Thursday, March 8, 2012

Unsolved Mystery

How do you like your mysteries?  Solved and fully-explained at the end of a one-hour TV show?  Cleverly tied up like the proper English package that is an Agatha Christie novel?

Or are you more of an unsolved mystery kinda gal?  Fuzzy details, fog machines, men in trench coats saying we may never know what really happened that fateful night?

Well, if you’re one of the latter group, you’re in luck.  I have an update on the Iowa Lottery mystery I blogged about in January.  You may recall that a winner stepped forward at the last possible moment to claim his mega-winnings.  Only it wasn’t the winner exactly, it was a group of lawyers representing a trust set up by the winner. 

I had theories.  Oh yeah, I had theories.

We may never know what the real deal was.  As the Wall Street Journal reports, the winner has stepped aside and has withdrawn from the lottery.  Iowa was asking too many questions, and the winner’s lawyer just said, “Hey, you know what?  Never mind.”

I have to note that the Wall Street Journal could have described the lawyer many ways.  They could have called him a tall man with high cheekbones.  A lover of Labradoodles.  An avid butterfly collector.  They went with “a 76-year-old Yale graduate who has faced allegations of fraud in business dealings in lawsuits in Texas and Delaware.  Clearly, someone at the WSJ thinks the story isn’t a complete mystery. 

Though I wish we could have known what really was behind the lottery winner and his shadowy trust, I guess we’ll just have to be content with an unsolved mystery. 

Cue the fog machines.

So what about you?  Know any good unsolved mysteries? 

Monday, February 6, 2012

Carved from the Pages

All I can say is wow ... just wow.  Art and books, all smooshed together.  Treehugger posts some of the gorgeous work of artist Guy Laramee, who knows what to do once Kindle takes over the world.



Guy Laramee


Guy Laramee


Guy Laramee

I'd like to think that this is what my blog would look like, if transmogrified into Art.  But we all know the actual result would somehow involve an artist's interpretation of the Happy Days episode when the Fonz lost his cool.

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Rip It!

It’s official, guys.

Rip It -- wherein I take a weird, riveting, or downright freaky news story and offer it up as worthy of novelization or film adaptation -- is now a recurring feature on my blog.

You faithful readers will no doubt remember the first Rip It installment, where I poked innocent fun at an all-knowing, all-controlling tech/spy firm. Not sure what I was thinking there. I'll be more careful this time.

This week, an AP news article, dateline Iowa, caught my eye. Some lucky guy won the lottery. Over $14 million. But instead of turning in his ticket right away, he waited. For almost an entire year. In fact, he waited until two hours before the forfeiture deadline. And he sent a team of lawyers, representing a “shadowy New York trust” to collect the winnings.

This went down on Friday afternoon, so the details are still sketchy. Iowa Lottery officials don’t know who, exactly, the winner of the lottery is. All they have is the shadowy footage of someone purchasing that winning ticket at a convenience story in Des Moines over a year ago.

But before close of business Friday, lottery officials started fielding calls from several quick-thinking, industrious people who claimed the ticket was theirs. It had been stolen.

Once I read all this, my mind started jumping to fantastic conclusions. Surely, the winner is the lone survivor of a group of coworkers -- no, friends! no, family members! -- who went in together to buy a ticket. While they waited to come forward until they could decide how to split the money, greed got in the way. The lucky winners started turning up dead.

This would make a fantastic book. A best-selling book.  A book like A Simple Plan.



Scott Smith's A Simple Plan, is a gorgeously-written piece of suspense.  An honest, hardworking accountant, his no-good brother, and the brother’s even less-good friend stumble upon a duffle bag stuffed with millions of dollars. They decide to keep it.

The plan is simple:  They’ll wait things out, then divvy up the cash once the police stop searching for the missing money. But of course, simple plans have a way of getting really complicated really fast.

Smith takes us down a path where we readers imagine we might go. Until suddenly, our accountant hero starts making bad decisions.  His actions go from white to gray to darkest, most sinister black.

It’s a wonderful read. And I hope for the sake of our unknown lottery winner, it’s just fiction.

So what about you? Did you hear any news that deserves to be ripped from the headlines?