Brian Bonsall Goes Full Klingon

That, folks, is cute little Brian Bonsall, the child actor who played Andy Keaton, the youngest son on Family Ties before taking on the role of Alexander, Worf’s quarter-human nerd son, on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Bonsall, now 28, was arrested and charged with assault in Colorado after nailing a buddy with a broken barstool. The two of them were going at it pretty fierce in a Boulder apartment, police say, and Bonsall decided to get Nausicaan on his friend.

This is not a surprise, really; child actors are notorious for running into trouble with the law in their later years. Bonsall, in fact, has been arrested before. What makes this one different is Bonsall’s current look.

He has, apparently, gone Full Klingon. Spikes in his lips, tattoos on his neck … wait, that’s a butterfly. Okay, so he’s not quite Full Klingon. No Klingon would add butterflies to his look. It is without honour.

On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Alexander’s wimpiness was a constant source of prune-juicing anxiety for his father, Worf. Worf was a Klingon, but was raised by humans and wound up in Starfleet with a ponytail, so he struggled with identity issues. When Alexander turned up — Worf knocked up his half-human half-Klingon girlfriend and was surprised a few months later when a six-year-old kid arrived — Dad had to try to teach the kid how to be a fierce, scary Klingon warrior. He even dressed them up like cowboys once and took him to the Old West, and wore chaps.

Worf’s problem, of course, is that he wasn’t much of a warrior himself, despite what Captain Picard would later tell him in the movie First Contact. This lack of parental weapons training led to Alexander rejecting the Klingon lifestyle and becoming a poet and moving to that planet where everyone wore diapers made of bedsheets and Wesley went on trial for stepping on a flower. I might be remembering that wrong.

Alexander never did become Full Klingon. But it’s clear that the lessons Worf tried to instill in Alexander rubbed off on the young actor under the latex forehead. Brian Bonsall grew up, left acting, and has embraced the Klingon warrior lifestyle. You can’t call yourself a Klingon if you’ve never bounced a barstool off your buddy’s skull, right?

I’m still not sure about the butterfly tattoo. I guess there’s still a little Alexander in him after all.

• Note: Strangely, the mainstream media is identifying Bonsall as a former Family Ties actor, with little mention of Star Trek. Anyway, thanks to my good buddy El Diablito for the heads up on this one.

Today’s Moron: Gary Moody

I have 10 questions for Gary Moody of Portland, Maine, who has been nabbed (again) hiding in a campground outhouse. You may remember this guy; he was arrested a few years ago for the same offence, and told police he had dropped his wedding ring into the pit. This time, he said he’d dropped his shirt.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have nothing but sympathy for people with psychiatric or psychological conditions that make them want to do these strange things … until those compulsions intrude into other people’s lives. Imagine yourself sitting in that outhouse — already an unpleasant enough experience — only to discover a face looking up at your privates. Imagine it’s your mother, or wife, or child.

If I were still a crime reporter, and I had the chance to meet with Gary and ask him a few questions, this is what they would be:

1. How did you fit through that narrow little poo-hole?
2. Have you ever gotten stuck halfway into an outhouse?
3. Have you ever found anything interesting down there, like an old comic book, or a cellphone, or a bag of smuggled heroin?
4. Assuming you really did drop your wedding ring, how much do you love your wife, and is getting the ring back really worth crawling into human poo-waste?
5. Assuming you really did drop your shirt, how much do you love that stupid shirt? Did your wife give it to you?
6. What does it feel like to sit in poo?
7. Assuming, as you say, that you have “an outhouse problem,” and you’ve done this many times before, how do you clean up afterward?
8. Why the hell would you do this?
9. Why? For the love of God, why?
10. Do people call you Mr. Smells Like Poo?

I used to know a guy who was hired to pump out portapotties at campgrounds. He quit after a few weeks because he could never get rid of the smell on his skin. Imagine what Gary’s wife must have to live with …

Here’s an article about Gary, with a smelly-looking photo.

Evil In The Neighbourhood

After reading yesterday’s news coverage of the shocking case of Jaycee Dugard, the 29-year-old California woman who has spent the last 19 years as the captive of a sexual predator who stole her when she was 11, I used Google Earth to take a look at suspect Phillip Garrido’s property in Antioch, California.

Jaycee joins a sad list of damaged women, victims of sexual slavers whose lives were destroyed by someone else’s evil needs. Colleen Stan, Natasha Kampusch, Elisabeth Fritzl … These cases shock and frighten me. Is it because I have a daughter? Perhaps. But I think there’s more to it than that. As someone who spends much of his time creating and absorbing “out there” fiction (sci-fi, horror, mystery, fantasy), I worry that I may become desensitized to real-life horror. But cases like this one, incidents of this horrendous level of child abuse, cause a gut reaction in me that proves that idea wrong.

That’s why I Google Earthed Garrido’s house. After reading that Jaycee and the two daughters she had by Garrido spent the last two decades living in a hidden area of his back yard, I wanted to see how this monster pulled that off. What I saw was a ramshackle property littered with tents and tarps and shacks and crap, a campsite hidden behind fences and shrubs. It’s an awful place. But what I also saw were other houses and businesses surrounding it on all sides, other families living just feet away from the place where a little girl grew up as a slave.

Some neighbours have been interviewed, saying they knew Garrido had issues, and they knew there was something strange about his property. One woman complained to police, saying she thought Garrido was allowing people to rent tent space in his yard. But officials didn’t know about the compound. Garrido, a registered sex offender on parole, was subject to home inspections and visits from the authorities. None ever noticed that his small back yard was only a fraction of his property, and that just over that six-foot fence was a rough prison, a lost girl and her two lost daughters.

How much do you know about your neighbours? I barely know mine. I wouldn’t recognize them at the mall. And I sure don’t know what’s going on in their back yards, or in their basements. We rarely do, do we? And when we do, we mind our own business, because we all have that fear that if we raise too much of a stink, we have to live with the fallout. Would you call police because you thought your neighbour might be up to something? What if you’re wrong? It’s a hard decision to make.

Police say Jaycee may not have left the property in 19 years, that the yard is the only thing she knows. I hope that isn’t true. But I suspect it is. And I hope the neighbours think about what was happening under their noses, and wonder what might have been. Because as hard as that decision is to make, a phone call from a concerned neighbour 19 years ago might have changed a little girl’s life.

That’s worth risking your neighbour’s anger, I’d say.

• UPDATE: The day after I wrote this, it emerged that police were, in fact, alerted by a neighbour to the strange happenings in Garrido’s back yard — but didn’t do anything about it. And a lot of other neighbours are coming forward now to say yeah, they thought something was up. To little, too late.

Today’s Moron: Scott Gibson

I don't think this has anything to do with this article, but it's funny.

Police in Mount Carmel, Tennessee, pulled over a speeder back in June, issued him a ticket, and later sent him a citation. Speeders usually send a cheque to pay their fine; sometimes they contest the charge and end up in traffic court. Not Scott Gibson. He had a better idea.

He mailed police a scrawled letter explaining that he didn’t have to pay the fine because he was a deputy director of the CIA. After the police stopped laughing, someone called the CIA and asked who the deputy directors were. “Hmm,” the receptionist said. “We have Hawk, Duke, Snake Eyes, Scarlett, Flint, Short-Fuze, Breaker and Grunt.”

Not surprisingly, Gibson’s name didn’t come up.

Problems:

• Nobody in CIA will admit being in CIA.
• Anyone claiming to be a CIA employee is clearly lying.
• This is even stupider considering Gibson took time to think this plan up before he mailed his letter.
• Police pointed out that even if Gibson had been an actual deputy director of the CIA — hell, if he’d been president of the U.S. — he would still have had to pay the ticket.
• And now Scott Gibson, who faced a small fine for going 11 mph over the speed limit, has been arrested for criminal impersonation, and faces other federal charges. Nice going.

One lesson learned from this: The CIA will indeed confirm or deny a person’s employment, which runs counter to that stuff you hear on TV about the agency’s secrecy. Next time I get pulled over, I’m going to claim to be a beer distributor. I’ll probably stand a better chance.

Today’s Moron: Alonzo C. Rucker

I like it when people with odd names are identified with a middle initial. See, the whole idea of a middle initial is to help set you apart from other people with a similiar name; thus we see John A. MacDonald (first prime minister of Canada) and John D. MacDonald (king of the mystery writers), and we see George Bush, George W. Bush, and now George P. Bush. Pierce Bush doesn’t bother with a middle initial, because nobody else is named Pierce Bush, for good reason.

For a while, early in my reporting career, I used my middle initial in my name, until a very good editor told me “I don’t think people are going to mix you up with anyone else.” Which was true; I have an uncommon name. So I chuckle now when I see people who insert the middle initial when it isn’t necessary.

Of course, it’s possible there’s another Alonzo Rucker out there, which is why Alonzo C. Rucker is being tagged with his middle name. Anyone else named Alonzo Rucker would not want to be confused with this guy, let me tell you.

A few days ago, Rucker allegedly decided to rob a bar in Janesville, Wisconsin. Don’t worry, I don’t know where that is either. Rucker ran into the bar, a bandanna over his face, and told the people inside that he had a gun, and he was going to rob them.

Some problems, though:

1. Rucker didn’t actually have a gun.
2. The bar was very, very crowded.
3. The crowd was made up of union members.
4. The union was holding its annual statewide golf tournament and pub crawl, with members coming from all over the state.
5. The union was the Wisconsin Professional Police Officers Association.

Yeah, it ended the way you think. Rucker was thrown to the ground, unmasked and arrested, and now he’s in jail. He has not been convicted of a crime and remains innocent until proven intelligent. Wait, not, this is less an incident of stupidity — although it is pretty stupid — than it is an incident of bad luck.

You can watch this video for the whole story …

I like the fact that the police chief’s last name is Kopp. I also like the reporter, who points out that the cops apprehended Rucker without ever putting down their beers. That’s funnier than anything else here.

Here’s an actual news story about all this. Ooh, this gets funnier: two of the arresting officers were named Porn and Peiper.

• “You’re under arrest. I’m Officer Porn.”
• “Whoah, I rented that once at XXX Video!”

Today’s Moron: Keith R. Griffin

Meow!

Keith R. Griffin, 48, of Jensen Beach, Florida — and why is it always Florida? — was charged this week with possessing child pornography. Police say they found more than 1,000 child porn images on his computer, and hit Griffen with 10 charges of being a filthy sleazy pervert. Well, they call it something else, but you know what I mean.

Griffen isn’t featured here because of that, though. He’s Today’s Moron because of his explanation. He claims he left his computer on, and his cat walked on the keyboard, causing the child pornography to be downloaded.

This story falls apart on several fronts.

1. The odds of a cat randomly typing out the complex URLs and passwords needed to access download sites are astronomical.
2. The odds of a cat randomly accessing child pornography, which is hidden online because of its evil nature, are even more impossible.
3. Cats prefer looking at pictures of birds, mice and old episodes of Sylvester and Tweety on YouTube. Everyone knows that.

The cat issued a terse “no comment.”

I like it when bad guys come up with these outlandish, stupid excuses. It means they stand no chance of walking the streets again. And with guys like this, that’s the best news I can give you.

In related coverage, a guy who was cheating on his wife with a whole bunch of other women was reportedly lured to a motel, then tied to a bed by his wife and three of his girlfriends, and had his cheater super-glued to his belly. You know, so when he has to pee, it goes … well, you get the picture. Anyway, it turns out he’s also, allegedly, a child abuser who stole someone’s ashes or something. So I guess he got what he deserved, times three. Or four.

It’s all too weird for me. I’ve never understood these serial cheaters; I’ve always had trouble handling one relationship at a time. Why would anyone want to add to that?

The superglue thing is pretty funny, though. Maybe, if those four women make bail and are allowed to travel, they could go see Keith.