Oh dear god, they have half-lives for the unstable elements.
–one of my cow orkers, in reference to this.
Archive for April, 2014
Quote of the day.
Tuesday, April 29th, 2014Banana republicans watch: April 29, 2014.
Tuesday, April 29th, 2014So what?
Mr. Piquette is a deputy with the LA County Sheriff’s Office.
Mr. Piquette also has admitted to possessing a shotgun “that had been stolen from the Sheriff’s Department” and “three assault weapons that are banned under California law”.
Really? There’s a lot of short barreled ARs on the streets of LA? I’d love to see some evidence of that.
Then again, given that this is the “first plea agreement by one of 20 sheriff’s officials charged or indicted since December”, Hedding may be right, and the “criminals” who are carrying these types of weapons on the street work for the LA County Sheriff.
Random notes, some administrative, for April 23, 2014.
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2014Apologies for the extended radio silence. The past few days have been busy.
As many of the Whipped Cream Irregulars know, Sunday was my birthday, as well as Easter. This will not happen again until 2025.
Anyway, Mike the Musicologist came up late Friday night, rented a Silvercar, and we drove down to San Antonio on Saturday to do some gun shopping, tour Ranger Creek (which will be the subject of another post), and have dinner with Andrew and Lawrence at Bohanan’s (which may be the subject of another post).
I spent Easter Sunday with family, eating an excellent ham from the Noble Pig and a very good cake baked by my sister. (I don’t remember which cookbook she got the recipe from, but I thought it was very good; perhaps she’ll post here and update.)
Then on Monday, MtM and I took the Silvercar to Dallas, where we did some more gun shopping (including a stop at Cabela’s, but not that one), had a very good lunch at Chop House Burgers, and did some shopping for tacky souvenirs of pre-revolutionary America at the 6th Floor Museum shop.
So Saturday through Monday were jam packed. (For the record, I did not buy any guns. Though I was really tempted by the Sig Sauer 1911 22 at GrabAGun. I was also tempted at one of the San Antonio gun stores that had a couple of Nylon 66s, but I just can’t bring myself to pay $350 for one, even if it did have a scope.)
(Edited to add: Also, $1,300 for a K-22, even if it was an early post-war gun with the box, seems really really high.)
Anyway, I’m back and trying to get caught up on blogging. Profuse thanks to MtM for organizing the weekend.
Márquez.
Friday, April 18th, 2014NYT. Tribute from Michiko Kakutani.
LAT.
WP. WP original 1970 review of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Edited to add: “Love in the Time of Cholera: why it’s a bad title“.
Funny thing: I’ve never read any of Márquez’s work. I have One Hundred Years of Solitude
I actually went by one of the Half-Price Books locations last night looking for Márquez’s works. They had nothing. Nada. Zero. Surprising: I would have figured they’d have some copies of Love or Solitude at least.
Books in brief: The Power Broker.
Thursday, April 17th, 2014This won’t be a review. Reviewing The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
These are a few random thoughts:
1. The Power Broker deserves all the acclaim it has gotten. Caro’s a great writer, and the story of the rise (and eventual fall) of Robert Moses is a compelling one. I kind of expected it to be slow moving and a little dull; how do you make urban planning interesting? But Caro found a way to do that. I got caught up in the sweep of the book, and found myself wanting to read more about Al Smith and La Guardia and other background characters.
There are a few places where I have reservations about Caro’s conclusions. The largest reservation I have is Caro’s emphasis on mass transit, and Moses’ failures in that regard. I’m not as much of a believer in mass transit as Caro seems to be, but I’m willing to concede Caro might be right. Given the population density (both at the time and projected for the future) mass transit may have been the only workable alternative for NYC’s traffic problems.
2. I haven’t read Caro’s LBJ books. I’m waiting for the series to be completed before I start on them. (I have read excerpts from them in other places.) But I wonder if Caro is drawn to people who were, in some way, corrupted by power. I have the impression that this is a theme in the LBJ books. And as for The Power Broker…
3. You know that quote attributed to Dave Barry? “Someone who is nice to you, but rude to the waitress, is not a nice person?” Robert Moses was a walking example of that. He was an elitist who believed that he and people like him – rich, Ivy League educated – were the only ones who were fit to govern, and everyone else should just get out of the way. He was a racist – he didn’t want the “lower classes” (read: blacks and the poor) using his parks, pools and playgrounds. He treated anyone he considered an inferior like dirt. As for the powerful, his main interest in them was how he could use them to enhance his own power. He destroyed vital and interesting neighborhoods for the sake of new roads, even though those neighborhoods could have been saved by small changes in routes (but those changes would have inconvenienced politicians who were important to Moses). And the new roads and bridges he built were full as soon as they were completed, which Moses saw as a reason to build more. Lather, rinse, repeat. We’re too close to Easter for me to say what I’m really thinking, but you can probably guess.
4. This shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did: there was (is?) a recent Robert Moses revisionist movement. The central thesis seems to be: yes, he was every bit as big a you-know-what as Caro portrayed him. But. He. Got. Things. Done. And “If the ends don’t justify the means, what does?“
Obit watch: April 17, 2014.
Thursday, April 17th, 2014Gabriel García Márquez is dead. Roundup tomorrow.
Cue the sad tiny violins…
Thursday, April 17th, 2014Second day story on the Robert “Ratso” Rizzo sentencing. Not much new, but linked here for the historical record.
Okay, the miniature golf course is the first good thing I’ve heard about him.
I knew about Ratso’s horse racing, but “more to care for than what they were worth”? Hadn’t heard that before.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#11 in a series)
Wednesday, April 16th, 2014Robert “Ratso” Rizzo has just been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
This is breaking news: watch this space for updates and links.
Edited to add: link with more details.
In addition to the prison sentence, Ratso will also have to pay $8.8 million in restitution to the city of Bell: but he will get credit for “money he and the city’s former police chief have already returned to the city”.
The LAT also states that Ratso will be allowed to serve this sentence concurrently with his 33 month sentence on tax fraud charges. One of the LAT‘s editors tweets:
When will we see #Rizzo again? Here's the brkdwn: 33 months in federal prison, then off to state prison. Likely out in 6 years, maybe less
— steve marble (@StephenMarble) April 16, 2014
In other news, Superintendent Jose Fernandez of the Centinela Valley Union High School District was paid $674,559 last year. For comparison purposes, the head of the NYC schools made $412,193. The head of the LA school district made $393,106.
Isn’t that kind of “Here, let us give you some money so you can end up taking even more money out of our pockets?”
The FBI may be investigating. Or at least asking questions before they start an investigation. (I’m not sure what laws may have been broken: being paid a lot of money isn’t a crime by itself.)
Doesn’t that still seem kind of high? The Centinela school district has “6,600 students, five high schools and a $70-million budget.” There seems to be an argument being made that Fernandez pulled the district out of possible bankruptcy; but at the same time, there are also claims that teachers were being laid off while he was getting paid to purchase more seniority in the retirement system.
Edited to add 2:
On a completely unrelated note, there’s an iPhone app called “Tiny Violin“.
Banana republicans watch: April 15, 2014.
Tuesday, April 15th, 2014I have written before about the California city of Cudahy: election fraud, marijuana dispensary bribes, the bimbo and the badge, payoffs in the Denny’s…
Latest developments:
The city has been ordered to repay $22.7 million in “redevelopment funds”.
On a totally unrelated note, here because I just love typing the name, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow has pled not guilty to the charges against him.
Who holds back the electric car?
Tuesday, April 15th, 2014By way of the Y Combinator Twitter, I found this rather interesting Fast Company article about “Better Place”.
Better Place was born to be revolutionary, the epitome of the kind of world-changing ambition that routinely gets celebrated. Founder Shai Agassi, a serial entrepreneur turned rising star at German software giant SAP, conceived Better Place “on a Davos afternoon” in 2005 when he asked himself, “How would you run a whole country without oil?” Four years later, onstage at the TED conference, Agassi, a proud Israeli with a bit of a Steve Jobs complex, wore a black turtleneck and promised, with the confidence of a man who has known the future for some time but has only recently decided to share his findings, that he would sell millions of electric vehicles in his home country and around the world. He implied that converting to electric cars was the moral equivalent of the abolition of human slavery and that it would usher in a new Industrial Revolution.
Shai Agassi was on FC‘s “2009 Most Creative People in Business” list. He was on the cover of Wired. Better Place raised almost a billion dollars.
And if being on the cover of Wired wasn’t a dead giveaway for you, they collapsed.
I have been, and continue to be, somewhat critical of Tesla. But I think one thing they’re doing right is positioning their vehicles as a premium product that’s worth the asking price.
Better to light one small candle…
Monday, April 14th, 2014…than to let the tax-fattened hyena get away without going down in flames.
Robert “Ratso” Rizzo has been sentenced to 33 months in federal prison on his tax fraud charges.
He was also ordered to pay $256,000 in restitution to the federal government.
As I noted earlier, this sentence will likely run concurrently with his sentence on the Bell corruption charges, which will be handed down Wednesday.
Random notes: April 14, 2014.
Monday, April 14th, 2014Don’t forget: tomorrow is National Buy a Gun Day. I’m not sure I’ll be observing it on the 15th this year, but we’ll see how things go…
I see Lawrence’s killer paramedic, and raise: 77 arson fires in a Virgina county over five months. Serial arsons are kind of interesting on their own, but who did it and (allegedly) why, is the twist here.
In the past four days, the NYT has run two stories bemoaning the closing of J&R Music World. Just saying.
e-Haggadah.
I think Rabbi Nevins is on the mark with this. But:
If it is okay to read books on the Sabbath, why is it not okay to use e-readers? (Please note: while I have a great admiration for the Jewish religion and people, I am not Jewish, nor am I a Torah scholar.)
Lawrence also suggested at dinner the other night that I do a comprehensive prison personæ for the city of Bell: basically, a quick reference guide to who’s been convicted of what, and how much time they’ll serve. I may do that in the next few days, but I want to hold off a bit: Robert “Ratso” Rizzo is supposed to be sentenced on his tax charges later today, and sentenced on the other charges related to his role as Bell city manager on Wednesday. I will update here once Rizzo’s sentences are announced.
By way of Popehat on the Twitter: NYC’s Brecht Forum is closing. No, this wasn’t a place where folks sat around and sang “Mack the Knife” and other songs: that would actually have been kind of cool.
The center’s mission, according to its website, is to “create, within existing society, a counter-hegemonic culture of working people and their allies, who are capable of challenging the capitalist agenda, prefiguring new ways of thinking and of self-organization, as well as creating new ways of relating to each other and nature.”
Figures like Noam Chomsky, William Greider, Lewis H. Lapham and Naomi Klein have spoken at events at the forum. Affiliated groups include the Institute for Popular Education, the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory and the Strike Anywhere Theater Ensemble.
Yeah, Donnie, they’re Marxists.
Awwwww. But where will they go now?
I was hoping to be able to provide an Amazon link for “Class Struggle”, just in case you have any children in your life that you hate. Sadly, it appears that “Class Struggle”, produced by Avalon Hill (!), is out of print and used copies are pricy. Here’s BoardGameGeek’s page.