WOW MT @mwa4 Globalization: Syrian rebel uses iPad accelerometer to aim homemade mortar http://t.co/ltbIaIz9Iu t.co/2BudEtToni
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) September 16, 2013
Hattip on this to Big Bill Gibson and John Gruber.
Archive for September, 2013
The street finds its own uses for things.
Tuesday, September 17th, 2013Onion headline, or New York Times headline?
Tuesday, September 17th, 2013Pullet surprise.
Tuesday, September 17th, 2013More:
Of course, these chickens are not dining on stale loaves from grandmother’s breadbox. On a recent afternoon at the farm, where a few hundred creatures inhabit a peaceful, 15,000-square-foot coop that would dwarf the size of most New York apartments, they clucked and ambled around pans of bread soaked in fresh milk, and white buckets full of leafy trimmings that would make a tremendous tossed salad.
“Some of this is nicer stuff than I have to eat when I get home,” said Mike Charles, a local poultry expert involved in the project.
I could snark on this, but I actually think there’s a lot to be said for chicken that tastes like chicken. (Didn’t Nero Wolfe buy chickens from a farmer who fed them on acrorns? Or was that pigs, and the chickens were fed on something else? I don’t have any of my Wolfe books here at work.)
But:
Yeah, what’s the carbon footprint of these chickens? How sustainable is “driving two and a half hours” to deliver vegetable scraps? Especially since the Amish are likely to have vegetable scraps and day-old bread of their own?
Your loser update: week 2, 2013.
Tuesday, September 17th, 2013NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Pittsburgh
Cleveland (Quote blatantly stolen from a family member in Cleveland: “Apparently, the Browns now have to suck for Teddy Bridgewater!” And what’s even worse: “Suck for Bridgewater!” doesn’t even have the ring to it that “Suck for Luck!” did.)
Jacksonville
Washington
NY Giants
Minnesota
Tampa Bay
Carolina
Quote of the day.
Monday, September 16th, 2013Bloombergism is the sort of thing the Constitution was designed to prevent.
–“The Dashed Dreams of President Bloomberg”, Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
(Hattip to Popehat on the Twitter for this one.)
Dear Washington Post.
Friday, September 13th, 2013There’s something you might want to go read. Parts of it are engraved on a monument very near your headquarters. Here’s the relevant section:
I hope this helps. If you have any more questions, I recommend an extended session of meditation at the Jefferson Memorial, and perhaps a little bit of reading.
More schadenfreude!
Thursday, September 12th, 2013I can’t help it. I’m enjoying this too much.
Hey, remember when folks were saying this was Weiner’s comeback?
We can hope.
“time-honored city tradition”. There’s really nothing I can say here, is there?
I wonder if this is a rejection of the nanny state exemplified by Bloomberg.
Note the paper of record’s use of “post-Bloomberg” there, too. Interesting.
(Edited to add: More on the “Bloomberg backlash” theme by way of Insta.)
Noted.
Thursday, September 12th, 2013Oh, well, there’s always next year.
Random notes: September 12, 2013.
Thursday, September 12th, 2013Two games in, and we have our first head coach firing of the college football season: Doug Williams is out at Grambling. The team lost the first two games of this season, and was 1-10 last season (0-9 in conference).
The Chicago City Council voted to do away with the city’s gun registry.
Or, as Iowahawk once noted, Chicago blames their violence problem on other states…that don’t have a violence problem. (I can’t find his exact quote. By the way, Twitter’s search features stink.)
Criminal experts say the gun registry database in Chicago, which contains more than 8,000 gun owners and about 22,000 firearms, has helped the police better understand the movement of weapons in the city as they put in place new law enforcement strategies. Adam Collins, a spokesman for the Police Department, said in a statement that officers would be able to use a new online database of permit holders maintained by the Illinois State Police under the law.
“There’s no scenario where this makes the jobs of police easier,” said Jen Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, about having to repeal the registry.
Of course, because Chicago’s criminal class is composed of law-abiding permit holding individuals who register their illegally possessed guns.
Speaking of sad pandas:
Kind of interesting that the paper of record mentions Bloomberg specifically, and not the NRA.
Heh. Heh. Heh.
And among the many things Mexico needs: strict machete control.
Things that make me go “Interesting”…
Wednesday, September 11th, 2013- “… on Friday, after six years of legal wrangling and decades after he wrote the lyrics to the hit song “YMCA,” Victor Willis will gain control of his share of the copyright to that song and others he wrote when he was the lead singer of the 1970s disco group the Village People.”
- Wow. “YMCA” is 35 years old?
- Hey! You kids! Get off my lawn!
- “He added, however, that he is thinking of prohibiting the Village People — the band still exists and is touring this month and next, though with largely different members — from singing any of his songs, at least in the United States.” Is this an example of copyright being used for the public good?
- “‘We hired this guy,’ Stewart L. Levy, a lawyer for the companies that controlled the Village People song catalog, said last year. ‘He was an employee. We gave them the material and a studio to record in and controlled what was recorded, where, what hours and what they did.’ Eventually, though, that argument was withdrawn. If the ‘work for hire’ doctrine can’t be made to apply to a prefab group like the Village People, it stands little chance of surviving a test against other artists who emerged in the 1970s and who always had a much greater degree of autonomy, like Bruce Springsteen, the Eagles, Billy Joel and Parliament-Funkadelic.”
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! watch (#3 in a series)
Wednesday, September 11th, 2013Speaking of ESPN…
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013The Washington Generals? Dude, what are you smoking, and where can I get some?
TMQ Watch: September 10, 2013.
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013Football season again. Soon, the air will chill. Soon, the Christmas decorations will start appearing in stores. Soon, Gregg Easterbrook will be writing about TV shows and the blur offense.
Oh, wait. Did we say “soon”? We mean “now”. After El Jumpo…
Random notes: September 10, 2013.
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013You could hear the music on the AM radio…
(If you have to put this much effort into “saving” commercial radio, is it really worth saving?)
I’m not a huge NASCAR fan: if I’m home and a race is televised, I’ll put it on as background noise, and I’d happily go to a race if someone invited me. But my life doesn’t revolve around it. With that said, this is interesting:
Ryan Newman replaced Martin Truex Jr. in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship on Monday night when NASCAR penalized Michael Waltrip Racing for manipulating the outcome of last weekend’s race.
Michael Waltrip Racing was fined $300,000, and general manager Ty Norris received an indefinite suspension. Truex, Bowyer and Vickers were docked 50 points apiece — but Bowyer’s deduction does not affect his position in the Chase, which begins Sunday at Chicago.
Isn’t “manipulating the outcome” of a race pretty much what every racing team tries to do? Is this example just particularly egregious? (And I find it surprising that there’s been no FARK thread on this yet.)
(Edited to add: Thanks to Ben for his thoughtful and enlightening comments, which you should really go read now. Also, FARK did put up a thread after I posted this.)
Your loser update: week 1, 2013.
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Buffalo
Cincinnati
Pittsburgh
Baltimore
Cleveland
Jacksonville
San Diego
Oakland
Washington
NY Giants
Green Bay
Minnesota
Tampa Bay
Carolina
Atlanta
Arizona
For the future is where we will spend the rest of our lives.
Sunday, September 8th, 2013I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction:
This is Mack Brown’s last season coaching at the University of Texas.
The big questions in my mind are: who else does he fire, and does he finish out the season or get canned part way through?
(By the way, NFL loser update resumes Tuesday, for obvious reasons.)
Random notes: September 6, 2013.
Friday, September 6th, 2013How long is forever?
If you bought a memorial stone at the former Crystal Cathedral, forever ends soon:
By the way, Robert Schuller has been diagnosed with cancer.
There’s a new update in the case of Bruce Malkenhorst, former city administrator of the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon: the California legislature is considering a new bill…
Under the bill, to be introduced Friday, executives convicted of felonies could appeal the reduction of retirement benefits only to the public retirement system that cuts the checks. They could sue that agency but not their former employer.
Cities would be responsible only for benefits approved by officials of the appropriate retirement system. In the case of Malkenhorst, that is CalPERS.
My first thought on this: aren’t we talking about an ex post facto law?
A better argument comes later in the article:
I’ve written previously about Louis Scarcella, the former NYPD detective whose cases are being re-investigated. The NYT asks a fair question: where were the prosecutors when all this was going on?
Answer: la la la la I can’t hear you…
But even some of those who were suspicious of Mr. Scarcella acknowledged that they mostly kept their concerns to themselves, saying that his ability to clear cases had made him popular with the bosses.
“Some prosecutors were leery; they didn’t trust it,” said one former investigator, who did not want to be identified publicly while criticizing his former supervisors. “He was one of the best detectives in the city. He’s turning over all these cases, and the bosses loved him. You’re going to go to the boss and say, ‘This doesn’t look right’?’”
More:
Jeffrey I. Ginsberg, a former assistant district attorney who also prosecuted two of the convictions under review, said the cases might look bad in retrospect, but they needed to be considered in the context of the 1980s and ’90s, when the crack epidemic was helping fuel a crime wave.
“The witnesses often came in orange jumpsuits,” said Mr. Ginsberg, referring to the outfit worn by inmates. “I was not afraid to go to trial on a weak case. I was not afraid to lose. I was not lying and cheating to get a conviction.”
The economics of selling hot dogs.
Thursday, September 5th, 2013And other things, at least in NYC. Have you ever wondered about those pushcarts?
The guy who owns the cart at the entrance to the Central Park Zoo (“Fifth Avenue and East 62nd Street”) pays $289,500 a year to the city parks department.
Can you make money doing this? Apparently so: “…while vendors are adamant about not divulging details about what they make, most pushcart sites presumably turn a profit or they would not attract such high bids.”
More:
A decade ago, the fee paid for the pushcart at the Central Park Zoo entrance was $120,000, less than half what Mr. Mastafa paid most recently. The second most expensive cart is on the West Drive at West 67th Street near Tavern on the Green, where the fee is $266,850.
For many other parks, especially those in parks outside Manhattan, the fees are much lower — $14,000 in Astoria Park in Queens, $3,200 in Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn and $1,100 in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. The lowest fee, $700, is paid by the owner of a pushcart near the soccer fields in Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan.
The biggest selling item? Apparently, $3 bottled water. That sounds surprisingly reasonable for NYC, but:
Maximum prices for snacks and beverages are set by the department.
Obit watch: September 4, 2013.
Wednesday, September 4th, 2013Frederik Pohl: a nice long obit in the NYT. LAT/AP.
(Edited to add: A/V Club, which I really didn’t expect. And it isn’t up to their usual standard.)
(Edited to add 2: Patterico.)
Also: Ronald Coase, winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. LAT.
Toes in the water.
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013Sorry about the short blogging quasi-hiatus there.
After work on Friday, I drove down to San Antonio for LoneStarCon 3, the 71st World Science Fiction Convention. It was a swell time. I got to hang out with several friends, including Mike the Musicologist, Andrew the Colossus of Roads, RoadRich, and Lawrence, who was doing a land office business in books. (Who says people don’t read any more? I covered the table for him a little bit, and by Ghu the books were flying off the table like snow crab legs at an all you can eat Chinese buffet.)
I haven’t been down to San Antonio for reasons other than medical for years, and hadn’t been on the RiverWalk since LoneStarCon2. I’d forgotten how nice the RiverWalk is, even though the vendors make things a bit crowded. (I don’t remember there being as many sidewalk vendors there last time I was down. But I’m getting old, and memory fades.)
Mike the Musicologist did most of the meal planning. Breakfast for two out of three of the days we were there was in the Marriott Rivercenter, mostly for reasons of timing. However, it is a pretty good buffet; I’d go so far as to say, with the custom omelets and made-to-order waffles, it comes close to being worth $20+tax and tip. Especially since I really didn’t see any breakfast places near the hotels or along the Riverwalk. (McDonalds and Whataburger excepted. There was also a Denny’s across the street from the Rivercenter; but literally the first thing I heard when I got to the hotel was that a mutual acquaintance of ours got food poisoning from the Denny’s bacon.)
The one non-Marriott breakfast was at the Magnolia Pancake Haus on Embassy Oaks, which was packed to the gills. We waited 40 minutes for a table, but the Munchener Apfel Pfannekuchen was worth it. I’d love to go back (and maybe try the wild mushroom hash) but I’d make sure I brought a good book.
(At some point in the near future, I want to do a post on how tablets, and especially the iPad, are transforming the restaurant industry, with Magnolia being one of my examples.)
We also had an excellent meal at Moroccan Bites (I loved the lamb shank and the chicken bites) and a pretty good meal at a place called Charlie Wants a Burger. (I had the pulled pork sandwich. And wings.) Sunday night we went to Fogo de Chao…which, you know, is Fogo de Chao. If you want huge amounts of roasted meat, you know what you’re getting into. For reasons I won’t discuss here (think Tim Cahill’s rule #6, corollary 1), I just had the salad bar. Which is actually a reasonable thing to do at Fogo de Chao (especially since you also get to eat the fried polenta, bananas, and cheese rolls), and I didn’t feel ripped off at $22.50. (I did feel gouged by the $3.25 iced tea. Note to self: water next time.)
(If you think you detected a trend, you may be right: Moroccan Bites and Magnolia have both been on Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. Guy Fieri may have problems running a place of his own, but as far as recommendations go, he’s batting 100% with me.)
Oddly enough, I bought more t-shirts (three) than I did books (two). Of course, one of those shirts is a gift for my brother. And one of those shirts I don’t actually have yet (they’re shipping it). And one of those books I bought mostly so I could support my friends. (I would have bought more books, but nobody had any Robert Frezza. “The Whistling Pig” was the theme to my last few months at 4LCC.)
I do want to say a few words about the best thing that happened at the convention. I don’t like bragging about famous people I know, mostly because I’m always afraid someone will ask them about me and they’ll say “Dwight who?” (Or, if they’re talking to Gardner Dozois, “That a–hole Dwight?!”)
(If you’ve never met Gardner in person, let’s just say he has a puckish sense of humor.)
But I digress. The best thing that happened at the convention is that one of my closest friends in the world won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette. That put the cap on a pretty swell weekend.
Congrats, again, Pat.
TMQ Watch: September 3, 2013.
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013There are some things you can always count on as the seasons change:
- The return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano. (Sort of.)
- The return of the buzzards to Hinkley, Ohio.
- TMQ’s haiku predictions column.
- WCD pointing out that many of TMQ’s haiku are not actual haiku, as they lack a seasonal reference. (We counted two out of 32.)
Now that we’ve nodded in the general direction of the eternal verities of the universe, let’s get started after the jump…
Obit watch: September 3, 2013.
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013Several sources, including SF Signal, are reporting the death yesterday of noted SF writer Frederik Pohl. I hope to have more on this later.
Paul Poberezny, founder of the Experimental Aircraft Association, passed away on August 22nd, though the NYT didn’t get around to mentioning it until today. He was 91 years old, and his life “spanned more than 70 years of flight at the controls of more than 500 different types of aircraft“.
Damn. What a ride.
Obit watch: September 1, 2013.
Sunday, September 1st, 2013Harris County DA Mike Anderson.
I don’t have any thoughts about how this is going to play out. I’m out of town, WiFi is catch as catch can, and I’m blogging from the Kindle. Check in tomorrow or Tuesday.