The LAT link above contains a great photo of Timothy Durham being perp-walked by two FBI agents. Also worthy of note:
Archive for March, 2011
Invest in our company or we’ll shoot this dog.
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011Soy un perdedor.
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011Overslept. Running behind. Quick note: Carlos Alvarez, mayor of Miami-Dade County, lost his recall election yesterday.
Voters favored removing the mayor by 88 percent to 12 percent.
Apparently, Mr. Alvarez managed to alienate people by raising property taxes 40 percent, while giving various county workers (including his “top aides”) raises. And his taxpayer-subsidized BMW didn’t help much.
Edited to add: The NYT article touches very briefly on this, but Commissioner Natacha Seijas also got kicked out of office. Here’s a longer article from the Miami Herald on Ms. Seijas and her loss. And here’s the Herald’s coverage of Mr. Alvarez and his loss.
(Hattip: Ace of Spades.)
Random notes: March 15, 2011.
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011The NYT has a long and interesting obit for Owsley Stanley, noted recreational chemist and sound engineer for the Grateful Dead (and others).
Well, okay, then.
Ditto. (By the way, Stanley died in a car accident.)
I kind of like Berkeley Breathed (much less so post-“Bloom County”, but still), so it doesn’t give me that much pleasure to note that “Mars Needs Moms” is being compared to “Ishtar” and “Pluto Nash”.
“Mars Needs Moms” is a 3-D movie, so that $6.9 million figure is with the higher 3-D ticket prices.
Good!
“…not necessarily narratively coherent.”
Monday, March 14th, 2011Today’s news from the “Spider-Man” front isn’t really news as such: Patrick Healy and Kevin Flynn in the NYT recap the troubled history of the musical.
Didn’t someone think it was a bad omen when the first producer literally had a stroke as they were about to sign the contract? (He died two days later.)
The full quote, for Lawrence:
The timeless, changeless ways of the HouChron.
Monday, March 14th, 2011Your annual slideshow (warning! Slideshow!) of rodeo food (warning! Slideshow!) is here.
Warning: this does include photos of the chocolate covered pickle and the pulled pork sundae. Also, did I mention that this is a slideshow?
(Wouldn’t fried beef jerky be kind of dry? Or is that the point; after eating a big plate of fried beef jerky, you really need one of those $12 beers?)
Gonzaga!
Monday, March 14th, 2011
Gonzaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaga!
Now that the bracket is out, I’m once again picking Gonzaga to go all the way.
How can you not, really? Doesn’t the sound of the name stir something in your heart? Say it with me: “Gonzaga!”
Happy Pi Day, everyone!
Monday, March 14th, 2011Sorry, the pi related content is a bit thin this year; instead of researching the state of pi, I spent most of the weekend banging on MySQL and Perl for a project I’m working on. (I expect that folks will see some of the results of that project in an upcoming “Talking GPS Blues” post.)
In the meantime, there will be pie.
Watch this space for updates.
The sands of time.
Friday, March 11th, 2011Latest news from Vegas: the Sahara is closing in May.
This is sad news for me personally. I’ll admit the Sahara was kind of run down, but it was one of the cheapest rooms available on the Strip. I preferred it slightly to the Imperial Palace (which seems to me to be even more run down these days); on my last few trips to DEFCON, I’ve stayed at the Sahara. (Being slightly run down doesn’t bother me too much when I’m on the road. All I’m really looking for is a bed, toilet, roof, and a place for my stuff. I don’t spend a lot of time in my room.)
(I wasn’t planning on staying there this time; since the convention is at the Rio this year, I’m more likely to stay there.)
Coverage from the Las Vegas Sun. The Sun’s coverage makes another good point; one of the stations for the Vegas Monorail (which is also in deep trouble) is the Sahara. I’ll be interested in seeing how that plays out.
(Also: are they going to try to keep the NASCAR Cafe open? I never ate there; the advertising always seemed to be more about quantity than quality, which really turned me off.)
Star Song of the Dream Dancers.
Friday, March 11th, 2011I believe it was one of the early 80s cyberpunk writers (I’m thinking Bruce Sterling, but it could have been Lew Shiner) who suggested that the most generic possible SF book title combined the words “star”, “song”, “dream”, and ‘”dancers”. For example, “Dream Song of the Star Dancers”. Or “Star Dancers of the Dream Song”.
I was strongly reminded of this by a post at the Tor website, outlining the most common words in fantasy and SF titles. Song and dance is apparently out; dragons and war are apparently in. A reflection of the time we live in?
(Hattip: the Scalzinator on the Twitter. His list of demands for Tor if they want him to write <go to the Tor link> actually sounds pretty reasonable to me. I mean, who among us has not wanted all of those things? Well, with one exception in my case, simply because I live in an apartment. But other than that, perfectly reasonable.)
Today’s War on Drugs update.
Thursday, March 10th, 2011This is shaping up to be a major scandal, and I’m frankly shocked that I haven’t heard about it until now.
Local coverage from the SFChron. Curiously to me, the SFChron is not giving this story major play; I had to click several levels deep in their website to find it. On the other hand, this next story was front page news in the SFChron, even though it happened clear across the country:
This wouldn’t ordinarily be big news. But one of the people arrested was Felicia Pearson, who played “Snoop” on The Wire.
Damn shame.
“Away with her.”
Thursday, March 10th, 2011This has turned out to be one chaotic morning, but I wanted to quickly note the latest news on the “Spider-Man” front:
Heretic!
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011My “Applications in Business Programming” class had our first meeting last night.
This
Note that it is:
- Readily available from sources other than the university bookstore.
- Recently published.
- Reasonably priced. ($34 is about average for a programming book these days.)
Given that I paid $180 for the textbook for my previous class with this professor, I think this is worthy of praise. Well done, sir!
Bang theory.
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011I haven’t done any explosives blogging in a while, and a conversation over the weekend reminded me that I had two links pending:
Derek Lowe’s latest “Things I Won’t Work With”: chlorine azide.
A while back, Joe Huffman (of Boomershoot fame) exchanged emails with a gentleman named Lawrence Johnston. Dr. Johnston worked at Los Alamos during the war: specifically, he worked on designing the detonation mechanism for the implosion bombs. Mr. Huffman has a link to a presentation Dr. Johnston gave in 2006, on his experiences at Los Alamos.
In particular, the material about designing the detonators is fascinating stuff. The problem with the implosion device is that, in order to get it to work, they had to set off 32 separate explosions (in explosive lenses arranged around the core of the bomb) and all of those explosions had to take place within 1/10th of a microsecond. Using conventional detonation mechanisms gives you a timing of several tens of microseconds, which won’t work when you’re trying to get a bunch of explosive fronts to converge into one spherical wave. So how do you solve this problem? Dr. Johnston developed the exploding bridgewire detonator for this purpose, and there’s some great stuff in his presentation about things like the D’autriche test for detonator timing, determining the blast yield of the early bombs, and what daily life at Los Alamos at the time was like. I commend Dr. Johnston’s presentation to your attention, and regret not blogging it sooner.
My heroes have always been lawyers and ambulance drivers.
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011I thought about including this in the previous round of random notes, but on second thought it deserves a post by itself. Here are two epic tales from bloggers that I admire (though I have not met either of them):
Ambulance Driver and his buddy, Too Old to Work, Too Young to Retire, bring a woman back from the dead while on vacation.
Ken over at Popehat talks about a day in the glamorous life of a defense lawyer.
A roundup of miscellaneous crap for March 9, 2011.
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011Some things worth noting in the NYT on this fine day:
Michael Ruhlman reviews Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking
Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider
Never mind.
You may ask yourself, “Why would someone pay $20,000 for a replica of an Eric Clapton Stratocaster, ‘complete with every single nick and scratch, including the wear pattern from Mr. Clapton’s belt buckle and the burn mark from his cigarettes’?” You would probably answer that question, “Because they’re a moron.” The NYT would like for you to know that evolutionary psychology suggests you’re wrong:
Yesterday was election day in Bell, California. How did things go?
Noted: Austin now has a Peruvian restaurant. (Okay, technically, Pflugerville.) Yes, I’m thinking Saturday Dining Conspiracy. No, not right away; we generally give places three months after opening before reviewing them.