Daft Musings

Back in May, I was understandably chagrined when our security video revealed a sleazy guy riffling through my car. When Peter looked at the tape, he thought the burglar looked an awful lot like Andrew Clark Bergman, aka Mr. Skeezebag, who had stolen his PT Cruiser in September, and was caught in it by the San Jose Police in October. We quickly found out Bergman had simply skipped his sentencing, and never had to do time for his crime. When we called the San Jose police, they came over, and they were as sympathetic as they could be. One officer took fingerprints, and another gave me instructions for sending a copy of the security video to the burglary unit. In return, I showed them information Bergman had left behind in Peter’s trashed PT Cruiser which I had gone through for evidence and missing items before the insurance company picked it up.

One of the items was a change of address form for Bergman, registering him from an address in Fresno to one in San Jose. The police took down this information, since we all suspected he had lied to the police, the court, and his bondsman, as thieves are wont to do. I didn’t hear anything back from the San Jose police. But I would be not at all surprised if the SJPD, who always go a little above and beyond in community service, quietly decided to pay him a visit with a few questions shortly after they received by security video. Because since then, it looks like Bergman returned to Fresno, where the justice system is so criminal friendly, they won’t even put you in jail for grand theft. Not surprisingly, the public police blotter reveals him to be on a criminal tear there, with a May 17 arrest for burglary, and a July 7 arrest for “dangerous drugs.” This time, I hope Fresno keeps its garbage, and once again, I give a thumbs-up to the SJPD.

Peter chafes at absurd rules, and one of these is the rules that we can’t buy or shoot off fireworks for the fourth of July in our Californian town, despite the fact that budget cuts have also cancelled the annual downtown festival where we had a public display. So, one recent weekend, he drove all the way to Nevada to look for “illegal” fireworks he could buy. As we found out, fireworks are also illegal in Nevada–but you _can_ buy them on Native American tribal lands. And so, he ventured north from Reno into Paiute territory, found his fireworks, as well as gorgeous high desert country with a huge lake. To sweeten the temptation to stay, his fireworks purchase came with a permit to shoot off the fireworks at one of a number of beaches on the lake.

It sounded like a grand adventure! We shot off a few of the smaller “safe and sane” fireworks at home on the fourth of July, but the next weekend, we packed up our car with camping gear, fishing gear, and our new inflatable boat (since there are no boat rentals at the lake) and headed east to the land of the free and the brave, that is, er, of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. We needed special permits to use their resources, but these were modestly priced: $9 to camp for a night, $10 for each one-day adult fishing permits, $5 for a one-day child fishing permit, and a $10 boating permit, which may not have been necessary for our little floating dingy.

There aren’t really any formal camp sites: you just pick a spot you like, pitch your tent, and if necessary, dig a fire pit. Bathroom facilities consist of a public toilet on the road between beaches, and there are some garbage cans on the trail into each beach. We went to the Indian Head Rock beach, marked by a huge rock. There we were really sorry Peter hadn’t opted for the 4-wheel-drive option on his truck, especially when we got stuck in the sand once or twice. We had to settle for parking on the last stretch of hard-packed sand near some other friendly campers, and carrying our stuff onto a section of the beach that we liked.

Both Peter and Neil tell me they’ve never camped in strong winds, so I must have camping-in-the wind karma. The beach was buffeted with strong gusts whooshing through all day long. It wasn’t like the 40-mph wind bursts my modest Sears tent had to endure atop a canyon wall last June, but I wasn’t looking forward to another night of  gusts blow-drying me all night long. The trick to wind camping is to either have a low-profile tent, which I don’t have, or to remove the rain fly, so the wind can blow through the mesh in the top and encounters less resistance. It still requires double-staking and a strong tent that won’t tear.

As I was setting up our tents (Neil has a smaller one, which was just short enough to work, albeit also without a fly), Peter was inflating our boat by the lake, and figuring how to attach the propeller to the battery. Once he had it ready, we put on our life vests, packed ourselves in the boat with our fishing gear (which was a tight fit together with the cooler I’d optimistically added in case of catching fish. As it turned out, the waters on the lake were so choppy due to the wind, that it was nearly impossible to tie on a lure, much less the sinkers we needed in the middle of the day. The waves sloshed on to me and Kelly in the front of the boat, which was fun enough for us. About half way towards the other shore (where Peter had heard the best fishing was to be had), Peter read the battery, which said it needed recharging. Suddenly, Indian Head Rock seemed very, very far away. He turned the boat around and we returned to our campsite, where the winds, despite the fact that I’d weighed my tent down as much as possible inside, and staked it solidly, had blown over.

So instead, we lounged in our camp chairs, splashed in the water, and made a half-hearted attempt to fish from the shore until the sun set. Thereupon, we pulled out all our dangerous, banned-in-California-and-Nevada fireworks, and proceeded to set them off. It was a lot of fun, but it’s still hard to understand why officials consider these so dangerous. Most of our fireworks were fountains, just slightly larger than the “safe-and-sane” kind, and sadly, not particularly impressive. The best show came from mortar fireworks, which shot high into the sky. These seemed like less of a fire hazard, since from their high distance, the sparks are cold by the time they land. They have long fuses, so all you have to do is set the in a tube, light them, and stand back. In any case, our fellow campers enjoyed the show, and some of the ones further down the beach set off a firework which was still available in the Smokeshops called “Yellowjacket.”

Our neighbors brought us watermelon, and we sat around and snacked and told each other campfire stories until 10:30, when the winds seemed to have died down enough for me to put the rain fly back on my tent. As the more experienced wind camper, I bunked down on the floor, because low resistance is everything when it comes to surviving the wind. Peter took the cot I’d set up mostly to support the tent, and ended up having a hard night as the wind pushed into him all night long.

In the morning, Peter took Neil and Kelly back out on the lake for one more attempt at fishing. Kelly caught something with her Disney Princess fishing rod, but it snapped the line before she could pull it in. I suspect it was one of the lake’s renowned cutthroat trout, which were out of season, so we would have had to let it go anyway.

Instead of cooking eggs and bacon on our new propane stove, we decided to pack up and have breakfast at a restaurant near Reno. It was a beautiful vacation though, and I love Native territory. So maybe we’ll be back when trout is back in season, or when we want to enjoy fireworks. And hopefully, the winds won’t blow as hard.

 

Neil recently came up with some puzzles (and art) for Gary Antonick’s Numberplay column in the New York Times. It was really cool and as part of it, Antonick includes a picture of Neil with one of his heroes, Stephen Wolfram, whose book The Art of Science, introduced Neil to cellular automata, the Game of Life, and the work of pioneers in the same like his mentor Bill Gosper.

Neil met another of his heroes, John Conway, at Gathering for Gardner 9, but until now I never published the picture of Neil with Conway and his son, because it doesn’t do them proper justice.

They’re all happy, but it doesn’t capture the boundless energy John Conway and his son Gareth, constantly exhibit. A picture I received of Neil talking to John Conway previously about the Century puzzle is more accurate, but less personal.If you have seen them in person, this picture looks like Conway and his son are almost in pain for having to hold still for the second it took my camera to click.

And, while it may seem curious, Neil related equally well to both Gareth, who was closer in age, and to John, who was older, but who’d written and produced much of what Neil was working with. Gareth likes to play Nintendo and has memorized the digits of Pi to a scary level; John likes to create impossible puzzles and program things that will blow people’s minds unto future generations. Neil relates to both of these things.

Personally, I don’t care about either of the things that make Gareth or John magnificent in the eyes of their peers; and I am in the mean between their years (give or take up to 10 years, depending on how much I’ve been working out and feel like lying). My first encounter with John Conway came when I stumbled upon him with one of his admirers and mentioned that my son was one of his fans; Conway snarled at me, much to my surprise, since to me he was much the same as any other author, like Clifford Pickover or Ivan Moscovich whose works Neil collected. But as it turned out, I spent an unexpected amount of time in the presence of John Conway. Neil wanted to absorb each and every short talk at G4G9 and hang with the celestial minds who’d come. I should be embarrassed to point out that flat Earth representations of a Rubik’s cube don’t capture my imagination, though certainly they capture Neil’s, so I often left the conference room to explore my own insipid fascinations rather than run the risk of embarrassing my son. These insipid fascinations are more in line with my liberal arts education, a fine line between foreign policy, current economics, and reality TV, that for the sake of brevity, I’ll call Survivor: Gulag North Korea.

So, since I was still Neil’s chaperone, I parked myself with a netbook just outside of the conference hall to look up the latest news of Survivor: Gulag North Korea. Within an hour, John and Gareth would appear–John to hold court with a revolving line of admirers (which would eventually include his biographer, Bill Gosper, Neil, and Neil’s peer math colleague, Julian):

Since I had parked myself on a couch first, John Conway couldn’t really ask me to skedaddle each day, not that I was spying on anything he had to say. And his son, who was entertaining himself behind me, took to heart his half-English heritage by occasionally making like Action Man, taking flight, and dramatically descending in close vicinity to this German-born spy listening in to his father’s scientific conferences. That was amusing, given that on my first visit to England ever, a 4-year old fully English boy had his own GI-Joe rip-off doll descend upon me with loud sound effects while I was trying to figure out their Chutes-and-Ladders rip-off in London’s children’s museum under heavy jetlag. I was horrified then, but the best English mathematicians like Conway and Wolfram have now civilized themselves to America, and their children are no match for their fully English wilding counterparts. I laughed at Gareth, who (at his father’s lead) finally had to resort to regular competition with me.

On the last day, as Neil was absorbing a talk on why 0.999999 is actually greater than 1, an admirer of John Conway had delivered something called chatter rings. Bill Gosper had warned me that John Conway is dangerous with anything manipulative, like a magician, and perhaps his stroke may have slowed him, but he was still no-one you’d ever want to have played poker with. In front of me, John explained to Gareth how the chatter rings worked, and after Gareth mastered them, directed his son to let me have a go.

I finally figured them out, and John mocked me in the way an English dude would, but more affably.

Well, given how much Neil admires John and Gareth, I am honored to have been mocked by Pere Conway. I have been spat on by Joey Ramone; and graciously thanked for my company by the president of the World Bank when I accidentally sat next to him and had no idea who he was. Having been mocked by John Conway was only the icing on the cake of a delightful life, and I warn people to watch out for his son.

 

 

I was working in the office yesterday when in Guido from the city came in, asking to see our business license. Guido is not his real name, but he had the air of a low-end mafioso. I had no trouble showing him our license, since it’s prominently posted in the break room, and we’d recently received a bill for the renewal. As a bonus, he corrected the spelling of our company, since some idiot had written it down incorrectly and since no-one at the business license office ever answers the phone, we had had no way of correcting it otherwise. Then he pointed out that our business license was due on the 15th, and even though the notice says we have to mail it in, it’s perfectly acceptable to pay it in person. And if it’s not paid on time, we’ll get hit with lots and lots of fines, hint, hint, hint, and really it would be swell if we paid in person, it would save us 50 cents in postage! I wonder if what I was really supposed to do was peel 3 $100 bills off of the stack of petty cash we don’t have, with an extra $20 for good luck and expeditious service, but really, I’m just going to mail in the check.

I’m still a bit sore about the fact that when we moved our offices to San Jose, the same office tried to shake us down for the previous two years of business tax license payments, never mind that we had actually had offices in an entirely different city, Santa Clara, the entire time. As I said, no one at the business tax office answers the phone, or returns messages, so Peter had to go down in person to find someone and explain the situation. And even then, we had to show our leases for both offices, plus our previous stationary, and get the property manager to show up and swear an affidavit that we had not been in the building before they had to remodel an office for us. C’mon, I love San Jose, and city taxes pay for the services I really care about, but enough with harassing small businesses! We’ll pay what we owe, but that’s enough, and I resent having to repeatedly prove innocence in the face of a very unfair presumption of guilt. Peter later pointed out Guido was also probably scoping us all the city businesses on the number of employees, amount of space, and cash registers, just to make sure the maximum tax is collected in all locations.

Meanwhile Joe, our business development manager was on the phone again with one of our clients, who once again, failed to pay our invoice in time, despite frequent reminders, warnings, dunnings, and even once a work stoppage. So the city can freely levy any extra fines, which we have to fight, and our client can stiff us without consequence.

Speaking of no consequences, I was briefly delighted earlier this week when I discovered Mr. Sleazebag the car thief had been caught–surprise, surprise–stealing a car, this time in Fresno. But that delight soon turned to dismay, when Mr. Sleazebag, already having skipped bail in San Jose, and later caught burglarizing my car, was also released from the Fresno jail, because they have no room for any more criminals. It was news that the Supreme Court authorized California State prisons to release 40,000 felons because of funding problems, but apparently, there are already areas in California where you can commit any number of felonies and you will not go to jail. Not surprisingly, Fresno has a lot of crime, because what criminals do is commit crimes, and when there’s no consequence to same, there’s more crime! If there were any doubt to how much Fresno sucks, it sucks even more now–and I wouldn’t mind, if they could even just keep their criminals inside their own city borders instead of exporting them for a meet, greet, and car ride with the San Jose police.

So after Guido left and it was clear our client was stiffing us again, I took the checks we did have down to our local bank. Apparently, they’ve become hip to what sorts if things can happen when you let tens of thousands of felons loose. They recently installed a massive plexiglass wall, reaching almost to the ceiling, to separate the tellers from the customers and other assorted scurvy lot. As I slid the checks and the deposit slip through the narrow slot, reminiscent of the one at the gas station or scary flophouses in rundown neighborhoods, I had to restrain myself from squishing my face against the plexiglass and making fish faces at the teller. No doubt such an innocent act might have gotten me tossed into a federal prison, one of the few places in this state where there’s still room for miscreants. Well, I guess it’s a good thing I’m not in jail, and anyone who wants to rob our bank will have a hard time doing so.

I have an entire blog about the upcoming, er, proposed, closure of selected California State Parks, but it is out of context without a rant about the cynicism, demagoguery, and manipulation of the members of the California State Legislature.

We have, after all, been at this point before. In 2009, our then-governor vowed to close all the state parks: summer beaches, beloved camping grounds, famous wildlife observation areas, all. I took it seriously enough to make sure I used up by cache of visitor passes (given with an annual membership in the California State Parks Association.) But more seasoned nature lovers pointed out that the plan was astoundingly stupid. You can’t keep Californians off of their beaches, so now you suddenly want to stop collecting the $7 parking fee you get from each visitor every day? And they’d shut down Big Basin, which is has solidly booked camping spots, in favor of frosty Jebediah Smith, which sees only hardy souls once in a while. Riiiiight. They didn’t close the parks, because it was stupid to do so; they did push an $18-per-car license registration tax, which failed because we’re already freakin’ taxed too much.

I do not question the fact that my state is dead broke, with no hope of ever collecting all the revenue it needs to fund its many services, like public schools (including the public universities), Cal-Trans, Medi-Cal, state parks, the California Highway Patrol (CHiPs), the DMV, the EDD, and many little offshoots from them and other agencies that fund, feed, and dictate what the residents here may or may not do. But invariably, when the time comes when the brutal and necessary funding cuts must be made, the very first victim is the middle class taxpayer. God forbid our assemblypersons take a pay cut, or that the Bureau of Transgendered Activist Benefits should disappear. The public schools are a huge portion of the budget pie, and politicians love hearing the shriek of already tax-burdened parents as the pink slips are handed out to teachers, and the districts stuff ever more children into each class. Our park system (which includes most of the beaches) is also well loved, so the greedy demogogues find it easy to threaten their closure, counting on the fact that we’ll squeal with agony and hand over even more gobs of money.

Well, I am sick and tired of the show. If the politicians were honest, which as a rule we know they are not, their appeals would feature Gladys the DMV clerk.

“For only $12 a day*, you can save the job of this beloved public servant! And your next visit to the DMV may be as much as 5 minutes shorter! (*Average; actual cost may vary according to reported income; members of select constituencies may be exempted.)”

Well, I’m sick and tired of this annual show. Go ahead and close the state parks. Go ahead, do it already! We all know it’s just a game of chicken. Were the parks to actually close, the end savings will be nill, or even less than it. Either the state will have to continue maintaining the land without the offset of visitor entrance costs, or squatters and chaos will take over, making a mess that will cost more to clean up than it ever would have to prevent. Would the state dare sell off the land, or let a concessionaire run it? Those are options a private owner would already have brought up, but which is barely murmured, the assumption being we’ll blink first and acquiesce to another round of pocket picking.

Just as I absolved the state from educating my children by educating them myself, I can figure out how to have a great time outside without state parks. Close down the beaches, and we’ll spend the summer at Raging Waters or poolside. Close down the campgrounds, and I’ll go sleep under the stars at a friend’s ranch in Stanislaus County. Close down the hiking trails and I’ll just explore the county parks instead.

As it is, with 10% sales tax, a property tax bill which is doubled with all the parcel tax riders that have been voted on to it, and the highest state income tax rate in the United States, California residents are already better than anyone else at having their income redistributed for them to the less well off. No mas. So if the parks are really going to close down, I’d rather they actually did so rather than have some political bozo jabber on about it while having his hand out in eager anticipation of more money with which to “save” him from that unpleasant task, which hurts him none.

A few years ago, we saw Disney California Adventure’s Grizzly Peak Recreation and mocked it for being a weak imitation of one our favorite redwood destinations, Big Basin Park. As it turns out, I was wrong. It’s clearly a Disney-fied Yosemite National Park, albeit missing the massive crowds and cold climate.

Inarguably, Yosemite Park has spectacular natural beauty and we enjoyed it, despite the constant dampness and cold. Beyond just its beauty, like Disneyland, Yosemite is deliberately accessible to the very young and the very old, who have the luxury of leisure time and disposable income. Many of the paths were paved–a real rarity for most of my own hikes–and you can still easily enjoy much of the park’s most dramatic scenery from within the free bus which tours the valley, or any of the dozens of tour buses with go slightly further afar. Thanks to Peter’s parent’s friend making reservations a year in advance, we got a motel room with a view of Yosemite Falls right within the park. There’s another hotel with more luxurious rooms and better, pricier meals nearby, as the “low-end” option of $100-a-night tent cabins.

I hate crowds, though, and I hate them even more when everyone in that crowd is giddily paying exorbitant prices for something which for me personally, doesn’t match the value. Yosemite is a huge park, but the vast majority of visitors are crowded into the small valley portion of the park, with the rest inaccessible to all but wilderness backpackers–and even then, given that most of Yosemite is the top of a mountain, only during the warmest months of the year. As a result, even at this time of year, when it was still pouring rain and occasionally sleeting snow, all accommodations were booked months and months in advance. The free bus which picked up and dropped off every 10 minutes was packed to standing room only space. And even the dreary dry documentaries of Yosemite in the mid-20th-century which were shown each evening at 8 didn’t have a dry space big enough to accommodate all the eager guests wanting to hear about, say, the construction of the Ahwanee Hotel, or the long-gone 1940s vaudeville shows at Camp Curry.

Personally, I hate crowds, and as soon as anything starts feeling too crowded, especially when I’m paying, I’m looking for the exits. These are the reasons why I cannot bear Comic-Con, and why I disdain Fisherman’s Wharf and the Monterey Bay Aquarium despite their world class attractions.

Yosemite is beautiful, I know, but as a lucky California, I have other options which I can easily visit any time of year, at my leisure. I love to mountain bike up to Berry Creek Falls inside Big Basin Park, and when I want to take my children there, there’s an easy hike to Sempervirens Falls, or an even easier one making a simple loop near the park entrance. They have nature programs, as does another place with falls, Memorial Park near La Honda. You’re not in the isolated wilderness either, but at their worst, the paths are more like the mall on a slow day, rather than the mall on a weekend in December, which was what Yosemite felt like. Oddly, I felt slightly better to find out the Yosemite hype is not new: according the history museum, it sounds like Yosemite has always been an expensive place to stay. The $100-a-night tent cabins at Camp Curry and other places are actually the low-cost alternative which appeared as a democratic protest to the high costs of the few hotels.

In my opinion, I thought $271/night was too much to pay for a room which was like a low-end motel room, despite its spectacular location. But by economic standards, the room was actually underpriced. These motel rooms book out in seconds as soon as they become available. If you charged $400 or $500 or $600 a night for the same rooms, they might book up just as fast, given how eager people are to stay there. You’d eventually reach the point where some well-off senior can go to Yosemite with just a few months notice, or that the fewer overnight guest can switch their reservation dates as well. After all, you got a cheapskate whiny schmuck like me to shell out $271 three times over; at a higher price, I may actually balk, leaving those rooms to those who want them more. And I may be happier playing away those hundreds of dollars at a casino table in Reno, while staying in a cheap hotel room with free drinks and a coupon for scary $1 hot dogs.

Peter argues the opposite: that more of the massive park should be open and accessible to visitors, thus giving all who want to enjoy this public park more breathing room. But that would cost money that the national government doesn’t have, building more roads into the higher portions of the park, and those areas may not be as popular, thus losing their ability to cover their own costs.

In short, Yosemite is beautiful, but way to freakin’ crowded. Next time I want to escape to the high Sierras, I think I’d rather go camping at Lake Almanor again, or check out Big Trees or Sequoia, which have a similar vibe to Yosemite, but less of the hype.

We just spent two days in Yosemite, enjoying its spectacular beauty. We drove up to Inspiration point and enjoyed the view:

We drove further up the mountain near the Badger Point and played in a huge fresh snowfall, throwing snow balls at one another and creating all sorts of snowmen, from a wizard, to a squirrel, and Kelly’s own Ratchet from the video game she currently enjoys:

We hiked up to Lower Yosemite Falls, often going off the path which was busier than the mall on Christmas eve.

We found a less beaten path up above the Lower Falls, and ended up seeing squirrels and getting directions to a secret Indian path to the top of a mountain.

When we woke up the next morning, it had snowed overnight, much to Kelly’s delight, who made a slushy snowman and tossed slushballs at me and Peter.

Later we hiked with family up to Mirror Lake, where we found the area of many menhirs. Though many wanted to put romantic associations to the menhirs, the native Indians are long gone, and there’s no paths from here. It’s obviously a group art project which must reappear with the first visitors of each Spring.

Completely soaked and cold after the hike, we ate a light lunch with everyone in a crowded cafe, bought Kelly some dry socks, watched the corny Yosemite movie, and checked out the excellent and informing Yosemite Museum. Afterwards, we went to Bridalveil Falls, where we had too much fun getting soaked again in the spray from the massive waterfall.

But that was enough for us. Peter decided we could forego another night in our expensive motel room inside the park, and we simply packed up and went home to dryer weather.

At Gathering for Gardner 9, Dale Seymour gave a presentation of his spectacular house as well as of sculptures he’d brought to Tom Rodger’s estate. When I found out he lived in nearby Los Altos, I promptly asked him if there was any chance we could come over and see them in person, since Neil is a huge fan of mathematical and abstract sculpture.

Understandably, Neil wasn’t the only one in our crowd interested in seeing the house. I quickly collected Bill Gosper; the Ziegler-Hunts boys and their father; and Bill’s friend Peter Aiken-Forderer, who lives nearby and used to go trick-or-treating there as a child.

Here’s the veranda of the house, and Dale explaining the design of the circular house to us.

There’s a garden of hexagons on the stairs leading down to the yard.

The garden and yard are full of fantastic mathematical sculptures like this.

And this optical illusion.

And this groovy op-art that’ll make your eyeballs spin.

Here’s Kelly in front of an optical illusion.

An ingenious Serpinski triangle made with golf balls.

Stars and circles and spheres and triangles.

And that was just the outside!

After showing us around, Dale led us in through a centrally hinged door which Peter A. had said always had the neighborhood kids talking.

The inside was filled with old fashioned toys and games. We took a tour circling around the inside until we got to the top. Then we circled back around to the bottom where Dale and his wife Margot treated the kids to sodas and snacks, and let them play with the video games in the game room.

As it turns out, Dale is also the world’s authority on gambling chips, and has written the ultimate guide about them for collectors. He showed us some of those treasures as well.

He was also too modest to tell us that he’s written and published the best books you can find for learning about tesselations. I only found this out when I was looking for such a book for Neil, and found out we had met the author!

Then again, having seen the bar of tesslating lizards, I shouldn’t have been surprised:

 

 

We just sent video to the San Jose police department, showing the footage our video cameras captured of a skeezy guy in a hoodie casing our cars and breaking into mine and taking some stuff. Normally, the police simply take a report, but this was an exception. Since the guy in the video looks an awful lot like the guy the police found inside Peter’s stolen car on October 25, who Peter had to look at and confirm as someone he’d never loaned the car to, and whom the police report identified as Andrew Clark Bergman (born 6-5-1983), they came out in person. They reviewed the security video and took fingerprints off my car door, and all that evidence is now at the burglary department.

Meanwhile, I’ve been a busy little research beaver. Both Bergman and his accomplice seem to have tried to take their Facebook pages off the internet, with varying success and a spotty attempt at changed names. Bergman has a previous arrest record for something he did in 2006. And California, ever so quirky, still has a “three strikes” law on the books, which says that if you are convicted for three felonies, you get may get sentenced to 25 years in prison. Adding to the quirk is another statute in California penal code called “felony petty theft,” which means petty theft may be charged as a felony, if the thief has two prior felony convictions.

The best inventory I could do through the stuff I keep in my car is that Bergman stole a “Kill Hannah” CD and a small cloth case with my Buddhist liturgy and prayer beads. I don’t know whether to be pissed off at the theft specifically. When I had to clean out Peter’s car after the police recovered it, it was full of stinking hoodies (exactly like the burglar on the video was wearing), and Josh Groban CDs. How sad I thought: a life of crime, and cursed with bad taste in music and clothing, too? I can only hope the thief does listen to the Kill Hannah CD, because it’s a good band. Perhaps he’ll try the Buddhist liturgy, too, and convert to Buddhism, realizing and atoning for all the bad karmic deeds he’s done. If I’d left in a spiffy suit, maybe he’d have taken that too, and tried on the look of an honest member of society, and come to like it. As it is, if Bergman is unlucky enough to get a hanging judge in a bad mood on a bad day, he could theoretically to 25-to-life for stealing a CD. Oh, well, if you’re going to live out the rest of your life in jail, better to do it for Kill Hannah than for Justin Bieber or Josh Groban.

I am pissed off the guy is still casing my neighborhood. So I also found out someone (I guess a bail bond company) issued a $35,000 bond for him, which now goes into county coffers if he doesn’t show up. Now if Bergman does get caught and tossed in jail, the county has to hand that money back and take on the cost of keeping Bergman in jail. If he doesn’t, that’s $35,000 they can use to buy more grade-D kosher hot dogs for the currently convicted and incarcerated. The bail bond company’s motivations are much different–they’re out thousands if he doesn’t show up. It’s easy enough to find out who posted that bond, and let them set loose the bounty hunters of their choice. Eventually, this thief will be caught (again).

Update: It turns out he didn’t take any of my Buddhist stuff; it, like everything else of value, was in the house. Peter wants to add that stealing someone’s Josh Groban and/or Justin Bieber CDs would actually be a mitzvah, as the thief may only be trying to improve the victim’s musical collection.

 

In October, a skeezy white guy named Andrew Clark Bergman was caught red-handed in Peter’s PT Cruiser, which had been stolen 6 weeks early. I called him Mr. Skeezebag in my posting, assuming he would be quickly convicted and sentenced, but not wanting to have anything skew the case.

This morning, after finding security tapes which show a skeezy white guy riffling through my car and trying all the doors on Peter’s new car–and running to hide under the awning or on the sidewalk whenever the security lights go on–Peter called the D.A.’s office to see if Mr. Skeezebag, er, Andrew Clark Bergman had been released from jail, since the guy on the cameras looks an awful lot like him.

Turns out Bergman never went to jail! He never bothered to show up for his plea, much less for his sentencing. Well, to be sure, he had a strong case against him. The car was full of papers with his and his floozy’s name. His Facebook page had pictures of him crowing about his drive to work on September 16, clearly taken from within the dashboard of Peter’s blue PT Cruiser:

And his girlfriend posted as her Facebook profile picture herself in Peter’s stolen car!!

Mr. Skeezebag Andrew Clark Bergman took down his Facebook page, but the girl left hers up, with the last posting on December 14, 2010 saying she’d let people know what the courts had to say at sentencing that week. Bergman likely pushed the plea date back, since we got a letter from the District Attorney’s office saying his scheduled plea date was January 13, 2011. We figured any smart felon would plead no contest and do his time (only 6 months in California), but instead Bergman ran.

Perhaps the police thought he was in Fresno, since he’d recently officially moved from there. we have his San Jose address, because he’d too dumb to hide, even if he can lie. We’re giving it to the police, in case he “forgot” to do so himself. Hopefully he’ll be caught soon, and perhaps his capture will return our neighborhood to the safe crime-free area it used to be.

By the way here he is:

And here, if you can stomach it, is a picture of him shirtless with his idiot accomplice.

If you see him, call the San Jose police at (408) 277 8900 and let’s get this guy out of my driveway and away from our neighborhood, or anyone else’s!

Update: A recent search shows he’s been arrested for a May 17 car theft in Fresno (Booking#:1126019) and then….he was released on the 24th because the jails in Fresno were too crowded. Sorry, Fresno, he better stay with you, cause if he’s back in my county, I will be personally screaming at any judge who feels like setting him free.