Would have liked to have seen Casting Crowns in Rochester, New York in September.
Glad I could go see The Triumphant Quartet and The Collingsworth Family in Ottawa that same month.
Been listening to a lot of funny Christmas tunes in the last week from Da Yoopers, Bob Rivers and others.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Woman puts her unborn baby up for sale on Facebook, Texas cops say. ‘Minimum of $150’
BY JENNIFER RODRIGUEZ
NOVEMBER 04, 2024 4:07 PM
A Texas woman was arrested after officials say she tried to sell her unborn baby on Facebook.
On Sept. 22, two days before her baby was born, she posted to a Facebook group intended for birth mothers to find people interested in adoption, according to the Houston Police Department.
A day before, on Sept. 21, the woman had reached out to a family member and asked her to help find a family to adopt her baby, according to a criminal complaint.
The family member took to Facebook, and made a post in search of someone who could take the baby boy once he was born, court records said.
“Okay, I’m trying this again. Mom can see this post and she will be reaching out to whomever is tagged. She asked me to post again. She needs someone there during labor and (to) take baby boy home. She doesn’t want him going into foster care,” the post said, according to authorities.
After she published the post, the pregnant woman told the family member she wanted money for the baby, to which the family member told her “that is illegal,” according to court records.
McClatchy News is not naming the woman to protect the identity of the baby. Her defense attorney did not immediately respond to a Nov. 4 request for comment.
The family member said when she initially agreed to help the pregnant woman, she was unaware that the woman would be wanting money in exchange for the baby, officials said.
The family member said once she realized the pregnant woman wanted to sell the baby, she went back on Facebook to “let everyone know” and said she had no intention of helping, according to court records.
Police said they also spoke to another woman, who saw the Facebook post and reached out about adopting the baby. The woman said the pregnant woman never asked her for money and said she was in the delivery room Sept. 24 when the baby was born early, according to court records.
However, the woman later learned that the pregnant woman was asking others to compensate her in exchange for the baby, officials said. Once the woman learned of this, she said she informed hospital staff and involved child protective services.
After learning the baby’s biological mother had active warrants, officials arrested her, according to court records. They later found messages exchanged between the biological mother and couples hoping to adopt the baby.
In one message exchange, a couple was traveling from Louisiana to Texas to take custody of the baby. But, while in route, the woman asked the couple to send her money, police said. When the man began talking to her about the adoption and money, the woman backtracked on giving them the baby, according to court records.
“We can meet with an attorney and do what it is you want to do. Again, it’s your choice,” the man said, according to police.
“I’m not going through the system ... ,” she replied, according to court records.
The man told her they don’t have to go through CPS, but she replied saying she was asking “for a minimum of 150 bucks up front,” according to police.
“Please,” the man said in another message. “We could give him a great life with all the things you would want from him,” another message said, according to court records.
The man later told police he believed the woman “wanted money for the baby and was using the baby as a bargaining tool,” so they turned around and went back to Louisiana.
Court records revealed several other conversations the woman had with others who were hopeful of adopting the baby.
“I am interested, I am 29 years old, have a good paying job and brick home. Me and my fiance want to start a family of our own but due to infertility it’s not easy,” one person wrote, according to court records.
The woman responded by asking if they would be willing to compensate, police said.
The woman was arrested and charged with sale or purchase of a child, records show. Her bond was set at $30,000.
Have been reading "The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway" lately. I'd forgotten what a good writer he was.
Enjoyed a reading I heard about a month ago from local author Rick Revelle. The passage he read made the book sound intriguing, but the same bloody thing could have happened to three white women back in 1959 when the passage was set or even today.
Was pleasantly surprised the short story "Max" by Cahim Potok portrayed Christians in a good light.
PEOPLE
Family Mourned After Being Told Loved One Died in Crash. Then They Found Out She Was 'Alive and Well'
"During the course of our initial investigation, the NYPD misidentified the victim of a fatal vehicle collision," police said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE
By Gabrielle Rockson and David Chiu Published on November 6, 2024 06:00AM EST
A family is still reeling after being told that their loved one was killed in a crash, and then learning that wasn't true.
According to WABC-TV, police told Sheila Nagengast that her 44-year-old sister, Denise Owen, died after she was hit by a car on Staten Island on Tuesday, Oct. 31.
"They said, 'I'm sorry to inform you but your sister has been killed fatally in a car accident,’ " added Nagengast, who said her sister experienced homelessness at times and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In a statement obtained by PEOPLE, a spokesperson for the New York Police Department said that "during the course of our initial investigation, the NYPD misidentified the victim of a fatal vehicle collision."
Nagengast told WABC-TV that family members and friends also heard about the news as word spread.
Then, as Nagengast was meeting with a lawyer, she said her other sister called to say Owen was alive. "She FaceTimed me, and my sister Denise..is standing directly in front of my (other) sister. Alive and well," Nagengast said.
Personal injury attorney Jonathan D'Agostino tells PEOPLE that had "police been more diligent in following standard protocol in this matter," the family "would have been spared the infliction of emotional distress."
D'Agostino adds that he is now working with the "actual victim of this accident" but is not at liberty to discuss additional details.
In a statement obtained by PEOPLE, police said that "upon further investigation, a proper identification and subsequent family notification was made."
They added, "We apologize for the unfortunate grief we may have caused."
PEOPLE
How a 20-Year-Old Heiress Survived Her Kidnapping and Being Buried Alive for 3 Days: 'I Screamed and Screamed'
Barbara Mackle's 1968 kidnapping led an FBI search party to frantically dig to find her in a wooded area north of Atlanta
By Sean Neumann Published on November 2, 2024 03:35PM EDT
It’s most people’s worst nightmare: being buried alive and left for dead. And on Dec. 17, 1968, that nightmare came true for Barbara Jane Mackle, a 20-year-old college student and heiress to her family’s Florida housing development company.
Against all odds, the Emory University student survived the kidnapping and was back home with her family by the time Christmas came eight days later. Meanwhile, her kidnappers — an escaped ex-convict and a graduate student studying marine biology — nearly got away with the crime and a $500,000 ransom paid by Barbara’s father, Robert Mackle.
More than 50 years after Time first detailed the frantic FBI search that uncovered the “tomb” Barbara was trapped inside in a rural part of Georgia, PEOPLE is looking back at the harrowing kidnapping and the hunt for an heiress gone missing.
The Kidnapping
A week before Christmas, Barbara felt ill in class and called her mother to come pick her up early for the university’s upcoming holiday break, Time reported. Barbara and her mother, Jane Mackle, booked a room at a nearby motel, where they planned to stay before making the trip home, according to the Coastal Breeze News. But a knock at the door at 4 a.m. changed everything.
Outside their door were two people, one of whom identified himself as a detective. They said they were there because Barbara’s boyfriend, Stewart Woodward, had been in a car accident. According to Coastal Breeze News, when Jane opened the door, a masked man with a shotgun and a smaller woman in a ski mask burst through, knocked her out with chloroform and then bound her by her hands and feet. Her daughter, Barbara, meanwhile, was grabbed by the strangers and put into their car.
Jane was able to free herself and call the police not long after, but by that time, Barbara was already being transported 30 miles north of Atlanta by her kidnappers: the escaped convict Gary Steven Krist and his accomplice, Ruth Eisemann-Schier.
They were taking Barbara to bury her alive.
A Hefty Ransom
In an interview with UPI 20 years after the kidnapping, Krist’s former parole officer, Tommy Morris, suggested that the prison escapee kidnapped Barbara and buried her alive not for the $500,000 ransom he and Eisemann-Schier demanded from the Mackle family, but for the challenge of keeping their victim alive underground.
Nevertheless, Krist and Eisemann-Schier demanded half a million dollars from Mackle’s family, who were heads of the Deltona Corp., a Florida-based development company that was reportedly worth $65 million at the time Barbara was taken in 1968.
In a remote area in Gwinnett County, Ga., Barbara’s kidnappers placed her inside a “coffin-like box” with two flexible air tubes, an allotment of food, water and sedatives, among other things she needed to survive. Krist and Eisemann-Schier buried the heiress a foot-and-a-half under the soil, according to Time, where she remained for three and a half days until an FBI search team found her.
“He was looking for a rich, tough-minded female,” Morris told UPI. “Someone who could stand up to the trauma of being buried alive. Barbara Jane Mackle fit that profile.”
Barbara remained thick-skinned, she recounted in her 1971 book, 83 Hours Till Dawn. “I screamed and screamed,” Barbara recalled, according to UPI and ABC News. “The sound of the dirt got farther and farther away. Finally, I couldn't hear anything above. I screamed for a long time after that.”
The 20-year-old was said to have replayed visions of the upcoming Christmas morning with her family to remain focused on surviving.
Barbara's Rescue
Barbara’s location was discovered after Krist and Eisemann-Schief successfully received the $500,000 ransom from Barbara’s family and telephoned the FBI, giving them rough coordinates for where to find her.
Using clues from an initial botched ransom handoff when Krist and Eisemann-Schief fled the scene and abandoned their car, police were able to discover an alias Krist had been using, “George D. Deacon,” and began putting the pieces together, according to Time.
Krist was captured of the coast of Florida in a speed boat he purchased with some of the ransom money, according to UPI, while Eisemann-Schief was arrested months later after giving her fingerprints for a background check at a hospital in Oklahoma, where she applied for a job, according to ABC news affiliate KOCO.
Eisemann-Schief was deported back to Honduras, where she was from, while Krist was sentenced to life in prison, according to UPI. But 10 years later, Krist was released on parole and decades later landed a job as a licensed general practitioner in Indiana, according to ABC News.
The Mackle family maintained that Barbara remained relatively unfazed by the trying ordeal, though she rarely made public appearances in the decades after, according to UPI. Barbara later married and became a mother, living in Atlanta.
Nov 7, 2024, 4:30 PM EST
Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL’s “You’ve Got Mail” greeting, has died at age 74 after a long illness, according to local Ohio news station WKYC, where he was employed for many years.
During a 2016 interview, Edwards recounted how he became the voice of AOL. His wife, who worked at Quantum Computer Services (which later became AOL), heard that the company was looking to add a voice to its software. “I’d been an announcer throughout my entire broadcasting career, and she volunteered me,” Edwards said.
In 1989, Edwards recorded the once-ubiquitous phrase, along with “Welcome,” “Files done,” and “Goodbye” on a cassette tape for just $200. “It started off as a test just to see if it would catch on, and lo and behold, in the mid-90s, it had really caught on.”
Since then, Edwards has made appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and an episode of The Simpsons. He was even spotted as an Uber driver.
AOL still gives you the option to hear “You’ve Got Mail.” Screenshot: The Verge
As a longtime AOL user (yes, I still use AOL to this day), I’m ashamed to admit that I never knew there was a person behind that iconic voice — I thought it was computer-generated. Even now, Edwards’ voice will continue to live on in my inbox, which still declares, “You’ve Got Mail.”
PEOPLE
Woman Abandons Husband in 100° Home After Air Conditioning Breaks. 10 Years Later, He Hasn't Forgotten
Now, the woman wants to know whether she was in the wrong — or if her husband is in the wrong, for continuing to recount the story
By Virginia Chamlee Published on October 31, 2024 04:10PM EDT
A woman who once left her husband alone in an overheated home while she escaped to an air-conditioned home of a friend says he still hasn't forgotten, 10 years later.
In an anonymous post on Reddit, the woman writes that she and her husband "had just moved to the Arizona desert" when the story began. She was in medical school at the time, working an intern year that she describes as " a year-long hazing ritual in which you work 80-ish insanely stressful hours a week."
One day, she arrived home following a 16-hour shift, only to find her husband "sitting in his basketball shorts and nothing else in a house that is, minimum, 105F."
"He tells me our AC died, he called a repair guy but won't be there until tomorrow, he thinks we’re fine to wait it out," she writes. "He has windows open and fans going and a big glass of ice water, honestly he is doing fine. The heat is so bad that I am bit lightheaded, but also too tired to problem solve, and I have to be up and heading back to work in about 6 hours, so I just take off my scrubs and try to fall asleep."
Twenty minutes later, though, she found herself "lying in a pool of sweat experiencing a heat so intense that it feels like a febrile 400 lb bear has settled on my chest and is panting into my face," she continues.
"I text my friend with a guest room, she says come right over, 30 seconds later the scrubs are back on and I am in my car," she adds.
And while she decided to escape the heat, she didn't bring her husband with her, writing, "I did not invite my husband, just said 'I'm heading to [friend]'s house, bye' and left."
"About 10 minutes into being in the AC I realized that leaving my husband in a house that was literally suffocating me wasn’t super kind. I called and told him to he was welcome to come over [but] he was doing fine and stayed in the hell house," she adds.
In the years since, her husband has not forgotten that night, and takes "much joy from recounting this story," she writes, "always with the tone of 'isn't it hilarious how my kind and thoughtful wife becomes a total AH when she overheats.' "
In the last month alone, the woman says that her husband has recounted the story "to some new parent friends of ours and our regular babysitter."
Hearing the story over and over, she adds, has made her question whether her behavior was really that bad. "Sure, abandoning your husband in an overheating home is pretty bad. On the other hand, he happily settled himself into that 105° hellhole, and did not take the obvious step of arranging a hotel room so that neither of us had to suffer. He dropped the ball too!"
She ends her post with a question to other Reddit users: Who was in the wrong? If she was, she writes that she will "swallow my pride and let him keep telling this story through our 50th anniversary."
But if not, she says she will tell her husband that it's time to move on and not tell the story anymore.
Overwhelmingly, commenters sided with the woman, with one writing, "It didn't occur to him to leave the house and seek somewhere cooler until he saw you doing it. He could have gone to a mall. He could have gone to a friend's house ... He has only himself to blame for his discomfort. Does the man have zero initiative?"
Added another: "Hubby needs to step up his game and find new material," they wrote.
