own bedroom.
Counsel: Stolen, presumably, from some hapless hotel.
Accused: Never call a hotel hapless. They know what they are doing. No hotel loses money willingly. They may have things taken from them, but the stuff that guests leave behind is just as valuable.
Counsel: Are you serious when you say that clients of yours drink from their own minibars in their own bedrooms in their own homes?
Accused: Certainly. And just as in a hotel, they grumble about the price and size of the bottles, and the absence of ice.
Counsel: So why don't they get a proper fridge in their bedroom?
Accused: Because then it wouldn't be like a hotel.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 12:56 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
April 14, 2005
Deadly Closets
I've had a lovely time in Brooklyn and Manhattan except for feeling exhausted and twitchy and vaguely haunted that I'm wasting time unless I chase after some kind of goal every single second. Is that a New York feeling? If so, I should lose it in about 30 hours. Tomorrow afternoon I'll be climbing back on a SAS plane (hmm, flying, such a calming experience) and heading back to Stockholm. In the meantime, please check your closets carefully, baseball bat in hand. It seems that teenage girls aren't the only ones who stash men in closets.
"Jeffrey Freeman's body was discovered Monday in a bathroom of his home on Incline Drive in the Mountain View neighborhood of south Nashville, killed, police allege, by a man who was romantically involved with Martha and secretly living in a 2-foot by 8-foot bedroom closet for a month," according to Tennessean.com. "According to police, Martha Freeman told them that her husband followed the sounds of Rocha-Perez's snoring to the closet about 10 p.m. Sunday. Jeffrey Freeman demanded that his wife make the man leave by the time he returned from a walk. When Freeman returned, Rocha-Perez forced him into a bathroom at gunpoint, the woman told police."
The married couple were private investigators; the woman was reportedly bi-polar and the article quotes liberally from her e-mail. Like an accident on the freeway, this awful case is both horrifying and irresistible.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 31, 2005
Media Overkill Plus Big Closet News
Eric Boehlert's "A Tale Told by an Idiot" on Salon (subscription or day pass required) is blunt about the recent Terri Schiavo circus:
"It was fitting that reporters were in danger of outnumbering pro-life supporters outside Terri Schiavo's hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Thursday morning. When one man began to play the trumpet moments after Schiavo's death was announced at 9:50 a.m., a gaggle of cameramen quickly surrounded him, two or three deep. Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a 'furious debate' nationwide?
"... The 'furious debate' angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream. Clearly, the press went overboard in its around-the-clock coverage of the right-to-die case. But at this point, that type of exploitation is almost to be expected from news organizations, particularly television, desperate for compelling narratives that can be stretched out for days or weeks at a time. And it's not fair to suggest that the Schiavo story was a manufactured one, or that it didn't spark genuine interest. It did. What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks ..."
An important topic, sure, but Salon really dropped the ball on the closet front. Could this be a match made in heaven? "MINNEAPOLIS, March 28 /PRNewswire/ -- For homeowners with little time to get the house in shape for spring, organizing the home or garage is as easy as visiting a local Target. Beginning in April 2005, Target will carry the California Closets(R) Life, Stuff, Storage(R) line of ready-to-assemble furniture from the leading designer of custom home storage solutions and Dorel Industries, Inc. From dressers and shelves for organizing apparel and shoes to utility cabinets and a gardening center for storing tools in the garage, the new ready-to-assemble storage and organization products offer high-quality, design solutions that allow Target guests to live and work the way they want."
Target guests? Too weird. That only products from Target allow, hmm, let's call them shoppers, to live and work the way they want to is the kind of malarky that must be throttled. Still, I'm grovin' on the CalClosets-Target connection. Wonder if it will make the king of custom closet fittings seem somewhat down-market. But if the Kmart thing worked for Martha, the far-more-fashionable Target will probably be a happy home for the life-stuff-storage folks.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 17, 2005
Skeletons in the Closet
Usually it's just an expression. "Skeletons in the closet were a real-life problem for Ashford Price when he opened a cupboard in his late aunt's bedroom to be confronted with dozens of human remains." According to the Western Mail, these turned out to be a stash of bronze-age relics from the family caves (your family has caves, right?), put at the bottom of auntie's old oak wardrobe for safekeeping.
"Ancient bones, Nazis and archaeology make for a tale that reads like something from an Indiana Jones film, and Mr Price admits that the circumstances are unusual. 'I do not think anything like this has happened before. We have had to be very careful with them and we have spent all winter looking for a suitable place to put them in the caves. They are the remains of our human ancestors after all, so we cannot really just dump them in a bucket and chuck them somewhere.' "
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 09:17 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2005
Man Living in Teen's Closet
Now that I live in Sweden, a country that's practically a stranger to storage, I'm missing out on all the hot closet action. Don't believe me? In Texas, according to The Facts newspaper (reg. required), "a Brazoria man arrested after police said they caught him having sex with a 15-year-old girl in a parking lot in November is back in jail — this time on suspicion he was living in the same girl’s bedroom closet." But wait, it gets better. "A Brownsville woman searched her daughter’s room ... after the teenager had installed a lock on the outside of her bedroom door. ...The woman found that the closet door was locked from the inside, and when she peeped through a crack in the door, she said she could see a man inside."
She called the cops who busted the guy and in the process descovered he had "the mother’s credit card, the girl’s father’s Social Security card and jewelry and money that were missing from the house." The cops estimate the 27-year-old guy in the closet had been living there about two weeks. For once, the Internet is not to blame. Apparently the two lovers met through a telephone dating service.
That girl is, like, *so* grounded.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at 01:16 PM | Comments (0)