Crime Blotter
The US Department of Justice has charged Lisa Findley of Kimberling City, Missouri with faking documents, forging signatures, and impersonating officers of a fictitious loan company in a scheme to auction off Graceland. Prosecutors said Findley claimed that Lisa Marie Presley had signed over the estate prior to her death as collateral for a loan she hadn’t repaid.
According to prosecutors, Findley posed as three different people associated with a fake private lender called Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC. She told the Presley estate that Lisa Marie Presley had borrowed $3.8 million in 2018 from the fake lender and had pledged Graceland as collateral.
To support her claim, Findley fabricated loan documents, forged signatures for both Elvis Presley’s daughter and a notary public in Florida, and filed a fake deed of trust with the Shelby County Register’s Office and a false creditor …
A Cattleman's Feast
Bitcoiners weep bitter tears while learning lessons about scarcity, market forces, and the power of adaptive multi-paddock grazing
Texas Slim vs. the Big Four
Johnny Ochoa works with gravity to break down an entire cow using only a knife and a small hatchet. Spoiler: It’s delicious.
Arriving in Nashville to cover July’s 2024 Bitcoin Conference — a celebration of digital currency — my first order of business was to check in at the Music City Center to fetch my press pass. A press pass, like money, used to be a tangible commodity. One could fidget with them on a lanyard or tuck them neatly into the ribbon of a fedora. It said: I am a man of the press, which, like this pass, is made of paper. At the Bitcoin conference, the press pass is a digitally linked bracelet that you receive by scanning a QR code sent to your email. Incredibly, I somehow missed a link in this chain when applying, and the support staff are now staring at me blankly as I attempt to retrieve my pass the old-fashioned way: by stating my name.
“We do not have that identity,” reports a blond man with an efficient buzz cut.
“The identity is not in our system,” a slender woman pinched into a form-fitting dress …
Critic's Corner
Aghori Mhori Mei — Smashing Pumpkins
There seems to be a crazy divide occurring within The Smashing Pumpkins fan base. The band is probably one of the most important alt-rock bands of all time. Their 1993 masterpiece Siamese Dream is probably one of the best albums of all time, and has majorly helped to shape music of all genres since. What was so special about that album is that it was completely new and different and weird. Almost as much of a novelty for its time as The Beatles.
The new idea on that album, as my father notably pointed out to me when I heard it for the first time on a long car drive, is the opposing yin-yang forces of James Iha’s heavy, sludge-metal guitar and Billy Corgan’s weirdly high-pitched alien voice. It feels authentically grungy, and uniquely them. It doesn’t sound like Nirvana or Alice In Chains or any other ’90s grunge …
