Etc. and News

Good news for Reno, Nevada, indeed as the Hot August Nights celebration in Long Beach, California, has been canceled because of lack of interest and sponsorship.

It always was a northern Nevada event, and believe me, northern Nevada needs all of the financial help it can get during these lean times.
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So much for the value of a college education.
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Somebody is certainly benefiting from the attack on workers, and it isn't the workers.
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The oldest couple to be married did so last month.

The bride is 90, while the groom is 100. She said she would marry when he turned 100.
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A dog engaged in self-preservation when he hid in the bathtub while the house was on fire.
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Hot August Nights Photos 2010

When I was in Reno last week, I took in only a day of HAN (and wanted to do more), but it was pure murder to try and get everything boxed. I am still not done, but I am going to wait two or three weeks before going back.

Anyway, I did go to the Grand Sierra and photographed pictures of cars and so forth last Wednesday:




I did manage to "catch" Peter Noone performing at the Grand Sierra Resort.

It Appears Hot August Nights Will

remain in Reno for years to come, despite the recent uproar over moving the event to Long Beach, California. The uproar over the rumors of a move exclusively to California proved how much the residents here and participants all over the country care about it.

It's not just about the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for the city but the fact this event originated here.

While I have been getting things ready for stoage, I have been trying to take in some of the events this week. I plan to return to southern Oregon early Saturday for the 1970s reunion of my old high school because I don't think I will have everything moved out of the apartment today.

It's been hard leaving a place where I have lived 26 years and the apartment I have had a dozen years. I couldn't stay at the apartment anymore not just because of the finances but because my neighbors, two of the finest people I have ever known, are no longer there. The mother, about 90, is in a nursing home dying, and her daughter passed away from cancer two months ago.

It was just too much to take to have to look at the house from my window every single day and know these great people would never be there again.

News

Quite honestly I don't know why U.S. officials even bothered with the Polanski case given the questionable actions that happened over three decades ago by the court. It's pretty much indisputable that the judge presiding over the case, Laurence J. Rittenband, long since dead, engaged in behavior that cast doubt anything more could have been done legally.

Rittenband was a starstruck judge, and his attempt to make an "example" out of Polanski guaranteed this case was a loser for any district attorney dumb enough to pursue the case decades later:

Experts say the Swiss raise a number of issues about how Polanski, 76, was treated three decades ago by the U.S. justice system — and those issues could easily be referenced if U.S. authorities ask another country to arrest and extradite Polanski.

"Switzerland apparently decided, 'We will not extradite someone back into this legal morass," said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor. "It could be that the effort to bring him back to L.A. was hopeless from the start because, however carefully the extradition papers were prepared, they still would rest on the original proceedings of 1978, which contained a host of perhaps irresolvable issues."

Loyola Law professor Stan Goldman agreed, saying U.S. authorities would need address these questions if they are serious about going forward with additional extradition efforts against the director.

It's time to let the damned thing go and focus on more pressing matters.
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Yes, I heard Mel Gibson's foul-mouthed, vile rants against his now former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva, just as the rest of the world has. It isn't anything to make light of, and I hope Gibson's career is on the ropes, at least in the near term. But some people do make light of this and other awful events, and I guess there is an explanation for it.

In my view the guy has clearly "lost it" if he ever had it in the first place.
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God Almighty has endorsed Nevada's resident shithouse rat Sharron Angle for the United States Senate.
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As far as I am concerned, the executive director of Hot August Nights should have been fired as soon as the story was made public about HAN signing a six-year agreement to hold part of the event in Long Beach.

HAN was Nevada-created, period.
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Still More Pictures

More of the Hot August Nights Parade

This was one of only two Crown Vics I saw during this year's Hot August Nights.




"Elvis" and "Marilyn" were in the parade.

Hot August Night Parade Pictures, August 10, 2008

Here is the first of a couple of posts of some of the 205 pictures I took of just a portion of the hundreds of cars in Sunday's closing day parade: