George S. Irving has died. He was 94.
Mr. Irving was a Tony award winner (for a revival of “Irene” in which he acted opposite Debbie Reynolds):
He was also a television spokesman for White Owl cigars, and narrated episodes of “Underdog”.
But he was perhaps best known as the voice of Heat Miser in “The Year Without a Santa Claus”. He was also in “A Miser Brothers’ Christmas” (which I’d never even heard of, but I was apparently in my 40s when that premiered).
Well, found my 2017 calendar. (Okay, it is a little expensive, and I already have a Gunsite 2017 calendar that I picked up in Tulsa. But I’m taking a flyer on the CIA one because the thumbnails of the art look incredible: I’m seeing this described as more of an art book that you hang on the wall. I’ll do a follow-up once I get it.)
I’ve never liked the Philadelphia Eagles, but this story makes me feel a bit better about them: Quarterback Carson Wentz bought his offensive line a present.
Each of them is getting a personalized Beretta shotgun.
The great thing about this? Not only is a cool present, but it should make all the right people’s heads explode.
The Grim Reaper finally caught up with Vesna Vulovic (or Vesna Vulović). She was 66 years old, and had managed to outrun him for nearly 45 of those years.
If that sounds callous, well, Ms. Vulovic had an amazing story. You might even remember it if you were an obsessive reader of the Guinness Book of World Records when you were young.
Ms. Vulovic was a flight attendant on JAT Flight 367 between Stockholm and Belgrade on January 26, 1972. She had actually swapped places with another girl and wasn’t originally scheduled to work this flight. As we see so often in movies and television, this never ends well…
An hour into the flight, the plane, a DC-9, blew up over the Czech village of Srbska Kamenice. As others were believed to have been sucked out of the jet into subfreezing temperatures, Ms. Vulovic remained inside part of the shattered fuselage, wedged in by a food cart, as it plunged.
Trees broke the fall of the fuselage section and snow on the hill cushioned its landing.
Ms. Vulovic is believed to have fallen 33,000 feet, which (according to Guinness, at least) is the longest documented fall survived without a parachute. She was badly injured, but Ms. Vulovic was the only survivor of Flight 367. It is generally believed that the plane was blown up by a terrorist bomb in the forward cargo hold.
I think the Wikipedia page (I know, I know) on Flight 367 has a fairly good explanation of why this theory is bolshie bushwa. Here’s a hint: the black boxes…
I could buy a couple of Communist countries being in on the conspiracy. But the Dutch?
Sometimes there’s just nothing you can say. Debbie Reynolds: NYT. LAT. A/V Club.
Missed this one on Monday: Bob Diaco out as head coach of the University of Connecticut football team. 11-26 over three seasons, and had his contract extended in May.
Bob Bradley, who is American, was fired yesterday as the manager of Swansea City, which is apparently an English Premier League soccer club with American owners. I gather he was the first American to manage a Premier League club, and lasted 11 games before being fired, but I don’t follow soccer at all, so this mostly just baffles and confuses me.
I think I’m going to wait until tomorrow to try to pull together the Carrie Fisher obits. Not that it was entirely unexpected (though I think we were all hoping for the best for her), but I feel better letting things sit for a day.
By way of Lawrence: Richard “Watership Down” Adams. A couple of pithy quotes:
…
“If I saw a rabbit in my garden I’d shoot it,” he once said.
By way of my beloved sister-in-law: Vera Rubin, noted female astronomer.
Rex and Rob Ryan both OUT in Buffalo.
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Babou (either one), call your office, please.
Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the cheetah is “rapidly heading towards extinction”. While sad, this comes as no great shock to us…because, as we all know, cheetahs never win.
This is kind of cool, at least to me: a homebrew short-range transmitter that sends out time signals on the WWVB 60 KHz frequency. Why would you want to do this, other than for the challenge?
Looks like I had good reason to be worred about this game.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
None.
One the one hand, I’m glad that my Browns fan relatives don’t have to see their team be the second one in history to go 0-16. On the other hand: seriously, San Diego?
And on the gripping hand, this is just more evidence for my belief that San Diego is a horrible team, that Philip Rivers should be drummed out of the NFL, and that (instead of letting the team move to LA) the Chargers franchise should be revoked, the team disbanded, the current stadium burned to the ground, the rubble plowed into the earth, and the earth sown with salt.
The former sheriff of LA county got to open his present a few days early:
The LAT reports that the jury was “split 11 to 1 in favor of an acquittal”, which makes me wonder if the prosecution is even going to attempt a re-trial. As noted previously, Baca is also in “the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease”; an attempt at a retrial may run into competency issues.
Related LAT editorial:
If hypocrisy, mismanagement and detachment were crimes, Baca would surely be staring down a long prison term.
But they are not, and they do not warrant criminal conviction or incarceration.
…
How hard is it not to beat prisoners and obstruct justice?
“It’s just not Christmas until I see Hans Gruber fall from the Nakatomi Tower.”
The Jacksonville Jaguars have already fired head coach Gus Bradley.
But at least they let him take the plane home.
He was 14-48 overall with Jacksonville:
By season, the Jaguars were 4-12, 3-13, 5-11 and 2-12 under Bradley.
Finally found a reliable source to confim: Zsa Zsa Gabor. (Edited to add 12/19: NYT. A/V Club.)
You know, I have seen “Touch of Evil”, but I don’t remember Zsa Zsa at all. (It was a while ago, though. It might be worth watching that again, especially since I think the current version is slightly different than the restored version I saw.)
Well covered elsewhere, but for the historical record: Dr. Henry J. Heimlich, inventor of the epinonimous maneuver.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Cleveland
That takes care of one of the two games I was most concerned about. Still to come:
I’m worried a little about the San Diego game, but I’m pretty confident in Pittsburgh’s ability to beat the Browns at home.
In semi-related news, ESPN is claiming that Rex Ryan is going to be shown the door in Buffalo. It sounds like this isn’t going to happen until Bloody Monday, though.
In other news, the Texans benched their starting quarterback, Brock Osweiler (seriosuly) in favor of Beat PunchBeef Tom Savage (also seriously). Also also seriously, Savage actually engineered a comeback for the Texans, who ended up winning 21-20 over Jacksonville. Granted, Jacksonville is 2-12. so it isn’t like the Texans were playing the first team here, but Brock turned the ball over twice and put Jacksonville up 13-0 before he was benched.
(Isn’t “Brock” one of the most preppy names you can think of? “Hi, Brock, it’s Biff. I was going down to the club with Muffy and Buffy, and wanted to know if you’d like to join us. Maybe we could play doubles and have some white wine spritzers after? Sure, that would be swell, Brock. See you there.” On the other hand, “Tom Savage” strikes me as the kind of name a quarterback should have. It’d also be a great name for a series of children’s books: “Tom Savage and the Improbable Comeback”, “Tom Savage and the New Offensive Coordinator”. “Tom Savage and the Contract Negotiation”…)
The Austin Police Department has abandoned plans to reopen the DNA and forensic serology labs.
Props to Chief Blast HardCheese for stepping up and taking responsibilty. But:
Question number 1: how did the lab manage to pass 17 audits and get accreditation if it’s been badly run since the beginning?
Question number 1a: did the problems just start recently? If so, how and why?
Question numero dos: The lab opened in 2004. Chief HardCheese has been chief for about two weeks now: before that, he was an assistant chief, and I’m not sure how much day to day input he had into lab operations.
You know who did have a lot of input into lab operations? You know who was the HMFWIC when things went to hell in a handbasket? Yes, you do know, don’t you?
By the way, that’s not the only lab news today. The guy that was hired to run the lab? He’s no longer running the lab. And not just because the lab isn’t reopening:
Milne was hired to be Austin police’s chief forensic officer and earned $111,384 a year, police officials said. Manley said he has heard concerns from within the criminal justice community about Milne’s background and qualifications. Manley said he pulled Milne’s academic transcripts, which led him to conclude that Milne did not have adequate qualifications to run the functions of the lab.
“This individual has been removed from his role overseeing any functions at the lab and he is not associated with the lab at this time,” Manley said. “His future at this point is something we are working on determining how we will work through that.”
Perhaps I am a little biased here, but I’m starting to like Chief HardCheese more. I actually heard him speak last night, and he’s a pretty good speaker. He hasn’t done anything to irritate me yet. He hasn’t made any stupid public statements on guns. He’s a St. Ed’s graduate. (Hilltoppers represent!) And he actually seems to be making efforts to clean up this mess.
Huh. I guess it is that time of year again.
Quick takes:
Edited to add: nothing to do with the LoC list, but I wonder: was one of the Simpsons writers a closet 87th Precinct fan?
Anyone remember “Thicke of the Night”? I do, but only as being synonymous with “legendary disaster”.
Lawrence forwarded a story from “Community Impact”, one of those free neighborhood papers, that I thought was worthy of note.
The gist of it is that the Capital Area Private Defender Service (CAPDS from this point forward because I don’t want to keep typing that) is willing to get involved with fixing the DNA testing issues in the APD forensics lab.
Well, that sounds great. But what do they need? Money. And what does Travis County not have a whole lot of? Money.
Meanwhile, the Statesman is saying that fixing the DNA lab problems could cost…well…
More:
According to the organization, county officials could assign an attorney to each case that used DNA evidence analyzed by the lab to review it and “file appropriate motions” for a minimum cost of $13.2 million. Or it could choose a more expensive option in which attorneys would do a deeper review of cases using two attorneys from the outset to learn which might have potential issues — for $14.4 million.
The last option — at a cost of $6 million — would involve the county or city hiring new lawyers to handle the cases instead of using outside attorneys.
Oh, by the way, this doesn’t include the costs associated with actually getting the lab up and running again.
And, in an also related story: after the lab was closed, the APD asked the Texas DPS crime lab to do retraining of some of the DNA analysts.
But Monday, DPS officials told the department they had lost faith in most of the staffers they were working with — and wouldn’t be returning.
Instead, according to a one-page letter obtained by the American-Statesman and KVUE-TV, only a select two from a staff of six DNA analysts are invited to a state facility to continue training in a “supportive environment.”
More:
In a letter to the Travis County district attorney’s office, Brady Mills, deputy assistant director of the DPS crime lab, wrote that the last four months of working together have shown that “there are significant challenges that impact confidence in the work product” of some of the lab’s DNA analysts.
“This has been demonstrated through our personal interactions with the group as well as the practical work product that has been completed and reviewed thus far,” Mills wrote. “Coupled with the expressed belief by your office that those senior analysts may no longer be utilized for expert testimony, APD and DPS plan to move forward with a new course of action.”
The position of DNA analyst (which requires a bachelor’s degree) in the APD lab starts at $23.44 an hour. I believe when I started doing enterprise tech support at Dell, I was making $22 an hour and that was in 2006: I would expect that by now, Dell’s paying closer to $23.44, if not more, and I also suspect enterprise tech support is easier than DNA analysis.
I want to be very very careful with what I say here. I don’t want to seem like I’m sneering at anyone. I couldn’t do this work, and I believe the people who do are motivated by things other than pay. But when DPS says 2/3rds of the people sent over for retraining, can’t be retrained? Is the DPS training that much more demanding than APD’s? Is there something else going on here? Or is the simple explanation also the correct one: APD’s been hiring people who are wrong for the job, and it finally caught up with them?
Jeff Fisher out as head coach of the Los Angeles Rams.
The Rams are 4-9 so far this season. Fisher was 31-45-1 overall with the Rams (including their pre-LA incarnation).
Actual headline on a column in the LAT:
Rams’ return to L.A. is officially an embarrassment. Coach Jeff Fisher needs to go — now
Hey, remember when all the NFL talk was about how LA desperately needed a NFL team, and how wonderful things would be when LA got a NFL team, and how much the league and the city would benefit from a NFL team? Wasn’t that a time.
(Hattop on the title to First Amendment badass Marc Randazza, who didn’t originate the term (as he makes clear) but is the person who introduced me to it. He would probably want to punch me in the face for using it in this context, but I couldn’t pass up a little bit of wordplay.)
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Cleveland
Three games left:
I still wouldn’t bet this way, but I think it is at least possible that Cleveland could win one or two of these games.
John Glenn roundup: NYT. Lawrence. WP. Sweet story about Mrs. Glenn: they were married for 73 years. LAT. NASA Glenn Research Center.
(My dad worked at the Glenn Research Center a long time ago; so long ago, it wasn’t called the Glenn Research Center back then.)
Edited to add: Borepatch on Glenn. NYT obit for Greg Lake.
John Glenn obits to come tomorrow, after everyone has had a chance to write and correct them. I’m sure the NYT obit has been in the can for a while now – it wouldn’t surprise me if at least one of the credited writers has died or left the paper – but sure as god made little green apples, there will be at least one correction.
This is kind of a weird three-fer. Sort of one of those triangle intersections.
A woman bought “$23,000” worth of “Hatchimals” which I am given to understand is this year’s hot Christmas toy. (Personally, they sound stupid to me, but I am not a small child.)
Interestingly, eBay has apparently imposed limits on “Hatchimals” sales.
…
So why is some random woman’s attempt to profit on the backs of hard-working parents who just want to get their children a toy for Christmas interesting?
Intersection number 1: the random woman is author Sara “Water for Elephants” Gruen.
This raises questions: namely, why would Ms. Gruen, who is surely rolling in all that sweet Oprah’s Book Club and movie money, embark on this quest to profit on the backs yadda yadda? And why wouldn’t she have checked eBay polices before spending $23,000?
I don’t have an answer for the second question. As for the first, that’s intersection number 2:
More:
Curious. I might watch that series, if shows up anyplace I have access to, mostly because I wonder how she got involved in this case.
Edited to add: Got to remember. Always, always do the math.
$189 times 156 is $29,484. Subtract the $23,595.31 she paid, and that leaves a gross profit of $5888.69. And that’s before the cost of the batteries, whatever she’s paying for the copies of her books (unless she just has 156 copies lying around the house), and assuming she sells all of them. (The article says she’s given four away to “needy kids”, which reduces her gross that much more.)
Doesn’t $5,000 seem like a relatively paltry amount to fund a documentary? Heck, couldn’t she have raised that on Kickstarter without the whole exploiting parents yadda yadda angle?
Greg Lake, noted prog-rock guy. (King Crimson, Emerson Lake and Palmer)
Show your children the classic Chris Rock video, “How To Not Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police”. Problem solved in five minutes. No need for a course. As a public service to those of you who have children, I’ll even embed it here for you.
I’m really about 80% serious when I say that: there’s actually a lot of really sound advice in that video.
And I wouldn’t mind a class that taught “how to interact with law officers”, but I think that should just be part of a larger class. I’d also teach how the DA’s office works and how crimes are prosecuted, how civil court works, and I’d bring in defense attorneys (maybe even someone from the ACLU) to go over what your rights as a suspect are. I almost want to say that they used to call this “Civics”.
But I’d probably teach this as part of a larger year-long class for high school students which I’ve been calling “S–t You Need To Know”. I’d also want to cover things like basic car maintenance (how to check fluid levels and change a flat), basic gun safety, strategies for avoiding being a crime victim, statistical fallacies and how to recognize them, bad science and how to recognize it…there’s a whole bunch of things that I think graduating seniors need to know, but aren’t getting taught unless they have exceptional parents.
Feel free to leave your proposed curriculum item in the comments.
Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg, as promised, did not seek re-election. Margaret Moore is the new DA, and will take over January 3rd.
But she’s already making her mark: she’s fired 27 people.
Seventeen attorneys, 12 investigators and six administrative staff are retiring or have been told they will no longer have jobs when Moore takes over on Jan. 3. Additionally, 13 lawyers are being bumped to a lower classification and will take paycuts. And more changes may be coming. Moore told the American-Statesman on Tuesday she still has decisions to make on some administrative positions after wrapping up interviews this week.
in all, 48 people in the 238-employee agency have been affected by the moves. Twenty-seven were told their services will no longer be needed; they will not receive severance pay.
Is this good or bad? The DA’s office seems to want to spin it as “good”:
And it isn’t unprecedented for a new DA to want their own people. See Pat Lykos. Okay, maybe that was a bad example…
But there also seem to be some possibly legitimate concerns:
,,,
In other news, here’s an idea: why don’t we separate the crime lab from the APD? This makes a lot of sense to me: one of my ideas for criminal justice reform is to make crime labs arms of the court system itself, reporting to the judiciary, rather than arms of law enforcement. I’m sure that the vast majority of people who work in these labs remain independent, but it still looks and feels unseemly to me to have that kind of reporting relationship.
It seems like Grits agrees, though he calls for the lab to be “truly independent, as was done in Houston“.
I could live with that. They might need a new building, which probably means more bonds and more taxes, which does not excite me. But I think I could vote for that, too, as long as they put two quotes over the doorways:
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.