These crazy days

So yesterday, they found Steve Fossett's plane and maybe a bit of his remains and the jury got the O.J. Simpson armed robbery case. I handled both simultaneously for The New York Times, earning myself two bylines on the same page. Kinda cool. Here's my Fossett output, and here's my Simpson piece.

Now here I am (literally, see me to your right appearing to pimp for Aquafina) waiting for that very O.J. verdict as well as the verdict in the case of who gets to use the Plaza name. Hard to believe, but both trials took the same amount of time and now both verdicts are coming on the same day -- or not!

Since I'm in this holding pattern, I've already written and filed the piece to go up on the Times website when we know there's about to be an OJ verdict. We'll be getting two hours notice on that. We'll add and subtract material from that framework once the verdict occurs and the various players become available to talk about it.

Meanwhile, I've got to read Tony Curtis' autobiography over the weekend. I've got the print exclusive on the book and interview the legend next week for a major paper. Podcast listeners will get to hear that interview the following week after the article appears.

All this has made me -- and evidently everyone in the media -- forget that it was five years ago today that illusionist Roy Horn was attacked by a tiger on stage. Even Norm Clarke of the R-J acknowledged Roy's birthday today -- yes, he was attacked on his birthday -- but didn't realize the anniversary. Here's my 2003 report on the incident from the Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe.

Oh, did I mention I've had a massive headache for several days? Such a trooper.

More Fossett photos

Here's five more from the Mono County Sheriff's Department, including the most important image, that of the N number that confirms this was Fossett's plane.

Fossett Plane Wreckage Photos

So the two biggest stories for me from 2007 are both coming to a head today -- they've found Fossett's plane AND closing arguments are this afternoon in the armed robbery-kidnapping trial of O.J. Simpson. When it rains, it pours buckets.

The latest NYT update on the Fossett case was just atop the Google News home page with a byline by yours truly. Another update is coming -- they just confirmed that it was certainly his body and the NTSB chairman himself is on his way to Mammoth Lakes. But here's the glory-screen-shot:



And here are five photos released just now from a daybreak search that found the plane. No human remains have been found yet.





More to come as it develops. Gonna be a busy frigging day. And I'd be in the beautiful mountains of California right now if not for the fact that O.J. Simpson's such a weirdo. Oh well.

Mamma Mia, Trump and WSOP

Sorry I've been quiet today, but it's been a bit of a busy morning writing my next Las Vegas Weekly column and filing a piece for tomorrow's New York Times on the renewed Steve Fossett search before heading to lunch at BLT Burger at Mirage.

I'm at the Rio right now for the World Series of Poker -- the last 27 are being whittled down to the so-called November Nine today. So, since I don't actually have to spring into intense action until we get closer to that -- and there are 18 of the 6,844 players left, I have a breath.

I'll discuss BLT Burger on this week's episode of "The Strip" this week but suffice to say it was a very pleasant surprise. And yesterday's visit to the Trump is the subject of a slightly admiring but largely scathing LVW column to come, so I'll hold my fire on that until Thursday with perhaps some preview on the show as well.

Which leaves all I have to discuss right now is the preview I attended yesterday of the "Mamma Mia!" film yesterday. And girls, y'all better get out that pack of wild horses you used to drag your men to "Sex and the City" last month if you want to go in pairs to see this. Even more than SATC: The Movie, MM!: The Movie is nothing but eye and ear candy for the ladies and, happily for me, the boys-who-like-boys crowd. Dominic Cooper, the actor who plays Sky, in particular, is a young, beefier Adrian Grenier who does entire numbers with the camera lovingly panning over his immaculate physique. Read all about him from the San Francisco Chronicle here. He's like a Mario Lopez who can act.

The local MM! cast attended and they all were effusive. I imagine that's partly because the movie provides a three-dimensional view of what, on stage, is essentially two dimensional. And they were very respectful of Meryl Streep as Donna Sheridan in the flick even though it was clear she did not do justice to many of the more difficult singing moments -- particularly "Winner Takes It All," which is the emotional core of the entire show.

Ultimately this was a very campy, very sexy, very expensive version of the show with Streep sort of saying to the audience: "I'm Meryl Streep, I'm going to have fun playing this role and you're invited to come along on the ride with me." It is a lot of fun, if you're into that sort of thing.

L'Shanah Tovah

I'm about to head out to Congregation Ner Tamid for Rosh Hashanah services and just wanted to quickly say Happy New Year to all of you. Jewish or not, there is something about this time of year that does always make people feel like new beginnings are upon us. September and October has always been a time of starts for me, including several jobs, school years and even my relationship with Miles.

If you miss me, catch up on my latest output:

* My piece in the New York Times on 9/11 about the crappy beacon on Fossett's plane is here. I was amused this morning to start reading it in the Las Vegas Sun, which uses NYT wire, before I noticed it was my own piece.
* My piece for Wired News on the 50,000+ people searching for Fossett via Amazon.Com is here.
* Appeared on Jon Ralston's Face To Face on LV1 on 9/11. Video is available in three segments if you scroll down a little bit on this site.
* The Peter Frampton episode of "The Strip" can be heard here, or you can right-click here to download it and listen to it whenever.
* Episode #102 of "The Petcast" is online now, too. It's called "Duck Poop and Reptiles Happen," and our guest is a woman from the Colorado Reptile Humane Society. Hear it here or right-click here to save it.

Cheers!

The Strip is LIVE tonight -- Really This Time!

OK! We're back on our regular schedule and will see you all tonight in the chat at LVRocks.Com for a fantastic show featuring one of the weirdest, coolest interviews ever, this time with Peter Frampton.

Do NOT miss the first three minutes or you'll miss the best laugh you'll have all day. We're holding Wynn another week b/c Frampton plays Vegas this coming weekend.

Join us at 7:05 pm PT. We promise, minimal Fossett. Well, unless they find him.

Will Fossett Search Find This Man?

Continuing to mine the intrigue surrounding the Steve Fossett search, today I have a piece on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle and inside the Chicago Tribune about one family that hopes one of those many other previously unknown wrecks found during this hunt will turn out to belong to Charles Ogle, who vanished FORTY-THREE YEARS AGO. The charming photo above is Ogle with his now-47-year-old son, William Ogle, who is a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida at Gainesvile. I especially love the car in the driveway.

It's a truly fascinating story, exclusively mine, and you can read about it here.

Steve Fossett: The Podcast (w/ Richard Branson!)

OK, so we didn't do a regular show this week. We've got something better.

We just put together a special edition that features parts of my interviews that include details and discussions that didn't make it into my coverage. The whole 45-minute show includes chats with:

* Sir Richard Branson, Virgin mogul and friend/financier of Fossett
* Ex-CBOT chairman Patrick Arbor, friend/adventure pal of Fossett
* A choice piece of press briefing from Civil Air Patrol's Cynthia Ryan
* Chat with Gary Derks, spokesman for the NV Division of Emergency Management.

Click here to hear it or right-click here to download it and listen to it at your leisure. Or, as you ought to, subscribe to "The Strip" via iTunes by clicking here.

A Productive Trip Indeed

Figured I'd list the links to the rest of my work from the Fossett trip:

* NYT: Profile of the Flying M Ranch. For print and online on 9/8.
* NYT: Interview with Sir Richard Branson interview on Fossett. For online on 9/7.
* Las Vegas Weekly: Column on Fossett, Nevada and conspiracies. Posted 9/7.
* Wired News: A geeky look at the technology employed in the search. Posted 9/7.
* KNPR: I was interviewed by Michael Squires for "State of Nevada" on Fossett. Aired 9/7.

I plan to listen to my recorded audio on Saturday and decide what might be worth putting out as a podcast. Not sure if there's that much interest or not.

A Roving Reporter's Diet

As I was cleaning out my rental car in Reno this afternoon before my flight, pitching empty bottles and wrappers, I realized that I'd eaten pretty miserably while on this 48-hour Steve Fossett junket. I wondered if I could recount the horror of my diet since I departed Wednesday afternoon. I had, by the by, chopped up a nice salad and bought a pre-cooked chicken for dinner at our stead for that night, so when I'm not working around the clock I do like to eat somewhat properly.

Here it is, in order:

Wednesday evening

3 bags of Southwest peanuts in flight
1 cup of water
1 bag of spicy beef jerky
1/2 bag of gummy bears left over from San Diego trip last weekend
1/2 bag of almonds left over from SD trip last weekend
1 bottle of water
1 bottle of V8 tomato juice
1 bottle Diet 7-Up
6 Chicken McNuggets & fries, both w/ranch dressing
1 medium cup of half water, half light lemonade from McD fountain
1 stick of "5" Cobalt gum by Wrigley

Thursday

1 cup of coffee
1 blueberry muffin
1 large orange-flavored energy drink
1 large AM/PM coffee of 1/2 French vanilla cappuccino, 1/2 regular coffee
1 bottle of V8 tomato juice
1 bottle of Diet 7-Up
1 box of Good N Plentys
1 package of Keebler soft chocolate chip cookies
1 stick of "5" Cobalt gum by Wrigley

Friday

1 bottle of water
1 bag of Famous Amos cookies
1 roast beef sandwich on sour dough with mustard & mayo
1 small bowl of mixed fruit
1 cup of water in flight
1 stick of "5" Cobalt gum by Wrigley

Total hours of sleep in 2 nights at the Best Western Minden: 6.5

Once I got home, I enjoyed the aforementioned salad I intended to eat on Wednesday with bacon ranch dressing with some diced chicken. Oddly, I wasn't hungry enough to eat all of it!!!

Tomorrow we're going to Bagelmania!!! Woo-hoo! Good to be home!

Fossett Sightings Abound!

Here we go... A minister near El Paso, Texas, emailed me this morning saying he'd seen Steve Fossett at a filling station down there in a Ford Mustang. He left his number, so I called.

The fellow, whom I will not name because I know he means well, explained he turned around and, "Boy gosh, that guy was Steve Fossett!" The man he saw pulled right out in front of my "source" in a vintage black Ford Mustang convertible and got on Interstate 10. "The guy looked a little spacy," I was told. "I wondered if he realized they're lookin' for him."

I am NOT making this up. He also said, "I sure hope it was him. I'd sure hate if we lost him. He's a great man."

I called Nevada Civil Air Patrol Maj. Cynthia Ryan, spokeswoman for the massive search, to let her know.

"We've getting those by the hundreds," Ryan said. "There's a psychic in Ohio who knows where he is and can lead us to him if we'd only follow her instructions. We have someone devoted to nothing else but these sorts of sightings. If they could only put this to work on the lottery. I guess we just have to delight in the diversity of humanity and give everyone their shot."

I asked if she wanted this fellow's name and number and she said, "No, not really. We can't even wade through what we have."

Imagine if Fossett is never found!

Departing the Fossett Watch

Whew! I am done! After I post this, I'm going to take some pix of quaint Minden and then head to Reno to fly home. I'm off Fossett duty until there's some definitive development.

I just filed to the NYT website a piece based off my chat with Sir Richard Branson this morning. That material should appear here in the next hour or so in some form or fashion. I may post the audio from that chat later, although I suspect it's kind of rough as Branson and I were both on cell phones and he was in Europe. There's some real news out of this, including some of Fossett's future plans. If it doesn't get posted there, I may post some of what was cut here after I get back to Vegas.

Also, I just filed my piece for tomorrow's newspaper about Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch with insight from some interesting folks who have been there. I imagine it'll post on the Web site in the next several hours, too. Quite a place.

In addition, I had a kick-ass chat with Peter Frampton this morning that was so good, we're playing it on "The Strip" next week and holding the Steve Wynn bit for another week. (Sorry, Wynn-o-philes, but your wait shall be rewarded, I pledge.) And if you don't care about Frampton, you should know I knew very little of him until about 10 p.m. last night and still I assure you you'll love this discussion.

OK. I'm out for now. The Best Western Minden needs my room for some other inbound journo.

Frampton, Fossett, Forbes and Friess

Amid all the rest of what I'm doing here, I am interviewing Peter Frampton this morning for an upcoming episode of "The Strip" podcast. And here's the weirdest thing: In doing my research for this chat last night, I noticed that Frampton and Fossett share a birthday, April 22. Now what the hell are the odds of that? Almost as strange as the experience of leaving messages with a reasonably confused secretary from Steve Friess for Steve Forbes about his pal Steve Fossett, perhaps?

Keep watch on this space. We should be publishing some new Fossett details I learned from Sir Richard Branson this morning on the Times site and I'll alert when that happens. Meanwhile, here's my piece in the Times today.

Mid-Air Over Minden

The reflection from a window of me with the plane I went up in today. Cool, huh?

So here's the thing. I went up on a four-seat Cessna this afternoon with a local flight instructor who told us he knew the location of the fancy Flying M Ranch, owned by Paris Hilton's grandpa and where Steve Fossett took off. I wanted to see it. I shared the tab for this flight with journalists from the Sunday Telegraph and the Sunday Times of London, lovely blokes both.

Sadly, for $200 an hour our pilot was a bit incompetent. We wandered through the region searching for it and couldn't find it. My cell phone was working from up above, so I text messaged Miles and my "Petcast" co-host Emily to get them to find me GPS coordinates. We ended up with five different sets of coordinates, the final one of which was probably the most precise although all would have been in the right area. Emily, in fact, managed to spot the thing on a Google Earth map, but by the time we had that specific a pinpoint, our pilot said he really had to get back in for another appointment! Later, one of the Civil Air Patrol officials expressed bafflement that the pilot couldn't find a landmark that obvious and easy to spot; it's apparently right at a fork in a very prominent river. Oh well. I started to think the place was like the island on "Lost" and worried that if we did find it, we'd have to kill a legion of Others to get away.

Anywho, it was still a nice ride that gave us good perspective on the vast and difficult terrain the planes are facing as they seek Fossett. And I may have set myself good for some future assignments with the British newspapers, too. Always working an angle, I am.

Here are some more pix, each of which can be enlarged by clicking on them:

The mountainous terrain (above) and the flat area. The greenery you see is hay farms.

About to take a little flight...

I'm about to go up in a little plane to tool around for a bit and see what the rescuers see. Will post some pix from that later on. And my latest piece for the NY Times will likely post in the next hour or so, so keep watch for that. Fun stuff -- interviews with several prominent people who know Fossett well, including the pres of the Boy Scouts of America, the former chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade and others.

Meanwhile, here are some pix of Minden. I love that there's this greasy spoon right there at the Minden "airport" and I have every intention of trying their milkshakes which, I suspect, are killer. Minden is actually quite cute and I'll shoot some more pix later of the downtown area, complete with old buildings and stuff. Makes Boulder City look tres moderne.

Also love how they've posted signs to stop the press from crawling all over them.

Click on each to see it closer. Later!

Greetings from the luxurious Minden Best Western!

I landed in Reno last night having made my flight with about five minutes to spare. Then I wrangled mightily with the Hertz folks to get a car with an iPod jack -- oddly, I've found, the desk clerks never have any idea whether their cars have them and they usually do. I ended up with a Chevy Cobalt which is a cute little glorified golf cart that does the trick. I've been getting them a lot lately and, while they don't meet the standards of my car-nut partner, all I really care about these days is that auxiliary jack!

All I know about Minden thus far is that US 395 is well-signed with indications of where it is and, at 11 pm, the only things open are a McD's and an AM/PM. And that is likely to be all I find out. Not looking good for finding a Starbucks around here.

There are two versions of my Fossett work from yesterday available, one here for Wired News and the other is here for the New York Times. They're not terribly different except that Wired did let me deal with the flowering conspiracy theory issue involved. I just watched CNN's report from the Minden Air Field and they had nothing new to report today. But the Associated Press' excellent Northern Nevada correspondent Brendan Riley had this terrific backgrounder on what the Flying M Ranch is.

Mark my words, and I've been saying this since the beginning: The Steve Fossett disappearance will eternally be fodder for conspiracy theorists. And you know why? Because this is Nevada!

Stay tuned -- I hope to update throughout the day here and post some pix when I can. Now would be a really good time for me to have one of those air-card things, huh? But thankfully, the Best Western has free and reliable Wi-Fi and is only about 4 mins from the air field.

OK - gotta go get my complimentary breakfast!

SHOW CANCELED THIS WEEK

Sorry folks -- I'm being shipped to Reno to cover the on-going Fossett saga. Will pick up again next week. Keep watch at www.nytimes.com for my stuff and we'll be back on track next week with Steve Wynn.

Also, keep watch on the feed for the Lynn Johnston interview, which will go up in the next day or so to go with my piece in a major national publication on changes to "For Better or For Worse."

Just Kinda Cool

It may be hard to see, but guess whose byline was right up there under the lead story on Google News a little while ago? Fun!

Official: O'Brien's Report is "Laughable"

The blather emitted from CNN's Miles O'Brien earlier today was laughed off by Civil Air Patrol Nevada Maj. Cynthia Ryan. O'Brien's claim was that Fossett might have wandered into restricted air space in "nearby" Area 51 or Nellis Air Force Base -- both 300+ miles away from where he went missing.

He based this on Ryan's utterance of the phrase"electronic evidence" during the press conference that he, like me, followed via TV. But what Ryan meant by that was not that some super-secret federal agency data but the fact that, somewhere in Oakland, there might be some radar blips representing Fossett's plane. Turns out, there aren't anyway.

Ryan told me O'Brien's comments are "laughable." I asked Ryan whether there's "restricted air space" in the region.

Ryan: It’s everywhere in this region and every experienced pilot knows that. Nevada is one huge training ground for the navy and the air force.

Friess: So if Fossett wandered into that, then you'd definitely know where he was.

Ryan: Yes, that's right.

So what O'Brien is positing is true, except that if Fossett had wandered into restricted air space, then there would be no need to figure out where he was. They'd know. Of course.

CNN's Nutty O'Brien: Fossett Conspiracy!

I'm covering the disappearance of Steve Fossett for the New York Times right now from Vegas. He's missing in remote western Nevada around 90 miles south of Reno.

Since I'm stuck following this case by phone calls and by watching the TV coverage, I'm sitting here amazed by the misinformation and awful speculation coming from CNN's Space & Technology Correspondent Miles O'Brien, who is phoning in his "expertise" from an undisclosed location.

First, he gets uppity about a question that reporters on the ground in Minden, Nev., didn't ask about a beacon the plane might have had that might be accessed via satellite. The reporters did ask whether that had yielded any info but the officials didn't know. "Shame on them," he barked at the reporters for not knowing the make and model of that transmitter.

Then, about an hour later, he's on the air with totally off-the-wall conspiracy theory that is based entirely on O'BRIEN'S LACK OF KNOWLEDGE OF NEVADA GEOGRAPHY. He refers to something in the press conference about "electronic evidence" and then says:

"It is possible that Fossett flew into some restricted air space in that area. Nellis Air Force base is nearby, that's the home of the Thunderbirds. Not far also from Area 51 which everyone knows a little something about. It is possible that there was some sort of electronic radar information which the military might have had associated with that restricted air space."

Hey O'Brien! Nellis Air Force Base is more than 350 miles from where Fossett was flying. Area 51 is more than 300 miles.

Sheesh. Shame on YOU.