Paul Auster, author. (The New York Trilogy)
I wish I could say more about this. I know Auster was an important mainstream writer, but I’ve never read anything by him.
Obit watch: May 1, 2024.
May 1st, 2024You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#116 in a series)
May 1st, 2024I have no joke here, I just like saying “Wonderful thing, a subpoena.”
Mike the Musicologist also tells me that Ms. Henyard’s current lawyers have asked to withdraw from the case…because Ms. Henyard isn’t paying her legal bills.
NERFed.
April 30th, 2024First, we had the NERF machine gun.
How do you follow that?
Would you believe…NERF night vision?
It looks like a camera with (probably) a cheap magnifying lens that’s also IR sensitive. It almost certainly isn’t great, but for $35 it might be fun to play with.
And it seems like there’s already a hacker community around it, mostly on Reddit. (No link, because Reddit.)
Hattip to awa over at Gun Free Zone, who points out there’s a meme around this too.
I’m all right, don’t nobody worry about me…
April 30th, 2024…just really nothing to write about.
I want to do some more gun and gun book blogging, but I’m going to be busy through Wednesday and just won’t have time.
Bagatelle (#110)
April 26th, 2024Shot:
Noem also detailed how she killed a “nasty and mean” male goat because it had not been castrated.
She described the animal as smelling “disgusting, musky, rancid” and claimed it “loved to chase” Noem’s children and knock them down.
The goat was also “dragged to a gravel pit,” but jumped when she pulled the trigger, and subsequently survived the wound. Noem went back to her truck to retrieve another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down,” she wrote.
Chaser:
A hoarder “squatter” with a large aggressive goat refused to leave a house in San Antonio for months — as the belligerent billy goat attacked the homeowner and police, sources said.
The four-legged baaaad boy stormed and butted house flipper Daniel Cabrera, who bought a five-bedroom abode for $175,000 from a woman who refused to move out in June, he told realtor.com.
Spicy bar snack:
Ammo cuffs from Andy’s Leather. So you don’t have to go back to the truck to load another round. Or you could use a rifle with a magazine.
Everybody was gun book blogging…
April 25th, 2024…they read as fast as lightning…
Needs some work.
After the jump, some more old gun books, and one new one.
Well! Isn’t THIS special?
April 25th, 2024New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges, a stunning reversal in the foundational case of the #MeToo era.
In a 4-3 decision, the New York Court of Appeals found that the trial judge who presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case had made a crucial mistake, allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses a series of women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him.
Still breaking as I write this. THR is also on the case.
Annals of “law”. (#1 in a series)
April 23rd, 2024Murray Sawchuck went on “trial” a week ago Wednesday.
I put “trial” in quotes because there was no actual court of competent authority involved. The trial was at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, and the judges were members of the Magic Castle board.
Murray Sawchuck is also known as “Murray the Magician”. He had a gig at the Tropicana until it closed earlier this month, and he’s been on various TV shows.
He also has a YouTube channel. And that’s the problem.
The troubles began in late January, when he and his showgirl wife, Dani, cooked up a new video, inspired by the bickering of Lucy and Desi Arnaz, in which he’d perform a series of tricks for the camera — mostly basic illusions one could purchase off of Amazon. She, playing the role of unimpressed wife, reveals how they’re done.
A bouquet of flowers, for example, is shown to be sucked into the base of the trick table on which it stands. A sword-swallowing act is rendered all the less impressive when she flicks the blade — and it coils up like a measuring tape. The whole thing took 10 minutes to make. Then they posted it to YouTube.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it did make a lot of people in the magic community upset. This, in turn, led to the “hearing”, for want of a better word.
Summarizing Mr. Sawchuck’s arguments, from the article: “teaching magic” is “exposing magic”, “exposing magic” isn’t as black and white as magicians would have it, exposing magic “forces magicians to be more entertaining and charismatic”, and there’s a long tradition of “exposing magic” (including Houdini and Penn and Teller).
Anybody remember “Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed” with the “Masked Magician”? I always thought that was a hoot. And I don’t see where the “Masked Magician” was ever “prosecuted” by the Magic Castle (though Wikipedia says he was sued by some people whose illusions he spoiled).
Obligatory:
I have not seen any follow-up on this, and I have no idea how long it takes for the Magic Castle to rule. If I do see an update, I’ll let y’all know.
Obit watch: April 23, 2024.
April 23rd, 2024Playing catch-up from the past few days:
Terry Anderson, journalist who was kidnapped and held for six years by Shia Hezbollah militants of the Islamic Jihad Organization in Lebanon.
While he had not been tortured during his captivity, he said, he was beaten and chained. He spent a year or so, on and off, in solitary confinement, he said.
“There is nothing to hold on to, no way to anchor my mind,” he said after the ordeal. “I try praying, every day, sometimes for hours. But there’s nothing there, just a blankness. I’m talking to myself, not God.”
He found some consolation in the Bible, though, and added: “The only real defense was to remember that no one could take away my self-respect and dignity — only I could do that.”
Roman Gabriel, quarterback for the Rams and Eagles.
He was voted the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player when he led the league in touchdown passes, with 24, in a 14-game season with the 1969 Rams.
He was also named the comeback player of the year by pro football writers in 1973, his first season with the Eagles. Coming off knee problems and a sore arm, he led the N.F.L. in touchdown passes (23), completions (270) and passing yardage (3,219) that season.
He played in four Pro Bowl games, three with the Rams in the late 1960s and another with the Eagles in 1973. But he reached the postseason only twice, and his Rams were eliminated in the first round both times.
Terry Carter, actor. This is buried a bit in the article, but he was McCloud’s partner and played “Colonel Tigh” on the original “Battlestar Galactica”.
Other credits include “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Search”…
…and “Mannix” (“Medal For a Hero”, season 3, episode 14).
And in a wayfaring six-decade career, he was a merchant seaman, a jazz pianist, a law student, a television news anchor, a familiar character on network sitcoms, an Emmy-winning documentarian, a good will ambassador to China, a longtime expatriate in Europe — and a reported dead man; in 2015, rumors that he had been killed were mistaken. It was not him but a much younger Terry Carter who had died in a hit-and-run accident in Los Angeles by a pickup truck driven by the rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight.
Slightly misquoting Mark Twain, Mr. Carter posted on social media: “Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
Frederick Celani, serial con man. He conned people into thinking he was going to build a package delivery hub in Springfield (Illinois), conned inmates into giving him money to have their convictions overturned (he wasn’t a lawyer), and ran various real estate cons.
Fred Neulander. You may recall that name, as his trial was a brief sensation back in the 1990s.
The rabbi and his wife, Carol Neulander, 52, were well-known in the community through both the shul and Classic Cakes, the popular bakery Carol co-founded, CNN reported.
The mother of 3 had just returned from the bakery when she bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe in the couple’s Cherry Hill home on the evening of Nov. 1, 1994, the outlet said.
…
Neulander was indicted for the murder in 1999, but the case did not come together until the following year, when private investigator Len Jenoff told police that the rabbi paid him and another man, Paul Daniels, $30,000 to kill his wife.
At trial in 2001, prosecutors argued that the rabbi wanted to get rid of Carol to continue his two-year affair with Philadelphia radio host Elaine Soncini.
Soncini, who was Catholic, had even supposedly converted to Judaism to be with the rabbi, whom she met when he performed funeral rites for her late husband.
…
When the first trial ended in a hung jury, the 2002 retrial was moved from Camden County to Monmouth County to downplay the local scrutiny.
Following the retrial, Neulander was convicted of Carol’s murder. He narrowly avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison.
Soncini testified against Neulander at both trials, as did two of his three children.
Obit watch: April 20, 2024.
April 20th, 2024In haste: Death finally caught the Midnight Rider.
Daniel C. Dennett, author.
An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.
According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.
For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.
Mr. Dennett irked some scientists by asserting that natural selection alone determined evolution. He was especially disdainful of the eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose ideas on other factors of evolution were summarily dismissed by Mr. Dennett as “goulding.”
Administrative note.
April 18th, 2024This coming weekend is my birthday. I plan to be fairly busy for much of it: I’m taking Friday and Monday off work, and expect to be running around a lot (including some gun shopping) over the weekend. I also have some errands I want to run.
All of this is to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox posting is going to be catch as catch can probably through Tuesday of next week.
Firings watch.
April 17th, 2024This kind of stretches the definition of “firing” just a little bit, but I claim noteworthiness.
Jontay Porter, forward for the Toronto Raptors, has been banned from the NBA for life.
The NBA said that Porter provided confidential information to bettors, limited his own participation in games for gambling purposes and bet on NBA games.
“There is nothing more important than protecting the integrity of NBA competition for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport, which is why Jontay Porter’s blatant violations of our gaming rules are being met with the most severe punishment,” NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement.
“While legal sports betting creates transparency that helps identify suspicious or abnormal activity, this matter also raises important issues about the sufficiency of the regulatory framework currently in place, including the types of bets offered on our games and players. Working closely with all relevant stakeholders across the industry, we will continue to work diligently to safeguard our league and game,” Silver said.
…
Porter, the league said, gave a bettor information about his own health status before Toronto’s game on March 20. The league said another individual, known to be an NBA bettor, placed an $80,000 bet that Porter would not hit the numbers set for him in parlays through an online sportsbook. That bet would have won $1.1 million.
Porter took himself out of that game after only a few minutes, claiming illness, with none of his stats meeting the totals set in the parlay. The bet was frozen and not paid out, and the NBA started an investigation.
The NBA’s investigation found the Porter placed at least 13 bets on NBA games using an associate’s account, with the bets ranging from $15 to $22,000, totaling $54,094. The NBA said the total payout from those bets was $76,059, a net winnings of $21,965. None of Porter’s bets involved games in which he played. Three of his bets were multigame parlays that included one Raptors contest — and Porter bet that the Raptors would lose. All three bets lost, the NBA said.
“List of people banned or suspended by the NBA” from Wikipedia.
As critical as I’ve been of Gregg Easterbrook’s “pro-topless, anti-gambling” trope, I find myself thinking he’s right: the growth of sports betting has already had a negative impact on major league sports. And I think it is likely to just get worse.