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Some comments I want to post, just misc tidbits I thought about as I was reading through the many posts I missed today. These are “on the fly,” so kind of abbreviated.

1) Thanks for all the updates on the nannies’ statements, y’all. Since I can’t see them, it helps to know some FReepers find them credible. Wow, about ANS falling down a lot and HKS not helping her. Very sad, but doesn’t surprise me at all.

2) About the 1992&1994 diaries - I know a lot of FReeple think KE is the one who sold them to the memorabilia dealer - and we have all these stories about finding them in trash or Virgie cleaning out ANS’s house in LA (we KNOW that’s a lie) or Virgie throwing them out at her own home and a neighbor retrieving them or someone getting them from the set of the reality show after it folded.

I’ve always kind of felt like ANS gave them to someone from the show, half thinking they were trash and half thinking they might be worth something some day. I felt like it was that Frankie Rodriguez who retrieved them among the things being thrown out from the show and asked her if he could have them. He seemed to really care for her and she for him. (He was the guy who said she told him she had lupus.)

3) Jenny McCarthy - that’s who I think should’ve been chosen to play ANS (or still could be for another show). I knew there was someone in the back of my mind who would be right - who was pretty and could also play ditzy real well. She was on a show last night and the light bulb went off - bingo! She’d be just right, I think. Better than the two horse-faces they’ve picked so far - first they said Spelling, then this Willa Whoever Ford.

Got some more ... next post ...

OK, bear with me on this one. I have finally rejected this idea, but only after checking out a lot of stuff to see if it fit together.

My idea for why the boat was named “Cracker” or “The Cracker” and then a company was formed by the same name:

ANS and HKS said it was a nickname for Daniel - but nowhere could I ever find her calling him that, only “Pumpkinhead,” which she even included in the tattoo for him (the one that disappeared, apparently).

I felt it was some kind of inside joke between the two of them, like ANS making fun of herself as a “backwoods hick” (GA cracker) or as a white person living in a black community (corruption of bullwhip-cracker) in Nassau. Both of those could fit - and it may also be something we’ll never know.

Also wasn’t sure why they tied it to Daniel, either. If it had been a childhood nickname, I would think it was something like an abbreviated form of “firecracker” (’cracker) or short for “cracker jack,” which is closer to the Shakespearean, lol, but also relating to a confection kids love for the toy inside.

Well, as an oilie myself, I just kept coming back to “cracker” being a cracking unit at an oil refinery. Simplistically, the cracker is the piece of equipment in the process that turns crude oil into gasoline. To “refine” it, you put crude oil in, either heat it or treat it with chemical catalysts, and the crude divides itself - or “cracks” - into various forms of hydrocarbons, from jet fuel to kerosene to gasoline.

The reason this matters is because I feel like the Marshall money - or the false hope of obtaining some of it - was the only glue that made ANS allow HKS to stick around. It was their common obsession.

And the main reason no one outside the Marshall family will ever get their hands on any of the core money - that big number always being headlined - is that it is tied up in private stock in a privately held company that is only owned by a handful of people, mostly in one family.

I’ve gone on about it, ad nauseum, before, and here I am again. Back in the 1920s, Fred C. Koch was a young engineer who devised an improved method of thermal cracking - that is, using heat and high pressure - which produced much more gasoline out of a barrel of crude oil than was possible before.

This became important as the automobile caught on more and more in the US. Koch designed a cracking unit with two partners and formed a company to build and install them in refineries. That was the Keith-Winkler-Koch Engineering Company, soon just the Winkler-Koch Engineering Co.

His company was one of about 30 in the US who were doing similar types of cracking design work and installation. When trying to get patents on his units, he ran into a lot of opposition from the major oil producers, who wanted to keep the number of patents within the industry small and mostly proprietary to their companies.

He was in court so much defending himself against the Patent Club, that he finally went to Russia to install his Winkler-Koch units - and they bought 15 of them (these are enormously expensive processing units and could take 1-2 years to build). The oil business was not as high-demand there back then (I think I read there were only 850 cars in the whole enormous country!), but their oil reserves were huge, so they produced vast amounts of refined oil products for export, close to 90% of it.