DL Open Thread: Sunday, December 25, 2022

Yes, Virginia, There Really Was a Festivus.  Even A ‘Festivus For The Rest Of Us‘:

(Seinfeld writer) O’Keefe said years later, “I mean this in the nicest way possible: My father was an undiagnosed bipolar, severe alcoholic who nonetheless was extremely high-functioning.” His father, Daniel O’Keefe, was an editor for Reader’s Digest who “came from an extremely working-class background, which he was constantly trying to make sure no one knew about — and in so doing, he reminded everyone of it constantly.”

Still, O’Keefe remarked that his family’s version of the holiday was “entirely more peculiar than on the show.” For some reason — O’Keefe can’t imagine why — his family’s celebrations included a clock in a bag.

“It didn’t have a set date [and] in real life it could just happen whenever the f— [my father] felt like it,” O’Keefe explained. “In one year, there were two for some reason; one year, there were none. You never knew when it was coming.”

Sometimes, O’Keefe said, the celebration was brought about because his father was “extremely hungover and wanted to jump-start his synapses.”

At first, O’Keefe even tried to dissuade his coworkers from turning Festivus into an episode for the show, but eventually, he said to himself, “F— it, if this has to be smeared onto the world, I might as well be the hand doing the smearing.”

The Usual Suspects Who Helped The Muskmare Buy Twitter.  You know them, you hate them. The Saudi Prince. Qatar.  Larry Ellison. And a whole host of the world’s undesirables.

Nowadays, It’s Tough To Recruit Police Officers.  Allegedly because many had a ‘sad’ due to Defund The Police (I call bullshit):

As American police departments seek to overcome an exodus of disgruntled officers and a sudden decline in applications, they are wooing recruits with some of the tactics a football coach might use to land a prized quarterback.

The economics of law enforcement were long tilted in favor of police departments, which often had far more qualified applicants than they did job openings. No longer. A steep drop in the number of people wanting to become police officers since the start of the pandemic and the unrest of 2020 have given extraordinary leverage to job seekers, forcing departments to market themselves in new ways.

Calls to radically revamp policing and divert resources to other agencies, heard in protests nationwide after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, have since cooled. But police chiefs say they are still contending with the fallout from those months.

At a recent conference in Washington held by the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy organization, officials from departments across the country said they were struggling. They said they were not finding enough people willing and able to fight crime, staff unfilled shifts and build residents’ trust in the police.

As to all those ex-cops (the ones who aren’t in state legislatures across the country)?  I’m assuming they’re still armed vigilantes, just not being paid (by the government) for it.

That reminds me–check out what happened in Philly:

For years, Philadelphia police officials had been alarmed by an internal list that tracked the number of officers who were out of work but still getting paid.

The list, updated every Monday, first grew by dozens of names. Then by hundreds.

Cops stayed out longer, with injured-on-duty claims, while continuing to collect their full paychecks — plus a 20% raise, in the form of tax breaks provided by Pennsylvania’s Heart and Lung Act, a generous disability benefit for first responders.

And doctors handpicked by the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge No. 5 diagnosed the vast majority of officers as being so injured that they couldn’t even do menial work, like testifying in open criminal cases.

By September 2021, the weekly list of injured cops exceeded 650 — a staggering 14% of all patrol officers in Philadelphia, and a vastly higher percentage than in other major cities.

For the last year, The Inquirer has investigated potential fraud and abuse in the police disability system as part of a series, MIA: Crisis in the Ranks. Since the first installment was published in February, the weekly total of cops who are labeled “no duty” has changed dramatically.

Now, according to a recent list obtained by The Inquirer, the number of officers out with injury claims has dropped by 31%, while the number of injured officers cleared for court duty has more than tripled.

The cops were stealing. From taxpayers.  Now some of them are apparently no longer stealing from the taxpayers.  They’re still cops.  No harm, no foul, I guess.

RIP: Thom Bell.  When you think about it, once Berry Gordy abandoned Detroit for LA, the Philly soul of Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell was far and away the sweetest soul music anywhere. Bell was the ace arranger, and loved to experiment:

Mr. Bell had a knack for incorporating instrumentation into his arrangements that was not typically heard on R&B recordings. He employed French horn and sitar on the Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” (1970) and oboe on the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow” (1972). Both records were Top 10 pop singles, and “Didn’t I,” which was later covered by New Kids on the Block, won a Grammy Award for best R&B vocal performance by a duo or group in 1971.

“The musicians looked at me like I was crazy. Violin? Timpani?” Mr. Bell said of his first session with the Delfonics in a 2020 interview with Record Collector magazine. “But that’s the world I came from. I had a three-manual harpsichord, and I played that. I played electric piano and zither, or something wild like that.”

“Every session,” he went on, “there was always one experiment.”

Here’s one of them:

Oh, he also arranged this ‘propulsive Afro-Latin tour de force’:

What do you want to talk about?