Nathan Myhrvold, the former chief technology officer of Microsoft, has a new “cookbook” coming out “sometime in the not-too-distant future”, says the LAT.
(According to Amazon, Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
“The food world eagerly awaits the former Microsoft technology officer’s book on the science of cooking.”
I don’t know that I’m really representative of the food world, but speaking strictly for myself: no. I’d much rather read Ferran Adrià’s book
Giant squid are roaming the Pacific, and they’re not just wiping out fish stocks; they’re eating fishermen.
Honestly, I take this entire article with a grain of salt. However, any time I have a chance to link to a story about giant man-eating squid, I can’t pass it up.
(Hattip: Dinosaur Comics. Really.)
So the city of Bell hired a guy named Randy Adams to be their chief of police. Mr. Adams used to be the chief in Glendale; I can’t find exact figures, but according to the LAT, the Glendale force is much larger than the Bell force. Looking over Glendale’s Wikipedia page, it appears their cops are a pretty active bunch.
In spite of Bell’s force being smaller than Glendale’s, and Bell having a smaller population, the city of Bell decided to pay Chief Adams $457,000 a year, which the LAT describes as being more than twice what he was making in Glendale.
Sleazy enough for you? But wait, there’s more!
At the same time Chief Adams was being hired for the post in Bell, he was also filing an application for a disability pension from the city of Bell.
Yes, you read that right. At the same time the city was hiring him, they were also approving his application for disability payments (without any waiting or vesting period), which would have amounted to $411,000 a year. Of that, the first $205,500 would have been tax-free.
In the words of TJIC, “Rope”.
The LAT apparently would like for you to feel sorry for someone in the city of Bell.
The question is, who?
Not Robert “Ratso” Rizzo and his cronies. They’re under arrest and facing a recall election. If that doesn’t work, Jerry Brown’s going to try to get them kicked out of office anyway.
Should we feel sorry for the citizens of Bell? According to the LAT, they were literally dancing in the streets when the arrests went down.
(Edited to add: Here’s a second article from the LAT about the street celebrations in Bell. Unlike the first, it does not mention dancing, but the guy playing “Another One Bites The Dust” is a nice touch. Of course, the LAT had to find the one moron in the crowd…
“They were making a lot of money, but I don’t have an issue with it because they were taking care of us,” she said. “We have a clean city, good parks, no graffiti. It’s very safe…. I’m not saying the salaries and other things that were going on were fair, because they weren’t, but it’s not like they were getting paid a lot and not doing a good job.”
See also Mussolini and the trains running on time. Of course they were doing a good job. Except for those illegal taxes. And the towing scandal. And the illegal sewer fees. And the fake meetings.)
Even better for the citizens of Bell,
The state controller’s office has found that Bell collected about $5.6 million in illegally imposed tax increases and business-license fees — and now must refund an amount equal to more than one-third of its $13.5-million general fund.
Of course, having to cough up that much money means there isn’t enough left to spend on essential city services, like Rizzo’s million-dollar salary. Perhaps the city could sell bonds to fill the gap? Except that Bell’s bond status, according to Standard and Poor’s, is “junk”.
So what next? Cut city services? Place the city into receivership? The LAT article seems to view these as last-resort options. We would suggest that these should be first resort options. Does the city really need 47 police officers? Couldn’t they contract out services to LA County?
Here’s the City of Bell website. Perhaps our loyal readers could explore that and propose some cuts in order to meet the budget.
In no particular order:
If you send invitations, please mark clearly if there will be any sort of clown in attendance. If there is, we will NOT be able to cover your event.
At last, the concussion column.
WCD comes up with a total of 3,041 words out of a 9,479 word column (or about 32%) devoted to the concussion problem in the NFL. Easterbrook’s points:
(Editor’s note: The last two bullet points were actually pulled from a separate section of TMQ, much lower in the column, “Two More Concussion Points”. In order that readers might better follow the logical flow of Easterbrook’s arguments, we collapsed those points and Easterbrook’s initial arguments into one section.)
We wanted to highlight this “Stat of the Week”: “The Dallas Cowboys have lost both opening games at their new $1.3 billion stadium.”
Serita is just kind of okay looking. We can’t tell for sure, but we suspect she has sharp knees.
Sweet and sour plays. “Stop Me Before I Blitz Again!” highlights the Texans-Redskins game, arguing that Washington blew a comfortable 3rd quarter lead by going blitz-wacky.
Wacky disclaimer: the iTunes store.
Adventures in Officiating: DeSean Jackson, Calvin Johnson, and the catch/no-catch rule. If the former head of NFL officiating can’t understand the rule, isn’t it too complex? And (recurring trope) why is the NFL officiating manual not public?
TMQ on fashion: “Apparently the perfect New York City couple would be a very thin woman in a dress that makes it impossible to walk, squired by a metrosexual wearing a snorkel.”
Adventures in Announcing: exaggerating the blitz (another recurring trope). I’m not sure what Buffalo’s poor draft choices have to do with announcing.
“Maybe It’s Not Such a Good Idea to Cut Your Starting Quarterback on the Eve of the Season”. Arizona, TMQ is looking at you. Also, preposterous punts.
In keeping with TMQ tradition, “The Town” is…wait for it…wait for it…unrealistic! My God! Can we no longer trust Hollywood to give us depictions of reality, like “Casablanca” or “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”? Good work here by Easterbrook, though, in linking to Maggie Lloyd and her article about actual bank robbery statistics. (This has nothing to do with TMQ, but WCD absolutely loved Where the Money Is: True Tales from the Bank Robbery Capital of the World
Preposterous punts, college edition. The football gods frown on your shenanigans. Crabtree curse. Manning Bowl. Wasteful spending on bodyguards (special guest appearance: Rick Perry).
Malone 69, Anna Maria 0. Citadel 26, Presbyterian 14.
Reggie Bush didn’t do anything “ethically wrong”, he just violated NCAA rules. NCAA rules that he agreed to abide by before playing football for USC. Isn’t there something “ethically wrong” about breaking an agreement? Meanwhile, O.J. Simpson is still in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That’s the Pro Football Hall of Fame, in Canton, Ohio. Not the “College Football Hall of Fame” (which actually exists, in South Bend, Indiana; yes, O.J. Simpson is in that Hall of Fame as well). While WCD thinks Simpson is a scumbag, we fail to understand the relationship between his conduct (which took place after his retirement from football) and that of Mr. Bush (which took place while he was playing for USC).
Reader comments: East Carolina-Tulsa and deconstruction of the celebration penalty. Thucydides did it first. Cupcakes in I-AA. Michael Caine. And police escorts for PeeWee football teams.
That’s a wrap for this week. Tune in next week, when we’ll hear the tastefully named Gregg Easterbrook complain that “Citizen Kane” is an unrealistic portrayal of a media tycoon’s life.
Also the quote of the day:
“…I had always believed that if somebody who worked with me went home feeling like a jerk for giving their time and their genuine effort, then it was me who had failed them—and in a very personal, fundamental way.”
—Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
Question for you leaders out there: how do your people go home at the end of the day?
Robert “Ratso” Rizzo and eight other officials and former officials of the city of Bell have been arrested and charged with 53 counts of “misappropriation of public funds and conflict of interest”.
Also among the arrested: Angela Spaccia, former assistant city manager for Bell, and former Maywood city manager.
Oh, my God! Has bootlegging returned to Harlem? Are folks selling mixtures of methyl alcohol out of the back of bodegas? Are we in for a return of the “jake leg“? (Speaking of Prohibition, methanol, and “jake leg”, Deborah Blum’s The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
The answer is…almost certainly not. The NYT‘s concern is that people are selling “potent sweet liquor drinks”, “a blend of various hard liquors and fruit juices”. So, basically, they’re selling cocktails without a license.
By way of Daring Fireball, here’s a vintage ad for Beefeater Gin that explains the proper mixing and enjoyment of the martini.
Preach it, brother!
The worst thing about this past weekend is that someone had to win the Philadelphia – Detroit and St. Louis – Oakland games. If there was ever a time for a surgical meteor strike or two, this was it.
The best thing about this past weekend is that the Manning Bowl is, mercifully, over.
During my intermittent watching of the games this weekend, I heard someone claim that the Cowboys were favorites to go to the Super Bowl this season. Of course, this year’s Super Bowl is in the Jerry Dome. Now, the idea that the Cowboys were Super Bowl favorites this year was news to me…
The more I think about it, though (and I try not to think about it for very long, because Houston teams will always find a way to break your heart), wouldn’t it be wonderfully fitting if a team from Texas did play in the Super Bowl this year…and it wasn’t the Cowboys?
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Buffalo
Cleveland
Dallas
Minnesota
Detroit
Carolina
San Francisco
St. Louis
“…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.)