Michael Hastings' death: I'm glad that's all cleared up

From the Los Angeles Times:

No foul play suspected in Michael Hastings' death, LAPD says

I watched a lot of the Mannix detective series in 1969 and expensive cars were alway crashing and exploding into flames in nice parts of Los Angeles, so this quick "no foul play" conclusion makes perfect sense to me.

Nothing to see here, folks, move along, nothing to see here. It's just the top investigative journalist of his generation charbroiled in his new Mercedes, so keep moving. Hey, did you hear about Kim Kardashian? Now, that's what I call news.

By the way, the two pictures don't seem to be of the same exact spot (deciduous trees and streetlamp v. telephoto-compressed palm trees on the median). I presume the cops moved the car to get it, and the stench of roasted reporter, away from the houses seen in the first picture. Or something ...

Update: No, it looks like the same spot: in the fiery picture, the lone palm tree that car ran into is lost from view behind the flames, while in the daytime picture the telephoto compression is so extreme that it makes the palm trees on the median look omnipresent when they are actually spaced rather far apart. In the fire picture, the car looks like it's up against the streetlight, which is not in the median, but the streetlight is actually about 40 feet or so beyond the car -- the misleading element is that the streetlight looks taller (and thus closer) than it is because it's reflected in the water a neighbor sprayed on the car with his garden hose in an attempt to extinguish it.

Now, the notion of a 33-year-old war correspondent driving dangerously fast in his new car hardly sounds implausible. Still, it would be helpful if, say, that Taiwanese TV network that does animated re-enactments of Tiger Woods running into a fire hydrant would animate the official story so we can see if it looks reasonable.

To continue with the Mannix theme, which usually ended with the car chase with the bad guys plummeting off Mulholland Drive on top of the Hollywood Hills, the most reasonable way to dispose of a dead body in a fake car crash in this area is to put the dead man in the trunk of his car, drive it up to Mulholland, put him behind the wheel, and push the car off. That seems far more likely than staging a gigantic crash in an upscale flat neighborhood.

There are a lot more guard rails on Mulholland now than in Mannix's day, but, still, cars go over the cliff now and then. Three years ago, for example, somebody propelled Charlie Sheen's reportedly stolen car off Mulholland and it was found wrecked 400 feet down with no bodies to be seen anywhere.

Sheen's Mercedes did not, however, explode

The usual theory is that a seriously impaired Sheen drove it off, but the notion that he crawled back up through the sage brush and walked home seems hard to imagine. Maybe 20 years ago, but Charlie's body had a lot of miles on it by 2010.

Around that time, as we learned later during his self-destruction, Sheen requested and obtained a huge advance on his actor's salary from Chuck Lorre's Two and a Half Men. My off-hand guess would be that the destruction of Sheen's car was a message to Sheen from his underworld creditors to get serious about paying his debts, or else, but I'm just making that up.

Has anybody been by the site of Hastings' death on Highland south of Melrose and north of Clinton? I really ought to drive over there and take a look; but that would involve me leaving the house, so that's probably not going to happen.