Forum software upgrade completed.

I'm doing yet another software upgrade.  I hope this will resolve some of the problems users of mobile devices have been having, as well as some of the problems with searches.  I also hope this will be relatively quick.

No notice because my functionality has been dodgy, and this sort of thing has to happen on a weekend when traffic is minimal.


As of 2:15 PM Mountain Time (GMT -7) the upgrade is complete.  Nothing appears to be broken.  Yet.  However I don't see much in the way of fixes regarding the search function or mobile devices.

Now it looks like the search feature is working like it should.  Cache, cookies, the usual Interwebs wackiness was messing with me.  I'm still not sure about mobile devices.

Fuck if I know what the problem is, part 2.

I still don't know what's going on regarding the sporadic connectivity problems I'm having.  Just like last year I have found that if http://www.crazymeds.us is unavailable http://crazymeds.us works just fine.  I haven't been messing around with apache, so I don't know what the deal is.

I'll probably change all internal links that explicitly reference the domain from the flaky www.crazymeds.us to crazymeds.us.

Fuck if I know what the problem is.

Suddenly Firefox and IE can't find Crazy Meds.  But I'm still connected via telnet and ftp.  I can ping the site from domaintools.com and traceroute goes through fine, but ping and tracert fail from here.  For shits and grins I restarted the HTTPD service, but that didn't make any difference.

I'll ask tech support, but my money's on it being due to Internet weather or something else between here and the server.

--------------------------------------

Update: We're back on the air.  Whatever and wherever the problem was, it's gone now.

Dave's not here man

You know how you get to keep your cell phone number when you switch carriers?  What they don't tell you is your previous carrier may give your phone number to someone else, so you both have the same phone number.  Anyone who calls the number using your old carrier will get the person who was just assigned your phone number.  Anyone who calls using a landline or any other carrier winds up calling you.

This happens to me three or four times a year.  Usually it lasts two days and is no more than a minor inconvenience for the person with my phone number, while I don't particularly care and, if I feel like answering the phone, tell the callers what happened.  Over the last two weeks it's been alternately annoying and amusing for me.  I have no idea what it's been like for the very popular B., as it took him long enough to both get a new phone number and let everyone know what it is.

I wasn't up to talking on the phone most of the time, but they couldn't get a clue from my voicemail message that I'm not B.  I kept seeing the same phone numbers on the list of missed calls.  B.'s wife kept calling because she didn't update her contact list.  Only one person left a message, and he had just got out of jail.

The jailbird called the other night asking for B.  I tried to explain what happened and he couldn't quite understand it, because he kept asking for B.'s new phone number.  He said he had a wad of cash and wanted a big bag of pot.  That certainly explained why he couldn't grasp the situation, why B. is so popular, why it took so long for B. to get a new phone number and inform everyone he knows what it is, and why no one could take a hint from my voicemail message that I'm not B.

After telling this guy several times I didn't know B.'s phone number or where he could buy some pot he got pissed off at the world, ranting about the Mayans and 2012, and got pissed off at me.  He told me that everyone I know will die some day, that I'll die some day, and so forth along those lines before hanging up.  I think he was trying to harsh my buzz or something.

Blog roll updates

Once again I've moved some blogs to and from the defunct list.  Nothing new was added.  Anyone who reads the blogs regularly will notice, most of you won't.  I still feel like crap, so I was barely paying attention to what I did.

Video of Brent Arthur Wilson's Guilty Verdict

I know it's a month after it happened.  I've been ill.

Like the other videos of Brent and Jackiya you'll need to turn up your speakers to 11.

Brent Arthur Wilson: Guilty

Brent went to trial on Monday and was found guilty Tuesday morning. That's swift even by Montana standards, where it can be under a year from arrest to conviction for murder without a confession, and under six months with one.  It's not like I'm surprised or anything.  Sentencing is scheduled for 19 August.  The maximum punishment is 30 years in prison for the three felonies, six months in jail for the misdemeanor, and a $151,000 fine.  I don't have a clue as to what the likely sentence will be.  Judge Christopher might throw his ass in prison for 20 years just to save Lake county the cost of another trial.

From the Missoulian's coverage of Monday's proceedings:

Peering through reading glasses, accused house thief Brent Arthur Wilson spent the first day of his trial Monday alone at the defense table and seemingly uninterested in what was unfolding around him, poring over what appeared to be an Internal Revenue Service publication instead.

A few feet away, Lake County prosecutor Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson told a jury of nine men and three women that a year ago Wilson was unemployed, deeply in debt and living in a travel trailer.
But, she said, he was a "man with a plan," and the plan was to steal area homes in foreclosure - up to 100 of them, according to journals seized by authorities after they executed a search warrant on his residence.

Brent's residence at that time being another house he was attempting to steal.  That's making sure every i is dotted and every t is crossed with the same colored ink.  

Wilson, who has refused all attempts by District Court Judge Kim Christopher to appoint him legal counsel, didn't lift a finger in his own defense outside of repeatedly telling the judge that as far as he's concerned, he appears in her courtroom not as a criminal defendant, but only as the beneficiary to a trust in his name.

For anyone coming in late, Brent has repeatedly asked Judge Christopher to be the trustee of the BRENT ARTHUR WILSON Trust.  As she kept declining one can only assume the trustee of Brent's other trusts - "the creator, Yahweh" - has taken up that position.

He didn't ask a single question of potential jurors during the morning's jury selection, didn't exercise his right to preemptory challenges of any jurors, didn't object to the introduction of any evidence, and didn't cross-examine a single witness.
At times he appeared so engrossed in his reading material that only the silence in the courtroom made him aware the judge had addressed him and was waiting for an answer.
"Thank you for the question," Wilson said each time Christopher asked if he wanted to cross-examine someone, "but I appear only as the beneficiary. That question needs to be addressed to the trustee."

I can already see where this is going.  The basis of Brent's appeal will be that the trustee, i.e. God, was not allowed to be involved in the trial.  However, since God is omniscient and omnipresent, He was there and aware of all questions, statements, evidence, etc. and could have said something anytime He wanted to.  Even if prosecutor Cole-Hodgkinson said, "a trustee who apparently exists in his [Brent Arthur Wilson's] mind only."

The Missoulian didn't name the "Missoula financial institution" where Brent tried to get a loan for $125,000 using the property in question as collateral, nor how far into the loan process he got.  While I don't care all that much as to which bank / credit union / savings & loan was involved, just how deep into a home equity loan on property he didn't own is key to this symbolic denouement of the real estate pyramid scheme.

Not much happened on Tuesday.  A couple more witnesses, the prosecution's closing statement, and it took less than hour for a guilty verdict.  The verdict was the banner headline on today's edition, but there was a lot of padding with recap to justify that, because you can't run an above-the-fold story that's only five paragraphs long.  Plus there's not enough crazy, irony, or anything else to make up for the entire comics page not getting printed.  In any event, from the Missoulian:

Brent Arthur Wilson sat at his defense table alone on Tuesday, reading the Bible as jurors filed into the courtroom and delivered unanimous guilty verdicts in the peculiar case of a pilfered home.

Sentencing date, maximum possible punishment, recapping the saga, favorite wackiness, possibility of more charges, and at the very end the buried lede:

Cole-Hodgkinson said the spurious documents Wilson filed "created a cloud on the title," and he even scrawled his name into the property tract books maintained by the clerk and recorder's office.
"Of all the crimes that the defendant committed, that was probably the most heinous. The most far-reaching," she said, adding that people rely on those records when choosing their investments.
"I think he undermined everyone's sense of security," Cole-Hodgkinson said.
Susan Newton has worked in the Lake County Clerk and Recorder's Office since 1982, and has always felt the records should be accessible to the public. The way Wilson manipulated the records has her second-guessing that policy.
"We're a small county and we'd like to keep our books open to the public, but after this we may have to re-evaluate that," Newton said.

Anyone who has bought, sold, or taken out a loan for property knows the importance of a title search.  Any hiccup can delay or derail the process, and this is why it's important to know how far Brent got in getting a home equity loan.  It's like identity theft, in that once some jerk screws with your credit history you're the one who ends up paying for it.

The AP picked up the guilty verdict and ran an abbreviated version of the Missoulian's report.

I missed the report of a hearing on 1 July.  Here's a video of Judge Christopher and Lake County prosecutor Cole-Hodgkinson repeatedly trying to tell Brent all the different ways he can stop being stupid and get a shorter sentence.  Brent will have the last laugh. He's successfully stolen housing, food, and medical coverage from the state of Montana, and will continue to do so for how ever long he's sentenced.

FDA sanity fail: condoms cause breast cancer and eating disorders

This puts neuropsychiatric medication fearmongering into a new perspective.  I don't know exactly what that perspective is, but it's different.  Not only are condoms bad, but pearl necklaces and facials cause eating disorders as well, but blow jobs don't.  I guess this 'doctor' (who isn't a health professional) has issues and/or he's fed up with money shots.

Here it is on the FDA's website.

We're back on the air!

The forum is back up.  I'm really loopy.  It's a little before 8:00 PM, the fireworks are still two hours away (as if I were planning on seeing them in the first place, although I did want to go to the parade, lumberjack games and other 4th of July festivities) and I'm ready to go to bed.

There's one remaining problem I'm aware of: importing additional skins (IPBoard-speak for color schemes / styles) isn't working properly.  I have a good idea why and how it might be fixed.  It can wait until I recover from all this, which might not be until Friday.

At least there are a shitload of new anime avatars.

And you can put polls in your blogs.

Have fun with the new forum.

The Never-ending Crazy Meds Forum Software Upgrade Status Report

Actually there is some light at the end of the tunnel.  The software upgrade and data conversion are finished.  I'm doing some clean-up now.  More details to follow.


6:40PM MT  Jason from IPS tech support came through again.  When I hosed the production database two weeks ago I managed to convince the production version of the software that an upgrade was underway.  So even with fresh-out-of-the-box programs the process itself was somehow flagged as being about half-way through.  I'm still the better idiot that made me great at testing software.  So that part is done.

I'm finished with the system settings, and I just determined that I need to run the rebuild & recount tools.  That might take an hour or so.

Crazy Meds Forum Software Upgrade Status Reports

I couldn't get my act together until around 11:00 this morning, mainly because I thought I wrote that the upgrade would be starting at noon.  In any event there was a minor burp during the initial upload of the software, otherwise that part is fine.  I don't have an estimated time as to when it will all be finished.

One problem the new version of the software doesn't fix is resizing avatars loaded into the directory via FTP.  A lot of the anime avatars exceed the 120x120 pixel limit, and that was occasionally problematic.  I found some freeware that resizes batches of files, so they all meet that standard.  I've also added a shitload of new avatars.  Because of those two events I sorted the avatars into several galleries instead of having the single anime gallery.  As always the promise of more of your¹ favorite² anime avatars will be hanging for who the fuck knows how long. Once I'm finished there will be over 3,000 avatars from about 20 different series, so that should satisfy your inner otaku.

3:25 p.m. MT: Look at that.  The upgrade to the most current version assumes you are already at 3.x and not 2.3.x  So I first need to upgrade to 3.something and then upgrade to 3.1.latest&greatest.

It's a good thing I don't throw anything away.


6:20 p.m. MT: Nope, that wasn't it.  I've opened a ticket with IPS tech support. 

My guess is the problem has to do with my breaking the forum on 14 June.  The message I get is an SQL failure when something runs a query with a select based on a column that exists only in version 3.x of a table that hasn't been converted, so it doesn't have that column.  In other words, even though the upgrade tells me it's going to take version 2.3.6 and turn it into version 3.1, when the software actually starts it expects version 3 data.

Why do I think that's my fault?  Because whenever I ran the upgrades in a test environment they worked just fine.  The only difference now is the funky database that's a mix of old and new tables.  It didn't give me any problems, so I didn't know there extraneous tables until it was too late to do anything about them.

So we're off the air until at least tomorrow.  The old version comes up just fine, so the fallback is still good.

¹i.e. mine 

²that I could find

Crazy Meds Forum Scheduled to be Offline for Software Update

I plan on upgrading the forum software this weekend.

We'll be offline for however long it takes from around 10:00 a.m. Mountain time (16:00 GMT) 3 July until I'm finished.  One way or another we'll be back on the air sometime in the evening of 4 July, (early morning 5 July GMT) even if that means still being on the current version of the software.

I'll post on here when I start and when the forum is back up, as well as any status updates I feel are necessary or interesting, or I have nothing better to do.

Unlike the weekly backups, I'll be doing a manual backup without the forum software running, so I'm fairly confident all posts, etc. will be safe in case anything goes wrong.

I spy with my little eye diverse fungi

Last Saturday (12 June) it stopped raining after about 10 straight days of varying amounts of rain.  I walked around the property to check out what sort of mushrooms might have fruited and the pickings were pretty good.  As I'm way off of my game I have no real idea what these are, and, at best, can pin them down to their genera.

First up are the ones I see all of the time:

This one is representative of the ones that frequently fruit on or near the meadow (like this one) or the 'lawn' from late spring through mid autumn.  My guess is it's either a type of lepiota or amanita, although only strong remnant of a veil is the annulus / ring.  When I can pull one up the base of the stem is bulbous, it's just not an obvious volva.  Still, the gills are detatched, the stem isn't particularly smooth, and the spores are rather white.

Also popular...

Miniature puffballs, which I'm likely to find whenever the lepiotae / amanitae are fruiting.

I have mostly pine trees, most of which are lodgepole pines.  I expected to find more Slippery Jacks (suillus species), but the conditions aren't right, the deer like them too much or something.  Here's a fairly generic Slippery Jack that fruited amongst the pines:

And a couple of less-than-generic specimens:

You can't tell from this picture, but the cap is yellow. I found the remnants of another one a deer really liked that was chanterelle yellow.

I found this suillus (I think) on the 'lawn.' It had a very sweet scent and was hardly slimy. As you can see it was popular with critters of all sizes, as a couple of fairly large bites were taken out of it.

This one from the meadow is pretty neat:

I found another just like it alongside the driveway.  It sort of looks like a bird's egg.  Based on the two I found the off-center stalk seems to be the norm.  It didn't cooperate and leave a spore print, so I don't know where to start in trying to identify it.

This one fruited Thursday the 17th.  It's obviously an agaricus of some kind, with the purplish-brown spores pretty much ruling out most anything else.  I'm impressed by how it forced its way up through the packed clay and gravel of the driveway!  It doesn't look like A. bitoruis, because its stalk and ring are too small, but I could easily be wrong.

 

Finally, file these under nothing special. Colorful, but otherwise unremarkable shelf conks and waxy caps.

Polite Antics Ensue

That's the headline for the article the print edition I received this morning. The headline of the online version is far more staid.

Brent continues to treat the case against him as a civil matter involving the BRENT ARTHUR WILSON Trust and that the US Constitution does not apply to him. Good luck with that.

Brent Arthur Wilson's courtroom demeanor has changed noticeably.

His legal strategy, not so much.

The defendant, who at one time had lectured the judge presiding over his multiple felony case by telling her she was "not God," was polite - sometimes exceedingly so - during an omnibus hearing here Thursday morning.

But the alleged Polson house thief, who is representing himself, remained just as committed to his unusual courtroom tactics as well.

He insisted that District Court Judge Kim Christopher address questions she asked of him to herself instead, as his "appointed trustee" of an express revocable trust in his name.

[...]

When Wilson tried to waive his "constitutional benefits in a trial" on Thursday, Christopher told him, "We don't conduct them any other way, Mr. Wilson."

Wilson's polite reply:

"I appreciate your offer, it's very generous of you, but I'm going to waive that constitutional benefit offer."

The big news, to me, is that everything up to this point involved what I've been calling the "third house," i.e. not the one he was living in nor the one he rented out to someone else, but the house he attempted to use as collateral for a home equity loan.  At least I hope it's the house he tried to use for a loan, but as there could be more than three houses involved who knows if that's ever going to be evidence in a trial.  I really, really want everything regarding a home equity loan on a house with paperwork involving Yahweh and reincarnation to be brought out in the open, because that will be the icing on the cake of the YIIKes! decade's real estate pyramid scheme.  

It's not easy to bury that sort of stuff in Montana like it is in other states.  

I've bought and sold property in California and it takes several hours to go through all the paperwork with a good Realtor who will explain everything so you don't have to read all of it yourself (which would take at least a day, assuming you had the correct reference books at hand) and not be an idiot and sign anything they put in front of you.  In Montana you can actually read each of the few documents in its entirety, understand them, and be done in under an hour.

The Lake County DA's office is still compiling charges, and may file those as a separate case. Why?  Because it's so freaking complicated.

The other properties involve other witnesses and different paper trails, and all are complicated, the assistant county attorney [Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson] said. She must also decide whether to amend the current charges - which include theft, deceptive practices and tampering with public records or information, all felonies - to include the other properties.

If Brent decides to, or Judge Christopher rules Brent is too crazy to represent himself and forces him to use a public defender, he could plead guilty and instantly be out on probation for time served. Hell, he doesn't even need a public defender to do that, all he has to do is stop believing in the Sovereign Citizen bullshit.

No, really.  From the last two paragraphs of the story:

Her other option is to file separate charges in those cases in a situation where, at least some have speculated, Wilson might otherwise already be out on probation and credited with time served, were he not insistent on following his curious courtroom strategies.

Wilson has already been judged mentally fit to stand trial.

So if Brent isn't crazy and thinks the Sovereign Citizen thing is a rational defense, even if being a true believer is keeping him in jail longer than necessary, does that make him a de facto member of the 'patriot' movement?  According to David Neiwert at Crooks and Liars it does.  Personally I think that's insulting to Brent, who might be opting for the guaranteed three squares and a bed.

Don't underestimate Brent's legal kung fu.

Whoops!

The Crazy Meds Talk forum is temporarily broken.  The database error is my fault.  It'll be back up soon, but everything posted after midnight Sunday Mountain Time will be lost.   Life just sucks that way.

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OK, it's fixed now.  At least it was both easy and fast to repair.  That took all of fifteen minutes, most of which was spent RTFM for MySQL to make sure I had the syntax correct for a full restore.

I was doing yet another test installation of the forum software upgrade, because version 3.1 was just released so there wasn't much point in installing 3.0.5.  I forgot to change the database name in one location.  So the production database was updated to version 3.1 during the installation.

At least I know that part of the upgrade process works.

Everything is backed-up on Sundays around midnight Mountain Time, (GMT -6, -7 winter time), so it could have been a lot worse.

Jackiya Ford: Officially Crazy. Brent Wilson: Unofficially Scary

Jackiya Ford is officially crazy. According to the article in the Missoulian from 1 June 2010 (I'm having problems with my meds, hence the delay):

A psychological evaluation of the 37-year-old woman accused of stealing a home in Lolo revealed that she is not mentally fit to proceed to trial, but prosecutors want a second opinion.

[...]

An appointment for the second evaluation couldn't be made until mid- to late July, however, and Public Defender Chris Daly said that was too long to wait under Montana's speedy trial guarantees.

[Judge Robert L. "Dusty" Deschamps III] agreed, and said the prosecutor would have to find a private psychologist who could perform the evaluation sooner.

"I'm not going to leave someone who is mentally ill and suffering from delusions sitting in a jail cell for two months while she waits for a bed at the state hospital," Deschamps said.

I wonder what gave it away? Was it her LinkedIn page where she claimed to have marched with MLK several times, the Dr. Bronner-like rant on her MySpace page (see Jackiya Ford: Crazier than I thought for more of that sort of madness), or the pure insanity of an African-American gospel singer appropriating the language and methods of a scam rooted in Identity Christianity to attempt to steal property in MONTANA? (see Reverend Colonel William Potter Gale must be spinning in his grave for details)

Perhaps she had something new for the people evaluating her.

Meanwhile, since the 1990s were 20 years ago it's time for '90s retro chic.  Militias were hot as the right-wing political extremists of the 1990s, so they're back.  Montana had two organizations in the vanguard of patriots guarding against the Black Helicopters and New World Order: the Militia of Montana and the Freemen.  Brent is reminding people of the Freemen.  I originally thought he wasn't involved with the neo-Freemen who are openly back in Lincoln county.  Most political extremists are united only by overlapping aspects of their ideologies;  Brent is probably acting on his own, like whoever did the drive-by "paper terrorism" in Hamilton county earlier this year.  So if he used the Freemen's tactics to try to acquire some property, will he do the same during his trial?  An article in the Missoulian from 3 June 2010 tries to answer that.

Nick Murnion was Garfield County attorney who prosecuted members of the Montana Freemen.  He said:

"Some have said very few things and mostly just sat there," ... "This fellow sounds more vocal. Obviously, none of them believe the state has any authority over them - they claim they aren't citizens and the courts have no jurisdiction. It gets kind of bizarre."

How bizarre?

"Does the courtroom where he's appearing have an American flag in it?" ... "If the flag has a fringe on it, I've seen them claim it's a maritime flag and therefore the court only has jurisdiction on water."

Like the Freemen Brent insists he has no rights, wants no attorney, and doesn't recognize Lake County's jurisdiction over him.  It's doubtful anyone would believe it if Brent offered a $1 million dollar bounty on the prosecutor as happened to Mr. Murnion, but Brent rented out one of those houses and was in the process of getting a home equity loan, so anything is possible.

In 2008 the US Supreme Court ruled that if someone is declared competent enough to stand trial the judge could still say that person is too crazy to represent themselves, and the judge gets to determine that however they like.  (Indiana v. Edwards) It's like obscenity, the judges know it when they see it.  However...

Broadwater County Attorney John T. Flynn says the Montana Supreme Court has said that defendants have an absolute right to represent themselves, in a ruling that essentially read, he says, that "in Montana, you have a constitutional right to be a fool."

A defendant who disrupts proceedings and does not conform to a certain level of decorum, however, does not have an absolute right to be present in the courtroom, and Flynn says that leads to a couple of competing rights for those who represent themselves.

They have the right against self-incrimination, but they also can't obstruct justice.

A defendant who disrupts proceedings and does not conform to a certain level of decorum, however, does not have an absolute right to be present in the courtroom, and Flynn says that leads to a couple of competing rights for those who represent themselves.

It would be a tad bit difficult to represent yourself if you're not allowed to be in the courtroom.  Judge Deborah Christopher would probably have to invoke Indiana v. Edwards, tell Brent to suck it up, and appoint a lawyer to represent him.

Read the full article for more potential courtroom antics and wacky prosecutorial war stories. 

Brent Arthur Wilson, public enemy #275,000

A trial date has been set for 12 July.  Another omnibus hearing is scheduled for 10 June regarding charges for one or more other properties.  I really hope evidence about the home equity loan Brent was supposed to have started the process for comes to light.  That is what makes his case truly emblematic of the YIIKes decade's real estate pyramid scheme.  At his most recent hearing Brent took the dare to make even less sense than before.  From the Missoulian article:

[Judge] Christopher again asked Wilson to accept legal representation from the public defender’s office, again told him she could not rule on any motion that hadn’t been made in writing, and again warned him she would not accept nor perform and fiduciary responsibility in the matter even if he did request it in writing.

“I cannot assume that, I cannot practice law, I can perform only as a judge in this case,” she told him.

“Well,” Wilson announced, “I think it’s apropos then that, for the record, on the record, let the record show that I reiterate the situation from last May 20.”

And this is what he went on to say:

“I, Brent Arthur Wilson the man; on the land, born of spirit, of issue, of messiah on the most high; grantor, trustor, settler of the all capitals B-R-E-N-T A-R-T-H-U-R W-I-L-S-O-N Trust; do appoint and nominate District Court Judge Deborah Kim Christopher as the trustee for the Express Revocable all caps Brent Arthur B-R-E-N-T A-R-T-H-U-R W-I-L-S-O-N Trust, with the following three points of law:”

He went on to talk about trusts.

“The purpose for which a trust may be created is the tangent purpose of the settler in truth. It is the law of the trust,” he said, adding that “Brent Arthur … the man is not defaulted as the trustee for the all capitals B-R-E-N-T …”

Well, you get the picture.

“Do you have any evidence to the contrary, Your Honor?” Wilson asked when he was finished.

The other news was how Brent is in the news.  Even the Facebook group I created about Brent is getting some media attention.  OK, it got some local medium attention as part of an article in the Missoulian about Brent gaining national notoriety.  The group's entire manifesto (i.e. description) was reprinted, and I can't ask much more than that.  Alright, I can ask for a link to the group in the online edition, but a Facebook group is easy enough to find.

The article begins with:

When Assistant Lake County Attorney Jessica Cole-Hodgkinson plugged Brent Arthur Wilson’s name into an Internet search engine Wednesday afternoon, it delivered 4,000 hits.
When she tried it again Thursday morning, it was up past 6,000.

That would have been the 20th and 21st of May.  I don't know which search engine or how she entered the search.  Asking the Googles today about "Brent Arthur Wilson" returns 93 unique pages, and about 800 to 7,200 if you include everything with his name that is a link to one of those pages and each time that link shows up on a site.  I've got over 150 posts and a label with his full name, so if you tell Google to show you every single entry you'll get over 150 links to this blog alone.  It's a similar situation with the Missoulian's site and any other media site in Montana with a news section that picked up at least one article about Brent.  Searching for "Brent Wilson" isn't going to work, as that guy is a rugby star and bass player who also happens to be a legitimate real estate agent in several states.  Entering Brent Arthur Wilson without quotes returns almost 800 unique results out of a possible 275,000.  Most of those are not about anyone named Brent Arthur Wilson, are from news/blog aggregators, or are the results of searches run on other sites, including searches that aren't about our Brent.  That search does return several pages about Brent that are outside of Montana and aren't the News of the Weird entries previously mentioned.

It's not possible to get a good fix on how many sites have written about Brent.  Regardless of the search method used, here are some other examples of Brent's growing notoriety.

Domestic Terrorists or Fierce Patriots? on the investment / money management site Main Street, Seth Fiegerman followed up on Tristan Scott's article from the Missoulian in comparing Brent and Jackiya Ford (whom the article is mostly about) with the all-American domestic terrorists - white stupidists supremacists & separatists - for appropriating the sovereign citizen & redemption scams.  Mr. Fiegerman wrote about sovereign citizens:

They want to rely on common law rather than federal law and restore a certain simplicity to America. The hope is that they can get rid of the big banks and big government so they can be free to live in this country without being “hijacked” by these imposing forces. In essence, they are arguably a more zealous and extreme version of the Tea Party movement. Sovereign Citizens promote individual liberties, but they also have taken controversial steps that endanger fellow citizens; members bill themselves as true patriots and yet they break laws and take steps to undermine the government.

The comparison is hardly new.  I read it a few places before writing this in a post commenting on the Missoulian article:

Some of the more extreme tax protesters have been linked with white separatists / supremacists. Lots of people have already connected the extremist tax protesters to the Tea Baggers Party, and Tea Party rhetoric sounds a lot like sovereign citizen / redemption rhetoric.

Wow!  The Tea Party isn't exclusively white after all!

If you like it when Tea Baggers go ballistic, be sure to read the comments on Mr. Fiegerman's article.

Brent has been linked to the white stupidists and their sovereign citizen's scam by Rick Ross.  The articles are just reprints from the Missoulian, but getting listed on Mr. Ross' site usually qualifies you as a dirtbag.

Some nimrod stopped by the Tree of Liberty forum trying to sell the sovereign citizens scam as a way to "achieve true justice."  Two Missoulian articles about Brent were used to demonstrate how ridiculous the scam is.  If Objectivists who are still getting ready to survive a post-Y2K meltdown and veer into Black Helicopter territory now and then think something promising freedom from the government is crazy you know it's fucking crazy.

More Scenes from My Boring Life

Downmarket Most Dangerous Game meets bum fight:

Man shot with blowgun dart outside Missoula homeless shelter

A 32-year-old homeless man was shot in the cheek with a blowgun dart early Monday morning and police are looking for a suspect who drove away in a white Lexus.

A&C Drugs, the oldest pharmacy in Missoula and the one I've been using since I moved up here has closed.  Even after I moved from Missoula I kept my prescriptions there as they would mail them to me.  They were yet another victim of Medicare Part D, reduction of Medicaid payments, and competition with big box stores offering $4 generics.  Here's a good article on the subject, Disappearing drugstores: Small-town health suffers as rural pharmacies close.  I'll be using the little pharmacy in Superior now.  I hope I'll be able to keep getting Teva's lamotrigine, as Dr. Reddy's may as well be a placebo.  The nearest big box store or chain pharmacy is 60 miles away, and they fill the prescriptions for the community hospital, so they should be able to stay in business.  If they go under I'll do what I can to get generics from specific manufacturers from a chain pharmacy, or get another dispense as written prescription.  I'm considering going to generic topiramate next year, as I'm reading reports that Teva has their act together with their topiramate now.

After a five-year absence I'm back on The WELL.  As I wrote on my member page, I pretty much spend my life just dicking around anyway.  The more things I have to do in a half-assed way, the less I ruminate on how much less my life sucks than a young woman living in Yemen or the parents of a child with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome.

One of the things I do to waste time / procrastinate / calm me the fuck down is look at visitor statistics for the various sites I run (I'll be updating the stats for Crazy Meds Real Soon Now), including the results of search terms used to find them.  One visit to this blog resulted from the search straitjacket design.  The result teh Googles gave me was for a page on paddling.net  Specifically the review of a strait jacket [sic] by someone named Beaverman.  "Beaverman" reviewing a straitjacket for a paddling site?  Kinky!  Unfortunately not.  Reviews for Lotus Designs Strait Jacket PFD, of which Beaverman's is the first, has to do with a jacket or vest one wears when kayaking or canoeing or something like that.

I've got traps out for hornets and yellow jackets, and traps for other social wasps.  The traps for other wasps have fruit juice in them, the traps for the hornets have only sexy pheromones.  I'll give you one guess as to which ones the hummingbirds are trying to feed from.  I can't find any reference to hummingbirds being attracted to yellow jacket sex pheromones.

The Once and Who the Hell Knows about the Future Domain

Thanks to forum member Sduibek crazymeds.com is now a valid address for Crazy Meds.

Way back in October 2003 I thought I had registered crazymeds.com with 1&1.  For some reason it didn't work and the domain was squatted.  Then and there I should have gone elsewhere, but as I wasn't thinking clearly enough to properly register a domain I wasn't thinking clearly enough to find another registrar and domain host.

crazymeds.us is still the primary domain.  At some point that may change.

You're a legal genius Brent Wilson. Or maybe crazy after all.

Judge Deborah Christopher declared Brent Wilson sane enough to represent himself at trial, with the usual caveats judges give to people who want to do that.  E.g. "You're an idiot."

Yesterday's promise of courtroom antics were fulfilled when Brent appointed Judge Christopher the trustee of the BRENT ARTHUR WILSON Express Revocable Trust.  Brent was very insistent about the capslock name, so it's pretty obvious he knows how to game the system; as long as the system is Linux- or DOS-based.  Judge Christopher declined.

Although Brent managed to address Judge Christopher correctly during this hearing, he refused to rise for her when she entered the court.  I think he had risen in another way and didn't want everyone to know.  Really, Brent, there are better ways to stalk meet women.

More details at the Missoulian.  I'll post any video I find of this hearing.

Jackiya Ford: Crazier than I thought

I thought the previous post about Brent was it for the day, but I'm in serious procrastination mode.

Jackiya Ford has some serious crazy and/or fraud going on.

First there's Mcjala Entertainment, her combination record label / promotions & bookings company / Millennialist church.  The website is sadly defunct.  Archive.org isn't aware of it.  A few of its pages are visible, for now, in Google's cache, such as Jackiya's narcissistic About Us / featured artist page and a page plugging the music of the artists they represent.  I'll give you one guess as to how many that is.  Without the graphics, especially on the site's home page, the Millennialist cult church aspects of Mcjala Entertainment are missing.

As someone who has been diagnosed as bipolar by numerous psychiatrists for the last 25 years, and who has lived with people with equally official bipolar diagnoses, I know crazy.  I'm not qualified to diagnose anyone, especially not over the InterGoogles, but I'm pretty good at spotting someone being mentally interesting to some degree.

Jackiya Ford's LinkedIn page screams "batshit crazy."

Sure, lots of people pad their resumes.  Many outright lie.  So her claims of having a law degree and a business degree with 4.0 GPAs could be simple fraud.  But Jackiya also wrote that she marched with Dr. Martin Luther King. That must have happened in a past life as she was born in 1972.  How reincarnation works with homo-hating Christianity (check out her YouTube play list) is beyond me.  She must have been born self-aware like those freaky kids from the Dune books that sucked, because one of her current jobs is "Freeman on the Land" and she's been doing that since 1972.  Those 4.0 GPAs are apparent as part of her duties as a Freeman is being a "Sovern Citizen."

While you're at the YouTube, be sure to listen to Send Me YHWH I'll Go.  Listening to her music you can hear how much Jackiya loves Jesus.  Really LUVS Him, and she'll be the best girlfriend He'll ever have.

Like any musician Jackiya has a MySpace page.  Unlike her Facebook page, the MySpace page still exists.  For now.  It's a typically ugly MySpace page, but it has one thing you'll find on just a few - an awesome, Dr. Bronner-like rant of pure crazy.  In case it goes away, here's a more legible copy of the dense text:

What If you wake up one day and realize that your entire life you've lived a lie? Everything you've been taught in school and about life was a lie. What if I said your birthrights were sold you into slavery the very day you were born? Your Birth Certificate, Social Security Card, Drivers License and any other contract you've signed in life was a contract signed with the devil, to take away your true GOD given freedom B.K.A BIRTHRIGHT. Want the TRUTH? God says that my people perish for lack of knowledge.... Ready to really go down the rabbit hole... Pray and ask GOD for Guidance and Wisdom and be assured that he will give it to you. Seek and you shall find. Ask and it shall be given, Knock and the door shall be opened. SEEK TRUTH, embrace knowledge. Study the U.S. Constitution, Common Law,Etymology and the Black Laws Dictionary--(STUDY EVERYTHING YOU CAN)know it & learn it by hard. Learn about the original people of the Land. Separate yourselves from those who embrace the darkness and walk into the Light. Don't worry about what others do unto you. Give it to God and Believe their days are numbered. Know who you are and who's you are. You will never be the same. Life will never be the same.... Know it doesn't matter where you've been or what you've done but it's where your going that counts. These are evil times that we live in. WOE unto those that operate in a De facto Government, WOE unto those that say there is NO GOD. And WOE unto those that have touched the anointed ones of GOD. We are living in a time when the MEEK shall surely inherit the Earth. IT IS WRITTEN. The Word of GOD shall not return unto him Void, but shall accomplish that in which it was sent out to do. I would like to dedicate this site to my grandmother who’s called me on my gift to sing the Gospel and believe GOD in all things early on as a little girl. Carrie Lee Patterson, proclaimed the prophecy that one day Ahayah was going to use me for his glory.( R.I.P. “I Love you grandma.”) Look out for my Album (My Life 4 the Gospel) (2010). My sound is hot and quite commercial. Yet most importantly, I sing to represent Ahayah, in the name of Yashua. Many people feel that they've got what it takes, but I think by now we all know that many are called but few are chosen. Ahayah, has raised up a new generation of nobody's to help him speak the true unmerited Gospel. Yah calls them a pecuiliar people... I understand and I accept the call by AhaYah, that I’ve been chosen to represent in such a way that'll tickle the hearts of mankind. I have full intentions on ministering the true unedited Gospel of my God; until the day I die. I can not be moved, brought, broken, shaken nor turned. I'm In this till I die. As far as the Illuminati's out there; know that GOD of Heaven is the GOD of Israel; who was and Is and is to come. Repent and turn from your wicked ways for his return is at hand. "What profit is it for a man to gain the whole world; yet loose his soul. I love what I do, I love what I’ve become ,I know who I am, I love being me, and most importantly I love living for Ahayah in the name of Yahshua. For those of you who don't know what Ahayah means or Yahshua; Ahayah is God's real name before man changed it. Yahshua is Jesus's real name before man changed it. Know the truth will set you free. However, "Need I say any more," Because when it’s my time to shine. I plan on shining just as bright as the North Star. SO! "WATCH OUT WORLD.... HERE I COME (By the grace of God as he leads me)....." In the true name of Yahshua. WORD OF THE DAY: The true beauty of a woman comes from within. It’s not necessary for a woman to reveal her body for attention. A real man is a man who loves & fears "Ahayah". It is then when Ahayah will lead him to a true beautiful woman that will love & honor him just as Ahayah Loves the Church (the called out ones)(The Remnant). A woman that is spiritually inclined. A woman that knows the truth about historical facts. A woman that respects herself. A woman that will refuse to sell her soul to the devil. A woman that Ahayah has created just for him. (A woman of Virtue). Wake up people if you’re living your life as if these aren't the last days than you’re sadly mistaken and obviously blind to the truth. Open your eyes..... The signs are all around you..... Yahshua, really Is coming sooner than we all think. "I'd rather live my life as if there was a God and die to find out there is none; than to live my life as if there isn't a God just to die & find out there is one. - Anonymous. Shout out to the 144,000 ( one hundred forty-four thousand); and the 2 (two) witnesses at the waling wall.

For anyone who doesn't believe that commercial soap was covered with wacky religious rants, or hasn't seen a classic Dr. Bronner label for some time:

Dilute! Dilute!  OK! 

picture via sethwhite.org

Brent Arthur Wilson: Sane enough to stand trial

Hot off the Missoulian's press, or however they print their website:

POLSON - A drifter known for his courtroom antics and accused of trying to steal a foreclosed house in Polson is competent to stand trial.

Brent Arthur Wilson, 53, is back in the Lake County jail after being committed to the Montana State Hospital in Warm Springs, where physicians determined he was fit to stand trial.

Lake County District Judge Kim Christopher sent Wilson to the state mental hospital after he refused to participate in court hearings or to work with a public defender.

The article continues at the website, although it's mostly a brief rehashing of what's happened so far.  

An omnibus hearing is scheduled for today.  We'll just have to wait for more antics, and if Judge Deborah Christopher rules Brent competent enough to defend himself.  

Drug-Drug interaction checker is working again

The folks at AIDSmeds changed the URL for their drug-drug interaction checker.  I'll try to update those pages today.

Edit:  As of 6:10 PM Mountain Time the drug-drug interaction checker is working again.  Copyright dates on most, if not all pages have been updated, and a few broken links I spotted have been fixed.

Do I still live in Montana? You bet!

I was in Superior the other day and saw a totally FAH-bu-lous secondhand shop and beauty salon now occupies the building built atop the burned-out ruins of the hotel where Gideon first forgot his Bible a little over 100 years ago.  It replaced the 24 hour gym and "supplement" shop that was there.  Across the street the marquee over the dive bar (as if there is another kind in these parts) no longer advertises the 3 to 7pm happy 'hour' and which nights ladies drink half-price.  Now they have Wii championships.

In places like Missoula, Kalispell, Bozeman, Butte and Billings that sort of stuff is normal, but Superior?

A little before, and since then, several stories made the news that, while maybe not only in Montana, are certainly Rocky Mountain flavored...

Tea Baggers who are trying to unseat Republican incumbents for being RINOs are everywhere.  One such in Montana is Ron Lake trying to unseat Republican state Representative Jeff Welborn in the June 8th primary.  From Mr. Lake's campaign flier:

It is going to take real Republicans committed to conservative values to make things right again, not Republicans who are ‘in bed' with Big Government. 

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but when a person runs as a Republican, when he gets to Helena, I think he should vote as a Republican.

Good, wholesome, American conservative values coming from someone who is a registered violent offender, and whose offenses include breaking into someone's apartment to use their phone to place "long distance phone calls" to "adult entertainment" providers.

Tea Party values: Republicans who are in bed with Big Government are bad; Republicans who are violent criminals addicted to phone sex are good.

On the subject of family values, Missoula has a brand new law (as of today) that prohibits discrimination based on sexual identity.  Yay!  Certain people are uncomfortable with that sort of thing.  Especially priapic anti-porn crusader Tei Nash.  Nash, who is squarely in the "God hates fags" camp, decided to take a gentler approach this time.  He doesn't have a problem with how people are or anything, he just doesn't want pre-op trannies using the ladies room because it will confuse little kids and lead to sexual assault.

No, really.  notmybathroom.com  

I'm surprised Mr. Nash's head didn't literally explode when his daughter came out in front of him and half the county at the overflowing city council meeting about the ordinance. 

At least cowboys are still heroes in Montana.  Especially cowboys who rassle space aliens to prevent a plane from being hijacked.  OK, it was just one cowboy and he helped the flight crew subdue someone who had too much to drink who was ranting about being a being from another planet, but the guy really is a cowboy.

If we have space-alien-rasslin' cowboys, we need Indians who still hunt tasty critters with handcrafted bows.  And teach kids about it in schools.  Not just about how it used to be, but what bow hunting is like now with handcrafted bows.

All that plus Brent and Jackiya!

I don't know what I was worried about, I totally live in Montana!

I don't think that was how YHWH wanted you to spread the word

Jackiya Ford's story is the one with legs.  As expected, she's in News of the Weird.  It's not surprising to see her story in Fark.  You know she's got it going on when they're writing about her in India and using her to illustrate a point in the endless argument about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the Pravda.ru forum. That's why she has her own tag now.

I also found a blog entry from someone who claims to know Jackiya.  All of the comments have to do with the homeless and the politics of welfare.

There's an answer to my question about how white separatists / supremacists feel about someone like Jackiya using their scam to have all the fun crooked mortgage brokers had.  On Stormfront (a very large and active site for those people) there's a topic with a title about a "Negress 'Sovereign Citizen'".  There is much outrage about how such thefts hurts working people and how ludicrous she is for claiming to be a so-called sovereign citizen in the first place.  Amazingly enough the sovereign citizen concept is praised all over that site as a way to avoid paying unconstitutional taxes to a corrupt and tyrannical government.

The site for her combination record label-promotions and entertainment company-millennialist church is "temporarily unavailable" due to a problem with the account.

Litany of complaints. Don't bother reading.

There's one licensed plumber in this part of the county.  Fortunately Kelvin is an ace.  The sort of guy who grew up making stuff from the remnants of pipes and faucets using wrenches and hacksaws that had seen better days.  The plumbing in my house always finds a way of surprising him.

When Kelvin was here previously he needed to run 150 feet of a snake to get to a clog that was responsible for waste water overflowing into the basement / garage.  The access point for the upstairs pipes - only output from the upstairs fixtures spilled into the basement - is about 40 feet north and 10 feet below the farthest fixture, AKA the kitchen sink.

The plumbing here must be based on Monty Python's third season title sequence.

This time around something blocked the flow of water into the water heater.  Whatever it is^*, 120 psi of compressed air from either direction isn't enough to dislodge it.  Kelvin decided to just screw it and route water from the sink in the downstairs bathroom into the water heater.  Everything works fine now.

While he was dealing with that a plumbing mystery has been solved.  For a couple years the water pump would turn on once or twice an hour.  I couldn't find a leak anywhere.  Kelvin was here installing a new toilet and he couldn't find a leak either.  When a pipe under the driveway burst and was later repaired the pump would still kick in several times a day for no good reason, stop doing it for a couple months, start again, and finally stopped.

And then it just stopped.  Why?  It sealed itself.  Huh?

So how hard is the water here?

 

Not as hard as lots of places, but I've been spoiled by the water in Missoula, San Francisco and Hawai'i.

Meanwhile the furnace / boiler is still shot. It's not talking to the thermostat  in the front part of the house, but that doesn't matter as the water for the baseboards doesn't circulate if I manually override the thermostat control.  It can burn all the oil it wants to, not much happens in the way of heating the house.  On a good day that fucker is 65% efficient, and that's probably with the door to the boiler room open so the heat from burning the fuel oil comes upstairs.  

I don't know what to do, have it repaired, replaced, or just get some space heaters.  Switching to propane seems too expensive.  The three to five grand for a new boiler I could do, but digging and installing new pipes from the tank to boiler would cost a shitload.  Then there's my fear of propane go boom in case of a fire.  The fuel oil tank is way the fuck underground.  Plus if I did get propane installed I'd want to use it for the water heater and the clothes dryer.

And I'm still stuck with baseboard radiators that aren't all that hot.  Switching to some other method of heating this dump, along with everything else, would probably cost more than it's currently worth. 

On top of all that the methylphenidate is giving me trouble.  The split 5mg AM & 5mg afternoon doses weren't doing anything.  So I tried 10mg with breakfast.  That seemed to work for a few days.  Until yesterday, where I felt kind of off.  Today it's the same, only a little more so.  It's like I'm on the verge of an aura.  I have the headache and I'm more confused than usual, while everything else is somewhere between psychosomatic and actual onset.  If I do nothing else except pay attention to how I feel, I can just notice my stomach tightening, and a tingling in my right hand that comes and goes.  I haven't been able to walk straight for over two years now, so that's no longer a reliable indicator, but it's been worse today and yesterday.  So it's back to minimal functionality.

I've been working on the forum software upgrade as best I can.  So far so good now.  No idea when it will be ready.

^*At long last, has some piece of Bob Crane's corpse surfaced?