Archive for November, 2011

TMQ watch: November 29, 2011.

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

TMQ is back. So are we. After the jump…

(more…)

Hit the road, Jack.

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

I saw reports early this morning, but wanted to wait for the official announcement.

Jack Del Rio out as head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars.

And the team is being sold to the same guy who tried to purchase the Rams last year.

The new owner, according to reports, plans to keep the team in Jacksonville. I am curious how long that will last.

I have no joke here, I just like saying…

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

…”Nazi pumpkin“.

Gilliam watch.

Monday, November 28th, 2011

The LAT has a nifty piece about Terry Gilliam, tied to his receiving a Federico Fellini Foundation award.

Obviously, I knew about Heath Ledger’s death, but I didn’t know Gilliam was hit by a bus during the filming of ”The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus”. Combined with the whole “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” story (well covered in the article, for you non-obsessives) and it makes you think he may be on to something when he suggests God doesn’t want him to make movies.

What’s Neu?

Monday, November 28th, 2011

The coach at UCLA.

Rick Neuheisel fired. UCLA had a 21-28 record under his tenure, and lost to USC 50-0 on Saturday. (I missed that score. Daymn, dudes.)

More random crap.

Monday, November 28th, 2011

First of all, a couple more obits: Lana Peters. You might know her better as “Svetlana Stalina”, Josef Stalin’s daughter.

I missed this over the weekend (I’ve been distracted, working on my final project for school) but Tom Wicker, noted NYT journalist, passed away on Friday.

…the sputtering economy and municipal budget cuts are presenting new problems for the Tournament of Roses.

Speaking of municipal budget cuts, Lourdes Garcia, one of Robert “Ratso” Rizzo’s employees, has lost her job with the city of Bell.

Garcia is now a witness for the prosecution in the government’s case against her former bosses. She has been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony.

She was making $422, 000 a year until last year, when her salary was cut to $165,000.

We haven’t had a “Spider Man: Turn Off the Dark” update recently. How are things going?

In an interview to mark the Monday anniversary of the production’s first, fumbling preview performance, the producers of “Spider-Man” said they were considering new plans for recouping the show’s record-setting $75 million capitalization. The most unusual idea: adding new scenes and perhaps a new musical number to the New York “Spider-Man” every year, making it akin to a new comic book edition, and then urging the show’s fans to buy tickets again.

The producers also say that they’re not planning on mounting touring companies, but instead want to concentrate on making the Broadway production successful. And this decision has nothing to do with Julie Taymor’s lawsuit. Nothing at all.

Weekly running costs alone for “Spider-Man” total $1 million or more, by far the highest amount on Broadway, while its net income has ranged recently from $100,000 to $300,000 a week. At that rate the show would need to play on Broadway at least five more years — and possibly quite a bit longer — to pay off debts, a run very few shows achieve. In other words, it would need to turn into a hit on par with “Wicked” or “The Lion King” (the latter directed by Ms. Taymor), which after lengthy runs still regularly sit atop the weekly Broadway box office charts.

Bruce Boudreau out as coach of the Washington Capitals.

Up until about five years ago, I drove Loop 360 every day. I still have to drive it from time to time, so I was quite interested in the Statesman‘s coverage of plans to improve traffic flow. The biggest change involves implementing “Michigan left turns”: instead of left turn arrows at the lights, drivers will have to turn right, go down to a median cut, and do a U-turn.

I had plans: if I was ever diagnosed with a terminal illness, I’d go out late one night and blow up all the pointless traffic lights on Loop 360. The “Michigan left” plan doesn’t go quite that far, but I think it is a good step, if properly implemented. However, the plan doesn’t address the other major problem I used to see: traffic backs up horribly at the Loop 360/Mopac (Loop 1) intersection. That area badly needs a massive intersection redesign.

Administrative note.

Monday, November 28th, 2011

This is your yearly reminder that, if you’re doing shopping for the holidays, and you use the Amazon search box on the right hand side of the page, I get a small kickback.

This allows me to continue providing the high….high…okay, I can’t say “high quality content” with a straight face. How about, this puts some jingle in my pocket that I can spend on guns and ammunition?

Random notes: November 28, 2011.

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Well, that didn’t take long: Astros team president Tal Smith and general manager Ed Wade are done.

Also done: Bernie Fine, assistant basketball coach at Syracuse University and accused child molester.

Obit watch: rapper “Money Clip D”. Where do they get these names?

Edited to add: And not 30 seconds after I hit “publish”, Lawrence emailed me noting the death of director Ken Russell.

Edited to add 2: Missed that Ron Zook got fired from Illinois. That’s epic: start the season 6-0, then lose six games in a row.

Turner Gill is also out at Kansas after a 2-10 finish.

The high-water mark came in Gill’s second game, when the Jayhawks stunned then-No. 15 Georgia Tech last season. But that was the only victory over a ranked team, and Kansas would lose 17 of the next 21 with Gill on the sideline, the lone conference win coming against a Colorado program that fired its coach immediately after the defeat.

Your loser update: week 12, 2011.

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Indianapolis

William Shatner, call your office, please.

Friday, November 25th, 2011

Sambet’s Cajun Restaurant suffered a fire on Thursday. Apparently, while they were frying turkeys, the oil in the deep fryer caught fire…

The fire caused about $300,000 of damage to Sambets and Ann’s Kitchen, plus another $150,000 in smoke damage to six neighboring businesses, Buck said.

This is disheartening, as I’m kind of fond of Sambet’s. They’re one of the few places in town you can get good boudin, and they do a fantastic crawfish etoufee. And $450,000 in damages? In that dump of a strip center? I find that hard to swallow (unlike Sambet’s boudin sandwich).

During the fire, Buck said, “We had many people drive up, three of them who wanted to know if they could get their turkeys; we had to explain to them that they could not go in and pick them up.”

I haven’t driven up that way to see how bad the damage is; I may try to do that later this weekend. In the meantime, I wish Sambet’s the best of luck and hope they’re able to re-open soon.

(Link to the Shatner turkey frying video via Lawrence.)

Jersey justice.

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

Five teenage boys disappeared on the night of August 20, 1978, in Newark.

Their bodies have never been found.

In July of 2008, Philander Hampton, a convicted drug dealer and thief, told the local police that he had witnessed his cousin, Lee Anthony Evans, murder the boys. Specifically, Hampton claimed that Evans thought the boys had broken into his apartment; Hampton and Evans rounded the boys up, Evans allegedly shut them all in a closet, and then set fire to the abandoned building.

The building was totally destroyed. Searches with dogs and sonar did not turn up any bodies.

Hampton pled guilty to the murders, but under the terms of his plea agreement, he could be released next year.

Evans denied the murders, and represented himself at trial. (An attorney was appointed to assist him.)

The jury acquitted Mr. Evans of all the charges earlier today.

I find this interesting because:

  1. It was a sensational crime. Five teenage boys vanish at once and are never found?
  2. The prosecution rested their case almost entirely on the testimony of a convicted drug dealer and thief. That’s pretty much all they had going for them; they did try to introduce evidence that the judge had barred, and the judge appropriately reprimanded them.
  3. When’s the last time you’ve heard of a defendant who represented himself being successful? Sure, it happens, but rarely, especially in a sensational murder trial.

In other news, the jury in the case of Paul Bergrin couldn’t reach a verdict, and a mistrial has been declared.

“Who is Paul Bergrin?” you cry. He was Newark’s “lawyer to the stars”, where “stars” are defined as “big time drug dealers”. In this case, Bergrin was charged with arranging the murder of an FBI informant so that his client would be able to beat drug charges; the government also alleged that the murder was intended to hide Bergrin’s involvement in supplying large amounts of cocaine to a local gang.

Mostly, this gives me an excuse to link to Mark Jacobson’s piece for New York, “The Baddest Lawyer in the History of Jersey“, which provides an astonishing summary of the allegations against Bergrin.

“Someone got killed, and they were trying to put it on me,” remembers Clay, as he asked to be called. “First-degree murder, can’t fuck with that, so I got Paul. He was the biggest name out there. He drove his Bentley down Clinton Avenue, and it was like, ‘Don’t you punks even think about jacking that.’ Everyone said he was wide open. But I didn’t know how wide open until that day. I’m in his office two minutes. He says he’s looked at my case, and only one witness can hurt me. Then he says, ‘Okay, what are we going to do about this person? She’s a user, right? Why don’t we give her a hot shot? Just stick her.’ ”

It is worth bearing in mind that the allegations against Bergrin are allegations, and haven’t been proven yet. Bergrin is set to stand trial for a grocery list of other charges (“witness tampering, murder-for-hire, fraud, cocaine trafficking and running a high-end prostitution ring”), and can still be retried on the murder and murder conspiracy charge.

Cheese louise.

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

The New York City Health Department would like for you to know the following:

  1. They didn’t tell Sardi’s that the cheese on the bar was a health code violation.
  2. They generally don’t cite for peanuts and other bar foods.
  3. You can leave your cheese out at room temperature for up to four hours. (Or six hours, if it is kept below 70 degrees, and someone records the temperature every two hours.)

(Damn. I would have sworn that I’d blogged the original Sardi’s story earlier in the week, but I can’t find it now.)