Thomas Hoving, former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Harlan Ellison has written
(Edited to add: Well, I will be sheep-dipped. You can get at least the first season of “Burke’s Law”
Archive for December, 2009
Obit watch.
Friday, December 11th, 2009DeBugged.
Thursday, December 10th, 2009BugMeNot.com links added. I’ll be happy to accept additional suggestions in comments or via email (see the Contact the proprietor page).
Please note that those links, unlike the others, open a new browser window or tab for your viewing pleasure.
Did you stand by me? No way.
Thursday, December 10th, 2009CapMet awarded “emergency” contracts to two other contractors to run the system “over the next five-plus years”. But don’t worry, this won’t delay the startup of the rail system any longer; CapMet says we’re still on target for startup “sometime before March 31, about two years later than originally scheduled”.
Two interesting food-related articles in the NYT: one about the upcoming Tavern on the Green auction, which gives a good overview of the restaurant’s decline and fall. The other article is really more of a rewritten press release on Chex and their promotion of new recipes for Chex Party Mix. Even though it has that whole rewritten PR quality to it, I feel compelled to note the later article; Chex Party Mix is a traditional food of my people.
As a side note, sometime later this evening, I’m going to add a list of BugMeNot links for the NYT, LAT, Statesman, HouChron, and WP to the sidebar. I already have cookies on my machines for most of these, so I don’t think about logins (and all of these sites are somewhat flaky about requiring logins), but Lawrence mentioned this problem to me the other day. (I can’t do it now because, believe it or not, BugMeNot is blocked at the office.)
(Edited to add: Speaking of Lawrence, I haven’t been able to listen to Ms. Aguilera yet; blocked at work. But the Bob Dylan YouTube video isn’t. I’d heard Mr. Zimmerman’s Christmas album was pretty awful; but am I a bad, evil, taste-lacking person for kind of liking “Must Be Santa”?)
Snakes on a book.
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
The book on the left is the 4th edition of Learning Python
The book on the right is this year’s Austin phone book.
Yes, Learning Python is thicker.
No, I’m not sure what that means; I just find it amusing.
How can we dance when our Earth is turning?
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009We don’t have to worry about that now. CBS has cancelled “As the World Turns”.
(I like the song, but I’ve always thought that particular lyric was rather stupid. If the Earth wasn’t turning, dancing would be the least of our concerns.)
Random notes: December 8, 2009.
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009I’m not a pro wrestling fan. I did see the FARK thread about Umaga’s death over the weekend, but didn’t really think it was blog-worthy (especially since it had already been on FARK). However, Ken Hoffman has a touching obit for the late Mr. Fatu in the HouChron.
“He speaks English!” the kids said. Even more surprising, he didn’t take their money for his autograph. “He said it was Christmas and told us to use the money for presents for our parents.”
On the obit front, the LAT has a story about the sectioning of Henry Molaison’s brain. This was also noted in the NYT last week, but for some reason I didn’t blog it. I’ll take this chance to link again to the obit the NYT published after Mr. Molaison’s passing last year. (I blogged this at the time, for values of “blogged” that include “noting it on the private mailing list I was using at the time”.) If you can read the last line of that obit without tears, you have no heart.
While we’re on the subject of the NYT, the government of India has released their report on the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque. The report came out last week; the mosque was destroyed by riots in 1992.
I probably should have blogged something about Pearl Harbor yesterday, perhaps the discovery of the Japanese mini-sub. But hey, I stink, and everyone else was doing it anyway. There’s also a good story in the Statesman about the new wing of the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg. I’ve got some time off coming, and I haven’t been to the musuem in a few years…
Random notes: December 4, 2009.
Friday, December 4th, 2009Today’s memo from Captain Obvious: scalpers find it hard to sell tickets when the team is awful. And sympathy for the Nets.
So your scam involves taking money for hot tubs from people on eBay, then not shipping the hot tubs? I can’t decide who is dumber; the scammer, for not thinking that he’d be caught, or the people who actually thought purchasing hot tubs off eBay was a good idea.
In other news, we’re all going to die (well, mostly you folks in Houston). Film at 11.
Edited to add: The Observer has a nifty interview with Maj Sjöwall. I’m kind of ashamed to admit, even though I’ve read some of the Martin Beck books, I had no idea Per Wahlöö was dead. (Hattip: Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)
Dropping like JaMarcus Russell passes.
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009Hofstra University has dropped their (1-AA) football program. (I know the NCAA doesn’t call it 1-AA any longer, but if you think I’m going to type out “NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision” every time, you’ve got another think coming.)
As noted in the linked article, Northeastern (also 1-AA, and in the same conference) dropped their program last week.
When is TMQ going to blog about the impending cupcake shortage?
Human ingenuity.
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009Joe D’s comment below about Obama blotter acid reminded me of another favorite government publication of mine: the DEA’s Microgram Bulletin.
If you ever want a catalog of all the ingenious ways people try to get high, spend some time going through back issues. The June issue even has some snazzy illustrations of “Ecstasy” tablets (Homer and Bart Simpson, Obama, Autobots, and others.)
It isn’t that I drop acid, smoke the chronic, or take X and go to a lot of raves; I’m fascinated by Microgram because of the discussions of analytic chemistry, plus this will make good background material if I ever wind up writing that series of crime novels I’ve sketched out.
When you’re a Net, you’re a Net all the way…
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009…from your opening loss at Charlotte to losing at home against the Mavericks and setting a new NBA record for futility.
Two other franchises had gone 0-17 to start a season. The Miami Heat set the record 21 years ago as an expansion team. The Los Angeles Clippers, who often look like an expansion team, matched the mark 10 years ago.
The Nets now stand alone, wallowing in despair and self-loathing.
Lawrence gave me some flack yesterday for not mentioning Bobby Bowden. My feeling was that Bowden wasn’t fired, he resigned; Lawrence’s argument is that Bowden resigned in the same way Nixon and Spitzer resigned. I don’t have much to say on the subject, but if you do, here’s your thread.
Obama Ecstasy tablets? Those will go well with my Chia head.
Dear Congressman Lamar Smith: Please be so kind as to consume excrement and thus hasten your demise.
Edited to add: I forgot this one. By way of the Scalz, homeowner’s association tries to tell a 90-year-old Medal of Honor recipient he can’t have a flagpole in his yard. Get the popcorn, folks, this should be almost as much fun as the ongoing situation in what Balko calls Marakafka County.
Random notes: December 2nd, 2009.
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009(I had originally considered calling this post “Rum, S—-y, and the Lash” but I couldn’t find any good articles about whipping. Plus, I don’t want to get filtered.)
Did you know the NYT had a “Winter Drinks Issue” in the Dining section? Neither did I. Articles include one about the rise of rum, and an excellent article by Harold McGee
By way of Jimbo, here’s a good article on Richard Loeb (of Leopold and Loeb
Just in case you were wondering what Roseanne Barr is doing, you now have your answer.
Edited to add: I knew I forgot something. I won’t be watching this tonight. (I don’t, and won’t, have cable; I’ve asked someone if they’d be willing to record it for me.) That won’t stop me from linking to Alan Sepinwall’s review:
…with his new reality show “Steven Seagal: Lawman,” Seagal has cemented his position as an accidental comedy savant. It’s easily the funniest thing he’s done since the climactic speech from “On Deadly Ground” (his infamous directorial debut about evil oil companies polluting the Alaskan wilderness), and one of the more entertaining additions to the Has-Beens On Parade reality sub-genre.
If you’re the police, where are your badges?
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009(Speaking of recurring themes.)
The answer to that question is apparently at home.
Mr. Sash, who was arrested several times for making and selling replica badges, quit the business after his last arrest in 2002, for which he served nearly four years in prison.
The linked article is a pretty good slice of NYPD life, but I’d really like to know more about Mr. Sash and his story. If all these folks in the NYPD knew he was the unofficial go-to guy for replica badges, what were the circumstances that actually led up to his arrest?
The Gary Kubiak firing pool.
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Place your dates in the comments.
Lawrence has already claimed January 4th.
As your moderator, I won’t be picking a date.