Pardoning Porter.

May 18th, 2012

Over at Grits for Breakfast, Scott Henson has announced an interesting project: obtaining a pardon for William Sydney Porter, also known as “O. Henry”.

The project has a separate website: Pardon O. Henry.

I thought this blog entry, in particular, was interesting: Is it possible O. Henry was actually innocent? I don’t want to spoil it for you, but the short answer is that Porter was very probably a victim of shockingly poor banking practices and, had he not fled the country and returned, he probably would have walked. There’s an even more astonishing piece of information contained in Henson’s blog entry, but I encourage you to go read it for yourself.

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Noted.

May 17th, 2012

I can get Wired for a buck an issue if I use the blow-in cards that come with the print edition. (I can also frequently get Wired for a buck an issue if I purchase it at Half-Price Books.)

If I go to their website to subscribe, the combined print/tablet issue costs $1.67 an issue. The tablet or print issues by themselves cost $1.25 an issue.

If I get the Wired app from Amazon for the Fire, yep, $1.67 an issue if I do an in-app purchase. And the app gets mixed reviews.

(Current print subscribers apparently get the content for free. Which means that it makes more sense to go to Wired‘s web site and subscribe than it does to do an in-app purchase: $15 vs. $19.99. It makes even more sense to subscribe using the cards, but then I have to deal with the print editions.)

Look, Conde Nasties, I’d be happy to subscribe to the Kindle edition of Wired. But I want at least as good a deal as you give on those blow-in cards. One dollar an issue or bust!

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Administrative note.

May 17th, 2012

Graduation is over. Back on your heads.

More seriously, the time for introspection has passed. (Also the time for action.) Expect a return to snark, guns, snark, cops, snark, pop culture, snark, art, and snark.

I still have a few things to finish up: thank you notes are being written and mailed, and I need to go through the photos and pull some out for posting.

In the meantime, frankly, things have been kind of slow. I’m not finding a lot of blog fodder; FARK has picked up most of the good stuff, including some “Art, damn it, art!” fodder.

Lawrence did send me an intriguing link yesterday about Rielle Hunter, equestrian, and how her father paid a hit man to kill one of her horses. That William Nack story rings a bell with me, like I’ve read it before, but I don’t remember where. Setting aside the John Edwards angle, it is a fascinating crime story. It reminds me of Skip Hollandsworth’s “The Killing of Alydar”, which was anthologized in one of the The Best American Crime Writing volumes, and which I also commend to your attention. (I believe the BugMeNot link on the side will let you read the full version of the story online, but BugMeNot is blocked at the office, so I can’t verify that.)

I would also like to add one final note, for the record: I will put my family, friends, and coworkers up against any other group of people for sheer concentrated awesomeness. Thanks, gang.

Posted in Admin, Art, Horses, Law, Politics, School, Thanks | No Comments »

Obit watch: Naked came the reporter.

May 15th, 2012

Mike McGrady, reporter for Newsday.

Mr. McGrady was also somewhat famous for being one of the instigators behind the legendary Naked Came the Stranger:

…the Village Voice rapturously described the book as being “of such perfectly realized awfulness that it will suck your soul right out of your brainpan and through your mouth, and you will happily let it go.”

The book is attributed to “Penelope Ashe” but was actually written by a group of 25 Newsday reporters, with McGrady and Harvey Aronson editing their work.

And there’s a punchline at the end of the obit which I won’t spoil for you.

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It was perfectly innocent. Really. I swear.

May 14th, 2012

I went over to Amazon because I wanted to see if S.W.A.T Magazine was available in a Kindle edition.

The answer is “No”, but I discovered something else.

S.W.A.T. themed romances. There appear to be two authors in this genre: Denise A. Agnew whose works include

and J.C. Wilder, author of:

(I can’t tell for sure, but the latter two appear to be longer works in the “Men of S.W.A.T.” series. The first two are 70 and 79 pages long, the last two 100 and 96. The Agnew books appear to be closer to full on novels, coming in at about 250 pages. Except for Within His Sight, which clocks in at 81 pages.)

Posted in Books, Kindleing | No Comments »

A little night music.

May 10th, 2012

Continuing with our theme of musical interludes, how about a little sherbet as a palate cleanser?

This is another song that I was listening to a lot in 2006 (along with “The Walls Came Down”: “It’s a song of assassins ringing in your ears/We got terrorist thinking playing on fears”). It still has a lot of resonance with me as a song about hope and faith and belief. Not necessarily in a religious sense; there’s not a whole lot of religion in this song, but the message is still clear.

“For people like us, in places like this, need all the hope that we can get…”

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A long overdue thank you note.

May 10th, 2012

I want to write about someone I don’t know personally, but yet I feel an obligation to them.

This is hard to do. If you don’t carry it off right, you come across as a creepy stalker. Of course, I am not a creepy stalker. At least, not of this person; my creepy stalker exploits are reserved for Kate Winslet (I have been a proud member of the “Kate Winslet Creepy Obsessed Stalker Web Ring” since 1994). I also do hire out my services as a stalker to certain people I know personally. Writing about Marc Randazza made me feel strange and kind of stalkerish, but in his case I had some public accomplishments that I could point to.

More seriously, I’m not saying anything profound by pointing out that electronic interaction is weird. I can have friends I see rarely, and who I communicate with only through the Internet. (There’s a person I know who I would jump in front of a bullet for without hesitation. She lives in London, and the last time I saw her in person was in 1997. Much of our friendship has been mediated through electronic interaction; email, chats on the old Delphi network, and things of that ilk.) There are people I’ve come in contact with since I started this blog who I consider friends, but haven’t met – yet. (But the NRA convention is in Houston next year. Just saying.)

So. Anyway.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Obit watch: special “and his hair was…perfect” edition.

May 9th, 2012

Vidal Sassoon.

Posted in Clippings, Obits | No Comments »

Hog update.

May 9th, 2012

A few weeks ago, we asked the musical question:

…how bad was the damage to Petrino’s Harley Davidson Road King?

By way of FARK, we have an answer. The Harley is for sale on a site called copart.com. It looks to be in pretty bad shape; as both the Mobile Press-Register and copart note, the Harley is estimated to have suffered $18,000 worth of damage, but is only valued at $16,000.

Posted in Clippings, Sports | No Comments »

En Fuego.

May 9th, 2012

Some folks may have noticed that I haven’t written much about my experiences with the Kindle I purchased a while back.

Well…the screen went south on that one and it is unusable.

I’d held off on replacing it because I have the Kindle reader on my phone, so there wasn’t a compelling argument for me to have a stand-alone Kindle.

At least until Amazon had their sale last week offering refurbed Kindle Fires for $139.

Mine arrived yesterday. I’m still messing around with it trying to get things set up the way I want then, but expect some thoughts on the Fire in the nearish future.

(I actually do still agree with John Siracusa’s summary of the Kindle Fire: “a magical, colorful window through which you can give money to Amazon“. But my plans for the device mostly do not involve giving a lot of money to Amazon; rather, I’ve been loading it up with O’Reilly ebooks and public domain/free content.)

Edited to add: Interestingly enough, the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson 3rd Edition is available on the Kindle, and probably works much better on the Fire than it does on the regular Kindles. I’m willing to give Amazon $15.39 for that; Supica and Nahas are essential, but also an awful lot to lug around.

Posted in Android, Guns, Kindleing | No Comments »

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