I’ve been running way behind on these (life has gotten in the way) and am hoping to fix that soon.
In the meantime, I do have a post up about my experience last night at The Goodnight. The categories on this post might give you a hint as to how things went…
Let us start off with one of TMQ Watch’s patented musical interludes. This one even has a small amount of relevance to this week’s TMQ:
You’ve got to love YouTube comments:
stephen scazzafavo 2 weeks ago
thumbs up for REAL COUNTRY none of this new age shiit
Yeah. About that, Steve.
Anyway, with that diversion out of the way, let’s get into this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
A while back, I suggested the words ‘f–king” and “b-tch”, along with the conjugate “f–king b-tch”, do not belong in a professional email.
To that list, I now suggest that the word “whore” be added.
Also: pay the writer! But that’s not really a “safety” tip…
So, here, have some crap:
The complete “Mama’s Family” is being released on DVD, for those of you who were looking forward to this. And if you were, may God have mercy on your soul.
Burnett considered the “Family” sketches to be “Tennessee Williams on acid.”
Highly local, but mildly interesting to me, and also picked up from the LAT: Mayor Garcetti has more or less fired the head of the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Chief Brian Cummings, who announced his retirement Thursday, never fully recovered from his management team’s admission in March of last year that highly touted 911 response times were inaccurate, making it appear that rescuers arrived faster than they actually did.
Subsequent Times’ investigations documented widespread delays in processing calls for help, routine failures to summon the closest medical rescuers from nearby jurisdictions and large disparities in getting rescuers to life-threatening emergencies in different areas of the city.
I don’t know what to make of this NYT article, so I’ll throw it up for grabs.
The brief summary: In 2010, Sheriff Deborah Trout of Hunterdon County, New Jersey was indicted, along with two of her deputies, on charges that included
What happened next?
The paper of record is not helpful in explaining why the state attorney general’s office took over a county prosecutor. That just doesn’t make sense to me; where is the legal authority for the attorney general to just simply take over a county prosecutor’s office, barring something on the order of massive corruption within the office?
But let’s set that question aside for right now. You can probably guess what happened after that:
And you can probably guess what happened after that: one prosecutor was fired, and two others (including the one who secured the indictments) were “forced to retire”. The news peg for this is that the fired prosecutor has filed a wrongful termination suit, which has led to the release of the grand jury records for the original indictment.
Here are my problems:
So I report, you decide.
Scott Carpenter, the second man to orbit the Earth.
NYT.
Scott Carpenter’s biographical page from NASA. I was hoping for a tribute, but…you know.
Is it IKEA furniture or a death metal band?
I’m not doing well so far.
(Edited to add: 7 out of 20. Either I need to spend more time at IKEA, or more time listening to death metal.)
28 years in Federal prison for Kwame Kilpatrick.
Apparently, there is one person in Detroit who thinks Kilpatrick is getting a raw deal.
One.
…
Two o’clock Tuesday came and went. No protesters showed up. Not even Captain Protest.
Offensenitivity! In this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
I had the day off yesterday, so I spent some time with my mother helping her run errands. (One of the disadvantages of those Dyson vacuum cleaners
We decided to check out the new Trader Joe’s and the new Wheatsville co-op, because, you know, reasons. (New! Shiny!) I note that neither store had any sort of “No guns allowed” signage, much less a legally compliant 30.06 sign. But I digress. Again.
I found this at Wheatsville. Click to embiggen.
In case you can’t read it, that’s “Primal Strips” “meatless vegan jerky” in “Texas BBQ”, “Teriyaki”, and “Thai Peanut” flavors.
“meatless vegan jerky”. Couldn’t make this up if I tried. What is it with vegans/vegetarians and the emulation of meat products?
In a related vein:
They held signs featuring photos of animals in pairs: a kitten with a fluffy yellow chick, a puppy with a piglet.
“Why love one but eat the other? Choose Vegetarian,” the signs said.
“Why love one but eat the other?” Oh, I don’t know, Bob: maybe because chickens and pigs taste good, while dogs and cats don’t. (I can’t say for sure: I’ve never eaten dog.)
Or maybe it has something to do with charisma; dogs and cats have it. I’m dubious that pigs and chickens do, though there was the great pot-bellied pig boom of a few years back…
Why would someone buy a mansion for nearly $350,000, then sell it at a $40,000 loss?
Could it be…Satan?
Nothing matters more — even the horrors that took place — than perception. That’s especially true in the case of Resnick’s mansion, where Bell says no evidence supports stories of ghosts and mob murders.
But people believed what they saw on the TV show, which Resnick says was filmed inside the house without his permission. After the show aired, police calls to the vacant house exploded. Some young troublemakers and trespassers even posted on YouTube their own ghost hunts at the house.
Interesting legal question: if the owner can prove that the TV show was filmed on the property without his permission, and if he can prove that the TV show led to his loss on the property, does he have a course of action against the producers? I’m inclined to say, “Yes, but he’ll have a high bar to prove both those things.” Of course, I Am Not A Lawyer.
Yesterday’s NYT ran an interesting article about the Inverted Jenny re-issue, about which I have written previously. I have actually already received my Inverted Jenny first day cover (it’s very nice – I am tempted to scan it and post it) but I did not order a full sheet of stamps. (Because $2 per stamp x 24 stamps = more than I was willing to spend.)
“We thought, wouldn’t it be funny if some of the inverts came out wrong, and actually got printed right side up?” the postmaster general, Patrick R. Donahoe, said in an interview. “And we started thinking, what a great way to recreate the excitement Robey must have felt when he found that first sheet.”
As a result, 100 of the new sheets actually show the airplane flying upright. Each sheet is individually wrapped, so no one can see the stamps before they are bought. A note is included with the right-side-up rarities, alerting buyers to their true nature. Lucky finders can obtain a certificate signed by the postmaster general.
So, wait. The original stamps were valuable because the plane was printed upside down. So they’re making new rare stamps by…printing them correctly in the first place? Excuse me while I go take some headache medication.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Pittsburgh (bye week)
Jacksonville
NY Giants
Tampa Bay (bye week)
And Cleveland is 3-0 after the trade from hell?
WE’RE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS HERE, PEOPLE!
I was taught you should say only good of the dead.
By way of Lawrence, I have learned that General Vo Nguyen Giap, described by the NYT as “the relentless and charismatic North Vietnamese general whose campaigns drove both France and the United States out of Vietnam”, has died.
(I’ll have to go back and look: did the NYT ever describe Hermann Göring or Erwin Rommel as “relentless and charismatic”?)
The LAT‘s second day story on Robert “Ratso” Rizzo’s plea answers a few questions from yesterday.
We already knew that Rizzo was rolling on his former assistant, Angela Spaccia. You may remember that the former Bell city council members who went on trial adopted the “throw Rizzo under the bus” strategy. Now that Rizzo is taking a plea and cooperating, his plan is to throw Spaccia under the bus:
I don’t think Spaccia has anyone left to roll on. Possibly the council members, but if Rizzo’s already rolling on them as part of his deal, why does the prosecution need Spaccia?
And how do the people of Bell feel, now that Ratso’s pled guilty? Relieved and disappointed, according to the paper.
This is a great day.
Somebody (I believe it was Harlan Ellison) once wrote that the most eloquent speech of Spiro Agnew‘s career in politics was “Nolo contendere“.
Robert “Ratso” Rizzo, former city manager of Bell, gave that same speech today.
Longtime Bell city administrator Robert Rizzo, who became a national symbol for public corruption for alleged graft in the small city, pleaded no contest to 69 charges, prosecutors said Thursday.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey said in a statement that Rizzo had agreed to serve 10 to 12 years in state prison, which she described as the largest sentence ever in an L.A. County public corruption case.
10 to 12 years in state prison. I have only one thing to say about this:
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena!
(The comments at the LAT do raise some interesting questions: is this part of a deal where Rizzo is going to roll on the other council members? Remember, all but one of the indicted council members still have retrials pending. Also, Angela Spaccia, Rizzo’s former assistant, is still facing trial; will he roll on her? And there’s no mention in the LAT that Rizzo will have to pay any restitution.)
Edited to add: The LAT is still updating coverage: