King con | 5 years ago | February 23, 2001 | Chris Wright told of a scam artist who duped a station full of cops.
“A short while ago, a man walked into a Boston police station bearing good news and bad news. Apparently, as a demographic, police officers are not very adept at keeping up with their cell-phone payments. The bad news was that the man — we’ll call him Bob — was there to collect outstanding phone bills. The good news was that the company Bob worked for — a collection agency — was offering a one-time-only deal. If the officers coughed up immediately, they would have to pay only a fraction of what they owed.
“The opportunity seemed too good to pass up, and by the time Bob had finished brandishing his brochures and business plans, many of the cell-phone deadbeats wanted in. Forms were signed. Bills were paid. Receipts were shown. Cash changed hands. Bob was gone. A few weeks later, however, some odd things started happening. Cell-phone bills continued pouring in. Worse still, there were rumblings of fraud. The officers’ bills, it turned out, had been paid with a dodgy credit card. Somebody call the police! Oh, wait...”
Boys on the bus | 10 years ago | February 23, 1996 | Margaret Doris rode C-SPAN’s big yellow campaign bus into New Hampshire.
“ ‘Kill the Robin Dole!’ C-SPAN’s Steve Scully is frantic. Well, as frantic as the on-air non-personality gets. The voters of New Hampshire’s Dixville Notch — all 20-odd of them — are gathering to cast their First in New Hampshire votes in the National Primary. And for Scully, things are not going as planned.
“The big yellow C-SPAN School Bus has braved snow and ice, lumbering three hours north of the network’s Manchester headquarters in pursuit of a world exclusive. For the first time ever, a network is going to provide live coverage of the Dixville Notch primary voting.
“ ‘We’re making television history here,’ says Kristen Marshan, a producer’s assistant, from her post in C-SPAN’s Manchester production facility.
“Or will they? The School Bus crew reports that there are more reporters than voters in Dixville Notch. What if CNN goes live too? And the upstart hamlet of Hart’s Location — despite a decade-old proclamation from the governor of New Hampshire awarding Dixville Notch the honor of being the first town in the state to cast its primary votes — is trying to beat Dixville Notch to the polls. It’s just before midnight on Monday, and the voters are beginning to queue.
“There’s no time for Robin Dole — Bob’s daughter — on C-SPAN.”
The perfect score | 15 years ago | February 22, 1991 | Stephanie Zacharek reviewed Dinosaur Jr.’s new release,Green Mind.
“If you play in a neo-psychedelic rock band in the ’90s, you sure have your work cut out for you. At least, that’s the evidence from ... Dinosaur Jr.’s Green Mind (Sire). In the Just Say No era, if musicians want to go the psychedelic route, they have to work twice as hard. Since they can no longer depend on tripped-out (or even smoked-out) audiences, bands have to find a way to put the drugs into the music. When it works, listeners feel as though they’d scored the perfect tab; when it doesn’t it’s as though they’d been stuck with the brown acid.
