Archive for the ‘Clippings’ Category

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Art, damn it, art! watch (#36 in a series)

Thursday, May 9th, 2013

BERLIN — A Nazi-themed production of the Wagner opera “Tannhaeuser,” which featured scenes of gas chambers and the execution of a family, has been canceled in Germany after some audience members had to receive medical treatment for shock.

More:

At the opening of the opera Saturday evening, naked performers could be seen falling to the floor in glass cubes filled with white fog. The production showed a family having their heads shaved and then being shot. The character of Venus, goddess of love, was depicted dressed in a Nazi uniform and accompanied by SS thugs, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel. The production was booed by audience members, German media reports said.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Music, Nazis, Wagner | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 8, 2013.

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

“I have no idea, I have no idea,” said Philip Levine, the former United States poet laureate, who has lived in Fresno since the late 1950s. But his enthusiasm was tempered by worries over the proliferation of poets laureate. “If you gave the Congressional Medal of Honor to everybody who got drafted, in a way you water down the award,” he said. “Do all these towns need a poet laureate? That’s what I wonder. Does Fresno, for that matter?”

(Fresno is paying their poet laureate $2,000 for a two-year term.)

Paging Andy Ihnatko. Andy Ihnatko to the white courtesy phone, please.

(Seriously, this does not strike me as a good idea.)

“When things got tough or extremely difficult on the House floor, we could count on Jesse to bring levity to an otherwise daunting situation with a bad joke or a one-man skit,” she wrote. “Jesse was the highlight of our karaoke nights and always made everyone feel like an integral part of, and not apart from, various activities.”

“She” is Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (D-Ohio), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Edited to add: Ken over at Popehat has a post up flaming the LAT and other newspapers (and, sort of by implication, your obedient servant) for seizing on the karaoke angle and taking out of the context it was in.

More guns, less crime.

The Statesman has been all over the collapse of RunTex (a local running shoe store, which was also active in various community events) like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition. I haven’t paid much attention to the story because I’m not a runner and didn’t care about RunTex. I remember my sister (who competes in triathlons) telling me about going there a while back and being totally unable to find any shoes that fit her. (And my sister does not have giant mutant feet.)

In that vein, I found this Statesman column rather interesting. It looks like my sister wasn’t the only person who had that problem…

On recent, long Saturday runs with my Gazelle pace group, when the conversation meanders from work and family stories to movies and smoothie recipes, someone occasionally would mention that they had tried to buy a pair of shoes from the Riverside location’s diminishing selection. Stories of failed attempts to buy new shoes resonated. “I used to shop there all the time” had become a familiar sentence.

Edited to add: A friend of WCD told us a similar story in email; he went in looking for the Nike shoes that would work with their iPhone application and transmitter. They didn’t have any shoes in his size, let alone the Nike ones. When he inquired, they told him “We’re not a shoe store. We support the running lifestyle.”

“We support the running lifestyle.” WHAT THE FRACK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?

“We’re not a shoe store.” Yeah. Now, you’re nothing.

This is just further evidence towards my theory: the problems with the American economy have much to do with the fact that nobody wants to take money for goods and services any longer. I’m not kidding: I can’t count the number of experiences I’ve had, or been told about recently, involving wanting to make a purchase and not being able to get help, get questions answered, or get people to take money.

Posted in Books, California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 8, 2013.

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Ray Harryhausen. NYT. LAT. A/V Club appreciation. Lawrence. Popehat.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Week of Gatsby: Day 3

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Why isn’t “The Great Gatsby” in the public domain? F. Scott Fizgerald has been dead for nearly 73 years, after all.

This is 19 Zillicoa Street in Asheville, North Carolina:


View Larger Map

This building is Homewood. Homewood was part of Highland Hospital, and was the home of Dr. Robert S. Carroll and his wife, Grace Potter Carroll. Dr. Carroll ran the hospital, and his wife taught music lessons. (Nina Simone was one of her students.)

In 1939, Dr. Carroll turned management of the hospital over to Duke University’s Neuropsychiatric Department. It was while Duke was managing the hospital that the final act of a great American tragedy took place.

On the night of March 10, 1948, a fire broke out at Highland. Various reports say the fire started in the kitchen and moved upwards through the dumbwaiter shaft. The fire escapes were made out of wood and also caught fire. By the time it was extinguished, nine women were dead.

One of the women who died was Zelda Fitzgerald, the widow of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Zelda had a troubled life. I’m not an expert, but the consensus opinion I’ve seen is that she probably suffered from some form of bi-polar disorder, and medicated herself in an attempt to deal with it. She was in and out of Highland between 1936 and her death.

This is the closest thing I could find to an obituary for Zelda Fitzgerald. (Local cache if that doesn’t come up.) I hope wherever she is, she found the peace that evaded her in life.

(Information about Highland Hospital drawn from the NPS page.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Gatsby, Law | 1 Comment »

Week of Gatsby: Day 2

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013

Real estate people like Gatsby.

There are the Gatsby condominiums on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and the Fitzgerald apartment building on the other side of Central Park. There is a Gatsby Lane carved out of a subdivision in Montgomery, Ala., where Mr. Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, was raised. And there is a 50-year-old company created by the real estate titan Peter Sharp and his longtime partner, Norman Peck, that still exists today.

That company, by the way, is “East Egg”.

In the novel, Mr. Peck explained, wealthy people, including Jay Gatsby, lived in a fictional part of Long Island called West Egg, “but the better people lived in East Egg.”

In other news, have you driven a Gatsby lately?

(Nice looking cars, but not $34.5K worth of nice looking in my opinion. Assuming these people are still building cars, which I admit is a questionable assumption.)

Posted in Books, Cars, Clippings, Gatsby | Comments Closed

Municipal corruption watch.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Hey, remember the city of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania? Sold bonds to build a new trash incinerator? Then sold more bonds to pay off the earlier bonds? Remember some jackass saying

If you or I did this, they’d call it a Ponzi scheme, and we’d be going to Federal pound you in the ass prison.

Good times, good times. Guess what?

In the first such settlement ever agreed to by a U.S. city, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s state capital, has agreed to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges accusing the city of securities fraud for making “misleading public statements” as the cash-starved city’s finances deteriorated in the late 2000s and debts piled up in the wake of a failed public incinerator project and other questionable borrowing.

Yeah. That wasn’t an individual charged with securities fraud, that was the city itself. Noted:

Under the settlement agreement, Harrisburg didn’t admit it did anything wrong, and agreed to stop doing it.

This comes to our attention by way of Shall Not Be Questioned, which also points out that Mayor Linda Thompson (who is running for re-election) is a member of Criminal Mayors Who Don’t Want You To Have Guns.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Awards season.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Pop quiz:

Fäviken: Understanding the Genius Behind the World’s 34th Best Restaurant

Is that a headline from the Onion, or a real article from a food blog?

Answer: That’s a real article in the current “issue” of Dark Rye, which won the James Beard Award for “Best Group Food Blog” this year.

In conclusion, we introduce the RITUAL edition of Dark Rye, which is to say CIRCLES – that’s where it’s at. The essence of ritual. It all begins when we rise once again to make the perfect cup of coffee. We scramble eggs. Butter toast. Breakfast preparation as meditation.

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

Sorry. Where were we?

Again. Always again. Days as snakes that swallow their tails. Months, moon cycles. The ceaseless rotation of seasons. From Big Bang to apocalypse. From the eruption and destruction of every single moment – now, now, now. We’re born. We die. Who doesn’t dig a juggler?

I’d write more on the subject of “Dark Rye” (Why does the design make me stabby? Why are they endorsing the crank theory of Ayurveda?) but Ryan Sutton over at “The Bad Deal” has already made about as pithy a comment as I’ve seen.

(I know there are some people in my audience who feel that New York in general, and New York dining specifically, is overblown in the food news/food blog scene. I kind of agree with this in general: when it comes to Sandy, though, that was one of the most important food stories of the year, and there were lots of real food blogs that covered it well.)

In better news, the Edgar Award winners have been announced. I like Dennis Lehane a lot, so I’m pretty happy Live by Night won. I have a copy somewhere, I think, but I haven’t read it yet; or, for that matter, the other nominated novels. (I am also kind of happy that Ace Atkins got a nomination for a non-Spenser book.)

True crime: I didn’t read any of this year’s nominees. Midnight in Peking looks interesting, but I never got around to picking it up. I probably will next time I’m at Half-Price. The other book people were talking about was People Who Eat Darkness. My problem with that is: I’ve already read about the Lucie Blackman case in Jake Adelstein’s excellent Tokyo Vice, and I’m just not all that damn interested in reading about the case again.

Critical/biographical: I hope The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics is a swell book. I thought Books to Die For was a worthy nominee and a delightful book, so Scientific Sherlock darn well better be an even better book.

I finally got my hands on a copy of In Pursuit of Spenser just this past Friday, so I can’t comment on it yet. I suspect I will be writing a longer review/appreciation once I do finish that book. But it is a promising sign to me that three of this year’s nominees for best novel were also contributors to Pursuit. (Lehane, Atkins, and Lyndsay Faye, in case you were wondering.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

Chester, Chester…

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Eric Toth is allegedly a bad guy. He stands accused of being a child molester and child pornographer. (I use the word “alleged” because he has not been convicted yet, though the evidence against him appears to be pretty strong.)

Toth was indicted on these charges in 2008 and went on the run. He managed to avoid capture, even though he was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and made the FBI “10 Most Wanted” list, until a few weeks ago. Authorities found him in Nicaragua and shipped him back to the US to face charges.

Why do I note this here? Because there’s an Austin connection: Toth lived here for a while…

Colleagues knew the speaker under a different name as an Austin-based tech writer and computer technician they described as brilliant and friendly.

More:

The man people identified as Toth seemed to grow bolder. A few months earlier, he freelanced his first blog post for SMBNation, a small-business technology company, under an assumed name, according to people at the company and entries on the blog. In the months that followed, he contributed regularly to the blog on everything from Facebook’s initial public offering to cloud computing and wrote magazine articles.
An online biography says he was a “banker once upon a time” but didn’t much like it. The biography hints that “there’s even more to his story.”

He was invited to speak at a SMBNation conference in October, but skipped the country instead.

One of the big questions on my mind (and I’m sure other people in Austin are asking the same thing): did I ever meet this man?

Paul Mullen, the owner at the time [of P.C. Guru, where Toth worked – DB], said he had no reason to suspect the man, because his driver’s license and Social Security number checked out. Toth allegedly used bogus papers and stole identities during his time as a fugitive. The Post is withholding the name the man in Austin used because the identity may have been stolen, too.

I’m just going to point out that if you do a carefully crafted Google search using the phrase “banker once upon a time” and using the “site:smbnation.com” parameter, you’ll get results. And those results match the last name Toth was using when he was captured. (In Nicaragua, he was going by “Robert Shaw Walker“.)

I share some of the qualms the WP has, which is why I’m not directly linking to the bio on SMBNation. But I want to point out to the Posties that they’re not quite as clever as they think they are; the art of crafting Google searches like that is hardly arcane or mysterious.

(Also, SMBNation? You might want to address this somewhere on your site.)

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

“Firing” watch

Sunday, May 5th, 2013

P.J. Carlesimo out as coach of the Brooklyn Nets.

I put “firing” in quotes because Carlesimo was acting as an interim coach: as you may recall, the team fired Avery Johnson in December. (Wasn’t he great in “Spenser: For Hire” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”?)

Carlesimo went 35-19 as interim coach, and the Nets did go to the playoffs. But apparently that wasn’t good enough, and the team is looking for a change.

Posted in Clippings, Firings, Sarcasm, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 5, 2013.

Sunday, May 5th, 2013

Mildly interesting NYT article: Revisiting L.B.J.’s Austin, One Address at a Time. I would have liked for this article to be a little longer, but some of the places I have in mind (such as El Patio) are actually associated more with Mrs. Johnson than the president.

Weer’d is at the NRA convention, so I’m going to step on his “Gun Death” territory: we must ban the deadly killer assault limos! Nobody needs a high capacity vehicle to get anywhere: you can get by with a Smart Car!

(Also.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 4, 2013.

Saturday, May 4th, 2013

This is kind of surprising to see in the NYT: Tom Knapp, noted exhibition shooter.

From 1993 to 2004, Mr. Knapp made and broke his own records for the number of hand-thrown clay targets struck in a single round and for speed in doing so. His last record — 10 airborne targets hit (or “dusted,” in shooting-speak) in 2.2 seconds, each struck with a separate round — was set at an exhibition in Murfreesboro, Tenn., on Oct. 10, 2004.

More:

Mr. Knapp said he had been inspired by trick shooters of the next generation, most notably Herb Parsons, a showman who toured the country from the 1930s through the ’50s and often worked in Hollywood as a trick-shot stand-in for stars like Jimmy Stewart in “Winchester ’73” (1950), which involves a shooting contest.
“Parsons was probably the greatest of the modern era — and in my book, after him, Tom Knapp comes a very close second,” said Warren Newman, curator at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., a site of trick-shooting exhibitions. “What these two fellows did was always so much more than just shooting.”
He added: “What they did was amaze people, put on a real show. They were outstanding professionals.”

Posted in Clippings, Guns | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 4, 2013.

Saturday, May 4th, 2013

I feel sure I’ve written before about the Feds and their effort to shut down the Mongols Motorcycle Club by…seizing their trademarks. Because, of course, not having a logo will deter members of the Mongols from engaging in criminal activity, and they’d never think of something like adopting a new logo, or doing without. After all, how can you make meth without a snazzy logo?

Oddly, though, I can’t find that post. But by way of Reason‘s “Hit and Run”, I have discovered a couple of updates:

  1. The Feds first effort to seize the Mongols trademarks failed. Badly.

    Loy and Alan Mansfield, an attorney with the San Diego-based Consumer Law Group of California, successfully challenged the Justice Department’s last effort to seize the Mongols’ trademark through the tool of asset forfeiture. Citing the government’s “unlawful action based on an ungrounded and unsubstantiated legal theory,” a federal judge also ordered the Justice Department to reimburse the attorneys $253,206.

    So not only did the government not get what they were looking for, they have to pay out a quarter million dollars worth of taxpayer’s money and clean up the garbage.

  2. Typically for the Federal government, if it doesn’t work, do it harder: they’ve filed to seize the trademark again.

In other news, I was considering writing an extended rant about the Statesman and their forthcoming paywall. But now I don’t have to: Lawrence has saved me the trouble, in a post with charts and graphs and words and all that good stuff. I commend it to your attention.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Media | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 2, 2013.

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013

Jimmy Savile isn’t the only British entertainer caught up in scandal:

…what surely qualifies as one of the more ambitious, and possibly quixotic, law enforcement investigations in Britain in recent years: Operation Yewtree, a nationwide inquiry into sexual offenses that may or may not have been committed decades ago. In American terms, it is as if Captain Kangaroo, Dick Clark and Jerry Lewis were suddenly being accused of committing sexual crimes dating back 30 or 40 years.

I don’t want to seem like I’m trivializing this. But going on:

The result has been a flurry of arrests, about a dozen involving very public people. But even as women’s rights advocates and others applaud a new era of openness, in which once-cowed victims feel able to speak out, lawyers for the high-profile suspects say that in the current climate, the accusers appear to be going out of their way to opportunistically target celebrities.

Among the people caught up in this:

One of the biggest names on the list is Rolf Harris, 83, an Australian-born artist, singer and children’s television host who, according to British newspaper reports, has been accused by a woman of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. Mr. Harris, also famous for his didgeridoo playing, performed for Queen Elizabeth II at her jubilee last year. Channel 5 pulled his two television programs off the air — “Olive the Ostrich” and “Rolf’s Animal Clinic,” which was showing in repeats — pending the investigation.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Crap. Crap crap crap crappity crap.

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Freewheeling Bicycles, official purveyor of bicycles, accessories, and repairs to sportsfirings.com, is closing at the end of May.

The business was still profitable but its location, at 2401 San Gabriel Street, “ended up being too expensive for a bike shop,” said owner Angela Prescott, 62. “Once the overlay plan went in, property taxes doubled, and that’s a huge thing to try to absorb. The percentage you pay out in rent is too high.”

This makes me sad. There are other bike shops in Austin: REI in particular isn’t a bad place to go. But the people at Freewheeling were always nice and helpful to me, and the store felt like it had a personality. That’s something lacking at REI, or Bicycle Sport Shop, or pretty much all the other shops I’ve found in Austin.

Posted in Clippings, Cycling, Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 1, 2013.

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Deanna Durbin, movie star of the 1930s and 1940s. NYT.

Ms. Durbin had remained determinedly out of public view since 1949, when she retired to a village in France with her third husband.

More:

Ms. Durbin, who gave almost no interviews after she left Hollywood, did send reporters a letter in 1958 that read in part: “I was a typical 13-year-old American girl. The character I was forced into had little or nothing in common with myself — or with other youth of my generation, for that matter. I could never believe that my contemporaries were my fans. They may have been impressed with my ‘success.’ but my fans were the parents, many of whom could not cope with their own youngsters. They sort of adopted me as their ‘perfect’ daughter.”

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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