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In a perfect world, every true Valley celeb sighting would involve raccoons and crossbows. For now, this story about Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, by the inimitable blogger Curt Hopkins, can feed your bizarre robber-baron fantasies.

When I worked across the pond from Oracle, a friend and I used to scrutinize Ellison's lair at night, when the evil congealed in an oily rainbow on the manmade waters. Here's what we finally figured out: Every evening a short truck arrived from the Sierra. Inside were cages full of captured raccoons. Ellison's handlers would usher everyone out of the building at midnight on the dot, then let the raccoons go.

Ellison would spend the night in an orgy of sloe gin-fueled coon-shootin', using crossbows (and only crossbows). High-tech polymer crossbows he designed himself, 10th century Iberian Muslim crossbows he bought at auctions and so on.

Each pre-dawn would see an Agincourt of murdered raccoons (and in one case a Filipino maintenance man — let's just say one family on Mindanao has a house they could never have dreamed of) and Ellison, frequently pantless, collapsed, exhausted and spent, into an oversized planter in the foyer.