Lt Mike Stone: So what else did you find out?
Inspector Steve Keller: Well it appears that this professor married this grifter she met through the lonely hearts letters exchange. I guess those cats and rubber sheated electrical devices were not enough for her anymore. It seems they went through some bogus marriage ceremony performed by an Indian shaman and now they claim to be married.
Lt. Mike Stone: So I guess he is taking her for all she has got.
Inspector Steve Keller: Everything. Her money. Her house. Her pension. The works. He is sucking her dry. First he isolated her from all her friends. It is a pity that her family and friends didn't care enough to get involved. They let this guy take over her life and turn her into an isolated recluse with no friends and no correspondents or even a dog. They just rent them. Can you believe that?
Lt. Mike Stone: This is San Francisco in the 1970's so I can believe anything. So do we know where this woman is.
Inspector Steve Keller: Nope. Nobody has heard from her. I fear the worst. I am going to stake out her house. Maybe I can find something out.
60 comments:
As someone whose 13-year-old son was attacked by Palladian with Althouse's ultimate approval, and which amazingly foul insult was still current among the kids at my son's school a year later, I don't care what happens to Palladian, his relationships with A&M, the remainder of the Althouse community, or the Devil incarnate. As far as I'm concerned, having been insulted by Palladian for years, there is nothing more I want to know about him.
That said, with Althouse, Palladian may have learned like the rest of us, bringing in Dr. Johnson's shepherd in Virgil, that love is a dweller of the rocks. And, to hazard a guess at yashu's question, I think it is "D," as the simplest. A&M have proven themselves to have skins thinner than naked worms. They took very amiss even the mild sport I made of them on my own blog in the aftermath of the Palladian affair. I never was one to "stink up the place," and confined any jabs to my own venue. But as someone who has supported and suborned the dishing all these years ("candy-asses" comes to mind as a favorite epithet), Althouse has proven remarkably incapable of doing any taking.
And why should she? She's perfectly happy in her new, hermitically-sealed environment. For my part, I'm happy to make sure the lid is firmly screwed down, never wanting to smell again the stench that comes from the contents.
I never had any issues with Palladian myself and missed his attack on you TTBurnett. Given what you experienced, I would have the same reaction.
As far as Meade grooming Ann Althouse (as Trooper suggests)...it is true that arrogant professionals who are less smart than they think they are make the best marks for grifters.
Sixty...well yeah!
@Yashu: I have no clue what Meade was up to when he wrote that to Palladian. He put scare quotes around Palladian's name which signifies something--perhaps that Meade believes that Palladian is momentarily possessed.
That aside, I think people are reading their fellow human beings too simply and damning everything they do based on isolated and current events.
Life is a continual test. For example, I was intrigued by Althouse's announcement of a new project--that of listening to and musing on her father's old vinyl LPs. It's a 5th Commandment test and I'm curious to read how she does it.
I think I'll make a comment about that - oh, right...
I don't get the dynamic between the three of them. I thought Palladian was an Althouse favorite because gay, art, and conversations.
Now he's non-grata?
Meade seems like he's pushing male commenters out of Althouse's world, after alienating a lot of the females.
Plus, he was wearing shorts and riding a girl's bike yesterday.
@Evi: Palladian was tried in these very pages a couple years ago. He remained silent, but many testified on behalf of both plaintiff and defendant. Sadly, some are now dead. You can read the transcript here
(Sixty Grit could read the transcript and record any errors, please)
Already did.
Meade has always been an asshole, that's for sure.
Thanks Chick, I missed at that fun. But this comment summed it up:
Trooper York said...
I am watching this documenty called Blood Dolphin about the town of Taji in Japan.
It seems that they lure all of the dolphins in to this cove. The fisherman pick out the ones they can tame and sell to sea world and other circuses and stuff.
Then they kill the rest for meat.
Sounds familar?
JANUARY 11, 2011 AT 1:14 AM
Sea World would be a good name for a new blog I follow...
Or maybe Meade's Creepy Petting Zoo
Ooh, I love blog history!
Apparently Meade has always been a fatuous jerk. In that thread chickie linked to, right after he called for Theo to apologize to Althouse (!) (and Palladian!!!), he wrote this:
suck it up, that there's no crying in blogball.
To quote the much-maligned Jay,
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
That blogger lady sure seems to expect a lot of apologizin' for someone who's never offered one.
@Raylan
Thanks for the link to the old thread. Man, I was young in so many ways, then.
I like Tim and I like Palladian both very much.
And, I adore several others - many of them regular posters here, and every one of them get the benefit of the doubt from me. I've run off at the mouth far too often not to extend that grace.
I'm a little bummed by the obvious protection of Meade going on at Lem's.
(Lem - if you're reading - I will abide, but it's really kind of a lot to suck up with Meade all dickish like that. I know you feel differently.)
And so there's another example of me needing grace. =)
I just wanna say thanks, Lem, for providing a space where everyone can read all-star commentary like this:
Meade said...
Calling women "people" is a feminist statement.
It'd be a tremendous loss if *ahem* certain people drove that guy away.
It would be hard to drive Meade away. He would just keep coming back. Like herpes.
EBL: if you don't know who the mark is--its you
Now Meade is going after RH Hardin.
I am telling you this is classic griter mode.
Eliminate anyone who had prior history with the mark so the new circle except the dominance of the griter as the normal chain of events. Classic I tell ya.
You know, obviously some good people are behind the "please stop" thing. It's really a pity that Meade can't emulate that class. The freaky thing to watch is that he probably thinks he is. I would love to know what his protectors are thinking about his comments. Or maybe not, since our perspectives seem to be so off.
He left 4 comments in a row over at TMR.
I thought "That guy is fucked up!"
And if I think he's fucked up, imagine how fucked up he really is.
Damn!
Just tryin' to drink a cup of tea here, organize a list of materials for this week's jobs, and damn!
Descent into madness, now with MOAR VORTEX!!!
The thing about Palladian's comment—which Althouse refused to do anything about, leaving it to Palladian, who, in fact, responded with the most amazing, incoherent bullshit I have ever seen—the thing about that comment, as I say, was that I wanted to protect my son from seeing it. There may be no crying in blogball for adults, but 13-year-olds are another story. And, or course, being a bright kid, he read Althouse on his own occasionally. So did one or two others in his school. They're in Cambridge, so you might expect it. Several of them were lawyers' kids, and a couple were the offspring of actual elected officials. I've heard these kids talking about Kos almost every day, and one of them was a regular Instapundit reader. So, you can understand I was in a panic to get Palladian's crap out of the public view of these kids.
I was also personally bound to be slightly humiliated, because I knew there was at least one set of parents who were regular Althouse readers. But, as Gerard Vanderleun said, "There's something wrong with a person who hasn't been attacked on Althouse," so I could console myself that I would be in good company, by then having been raked over Althousian coals enough to demonstrate there was, indeed, nothing wrong with me.
I will own, however, that my precipitating comment was terrible. It was too adamant, too pompous, badly-written and overlong. In my defense, I'll just say I was in a hurry, and Althouse had come out with some total horseshit that I felt I had to counter. I should have ignored it.
Anyway, as I've already written about elsewhere on this blog, a year goes by. My son graduated to bigger and better things, and I'm teaching part-time at the school. I mention one day in class something about starting a blog (for Music Appreciation), and the boys erupted, doing a version of the internet commenter's funeral from YouTube, and one of the kids quoting verbatim, as best he could, Palladian's remark.
With a wrench in the gut, I shut them up and kept going. I was nicely forgetting about the original incident as just more internet blap, when it was shoved in my face that Palladian's bile had taken on an institutional life of its own.
Well, another year has passed, and all the kids who knew my son will be gone this Fall. The Althousian trainwreck was a topic at dinner at our house the other night, and my son had some very astute things to say about AA's psychology, fame, performance, politics and online life in general. He's actually far beyond old Dad in his powers of analysis, so whatever he might have thought about Palladian's insult, he's certainly none the worse for it.
But that was an experiment I would rather not have run. Palladian and Althouse acted as if what was on the blog was in a vacuum, and that Althouse was not responsible in any event. And if she was, it was okay to attack my son, because I was boasting, as if that was a justification. In my scheme of things NOTHING is a justification for what Palladian wrote. But in the end, I suppose it comes down to having a different scale of values, and there's no arguing that, just avoiding the source for your own peace of mind.
Trooper is right on the money about the grifter and isolating the mark. It is also a typical tactic of an insecure, emotionaly immature and emotionally abusive relationship, which can devolve into a physically abusive relationship.
Getting personal here: my first marriage was of this type. It never starts OUT as an abusive relationship and it may take some time before you wake up and say to yourself WTF! I don't need this shit. My first husband was charismatic, smart, would command the room and admittedly somewhat of a blowhard asshole. That last part was not always evident. We had a lot of fun and seemed to have a very loving relationship for some time.
However, gradually I could see that he was trying to drive away my friends, isolate me from my family and put me down with insulting and disparaging remarks in an attempt to undermine my self confidence. By this time, we had a child and being a good Catholic girl I felt that it was for the best to try to keep the marriage together and work it out.
Well....long story short....It just got worse and worse. The better "I" did in life, my jobs, my career, getting community respect from the various offices and positions that I held in the community....the worse it got. Fortunately, he wasn't around all that much...supposedly working out of town. So, one night....after he came home drunk and abusive at 3am and passed out in the bedroom.....I finally had had it and said YES....this is over get the fuck out. Of course he didn't believe me, until all of his crap ended up in the back of his truck and in the yard....plus the note I nicely pinned to the front seat of his pickup truck with a filet knife must have driven the point home that I was serious. That was 25 years ago and damn my life has been good ever since.
I see all the signs of this dysfunction in the Althouse/Meade saga. I think they are in the part where the abuse is beginning to escalate. Althouse doesn't have small children to tie her to Meade, but at some point she will either do like I did and get out of the relationship or just continue into the destructive spiral and lose herself and her autonomy. So far, that second case seems to me to be the path she has chosen. The fact that she doesn't seem to have any or many friends is one of the biggest problems for her. When I was going through my dark times, I had a couple of very good, very strong women (one of whom was my boss and the Best Woman at my marriage to The Dumbplumber) who stood with me and helped me to be unwavering. Althouse will need something like this. I doubt her children can do it for her.
Hope it wasn't a good filet knife, just sayin'...
Seriously, do not mess with the DBQ.
Hope it wasn't a good filet knife, just sayin'...
Of course not. It was one of his own fishing filet knives. I wouldn't waste one of my good knives.
I see it exactly the same way as you DBQ.
It is going to be sad finish to this story.
The head grab portion of that vlog was disturbing to me. Very revealing, I think.
As someone who was abused as a child I have never allowed anyone to get physical with me. Any woman who even so much as punched me in the shoulder was turned loose. I will not abide it.
Maybe somebody should drop a dime to the social services of Madison. I bet they love to get up in peoples business.
I mean that totally looked like a hostage video.
Aw crap. Dennis Farina has died.
The Althousian trainwreck was a topic at dinner at our house the other night, and my son had some very astute things to say about AA's psychology, fame, performance, politics and online life in general. He's actually far beyond old Dad in his powers of analysis, so whatever he might have thought about Palladian's insult, he's certainly none the worse for it.
There's that 5th Commandment thing I mentioned earlier. There is no corresponding "honor thy children..." is there? That instinct is more animal.
I have found that the childless are poor judges of parenting: they either overdo or underdo things and rarely get things right. It's like you're suddenly fitted with a sort of wisdom when you become a parent. It's also like parents and death. Everybody has parents but you don't know what it's like to lose one until you lose one.
Michael Haz said...
Aw crap. Dennis Farina has died.
Where have all the flours gone?
El Pollo: A great comment. Spot-on.
He was great in a couple of TV shows.
Recently as Nick's Dad in "New Girl."
He was great in a couple of TV shows.
Yes, like in the abruptly cancelled "Luck" (the Milch horse racing show on HBO). He was so good, my favorite thing in it.
I liked him in Crime Story. But once you learn who he is you notice he's all over the place.
Still, sad to lose him. And 69 now seems kind of young. Too close to home, as it were.
For example, I was intrigued by Althouse's announcement of a new project--that of listening to and musing on her father's old vinyl LPs. It's a 5th Commandment test and I'm curious to read how she does it.
I'm beyond curious. Closer to repelled. Gobsmacked by the title of the first album selected and the color of the singer's hair on the LARGE picture posted.
Holy Hell.
Mama- It was Julie London. Any dimwit with an appreciation for music of that era would love it, especially if it was listened to by a long-dead parent.
What I took away from her review was "oh icky, it isn't Bob Dylan".
@MamaM: Are you hinting that the LP was issued by Elektra Records?
Don't overlook the last 4 words in the sequence of tags on that post, MamaM.
Freud has nothing on you guys in interpretations. LOL
I am reminded of the punchline in Terry Southern's book "Candy".
Jung At Heart...
I wonder if her dad was a Blowfly fan.
Julie London is one of my favorites from this era https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFN_Iu_PD-g
Peggy Lee also can't be beat. Blues in the Night
Back in the Napster days, we spent hours upon hours downloading songs and I love it that these are on my ITunes.
Holy Cowboy Coffee, DBQ! That song reeks of sex!
DBQ,
My for-what-it's-worth take on AA is she is a mean girl with Daddy issues who doesn't play well with others, especially other women.
@Ruth Anne: Is she more like Lady Mary, Lady Edith, or Lady Sybil?
@ Ruth Anne
I think you are right. Also with more than a bit of narcissism.
I changed my avatar to a happier mood.
:-)
more like Lady Mary, Lady Edith, or Lady Sybil?
If RuthAnne doesn't answer, I'm waving my hand madly!
The narcissism of Lady Mary, but the vindictiveness of Lady Edith in Season 1. Not a bit about Lady Sybill. That's played by Darcy.
Me? Probably a blend of Mrs. Hughes and Anna.
As a pair, I'm going with Miss. O'Brien and Thomas.
Agenda covering heart.
Let me expand on my Lady Sybill/Darcy connection.
Young. Check
Beautiful. Check
Seeing the best in everyone. Check
Hopeless romantic. Check
DBQ, Thanks for coming forward w/ some painful shit to help us understand that dysfunctional relationship @ TOP.
@RuthAnne
Oh my goodness, you are far too kind, my friend. :)
Been thinking of you and often when I do, I smile. Your beautiful children must be getting all grown!
WAIT A MINUTE!!!!!!
DARCY IS BANGING THE CHAUFFEuR?
AND HE IS IRISH?
HOLY CRAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!
the last 4 words...
And the next 4 words: I can not look! (But I did-through the cracks of my fingers).
There's no more I can find the words to say about that right now. I'm back to thinking about trainwrecks and Chernobyl. Maybe a combination of the two, like the derailment of a train hauling toxic waste and radioactive material.
When I asked SonM who is train conversant, how he thought the word trainwreck might apply to an event, he answered by talking about momentum and the sequential damage that results from an incident that happens further up the line. "A trainwreck is not like a car accident or a single event that is quickly over or mercifully quits. It's a continuous accident that keeps happening and happening and happening in slow motion, with no speed and tons of weight, a ponderously slow accident that just keeps on unfolding" According to the wiki, Train wrecks often occur as a result of miscommunication, as when a moving train meets another train on the same track; or an accident, such as when a train wheel jumps off a track in a derailment; or when a boiler explosion occurs.
Well, if he's Irish, a redhead and a good driver, then it is elementary, my dear Inspector.
@ MamaM
That is a very good description of "train wreck" and how it is a different metaphor than a car wreck. I'll remember that.
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