Ray Manzarek. NYT. LAT. A/V Club.
Mentioned by Lawrence last night: Manzarek wrote a horror novel (the A/V Club calls it “a Civil War ghost story”), Snake Moon
Archive for May, 2013
Obit watch: May 21, 2013.
Tuesday, May 21st, 2013
, that was little more than a therapy exercise masquerading as fiction, in which a Jim Morrison-type rock star known as “The Snake Man” fakes his own death, reunites with his keyboard player “Roy,” apologizes for how he treated him, then thanks him profusely for keeping his legacy alive. As of 2011, Manzarek was still trying to turn it into a movie, convinced, as always, that this story needed to be told… by Ray Manzarek.Your loser update.
Monday, May 20th, 2013Lawrence sent over a link to an interesting article at Grantland: “The Joy of Tanking: Hoarding prospects and being horrible with the Houston Astros”.
But the main point of the article is that the Astros actually have a chance to be good several years from now:
Currently, Houston and Miami are tied for the worst record in baseball: 12-32, with a .273 winning percentage. That puts both teams at a projected 117 losses.
Stupid question, probably.
Sunday, May 19th, 2013But why does the National PTA have an “official e-reader”? And what other “official” products does the National PTA have? “Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy: Official beer of the National PTA”? “Leica: Official camera of the National PTA”?
I know, I know, but does anyone have a better answer than “M-O-N-E-Y”?
Cahiers du Cinéma: Alphaville.
Sunday, May 19th, 2013Last night’s movie was Alphaville
Lawrence has said he’s not sure he wants to write a review of it, so I guess the duty of commentary falls to me. The problem is, I’m not sure what to say about it. I get the idea that Jean-Luc Godard is an important director, and Alphaville is an important film in the history of the French New Wave.
And the movie does have some things going for it:
- The women are beautiful, especially Anna Karina.
- “Hey, we don’t have a budget, so let’s use a Ford Mustang as an interstellar spacecraft, and Paris at night to represent an alien city.” Sounds good to me.
- Godard does do a lot with little money in this movie.
- It is shortish: 1:39.
- I am not sure, but I believe this may be the first pop culture example of the “destroy the computer by setting it up with a logical contradiction” trope. TVTropes is not helpful in this regard, but Alphaville does predate Star Trek.
- At least Godard had the good taste to give Lemmy Caution a 1911.
- Wow. What great staircases.
Beyond those things, though…wow, this is one hot pretentious mess. Alphaville is the kind of movie that is great to be able to say you have seen, but not all that great to actually sit through.
(I have a feeling this is going to make it much harder to talk Lawrence and everyone else into seeing Made in U.S.A.
(And no great shock here, but my guess was right: you can buy Alphaville buttons online. However:
- Lawrence isn’t a button person.
- $6.25 seems steep to me, especially given that…
- …most of the things I’ve ordered from Zazzle have been disappointing, especially t-shirts.
Maybe if there’s a button maker at Worldcon I’ll get some done. Goddard won’t mind me infringing his copyright, will he? If he does, it isn’t like he has any room to complain.)
Subcontinental notes: May 19, 2013.
Sunday, May 19th, 2013My initial reaction when I saw this NYT article was, “Pakistan has problems because they’re ruled by a kleptocracy? Stop the freakin’ presses, Batman!” If that was a hot news flash to you, well, welcome to the 21st Century; we hope you enjoy your time here.
Having clicked through to the article and read it, my reaction is somewhat different: it is actually an interesting survey of Pakistan’s problems, as reflected by the state of the national rail system. That state is dysfunctional.
One thing towards the end of the article lept out at me: “Nazir Ahmed Jan, a burly 30-year-old and an unlikely Pakistani patriot” lives in Karachi. He migrated to the city in 2009, and makes a living…
So? Mr. Jan also writes patriotic Pakistani poetry. Still “so?”
His Facebook page?
Wow. So even desperately poor people in a desperately poor kleptocracy can get Internet access and have Facebook pages? Not really a shocker, but worth noting next time someone starts talking about the technology gap between rich and poor.
On a tangentially related note, something else that should not have surprised me but did. Last night’s SDC was at one of the growing breed of “fast casual” Indian places. (Review to come.) The big screen TV on the wall was showing Indian cricket.
That wasn’t the surprise. I think you’re hard pressed to find that on US television, even if you have DirectTV, but I know there are satellite TV providers that target the Indian population in the US.
What surprised me, and, in retrospect, shouldn’t have, was: discovering that there is such a thing as “fantasy cricket“. After all, there’s fantasy football, fantasy hockey, fantasy basketball, and cricket really isn’t that far from baseball, so why not fantasy cricket? I guess it surprises me because I hadn’t really considered the idea until it was thrust in my face; now that I have, well, it is interesting, but I won’t be assembling a fantasy cricket team this year.
Random notes: May 18, 2013.
Saturday, May 18th, 2013Not news: New York State Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez (D-Brooklyn) has been accused of sexually harassing several women.
News: Assemblyman Lopez is resigning rather than fighting the charges.
FARK: Soon to be former Assemblyman Lopez plans to run for a seat on the NYC City Council.
The Assembly has not expelled anyone since it ejected five socialists in the early 1920s.
About a month ago, I noted the money laundering and gambling charges against Hillel Nahmad, a prominent member of the NYC art scene. Over the past two days, the NYT has run two longish articles going into more detail about the Nahmad accusations:
- Shocked, shocked I am to find out that high-stakes gambling goes on in NYC.
- “Information about how the family’s art business actually works has been difficult to pin down. In several settings, the Nahmads have described a company called the International Art Center as their base of art transactions. But in a federal suit last year the Nahmads sought to deny any legal connection between themselves and the center. Lawyers for the other side in that case said they were not even able to determine where the International Art Center was incorporated. A Christie’s invoice in the case showed the center’s location as Switzerland, but the auction house redacted the city and precise address before entering the document into court records. In a deposition in another lawsuit, Helly Nahmad said the International Art Center was based not in Switzerland but in Panama.”
Meanwhile in Utah, the West Valley City Police Department has problems.
It all started when two undercover officers shot and killed a 21-year-old woman.
More:
And:
Random CrapCam ™ photos that amused me.
Friday, May 17th, 2013
HEB Central Market: the place to go for all your Juggalo needs.
I have a three-year old nephew who loves his “trucks”. So whenever I’m at the HEB, I check the toy aisle and try to pick up a Hot Wheels car or something for him. I noticed this at the HEB yesterday:
I don’t know who the target audience for this is. Little kids shouldn’t be watching NCIS, and I doubt adults are big into toy cars. (Collectors are an exception, but is there really a big audience of NCIS collectors, as opposed to Star Trek or Star Wars ones?)
No, I didn’t buy it: the three-year-old is not a big NCIS fan, and it was $5. The Hot Wheels were 97 cents.
(To answer another question: this was the only NCIS branded car they had, though there were also some “Greenlight Hollywood” vehicles with branding tied to one of those auto auction shows on some cable channel. I don’t remember which one; sorry.)
Quote of the day #2.
Friday, May 17th, 2013As Say Uncle once said, it is my damn blog and I can have more than one quote of the day if I want.
-Ken @ Popehat
If I ever take a class where I have write my own operating system, it will be comma-based and called “Ken”.
Another question for the huddled masses.
Friday, May 17th, 2013Why do Android podcast clients suck?
I’ve written previously about my experience with the awful Pocket Casts application.
I dumped that and started using Google Listen. Google Listen frequently fails to completely download all of a podcast (so you end up with one in the queue that’s cut short, without any warning), frequently hangs up when trying to add a new podcast, and is no longer supported or maintained by Google. (Edited to add: Also, my phone frequently reboots while Google Listen is running, but I’m not sure if that is a Google Listen problem or a problem with some other application.)
I downloaded BeyondPod for my Kindle Fire. The free version (which I am using) has some limitations: you can’t set up automatic updates to your podcast feeds, nor can you download more than one podcast at a time. In order to activate those features, you have to pay $6.99 for an unlock code. Personally, I think that’s a bit steep for a podcast client, but if BeyondPod actually did what I wanted it to do, I’d pay that.
However, BeyondPod has a couple of what I consider to be crippling issues:
- I find the user interface to be completely counter-intuitive. For example, if I have a podcast on my playlist, playing, and I want to switch to the player controls (to rewind, pause, or fast forward) I can’t figure out how to do that. Sometimes BeyondPod will display player controls underneath the playlist, other times it doesn’t. Sometimes you can swipe up and see the controls for the specific podcast; sometimes you can’t. There seems to me to be no rhyme or reason to what controls BeyondPod displays when and where, and how to get from one set of controls to another.
- Then there’s my personal favorite BeyondPod “feature”. If you have a playlist, and you’re looking at the feeds for a podcast (say, you want to read the notes on a specific podcast), and you accidentally touch in the wrong place, BeyondPod starts playing the podcast you’re looking at. This makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that BeyondPod also wipes out your existing playlist. Oh, you wanted to listen just to that podcast, or you missed the touch target and didn’t intend to play that podcast at all? Too bad, so sad, rebuild your playlist. That’s a deal breaker for me; no, I will not pay you $7 for a podcast client that erases my playlists.
All I want out of a podcast client is a few basic, simple things:
- Maintain a feed of the podcasts I want to listen to.
- Reliably download those podcasts. If a podcast fails to completely download, either warn me or retry until it does.
- Let me mark podcasts as listened or not listened.
- Let me fast forward/rewind within the currently playing podcast.
- Let me have a playlist of podcasts that I can easily rearrange.
That’s pretty much it. There are some other features that would be nice (ability to sync across multiple platforms, for example) but not essential to me. So why is this so hard?
Android fans constantly bash Apple and iTunes. Yes, iTunes has problems, most of which involve trying to put too many functions into one piece of software. But for all the problems iTunes has, it is at least capable of doing all of the things on my minimum list. I can’t say that for any Android client I’ve tried so far.
Quote of the day.
Friday, May 17th, 2013When thrown into water, (dimethylcadmium) sinks to the bottom in large drops, which decompose in a series of sudden explosive jerks, with crackling sounds…
–Derek Lowe, “Things I Won’t Work With: Dimethylcadmium”
In other news, “A Series Of Sudden Explosive Jerks, With Crackling Sounds”, is the title of the next album from the Suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band.
Random notes: May 17, 2013.
Friday, May 17th, 2013Actual headline on an AP story from the NYT:
Well, you see, when a mommy anteater and a daddy anteater love each other very much….
Obit watch: NASCAR driver Dick Trickle. The NYT obit (by way of the AP) is just awful: here’s a better obit from the HouChron.
Just one more thing…
Wednesday, May 15th, 2013As long as we’re talking about Lawrence’s review of General Idi Amin Dada, I have a question that’s bugging me, and I know I have some aviation buffs in my audience.
What are these planes? I apologize for the pictures: they are actually screen snapshots from the DVD, and I tried to get ones that showed the best possible angles. Click to embiggen.
Lawrence suggested they might be MiGs, and I know the Ugandan Air Force had MiG-15s and MiG-17s. But both the 15 and 17 have a really blunt open nose, while these planes have a more rounded one. I don’t think these are Fouga Magisters either, because they lack the V-tail. I believe these are some sort of two seat jet trainer, and they may be French. But I can’t tell, and it really bugs me that I can’t figure it out. Maybe if I’m lucky Tam will see this. For some reason, I’ve also got in my head that the good and great Brian Dunbar knows his planes. And, of course, there’s RoadRich…
Okay. I lied. One more “one more thing”, just because this amuses me, and I’m pretty sure it amused Lawrence as well.
(Okay, one last thing. It irritates the fire out of me that Apple disabled screen captures from DVD Player in the Grab utility. And they don’t just throw up a “You can’t do this” popup: Grab lets you do the capture, but the resulting file is just a checkerboard grey and white pattern. Fortunately, VLC will a) playback DVDs, and b) even has a built-in “Snapshot” menu option. Hurray open source.)
Linkey linkey.
Wednesday, May 15th, 2013Lawrence has put up a review of Barbet Schroeder’s classic documentary, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait
Don’t have much to add to what he says, and I agree with him pretty much 100%, so I encourage you to wander over there and read his review.
Bacon numbers of note: Idi Amin – Bacon number of 3, if you include TV shows. Otherwise, the Oracle of Bacon says Amin can’t be linked to Bacon, which I find hard to swallow. (I checked using both “Idi Amin” and “Idi Amin Dada”.)
Fidel Castro, on the other hand, has a Bacon number of 2. Castro is linked to Bacon through Detective Munch and something called “Marilyn Monroe: Murder on Fifth Helena Drive” which is scheduled for release sometime in 2013.
Random notes: May 15, 2013.
Wednesday, May 15th, 2013Obit watch: “flamboyant swindler” Billie Sol Estes. NYT.
Mr. Estes’s daughter Pamela Padget said that he died in his sleep and was found in his recliner.
The AP adds the telling detail that he died with chocolate chip cookie crumbs on his lips.
Billie Sol was a little before my time, much less the time of some of my younger readers, but the NYT gives a good one-paragraph summary:
Paging Mayor Bloomberg! Mayor Bloomberg, white courtesy phone, please!
I remember when the blood alcohol limit was 0.10%. I remember the arguments at the time for and against lowering the limit to 0.08%. The one question I had was: how many accidents were caused by drivers who were at 0.08% or above, but below 0.10%? I never got an answer to that question, and it didn’t matter anyway, since the government issued a decree:
And now the government is talking about dropping it down to 0.05%. Again, I ask: how many accidents are caused by people at or above 0.05% but below 0.08%? There was a report on Reason‘s website (I can’t find it right now) that estimated “500-800” lives saved per year by lowering the limit to 0.05%. But does this take into account the number of lives that might be lost by diverting police resources to pursue drivers at the 0.05% level, instead of pursuing other crimes?
Larry Wayne Mahoney, the intoxicated driver, had a 0.24% BAC at the time of the crash, so he was already DWI even by 1988 standards, let alone the 2000 standard or the proposed 0.05% standard. Most of the serious DWI accidents I hear about involve people who are above – in many cases, way above – the 0.10% mark. Would we save more lives going after the highly intoxicated drunk; the guy who blows a 0.20% or the gal who blows a 0.25%?
SDC updates.
Tuesday, May 14th, 2013New posts over at the SDC site: a review of Pinthouse Pizza (updates to come) and a post about America’s favorite British chef and the latest episode of his TV show. (Can you say, “batshit crazy”, boys and girls?)
On a semi-unrelated note, I have an App.net account now. I will try to start sending out notifications of new and updated posts here and on the SDC site.