Friday Hound Blogging (Thursday Edition)

Busy, busy, busy here in the marbled halls of IM Central. And not just because of the closeout sale down at the local adult beverage emporium either. How does a liquor store go out of business anyway? Is that even possible? Shouldn't there be TARP funds available? Anyway, we anticipate no interruption in the Stoli flow as the adult beverage emporium across the street from the soon to be defunct adult beverage emporium seems to be adequately stocked.

No, the reason for our madcap hustlebustle is the burgeoning conference season, a favorite time of year when we get to jet off to exotic cities, commune with our fellows and come up with new and innovative ways to skip out of sessions. In fact, even as we despoil the pristine innocence of the blank page with our desultory scribblings we are also preparing for a rendezvous with our local TSA naked machine. It occurs to us that Christmas parties must be a real hoot at TSA headquarters (Look at this. I bet this guy's nickname is stubby...Dang. Talk about top heavy. How does she do that without a back brace?)

But we digress. On to the overlords. We're coming to you today from the Blood From A Turnip Department. The BFAT Department is part of the When You Got Nothing, You Got Nothing To Extort Company, in cooperation with Like I Have A Reputation To Lose, LLC.

The man federal prosecutors say threatened to damage Gov.-elect Earl Ray Tomblin's reputation pleaded not guilty to an extortion charge Tuesday. Harry Marshall Rae, who used to be involved in the dog racing business, allegedly tried to blackmail people with ties to the industry.

Reputation? Dude. Do you even know anything about this Tomblin guy? Him worrying about losing his reputation is like Donald Trump worrying that he might miss his hair appointment.

Unless he received money, Rae threatened to release videos he said would damage the reputation of the greyhound industry and Tomblin, whose family breeds and races the dogs, according to a federal criminal complaint.

 Clearly Mr. Rae, you have not thought this through. You're going to damage the reputation of the greyhound industry? That's like saying you are going to walk through a city that has just had nuclear devastation rained down upon it and break a few windows.

But the videos Rae said he had were shot in another state, so it's unclear how they would have directly affected the reputation of greyhound racers here, including Tomblin's mother and brother.

Yeah, "unclear" is probably a word that could be worked into a lot of descriptions about Mr. Rae. But here's our question, if you got embarrassing videos of overlords in another state, why didn't you just go black mail those overlords?

Rae lives in California, but his cased was moved to West Virginia.

OK, so the guy lives in California, which is not a racing state. He gets embarrassing video from some other state that is not West Virginia, then tries to convince the Tomblin family in West Virginia they're going to be embarrassed unless they give him money. A criminal genius this guy is not, huh Boss?

Boss is a three year old guy who ran his races (all 119 of them) in Florida. Here's a clip: Boss comes out of the number eight box and finishes sixth.

For more information about this dog, and other rescued racing greyhounds looking for homes, go here. If you don't know about the plight of racing greyhounds go here.