The train wreck is now official. I expect this to be about as successful as M. Night Shamalamadingdong’s latest movies.
And Vince Young won’t be a Titan in 2011. However, it is not clear that the Titans are going to keep Jeff Fisher on as coach, either; that decision is yet to come.
Edited to add: And tying it all together, Richard Justice in the HouChron: “Should the Texans sign Vince Young? Are you kidding? Of course! Today!“
I intended to post this yesterday, but got sidetracked: the SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian have reached a settlement in their legal dispute. I’ve previously blogged about the dispute here, here, and here. (Hattip: Jimbo.)
I’m posting this only because it amuses me: the Statesman has posted the APD’s annual list of “local bars where drunken driving suspects reported having their last drink before hitting the road”. Particularly chuckleworthy to me is the large cluster of places in one block of 6th Street…
Speaking of the Statesman, there’s also a kind of neat profile of Austin writer, former Dell employee, and MonkeyBrain Books publisher Chris Roberson, who is taking over the current “Superman” story line with issue 707.
And speaking of things that amuse me, “Never Said About Restaurant Websites” pretty much hits all of my peeves (and Lawrence’s) save one. And we’ve both submitted that one. (Hattip: Daring Fireball.)
Edited to add: Here’s something else I wanted to blog but forgot: “The Now-You-See-It Restaurant“.
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Rich Rodriguez has apparently been fired as head coach at Michigan.
I say “apparently” because there hasn’t been an official announcement yet; Lawrence sent me a link earlier, but that link is no longer active, and appears to have been replaced by this link.
Edited to add 1/5/2011: Now it looks like the decision will come sometime today.
Edited to add 1/5/2011 2: Looks like “This time for sure!” Hey, Rocky, watch me pull a head coach out of my hat!
Edited to add 1/5/2011 3: Yep, he’s done.
I’m running a bit behind today due to a personal matter this morning, so here’s a quick roundup of some things I felt were worth rounding up.
Day after coverage of the Kubiak situation from the HouChron. Kubby stays, four assistants get the axe. And it looks like the Wade Phillips thing is moving closer to happening.
Fire last night in one of our downtown condo complexes. A close friend of WCD and many of our readers (who shall remain nameless here to protect his privacy, but the people who know him know who I’m talking about) lives in that condo one floor above the fire. He’s fine, and his condo suffered what he describes as minor smoke and soot damage.
Local gun store (McBride’s) robbed. This is the second break-in at McBride’s that I can remember; I have it in my head that the perps were caught in the act the first time, but I can’t confirm that now. It struck me as odd that they only stole “several” handguns, but this KXAN article describes them as high-end .45 autos. I think I know which guns were taken, as I’ve seen them in the display case. My recollection is that they were Wilson Combat and Les Baeur 1911s. Nice to know that our local crooks have good taste, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to move those easily. Assuming that they want to move them, as opposed to using them personally…
The Macy’s store in Highland Mall is closing. I’m thinking this is probably the end of Highland Mall. I haven’t been there in…I can’t remember how long. And I haven’t been to that Macy’s since shortly after they dropped the Foley’s branding. (I miss Foley’s.) Highland Mall attempted to file for bankruptcy last year, but had the petition dismissed. The mall itself has been in decline for several years; there are a lot of allegations that it has become a hangout for gangs, and a hotbed of criminal activity. The more recent Statesman articles avoid discussing those issues, but you can pick up on them by reading the discussion and this older Statesman article.
Question: if you level the mall, what do you put there as part of the redevelopment process?
The NYT has a regular feature, “Recipe Redux”, where Times writers revisit a classic recipe from the pages of the NYT, and attempt to update it for contemporary tastes/styles/availability of ingredients.
This week’s recipe was for Chocolate-Rum Mousse; the original actually sounds pretty good, at least to my unsophisticated palate.
So how did the NYT‘s chefs (Alex Talbot and Aki Kamozawa, who run the Ideas In Food website) update this recipe?
Should have gone with that idea; sounds good to me. But, no:
Talbot and Kamozawa substituted beets for chocolate in the original recipe
Beets? Beets?! Were these people not loved enough as children?
Okay, let’s be fair: how did it come out?
So…
To the cloud! Sorry. Here’s what I think they’re referring to when they talk about an ISI dispenser
Yeah. The original recipe sounds simple, straightforward, and relatively easy to prepare with nothing more than a blender and a stove. The new one requires relatively specialized kitchen equipment and sounds like crap.
I have to ask: if you did a side-to-side, A-B comparison, would Mr. Latte
First Monday after the end of the NFL regular season, and the firings have begun.
Mangini out as head coach of the Browns.
More coverage from the Cleveland Pain Dealer.
Watch this space for updates. Thanks to Lawrence for the heads-up.
Edited to add: Looks like Kubiak is staying on as Texans head coach, but Frank Bush is out as defensive coordinator.
Little snark here, because I find this kind of sad and disturbing.
Mike Haywood is out as head football coach of the University of Pittsburgh, two and a half weeks after being hired, and before he even coached a game. I’m not sure if that’s a record, but if not, it comes pretty darn close.
Haywood’s firing stems, at least in part, from an arrest on felony domestic violence charges in Indiana. According to the Post-Gazette, Haywood became involved in a domestic dispute with a woman he has a child with; the charge was upgraded to a felony because the alleged domestic violence took place in front of the child.
The ESPN story linked above and, to some extent the Post-Gazette story, also seem to suggest that Haywood’s hiring was somewhat controversial; Haywood didn’t have an extensive record as a head coach before he was hired, while the Post-Gazette suggests the hiring process was rushed and driven entirely by athletic director Steve Pederson.
That’s the thing about being a leader; what you do doesn’t just have an effect on you, but on the people around you as well. It disturbs me that the assistants are getting the shaft, and it bothers me a little that Haywood was let go that quickly (without the university waiting for the legal system to take its course). I’m a little hesitant to go along with some of the speculation that Haywood was an unpopular hire, and the university saw a chance to cut their losses and bring in someone else, because that makes me sound like I’m condoning thumping on one’s woman. (I don’t.) It does make me wonder.
(Hattip: FARK.)
Neither do panthers. In what I expect to be the last sports firing of 2010, John Fox is officially out as head coach of the Carolina Panthers.
(Hattip: FARK.)
I’ve been a little hesitant to discuss the end of Kodachrome.
On the one hand, I am a photo buff (though not very good at it) and this is relevant to my interests. (I actually never shot a roll of Kodachrome, though; I used Ektachrome when I shot slide film, and I generally didn’t shoot slides.)
On the other hand, this has been well covered pretty much everywhere else in the known universe.
On the gripping hand, the NYT has an article this morning about Dwayne’s Photo, the last surviving Kodachrome processor; Dwayne’s is ending Kodachrome processing today. Particularly cool, to me, is the shirt pictured in the article.
And, yes! You can order those shirts from Dwayne’s Photo online! They aren’t even terribly overpriced!
(Note to self: also order a “Live Poultry Fresh Killed” shirt. Thanks, TJIC!)
John McClain takes a break from defeating Hans Gruber and his minions to let us know:
That post is timestamped at 12:10 AM this morning. This is the kind of brilliant analysis that passes for sportswriting at a major daily newspaper.
At 12:31 PM, McClain (having finished with Gruber and his minions) tells us:
Meanwhile, Pro Football Talk is repeating speculation that Kubiak will stay, but the Texans will hire…Wade Phillips?! as a defensive coordinator.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so let me just put one here:
And the owner of FireGaryKubiak.com is taking the site down “due to unrelenting hate mail and threats”. I didn’t think Gary Kubiak had that big a family.
By way of Daring Fireball, in a roundabout way (and, yes, it is kind of old, but it still tickled my gigglebox):
From Jon22, a site I was previously unaware of, but which I am now considering adding to the blogroll. I actually had a lot of trouble picking just one quote of the day from his site: there was also “Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin of the technology world, minus all the fun jokes about the front-door view of Russia.” and “I find myself expanding the English language to properly encompass the unremitting catastrophe that is M. Night Shyamalan’s latest work, inventing words like omnihorrific and vomitacious and spectacuturd.“
One HouChron writer says “Fire him now; don’t let him coach the final game.”
Another HouChron writer says “Firing him now is pointless.”
Meanwhile, the fans are restless and organizing a “Fire Kubiak” rally for Sunday.
And in today’s bulletin from a failing chain of restaurants desperately crying out for relevance, T.G.I. Friday’s is apparently lobbying to have their particular style of bartending (which has a name that I will not dignify by giving it here) made an Olympic sport.
The LAT has a longish summary of how the city of Bell got to where it is today, along with some background on Robert “Ratso” Rizzo.
A few choice quotes:
Hmmm. Perhaps someone should have been reading documents.
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Wait a minute. There was a former mayor who did time? That’s an interesting detail I don’t recall hearing before.
We previously noted the Chapter 11 filing of Mangia Pizza.
Word comes to us now that the Guadalupe location has closed. As far as we know, the other locations are still open. (As a matter of fact, we had an…interesting meal at the Mesa location a few days before Christmas.)
What a day! Once again, we get to combine two more pet obsessions: food and the police blotter!
The Grinch, or someone equally mean, has stolen the main trailer of Lucky J’s Chicken & Waffles, an establishment we have not yet had the chance to try.
Luckily for Lucky J’s, they do have a second trailer (and I thought they were opening a sit-down eatery on Burnet as well), but in the meantime, please be on the lookout for a trailer that looks something like this:
The actual trailer, as far as I know, does not have a hand holding a giant plate of chicken and waffles in front of it.
Edited to add 12/28: Put a leash back on the dagron. The trailer has been found. You may resume normal activities.
Edited to add 12/28 part 2: An arrest has been made.