Quickies for October 11, 2012.

The vast majority of people renting homes for this weekend’s Austin City Limits Music Festival could be breaking the law, as only four houses out of an estimated 1,500 short-term rental properties had the required license to operate as of Wednesday.

The city implemented the new rules on short-term rentals ten days ago. Odd how that hasn’t been a problem for the last couple of ACL festivals, but yet the city felt compelled to make a new set of rules anyway. (Yes, it may also have something to do with the F1 race as well, but again, there haven’t been reports of massive short-term rental problems with ACL, or SXSW, or UT football games, or (fill in the blank).)

“It isn’t our desire to be punitive,” Christianson said. “We just want people to have a safe place to stay when they come to Austin.”

Because, of course, people are too dumb to make that decision on their own.

More Alex Karras: NYT. A/V Club.

The question before the court was whether Mr. Ndao was enough of an expert in Senegalese spells to testify at the murder trial of Bakary Camara, 42, who says he killed an ex-girlfriend last fall under the influence of evil spirits. He has pleaded not guilty to charges that he murdered the woman, Rita Morelli, 36.

The answer was “no”.

Unfortunately, the Squirrel Report is off the air this week. Which is a darn shame, as not only could they talk about “Commander Squirrel”, but they could also cover this story:

Since the beginning of September, the center has taken in some 400 abandoned baby squirrels, the most in three decades, if you leave out the Ike year.

(Story includes many cute photos of baby squirrels being fed, exactly the sort of thing that’s up Weer’d’s alley.)

Once again, I feel some obligation to comment on the Lance situation. It is looking like option #2 on my list may actually have turned out to be true. But I want to sit down and actually read the USADA report first, and I haven’t had time to do that. (I’m trying to finish the book I’m currently reading, I need to work on the Stanford Computer Networking class, I’m working on planning a birthday celebration, there’s still a movie I want to see, and some other things going on. Plus, tubular bells.)

Anyway, I’ll try to get to it, maybe over the weekend if I can manage to knock out the Stanford stuff.

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