NYT. Michiko Kakutani appreciation. LAT. WP. A/V Club.
“The Oliver Sacks Reading List” from The Atlantic.
I like what Kakutani says, and I don’t think I could say it any better:
Dr. Sacks was a personal hero of mine. Unlike most of my personal heros, I actually did get to meet him once. He probably wouldn’t have remembered it, even if he wasn’t famously “face blind”…
Mostly a local story, but noted here for people who may have missed it:
Austin police and fire officials spent much of Sunday investigating a fiery crash that left four people dead at the Arbor Walk shopping center.
The accident, reported at 4:53 a.m., happened when a Nissan Altima crashed through a barrier on the Braker Lane off-ramp on MoPac Boulevard, went airborne, caught fire and crashed into a building containing several businesses, including Mighty Fine Burgers Shakes & Fries.
Noted film director Wes Craven. LAT. A/V Club. NYT.
Dr. Wayne Dyer, author (“Your Erroneous Zones”) and perennial fixture on PBS. Quoted without comment:
…
Often promoted as “public television’s favorite teacher of transformational wisdom,” Dyer was a fixture on PBS for almost 40 years and became embroiled in a controversy over complaints beginning in 2006 that he was promoting a specific religious worldview in violation of PBS’ editorial policies.
Michael Getler, PBS’s ombudsman at the time, wrote in 2012 that it was “my sense” that Dyer’s advocacy strayed outside PBS’ editorial standards but that the PBS board disagreed with him.
An Oliver Sacks obit is coming, but his death was kind of personal for me, so I want to take a little more time.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Legendary Houston surgeon Dr. James “Red” Duke Jr.
Dr. Duke was one of the founders of the Life Flight service. He attended John Connally after the Kennedy assassination. He inspired a short-lived TV series with Dennis Weaver.
Edited to add 8/27: NYT obit.
Well. Well well well. Well.
We’ve been wondering when the first TMQ of the season was going to show up. We’re well into the pre-season and there’s no TMQ on the ESPN site. We’ve been watching Easterbrook’s Twitter: usually he links to his columns there, but there’s been nothing.
Apparently we missed the news. We fired up the Googles, and according to a certain website (one we have a policy of not linking to), Easterbrook’s deal with ESPN wasn’t renewed at the end of the 2014 season.
We would figure that Easterbrook would take TMQ elsewhere, and that he’d link to it on his Twitter, but perhaps he’s grown weary of writing it?
Tonight, when we get home, we’ll pour out a blueberry-almond martini for TMQ. If the column does show up someplace else, we’ll let you know, but we won’t promise that we’ll link to it or resume TMQ Watch: if Easterbrook goes somewhere like Salon or Slate, for example, we won’t follow him there.
By way of the invaluable NYT obits Twitter feed, I have learned that today is the 75th anniversary of the assassination of Leon Trotsky. I don’t know what I would have done if this anniversary had gotten past me.
(Technically, I suppose it is the 75th anniversary of Trotsky’s death. Ramón Mercader, or whatever his name was – he seems to have had multitudes – attacked Trotsky on the 20th, but he lingered until the 21st.)
I haven’t done one of these in a while, so how about a little musical interlude?
This might push a few buttons.
Brigadier General Frederick Payne (USMC- ret.)
Gen. Payne was 104 when he died, and was the oldest surviving US fighter ace.
Gen. Payne received the Navy Cross, the Silver Star, and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions.
With Mr. Payne’s death, there are 71 surviving aces, said Arthur Bednar, coordinator of the American Fighter Aces Association.
According to Mr. Bednar, only 1,450 American pilots qualified to be called ace, a distinction reserved for pilots who downed at least five enemy planes in aerial combat during World Wars I and II and the wars in Korea and Vietnam; in addition, six aces are recognized from the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War and the Arab-Israeli War. Mr. Payne was credited with five and a half kills.
The question of the day is: will we get to “Z” in the series?
Austin police Chief Art Acevedo is a finalist for the police chief of San Antonio Police Department.
(As a side note, I’ve always wondered what Sue Grafton’s going to do with Kinsey Millhone after she gets to “Z”. Two books to go.)
On August 21, 1971, Pinell, George Jackson, and several other inmates attempted to escape from San Quentin. Three inmates and three guards were killed in the attempt.
Pinell was killed by another prisoner during a riot.
Noted: Warren G. Harding apparently did father a child with his mistress, Nan Britton.
Also noted: VonTrey Clark was allegedly offering $5,000 for the murder of Samantha Dean. (Previously.)
My great and good friend Joe D. and I have had past discussions about death at the Grand Canyon and at Yosemite (although I can’t find them now). In that light, this is interesting: “Forget bears: Here’s what really kills people at national parks”.
Short version: if you do die at a national park, it will probably be a drowning or a car crash. But statistically, the odds are low that you will die at a national park.
More slides! More stuff!
The Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek paper, “Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle” is here. Sorry I don’t have much to say beyond that; I’ve been frantically busy all day and haven’t had a chance to review their paper (or much of anything else) yet. But I did want to get this up, because I’ve been waiting for it.
(Also, one of my cow-orkers owns a vulnerable vehicle, and I’ve been giving him a little bit of grief about that. Only a little bit, though, because he has problems with the vehicle that go beyond Miller and Valasek’s work.)
More when I have it; possibly tonight or tomorrow.
I was too young to remember Frank Gifford‘s playing days, but I do have fond memories of him from Monday Night Football in the 1970’s.
Interesting bit of trivia:
I kind of skipped over yesterday, because Thursday is traditionally slow. And it is a little early for stuff to be up today, plus many of the good presentations are scheduled for tomorrow.
But! BlackHat 2015! Not everything from BlackHat gets duplicated at DEFCON, and vice versa, but there’s always some overlap. Some things that are already up:
There are a couple of other overlaps I’ve found (specifically the Josh Drake presentation on Stagefright and the Valasek/Miller car exploit) but those don’t have any slides or other material attached yet.
More links and stuff as and when I find it and am able to post.
Edited to add: Just noticed this on the DEFCON 23 site. Download the conference CD optical disc here. Woo hoo woo hoo hoo. (The .rar file is 419 MB. Good thing I work for a networking company.)
In great haste, because I’m near the end of my lunch hour and wanted to get this up:
By my count, the first mention of her party affiliation occurs 15 paragraphs into the story.
(Hattip on this to Mike the Musicologist, who has been doing a better job of watching the Kane mutiny than I have.)
I’ve seen some mentions of this elsewhere, but I wanted to go ahead and link to the NYT obit for John Leslie Munro, last of the Dambusters.
I also kind of want to see “The Dam Busters” now. I’m pretty sure it was on TV when I was a kid, but somehow I never caught it. And it doesn’t look like Amazon has it on instant video…
For hysterical raisins: reprinted LAT obit for Marilyn Monroe.
Our old friend, ex-APD officer VonTrey Clark (previously) is in custody in Indonesia.
Yes, I know: I quoted the news reports as stating that Indonesia does not have an extradition treaty with the US. But, according to the reports I’ve seen, Clark is currently being held by Indonesian authorities because his visa isn’t in order.
And in spite of the fact that there is no formal extradition treaty, Indonesia apparently is planning to return Clark to the United States.
“He was arrested last Friday by investigators in Bali,” the secretary of Interpol’s national central bureau for Indonesia, Brigadier-General Amhar Azeth, told AFP.
“He is wanted for murder.”
I got dragged into something literally the moment I hit the door at work this morning. Not that I’m bitter or anything. But it did mean that my blogging time was cut short.
This, in turn, meant that Lawrence beat me to the latest developments in the Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow case. Really, I was going to blog that. But, to summarize:
More:
I suppose it could be selective prosecution. Then again, it could be: if you have a choice between indicting the guy who took bribes, and the guy who took bribes and engaged in gun running, who are you going to pick?
Also possibly of interest:
Chiu and Chow were involved in a dispute: Chiu pulled funding for the Night Market after finding out Chow was involved with it.
“a corpse eating a vegetarian dinner”? Perhaps that makes more sense in the original Klingon.
Noted historian and author Robert Conquest has passed away at 98.
The scope of Stalin’s purges was laid out: seven million people arrested in the peak years, 1937 and 1938; one million executed; two million dead in the concentration camps. Mr. Conquest estimated the death toll for the Stalin era at no less than 20 million.
“His historical intuition was astonishing,” said Norman M. Naimark, a professor of Eastern European history at Stanford University. “He saw things clearly without having access to archives or internal information from the Soviet government. We had a whole industry of Soviet historians who were exposed to a lot of the same material but did not come up with the same conclusions. This was groundbreaking, pioneering work.”
I expect Lawrence will have more to say later, but I do want to tell my favorite Conquest story. When his publisher was going to issue a new edition of The Great Terror: A Reassessment
Edited to add: Lawrence’s obit is now up.
DEFCON 23 starts Thursday. Black Hat USA 2015 starts tomorrow.
Once again, it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it out to Vegas. Once again, I’m going to try to cover things from 1,500 miles away. It isn’t completely clear to me that anyone other than me is getting any benefit from this, but I’ve been doing this for long enough that I have a hard time stopping now.
Here’s the schedule. There are several presentations that are already getting media attention:
So what would I go see if I was there? What sounds interesting to me?
For those who were wondering when I was going to put up Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, here you go. Not even paywalled, as of this writing.
(I probably should have put this up yesterday, but the workday was frantically busy, and I came home and collapsed after dinner. Sorry.)
Of course, these are just charges, he’s entitled to the presumption of innocence, yadda yadda yadda.
Vincent Marotta Sr., a great American.
Mr. Marotta was one of the inventors of the Mr. Coffee machine.