At the break, Houston is 33-61, with a .351 winning percentage. Straight multiplication projects out to 105 losses. Cool Standings projects “103.6” losses (how do you lose .6 of a game?), Baseball Prospectus projects 101.7, and FanGraphs projects an even 101 losses.
Miami is at 35-58, with a .376 winning percentage. Straight multiplication projects out to 101 losses. FanGraphs projects 100 losses, Baseball Prospectus 97.4 losses, and Cool Standings 99.5 losses.
And King continued to publish books as Bachman long past the “early” point of his career, including The Regulators and Blaze. Sorry, something about the NYT‘s phrasing here annoys me. As does this:
Nice bit of casual snobbery there, pal.
(This is actually the first Rowling book I want to read, though I don’t intend to pay an inflated price for a first.)
My heart goes out to any of my readers who are in LA:
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This is one of the best things I’ve read in the past few days.
And this is another of the best things I’ve read in the past few days: “A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts” by Shawn O’Neil and Kate Drueen.
Yes, that is a real road sign.
And where does River Styx Road go to? If you guessed “River Styx“, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.
We would also accept “the River Styx Bridge” as a correct answer.
I’m not 100% happy with the way these photos turned out, but it was a hard subject to photograph: I think it would have been hard even with the big camera instead of an iPhone. While they aren’t perfect, I think they’re interesting enough to post.
(Interior, Cleveland Arcade, downtown Cleveland, Ohio.)
I’ve been thinking about picking up one of the Olloclip lens kits
Well, just one bridge, really.
I keep thinking of these as “Egyptian”, but they’re not, really: they’re Art Deco.
These are a couple of the pylons, known as the “Guardians of Traffic”, at the ends of the Hope Memorial Bridge in downtown Cleveland. (AKA the “Lorain-Carnegie Bridge”.) We drove across this bridge several times, since it is the best route to the Westside Market. (“The bridge connects Lorain Avenue on Cleveland’s west side and Carnegie Avenue on the east side, terminating just short of Progressive Field.” Heh. My mother observed that everywhere we went in Cleveland, it seemed like we had to drive past Progressive Field. By the end of the trip, she was rather tired of it. In comparison, I think we drove past Browns Stadium twice, and Quicken Loans Arena once.)
The “Hope” in “Hope Memorial” is William Henry Hope, Bob Hope’s father. Mr. Hope was a stonemason who worked on the pylons when the bridge was built.
A reliable source tells me:
When the Cavs were in the playoffs, the city put Cavs sweatbands on the foreheads of the two closest to the Q, where the Cavs play.
There’s really no good place to park near the bridge and the pylons, so these photos were taken either with the iPhone camera or compact cameras, by myself and my mother, out of or through the windows of a moving rental car, while trying not to obstruct traffic. If I get a chance to go back and the weather is nice, I plan to get some better pictures with the big camera.
Whether you’re eating Beef Bourguignon and drinking a good Burgundy, or storming a prison to get at the gunpowder inside, I hope your celebration is a happy one.
Ja, das ist eine schnitzel bank!
Supreme lager, always!
(Poster found on wall at Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland, Ohio.)
Related:
I shouldn’t have to say this, should I? People aren’t this stupid, are they?
Apparently, they are. So, safety tip:
If it is hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement, for the love of Ghu, please use a pan.
Sergei L. Magnitsky was convicted yesterday of tax evasion by a Russian court. Mr. Magnitsky was a lawyer: his client, William F. Browder, was convicted as well.
This isn’t ordinarily the sort of thing I’d bring up, but there are a couple of interesting points:
(Subject line hattip. My linking to this should not be taken as implying any endorsement of the content.)
…I spent a lot of time in this tree.
(Yes, I can be a little sentimental at times.)
Or, technically, another view of the same lizard.
What can I say? I like lizards.
Sorry about the radio silence for the past few days. I’ve been spending a lot of time with family, and kicking around the Cleveland area.
Our flight got in around 7 PM last night, and it was 10 PM by the time I got home. I’m trying to get caught up, and hope to have more substantial reports and some photos up over the weekend.
In the meantime, have some music.
(Man, wasn’t Learning to Crawl a great album? “Back On the Chain Gang”, “My City Was Gone”, “Middle of the Road”…)
I’m waiting until I get back to edit and post photos. (As a side note, geotagging photos is a PITA on Ubuntu, compared to Apple’s iPhoto.)
We (that is, my mother, aunt, uncle, and I) were trying to get a good view of the tall ships at the Port of Cleveland. Which we couldn’t do yesterday, because the good views required $10 a car for parking plus $14 a person. However, my mother and I went back downtown today and took some photos.
I’ve been thinking a lot about firefighters recently. There was the West incident, and then the Houston Fire Department lost four people fighting a fire in a crack motel. Then there was Arizona. And it isn’t clear to me if any firefighters were lost in Quebec.
We stumbled across this yesterday while we were out, and I wanted to go back and photograph it. I’m happy with the way this photo came out.
Cleveland Fallen Firefighters Memorial, Cleveland, Ohio.
Interesting thing about this memorial: it was designed by Luis Jiménez, who also started building the sculpture. Mr. Jiménez was a popular and well-regarded sculptor. While he was working on the Firefighters Memorial, he was also working on the “Blue Mustang” sculpture for the Denver International Airport. In the process of building that sculpture, part of it fell and fatally injured Mr. Jiménez, and the memorial was completed by other people.
Winking Lizard, Macedonia, Ohio.
Blogging will be airplane and rental car bound until the late afternoon.
At least the Motel 6 has free wifi.
Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor are serving time for the kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Negron. Ms. Negron was 16 years old when she was murdered.
The main witness against the two men was a crack addicted prostitute who was “forcibly detained by the authorities in a hotel until she testified”.
Is this our old friend Louis Scarcella? Is the Brooklyn DA reinvestigating this case?
No. And no.
One. Out of 750. And three wrongful convictions.
(Explained.)
This sucks. I’ve wanted a good telescope for much of my life, even though I find it hard to use one with glasses and I really am not able to stay up late in order to do observational astronomy. Still, I’m sad to see the market shrinking, even though the technology gets better and better.
Verizon has a great idea for Fire Island. As you might have guessed, the island got the crap beat out of it by Sandy, and the phone system was devastated.
Sounds great, right?
Not mentioned in the article: Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) over copper works when the power is out. Will Verizon’s wireless system? The cell towers may have battery backup or generators, but do the home receivers?
There’s an interesting article (tied to the Arizona tragedy) in today’s LAT, about the problems of investigating these incidents.
Some of them are probably obvious: these things generally happen in remote areas, and fire destroys a lot of evidence. But the main thrust of the LAT article is that a deep distrust has developed between firefighters and investigators since 2001. That year, four firefighters died in the Thirty Mile fire. The Forest Service did an investigation, and determined that there were a lot of issues with the way the fire was fought; from my reading, some of those issues were just bad luck and equipment failures, but there were also some procedural issues:
What happened next is that one of the crew bosses was charged with manslaughter, based on that report. (The boss pled guilty to “making false statements” and served 90 days on work release.)
Safety procedures exist for reasons. And it is hard to say that people shouldn’t be held accountable. On the other hand, there’s also a very strong “do whatever it takes to fight the fire” attitude among firefighters, even if that means sometimes disregarding rest and safety rules. (And what are you going to do if it is rest time, there’s no relief, and the fire is still burning out of control? “Sorry, can’t fight that fire. On my coffee break.”) The other thing to realize is that wildfires are very volatile and chaotic situations; things can change literally in seconds. Is it fair or right to pass judgements in hindsight on the people who were there on the ground fighting the fire?
Obit watch: noted computer scientist and inventor of the mouse, Douglas Engelbart. LAT. NYT.
You, too, can have a Tony award. If you’re a “major investor” in a Tony-winning production. And you have $2,500.
I’m going through a little bit of personal agita right now. The next few days leading up to, and during, the holiday, are shaping up to be kind of busy. Mostly the fun kind of busy (some of us are trying to plan a range trip; plus, fireworks), but with some work involved.
This coming Saturday, I will be flying out to Cleveland. My maternal grandmother passed away on Saturday, and her funeral is scheduled for a week from today. I plan to take a laptop with me and blog as much as I can from the road, but be prepared for a bit of a slowdown.
(I know there’s been a bit of a slowdown already. Mostly, that’s because there hasn’t been a lot going on that I’ve found worthy of blogging. I think we’re into the summer slowdown season; things are so hot that everyone is acting like giant lizards, conserving energy as much as they possibly can. Which is great for keeping cool, but not so great for providing blog fodder.)
(Is it just me, or is Houston experiencing a rash of motel fires?)
They were still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.
–Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
(Why.)
