Archive for September, 2012
TMQ watch: September 25, 2012.
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#O of a series)
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012So Austin’s favorite police chief had a press conference this morning “flanked by two of his harshest critics”. (In case you were wondering, those are Nelson Linder, president of the local NAACP, and Jim Harrington, executive director of the Texas Civil Rights Project.)
Why the press conference? APD policy changes, which Chief Acevedo credits to input from Mr. Linder and Mr. Harrington. Specifically:
- Supervisor approval is required before officers do a consent search of a house or vehicle. Officers are required to get consent in “written and videotaped form”.
- “In cases where a suspect is known to be mentally or emotionally disturbed, a minimum of four officers along with a sergeant will be sent to the scene, and at least one of them must be specially trained in handling such issues.”
- Don’t stand in front of moving vehicles, dumbasses.
It isn’t clear to me if these are the only policy changes, or if there were less significant ones that the Statesman is skipping. One other area that’s been highly controversial lately is photographing and recording APD officers during arrests: Scott Henson over at “Grits for Breakfast” has some good coverage of what’s been going on.
Off the top of my head, none of these sound horrible. I do have a concern that requiring a minimum of four officers to respond to emotionally disturbed persons might, just might, cause problems, if that kind of response looks overwhelming to the subject. However, I think the training requirement may offset that concern. The big issue: does APD have enough people, with the right training, to respond in a timely fashion?
Charismatic megafauna.
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012Headline of the day:
I know at least one person who would answer that question with a hearty “Hell, yes!”
(Said person also needs to update his blog. Badly.)
Obit watch: September 25, 2012.
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012The NYT is reporting the death of Tereska Torrès.
Yeah, I’d never heard of her, either. After the jump, why I’m bringing this up (so to speak). (Strong hint: mature content.)
Maybe they should have done “Gaslight” (and more random notes for September 25, 2012)
Tuesday, September 25th, 2012Ben Sprecher is a theatrical producer. Most of his work has been off-Broadway, but he’s trying to put on a Broadway musical version of “Rebecca”. (I know what you’re thinking, but according to the NYT, this was done in Vienna in 2006, and played well.)
Anyway, Mr. Sprecher estimates that he needs $12 million for this. Mr. Sprecher had an investor – a man named Paul Abrams – who was putting up $4.5 million. That’s a lot of money for one person to invest in a Broadway show. But wait, it gets better!
But wait, it gets even better: Mr. Sprecher never met or spoke to Mr. Abrams at all. There are questions as to whether Mr. Abrams ever even existed.
Mr. Sprecher is trying to raise money to fill the gap. But if he fails and the musical doesn’t open, he’s on the hook to his other investors.
Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, bat cave!
Obit watch: Edwin Wilson. Remember Edwin Wilson? Former CIA guy? Convicted of shipping plastic explosives to Libya? Spent 20 years in prison?
Yeah. That guy.
Debacle? That seems strong. But I didn’t watch the game. “Debacle” may not be strong enough.
Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do? Well, they can register domains. But Donuts, Inc. has close ties to Demand Media…
The current theory on convicted sex offender and fugitive from justice Prakashanand Saraswati seems to be that he’s in India now, having been spirited out of the country by his followers. And the US Marshals don’t have an office in India.
Maybe they could send some BATF guys from Reno to India.
Your loser update: week 3, 2012.
Monday, September 24th, 2012I really hate to say this, but I’m starting to think Cleveland has a good shot at going 0-16 this year. And they lost to the Bills, which makes it even more painful…
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Cleveland
New Orleans
The Astros are at 50-103, for a .327 winning percentage. This is projecting out to 109 losses. Put another way, they’d have to win three out of the last nine games, or go .333, to avoid 110 losses.
Random notes: September 21, 2012.
Friday, September 21st, 2012Somewhere, deep within the Bronx, is a horse stable. Back in the old days (some twenty years ago) people went to the stable and rented horses for rides on a trail that runs past Pelham Parkway.
The stable has been condemned by the building department, and the owners of the property haven’t paid taxes since 2007. But just because the stable is condemned doesn’t mean there’s nothing left inside.
What remains? A horse, of course. A horse named Rusty that the residents are trying to “save”.
Noted here for family reasons: Texas Tech men’s basketball coach Billy Gillispie resigned yesterday. Gillispie had coached the team for one year.
This doesn’t sound like a firing: Gillispie states he resigned for “health reasons”. However, the university was investigating “allegations of player mistreatment” (Mike Leach, call your office, please), and Gillispie’s performance last season was disappointing, to put it mildly.
(I apologize for linking to the Statesman, but the Lubbock newspaper’s site isn’t working for me this morning. Here’s the HouChron story, which is a little longer.)
(Edited to add: Slightly different story, also from the HouChron.)
(Edited to add 2: I couldn’t pull it up at work – I kept getting errors from a proxy, and I don’t think it was ours – but now that I’m home, here’s the Lubbock paper’s coverage.)
Randy Adams had a hearing before a panel of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System yesterday. Mr. Adams is appealing the decision by the system not to include his one year as police chief of Bell in calculating his pension. (Previously.) If Mr. Adams wins his appeal, he’ll get a pension of $510,000 a year, “making him the second-highest-paid public pensioner in California” according to the LAT.
So how did the hearing go?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m not sure I understand California law. Does the Fifth Amendment apply in an administrative proceeding? Or is Mr. Adams taking the Fifth because he’s concerned that evidence presented in the administrative proceeding could be used against him in a criminal case? (Remember, Mr. Adams has not been charged with any crimes. Yet.)
Deja vu all over again.
Thursday, September 20th, 2012Someone is allegedly paying Monica Lewinsky $12 million for her memoir, which allegedly contains “more salacious details about Lewinsky and Clinton, ostensible complaints by Clinton about his wife, Hillary, and Lewinsky’s love letters to Clinton, previously unpublished”.
Kato Kaelin says O.J. is guilty.
The clock on my computer says it is September 20, 2012, not 1994. If it is 1994, does that mean I have to give back my diploma? And my Intel-based MacBook?
Headline of the day.
Thursday, September 20th, 2012This is a surprisingly hard question to find an answer for, but the best information I’ve been able to find seems to point to Cuba moving steadily westward as the Atlantic Ocean widens and South America pushes upwards towards North America, until eventually (some 250 million years from now) the continents reassemble themselves as Pangea Ultima and Cuba is sucked under what’s left of the Atlantic Ocean.
Then again, that may not have been the question the NYT had in mind…
Some random stuff for the morning of September 20, 2012.
Thursday, September 20th, 2012There hasn’t been much in the news the past couple of days, and I’ve been depressed and upset for various reasons that the readers of this blog won’t care about.
I don’t have a lot to say about the DOJ report on “Fast and Furious”. I haven’t had time to go through the report myself, and I’m expecting that a lot of people who are smarter than I am will have smarter things to say than I do, once they’ve had a chance to go through it.
The Astros have crossed the 100 loss barrier, and are still on track for 110 losses. Woot.
Today’s NYT has two articles I found kind of interesting. One is about problems with the United Network for Organ Sharing and kidney allocation:
Story number two is about the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation in North Dakota:
And:
And the mayor of Central Falls, Rhode Island, resigned yesterday. He’s also agreed to plead guilty on federal charges that “he took illegal gratuities from a friend and political supporter who received lucrative work from the city boarding up abandoned buildings”.
“Some homes were boarded up even though people were still living there.” In completely unrelated news: gee, I really miss Buddy Cianci.
I’m not snickering. I’m experiencing schadenfreude.
Wednesday, September 19th, 2012I would have sworn I had written about the Virginia Samuelson murder case last year, but I can’t find it. Maybe I sent it to Weer’d Beard for the “Gun Death” files instead.
Short version: Shaun Samuelson got into an argument with his mother, Virginia, and hit her several times. EMS was called, and while Mrs. Samuelson was on a stretcher, being loaded into the ambulance, Mr. Samuelson drove his pickup into the group (including Mrs. Samuelson, the EMTs, and an APD officer) killing her. (APD and the EMTs apparently ducked out of the way and avoided serious injury.)
Mr. Samuelson will serve a life sentence, as the prosecution did not seek the death penalty.
SDC updates.
Wednesday, September 19th, 2012Lawrence and I have been making efforts (around the other things we have going on) to reboot the Logbook of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy in blog format. As I’ve mentioned previously, mac.com hosting went away, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen with Real/Time hosting.
We have a first version of it here, or at least one I don’t mind sharing with people.
One of the big problems I’ve been running into is the need for a header image. I found one that sort of “works”, for some value of works, but I’d really like to find a distinctive header image (or a set of images) that I won’t mind looking at for the next twenty years or so. The recommended image is 940 pixels wide by 198 pixels high.
If anyone wants to take a cut at doing a header image, I’m willing to put something on the table; either cash (in the double digits) or dinner at an SDC if you’re in the area.
Contact me at the usual addresses if you’re interested in talking specifics.
TMQ watch: September 18, 2012.
Tuesday, September 18th, 2012
Apropos of nothing in particular…
Monday, September 17th, 2012There was a time in my life when I was listening to the original cast recording of “Evita
And the money kept rolling out in all directions
To the poor, to the weak, to the destitute of all complexions
Now cynics claim a little of the cash has gone astray
But that’s not the point my friends
When the money keeps rolling out you don’t keep books
You can tell you’ve done well by the happy grateful looks
Accountants only slow things down, figures get in the way
Never been a lady loved as much as Eva Peron
This guy’s no Patinkin, but he’s pretty good, and this is the best video I could find on YouTube. (There is one video that claims to be Patinkin performing the song, but it is almost unbearably poor quality.)
Actually, I take back the “apropos of nothing in particular”, because what got me going down this path was the “Stuff You Missed in History Class” podcast, and especially the “Why did it take more than 20 years to bury Eva Peron?” episode. There is a comment in the liner notes to that cast recording that the story of Eva’s body is almost as fascinating as the story of her life, and I’ve agitated for Rice and Weber to do a musical about the saga of Eva Peron’s body.
Hurry home early.
Monday, September 17th, 2012Mark Kriegel has a new book coming out tomorrow: The Good Son: The Life of Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini
I’ve never been a huge boxing fan, but the Mancini – Duk-koo Kim fight fascinated me even before the Zevon song was released. I’ll be watching for Kriegel’s book.
In the meantime, the NYT has a long article about the fight, adapted from the book.
And for those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about when I reference Zevon, or those of you who just want to hear “Boom Boom Mancini” right now: