This weekend has been rather busy, so I’m a little behind in blogging.
Friday was the annual barbecue roadtrip, in which a group of us rent a nice car and drive out into the Hill Country in search of barbecue.
After the jump, photos and commentary from the roadtrip, as well as the Texas Linux Fest:
The NYT finally got around to publishing an obit for “Coots” Matthews.
Also among the dead: Morris Jeppson, one of the two men who armed the atomic bomb on board the Enola Gay.
By the way, “new” copies of The Last Train from Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back
Here’s the Statesman summary of the first day of the Billy Joe Shaver trial. It is hard to judge from just the prosecution’s side of the case, but I’m not thinking it looks good for Mr. Shaver; all the testimony so far is from people stating the shooting was unprovoked.
Edited to add: The LAT is reporting the death of Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols.
Matthews worked closely with the legendary Paul “Red” Adair and Asger “Boots” Hansen in the oil well firefighting industry. Matthews and Hansen later left Adair and founded the Boots and Coots well control firm.
…Adair, Matthews and Hansen worked some of the industry’s most notorious blowouts, including a fire in Algeria in 1961 known as the “Devil’s Cigarette Lighter.” Experts thought the fire, which billowed 450 feet in the air, would take years to extinguish. They did the job in just a few weeks.
Edited to add: John Forsythe. The LAT fails to mention his lead role in “Kitten With a Whip“, which Joe Bob Briggs argues is a vastly under-appreciated film. (If you haven’t read them yet, let me recommend Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History
Because I know Lawrence is endlessly fascinated by the work of Frank Gehry, here’s a link to the LAT and Gehry’s preliminary designs for the Eisenhower Memorial. (Also, I’ve added a new “Gehry” subcategory to the “Art” category.)
Meanwhile, the NYT has a nice article on the art and music scene in Burma Myanmar .
This doesn’t really fit into the “Art, damn it, art!” category, but I do want to throw in a link to the complete 6 part LAT series on Philip K. Dick in Orange County.
Patrick over at the excellent Popehat blog has picked up on Tyler Cowan’s “Ten Book” meme, and posted his own list of ten books.
This seems like an interesting idea for a post, and I have much respect for Patrick (as well as the other Popehatters), so…why not? Ten books which, from the original Marginal Revolution post, “have influenced your view of the world”.
, by Robert J. Ringer. Other people came to libertarianism through Ayn Rand, or Milton Friedman: I came to libertarianism through Ringer’s book, then read Rand and Nozick and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and all the other classics.
, by William Gibson. This is the book that restored my faith in science fiction, which I felt had become stagnant in the early 1980’s. It also made me want to be a Gibsonian protagonist, but that was in another country, and besides the wench is dead.
, by Richard Feynman (with Ralph Leighton). At one point in my life, I wanted to be a physicist. For various reasons, this didn’t work out, but Feynman’s approach to looking at the world was still a major influence on me. (The link above is a bit of a cheat, as it goes to the more recent omnibus that contains Surely You’re Joking, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and some extra material. If you happen to know a smart high school or junior high student, you could do a lot worse than to buy two copies of this book; one for you, and one for them.)
, by Dashiell Hammett. Cheating again, but the complete Hammett novels were a Christmas present one year. Hammett’s work, especially Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon, got me back into reading mysteries, and are a major influence on my own writing.
, edited by Jerry Pournelle. I read this not long after Restoring the American Dream. Pournelle got laughed at a lot in the mid and late 80’s for his militaristic SF anthologies, like There Will Be War, but The Survival of Freedom is a shockingly strong anthology. It contains classic stories by William Tenn, Larry Niven, and Harlan Ellison (“‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” was the first Ellison story I consciously read.), essays on libertarianian and anarcho- libertarianian philosophy by people like David Friedman, and even some great poetry. (This was also the first place I ever ran into Robinson Jeffers: “The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean” is still one of my favorite poems.)
, by Oliver Sacks. At the time I read this, I was very interested in artificial intelligence, and had this idea that we could understand and develop machine cognition by understanding how the human mind worked, and especially how it failed. That didn’t exactly pan out, but the work of Oliver Sacks started me on an amateur interest in neurology that continues to this day.
, by Donald Norman. Donald Norman is a personal hero of mine (as is Dr. Sacks). This is the book that got me started thinking seriously about human interface design. Oddly enough, Norman’s work (especially the essay “Coffee Cups in the Cockpit“) was also one of the things that started me thinking about leadership.
. As a little kid, I loved the How and Why Wonder Books, and this was probably my favorite of the lot. I owe my fondness for firearms at least partially to this (and partially to growing up around guns).
, by Frederick Forsyth. When I was a little kid, I also hated fiction. I remember my elementary school teachers laughing at my comment that “Fiction is gross.” But much of the fiction targeted to people of my age at that time was “gross”, for values of “gross” that include “boring and condescending” (I didn’t know the word “condescending” at the time): it wasn’t until after I became an adult that fiction for kids and young adults began the great movement in the direction of dealing with the real world. The Day of the Jackal was the first fiction book I remember reading that had that feeling of “making it seem real like”. (I was also unfamiliar with the word “verisimilitude”.) Forsyth and Arthur “Airport” Hailey were pretty much my entire fiction diet for longer than I care to remember.Honorable mentions: Edward Tufte, especially The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which taught me that (in the immortal words of the great Lester Freamon) “all the pieces matter”. Wambaugh’s The Onion Field, which I’ve mentioned in passing before, and will probably come back to later. I’ve deliberately avoided mentioning the Bible and other religious texts, as I feel this violates the spirit (if not the letter) of Cowan’s meme. And Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984
Edited to add: And, dammit, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
At Half-Price Books not too long ago, I found Kipling Abroad: Traffics and Discoveries from Burma to Brazil
There’s a rather striking paragraph in one of the essays, “Some Aspects of Travel”. Kipling’s talking about why some men seem to be able to inspire impossible efforts from people everyone else considers to be no-accounts, while other men couldn’t motivate a hand-picked crew of highly skilled individuals to organize a piss-up in a brewery.
A man was asked some time ago why he invariably followed a well-known man into most uncomfortable situations. He replied: ‘All the years I have known So-and-so, I’ve never known him to say whether he was cold or hot, wet or dry, sick or well; but I’ve never known him forget a man who was.’ Here is another reply to a similar question about another leader, who was notoriously a little difficult to get on with. One of his followers wrote: ‘So-and-so is all you say and more; and he grows worse as he grows older; but he will take the blame of any mistake any man of his makes, and he doesn’t care what lie he tells to save him.’ And when I wrote to find out why a man I knew preferred not to go out with another man whom I also knew, I got this illuminating diagnosis: ‘So-and-so is not afraid of anything on earth except the newspapers. So I have a previous engagement.’ In the face of these documents, it looks as though self-sacrifice, loyalty, and a robust view of moral obligations go far to make a leader, the capacity to live alone and inside himself being taken for granted.
The NYT, in the person of John T. Edge, covers the breakfast taco scene in Austin.
The NYT also gives us a short piece on The Gastronomica Reader
The Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood has lost its lease! Everything must go! Seriously, this is an interesting story, with overtones of “Don’t tick off the Mouse.”
Shocked, shocked I am, that movie theaters don’t want to book a movie that’s already out on DVD, even if it did win the Academy Award.
Edited to add: This hasn’t gotten quite the attention I expected, so I’ll throw in a couple of links to LA Observed on the whale sushi scandal. I particularly like the Jonathan Gold quote: “Restaurants resort to gimmicks generally because their chefs just aren’t very good.” You don’t say?
It is unclear if the trial will continue without Brown’s presence, because under Texas law, he may be found to have “voluntarily absenced” himself, Gotro said.
This is for values of “voluntarily absenced himself” that include shooting himself in the head, in the front yard of a witness.
Willie Davis, former center fielder for the Dodgers and other teams, including the 1975 Texas Rangers.
Edited to add: I’ll throw Corey Haim in here, too. This story hadn’t broken when I started working on the blog earlier today.
H.L. Mencken once said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Apparently, this applies to New Zealand as well.
The WP has a brief review of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
The papers of David Foster Wallace are going to the Ransom Center at UT.
Obit watch: Malcolm Glover. Yeah, you probably never heard of him, unless you lived in San Francisco. Glover spent 56 years working for the Examiner and the Chronicle, most of those as a police reporter. This is a guy who was hired personally by William Randolph Hearst at the age of 12 (he didn’t start working for the papers until he was 16). Glover must have had some amazing stories. I hope someone wrote some of them down. (Hattip: Jimbo.)
Houston’s Clear Thinkers links to an article from Spiegel Online about the crash of Air France Flight 447. The current theory of the crash (they haven’t recovered the black boxes yet) seems to be that the pitot tubes iced up; those tubes are a major component of the system that drives the airspeed indicators, so when they iced up, the airspeed indicators started giving bad readings. Worse yet, the airspeed indicators were feeding bad information to the Airbus flight computer; this may have resulted in a loss of control which led to the crash.
This is the kind of accident that chills me. There’s very little even an experienced pilot can do to get out of this type of failure, especially at night, over water, with almost no visual references. For me, the most disturbing segment of Charlie Victor Romeo is the Aeroperú 603 crash, which happened under similar (but not identical) circumstances. If you read the CVR transcript, or hear it performed live, the crew’s confusion and desperation comes across pretty clearly. (The same incident was also used for an early episode of the Air Emergency
Serdar Argic, call your office, please.
Edited to add: Popehat is on a roll. Go here for more Armenian genocide commentary. Meanwhile, Ken has what I’ll go ahead and call the quote of the day:
Ah, fair food. (Okay, so technically the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo isn’t a fair. I consider it to be close enough for government work.) Chicken-fried meatballs from the Mandola family.
Edited to add: The HouChron has thown up (and I use “thrown up” in multiple senses of the phrase) a slide show of items being sold at the rodeo. (Warning! Slide show!) By my count, of the 24 distinct items shown, six are “on a stick”. What’s that sound I hear? Oh, that’s my arteries slamming shut.
I was working on a post about this list of the “100 best crime books ever written” but I’m not sure I’m going to go through with it. The general tone of the post came across as kind of dickish and show-offy to me, plus I think The Rap Sheet says all that needs to be said. (Especially Ed Gorman in the comments.)
Instead, have this link to Terry Gross interviewing Henry Scott about his new book: Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential
And happy Texas Independence Day, everyone.
The problems with The Last Train from Hiroshima have reached critical mass: Henry Holt, the publisher, is withdrawing the book from circulation. Here’s a link to the NYT article. And here’s a link to a LAT article that I think goes into a little more detail.
There is no evidence that one person who appears in the book actually existed; Pellegrino says that he knew that already because he’d invented a pseudonym and forgot to mention it. Maybe there is as simple an explanation for the concerns over his C.V.: Pellegrino’s website says that he earned a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 1982, a detail that has not been confirmed.
I find this odd. Pellegrino isn’t exactly an unknown author; if I remember correctly, at least one of his Titanic books was a Times bestseller. So why are these concerns coming up now?
Edited to add: I was going to mention: if you go to Amazon’s page, they still have the book in stock (3 copies as of 11:37 AM Central), but they’ve added a note, and the text of Holt’s statement, to the page.
Also in the LAT: a fun interview with John McPhee, who is finally filling in some of his personal history.
There’s a standing joke about the New Yorker running “a three-part series on corn by John McPhee” or some sort of other essay that sounds equally silly. Funny thing is, I’ll read pretty much anything McPhee writes, including that three-part series on corn; I always know that I’m going to find something in McPhee’s work that I didn’t know but am glad to know now, or that shakes up my world view. In the next couple of days, I’ll try to post a brief review of the most recent McPhee book I’ve read, Uncommon Carriers
Kim Stanley Robinson in the LAT.
Slate has an interesting article by Deborah Blum about the government’s deliberate poisoning of alcohol during Prohibition. Based on Sarah Weinman’s recommendation, I had already ordered The Poisoner’s Handbook
Edited to add: Lawrence suggests that I may have seen this on Megan McArdle’s blog. I honestly do not remember where I ran across Blum’s piece first; it is a top-billed story on Slate at the moment. But I’m always happy to give a hattip to my favorite Certified Netware Engineer.
Edited to add 2: I missed this story over the weekend; The Last Train from Hiroshima appears to have some problems. As in, one of the author’s sources seems to be a liar. (Hattip: Insta.)
In general, I don’t like telling people “Go over to this other guy’s blog and read his stuff”, especially when that’s instead of actual content. In this specific case, however, it will help considerably with context if you read Andy Ihnatko’s blog post about the City Lights bookstore historical reenactment and the comments on that post.
Still with me? Good.
My first reaction to this post was, “Yeah, Andy! Stick it to those snobbish bastids!” My second reaction was great annoyance at some of the comments, especially the one about City Lights as a bookstore with a “strong curatorial voice”. My third reaction was, “Wait a minute, do some of these people have a point?” This post is an attempt to work through those reactions.
Longer NYT obit for Dick Francis, as promised.
Also among the dead: Doug Fieger, lead singer for The Knack and co-author of “My Sharona“.
By way of Lawrence, we note this LAT article about a new collection of work by St. Clair McKelway, longtime New Yorker writer.
For 37 years, McKelway was one of the New Yorker’s most prolific and inventive nonfiction writers. In his time, he was regarded as a master of the long-form profile, a superior chronicler of rapscallions and low-rent hustlers. Indeed, when he was on his game, McKelway might have been the best nonfiction writer the magazine had — this at a time when Liebling, Mitchell and E.J. Kahn Jr. were also producing signature work.
Yes, I will be purchasing this.
What are the costs of green energy?
Edited to add: Today’s update from the Department of WTF: A French judge has issued an arrest warrant for Floyd Landis. Apparently, the judge wants to question him about an alleged computer hacking incident.
Today’s update from the Department of WTF, part 2: Dave Eggers can’t understand why Gourmet was shut down.
“It’s impossible” that Gourmet magazine wasn’t profitable, Eggers said, referring to the popular magazine Conde Nast shut down last year. “It’s impossible that you have a million subscribers paying 50 bucks a year and it can’t work.”
$50 a year? No, Dave. $15 a year is more like it. I think I paid $12 for a year when I subscribed.
Nets watch: At the All-Star break, the Nets are 4-48, for an 0.077 percentage. For the 82 game season, that works out to a projected 6.314 wins.
Lawrence mentioned this to me a few days ago, but I wanted to have something better to point at than word of mouth: Philip Klass, who wrote SF under the name William Tenn, died on the 7th.
I wasn’t all that familiar with Tenn’s work, though I read “The Liberation of Earth” a long time ago in a Jerry Pournelle anthology and rather liked it; I always intended to ask Tenn, if I ever met him, if that story was inspired by a Bill Mauldin cartoon. And if anyone has any of the NESFA press collections they want to sell at a reasonable price, please contact me.
The NYT is also reporting the passing of Dick Francis, noted jockey turned even more noted mystery writer. If I can, I’ll try to link to a better obit tomorrow.
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