Harold Camping. I’m really kind of curious what’s going to happen to Family Radio now; does it survive with a new leader? Do the stations get sold off? I think most of them are non-commercial licenses; is there another religious group that would want to buy them?
Janet Dailey, noted romance author.
You know, “Start writing or stop talking about it” is actually pretty good writing advice.
Ronnie Biggs, one of the conspirators in the Great Train Robbery and (briefly) vocalist for the Sex Pistols, has passed away at the age of 84.
I have the feeling that Biggs was often viewed as a loveable rogue. This is worth keeping in mind:
As is this:
(According to Wikipedia, Mills died from leukemia in 1970, and one of the robbers who wasn’t Biggs confessed to the beating last year. There does appear to be some question about whether that confession was truthful.)
Edited to add: more from the paper of record. And in case you are asking yourself, “Don’t they have newspapers in England?”: they do, but I haven’t found one I trust that doesn’t have the Biggs obit behind a pay wall.
(Wiki wandering led me to the article on the Big Boys:
Spinal Tap really was a documentary, and we just didn’t know it at the time.)
(Edited to add: Hurrah! The U2/Popmart/giant lemon story is immortalized online! What did I tell you? (Scroll down to “Rock and Roll Creation”.) By the way, I own and enthusiastically recommend This is Spinal Tap: Official Companion
It seems to me that the Christmas season doesn’t really kick off here at WCD World Headquarters until we spot this year’s silly Pez dispensers. How can you follow Lord of the Rings or Millard Fillmore?
Would you believe…
From Satan’s personal representatives here on Earth (you young kids may not remember this, but there was a rumor when I was young and KISS was a going concern that “KISS” stood for “Kids In Satan’s Service” or “Knights In Satan’s Service”) to having your own set of Pez dispensers. Rock and roll. What a biz.
(Not really Christmas or Pez related, but in the same “what a biz” vein: if you have a spare $2 million, you can be the new owner of the old Johnny Rotten place in Malibu.)
According to the WP, “the silencers were designed for the ‘AK family of firearms'”. The people who are under investigation claim they were intended for DEVGRU.
In February, the silencers were delivered to a Naval Research Laboratory warehouse in Chesapeake Beach, Md. NCIS agents seized the silencers two months later.
The silencers were unmarked and untraceable, despite a federal law requiring all firearm manufacturers to imprint them with a serial number and the name of the maker.
Yes, there’s nothing better when you’re running clandestine ops than having a serial number and manufacturer’s name stamped on your gear. (That is, assuming these silencers were actually intended for clandestine ops. “Officials with SEAL Team Six told investigators that they were unaware of any such order for silencers, according to court documents.” But if they weren’t intended for DEVGRU, what was the plan for them? We’re through the looking glass here, people.)
Today’s NYT has an article on the Industrial Trust Building in Providence. The Industrial Trust is the tallest skyscraper in Rhode Island – and now it’s vacant. The current owners want to convert it into apartments, but they need tax credits and breaks to do it; and the state isn’t inclined to give out those after the Curt Schilling fiasco.
This has a little bit of special significance to me. I used to travel to Rhode Island, and I remember this skyscraper. I’ve even stayed in the Biltmore (which you can see in the corner of the second photo in the slideshow).
It is a nice building. I’m sad to see it vacant. But I bet you Buddy Cianci could get something done with it.
Obit watch: John Tavener, classical composer.
Your Lou Reed obits: NYT.
Why, yes, I actually do own “Metal Machine Music
Let us start off with one of TMQ Watch’s patented musical interludes. This one even has a small amount of relevance to this week’s TMQ:
You’ve got to love YouTube comments:
stephen scazzafavo 2 weeks ago
thumbs up for REAL COUNTRY none of this new age shiit
Yeah. About that, Steve.
Anyway, with that diversion out of the way, let’s get into this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
Is it IKEA furniture or a death metal band?
I’m not doing well so far.
(Edited to add: 7 out of 20. Either I need to spend more time at IKEA, or more time listening to death metal.)
You know what New York City needs? Strict scissors control laws. I bet those were deadly assault scissors, too. At the very least, background checks for scissors purchasers would have prevented this…
And the New York City Opera has officially announced that they are shutting down. (Previously.)
(At this point, I would ordinarily nudge you, the metaphorical reader, in the metaphorical ribs and note my restraint in not making a “fat lady sings” joke. But the only reason for my restraint here is that FARK already did it.)
Barring a miracle, it appears the New York City Opera will file for bankruptcy next week and begin winding down operations.
The NYCO has been trying to raise $7 million before the end of September. So far, according to the NYT, they’ve managed to raise $1.5 million. They even have a Kickstarter: the goal is $1 million, but they’ve raised $194,549 (at this writing) with three days to go.
How did they get to this point? And how can New York City not be able to support two major opera companies?
The company cut back from “115 performances of 17 different operas” a decade ago to “16 performances of 4 operas” last year. The smaller number of performances has, in turn, resulted in a smaller number of patrons, and a smaller number of potential donors.
Apparently, the NYCO was in Lincoln Center up until 2011; then they moved out, and are now “an itinerant troupe at theaters across the city”. This may also have something to do with their problems. (I was confused about why NYCO was in Lincoln Center if the NYST was their home; if I understand Wikipedia correctly, NYST is actually part of Lincoln Center.)
And because they raided the endowment, the annual income from that source is now less than $200,000 a year – “less than City Opera makes from its Thrift Shop on East 23rd Street in Manhattan”. (If you try going to the Thrift Shop website, you’re confronted with an uncloseable fundraising appeal that completely obscures the rest of the content. Oh, wait; I hit the back button a couple of times and managed to close the fundraising appeal. Would you like to buy a piano? That’s a trick question: nobody wants to buy a piano.)
(O.M.G. Okay, I have to purchase this. If only as a gift.)
The back and forth in the NYT comments section is interesting, to the extent that any web comments section is interesting. Some folks complain about the unwillingness of the wealthy to step up and bail out the opera, others complain that of course the opera is failing because they present crap like “Anna Nicole” (while others point out that “Anna Nicole” is a critically acclaimed modern opera), and there’s a lot of blame for the management and board of NYCO.
There’s not really much more I can say about this, though I do find it interesting. I would be sad to see an opera company close down, in much the same way I’d be sad if a local restaurant that I liked closed their doors. On the other hand, it seems like the closure is the result of ten years of poor decision making, and there’s nobody to blame but NYCO itself.
This week’s TMQ, after the jump…
We were trying to come up with a clever introduction to the return of Tuesday Morning Quarterback (and, thus, the TMQ Watch) but we couldn’t. On the other hand, we were also suffering from a bad case of 70s nostalgia (brought about by many things, but exacerbated by the death of Bert Lance). So we thought we’d throw some vintage music your way before cracking open this week’s TMQ after the jump. Oddly enough, it turns out to be fitting for reasons we’ll see later on…
Tannhauser asks for her intercession with God, and dies of opera.
–Ken @ Popehat
Runner-up, also from Ken:
Sorry about the radio silence for the past few days. I’ve been spending a lot of time with family, and kicking around the Cleveland area.
Our flight got in around 7 PM last night, and it was 10 PM by the time I got home. I’m trying to get caught up, and hope to have more substantial reports and some photos up over the weekend.
In the meantime, have some music.
(Man, wasn’t Learning to Crawl a great album? “Back On the Chain Gang”, “My City Was Gone”, “Middle of the Road”…)