Actually, this is just an excuse to link this historical piece from the LAT, featuring Hugh O’Brian (who played Wyatt Earp in the ABC TV series “The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp”) and Al Jennings, “an admitted bank robber, train robber and cattle thief of the 1880s”.
What I like best about this piece is the huge photo at the top of Jennings and O’Brian shooting Colts, and the equally large photo at the bottom of Jennings, O’Brian, and two police officers.
…and the Astros finish the season at 56-106.
Their .346 winning percentage doesn’t quite qualify for the list of worst teams in history, but we’re sure the Astros tried their best to make the list. We salute their efforts this season, and hold out hope for 110 losses next year.
Edited to add: We would like to point out that the Texas Rangers, our gold standard for futility in baseball, had the following records in their early years:
1972: 54-100, .350 winning percentage.
1973: 57-105, .351 winning percentage.
1974: 84-76, .525 winning percentage.
Yes, even at their most rock bottom and pathetic, the Rangers have never lost as many games in a year as the Astros did this year.
Did TMQ spend the off season reading epic fantasy novels? (WCD wonders if Easterbrook is a big Game of Thrones
Seriously, “great heroes”? “Muscular men with square jaws”? “gleaming heroes”? Who is TMQ talking about? After the jump…
Posted for your mocking pleasure.
Here’s what 1276 Euclid Avenue in Cleveland looks like today, according to Google Street View:
Chain restaurants like Sonic (in one location) and Burger King (at least in their Whopper Bars) have started offering beer and wine. Unfortunately, this has turned into a great pain for little benefit:
(Our first thought is a big mouth-filling Cabernet. Other suggestions welcome in comments.)
The LAT asks the same musical question the FAA is asking: how do you keep planes from going into the crowd at Reno?
And the FBI apparently paid a deputy in the LA County Jail $1,500 to smuggle a cellphone in to an informant. You’re telling me a government agency would do something illegal? Why, the next thing I know, you’ll be telling me that government agents used form letters from BATFE to buy guns with taxpayer money, and then provided those guns directly to the drug cartels!
(Edited to add: Fox News. Hattip: Snowflakes in Hell.)
In this case I don’t think carrying your gun will be much use, sadly.
Young girl goes fishing in Tom Bass Park. Young girl catches fish. Fish turns out to be Pygocentrus nattereri, aka the red-bellied piranha.
Chron takes the opportunity to get hysterical about invasive species (including the freshwater stingray) suggesting that it “might” be possible for piranhas to survive a Texas winter.
The Chron won’t tell you, but we will. Here you go. And here’s your freshwater stingray.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Miami
Indianapolis
Kansas City
Minnesota
St. Louis
Approaching the end of the season, the Astros are currently at 55-104.
Well, not killing, exactly. But Lawrence pointed out to me a few days ago that there’s a trend…
First, Christopher Lopez quit as editor of the El Paso Times after close to three years on the job.
Next, Fred Zipp quit the Statesman after eight years as editor.
And finally, Robert Rivard quit the San Antonio Express News after 14 years as editor.
I don’t quite know what to make of this. I don’t follow either the El Paso or San Antonio papers regularly, but I know Zipp presided over a large buyout of Statesman staff before resigning. (I also know the paper was up for sale at one point, but the owners didn’t get any offers that they liked.)
(Hattip other than Lawrence: TSFKA “Romenesko’s MediaNews”.)
Edited to add 9/25/2011: Things just got even more interesting. Brett Thacker, who was apparently the second-in-command at the Express-News, is also leaving. And two of the paper’s top columnists also resigned. The South Texas Pistolero has a very good post up over at his site covering these developments; I commend it to your attention.
You couldn’t have found a better beer to steal, as long as you were stealing beer? I think we can make this a general rule of thumb: if it comes in a 30-pack, it isn’t worth screwing up the rest of your life for.
Also, what is up with that guy in the middle’s face?
Last night in my “20th Century: Triumph and Tragedy” class, we were talking about World War I and the capping of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the hapless Gavrilo Princip (who used a FN Model 1910 chambered in .32 ACP: yes, another John Moses Browning design).
One thing that I really wasn’t totally conscious of was that Princip was not acting alone; I think I read somewhere previously that someone had thrown a grenade at the archduke’s car, but missed, and filed that away deep in my subconscious.
Anyway, that someone was Nedeljko Čabrinović, who threw the grenade, missed the archduke’s car, hit the third car in the procession, and then…
The blackly comic aspect of this is: the cyanide that Čabrinović, Princip, and the rest of the conspirators were carrying had expired, and all the pills did was make them vomit.
The river Čabrinović jumped into? It was 4 inches deep.
And, of course, the only reason Princip was able to shoot Ferdinand in the first place was that the Archduke’s driver turned down the wrong street, directly in front of Princip, and then stalled the car while trying to turn around. If Ferdinand had been in a Mercedes, would World War I have been averted? Or would it have been some other “damn thing in the Balkans“?
Remember when I noted that HP was bringing back the 15C?
Yeah. Well. I’ve been keeping an eye on their website since I posted that; the 15C has been in “coming soon, please keep checking back” status up until yesterday, when the status changed to “out of stock, please check back soon”.
A company called Samson Cables does have them listed on their website; I placed an order yesterday and it has supposedly shipped. (When I ordered mine, Samson Cables was charging a premium. But not a 50% premium. Not that I have anything against folks making a profit.) Updates will come when the package arrives.
“Is Cam Newton already a football god?” Without even going past that headline, we’ll suggest that the answer is “No”: rather, Cam Newton is Gandalf the Grey, the NFL is Middle Earth, and the Lombardi Trophy is the One Ring.
Hey, it makes about as much sense as last week’s extended Narnia analogy.
After the jump, “yes” or “no” to TMQ’s question…
You killed my brother. Prepare to receive a strongly worded diplomatic message.
(Come on, do you really need a hattip?)
(Sipsey Street Irregulars has been on Gunwalker like a fat man on an all-you-can-eat buffet, but I want to be sure to keep this in front of you, my regular readers. Also my irregular readers; as I often tell you, I find Dr. Pepper and Cherry Coke Zero tend to…get things moving, for those of you in that group.)
Grantland has an interesting piece up: “Rock Bottom in H-Town”, about the decline and fall of the Houston Astros.
I commend the entire article to your attention, but this portion jumped out at me:
Really? That is what’s holding up the sale? Because if you’ve been reading the coverage in the team’s hometown newspaper, you’d get the impression that the sale is being held up because MLB has issues with Crane. Take this Richard Justice column from today’s paper:
So if the real issue is that Selig is putting pressure on Crane to support realignment, why hasn’t there been more reporting of this by Justice or the rest of the HouChron sports staff? The only time I’ve seen this mentioned is by Crane, in an interview with the HouChron, and the extent of his mention is this:
Significant to me is that:
And if Selig is putting pressure on Crane, and Crane says “Screw it” and takes his offer and money off the table, who is going to step up and buy the Astros? And if Selig drives away a potential buyer for the team, is that good for the Astros? Or MLB?
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Miami
Indianapolis
Kansas City
Minnesota
Carolina
Seattle
St. Louis
Also, the Astros now sit at 53-100.
I forgot to stick this in the loser update update, but it may merit a separate post anyway.
Someone (I forget who; it may have been the bloggers at Jimbo’s old site) alerted me to Taylor Branch’s “The Shame of College Sports” in the October issue of The Atlantic.
I think this is worth your attention, even though it is long. I’m still digesting the article, but there’s quite a bit of interesting material in it about the NCAA’s past (and current) legal battles; the information Branch brings out makes me more convinced that we’ll see the end of the NCAA in the next decade.
The Monday night game is between two 0-2 0-1 teams, so look for the loser update tomorrow.
In other news, the Astros hit the 100 loss mark, but not 101, over the weekend. They’re currently at 52-100, which means 110 losses is still in play: if they lose all ten of their remaining games.
I started to blog the 100th loss over the weekend, but Reno (and some other things) had me too upset and distracted to be able to blog. Sorry.
Dakota Meyer has been awarded the Medal of Honor.
Meyer is credited with killing at least eight attackers despite being wounded in his arm by shrapnel.
By the way:
Meyer also recovered the bodies of four friends killed in action.
At the time of his actions, Meyer was a corporal. He
(Post title borrowed from LaRue Tactical.)
Bill Muehlberger, longtime geology professor at UT, and the man who trained the NASA astronauts.
Back in 2009, WCD linked to the Statesman‘s profile of Professor Muehlberger. The Statesman website is acting hinky at the moment, and we’re not sure the original piece is still up. If we find a link, we’ll update this post.
(Apologies to Weer’d for stepping into his territory.)
To be clear, that’s worst Astros team ever, not worst baseball team in general.
Last December, TMQ Watch responded to TMQ’s assertion that “Favre’s 297-game streak will never be broken”, offering Peyton Manning as an example, and stating
TMQ never contacted us to agree on terms. However, we are honorable people, and we clearly lost that bet. Accordingly, in lieu of paying TMQ $5 directly, we are making a donation to A Call To Men, an organization TMQ praised in that same column.
Ranger Up is one of my preferred clothing vendors. (As I may have noted previously, I am partial to my “Mr. Grenade” shirt, since that phrase gets a lot of use around the office.)
Anyway, I was poking around the site this morning (looking at the new MAC-V SOG shirt) and ran across Nick’s Rules on Leadership. I think these are linkworthy. There is a lot of overlap with other entries in the leadership series, but this is the kind of thing that’s good to have in one place, maybe so you can print it out and drop it on someone’s desk.
(I would like to note, for the record, that I do not currently feel any need to print this out and drop it on someone’s desk. I note this because certain someones have mentioned that they read this blog. This is also one of the reasons I do not talk very much about my work life.)
(I would also like to note, for the record, that I haven’t abandoned the leadership series, even if there haven’t been any recent updates. I post stuff when I find it, and when I think it is worth posting.)
The Atlantic‘s Vladimir Putin photo gallery.
See:
Someone should have told this man, “Look. “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” was not a documentary. And you’re not Peter Weller. Okay?”