May 16, 2015

Episode 003 of The Rumbleshanks Tapes is online


A new-to-the-compound young agent named Jeremiah Hanson sits down for the first time with Captain Rumbleshanks.

Listen/ download for your private collection of wonderful, whimsical things... HERE


May 5, 2015

UNAUTHORIZED FACEBOOK BIOGRAPHY: BRAD MCENTIRE

Courtesy: Flickr
I somehow got included on David Mogolov's twisted online project...

UNAUTHORIZED FACEBOOK BIOGRAPHY: BRAD MCENTIRE
Professional perjurer Brad McEntire has long walked a very public legal tightrope, his audacious courtroom antics sharply dividing the nation into critics and supporters. To his critics, McEntire is representative of the corrosive, dishonest forces that pervert our legal justice system, but to his supporters, he is a roguish hero, a Robin Hood or Han Solo, swooping in to help the defendant in peril.

Only those closest to him know his reasons. The rest of us can only speculate, as McEntire has never spoken publicly outside of court. All that we know of him is preserved in court transcripts. If half of that is true (and almost nobody believes that any of it is true), he’s lived an incomparably strange life. McEntire has appeared as a witness in 714 different trials. In every case, he has come forward to the police or defense attorneys as an eye witness, always in support of the defendant. Almost invariably, he has appeared in cases where the defendant had no alibi prior to McEntire’s testimony.

Many suspicious of McEntire’s activity have tried to discover a pattern of payments or social contacts that connect one appearance to another, but investigators have yet to find anything. McEntire seems to derive no income from his testimony, and has appeared in jurisdictions from Juneau, Alaska to Key West, Florida, from the lowest municipal levels to the highest federal courts. He has never made contact with a defendant after a trial, despite all 714 of them being found not guilty based on his spellbinding tales.

His fans largely believe he is lying, but they marvel at how one person has managed to tell 714 distinct, undocumented, and unprovable stories without contradicting himself or slipping on a detail. Investigators have yet to find evidence that puts him anywhere at all. It’s as if he’s a ghost who only appears to haunt prosecutors by ruining their slam-dunk cases. Some examples of his work:

* In 2008, McEntire testified on behalf of accused bank robber Freddy Hendricks in Nashville and a cat burglar named Lexi Purchase in Cincinnati. His testimony in the two cases is remarkable, in that he told a plausible story of meeting them separately on the same evening in Lexington, Kentucky, at a Fishing Expo that happened to occur on an afternoon that both were accused of plying their trades in their hometowns. Until his appearance, neither of the accused had said anything about that expo, but upon hearing his story, both confirmed they were avid fishermen.

* In 2012, McEntire was able to exonerate an entire Mafia family with an account of a late-night bottle rocket party near the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Investigators discovered the site was indeed littered with old firework remnants. The family got off with only a littering charge.

* In 2010, McEntire claimed to have picked up a hitch-hiker in Duluth who was accused of being 100 miles away, vandalizing a pumpkin patch.

* In 2002, McEntire testified in federal court that an accused antiques smuggler was volunteering at a literacy workshop in Reno. The workshop kept no records of its volunteers.

* In January, McEntire perplexed the entire nation by providing an alibi for the pilot accused of the high-profile theft of an experimental jet from an air force base in Southern California. McEntire says he saw the jet fly overhead while sitting on a bar patio with the accused pilot, playing poker. He said the pilot identified the jet on sight, and attempted to call in a report of the theft, but couldn’t get a cell signal.

A union of six state Attorney Generals has funded a task force to investigate McEntire, but they’ve yet to find evidence of criminal behavior. A subreddit devoted to McEntire sightings attempts to map his travels against later testimony, but so far it’s produced nothing more than smoke, and most conversations devolve into supernatural speculation or arguments regarding the popular theory that McEntire is a ninja.

More Unauthorized Facebook Biographies... HERE


CAKE AND PROSE recap


With Bryan Pitts, Maryam Baig, Greg Schroeder and David Hopkins
Last week, I joined a wonderful group of folks to celebrate David Hopkins' birthday. He held a book release for his excellent new collection of short stories, WE MISS ALL THE GREAT PARTIES. Donations were collected at the door and the proceeds went to The BirthdayParty Project.

David did a pretty great (and thorough) post on the event. Read it HERE. He even captured an audio recording. You can hear me reading around minute mark 9:15.