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Quickies for October 11, 2012.

Thursday, October 11th, 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.

Posted in Austin, Books, Clippings, Law, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Well. Well well well well. Well.

Monday, October 1st, 2012

The significance is not that I happened to stumble across this:

(This being Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up, if you can’t read the cover in the photo taken with CrapCam 2.0!)

The significance is where I found it: on a register endcap at my local H.E.B., where they usually keep magazines, best-selling books (like King and Patterson) and impulse purchase items.

(Edited to add before someone points it out me: H.E.B. is a large local grocery store chain.)

And while my readers outside of Texas may think that this is a particularly conservative state…well, you’d be right, but Austin, and especially the part of Austin I live in, is an Obama stronghold. Seeing this get such prominent display is a bit surprising.

Posted in Books, Guns, Politics | Comments Closed

Guns up!

Friday, September 28th, 2012

Remember the auction we noted earlier in the week? The one that included some of Bonnie and Clyde’s guns?

Well, by way of SayUncle, we learned that there was a bit of a kerfuffle. One of the guns in the auction is a Colt Detective Special that was found taped to Bonnie’s thigh. Frank Hamer, the man who led the posse that reduced Bonnie and Clyde to “a bunch of wet rags” [*], took that gun (and many, if not all, of their other guns) as spoils after the ambush, and it got handed down from Hamer through a couple of other folks before ending up in the auction.

So what’s the problem? The serial number on Bonnie’s gun was obliterated, and BATFE doesn’t much like people selling guns with altered or obliterated serial numbers.  Serial numbers, as I understand it, were actually not required until the Gun Control Act of 1968, so there are guns out there without serial numbers. But if the gun did have a serial number, like Bonnie’s did, and that serial number is defaced or altered, you can’t legally sell the gun.

What to do, what to do? If you’re the auction house, you contact your friendly local BATFE branch. I will now pause for a moment so you can laugh at the juxtaposition of  “friendly” and BATFE.

In this case, though, BATFE issued a new serial number for the gun, and had the gun re-stamped, making it all nice and legal for the auction. SayUncle and some of his commentators seem a little bent out of shape about BATFE doing this; personally, I’d rather have them do this than have the gun confiscated and melted down.

While I was writing this entry, Lawrence sent me an actual link to the auction. Bonnie’s Colt is here.

The “Fitz Special” that I wrote about previously is here. Looking over the auction description, a couple of things jump out at me. There are three documents giving the gun’s provenance, from various law enforcement officers, but there’s no Colt factory letter documenting the gun. The price of a Colt letter, according to their website, is $75; that’s a small percentage of the estimated auction price, and I’d personally like to see one of those letters with the gun before I bid (were I planning to bid; yeah, like I have $50,000). It might help document the story that Clyde stole this gun from a Texas Ranger. I strongly suspect (and the auction notes seem to confirm) that this is not an actual Fitzgerald modified gun, but one done in his style.

Why, yes, as a matter of fact, there is a Smith and Wesson Hand Ejector in this auction. And it has “a copy” of a factory letter. There’s also a “Baby Face” Nelson Safety Hammerless (Third Model) with a S&W factory letter, too. And a .44 Double Action First Model top-break carried by Emmett Dalton, also with factory letter. Except for those three, it seems that choosy gangsters chose Colts.

[*] That description, and some of the other background in this post, comes from Jeff Guinn’s stunning Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde, the definitive work of Bonnie and Clyde scholarship and a book I enthusiastically recommend.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Colt, Guns, Smith and Wesson | 1 Comment »

Random crap, September 26, 2012.

Wednesday, September 26th, 2012

Let us say, hypothetically, you run a restaurant. (I’m fully aware the vast majority of my readers are not crazy or stupid, but play along here.)

You need things like stoves and refrigerators to run a restaurant, right? Those things need to work. If the stove breaks, you can’t cook food. If the cooler breaks, you’re going to lose a lot of stockpiled goods. So when things break, it is important to get them fixed, fast.

What are the economics of restaurant repair? How much can you expect to pay for service? William Grimes has an interesting piece in the NYT today about that subject.

Kitchen Works offers a basic contract for Manhattan restaurants for $425 a month, which puts it on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. When it was open, Tavern on the Green paid $1,000 a month. Like Kitchen Repair Specialists, also a mom-and-pop operation, Kitchen Works, based in Freeport, N.Y., has about 10 trucks that cover the five boroughs and Long Island. Techs can field up to 10 calls a day.

Kitchen Works specializes, from what I can tell, in stoves. Refrigeration contracts run roughly the same.

Speaking of Grimsey, I just finished Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York. I’m trying to decide if I want to write a longer review of it, and where I want to post that if I do, but the short version: this a swell book, and I enthusiastically recommend it. (I’d also recommend purchasing the print version. There are a lot of photos and reproductions of menus in the book, and I’m not sure how well those come across in the Kindle edition.)

She paid $362 in property taxes last year for the acre she lives on. This year, McIntosh County wants $2,312, a jump of nearly 540 percent.

More:

The county also started a new garbage pickup service and added other services, which contributed to the higher tax rates, he said. Sapelo Island residents, however, still have to haul their trash to the dump.
“Our taxes went up so high, and then you don’t have nothing to show for it,” said Cornelia Walker Bailey, the island’s unofficial historian. “Where is my fire department? Where are my water resources? Where is my paved road? Where are the things our tax dollars pay for?”

Remember yesterday’s APD press conference? Remember the chief saying that APD officers should stop putting themselves in front of moving vehicles?

A police officer shot a man who drove a stolen SUV toward him following a brief pursuit in South Austin, Chief Art Acevedo said Tuesday night.

I’m not saying the officer did anything wrong, or violated policy, at this point. Details are still coming in, but it sounds like the gentleman in question (who, according to the Statesman, had 16 felony warrants) may have deliberately driven at the officer. I just think this is worth noting.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Cops, Food, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 25, 2012.

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012

The NYT is reporting the death of Tereska Torrès.

Yeah, I’d never heard of her, either. After the jump, why I’m bringing this up (so to speak). (Strong hint: mature content.)

(more…)

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Hurry home early.

Monday, September 17th, 2012

Mark Kriegel has a new book coming out tomorrow: The Good Son: The Life of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini.

I’ve never been a huge boxing fan, but the Mancini – Duk-koo Kim fight fascinated me even before the Zevon song was released. I’ll be watching for Kriegel’s book.

In the meantime, the NYT has a long article about the fight, adapted from the book.

And for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about when I reference Zevon, or those of you who just want to hear “Boom Boom Mancini”  right now:

Posted in Books, Sports | Comments Closed

Score!

Sunday, September 16th, 2012

This weekend was the grand opening for the new Half-Price Books in Round Rock.

As they usually do, Half-Price was distributing coupons: 40% off one item on Thursday, 30% off on Friday, 20% off on Saturday, and 50% off on Sunday. (I heard one clerk complain that those coupons were only supposed to apply to the Round Rock store, but they made them valid for all the stores in error. I think that clerk was full of it, but that’s just my opinion.)

Anyway, I picked up a few interesting things Thursday through Saturday, including a copy of An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies (at 40% off of half cover price) and Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York (which I didn’t burn a coupon on, as the copy I found was marked down to $4.99).

Today was 50% off day. I had some things I was thinking about picking up, but then I got lucky. Fortunately, I had two coupons…

The new (2010) of Bill Warren’s magnificent book, Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, The 21st Century Edition, complete with Howard Waldrop introduction. Cover is $99, so take half of that, and then take 50% off of that with the coupon…

Hoglegs, Hipshots and Jalapenos, the other collection of Skeeter Skelton’s work from Shooting Times. Some of you may remember me mentioning I found a copy of Good Friends, Good Guns, Good Whisky in a Las Vegas bookstore last year and paid (mumble mumble) for it. This was in a locked glass case at HPB and I nearly walked past it; I’m glad I didn’t. I won’t say how much I paid, but with the coupon, it was about half of the (mumble mumble) price I paid for volume one in Vegas, and nowhere near the asking prices on Amazon.

Squee!

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Movies | 5 Comments »

Ancient Men and Fire.

Thursday, August 16th, 2012

You know, if I had it to do all over again, I’d seriously think about becoming a food anthropologist.

It doesn’t seem like this is a profession that rakes in the big money. But I think it’d be kind of fun to figure out how they made beer 9,000 years ago, or what the Anasazi indians ate, or how teosinte became corn. Why is meat inside some form of dough common across so many cultures?

What prompts this thought? Tuesday night, my mother and I went to see Steven Raichlen’s “Man Food Fire: The Evolution of Barbecue” lecture at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. (We had a very nice meal at Lambert’s beforehand. I had forgotten how much I liked their charcuterie plate.)

I hadn’t really thought much about the relationship between evolutionary biology and cooking. Part of Raichlen’s lecture was that we went from this:

(Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis. Note the large jaw and the protruding attachment points for jaw muscles.)

to this:

(Homo erectus)

largely due to our ancestor’s use of fire to cook meat. I may be glossing over some subtleties here, but the short version is that cooking meat (and other foods) allowed our ancestors to use their food more efficiently, leading both to the evolution away from the large jaw and large jaw muscles, and to an increase in cranial capacity – thus, larger brains to fill the space. And that’s how we got to modern man.

(It isn’t that I don’t trust Raichlen, but I’d really like to sit down and talk about  his ideas with someone like LabRat, who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. By the way, that linked post over at the Atomic Nerds site is well worth reading.)

Some other highlights:

  • Raichlen (and, I assume, his escorts) hit three barbecue places for lunch: Franklin Barbecue, John Muller’s (“tx@bugmenot.com”, “texas”), and…Stiles Switch. I still haven’t made to Franklin (I’m waiting for the circus to die down), and I need to try Muller’s. But Stiles Switch is probably my current favorite barbecue joint (at least in the Austin area) so it fills me with delight that it earned the Raichlen seal of approval. Here’s a review of the Switch from the Statesman.
  • This one goes out to our great and good friend Carol: grilled ice cream, an Azerbaijani recipe that I’d like to try. (Azerbaijan has TV chefs? I wonder if there is Azerbaijani public television, and if it has pledge drives.)
  • This one goes out to our brother-in-law. Raichlen on ceramic cookers (like the Big Green Egg): there’s really not much difference between them, so go with the one that matches your patio furniture best.
  • Packaged charcoal briquets actually originated with Henry Ford, as a method of recycling wood scraps from the Model T. Ford started converting them into charcoal, packaging them, and selling the bags; this venture became the Kingsford company.
  • The Statesman pretty much f’ed up their coverage of this event. The first article I saw on it said it was free, you just had to call and RSVP. A few hours later, they amended that to “free for museum members, $4 for everyone else“, and blamed the museum for the error. I can tell you we were not museum members, and nobody was collecting money for admission. (They were selling Raichlen books, and he did do a signing after the talk.)
  • Raichlen seems to me to be a pretty swell guy. I was impressed not just with his presentation, but his willingness to stay and answer questions afterwards. I think we would have been there all night long if the museum staff hadn’t cut off the Q&A (and he was still answering questions during the signing). My biggest surprise of the night: he has a degree…in French literature. Hmmmm. Maybe there’s hope for my food anthropology dreams after all.
  • Raichlen’s blog, though he hasn’t put up anything from Austin yet. There is stuff in his Twitter feed.

Edited to add: Let me throw this in. The patron saint of barbecue and barbecue pitmasters? Saint Lawrence. This explains much.

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Museums | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 15, 2012.

Wednesday, August 15th, 2012

Various sources, including John Scalzi and the Onion A/V Club, are reporting the passing of noted SF writer and SFWA Grand Master Harry Harrison.

I never met Mr. Harrison (though I suspect we attended some of the same Worldcons) and I wasn’t well read in much of his work. I should probably get a copy of Make Room! Make Room!

But I was a big fan of the first five “Stainless Steel Rat” books, especially The Stainless Steel Rat for President, the first one I read in the series. What’s not to like about a super-competent intergalactic con man turned quasi-good guy (and who manages to pick up a little on the side in between saving the universe)?

There was a quote in the first book that I found rather striking at the time:

We are the rats in the wainscoting of society – we operate outside of their barriers and outside of their rules. Society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as the old wooden buildings had more rats than the concrete buildings that came later. But they still had rats. Now that society is all ferroconcrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps between the joints, and it takes a smart rat to find them. A stainless steel rat is right at home in this environment.
It is a proud and lonely thing to be a stainless steel rat – and it is the greatest experience in the galaxy if you can get away with it. The sociological experts can’t seem to agree why we exist, some even doubt that we do. The most widely accepted theory says that we are victims of delayed psychological disturbance that shows no evidence in child-hood when it can be detected and corrected and only appears later in life. I have naturally given a lot of thought to the topic and I don’t hold with that idea at all.
A few years back I wrote a small book on the subject – under a nom de plume of course – that was rather well received. My theory is that the aberration is a philosophical one, not a psychological one. At a certain stage the realisation striked through that one must either live outside of society’s bonds or die of absolute boredom. There is no future or freedom in the circumscribed life and the only other life is complete rejection of the rules. There is no longer room for the soldier of fortune or the gentleman adventurer who can live both within and outside of society. Today it is all or nothing. To save my own sanity I chose the nothing.

When I first started using BBS systems, back in the early 80s, I took my online pseudonym from Harrison’s character, for precisely those reasons.

Rest in peace, Mr. Harrison.

Posted in Books, Obits | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: August 13, 2012.

Monday, August 13th, 2012

Gregory Powell, one of the two Onion Field killers, is dead.

Officer Ian Campbell was unavailable for comment.

Edited to add: Longer obit in the LAT. Karl Hettinger was also unavailable for comment. But Big Joe Wambaugh did have something to say.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 6, 2012.

Monday, August 6th, 2012

This was on FARK’s entertainment tab over the weekend, but I wanted to make note of it here as well.

De’Andre McCullough, one of the pivotal characters in David Simon and Ed Burns’ book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, died of an overdose last Wednesday.

I’m not sure what else I can say about this, other than to recommend the Simon and Burns book if you haven’t read it. There’s a surprisingly decent discussion going on in the FARK comments thread.

And for what it may be worth, here’s De’Andre as Lamar in “The Wire”:


Edited to add: I couldn’t pull this up before, but David Simon has a nice post on his blog.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 1, 2012.

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

Noted author and William F. Buckley foe Gore Vidal. (NYT. LAT. WP. No A/V Club yet: when they post it, I’ll add it here.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

After action report: Las Vegas, NV 2012.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

I don’t have much new to report as far as equipment, but I do have a couple of notes on existing stuff. DEFCON for the past few years has run a “secure” network using MSCHAPv2 authentication.

  1. This worked fine on the Kindle Fire. I was able to log in and browse whenever the network was working. However, there seems to be some sort of bug in the Kindle Fire: after a certain amount of time, the wifi setting on the Fire would either stop responding completely (on/off switch wouldn’t do anything) or would immediately crash (with an error message) as soon as I tried to open the setting.
  2. The default Network Manager on Ubuntu 12.04 would not connect to the “secure” network at all, but just constantly brought up the authentication prompt. Google turned up more than a few reports of Ubuntu issues with Network Manager and MS-CHAPv2 authenticated networks, so it seems this is a known issue. I worked around this by downloading and installing wicd, which was able to connect. However, wicd does not appear to save network settings, so every time I wanted to connect to the network, I had to re-enter the configuration.

(In general, I’m seeing more and more problems with project e and Ubuntu 12.04. I suspect some of these may be issues caused by doing several upgrade installs in succession, so I may try doing a backup of /home, reformatting project e, and doing a scratch install and restore of 12.04.)

Food: I had excellent meals at Lotus of Siam (the sea bass drunken noodles) and at Piero’s Italian Cuisine, which is a very old-school Italian restaurant near the convention center.

That was some swell osso bucco. And I don’t think I paid much more for it than I paid for osso bucco at Ciola’s when they were still open.

I also broke with one of my rules and went back to Shabu Shabu Paradise again. In my defense:

  1. I really like these people and want them to be enormously successful.
  2. I haven’t been there since my last trip with Andrew and Mike the Musicologist.
  3. I kind of have a tiny little crush on the waitress. Who, by the way, recognized me from my previous visits, even though I was clean-shaven last time. (I think she’s married to the chef, so nothing’s going to come of that.)

I also had a good meal at Mint Indian Bistro, and very good breakfasts at Blueberry Hill on Flamingo and The Egg and I on Sahara. (The rule doesn’t apply to breakfast, as it is very very hard to find good breakfast places that aren’t casino buffets, Denny’s, or IHOPs in Vegas. If anybody does have a recommendation for a good breakfast place in Las Vegas, please feel free to drop it into the comments.)

I’ve been driving past Hofbräuhaus Las Vegas for years now, considering giving them a try and then not going after all. This time, thanks to Tam inspiring a German food craving in me, I thought I’d give it a shot. The verdict: meh. It wasn’t a horrible meal. The service was pleasant and efficient. But it seemed like I paid a fair amount of money for pretty average food. Walburg is better and cheaper and really not that bad a drive if I go there from work. (You’d be hard-pressed to spend $50+ at Walburg without either being too full to move or too drunk to drive.)

I drove past Flavor Flav’s House of Flavor several times (it is very close to my preferred ATM in Las Vegas, which, in turn, is far enough away from DEFCON that I’m not any more paranoid than usual about using that ATM), and I regret not getting a photo.

I did get some photos (but they didn’t come out well) of “Lynyrd Skynyrd BBQ & Beer“. BBQ and beer? I can haz both?

(By the way, I was never offered a full can of soda on any of my Southwest flights. But I did get a full can of drinking water between PHX and AUS.)

Thanks to: Everyone at DEFCON 20 (staff, goons, presenters, and attendees), the folks at Shabu Shabu Paradise, Lotus of Siam, the Egg and I, Blueberry Hill, and Mint Indian Bistro, the Mob Museum, Amber Unicorn Books, Greyhound’s Books, Borepatch for linky-love, and anyone else I missed.

Posted in Books, DEFCON 20, Food, Kindleing, linux, Mixology, project_e, Travel | 2 Comments »

Quote of the day.

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

“I am a martini man, myself. Over six weeks we used up forty-six bottles of gin and a little less than half a bottle of vermouth. I like martinis dry.”
—Robert Ruark, Horn of the Hunter

(In case you were wondering, 46 bottles over six weeks works out to seven and 2/3rds bottles a week, or a little over a bottle of gin a day. That’s split three ways, though: Ruark, his wife, and their guide. Figuring 750 ml bottles, that’s close to 9.2 ounces of gin a day each. Ruark mentions at one point that they kill the bottle with three drinks each, so that’s something like three ounces of gin per drink. Plus unknown amounts of beer and brandy.)

(I enjoy reading Ruark. I wish more of his work were still in print; I found Horn at one of those used bookstores in Vegas, and spent downtime during the trip reading it.

But I get a funny feeling whenever Ruark talks about drinking, like in the last two chapters of The Old Man and the Boy, or as he does a few paragraphs later in Horn: “I can drink two bottles of wine at lunch in Rome or Paris or Madrid, top it off with three brandies, and feel marvelous all day. A glass of wine at lunch, two glasses at dinner, in New York, would keep me in bed with the miseries for half a week.”)

(This is, of course, a man who would die at 49 of “complications of cirrhosis of the liver”.)

Posted in Books, Guns, Mixology, Ruark | Comments Closed

What the frack is wrong with you people?

Wednesday, July 18th, 2012

Not “you people” as in my regular readers. I’m sure you’re all tall, strong, above average in IQ, and every one of your bodily functions smells like a vanilla Glade plug-in.

No, I’m talking about the rest of the Internet who doesn’t read my blog and seems to be overrun with a massive sense of entitlement.

Item 1: The existence of the GR Bullies site. “GR Bullies” is apparently a website devoted to combating “bullying” on the GoodReads website (for values of “bullying” that seem to include posting negative reviews) by…acting like misogynistic bullies themselves. Good plan, guys; I’m sure Big Fred Nietzsche would approve. Or maybe not. I commend to your attention the take of John Scalzi, an actual professional writer who gets bad reviews from time to time, on this subject. (I also recommend reading the other three writers Scalzi links.)

Item 2: The existence of ChickLitGirls, a site that takes money for reviews, only posts positive reviews, and, when it is politely suggested that their pay-for-review policy may not be 100% clear, issues bumptious lawsuit threats.

(“bumptious”. Such a great word. I need to work that into my vocabulary, along with “gargantuan“.)

Item 3: “How dare you think Dark Knight Rises isn’t the greatest thing since the invention of fire?”

Item 4: “…those like my son who have disabilities have the right to live life with access to everything people who aren’t handicapped do.” So, therefore, Netflix is obligated to closed-caption streaming video. And, no, providing closed-captioned DVDs isn’t good enough. I am so sick and tired of hearing people like Ellen Seidman talk about “rights” without making a distinction between liberty rights and claim rights.

There are some things that should require accommodation; for example, access to governmental services. And it may be good business for Netflix to make this kind of accommodation. Right now, Netflix feels that it isn’t. (As other people have pointed out, Netflix gets the material it uses for streaming from studios, that material probably does not have closed captions, and the studios would be rightfully upset if Netflix started altering their property.) If you want to prove to Netflix that they’re wrong, don’t use the service, or start your own competing service with closed captions. If Netflix looses enough business, they’ll change their mind. But you don’t have a right to closed captioned streaming video, or, for that matter, to “access to everything people who aren’t handicapped do”. Down this path lies madness: should we build a wheelchair ramp to the top of Half Dome?

[Edited to add: Hattip on item 4 to Walter Olson at Overlawyered.]

Posted in Books, Clippings, Movies, Sarcasm, Stupid | Comments Closed

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