On the face of it, a recent soft news piece gives an account of a maladroit marriage proposal and a lost engagement ring. After dating his girlfriend Stacey Scanlon for more than a year, Matt Cawley planned to propose to her this past Monday. His proposal was set to occur on a jetty at Bass River Beach, but things fell apart when the $9000 diamond ring he planned to give her was lost just before he proposed. Several hours of searching turned up nothing, and the dejected couple headed home empty-ring-fingered.

That’s certainly an unfortunate story. But what exactly happened? According to Cawley, he’d tied the ring to a sand dollar and left it on the beach. Shortly after, on an early morning walk, he pointed the sand dollar out to Scanlon. When she picked it up, the ring’s weight pulled the knot apart and the ring fell into the rocks, never to be seen again. Or seen at all, actually.

Scanlon said she wasn’t able to catch a glimpse of the ring, which was set with a diamond passed down from a relative of Cawley’s, before it slid down through the jetty.

So a man wishes to marry his girlfriend, but the engagement ring is sadly lost just before his proposal. In fact, the girlfriend never even sees the ring before it’s swept into the sea. Instead of a tale of tragedy, this sounds more like a clever man hoodwinking his girlfriend. To prudent spenders everywhere, this may well be worthy of applause. After all, going into debt by spending thousands of dollars on an overpriced hunk of rock is a bad way to begin a marriage. Of course, the benefits to the marriage obtained by avoiding debt are probably cancelled out if you get them by starting your new life together with a massive lie.

It’s possible there’s even more going on here. The story indicates the diamond was passed down from a relative, so there’s no paper trail on this ring. Further, upon giving up after hours of searching, Cawley’s cousin just happened to drive by in time to picked up the couple. But the most damning piece of evidence, indicating that perhaps this is a massive fraud, wherein an entire family conspires against both an unsuspecting girlfriend and an industry which seeks to indemnify against loss?

Only later did the couple find out that, unbeknownst to them, Cawley’s mother had insured the ring in full.

How convenient.

Many people have quit jobs in their lives and some have quit with aplomb. For my money though, I’ve never heard a better quitting story than Steven Slater’s. I’ve pieced together the best parts of the story from several other reports. Here’s the timeline as I understand it:

After their flight from Pittsburgh landed at JFK, an unnamed passenger struck 38-year-old JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater in the head while unloading his luggage from the overhead compartment, before the plane had stopped taxiing. Slater demanded an apology, but the passenger refused. An argument ensued, with the passenger ultimately suggesting that Slater “fuck off”.

At this point, Slater got on the plane’s PA system and used it to vent his frustrations. As part of his verbal onslaught, he is reported to have said “To the passenger who called me a motherfucker, fuck you. I’ve been in the business 28 years¹. I’ve had it. That’s it”.

Slater then proceeded to activate the plane’s inflatable emergency slide. He grabbed two beers from the galley, then slid down the chute to freedom and unemployment, to perhaps be followed by jail time.

That may be the pinnacle of the story, but it doesn’t end there. However, after sliding down, Slater reportedly returned to pick up his bag – it’s not clear from where exactly it was retrieved. After getting his bag, he rode the AirTrain, creating another spectacle at the Terminal Five stop by removing his company tie and flinging it off the train, much to the amusement of his fellow passengers.

Slater made his way to his car and drove to his home in Belle Harbor, Queens. Jetblue officials, presumably not yet believing that what they’d witnessed was real, waited 25 minutes before notifying Port Authority Police of the incident. This wait enabled Slater to make his ridiculous getaway.

Shortly after, police collected Slater from his home station and returned him to the Port Authority police station at JFK airport for questioning. He was reported to have been calm, as he was questioned and ultimately charged with reckless endangerment and criminal mischief.

It’s just too good. Fed up with his job, the man activated the emergency chute, then grabbed two beers and slid down the chute! Can you picture it? I can. Can you stop laughing? I can not.

Footnotes:

1. Was he a flight attendant at the age of 10? Has he been lying about his age? Is he just bad at math? We may never know.   ↩

While researching the validity of Friday’s Tiger Oil Memos, I stumbled onto further information about the main character, Tiger Mike.

The story begins with Frederick Gilmer Bonfils, a scandal-steeped publisher who made the Denver Post a major newspaper, and who reportedly once took hush-money to stop reporting on the Teapot Dome oil scandal. When he passed away in 1933, his daughter Helen took over the paper. She later married George Somnes¹. Somnes died in 1956, but by the end of the 50s and at the ripe old age of 69, Helen married her former-chauffeur, 28-year-old Edward “Tiger Mike” Davis.

After the nearly-inevitable divorce, Tiger Mike suddenly had the means to dabble in oil. He purchased drilling rigs and was later bought out, making him richer. Eventually, he drilled 49 dry holes (possibly not all in a row), and went broke, at least for a time.

Tiger Mike’s trail goes fairly dark, except for his memos slowly spreading around the world, and eventually landing online. He finally popped back up in 2008, when he helped broker a $684 million dollar deal between Denver-based Delta Petroleum and Las Vegas billionaire Kirk Kerkorian. By then, Tiger Mike was known as “an oil and gas veteran living in Las Vegas” and had sold properties to Delta in 2003. As part of this 2008 sale, Tiger Mike received 263,158 shares in Delta as a “finder’s fee”, worth around $6 million dollars.

And the newspaper which reported on that 2008 sale? The Bonfils’ own Denver Post.

Footnotes:

1. Somnes is reported to have looked like a twin of Helen’s father, which is not at all disturbing or creepy.   ↩