Jack Davis, noted Mad magazine illustrator. There are some nice examples of his work in the NYT and also in the A/V Club’s.
Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series of books. I actually have a copy of the first book in the series, but have not yet read it.
I’ve also never seen an episode of Babylon 5, but I keep hearing that it is above average for televised SF, and people who I do respect seem fond of it. So, for the historical record: Jerry “Michael Garibaldi” Doyle.
Blogger, with occasional chief.
This reminds me that I owe you guys a longer post on the Citizen’s Police Academy: thoughts on the academy itself, and the aftermath. I’ve had that stewing for a while now, but various things have gotten in the way.
Remember Christopher Correa, the St. Louis Cardinals “director of baseball development” who plead guilty to hacking the Houston Astros player database? (Previously.)
46 months in prison. $279,038 in restitution.
In other news, Former LA County Sheriff Lee Baca was supposed to be sentenced yesterday. The former sheriff, as you may recall, plead guilty to lying to federal investigators. He had agreed to take a plea, and the prosecution, in turn, had agreed to seek a sentence somewhere between probation and a maximum of six months in prison.
Yesterday, the judge in the case threw out the plea agreement.
…
Former sheriff Baca has also been diagnosed as having Alzheimer’s disease, which may be one reason why the prosecution was so willing to agree to a relatively light sentence; if his condition gets worse, he may not be competent to participate in his defense, which could result in any trial being delayed.
Aujourd’hui, nous sommes tous les habitants de Nice.
Mike the Musicologist and I found ourselves at a Barnes and Noble the other day. (Criterion Collection 50% off sale through August 1st. You’re welcome.)
For various reasons, we were flipping through the new Dana Loesch book, Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To. The jacket contains this rather pithy line:
Both of us got a chuckle out of that, since we couldn’t think of anyone we knew who got a deer rifle for their thirteenth birthday. (I think I was 13 when I got my .22, but it was for Christmas. And for my readers who are not people of the gun, a .22 is way underpowered for deer. I want to say my sister’s boys were 16 and 14 when they got a deer rifle, but I’m not sure that technically qualifies as “theirs” as much as it is “Dad paid for it and loaned it to them so they could go on a youth hunting trip.”)
Anyway, I thought of that when I read this Statesman story:
Mr. Owens is now a deputy with the Bastrop County Sheriff’s office. And he just won a gold medal in the precision/sniper rifle category at the 2016 Texas Police Games.
Owens said he drove to San Angelo on a Tuesday after work, with his Mark 12 special-purpose rifle and no air conditioning. He slept about two hours the night before his competition, when he went in and shot at 1-inch laser points on a human silhouette, in a timed, 20-shot course aimed at precision. He was positioned 100 to 200 meters from his targets.
On a regular day at his ranch in La Grange, he can hit from 600 meters.
Owens also took home a third place prize in patrol rifle, a five-hour course where he ran from bay to bay shooting enemy targets and avoiding friendly fire.
Cool story. Cool guy. I’d love to meet him somewhere with air conditioning and buy him a couple/three frosty beverages of his choice.
Lawrence has been on the UT corruption scandal like flies over a cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.
But I wanted to make note of this story, since I don’t think it has come to his attention yet, and it also sort of qualifies as a firing.
Backgroud: until a few years back, ticket sales for UT sports were handled by the Longhorn Foundation, “the official fundraising arm of Texas Athletics”.
More here on the audit, which was mostly completed by June 2013, but the report “was not sent to top university officials until two years later — after UT President Bill Powers and athletic director DeLoss Dodds, in office at the time of the ticket abuses, had moved on.”
I’m just going to give that one “well” for now, for reasons that should become apparent later.
Steve Patterson, who took over as athletic director after DeLoss Dodds, took ticket selling away from the Longhorn Foundation. The foundation still existed, but their fund-raising was charitable contributions – you know, donations from rich alumni who wanted good seats for football. Patterson hired a company called The Aspire Group to handle ticket sales, and they’ve apparently done a decent job: they exceeded goals for 2015. And they have a contract through August of 2017.
But. Steve Patterson isn’t the athletic directory any longer: he lasted two years. Mike Perrin is now the AD, and he wants to terminate Aspire’s contract by August 26th of this year.
Would you like to take a guess who Mike Perrin wants to handle ticket sales now?
“I believe the direction and tone of our relationships with our incredible donor and fan base needs to be adjusted, starting with the Longhorn Foundation once again leading those important relationships,” Perrin continued.
Perrin stated it was “my intention to come to an agreement to terminate our contract this summer. I am not interested in trying to figure out a way to keep this relationship active moving forward.”
So the new AD wants to turn ticket sales back over to the same crooked organization that had them previously.
And this is where we deploy the “Well. Well well well. Well.” Seriously, just how corrupt is the University of Texas these days?
No, I haven’t forgotten. I just had trouble finding anything to put here this year. Old jokes are old.
Enjoy your holiday. Be careful storming prisons. Don’t drink wine and drive: you might spill it and stain the seats. And please accept this rather interesting Weaponsman post on the Chauchat machine gun as our nod at history for this year’s holiday.
This story has everything: fire, an explosion, strippers (“Willow” and “Breonna”), and a potato.
…
Yes, I’m going to make you click through to the WP if you want to find out how the potato came into play. Hint: Martin is the stripper, Garguilo is the boyfriend (she’s 19, he’s 28: isn’t love grand?) and neither one is terribly bright.
I have previously written about the strange case of Carolyn Barnes, the local lawyer who was accused of shooting at a census worker, sent to the state mental hospital (where she continued to represent at least one client), was later ruled competent to stand trial, tried, convicted of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and sentenced to three years in prison.
Ms. Barnes is out of prison now (she got credit for time served before the trial), but was appealing her conviction.
…I’ve never had to fill out a Form 4473 to purchase a book.
Even The Poor Man’s James Bond.
Come to think of it, I’ve also never had to show a permit to purchase a book. Nor has anyone ever called in to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Books to get my purchase approved.
Prompted by various things, including recent events and other people’s travels:
There were rumors last week that this was coming: I wanted to wait until they became reality, but somehow I missed the report on Friday.
The fact that Rep. Brown is a Democrat is never specifically mentioned, though (starting with paragraph 13) there are references to her prominent supporters in the Democratic Party.
Cheeez louise, woman. You scammed money to see a Jaguars game?
I might have considered letting this get past me, since I missed the Friday reports, but this woman apparently has an ego the size of a small planet.
Item #1:
Friends,
Last week was very rough.
Two black men were needlessly gunned down by police; 5 Dallas police officers were slain by a demented man, and on Friday I had to appear in federal court.
Item #2 (by way of Ace of Spades and Mike the Musicologist):
“These are the same agents that was not able to do a thorough investigation of [shooter Omar Mateen], and we ended up with 50 people dead,” Brown said. Mateen was shot and killed by police at the scene of the Orlando nightclub attack, bringing the total death toll to 50.
Brown’s lawyer echoed those sentiments.
“Perhaps had it chosen to devote its resources more thoughtfully, 50 innocent people would be alive today,” Elizabeth White said, according to First Coast News.
For the record, it appears Rep. Brown has historically received a grade of “F” fron the NRA.
Sydney H. Schanberg, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, passed away on Saturday.
Mr. Schanberg was a correspondent for the NYT who covered the fall of Cambodia.
In the spring of 1975, as Pol Pot’s Communist guerrillas closed in on the capital, Phnom Penh, after five years of civil war in Cambodia, Mr. Schanberg and his assistant, Dith Pran, refused to heed directives from Times editors in New York to evacuate the city and remained behind as nearly all Western reporters, diplomats and senior officials of Cambodia’s American-backed Lon Nol government fled for their lives.
“Our decision to stay,” Mr. Schanberg wrote later, “was founded on our belief — perhaps, looking back, it was more a devout wish or hope — that when the Khmer Rouge won their victory, they would have what they wanted and would end the terrorism and brutal behavior we had written so often about.”
That didn’t quite work out the way Mr. Schanberg hoped. He was eventually thrown out of Cambodia and returned to the United States, but he never forgot Mr. Dith.
Overwhelmed with guilt over having to leave Mr. Dith behind, he asked for time off to write about his experiences, to help Mr. Dith’s refugee wife and four children establish a new life in San Francisco and to begin the seemingly hopeless task of finding his friend.
Dith Pran escaped Cambodia in 1979 and made his way to the United States. He and Mr. Schanberg got back together, Mr. Schanberg got him a job as a photographer with the NYT, and wrote an article for the NYT magazine, “The Death and Life of Dith Pran”. That became a book, and eventually the movie “The Killing Fields”.
I went to bed pretty early last night (after a frustrating attempt to deal with Wells Fargo) and didn’t find out what was going on until 5 AM this morning. (Great and good friend of the blog RoadRich texted and emailed us, but we were sound asleep when things started breaking.)
I really haven’t even had a chance to look at the news yet, and don’t have any profound thoughts. But I wanted to get something up. Consider this an open thread for discussion and updates.
Please keep in mind:
It is a sad state of things where I have to post this nearly daily. #DallasPoliceShooting pic.twitter.com/pFyWhgtyOB
— Stephen Kiskamp (@skiskamp) July 8, 2016
In a semi-related vein, this is an interesting thread from Reason’s “Hit and Run”. Part of my answer to this is: the author is asking this question less than 24 hours after the incident took place. All the facts were not in, and probably still are not in even now. Why should the NRA (or any other organization) be making public statements until we have all the facts?
Edited to add: Been tied up. Apologies. The reports I’m seeing now pretty much all state that the dead gunman was killed by a breaching charge attached to a police robot. The temptation is great to make Asimov jokes, but the situation is too serious, so I’ll just link to this Statesman article which quotes the “executive director of a nationally recognized police active-shooter training facility in San Marcos” as stating it was “unprecedented but perfectly legal.”
(Also strict knife control, but mostly burrito control.)
(I have no joke here, I just like saying “deadly assault burritos”.)
(Insert your own “deadly assault burrito” joke here.)
Why not drop your news on one of the slowest news days of the year?
Sheryl Swoopes was fired last night as head coach of the Loyola University women’s basketball team. Chicago Tribune. Chicago Sun-Times.
Her record over three seasons was 31-62, and 14-16 last season. But the problem doesn’t seem to have been her record:
More:
…
Players said Swoopes cried during halftime of games and during practices while imploring the team to play better and stormed out of the gym during practice several times, frustrated at their lack of execution. At one practice, multiple players said, Swoopes sat on a chair in silence the entire time.
Swoopes also shared with teammates personal information told to her in confidence, sources told the Tribune.
Ms. Swoopes termination comes at what is apparently the end of a three month long investigation by the university, though no details of that investigation have been released yet.
I’ve been running flat out for the better part of the past two days, and haven’t been near a real computer, so I want to get these up before I crash.
I really don’t have anything profound to add to the flood of Elie Wiesel appreciations. I haven’t read Night, though I know I probably should at some point.
Michael Cimino. I also haven’t watched a single Cimino movie, though I do have the Criterion director’s cut edition of “Heaven’s Gate”. I do plan to watch that at some point, but we watched “Spartacus” (also the Criterion edition) recently and thought that was long: “Heaven’s Gate” in the director’s cut is about 30 minutes longer. A/V Club.
Finally, Robin Hardy, director of the “good” (or maybe just “not batshit insane”) version of “The Wicker Man”.
Even though it is full of the usual anti-fireworks crapola we hear every year around this time – the same anti-fireworks propaganda that has been ruining the holiday and the country ever since I was in the single-digit age range – I wanted to note the NYT‘s “A History of Fireworks Mayhem on the Fourth of July” because:
Noted author Gay Talese (“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”, The Kingdom and the Power) has a new book coming out.
The Voyeur’s Motel is allegedly based on the diaries of a man named Gerald Foos. Mr. Foos owned a motel in Colorado, and claims that he constructed special walkways above the ceilings of some of the rooms so he could secretly watch his guests having sex.
Except there are some problems with the Foos story:
More:
If you can’t vouch for details, why did you write the book? Shouldn’t this have sent up some warning flags?
In a series of interviews, he expressed surprise, disappointment and anger to learn about the transactions. He said he had not been aware of them until a reporter asked him about it on Wednesday.
“The source of my book, Gerald Foos, is certifiably unreliable,” Talese said. “He’s a dishonorable man, totally dishonorable. . . . I know that. . . . I did the best I could on this book, but maybe it wasn’t good enough.”
The odd thing is, nobody seems to be talking about pulling the book. Yet.
Edited to add: And now Talese is disavowing his disavowal:
If I were a betting man, I’d bet money that there’s going to be even more information coming out that throws doubt on Foos and his claims, and that this will end badly for Talese, the book, and Grove Atlantic.