John Hodgman and Adam Stein of The Petersons

Blottered Team Party Bust coated our hair with gel, covered our feet in wingtips, and crossed the river to Galapagos in Brooklyn last Thursday for a special edition of John Hodgman's Little Gray Book Lecture series, No. 31: How To Commit The Perfect Crime. We've long resigned ourselves to the fact we'd never be perfect criminals due to excessive sweating and nervous twitching in even the calmest of situations. Taking the roommate's ice cream without asking is as far as we go these days and usually this is remedied by an adjustment in the rent split. Long gone are the days (or more specifically, late nights) of mailbox mutilation, tearing up the greens on golf courses, and the credit card scheme that offered free gas, clothes, tire rims, and all the liquor you wanted in the dimly populated bar establishments near army bases. Fortunately, John Hodgman assembled a panel of experts to set the record straight and then bend it in all sorts of directions.


Corinne May Botz, writer, started the evening by showing us how crime scenes were re-created and solved in the 1940's with the art of forensic dolls, covered here in a previous Blottered post.

Then Adam Stein (pictured at top) told his story of being a chronic shoplifter with a high success rate all his life, even after recently becoming a father. Apparently those Maclaren strollers can really stow some shit away. He's reformed now, thanks to a night in central booking in downtown Manhattan where he was nearly inducted into the Bloods.

Michigan State professor Brian Kalt, left, shares his insight to committing the perfect crime in Yellowstone Park, also covered here on Blottered previously. It has something to do with killing the dude on the right.


Lastly, Starlee Kine presented a slideshow of a modern era rogue's gallery of suspicious New Yorkers. Forget the obvious subway lurkers or street corner dope peddlers, it's those bent and crooked Avenue A grannies who take an hour to walk a city block. (Make note of Elizabeth Spiers cringing in horror as Starlee comes close to committing the heinous crime of spilling a drink.)


Jonathan Coulton is Little Gray Book's resident musical director and provided the kind of entertainment you'd expect from a guitar-wheeling bearded guy in glasses and a striped shirt. (That's not something I'd actually feel comfortable explaining as I just made it up but we once interviewed him for Gawker so we can take some liberties.)


This is the lower body of Sam Potts and that's not just a wad of money in his hands, he's also damn glad to see you. We once gave him the Gothamist Interview treatment. If it wasn't evident before, Chris Gage and I stopped doing interviews when Hodgman would no longer give us his contacts.