Monday, March 28, 2016

Get ready for traffic and t-storms...

...spring break is over.

Bummer.

Any trials starting up in Federal Court this week?

In the meantime, here you go...

The NY Times has this funny piece by Scott Shane. Maybe the other DM and I should do a post.

TAKE a glance at who wrote this article and you’ll understand the problem. Who’s who?

Two people with the same name can get mixed up — in both senses. Throw in the Internet, which can make geography irrelevant, and the possibility for confusion rivals that of a Shakespeare comedy, without the happy ending.

Just ask us.

For more than two decades, Scott Shane the business-school professor and Scott Shane the journalist have been mistaken for each other by co-authors, collection agencies, Google, a journalism school, public relations firms, an ex-congressman, a book distributor — and, yes, this newspaper. Being Internet doppelgängers has never been more than a persistent nuisance. But it reflects an era in which a person is not just flesh and blood but also an electronic composite, patched together from words, numbers and images, accessible at a click.

Dave Ovalle does this nice obit on Red from the state courthouse:
Outside Miami’s criminal courthouse, he was known to many only as “Red” the panhandler, a distinctive character woven into the colorful fabric of the justice community, as much a fixture as attorneys, hot-dog carts and TV news trucks.

On the Internet, his wild, woolly and wall-eyed mugshot made him a briefly viral meme to be mocked or, oddly enough, the face of an online ad hawking a dubious blood-pressure cure.

In real life, he was a 34-year-old named Brett Heinzinger, a man whose only luck seemed bad. He was born to heroin addicts, heard his grandfather murdered as a child, got addicted to drugs as a young man and wound up in South Florida chasing his next cocaine score and living under an overpass.

He died here, too — run down by a motorist on a dark rainy January night on Northwest 12th Avenue, under the Dolphin Expressway, next to the courthouse. The car never stopped. Next to him, Miami detectives found the foam cup he used to panhandle, seven pennies inside.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's really cool that you did a tribute for a homeless man. Defense attorneys can be some of the most humble, good-hearted people around. They are sometimes the only people to lend an ear to someone who has never had a listening ear to speak to in their entire life.