“…for me, as a New Yorker, however quaint the concept, homeland security is still about keeping suicidal mass murderers from flying planes into our fucking buildings.”
—Anthony Bourdain, from Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
I’ve been listening to this week’s Vicious Circle; I’m not all the way through it yet, but fairly early on, the gang was suggesting that Woodrow Wilson may have been America’s most intelligent president.
My reaction to that is: what about Herbert Hoover? If anyone thinks about Hoover today, it’s mostly as a figure of fun (“Hoobert Heever“, anyone?). But consider Hoover’s resume. He was a professional mining engineer, who graduated from Stanford with a geology degree. After marrying his wife, Lou, and having two kids, he moved the family to China and worked as a mining engineer there; in the process, Lou and Herbert learned Mandarin Chinese. (According to the Wikipedia entry on Hoover, Lou and Herbert spoke Chinese in the White House when they wanted to avoid eavesdropping.)
Later on, Herbert and Lou (as I understand it, Lou herself had an extensive classical background; I did not know she was a classmate of Herbert’s in the Stanford geology program when they met) did the first English translation of Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica. Agricola’s book was a massive tome about mining techniques in the 16th century: it was originally written in Latin, but contained a lot of obsolete technical mining terms of the time. The translation of Agricola’s book frustrated a lot of smart people, but Herbert and Lou pulled it off. (And you can still get Hoover’s translation
The Depression colors many people’s view of Hoover, perhaps unfairly. But compare Hoover to Wilson; Wilson had doctoral degrees in history and law, and earned those as part of his master plan to go into “public service”. Hoover didn’t earn a doctorate, as far as I can tell (he may have been awarded honorary doctorates later in life), but he did important and pioneering work in a somewhat esoteric technical field before making a career for himself in politics (and that, it seems, mostly by accident).
And while I’m not a big fan of Jimmy Carter, I have to give him credit; the man served on nuclear submarines under Admiral Rickover. From what I’ve heard, stupid people didn’t last long in Rickover’s Navy.
(This is similar to my argument about George W. Bush. I’m not a blind fan of the man, or of a lot of things his administration did, but when you want to talk about him being stupid…he flew F-102s with the National Guard. Stupid people generally don’t fly fighter jets very long; they usually end up evenly distributing themselves and the airframe over a small patch of land somewhere.)
The magic number for Pittsburgh is 12. That is, 48-98, .329 winning percentage, 53.298 projected wins, 12 losses needed out of 16 games to reach 110.
Baltimore is 58-88, .397 winning percentage, 64.314 projected wins.
The magic number for Houston is 11. That is, 70-76, .479 winning percentage, 77.598 projected wins, 11 wins out of 16 remaining games needed to reach 81-81.
Edwin Newman, legendary NBC newscaster.
91 years is a good run, but this still saddens me. When I was a young man, Strictly Speaking
The world is worse for his loss.
(Edited to add: NYT obit.)
It has been a long time since we’ve made it into Murder by the Book, and we cannot say we had the honor of knowing David Thompson at all. But we did want to note, with sadness, his passing. Busted Flush Press has published some pretty spiffy stuff (A Fifth of Bruen, for example).
Bill Crider was the first person to tip us off, and we suggest going over to his blog.
(Edited to add: HouChron obit.)
I figured there were two ways Easterbrook could have started off this week’s TMQ: Stewart Bradley’s concussion, or the Texans beating the Colts. Easterbrook went with the Texans, predicting the end of the world if they beat Indy on November 1st. This kind of shocks me; TMQ spent much of last season hammering the NFL for not doing enough to prevent head injuries. And justly so, in my opinion. But is TMQ abandoning that crusade this year? If so, why?
In another recurring trope, Easterbrook predicts that one of the teams not appearing on “Monday Night Football” this year – Bills, Browns, Bucs, Panthers, Raiders, Rams and Seahawks – will win the Super Bowl. Easterbrook has been right about this three times in 11 years, or about 27% of the time.
Recurring trope #2: the “preposterous punt”, in this case the Vikings punting on 4th and 3 from midfield against the Saints, “a mere half-hour into the 2010 NFL season”.
The cheerleader of the week returns! Excellent! Photo too small, but links make up for it.
Also returning: the sweet and sour plays of the week. (Ravens/jets, Oakland/Titans, James Madison/Virginia Tech, Cleveland/Tampa, New England/Bengals.)
Easterbrook has, for some inexplicable reason, been hammering on the idea that gamma ray bursts are actually the signature of cosmic doomsday weapons belonging to advanced civilizations. TMQ cites a Discover article that “presents slight support for the TMQ conjecture, or at least, fails to falsify the idea”. From the article (actually, a blog entry): “This is a fun notion to mull over, but unlikely nevertheless. It’s inconceivable that any civilization could generate artificially the colossal energies associated with GRBs.”
Easterbrook also thinks that this year’s biggest literary fraud may not be The Last Train from Hiroshima, but…Tony Blair’s biography? As usual, publishers don’t bother to do any verification, they don’t care about the truth of the non-fiction books they publish, etc. etc.
Michael Crabtree has been a curse for the 49ers.
TMQ argues that the suspension of A.J. Green for selling one of his own jerseys, while Georgia makes money hand over fist selling replica jerseys, is just the latest example of the hypocrisy of college sports. WCD agrees that the NCAA’s focus on minor misdemeanors is excessive, and would argue that eliminating college sports is one of the best things that could happen to education. But WCD questions whether this is an example of an athlete like Green getting caught by an obscure and stupid NCAA rule, or deliberately and knowingly breaking an established rule. In a similar vein, TMQ argues that Princeton should be allowed to slide (a tennis player had part of their tuition paid by an “adult friend”) on the basis that the “person who paid was a longtime friend of the student”. So how long term a friend do you have to be before TMQ thinks it is okay? One year? Four years?
TMQ’s obsession with excessive blitzing, and excessive calling of normal plays “blitzing”, returns this week as well. Welcome back, “Stop Me Before I Blitz Again!” We missed you.
Easterbrook objects to Tiffany, Gucci, Brooks Brothers, Chanel, and other high end retailers taking out 9/11 memorial ads.
More cheerleaders! More links to photos!
More chicken-<salad> punts and field goal attempts.
Bonus Slauson Cutoff reference!
TMQ continues its obsession with building planetary asteroid defense mechanisms. While WCD agrees that an asteroid strike would be devastating, we question the actual odds of such a thing, and whether the cost justifies the risk.
Christmas creep.
Football Outsiders is now football insiders, having signed deals with the WP, ESPN, and NYT.
“Helen Mirren trades her fake crown for a fake assault rifle in the upcoming action flick ‘Red.'” Actually, Gregg, I believe I’d call that a submachine gun, not an assault rifle.
TMQ is testing a new prediction method, called The Davis Postulate: “Existing Trends Continue; If Trends Same, Home Team Wins.” This replaces the previous “Transformed Isaacson-Tarbell Postulate”, in which week 1 and 17 games are picked by thinking; the rest of the time, the rule “Best Record Wins Unless Records Equal, Then Home Team Wins” is used.
More creep.
“Adventures in Officiating”, but nothing to say about Detroit. Lots to say about the stupid celebration penalty, though.
Towson 47, Coastal Carolina 45. RPI 6, Endicott 3. Fear the wrath of the cupcakes.
Why do college football teams need police escorts? This is sort of a recap of a TMQ trope that got hammered into the ground last year; excessive usage of police escorts and bodyguards for elected officials. Not that we disagree with TMQ’s point, but it got a little old last season.
That’s a wrap for the first week of the season. No trailer; I suspect either TMQ or ESPN dropped that idea.
Tune in next week when we’ll hear Gregg Easterbrook say, “TMQ wrote the words ‘game over’ in his notebook.”
This post is to acknowledge and memorialize, in public, the fact that I owe Lawrence $5.
Edited to add: Paid in full.
(Previously.)
We’re back, baby! Like the black plague!
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Jets
Buffalo (Good to see the Bills right where I expect them to be.)
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Indianapolis (Hey, wasn’t there someone who said something like “Until this team can beat the Colts, the Texans are nobodies.” Yes, yes there was. My 8-8 prediction for Houston is looking pessimistic.)
San Diego
Denver
Oakland (One of my picks for a possible 0-16 this year.)
Philadelphia
Dallas
Minnesota
Detroit (I’d gloat over the Lions losing, except I’m kind of inclined to think they got shafted on that last play.)
Atlanta
Carolina
San Francisco
St. Louis (Also one of my 0-16 picks.)
I missed this story on Friday: thanks to Roberta X for the link.
I’d seen the link on Instapundit about Amazon Mom (which, as far as I can tell, is Amazon Prime for parents; moms, dads, and other caregivers, in spite of the name) but not being a mom, it wasn’t relevant to my interests. (I did mean to send out a couple of emails about it, however, but got bogged down in illness.)
I just found out we now have Amazon Student as well. You know, for kids college students. Like me. I wish this had been available a few weeks ago…
The Liberace Museum is closing.
I’ve actually toured that museum twice, and had a great deal of fun both times. I find it just a bit surprising that they employed 30 people, but with all the clothes, the cars, the musical instruments, and what not, as well as staffing the museum, I guess I shouldn’t be that shocked.
The mention that they also hired a professional curator from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (who lasted a year) is also kind of interesting. I know Mike the Musicologist had some thoughts on curation and the Liberace Museum after our first visit, but I’ll let him post those if he wishes.
(Thanks to Bill Crider for the tip on this.)
Edited to add: Here are links to two stories from the Las Vegas Sun: link 1 and link 2. I do not believe the Sun is associated with the Las Vegas Review-Journal or Righthaven, but if I’m wrong about that, please let me know.
We previously noted that the White House was considering awarding the Medal of Honor to a living recipient, for the first time since the Vietnam War.
The decision has been made.
US Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta will be awarded the Medal of Honor for charging into the middle of a Taliban ambush and rescuing three wounded members of his platoon.
(Hattip: Ace of Spades.)
The end of the baseball season and the start of real sports both slouch ever closer, like something that slouches a lot. Our first NFL loser update for the season should post early Tuesday.
In the meantime:
Pittsburgh: 47-92, .338 winning percentage, 54.756 projected wins.
Baltimore: 53-87, .379 winning percentage, 61.398 projected wins.
Houston: 67-73, .479 winning percentage, 77.598 projected wins.
As noted previously, I finally resolved the phone issue. (And AT&T can still die in a fire.)
The number one question I’ve been getting (replacing “Where did you get that shirt?” at the top of the charts) is: “How do you like your new phone?”
Answer: I like it just fine, but…below are some preliminary thoughts on Android (at least, as implemented on the EVO 4G; I do realize that some of these may be issues with the built-in apps, rather than the Android OS itself):
. This makes me mildly cranky.Again, I generally like the phone; most of these are just minor quibbles that I can probably solve one way or another.
Two interesting stories I’ve run across in the past few days.
Story #1 is the guy in Long Island who held off a street gang with “an AK-47“, fired several “warning shots” in the process…and was arrested for “reckless endangerment“. This has been getting a lot of buzz on the gun blogs; some good takes on this story are Lawrence’s, Jay G’s, and SayUncle’s. SayUncle and Jay G. make the point I’d want to make on this; warning shots are generally not a good idea. If you’re justified in shooting, put your rounds into the SOB. Plus, those warning shots are going to go somewhere, and it may not be where you’d like.
Lawrence also tipped me to a story I haven’t seen elsewhere: the city of Carrollton, up near Dallas, is debating a proposition that would ban gun stores within a certain (unspecified) distance of liquor stores “and certain other (also unspecified -DB) retail establishments”.
As Lawrence puts it, “Somehow, I’m not seeing the sort of person who shotguns a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 in a parking lot as being the same sort of person who has either a few hundred dollars burning a hole in their pocket, or a valid credit card.”
I don’t have anything to add to that, so instead I’ll link to the Hobo With a Shotgun trailer.
Tropical Storm Igor forms in the Atlantic.
(Subject line hattip. Really, I had to do it.)
By way of Mike the Musicologist, we find out what Damien “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” Hirst has been up to recently.
(I love the caption on that NYT photo: “Damien Hirst with a spare frozen shark.” Because, you know, all serious artists keep a spare frozen shark around. You never know when a dead frozen shark might come in handy.)
Bespoke stainless steel wheel covers for your 4×4.
This is the kind of thing I could see myself purchasing. If I had a 4×4. And if I had money to burn. And if I was a moron.
This week, haiku. And for the second week in a row, no “TMQ Trailer”.
TMQ Watch is not going to re-type all of Easterbrook’s haiku, as that would be unfair to Easterbrook and ESPN. Nor are we going to write our own responses in haiku; one of WCD’s limitations (“A man’s got to know his limitations.“) is a total inability to write haiku.
Easing our toe into the waters…
In the same package, the Times asks why, if going for it, kicking onside and deuce tries make sense, NFL coaches rarely attempt these stratagems. The answer the Times proposes — that coaches don’t want to be blamed for failed gambles — is a running theme of Tuesday Morning Quarterback. I’ve even been saying this for 10 years, since this column began on Slate.com, which was then a radical innovation on that new Interweb thing.
Not just a trope, but a trope Easterbrook admits to!
Next week, the start of the season, and Easterbrook steps up his game. We hope.
I’ve been trying to find a way into this for the past couple of days now, which is why I’m a little behind.
Paul Conrad, former cartoonist for the LAT.
Robert Schimmel, stand-up comic.
Larry Ashmead, prominent book editor. Ashmead edited books by a lot of people I like, including some well-known mystery writers.
Joe Domenici, local Austin thriller writer (Bringing Back the Dead
Lawrence and Bill Crider both have posts up at their sites about Joe. I’m not going to pretend I knew Joe real well; both Mike the Musicologist and Lawrence knew him better than I did. I basically just saw Joe every year at Armadillocon, and the occasional convention in between. But he was always happy to see me, and I was glad to see him around. When Bringing Back the Dead came out, I thought it was a pretty spiffy book, and I’m glad I had a chance to tell Joe that. I don’t know why he seemed stunned by that; after all, the truth is the truth. You can’t have opinions about the truth.
Mike and I both got email from Joe quite a while back asking for permission to Tuckerize us in the next book. I’m not sure what Mike’s response was; mine was basically, “F- yeah!”. I was enormously pleased and honored that Joe would do something like that. Joe emailed us both back in early May to let us know the next book, The Death Factory, was tentatively scheduled for “Sping/Summer 2011”. I’m hoping it comes out and doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Joe deserves better than that.
Hello, I am a Customer Care rep for AT&T and I would like to say that I really do understand how this was aggravating for you from the very beginning, and I apoligize that you had so much difficulty upgrading your equipment. Honestly, you should have went to an AT&T Company Owned Retail store from the beginning. Best buy is a “National Retailer” and they do not have as much training or access to your account as the internal sales channels do. It is possible the the Best Buy reps either 1. Did not know what to do. Or, 2. did not even have access to the information they needed to figure out what was wrong.
This issue that you experienced was due to network and billing system conversion that has been going on for years. In the billing system, it requires all “Blue” customers to convert to the “Orange” network before they can do an equipment upgrade. We call this the “Migration Process.” AT&T has put blocks in the billing system that requires customers to eventually Migrate to the Orange network. This entails getting a new SIM card, a compatible phone and often changing rate plans also, since the “blue” rate plans are normally very old and are sales expired.
This is a very rare issue that impacts customer’s that have been with us for many many years and still have fairly old equipment. It is not a common issue, which may be why you had so much difficulty, and once again I apologize, on a lighter note I hope your enjoying your new phone!
As always, thank you for choosing AT&T, we really appreciate your business and have a pleasant day… 🙂
Dear anonymous AT&T rep:
Yes, as a matter of fact, I am enjoying my new phone very much.
By the way, that phone is a HTC EVO 4G, on the Sprint network. I’ve terminated my service with AT&T after six years.
Have a nice day.
We’re a little less than a week away from the start of the football season, and about eleven days from the start of the NFL loser update, for those of you playing along at home. In the meantime…
Pittsburgh’s at 44-89, .331 winning percentage, 53.622 projected wins. That’s about 108 losses; we can consider the 110 loss goal still in play.
Baltimore’s at 49-85, .366 winning percentage, 59.292 projected wins.
And the Astros have moved into third (3rd!) place in the division, with a 62-71 record, .466 winning percentage, and 75.492 projected wins.
I’ve been involved in a discussion over at Jay G’s site about famous mass murders that didn’t involve guns. As part of that, I went over to Wikipedia to refresh my memory about a couple of famous incidents and discovered the following interesting bits of information.
The Happy Land social club fire:
Found guilty on August 19, 1991, of 87 counts of arson and 87 counts of murder, [Julio] González was sentenced to 174 twenty-five year sentences, to be served consecutively (a total of 4,350 years) . It was the most substantial prison term ever imposed in the state of New York. He will be eligible for parole in March 2015.
Of the three employees accused of the fire, only one, Héctor Escudero Aponte, is still in prison. Armando Jimenez and José Francisco Rivera Lopez were released from federal prison in 2001 and 2002 respectively.
(And if you want to read about something both horrible and forgotten, look up the Bath School disaster.)
The Cardiff Botanical Society, in Cardiff-By-The-Sea, California, spent $120,000 to put up a 16-foot statue of a “surfer”. That is, for values of “surfer” that look a lot like…well, maybe, me on a surfboard.
Hilarity ensues, complete with people using the “Cardiff Kook” (as the statue is known) as a jumping off point to create their own works of art.
(Hattip: Reason’s “Hit and Run“.)
Because this broke while I was tied up with Armadillocon, I haven’t had a chance to blog it before now: the proposed EPA lead ammo ban appears to be as dead as the Roman Empire.
At least, for now. What was that someone said about the price of freedom?
Obit watch: Laurent Fignon, two-time winner of the Tour de France, and the man who lost the Tour to Greg LeMond by eight seconds in 1989.
Is it just me, or do Tour winners tend to die relatively young? (Yes, I read the obit. Yes, I’m aware Fignon blames his drug use. I’m trying to avoid painting all the Tour winners with the same broad brush.)
Kim Severson profiles Roger Ebert, rice cooker chef.
I wanted to blog this yesterday, but didn’t get a chance: the Barnes and Noble across from Lincoln Center is closing. People are sad, though it sounds like many of them were getting their books elsewhere. Remember when people were indignant that Barnes and Noble and Borders were destroying the little bookstores?
