Archive for January, 2013

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We must stop the killer Italian cars!

Friday, January 4th, 2013

Nobody needs a Ferrari to drive to the grocery store! We have to do something about these killer assault cars! Two deaths this week!  And that’s just in California!

A Ferrari driver was killed and his passenger injured when he lost control of the speeding car on a curve in Ventura County, plunging the red sports car into an irrigation ditch, where it burst into flames, the CHP said Friday.

Posted in California Über Alles, Cars, Clippings, Sarcasm | Comments Closed

Skulls for the skull throne!

Friday, January 4th, 2013

Hey, remember Bloody Monday? Wasn’t that a time?

Remember how the Kansas City Chiefs fired Romeo Crennel as head coach, but didn’t fire Scott Pioli as general manager?

Well, about that…

Beyond the losing on the field, Pioli’s management style created a toxic atmosphere within the organization. Haley told The Star a few days before he was fired in December 2011 that he suspected rooms at the team facility were bugged so that team administrators could monitor employees’ conversations. Haley also believed his personal cellphone, a line he used before being hired by the Chiefs, had been tampered with.

And this is sportsfirings.com, not sportshirings.com, but we have to add this note:

The move clears the way for the Chiefs to hire…

Yes, Andy Reid is the new coach.

Posted in Clippings, Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Important safety tip. (#13 in a series)

Friday, January 4th, 2013

For God’s sake, people, you’re adults. Act like it.

“Egging” someone’s house as a “prank” is just dumb.

Especially if that someone is your boss.

And especially if you’re a cop.

He says is handling the matter internally.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Safety | 1 Comment »

Resolved.

Friday, January 4th, 2013

I think Calvin has the right idea.

But I was puttering around in the kitchen yesterday, putting together a loaf of sourdough beer bread, and a couple of thoughts occurred to me.

  1. There’s something kind of magical in the transformation of water, flour, and yeast to bread. I know some of the science, but it still kind of amazes me when I dump a bunch of stuff in one end, and get something I can eat (that tastes good!) out of the other.
  2. I have a really nice bread machine that I haven’t been using as much as I should. I need to step that up, and I’ve already started working in that direction.
  3. I’ve been working through, or plan to start working through, several cookbooks: primarily Bread Machine Baking, though I want to try adapting some of the ones from Breads from the La Brea Bakery to bread machine use. Laurence Simon has some recipes on his site that I’d like to try as well.
  4. I’ve also been improvising some breads. For example, on Sunday I made a basic white bread from the cookbook that came with the machine, but I added a tablespoon of Penzeys Italian Herb mix and 1/2 cup of grated parmesan. It came out okay, but a little salty for my taste. (A major reason it came out that way is that I misread the recipe and added too much salt. If I had put in the correct amount, I think it would have been better, even with the added salt from the cheese.)
  5. But I haven’t been documenting the recipes I’ve tried, or my improvisations.

So I’m going to start keeping a bread journal of what I bake, where it came from, what changes/improvisations I’ve made, and how it came out.

I’m just using a simple notebook for this right now. But I’m thinking about posting these as regular entries (maybe once a week; as a single guy, a loaf a week is about what I go through) on a blog. Probably here; I thought about doing this on the SDC blog, but that’s more restaurant targeted than food in general. I don’t see that fitting in with the shared vision Lawrence and I have for that blog.

Would folks be interested in this? I don’t think there’s any danger of me turning into a foodie d’bag: TJIC would probably…well, maybe not sneer, but at least say something to me for using a bread machine rather than mixing and kneading by hand, for starters.

I’d also like to get some feedback on what I might be doing wrong. The sourdough beer bread tastes pretty good and has just about the right texture for my taste, but the top crust came out cracked and uneven. (The basic white bread+ I made came out distorted: one end rose to a normal level, but the other end just barely rose at all. I blame that on the salt problem. It was also pretty dense, but again, the salt problem, plus I kind of expect cheese breads to be dense.)

How about it, folks? Feel free to leave comments.

(I haven’t said this in a while, so let me drop this in here: if you buy stuff from Amazon using the links above or the search box to the side, I get a small kickback which I could use right now. Just saying; no obligation to buy.)

(Oh, and speaking of magic/science, I’ve started reading Ruhlman’s Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking. So far, I’m enjoying it; he’s making me want to try some of these things for myself, which I think is a high compliment for a food book.)

(Note to self: look for good kitchen scale when out thrift-shopping again.)

(Note to self 2: they’re really not that much on Amazon. Does anyone have a recommendation?)

Posted in Admin, Books, Food | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 4, 2013.

Friday, January 4th, 2013

It looks like this is going to be a NYT heavy day. I apologize, but I go where the interesting stuff is.

This is a no-snark story. Even though I think the main idea is well known, and gets repeated by the NYT every few years, I still think it is worth noting,

Decades later, the operators say, the images are vivid. The slender fellow in the jacket and tie, bending his knees at the platform’s edge. The reveler stumbling on the tracks at dawn, wobbly in her evening best, unable to stagger away in time. An arm reaching up, hopefully, then disappearing in a flash.
“As cruel as it makes it sound, for the individual it’s over,” said Curtis Tate, a former operator whose train struck and killed a man in 1992. “It’s just beginning for the train operator.”

According to the NYT, operators expect an average of one death per week. (There were 55 in 2012, and the system has already had the first death of 2013.)

“I was always seeing it, you know?” Ms. Moore, 45, from Staten Island, said. “I see him alive and….”

Also in the NYT, an interesting article about the investigation into the Indianapolis gas explosion.

Even before they heard that family photographs were missing, investigators said they sensed something was not right with the scattered remains of Monserrate Shirley’s home.

I’ve heard more than once that family photos being missing, or obviously taken out of the house before the event, is a significant clue to investigators that they might be dealing with arson or some other deliberate act. But as we shift towards digital photos and storage in the cloud, how long is that going to remain a useful clue?

Officials believe the home, in the Richmond Hill subdivision, had been saturated with natural gas for six to nine hours before it erupted at 11:11 p.m. The explosion was seen and felt for miles. It shattered windows and collapsed walls throughout the neighborhood, shoving some homes off their foundations. John D. Longworth and his wife, Jennifer, who lived in the house next door, did not survive.

Conveniently, the people who owned the house were “at a casino 100 miles away”, their daughter was spending the night with friends, and they had boarded their cat.

This came to me by way of the NYT: I’m linking to the AZCentral web site, but both have about the same amount of detail. The jury in the trial of Erick Venola deadlocked on the second-degree murder charges against him. Mr. Venola is expected to be retried in late February; he was pleading self-defense in the shooting of his neighbor, James Patrick O’Neill.

Why is this worth noting? I don’t note every mistrial in Arizona. True that, but: Mr. Venola was a former editor of “Guns and Ammo” magazine, and I’ve seen absolutely no mention of this in the gun blog sphere (or anywhere else) before now. It may be that Mr. Venola is not exactly a sympathetic defendant: the prosecution claims he and Mr. O’Neill were both drunk at the time of the shooting.

Interesting set of stats from the NYT, by way of Jimbo: Arthur O. Sulzberger’s obit in the NYT was the fourth longest in the past 30 years. The top five:

  1. Pope John Paul II.
  2. Richard Nixon.
  3. Ronald Reagan.
  4. Arthur O. Sulzberger.
  5. Gerald Ford.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law, Nixon, Obits, Safety | Comments Closed

Unintended consequences.

Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

Actual headline from the Y Combinator Twitter feed that made me click through to the article:

So why did the train cross the border 24 times and never unload? My first thought was “to get to the other side”. Turns out that was wrong.

I’ll spoil the riddle for you:

The cargo of the train was owned by Bioversal Trading Inc., or its US partner Verdero, depending on what stage of the trip it was at. The companies “made several million dollars importing and exporting the fuel to exploit a loophole in a U.S. green energy program.” Each time the loaded train crossed the border the cargo earned its owner a certain amount of Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs), which were awarded by the US EPA to “promote and track production and importation of renewable fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.” The RINs were supposed to be retired each time the shipment passed the border, but due to a glitch not all of them were. This enabled Bioversal to accumulate over 12 million RINs from the 24 trips, worth between 50 cents and $1 each, which they can then sell on to oil companies that haven’t met the EPA’s renewable fuel requirements.

This was all perfectly legal, at least according to the companies involved. The US and Canadian governments are investigating, according to the article, so the “perfectly legal” part may be in dispute.

(Wouldn’t you have enjoyed being a fly in the cab of that train and listening to the crew talk as they went back and forth and back and forth and back and forth across the border?)

Posted in Clippings, Law, Politics, Trains | Comments Closed

More things I did not know.

Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

Commenting over at Tam’s place led me to Wikipedia, to refresh my memory of the Rankine scale.

And a footnote there, in turn, led me to something I’d never heard of before: VSMOW. That’s Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water, “a water standard defining the isotopic composition of freshwater”.

Very pure, carefully distilled VSMOW water is important in the manufacture of high-accuracy temperature measurement reference standards.

You see, if your water doesn’t have the exact right isotopic composition, you may see errors in your calibration of up to “several hundred microkelvin”.

I prefer being a time geek, but I have to admit that being a temperature geek does appear to have some thrills.

Posted in Clippings, Geek | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 3, 2013.

Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

The shooting, on Nov. 26, was one more jarring reminder of just how common killings seem to have grown on the streets of Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, where 506 homicides were reported in 2012, a 16 percent increase over the year before, even as the number of killings remained relatively steady or dropped in some cities, including New York.

How’s that strict gun control working for you, Chicago?

First they came for the large sodas, and I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t drink soda. Then they came for the energy drinks…

Obit watch: Patti Page. NYT. A/V Club.

The NYT profiles Christopher Tinker, auto mechanic in Baltimore. Why? Christopher Tinker’s great-grandfather was Joe Tinker.

Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,
Tinker and Evers and Chance.
Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,
Making a Giant hit into a double,
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:
Tinker to Evers to Chance.

Yeah, that Joe Tinker.

In 1993, he paid $220 for one of the original baseball cards, which were issued by tobacco companies. But the card was eventually lost, and Tinker thought about how to replace it. One day he walked into a Baltimore tattoo parlor, and the idea hit him. Six hours and nearly $500 later, he had his great-grandfather’s image engraved on his arm.

Lake Tahoe has a bear problem. Actually, Lake Tahoe has two bear problems:

More than a thousand bear complaints a year are reported to officials on the lake’s California side alone. They break into homes to forage in refrigerators, at times surprising terrified residents. They den under porches and have learned to twist the tops off food jars. They make the trash-can exploits of the Southern California bruin nicknamed Glen Bearian look like the fumblings of an amateur.

Problem #2:

It’s not uncommon for people who have sought state approval to have a bear killed to receive an onslaught of threats. Homes have been vandalized. Even complaining about a problem bear to game wardens — who some see as the enemy — can bring scorn.
“People have been approached and yelled at in grocery stores simply for reporting bear activity,” said Placer County Sheriff’s Capt. Jeff Ausnow. “They’ll say, ‘You can’t do that because they’re going to kill it.’ This is a very emotional issue here.”

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law, Music, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Blood for the blood god!

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

The man who TMQ would describe as “the tastefully named Gregg Williams” is apparently out as defensive coordinator in St. Louis, according to ESPN.

This is kind of an interesting situation: Williams worked for the Saints, took the job with the Rams in the off-season, and was then suspended indefinitely by the NFL for his part in the bounty scandal. He didn’t coach at all this season, and has not been reinstated by the NFL. So I’m not sure why they’re letting him go now; couldn’t they have just as easily fired him before the season started?

Both ESPN and ProFootballTalk are reporting that Blake Williams, Gregg’s son and the linebackers coach, has also been fired. Blake actually coached this season: PFT states “After Gregg was suspended, [Rams coach Jeff] Fisher gave many of Gregg’s responsibilities to the 27-year-old Blake, making him one of the youngest assistant coaches ever to handle play calling in the NFL.”

Beats me, but I just report ’em.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 2, 2013.

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

“It is my belief that any commander that orders pilots out for combat in a F2A-3 should consider the pilot as lost before leaving the ground,” wrote Capt. P. R. White of the Marines.

Would you like to make great coffee and espresso? Well, you could get the NYT to pay for you to take classes from people with names like “Ant”. And you could pay anywhere from $100 to $600 for a burr grinder.

Or instead you could read this rant by Stingray, which pretty much tells you everything important about making good coffee. (Language warning on that link, just FYI.)

I do think there’s something to be said for the NYT piece:

The essence of good espresso, of good coffee in general, revolves around three numbers: the amount of quality dry coffee used, the amount of time water flows through it and the amount of coffee that comes out the other end. When the ratio is right, the process extracts the best flavor. If it is wrong, the good flavor never surfaces or is watered down. A mistake in seconds or grams, I am coming to learn, is the difference between something wonderful and awful.

It seems like the important thing is to use good coffee, use enough of it, and don’t let it sit and burn. Unless you’re a supertaster (which I am not), I doubt you can tell the difference between a $250 burr grinder and a $10 blade grinder, or an AeroPress versus a Chemex.

It isn’t rocket surgery, folks. It’s just coffee.

Posted in Clippings, Food, History, Planes | Comments Closed

Random notes: January 1, 2013.

Tuesday, January 1st, 2013

Let us pause in our revels for a few moments to consider the plight of the less fortunate.

Specifically, the Vegas sports books, which did not do well this NFL season.

The damage was particularly bad in Week 9 of the NFL season, when Vegas-backed underdogs finished 2-10 against the point spread, while seven games that day finished “over” the game’s projected total-points-scored line.

One of the people involved in the MGM sports books claims they took a “seven-figure” hit that day.

“Looking at this, I can tell you we’ll need the underdogs to win in every game. Again,” he said.

If I understand this right, the Texans are favored by between 4 and 5 points over the Bengals. Just saying.

This story was reported by Instapundit and other folks late last week. I didn’t link it because all the reports came back to PRNewswire, who I don’t trust. However, I finally found a link to a WSJ article. So here’s what happened: the ASPCA and other animal rights organizations sued Feld Entertainment (the parent company of Ringling Brothers) for violations of the Endangered Species Act. The organizations, along with a former Ringling Brothers employee, claimed that the circus was mistreating elephants. This has been dragging on for years:

After nine years of litigation, a federal court found that the plaintiffs had no standing to sue under the Endangered Species Act and that the former Ringling employee was “not credible” and “essentially a paid plaintiff and fact witness” whose only source of income during the litigation was the animal-rights groups that were his co-plaintiffs.

The hook (so to speak): last Friday, the ASPCA settled with Feld Entertainment and paid Feld $9.3 million. Feld is pursuing other parties in the case, including “the Humane Society of the United States, the Fund for Animals, the Animal Welfare Institute, the Animal Protection Institute United with Born Free USA, the former employee and the lawyers who prosecuted the bogus case”.

I’m opposed to animal cruelty. I don’t think you should run over turtles. I think dogs and cats deserve decent treatment, and I think we could do a better job of dealing with meat animals. But I also think that when you hear Sara McLachlan singing “Silent Night” while a bunch of sad-eyed animals appear on the screen, you should keep in mind that the money you donate is going to pay off a settlement from a frivolous and malicious lawsuit.

Posted in Clippings, Law, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Happy New Year, everyone.

Tuesday, January 1st, 2013

I’d like to say “may 2013 be better than 2012”, but that’s less of an expression of hope and more of a statement of fact. I find it hard to imagine this new year being much worse than the last one.

I’d also like to thank the following folks:

Those sites were the top referrers of hits here in 2012.

I don’t get the loony search terms that Ken and Patrick do. You guys need to work on that in 2013. My test and evaluation of the Nerf EBF-25 continues to be an evergreen post, and a lot of folks apparently came here looking for information on Azaria and Lindy Chamberlain, oddly enough. You’d figure that people looking for information on the case would go to a more mainstream site…

Enough administrative indulgence. Good luck this year, everyone.

Posted in Admin | Comments Closed

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