We haven’t heard much recently from the notoriously corrupt California city of Vernon.
His death appears to have been the result of natural causes (and not in the “he was shot in the head six times, so naturally he died” sense).
Archive for September, 2014
Obit watch: September 30, 2014.
Tuesday, September 30th, 2014The autumn wind is a pirate…
Tuesday, September 30th, 2014I love this time of year. The leaves are changing, if you live in one of those places. Around here, the temperature is getting to the point where you can consider doing stuff outdoors, or even dining on a patio if that’s your thing. The NFL season is picking up.
And we have our first NFL coach firing: Dennis Allen of the Oakland Raiders.
Allen also has the distinction of being the first coach hired and fired in the Mark Davis era.
I have a great deal of confidence in the Raiders ability to remain winless this coming week. The question I have is: what happens the following week? Do they get the dead cat bounce against the Chargers? I wouldn’t put it past them. Perhaps I should keep an eye on the line…
What’s wrong with Kansas?
Monday, September 29th, 2014Apparently, nothing that firing Charlie Weis won’t cure.
He was 6-22 overall, and 1-18 in conference. I’m pretty sure this is the first major school coach firing of the year. (Corrections welcome if I’m wrong.)
Obit watch: September 29, 2014.
Monday, September 29th, 2014Don Keefer passed away earlier this month. He was 98 years old.
Mr. Keefer was one of those actors who knocked around a lot; he was in “The Caine Mutiny” and the original Broadway cast of “Death of a Salesman”.
But he was perhaps most famous as Don Hollis, the man who ends up wished into the cornfield by Anthony in the Twilight Zone episode “It’s A Good Life”.
Also: James Traficant.
Your loser update: week 4, 2014.
Monday, September 29th, 2014So much for it being Tampa Bay’s year. But that sounds like it was a wild game. (I missed it, being out and about and all that.)
Elsewhere in the world, Gregg Easterbrook is chomping at the bit.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Jacksonville
Oakland
Historical video, emphatically NOT suitable for use in schools.
Friday, September 26th, 2014By way of Ace of Spades: The LA Police Department Skilled Shooting Exhibition Of 1936. (As Maetenloch notes, this is probably from 1938. And although the heading says LAPD, this is actually the LA Sheriff’s Department.)
There’s some good stuff in this:
- I do love me some nice Thompson work.
- It is an interesting piece of history, if you want to see how police shot back then. I believe the LAPD was pretty progressive in their pistol training at that time; certainly they were in 1955, when Sterling Walker wrote “How Cops Get Killed” for Guns Magazine. It seems logical to assume that that the LACSD worked the same way. The one-handed shooting stance looks funny in retrospect, but you have to remember the Weaver Stance hadn’t been invented yet. And I suspect that “Combat” range and the practice drills were pretty far out in front of the curve for 1938.
- I like the course of fire shown at the range. I might try that next time I go out to the range with one of my revolvers.
- I wonder if this is where the shooting competition in Magnum Force was staged. IMDB is no help here.
There are also some things I really dislike about this video:
- The tinkly piano music really gets on my nerves.
- I wish it were better lit, or in better focus, or both. I can’t tell what guns the shooters are using (except for the one guy with the Thompson, of course). Various sources say LAPD was issuing the S&W K-38 Target Masterpiece and the K-38 Combat Masterpiece until 1988. (The difference between the two is that the Target Masterpiece had a 6″ barrel; the Combat Masterpiece had a 4″.) The Walker article mentioned above says they also used the Colt Officer’s Model Special. The problem I have is that the K-38 in either version didn’t start showing up until post-WWII. I think the guns in the video may be Colts, and there could be a couple of M&P Model of 1905 4th Change revolvers in there; it is just hard to tell. (Again, I’m assuming LACSD and LAPD used the same or similar equipment. Frankly, there weren’t a lot of choices at the time, though I guess they could have issued Registered Magnums…)
- JESUS JOSEPH AND MARY ON A FREAKING POGO STICK, WERE THESE PEOPLE IDIOTS?! In case you’re wondering why I’m screaming, it should become apparent to you at about 35 seconds into the video. What the frack? What the fracking frack? Was life cheaper back then? Were these guys getting some hefty hazard pay? For my readers at home: DON’T DO THIS, OKAY? Seriously, this has “manslaughter” written all over it.
- Also, there’s much more effective ear protection out there these days than cigarettes or wads of cotton.
When ice picks are outlawed…
Thursday, September 25th, 2014Admittedly, this is kind of old, but I only ran across it today (while, oddly, looking up Trotsky for reasons I won’t go into):
…
…
The demand is greater than the store chooses to meet: because the store has a policy restricting the sale of ice picks to anyone under the age of 21, it has sold only two in the past six months or so.
“Some guy might buy this for torturing people,” another worker, Victor Reynoso said. “Sometimes they come to buy, but we don’t sell. If you are going to buy this, you have to show me ID.”
…
In other news, it appears that you can listen to Trotsky Icepick on Google Play or Spotify, or buy some of the albums from iTunes. The same cannot be said of Mussolini Headkick; only one of their songs is available on iTunes.
Well. Well well well. Well.
Wednesday, September 24th, 2014Original hattip on this to Jason Snell at Six Colors.
This is getting a great deal of attention, but there’s one aspect I want to point out: the ESPN Ombudsman’s page has disappeared from the site. Attempts to access it, either from the “ESPN Ombudsman” link (under “ESPN Feedback”, bottom left corner of the ESPN homepage) or direct links to columns (such as the one linked by Romenesko today) redirect to a generic “ESPN Blogs” page.
I’m not sure if this should be ascribed to malice or stupidity, but it is an interesting coincidence.
Edited to add, 9/24/2014 9:17 PM: Probably stupidity, since the Ombudsman’s page is back now. In that vein, this makes for interesting reading.
TMQ Watch: September 23, 2014.
Wednesday, September 24th, 2014Banana republicans watch: September 23, 2014.
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2014The six members of the LA County Sheriff’s Department who were convicted of obstructing a FBI investigation were sentenced today.
Your loser update: week 3, 2014.
Monday, September 22nd, 2014Running just a little behind: spent pretty much the entire day yesterday having fun with friends. Which I needed, but which was also not conducive to blogging.
Anyway, NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Jacksonville
Oakland
Tampa Bay
So the two teams I picked are still in the 0-16 hunt. And I’m starting to think that this could be Tampa Bay’s year, again.
TMQ Watch: September 16, 2014.
Thursday, September 18th, 2014This week’s TMQ, after the jump…
Tim Dog update.
Tuesday, September 16th, 2014Your loser update: week 2, 2014.
Tuesday, September 16th, 2014NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Oakland
Kansas City
New York Football Giants
New Orleans
Tampa Bay
Instead of actual content…
Friday, September 12th, 2014…I give you a very silly quiz from the WP:
Is this a line from ‘The Great Gatsby’ or a New York Times profile of Lena Dunham?
I have never seen an episode of “Girls” (since I refuse to have cable). However, I still got a perfect score on the quiz. Which says something: either about my knowledge of Gatsby or about how silly this quiz actually is, I do not know.
Oh, what the heck, I’ll throw this one in, too:
I sent this to Lawrence with the suggestion that it might be worse than Bello De Soto’s website: Lawrence doesn’t think so, and I’m still trying to make up my mind.
There are so many things that push it towards legendary badness for me: the chicken walking around on the live Twitter feed (why?), the auto-play Chinese karaoke (ditto?), the spinning chat avatars, gratuitous abuse of the blink tag…
On the other hand, it hasn’t actually crashed any browser I’ve tried it on so far. On the gripping hand, it is an actually up and (apparently) functional website, as opposed to an archive of one…
Obit watch: September 11, 2014.
Thursday, September 11th, 2014Colonel Bernard F. Fisher (USAF – ret) passed away on August 16th, though his death does not appear to have been widely reported until today.
Col. Fisher (he was a major at the time) received the Medal of Honor for pulling off one of the greatest rescue missions in the history of the Vietnam War.
(I swear that I read this story in Reader’s Digest when I was a child, maybe as a “Drama In Real Life”.)
The paper of record does not seem to have deigned to note the passing of Richard “Jaws” Kiel, but the LATimes and the A/V Club have.
Edited to add: now the NYT gets around to it.
You want sad? I’ll give you sad.
Wednesday, September 10th, 2014Very often the president would stride briskly out of the White House, with Tad at his side trying to keep up, and march four blocks down to 1207 New York Avenue, to Stuntz’s Fancy Store, a magical little toy shop. The owner, Joseph Stuntz, was a retired French soldier who carved wooden toy soldiers in a tiny back room. Sometimes Lincoln showed up alone at Stuntz’s and bought toy soldiers for Tad for Christmas. “I want to give him all the toys I did not have and all the toys I would have given the boy who went away,” Lincoln told the master toy maker.
—The Last Lincolns
Inside the White House, workmen were making last minute repairs, preparing the executive mansion for the new president. In a second-floor bedroom they found something unexpected — the vast collection of Tad Lincoln’s toy soldiers. These were the beautiful, hand-carved figurines Abraham Lincoln had purchased for his son at Stuntz’s toy store. They were Tad’s favorite playthings, but he had left them behind, probably because he could not bear to see them again. He was no longer the president’s son. He was just Tad Lincoln.
–ibid., page 71
TMQ Watch: September 9, 2014.
Wednesday, September 10th, 2014Might as well jump right into the first TMQ of the regular season…
Quote of the day
Tuesday, September 9th, 2014Lincoln, Robert Todd, xi, 3, 4, 22, 210.
See also Jinxy McDeath;
Presidential Angel of Death
—index entry in Charles Lachman’s The Last Lincolns: The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family
(Explained.)
(I just started reading Lachman’s book yesterday. For some reason, I found Chapter 2, about Willie, Tad, and the president’s relationship with the boys, really hard to get through. You want sad? That’s a sad sundae with sad sauce and chopped sad sprinkled over it.)
Your loser update: week 1, 2014.
Tuesday, September 9th, 2014Like Ebola or toenail fungus, we have returned for another year of the loser update.
Are there any teams that we think have a chance of going 0-16 this year? We haven’t given this a lot of thought, but off the top of our heads, maybe Oakland or Jacksonville?
In the meantime, NFL teams that actually still have a chance to go 0-16:
New England
Cleveland
Baltimore
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
San Diego
Oakland
Kansas City
New York Football Giants
Washington
Dallas
Chicago
Green Bay
New Orleans
Tampa Bay
St. Louis
TMQ Watch: September 2, 2014.
Friday, September 5th, 2014Yes, we know. We’re still a little behind. Our schedule was thrown off yesterday because we actually went “golfing”. (Technically, we went to a driving range. Yes, we know that seems odd; it was a corporate outing, and we were in it more to be social than to hit balls.)
Anyway, haiku after the jump….
There’s all kinds of stupid.
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2014Many of which I have written about here.
But forging a court order in an attempt to get content you don’t like removed is a whole new kind of stupid, even for sleazy telemarketers.
(Is “sleazy telemarketer” redundant?)
Today in journalism fraud.
Wednesday, September 3rd, 2014I have read and admired a fair amount of William Langewiesche’s work. He did some excellent reporting on Pakistan’s nuclear program, and is one of the better mass-market writers on aviation related subjects.
But.
Some of you may have been following Chevron Corp. v. Donziger. For those who haven’t, briefly: Donziger filed a lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador alleging that Chevron polluted drilling sites. Donziger won a $19 billion judgment in the Ecuadorian courts, but it turns out that there was massive fraud perpetrated by Donziger and the Ecuadorian courts. Overlawyered has a Chevron tag if you want more details.
The point, and I do have one, is: Langewiesche was asked by Vanity Fair to do a story on the suit. (Interesting point: “Donziger’s wife at the time worked in corporate communications at Condé Nast, the magazine’s publisher.“)
Langewiesche did the story.
But it wasn’t just “sympathetic”.
The reporter asks Donziger to prepare lists of dozens of questions to be asked of Chevron. And he begs Donziger to help him prepare arguments about why there’s no need for him to do face-to-face interviews with Chevron officials, as they’ve requested, even though he spent days meeting with Donziger and his legal staff.
“I want to avoid a meeting, simply because I do NOT have the time. But I don’t want to go on record refusing a meeting,” writes Langewiesche. “Perhaps I could say that my travel schedule is intense . . . ” He not only submits his emails to Chevron for Donziger’s approval (“What say, Steve. I gotta send this tonight”) and even lets him rewrite them. “Let me know if this works,” Donziger says in a note returning one of them. “I was a little aggressive in the editing.”
Langewiesche also sent Donziger a copy of the story before it was printed. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that is a violation of journalism ethics. Especially since
And, of course, there were errors. Including one major one: an expert hired by Donziger was quoted as saying cleanup would cost $6 billion.
I am looking forward to reading VF‘s response. Certainly, these are just accusations, but they are accusations backed up by Donzinger’s email, which was obtained as part of a court order related to the ongoing fraud case.
(Hattip: JR.)
Speaking of food…
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014…by way of the Hacker News Twitter feed, I’ve learned of a relatively new blog, “Cooking in the Archives“.
Subtitled “Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen”, the basic premise is this: Alyssa Connell and Marissa Nicosia, the authors, pull recipes published between 1600 and 1800, adapt them for a modern kitchen, cook them, and report.
Sometimes, this works well: maccarony cheese, anyone?
And sometimes you get…fish custard.
This should be interesting to follow. I commend it to your attention.
Ancient trade secret, huh?
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014This is a couple of days old, but I was waiting to find a non-paywalled report.
Kreuz Market (yes, the barbecue place in Lockhart) is accusing a former employee of stealing trade secrets.
That’s pretty much the nut. The rest of the story is a decent overview of Kreuz Market history and expansion plans, probably worth reading if you don’t follow Texas barbecue obsessively.
(For my younger readers, subject line hattip.)