Dermott Hayes's Blog: Postcard from a Pigeon, page 47
September 2, 2016
Melody
Pic: a lone busker on the highline, nyc/unionsquarebackslide.com
It was a quiet sunny afternoon in the park. She sat on a bench listening to a busker. A drunk tossed a cigarette butt in his bag. It smouldered.
‘Do you know your bag is on fire?’
‘No, he replied, smiling, ‘Hum a few bars, I’ll pick up the melody‘.
FRAMED, Ch. 5
Chapter 5 | Read it from the beginning
By Christopher Goffard
It was my wife, Kent Easter told jurors.
She had become obsessed with destroying the PTA mom, he said. She had planted the pot and painkillers in Kelli Peters’ car. She had lured him into her criminal scheme. She was the reason he sat here today, his life a shambles, on trial for a felony.
Easter had taken the witness stand in his own defense, casting himself as a figure instantly familiar to aficionados of 1940s crime dramas: the hapless cuckold and sap, undone by a femme fatale and her noirish machinations.
It was a pitiable tale, but he was a hard man to warm up to. He had an air of bloodless detachment that came across as arrogance.
He had been a busy man, he explained, logging 200 billable hours a month for his big Newport Beach law firm, trying to appease a hectoring spouse who was never satisfied.
He knew that his wife, Jill, had been unfaithful to him, off and on, for years. “I felt that my job was to be a husband, to stay married,” Easter testified. “Nobody in our family had ever gotten divorced.”
FIVE HOUR WORKDAY
A little over a year ago, Tower Paddle Boards started letting employees leave by lunchtime and offering 5% profit-sharing.
[Photo: Flickr user Hairi]
Stephan Aarstol 08.30.16 5:00 AM
In every office, I’ve often felt, there are just a few people who do three times the work of everyone else, yet their reward is only marginally higher. As an entrepreneur, I’ve been managing my own productivity time—not on-the-clock-time—pretty effectively for over 15 years, and I’ve largely been able to work fewer hours than my friends in the corporate world. So when I started Tower, my company that sells stand-up paddle boards, I figured (or at least hoped) that I could hire just these types and give them a better deal in the process.
So while we operated on a standard eight-hour workday at first, just like most other companies, I wanted to put my theory to the test. And it also seemed like freeing up employees’ afternoons for the outdoor lifestyle the company promoted would be a natural fit. So on June 1, 2015, I initiated a three-month test. I moved my whole company to a five-hour workday where everyone works from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Over a year later, we’re sticking with it. Here’s why, and how we made the change work.
September 1, 2016
FRAMED – Ch. 4
By Christopher Goffard
The Orange County D.A.’s Special Prosecutions unit dealt with crimes of particular sensitivity — high-profile cases involving doctors and cops, lawyers and politicians.
Christopher Duff, a career prosecutor in his early 40s, joined the team in the spring of 2012. Among the files that landed on his desk was a bizarre caper involving a pair of married Irvine attorneys suspected of planting drugs in a neighbor’s car.
Prosecutor Christopher Duff believed he had more than enough evidence to convict Jill and Kent Easter of framing Kelli Peters. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Duff was struck by how thoroughly the Irvine police had investigated a crime in which the victim had suffered no physical harm. They had put 20 detectives on the case against Kent and Jill Easter at one time or another, and the lead investigator had spent six months on it exclusively.
Duff considered the possibilities. In so many places, he thought, it would have gone differently. If the attempted frame-up had happened in one of the gang neighborhoods of Los Angeles where he used to prosecute shootings, rather than in a rich, placid city in Orange County … if the cop who found the stash of drugs in Kelli Peters’ car had been a rookie, rather than a sharp-eyed veteran … if she had been slightly less believable …
It was easy to picture. Peters, the PTA president at her daughter’s elementary school, would have left the campus in the back of a patrol car, a piercing sight for the teachers who loved her and relied on her, for the parents who had entrusted their kids to her for years. It would have stolen not just her freedom but her name.
When Duff met Peters, she seemed raw-nerved and brittle, the kind of person who would be traumatized by a trip through jail. “It would have broken Kelli Peters,” he said. “I just know it.”
He also knew jurors would find Peters sympathetic. She was never far from tears when she talked about the Easters’ plot to destroy her, and the ways it had shaken her sense of security.
August 31, 2016
Signs of the Time#17
If there is one thing remarkable about the graffiti in my neighbourhoos, it is how lamentably unpolitical it is…
TTIP of the Iceberg, Pt 3
Financial companies have figured out how to turn a controversial global legal system to their own very profitable advantage. Part three of a BuzzFeed News investigation — read the whole series here.
Chris Hamby
BuzzFeed News Reporter
posted on Aug. 31, 2016, at 11:01 a.m. 
In 2006, near the height of Wall Street’s disastrous speculative frenzy, some of the world’s biggest banks smelled an opportunity.
They saw a way to turn the soaring price of oil into hefty profits. And it involved the tiny island nation of Sri Lanka.
The bankers presented officials who ran the state oil venture there with a way to hedge against further price hikes.
What the banks were selling were derivatives, an often complex and risky type of financial instrument that became associated with the financial crisis. They amounted to a bet on the price of oil, but it was a lopsided bet. The banks — including giants such as Citibank, Deutsche Bank, and Standard Chartered Bank — bore very little risk. The risk for Sri Lanka, if the price of oil fell, was potentially catastrophic.
One Standard Chartered executive found the terms to be so “one sided” that she actually refused to sign off on the transaction, protesting to her colleagues that it could cause “unbearable losses” for the already-struggling oil venture, according to a sworn statement she later gave. But one of her bosses, she said, ridiculed her in a meeting and told her not to stand in the way of several million dollars of profits.
The deal went through, and the other banks struck similar arrangements. Then, instead of rising, the price of oil crashed. The Sri Lankan state company found itself forced to pay the banks millions. Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court ordered a temporary freeze of payments while authorities scrutinized the deals.
Deutsche Bank’s response was swift. It had already made more than $6 million on the deal, but it demanded to be paid more — much more. More than $60 million, which was 24 times more than the bank ever could have lost on the deal.
Deutsche Bank didn’t bother pressing its case in Sri Lankan courts or even in the business-friendly English court where the bank and the state oil company had agreed in their contract to settle disputes. Instead, the bank pursued an audacious strategy. It turned to a powerful worldwide legal system and commandeered it for a novel purpose: helping financiers profit from some of their most controversial and speculative practices.read more
The Waiter
The Waiter
The waiter turns the cup around,
a habit, bred from suspicion
that somewhere, someone else
was watching, waiting
He waits, he smiles,
anticipates, but never sees it coming,
someone has it in for him
but he prefers to leave them wanting
Desire, he feels, from memory,
and previous experience,
leaves nothing but an empty space,
a sensation, bitter tasting
He savours all encounters,
with hope and trepidation,
that service and delivery
are met with appreciative generosity
Grateful for the chance to work,
to pay his rent and life’s expenses,
so he can serve his other needs
recording all his observations
Of people and their foibles
jealousies, hates, vindictive squabbles,
joking through the pain of daily troubles;
some take delight from the agony of others
So one man’s pain
becomes another’s pleasure,
only see him to fulfil his function,
blind to him standing at the junction
Where he’s between two lives
and neither meet, nor look him in the eyes
his existence means as much to them
as a beggar in the street
FRAMED, ch 3
By Christopher Goffard
Jill Easter wasn’t talking. She bounced a basketball in the driveway with her 3-year-old daughter as Irvine police moved methodically through her house, snapping photos and jotting notes.
In her fiction, Jill Easter explored the psychology of revenge. (KTLA)
Inside, detectives found what seemed the well-appointed home of ordinary suburban parents. A garage cluttered with exercise equipment. Rooms with kids’ sports trophies, an airplane mobile, a canopy bed decorated with Disney princesses.
In the master bedroom they found a copy of Easter’s self-published novel, “Holding House,” written under the pen name Ava Bjork. It had just come out. She smiled glamorously from the back cover, with styled blond hair and arresting blue eyes. Like its author, the female protagonist was a Berkeley-educated lawyer who had found work at a Bay Area firm.
She was “a patient woman with a formidable intelligence,” the novel explained, alluring to men but unlucky in love. To cope with life’s stresses, she mixed wine with Xanax. When wronged, the heroine burned for revenge and applied her patient, formidable intelligence to the task of exacting it.read more
Postcard from a Pigeon
- Dermott Hayes's profile
- 4 followers
