Cat Connection

It might all just end there.

It was cute and fun and spontaneous and harmless. By now you have seen the story and video about the poor lawyer in Texas who borrowed his assistant's computer to join an online court proceeding. Seems it had been used for a prior Zoom meeting by someone who was having some fun, and forgot to restore it back to the normal settings. And so when Presidio County attorney Rod Ponton logged on, he came up as, well, a cat. The judge took it in stride, and tried to walk Ponton through the settings to lose the filter, as Ponton apologized and said with as much professional decorum as he could muster, "I prepared to go forward with it. I'm here live. I'm not a cat." Not quite "The Elephant Man," but there you go.

However, this is today. We're all sitting home with not much to do and plenty of time on our hands. And we have within a few taps of our fingers all the world's information and connections. And so while it's certainly possible that this is one of those viral moments that will disappear as fast as it happened, maybe not. As has been demonstrated by any number of recent stories, like the supposed connection between Dominion Voting Systems and deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, there is nothing – nothing – that can't potentially lead somewhere else if you have some imagination and the willingness to connect seemingly random dots. And so while odds are that by now you have all but forgotten Attorney Ponton's personal trial, there may well be more to it. As people start hunting and pecking, who knows what else they might unearth?

Perhaps the reason the problem happened was that the computer in question was not actually the assistant's regular machine. In the same vein as the Hunter Biden laptop story, maybe her computer was in the shop, and so she was given a loaner from the repair place. That computer had been just come in from being out with another customer. As Presidio County is on the Mexican border, it turns out that that other customer was actually part of a cartel that was trying to manipulate the tortilla market. The cartel had just had its winter meeting, and post Super Bowl were formulating a new strategy based on the slowdown in the demand for nachos. Per a recent article posted online in El Diario de Chihuahua, the daily paper of record in the closest Mexican city to Presidio, the head of the cartel is known as "Gatito Grande" which translates as "Big Kitty." Hmmmm.

Couple that with our lawyer's prior brush with fame stemming from a notorious case in the early 1980's. As you will find on the third page of Google search results referencing Ponton, he was featured in a documentary on Netflix called "The Confession Killer." Seems he represented Henry Lee Lucas, a convicted murderer who subsequently confessed to over 600 unsolved cases. Turned out that Texas Rangers were letting Lucas look at files before investigators interviewed him as a way of clearing cold cases, and Ponton's work showed Lucas could not have been guilty, resulting in revised ways of handling evidence and confessions. For the record, this extrapolation has nothing to do with that. But in the nether world of Lawyer Kitty, that hardly matters.

Maybe one of the cases Lucas "confessed" to was the theft of a car belonging to Mrs. Daisy Rodriguez of Marfa, Texas. An internet search of Texas motor vehicle registrations for 1981 shows a 1977 Dodge Warlock pickup was stolen on February 9th of that year, 40 years TO THE DAY after Ponton's more recent brush with notoriety. And if that's not suspicious enough, the truck was recovered in good shape, save for a rough etching of an animal on the right rear quarter panel of the vehicle. Officer's notes said that the scratchings "resembled a cat." Is it mere coincidence that Ponton's internet avatar was also in the bottom (or "rear") quadrant of the zoom call? 

Take all of this together and what do you have? Is there some kind of feline/car theft/tortilla cartel connection? It's all online so it must be true. Or to paraphrase, and with apologies to Freud for something he never actually said, sometimes a Zoom cat might be just a cat.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford has nothing better to do but imagine "what if." His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.