Dean Meminger is a 62 year-old former New York Knick and dad of Dean Meminger, Jr., a reporter and anchor at NY1. Police found discarded crack pipes at the scene of a fire in the Bronx that put the elder Meminger in critical condition last Sunday, and proceeded to leave 16 families homeless. Meminger has been battling cocaine addiction for much of his adult life, according to the NYDN.

Two's not quite an official trend. But if Pat Kiernan so much as stubs his toe any time soon, we advise everyone at NY1 to flee while you still can.

The incident began when the little deer "ran between people" and leaped into the lion pit, then was attacked and toyed with by a pair of bloodthirsty beasts for "as much as 20 minutes." Then, as is depicted in the below video, the little deer broke free! And escaped to the relative safety of a body of water. The crowd shrieked, gasped, cheered, and caught it all on video. When zoo personnel finally broke up the crowd to rescue the nimble survivor, the harrowing tale reached its happy ending...

OR SO IT SEEMED.

For there, in The Washington Post's Monday Metro section, was the tale's true, tragic conclusion:

Alerted, zoo personnel sent visitors away and brought the lions indoors. With the enclosure empty, the deer left the moat on its own. It was anesthetized and taken for evaluation by specialists. ...

Baker-Masson said the examination indicated that in addition to head and neck scratches, the deer had a serious wound on its belly. ...

They found it "pretty evident" that the deer "would not survive," and it was euthanized, Baker-Masson said.

And thus concludes the sad story of the Deer That Almost Lived, the saddest viral video ever uploaded to the internet, in retrospect. Even sadder than Bambi's mom and the Lion King's dad, because this one is real, and must have caused at least one 5-year-old to wet his pants out of terror that day at the zoo.

EXAMPLE ONE: Gatecrasher reports that "There was no official word on why Reichl failed to show up at a fete hosted by Alan Batt in honor of Gourmet [yesterday], but her absence sure fueled the dish among the city's top foodies." That would be this one. Apparently, notes on Craigslist aren't the best way to get in touch with Ruth Reichl. Live and learn.

EXAMPLE TWO: Deborah Solomon interviewed Reichl for the NYT magazine this weekend. Look at this outrage:

Did you see Jon Stewart the other night, when he made a Gourmet joke?
I did not. What did he say?

[Explanation of his joke]
That's great! I'm amazed no one has told me that.

No one except us, Ruth Reichl. Why do you ignore us so, Ruth Reichl? Hey, your picture is real nice.

Thomas spent several months earlier this year working on developing a reality science TV show to pitch to networks — the "show," Thomas says, that Falcon was referring to when he told CNN "We did it for the show." Among the ideas that Heene, Thomas and two others came up with for their reality TV proposal — and one that he says most intrigued Heene — involved a weather balloon modified to look like a UFO which they would launch in an attempt to drum up media interest in both the Heene family and the series he was desperate to get on the air. Still, Thomas never imagined that Heene would involve his six-year-old son in what he is certain was a "global media hoax" to further Richard Heene's own celebrity. Thomas' story of his time with Heene, based on an interview with Ryan Tate, follows below. It's a fascinating account and after he publicly offered to sell his story, we paid him for it.

I came to Fort Collins for school — Colorado State University. I was a Web entrepreneur, starting a few small companies that evolved into a larger scale project called Extropedia.org, an open source online encyclopedia for advancing humanity through technology and science.

Doing research for the project on Google and YouTube, I stumbled upon Richard Heene and his video series Psyience Detectives. I was surprised to find this potential collaborator in the small city of Fort Collins. Since a very young age, I've been fascinated with electromagnetics, applied physics and how technologies developed out of those concepts could that change the world. Richard was studying basically the same thing. He asserted, for example, that tornadoes and hurricanes are not a result of changes in pressure but of magnetic polarity changes within the Earth.

I sent him an email in March, talking about Extropedia, a web site I founed and hope to re-launch soon. (Click here to read some of Thomas' email exchanges with the Heene family). Things progressed. Soon I was dropping in unannounced, having dinner. I'd bring various patents from the 50s and 60s that showcased technologies far more advanced than what we use today, and we discussed why they weren't being used. That was when Richard first started telling me about his conspiracy theories — which would eventually reveal themselves to be both extreme and paranoid.

Hunger for Stardom

There was something else at work, though. Oddly enough, Richard's sampling of stardom from being on Wife Swap — twice — gave him a sense of seniority in our scientific conversations. They became less and less about what I had to contribute and more and more about what Richard wanted.

And he wanted  nothing more than to get another reality TV series. Richard had an ongoing dialog with someone at ABC who helped  produce Wife Swap. Richard was pitching something along the lines of "MythBusters-meets-mad scientist." There would be these esoteric abstract experiments attempting to prove or disprove various theories. My job was to help him prepare a formal proposal. For each of 52 weekly episodes, to explain specifically what the subject would be, and why. (See the full proposal here.)

As the days progressed I became basically a stenographer. Richard was very hyperactive, and I would type out his ideas as quickly as I could. It was five hours of us brainstorming, or really Richard pouring his ideas out, then an additional ten hours of me taking his thoughts, cleaning them up, and making them linear and easier to understand. I would hyperlink the various scientific theories he mentioned for the people at ABC. I was to be paid $15 per hour, per a verbal agreement. More crucially, if and when and the reality series and was picked up by ABC, I would be one of his lead research assistants on the show.

I was very receptive to the idea of filtering esoteric science for the general population. A show would allow us to take the TV network's money and use it to fund real experimentation, to buy equipment unavailable to me as a student and an entrepreneur. We could experiment with electromagetics, crystal formation and new types of materials.

Richard, on the other hand, was often driven by ego and fame. He was all about controversy, hoping to whip up something significant enough to eliminate our reality TV competitors. He wanted episodes that would shock people and maximize his exposure. And he'd been trying for months. On several occasions, he sat down and told me he'd do whatever it took to make it happen — to win. He eventually resorted to extreme measures.

The UFO Idea (And the End of the World As We Know It in 2012)

One night, when Richard and I were sitting and talking, he brought up Wife Swap, and specifically a confrontation he had with a woman on the show who claimed to be a psychic. They very much disliked one other. Richard said, "Well, think about it. We were the 100th episode of Wife Swap. And why are we the most recognized Wife Swap family and episode? It's because of the controversy. I don't care what people say about me as a person, but the fact of the matter is that they know who I am."

And then we delved into the area of UFOs. I was reading a book on witness reports of Roswell at the time, just out of curiousity — I've never concluded whether it really took place or was an elaborate hoax. And Richard said, "how much do you want to bet we could facilitate some sort of a media stunt that would be equally profound as Roswell, and we could do so with nothing more than a weather balloon and some controversy?" (See item 16 here.)

Can we attract UFO's with a homemade flying saucer? We will modify a weather balloon, so that it resembles a UFO and will electrically charge the skin of the craft (Biefield-Brown Effect). We will capture the footage on film, and will utilize the media as a means with which to make our presence known to the masses. This will not only provide us with incredible footage, but will also generate a tremendous amount of controversy among the public, as well as publicity within the mainstream media. This will be the most significant UFO-related news event to take place since the Roswell Crash of 1947, and the result will be a dramatic increase in local and national awareness about The Heene Family, our Reality Series, as well as the UFO Phenomenon in general.

I clearly remember Richard telling me that, if we accomplish this, it would be the most controversial and widespread UFO news story since Roswell in 1947. (See audio at top of post.)

 
But he was motivated by theories I thought were far-fetched. Like Reptilians — the idea there are alien beings that walk among us and are shape shifters, able to resemble human beings and running the upper echelon of our government. Somehow a secret government has covered all this up since the U.S. was established, and the only way to get the truth out there was to use the mainstream media to raise Richard to a status of celebrity, so he could communicate with the masses.

As the weeks progressed, his theories got more and more extreme and paranoid. A lot of it surrounded 2012, and the possibility of there being an apocalyptic moment. Richard likes to talk a lot about the possibility of the Sun erupting in a large-scale solar flare that wipes out the Earth. It got to the point where he was really pressing me, saying we're running out of time, we're running out of time, the end of the world is coming. And we have to take necessary precautions to make sure that we're not among the majority that's going to be killed.

It got to the point where I was just nodding my head and going along with what he said, because it was easier than trying to debate with him. (See audio at bottom of post.)

Falcon's Fishy Flight Incident

When my friends called me about the whole balloon episode I was working. I had just moved to a new place and didn't have my television set up. I probably would never even have heard about this, except that a good friend of mine remembered me telling him about Richard several months ago. He told me, "Rob, you need to turn on the tv immediately! That Richard guy you worked with just pulled a massive publicity stunt!"

Richard's story doesn't add up. He is saying he thought Falcon was in the balloon, and that Falcon ran and hid as a result of Richard yelling at him. I've spent a lot of time with them, and Falcon is, first of all, not afraid of his father. I've never once seen Richard's children afraid of him — and I've definitely never seen Falcon go hide. He was one of the most social of the three children.

Secondly, Falcon supposedly hid in that attic in the garage. I've spent a lot of time in his garage, which has a drill press and various welding tools. It's unorganized and chaotic. There's really not so much an attic as some support beams connected with plywood. Being an adult of average height, I couldn't get up into the attic if I'd wanted to, so I don't know how a six-year-old child could have gotten up there. There's not an easy way to access that overhang. Maybe if I'd lifted that child up into the attic, he might have been able to rest up there, but not comfortably.

My doubts and concerns about that story were verified when Falcon's parents asked him on CNN, "why didn't you come out?" And Falcon said, "you guys said we did this for the show." Lights went off in my head. Bells were ringing; whistles were whistling. I said, "Wow, Richard is using his children as pawns to facilitate a global media hoax that's going to give him enough publicity to temporarily attract A-list celebrity status and hopefully attract a network."

The Price of Desperation

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and I think in this case the desperation was too much for Richard to bear. Richard's construction business wasn't doing too well. It's hard to find people interested in spending money on the aesthetics of their home when they're worried about their mortgage.

A lot of the work I did with the Heene family related to passing out fliers, putting them on people's front doors. The fliers advertised a roofing business and a general handyman business. As the months progressed, Richard's paranoia increased exponentially and my paycheck decreased exponentially.  The work I put in for the ABC proposal was never compensated. Richard implied he didn't have the money to pay me. But he would always reassure me, "It's all going to pay off in the end."

But, in "the end," Richard didn't think about the implications of his behavior. He certainly didn't consider the people that were praying for his child, and the hundreds, maybe thousands of people that were inconvenienced in pursuit of this balloon. The thousands of dollars of taxpayer money spent on things that weren't necessary.

Bluntly, I think Richard's ego blinds him to his brilliance. The only thing inhibiting him from progressing is a steadfast determination to become famous and live a Hollywood lifestyle. Someone needs to slap him in the face and say, "Wake up! This is not what's important." He has an amazing family that has already been subject to a tremendous amount of criticism. I especially feel bad for Falcon. He's going to be known as Balloon Boy the rest of his life. That's not something you want to tell a girl on the first date.

For me, it's been quite the experience. I don't regret any of it. I learned a lot from Richard. Not necessarily what I should do but rather what I should not do, in my career path and in my goals. It allowed me to question, "What do I find of value in the world?" And I was led to the conclusion that the only thing that matters to me is my friends and family and loved ones. Everything else is details. If the world were going to end tomorrow, like a lot of Richard's theories on 2012, who would you go to? Would you go to a bunch of investors for some company or a reality show? Or would you go to your family and friends?

Here are two audio clips from Ryan's interview with Thomas:

(Richard and Falcon Heene pic via AP, reptilian humanoid pic via; 2012 apocalypse image via)

The Heenes have lived a self-consciously adventurous life, and sought to engage their children in it. Richard is a stormchaser, an amateur scientist (with some strange theories about civilization on Mars), and an avid self-promoter. When the family appeared on ABC's Wife Swap last year, the episode's set-up was that a stuffy, safety-obsessed woman was saddled with Richard and his wild boys. Here's a wrap-up of the show, featuring Falcon, the missing boy, saying, "Fuck this rule!"

Here is a report on the Heenes from a local Colorado station last year when they went as a family to chase Hurrican Gustav. Heene tells the reporter that "safety is always first" when chasing storms and that he hopes his sons learn the lesson of hard work and to love what they do from their excursions.

This undated family rap, apparently self-produced, features the boys and plenty of home video that somehow made it onto the internet.

Here is Heene, in a video he uploaded to CNN's iReport, explaining his discovery of life on Mars. This could be tongue-in-cheek.

And here's a YouTube video of Heene explaining his suspicion that John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death in a plane crash was faked. We're not entirely sure that this—and the above Mars video—isn't a gonzo persona of some sort.

Heene had a web show called "The Science Detectives"—alternatively spelled "The Psyience Detectives." Video of him discussing the science of 2012 end-of-the-world predictions can be seen here.

Richard and his wife Mayumi also created children's videos, including this instructional video on how to build fire trucks, trains and airplanes for your kids to play in out of cardboard boxes.

Our sincere hope is that this was all a hoax.

The two-story house she had occupied since roughly 2003 was attached and not particularly grand. That may be because the estate Anne Scripps Douglas left behind for her three daughters - the youngest sister, a daughter with Mr. Douglas, is named Victoria - was not strikingly large. It was $1.3 million.

Also the fact that her stepdad murdered her mom 15 years ago and then leapt to his death from the very same bridge. Could be a mix of those things.
[Pic: AP]

It sure was an awesome story (written up last week by the NY Daily News, but it had been floating around long before that—Roxanne tells it herself on the Beef video series, for example): Warner Music put a throwaway clause in her record contract when she was still a teenager saying they'd pay for her education for life; she took advantage of it to go all the way through grad school on their dime.

But! Slate says the story has the following problems: Roxanne doesn't actually have a Ph.D. from Cornell; she didn't even graduate from Marymount Manhattan as an undergrad; she's not licensed to practice psychology; and all her record labels deny ever paying for her education. Caveat:

In a subsequent e-mail, Shanté wrote, "I also attended College under an alias, because of a Domestic Violence situation" and speculated that she "made a mistake on an application and put my old name so maybe that's the reason for the computer error?" But she was unable to substantiate such claims.

God damn it Slate. We are going to ignore these enormous red flags and cling to our hopes of some bit of good in the world. Everything was fine until you journalists started poking around.
[Pic via]

Ojo's appearance at the hospital sent hospital employees flying to the phones to call their favorite tabloid reporters. Ojo was only too happy to describe the dramatic incident in detail!

"I didn't know what had happened. By the time I woke up, the skin was falling off," Ojofeitimi said.

"It sounded like a woman screaming," a neighbor in their Springfield Gardens building said of the 6 a.m. attack.

Between the Daily News and the Post, this story got a total of nine bylines today. If the Al "Grits" Green incident happened today, an entire spinoff paper would need to be launched. Tabloids: there when we need them.
[NYDN, NYP]

[Pic: Getty]

Stephen Shanabrook is an artist. He makes things out of chocolate. Like truffles molded out of casts made from cadavers' deadly wounds, or chocolate casts of fetal goats, or, hey, there's one of the remains of a suicide bomber.
There is nothing about chocolate that does not involve doom.
[Fast Company]

The problems began—as so many problems do—with Bernie Madoff. Walter Noel, the patriarch, is co-founder of Fairfield Greenwich Group (FGG), which funneled billions of its clients' dollars into Madoff's own funds. That was the point at which the Noels started their now-crushing downward social slide.

Monica, the matriarch, was a Brazilian-born socialite who started her own children's clothing line. She was known for pushing her daughters to be even bigger and, uh, better (?) socialites in New York. The five daughters—Marisa, Alix, Ariane, Lisina, and Corina—all graduated from top schools, and all ended up marrying businessmen. Four of their husbands went to work for Walter Noel.

You can see, then, that when the domino fell, everybody was in line to get knocked down. Since the Madoff scandal broke, FGG has been flooded with investor lawsuits. The family lost a huge portion of its own wealth as well. This was a convenient excuse for the other Greenwich richies to despise them.

But actually, they were despised long before that, because the flaunted their wealth and were all apparently huge obnoxious spoiled brats, to one degree or another. At least by the standards of the other huge obnoxious brats there. Among the outrages:

"The Noel women showed up in 'thongs and sarongs' [to a beach club]."

"The first summer they were here, I won't forget seeing two of the daughters blocking traffic on Jobs Lane, leaning out of their convertibles, talking to each other and making what sounded like idle plans and blowing kisses, as if they owned the street-literally for five full minutes while a line of too-polite-to-honk Southampton matrons sat in silence."

"They lit up their house like a Vegas casino, which shocked some of their neighbors on the pond [Lake Agawam]."

Okay, so maybe the neighbors were actually bigger pricks than they were. At any rate, their ostracism is now complete. Guest of a Guest says that the fawncy Round Hill Club has now "revoked their membership" for being too undesirable. Oh, the shame. When all the lawsuits are done they will probably be left with only the Palm Beach House. It's an object lesson to all rich families: Don't be a rich family.

[P6 Mag, Vanity Fair, Guest of a Guest. Pics: NY Mag, VF]

Some neighbors told The A.P. that Mr. Kellermann had lost a noticeable amount of weight under the strain of the job, and some said they suggested to him he should quit to avoid the stress. Mr. Kellermann was also involved in recent tense conversations with the company's federal regulator over its public disclosures.

Of course, this could be looking plausible because reporters have been running around all day asking everyone who knew him if he was stressed from his job. He was busy dealing with an SEC investigation and trying to help his company dig itself out from under billions of dollars worth of mortgage losses, so stress is likely. One former colleague said "He worked himself into a frazzle."

On top of that, he reportedly hired a private security firm recently after reporters came to his house to ask him about his $850K bonus, the type of thing that's been causing lots of populist outrage lately. But he did have a wacky side, by CFO standards:

Mr. Kellermann also was known for his humor. A colleague said he sometimes showed up at work in bow ties or loud plaid pants and liked to joke about his attire.

[WSJ, NYT]

The father of Rubina (age 9) reportedly tried to sell her for $300,000 to an undercover reporter, because his family didn't make any cash from the film:

[The father] reportedly raised an asking price of £50,000 for Rubina to £200,000 at a later meeting.

Justifying the increase, his brother Mohiuddin was quoted as saying: "The child is special now. This is not an ordinary child. This is an Oscar child."

Jesus, that is truly horrible. Add in the tidal wave of poverty porn the movie started, and Slumdog is actually a net loss for the human race! Unless you're a News Corp. shareholder: Rubina Ali has now served Fox Searchlight in the film, and also Murdoch-owned News of the World for the original child sale story, and Murdoch's Times UK and New York Post for follow-ups. Good work!

Perhaps the only thing worse than a terribly impoverished dad trying to sell his own daughter is this:

[The British filmmakers behind Slumdog] said that they decided not to shower the child actors from Mumbai's shantytowns with cash for fear of having "a transformative impact on their lives".

Again: absolutely nothing good came out of this feel-good movie, unless you're Rupert Murdoch.
[Times UK]

The first president Bush instituted a ban on coverage of returning caskets after he was embarrassed on television following the invasion of Panama, by coffins. Barack Obama asked that the ban be reviewed; Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who oversaw the review, had previously expressed discomfort with the ban.

Myers, who had previously been awarded a Bronze Star for bravery, was killed April 4 by an improvised explosive device near Helmand Province in Afghanistan. The return of his body to Dover Air Force Sunday night was covered by the Associated Press and New York Times, among others.

(Picture: AP)

Plath gassed herself at home in 1963, after sealing Nicholas and his sister Freida Hughes off in the room next door. Her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, had recently left her for Assia Wevill, another poet's wife, and Plath was struggling to make ends meet amid a harsh winter. Writes the Times of London in its excellent obituary:

Ted Hughes was hounded for the rest of his life by feminists and Plath devotees who accused him of driving her to her death by his infidelity.

In March 1969, six years after Plath's death, Wevill gassed herself and her four-year-old daughter in a suicide apparently modeled on Plath's.

Nicholas Hughes has recently left his post at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks to make pottery in his home studio. The evolutionary ecologist had been battling depression "for some time," according to his sister Freida Hughes. From her statement:

His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and, despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence and enthusiasm for the next project or plan.

If the grisly deaths of Plath and Wevill sparked questions about the propensity of poets toward suicide, Nicholas Hughes' death highlights the ongoing debate over how genetics and suicide might be linked; the expert quoted by the Times emphasized the importance of "what's happening in the here and now" over any biological factors.

Hughes reached the age of 47 and became a professor, having clearly found at least some of the emotional shelter his mother wished on him. She wrote of him in Nick and the Candlestick, "You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn."

[Times of London]

(Image via)

Neeson would also be excused for withdrawing his name from that project, given the "unfortunate parallel," as the Hollywood Reporter puts it, between the film, Unknown White Male, and Richardson's accident:

Producers had been out to Neeson for the title role, a doctor visiting Berlin who suffers an injury that leads to a coma.

Presumably Neeson, described by the trade as in the midst of a career resurgence, will have plenty of work to choose from when he is ready — and when movie roles might be of some healing value to him.

[Hollywood Reporter]

The New York Times confirmed Richardson is in New York, adding that her mother, the actress Vanessa Redgrave, was spotted walking into Lenox Hill, the NYU-affiliated hospital considered among the top neurology centers in the country.

People said friends and family were gathering for a "vigil in New York to be with Richardson." Gotham tabloids were more dire, with the Daily News joining in the chorus of earlier reports from the Post and Time Out New York that Richardson is brain dead.

Her family, which includes Richardson's husband, actor Liam Neeson, has gathered to "say farewell," the Daily News reported. The tabloid also offered an explanation for all the confusion over Richardson's status today:

Last night, there were tears as Richardson's family prepared to follow the heart-crushing choreography that goes with making the decision to let a loved one go.

"The rule of thumb is: You have two neurological exams 12 hours apart to show that there is no evidence of higher brain activity," said Dr. Philip Stieg, chairman of New York-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell's department of neurological surgery.

"If that is so, the patient is brain-dead; they are clinically dead."

Even at that point, the patient's heart can be kept beating to give the family "time to say goodbye," the doctor added.

One hopes the family has at least gained some clarity on Richardson's situation, or does so soon, even though the decisions following such knowledge may not be easy ones.

The Post's report asserts that the actress, who is married to actor Liam Neeson, is being flown back to New York so her family can say goodbye before she's taken off of life support. TMZ claims that's bunk, that she is suffering from brain swelling but is not 'brain dead.' We like their version better.

As for that whole Time Out New York fiasco where they declared her dead, the ever sane and reasonable Perez Hilton is roaring mad at the publication. Because he's a paragon of journalistic ethics. Glass houses, stones, etc.

For our part we're glad that she is not, as earlier reported, deceased and that there may still be a positive, if unlikely, prognosis.

You can't make Twitter up, people.

The Secretary of Defense is reportedly "tilting" towards changing the rules. Opinion of the families of fallen soldiers seems to be split on the issue of whether or not they should let the media into Dover Air Force base when the coffins arrive. But of course:

"This is very much Democratically driven to make it available to the public so they can publicize the negative side of the war and show the American public there is a high cost to be paid here," said Cal Peters, whose stepson, Marine Capt. Garret Lawton, died Aug. 4 in Afghanistan. "I think this is the ultimate disrespect."

Consider the original reason for the ban, instituted by the first President Bush during the first Gulf War:

It came about after a controversy arose when Bush held a news conference at the same moment the first U.S. casualties were returning to Dover the day after the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, and three television networks carried the events live on split screen, with Bush appearing at one point to joke while on the opposite screen the solemn ceremony unfolded at the Delaware base.

So pure and patriotic. Just let the families decide, and everybody stop being jerks. [WP; Pic via]