Archive for March, 2010

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

March madness.

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

I’m picking Gonzaga to go all the way.

Mostly because I like saying “Gonzaga”. Say it three times fast. “Gonzaga. Gonzaga. Gonzaga.”

Also, completely unrelated to basketball, I’m going to go on the record as saying I think the Chicago Cubs are going to win the World Series this year.

Edited to add: I’m documenting here that Lawrence has bet me $5 that the Cubs won’t win. Otherwise, I’ll forget.

Edited to add 2: Lawrence is also taking the field against Gonzaga for another $5. Gonzaga. Gonzaga. Gonzaga.

Edited to add 3: I owe Lawrence $5. Gonzaga!

Posted in Loser, Sarcasm, Stupid | 1 Comment »

SDC updates.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010
  • March 2010 to date posted.

I’d appreciate it if people would take a look at the peeing Calvin. Comments here are okay if you don’t want to email.

Posted in SDC | Comments Closed

Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters (part 2 of a series).

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

At Half-Price Books not too long ago, I found Kipling Abroad: Traffics and Discoveries from Burma to Brazil, a collection of Kipling’s travel writing.

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.

Posted in Books, Leadership | Comments Closed

Hookers and blow watch.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

I blogged earlier this week about the latest developments in the SF Weekly/SF Bay Guardian newspaper war.

Eli Sanders in The Stranger has a good overview of the story for people who haven’t been following it from the start.

Lacey has noted that Brugmann, for all his independent talk, once had among the investors in his paper Donald Werby, a billionaire real-estate mogul who bankrolled the Church of Satan (“No, really,” Lacey wrote) and was indicted for paying off underage prostitutes with cocaine before dying in 2002. (“I missed the Bay Guardian’s coverage of their investor’s indictment on child prostitution charges,” Lacey added.)

(Hattip: Jimbo.)

Posted in Clippings, Media | 2 Comments »

Art, damn it, art! watch (#5 in a series).

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

There’s a nifty profile in the NYT of Beriah Wall, who’s been producing and giving away ceramic “coins” for about 30 years.

The article includes photos of some of his work.

Edited to add: Let me make it clear, I like Mr. Wall’s work very much.

So, here, have a link to some more questionable art: John Kelso (the local excuse for a newspaper’s designated cranky curmudgeon columnist) on “Barton Barriers“:

…this more than 100-foot-long, 12-foot-wide, 10-foot-high cluster of 50 road barriers that are lit up at night.

Posted in Art, Clippings | Comments Closed

The holidays, they come on so quickly.

Monday, March 15th, 2010

I was so busy planning for today’s celebration of Pi Day (observed) that Meryl Yourish’s Eat A Tasty Animal for PETA (EATAPETA) Day almost got past me.

Almost.

I’m trying to think of what might be good for dinner. Looking at the sub-categories under “Food” gives me an idea…

Edited to add:

CrapCam!

Edited to add 2:

Keep your fork.

Posted in Food, Lobsters | Comments Closed

“I’m Peter Graves, and I was wondering if you could direct me to the natatorium, as I am attending a swim meet.”

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

Obit watch. I’ll link to full obits when they go up. (Edited to add: NYT obit. LAT obit.)

I still think Mission: Impossible was one of the great TV series of the 1970s. (You can find M:I openings on YouTube, but oddly, pretty much all the ones I found did not include Peter Graves, or were from the later incarnations of M:I.)

And I will confess that I’ve actually sat through Red Planet Mars.

(Hattip. Yes, I chose to go with the more obscure reference. You were expecting gladiator movies?)

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Happy Pi Day.

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

The advent of digital computers in the 20th century led to an increased rate of new π calculation records. John von Neumann et al. used ENIAC to compute 2037 digits of π in 1949, a calculation that took 70 hours.

(more…)

Posted in Geek | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#4 in a series).

Friday, March 12th, 2010

The hot theater ticket in New York City is “The Demons”, an adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel. There’s only going to be two performances. And the performance is taking place on Governors Island, so you’ll have to take a ferry and then walk 20 minutes to get to your seat. Only about 700 tickets are available, at either $175 or $225 a shot.

Oh, did I mention that “The Demons” is twelve hours long?

Posted in Art, Clippings | 3 Comments »

Random notes: March 11, 2010.

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

The SF Weekly (owned by Village Voice Media) and the San Francisco Bay Guardian have been engaged in a bitter antitrust dispute. The Bay Guardian argues that the Weekly was selling ads below cost in an attempt to drive the Bay Guardian out of business. So far, the Bay Guardian has prevailed, and has a $21 million judgment against the Weekly. Now, the Bay Guardian has an order awarding it half of the Weekly‘s ad revenue. (Hattip: Jimbo.)

I wanted to point out this blog post at the Public Policy In Houston blog because it expresses concisely my thoughts about public transit, and about the people who complain about America’s “love of cars”. We talk about the freedom cars give us, and that’s true; but cars also give us time. Time with our families, time to go to school, time to improve our lives. (Hattip: BlogHouston.)

On the local front, Travis County terminated their agreement with the operator of the Manchaca firehall.

And our police chief, Art Acevedo, is one of six finalists for the job of chief in Dallas. Even though he’s just a finalist at this point, the city is offering him money to stay. I’ll just point out that you may remember Chief Acevedo from previous coverage on this blog.

The various stories about the 10th anniversary of the dot-com peak didn’t amuse me that much, but I did get a kick out of this piece on the founders of Flooz. You remember Flooz, right? It was just like money, except harder to use. (ETA: I forgot that I was going to single out this quote: “In late 1999, Beenz and Flooz announced that consumers could buy Flooz with Beenz…” But was it transitive? Could you buy Beenz with Flooz? Nope.)

Merlin Olsen, for the record.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Food, Geek, Law, Obits | 2 Comments »

Oh, no. All those oily rags.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

This deserves a post of its own, rather than being lumped into the random notes.

Derek Lowe’s latest entry in the “How Not to Do It” sweepstakes.

Choice quotes:

…two guys who scavenged a liquid oxygen Dewar from a scrap metal yard and decided to put it back into service. According to the most detailed report, they tried to rig up a connection to refill the cylinder, but found that it vented immediately through the pressure-relief valve. So. . .well, yeah, you know what’s coming next: they took the darn thing off and plugged it shut. No more pesky venting!

And..

…one member of the Cylinder Kings ended up being blown across five lanes of traffic, while his partner was launched forty feet in another direction.

Photos at the link.

Posted in Geek, Stupid | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 10, 2010.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

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. I’m somewhat excited about this collection, as I’m a semi-regular reader of Gastronomica.

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.

The producers of “Iron Cross” sued Variety on Tuesday, claiming the trade lured the indie film into a $400,000 promotion campaign with promises of Oscar attention that would lead to a major distribution deal — then trashing it all with a scathing review.

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.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Movies | 2 Comments »

Obit watch.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Willie Davis, former center fielder for the Dodgers and other teams, including the 1975 Texas Rangers.

(Obligatory.)

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.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 9, 2010.

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

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, which actually sounds like a fun book. I do wonder if it mentions “Drowning Mona“. (Edited to add: Yes. Yes, it does.) (Edited to add 2: Also reviewed in Slate. Hattip: Lawrence.)

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 series, which goes by several other names as well.)

Posted in Books, Cars, Clippings, Movies, Planes, Stupid | Comments Closed

Generalities.

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

I was having lunch with The Usual Suspects earlier today. The TV on the wall in front of me was tuned to some ESPN channel; probably ESPN 8, “The Ocho”, since they were showing a Harlem Globetrotters/Washington Generals game.

The question came up; have the Generals ever won a game?

The answer is; yes, and no.

Here’s the (I know) Wikipedia entry on the Washington Generals. Apparently, they last won a game on January 5, 1971, but they were playing as the New Jersey Reds at the time.

“They looked at us like we killed Santa Claus.”

I was also previously unfamiliar with the term “kayfabe“.

By the way, the Nets are now 7-55, for a 0.113 percentage. Projected wins for an 82-game season: 9.266.

Posted in Loser | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »