We have sort of a trifecta today, because we can’t choose. All three by way of the Hacker News Twitter, the first two from the same source:
The third one really isn’t a quote of the day. You should just read the whole thing: “Laser Products I Hate”. Including why you shouldn’t give money to Kickstarter for that Cubiio piece of crap.
Week two. Gesundheit.
Our count is roughly 9,400 words. Will TMQ join the 10,000 Club this season? We would not be surprised.
(And this is why we’re running behind: we do plan to try to get these up on Tuesday, but if the Weekly Standard is going to let Easterbrook run on as long as he wants, without apparent editing or restrictions, we can’t promise that.)
After the jump, this week’s column…
By way of Patrick Non-White: a series of tweets from Matt Corbett about how flood planning and storm runoff works in Houston.
A Houston floodsplainer:
(caveat, I'm not a pro, just someone interested in how my city works. If a real pro finds an error, please LMK)— Matt Corbett (@CorbettMatt) August 28, 2017
If you click on that first one, you should be able to follow the rest of the (long) thread from there, though you might have to skip over some stuff about cheerleading.
I’m also not an expert, and haven’t lived in Houston for (mumble mumble) years now, but this fits in with what I do know. I especially appreciate his discussion of the evacuate/don’t evacuate decision: it was more than just partisan politics, it also involved differing sets of priorities.
just a different value judgement. Judgement calls are as much about being able to live with a choice being wrong
— Matt Corbett (@CorbettMatt) August 28, 2017
Fan fiction isn’t my cup of tea. If you enjoy it, more power to you. And I don’t like making fun of other writers for being supposedly “bad”: it feels kind of like throwing rocks from inside my glass house.
But I ran across a discussion of this work of fan fiction while looking into something else (I’ll get into that “something else” later) and thought it was worth mentioning here. Especially for all you “The Eye of Aragon” fans.
“My Immortal” by “XXXbloodyrists666XXX” is a work of Harry Potter fan fiction. With vampires.
More:
And it gets crazier from there. Draco Malfoy is bisexual, Harry Potter is a vampire, “there is also an unexplained cameo by a gothic Marty McFly, with the DeLorean time machine able to transform into an iPod.”
Also, the author can’t spell:
This was originally published in 44 chapters to Fanfiction.net. The author claims that chapters 39 and 40 were actually written by someone who hacked into their account. And the author also apparently had a falling-out of sorts with “their editor” somewhere around chapter 12. (Personally, the most amazing part to me is that the author had an editor.)
“My Immortal” is no longer on Fanfiction.net, though copies are still circulating. I haven’t found one yet. If I do, I am tempted to give it a shot. The 44 chapters total to about 22,000 words, so it shouldn’t take too long to struggle through.
But what’s the rest of the story? How did this come to my attention, and why am I interested? Well, there are rumors floating around – based on supposed similarities in the writing – that “XXXbloodyrists666XXX” is actually Lani Sarem, author of the “New York Times bestseller” Handbook for Mortals.
Noted movie director Tobe “Lifeforce” Hooper.
Okay, okay. He also directed the original “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. And “Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2”. And “Poltergeist”. And “Toolbox Murders”. And, apparently, an episode of “The Equalizer”.
Charlie Robertson, two term mayor of York, PA, has died at the age 83.
In July of 1969. Mr. Robertson was a patrol officer on the York police force. There was massive racial unrest going on in York. Another York PD officer, Henry C. Schaad, was shot and died of his injuries two weeks later.
On the night of July 21st, a woman named Lillie Belle Allen, who was visiting from out of town, was shot and killed. She was going to buy groceries with some of her family when their car was ambushed.
Both of these cases languished until 1999, when the local papers published a 30-year retrospective on the riots. People started coming forward with new information, and the local DA reopened the case.
As a result of the new investigation, Mayor Robertson was charged with murder. He’d just won the Democratic primary and was running for a third term, but dropped out of the race after being indicted. Nine other men were charged with crimes as well.
Prosecutors had argued that Mr. Robertson gave ammunition to at least one of the gunmen to avenge Patrolman Schaad’s shooting three days earlier. A co-defendant who pleaded guilty in the case, Rick Knouse, testified that Mr. Robertson had given him rifle bullets and told him to kill as many black people as he could.
Mr. Robertson admitted that he had shouted “White power!” at a gang rally in a city park a day earlier, but he denied the other accusations. He was the first officer to arrive at the scene of the shooting, but neither he nor three other officers disarmed gang members, took witness statements or filed a report.
Seven of the ten men who were indicted pled guilty to lesser charges. Mr. Robertson and two other men went to trial. The two other men, Gregory H. Neff and Robert N. Messersmith, were found guilty of second degree murder.
Mr. Robertson was acquitted.
In case you were wondering, the investigation into Officer Schaad’s death was also reopened. Two other men, Stephen Freeland and Leon Wright, were charged in that case and convicted of second degree murder as well.
1969 York race riot on Wikipedia.
Also among the dead: Cecil D. Andrus, former interior secretary under President Carter.
The loser update will return again this year. The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network is saying that the Jets are going to be exceptionally awful this year. We’ll see.
Speaking of ESPN, I thought some of my readers might enjoy this: the worst NFL teams of the past 30 years.
Obviously, the 2008 Detroit Lions were the worst of the worst, right? Well, not so fast: ESPN’s ranking is based on their “DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average) metric”. So the 2008 Lions aren’t the worst NFL team of the past 30 years: they’re not even the worst Lions team of the past 30 years.
Who was the worst? And are the Houston Texans represented? You’ll have to give ESPN a page view for the answer to the first question. For the second one, yes, indeed, the Texans do show up on both the worst teams and worst offenses list.
I ran across this one at Half-Price a few weeks ago. It was a little more expensive than I would have liked, but not signed Capstick level. I vacillated on it, but ended up pulling the trigger because:
He Made It Safe to Murder: The Life of Moman Pruiett by Howard K. Berry.
Who was Moman Pruiett? Like Earl Rogers, Pruiett is one of those forgotten titans of the law. As a criminal lawyer, he operated mostly out of Texas and (what became) Oklahoma, and later Florida, around the turn of the last century. Out of 342 murder cases he acted as the defense attorney for, he won outright acquittals in 304. 37 of his clients were convicted of lesser crimes than murder. The only client of his who was actually sentenced to death received a presidential commutation of his sentence.
How did Moman Pruiett do this? Well, he wasn’t just a criminal lawyer: he was a criminal lawyer. The young Pruiett had two felony convictions on his record and spent three years in prison. In spite of that, he read for the law and somehow managed to gain admission to the bar at the age of 22. It was a different time back then.
Even after being admitted, Pruiett didn’t have a lot of respect for the law: he suborned perjury, manipulated juries (in one case retold by Bill James, Pruiett figured out who the jury foreman was going to be and had the defendant’s sister seduce and move in with the man), kidnapped witnesses, played poker with judges (and, per James, “accepted acquittals to settle debts”) and generally just did whatever he needed to – legal or not – to get his clients off.
There’s an online article that partially retails one of the most famous Pruiett stores. Since this is already running long, I’ll put a jump here.
Also among the dead: the print edition of the Village Voice.
In other news: WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!
Just-completed GFS model (12Z) shows nothing less than a flooding catastrophe for Texas. 24-48" of rain in 3 or 4 days.
Please pay attention pic.twitter.com/VWmOe1DtG7— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) August 23, 2017
Keeping your head up, your eyes open, and not driving into high water is probably a good idea. But. I remember the last time a hurricane came ashore near Houston, and was threatening Austin. I was still attending St. Ed’s at the time, and the university was sending out regular updates. There was tremendous hysteria. Everyone was hunkering down waiting for the storm.
In my part of town, the skies turned dark…and we got maybe three drops of rain, total. The hurricane was a giant bust.
I suggest being careful. But I’m not going to put any faith in apocalyptic predictions until the water starts coming over the top of the dam.
Whatever happened to Alice Goodman? She wrote the librettos to John Adams’s “Nixon in China” and “Death of Klinghoffer”…and then she just sort of vanished.
Turns out, she’s an ordained Anglican priest living in England.
To quote John “Daring Fireball” Gruber: “Finally.”
Still no NYT obit for Brian Aldiss.
But the paper did run one for outsider artist M. T. Liggett.
But before you jump to the conclusion that he was a Republican (he actually ran for local office several times as one, but was never elected):
Apparently, he pretty much hated every politician:
…
Leo Hershkowitz is another one of those people I hadn’t heard of until the NYT published his obituary. And he’s also another one of those people I would have liked to have coffee with, though our politics might not have been in alignment.
Mr. Hershkowitz was a historian and an archivist. Over the years, he rescued a lot of municipal documents that were just going to be thrown away:
Among the treasures he discovered were the city’s financial records for the funeral of Abraham Lincoln — held at City Hall on April 19, 1865 — including the undertaker’s bill for $1,000 and another bill, for $20, from James Ayliffe of Trinity Church for composing a funeral dirge and playing the church’s chimes…
And, from bundles of papers earmarked for disposal by the city comptroller’s office, he saved coroner’s records from the late 18th and early 19th centuries that recorded infanticides, suicides, drownings — and the killing of Alexander Hamilton by Aaron Burr in a duel across the Hudson in Weehawken, N.J.
He also wrote a book called Tweed’s New York: Another Look in which he argued:
(As the Times notes, the thesis that Boss Tweed was framed by evil Republicans trying to cover up their own corruption was not met with universal approval by other historians.)
He was 92.
And by the way, paper of record, where’s your damn Brian Aldiss obit?
“The Year Without A Tuesday Morning Quarterback” was one of Rankin-Bass’s lesser holiday specials.
Then a year ago this time, I took a year off to complete my next book.
Oh. Is that what it was? (By the way, Gregg Easterbrook has a new book coming out.)
But now, he’s back. And so is the editorial “we”. Not to be confused with the editorial wee, though we plan to purchase one or more of those really nice Toto smart toilets when we win the lottery.
Welcome back to TMQ Watch. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
I seem to have a run of these lately.
Yesterday, someone tried to kill Judge Joseph Bruzzese Jr. as he walked into the Jefferson County courthouse in Steubenville, Ohio. The attack is being called an “ambush”: judges have reserved parking spaces, and Judge Bruzzese was attacked as he walked from his space into the courthouse.
The judge, who is described as “an avid hunter”, returned fire. Reports say the judge and his attacker fired five shots each. The judge was wounded and taken to a hospital in Pittsburgh: the most current reports I’ve seen say he’s expected to recover.
The gunman was killed by a probation officer.
Shooting a judge is bizarre enough that I’d probably make note of it here. But there’s a twist:
The gunman was the father of a former Steubenville football player who was convicted of rape.
You may remember the Steubenville rape case from 2013. Briefly, a group of football players sexually assaulted a fellow student, filmed the assault, and shared pictures on social media. There were allegations that school authorities in Steubenville knew about the sexual assault and tried to cover it up. The whole mess was big news in 2013.
The really odd thing is, Judge Bruzzese didn’t have anything to do with the rape case. That case was heard by another visiting judge. Judge Bruzzese was hearing a wrongful death suit being pressed by the alleged gunman against the local housing authority, and there was a hearing scheduled for next Monday.
So why shoot the judge now? Maybe you think he’s biassed and want to try your chances with someone else? But how did he expect to get away with this? The whole thing was apparently caught on camera (though I don’t believe the video has been released). And it’s not like Steubenville is a big city.
Maybe it was judgement juice:
We extend our best wishes to Judge Bruzzese and hope for a speedy recovery.
There are reports from Leipzig that Johann Sebastian Bach has risen from his grave, saying, "What the hell is all this crap?" #eclipse
— Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) August 21, 2017
I saw a story this morning that I was sort of vaguely keeping track of, but didn’t consider blogging. Yesterday, the FBI, BATFE, and Houston police blocked off a street in a Houston neighborhood, brought out the robot, and were telling people to stay inside:
Then the other shoe dropped. Apparently, there’s an explosives aficionado who lives on the block. And said gentleman tried to blow up a Confederate statue in Herman Park.
When confronted Saturday night in the park, he tried to drink some of the liquid explosives but spit it out, officials said.
Federal authorities said one of the tubes contained nitgroglycerin and hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, HMTD, a “highly explosive compound” used as a primary explosive. Nitroclycerin, in its purest form, is a contact explosive.
I describe the gentleman in question as an “explosives aficionado” because the police previously raided this house (and a couple of others) in 2013:
What really grabs me about this is the whole “he tried to drink the explosives” angle. I can’t find much information about the health effects or toxicity of HMTD. But everyone knows nitro is a potent vasodilator (that’s why they give heart patients nitro pills) and that exposure can cause severe headaches.
And even if he managed to choke it all down, couldn’t BATFE or the FBI analyze the dregs in the container? Guy doesn’t exactly strike me as the sharpest knife in the drawer. Though the fact that he was able to make and transport nitro without converting himself to chunky kibble makes me think he deserves some credit. (It looks like HMTD is fairly easy to make, the ingredients are mostly readily available, and it’s not quite as unstable as TATP.)
Noted British science fiction author and SF historian Brian Aldiss has passed away.
Oddly, we were just discussing Mr. Aldiss at dinner Saturday night, though I don’t think any of us were aware of his passing: the discussion was more about his book Trillion Year Spree (a mammoth history of SF) and the possibility of it being updated.
(Hattip: Pat Cadigan on the Twitter.)
It has to be believable.
22 years ago, four people were beaten to death in a hotel in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. The police believe that two men committed the crime: they had checked into the hotel intending to rob other occupants and were caught by another guest. They apparently beat that guest to death, along with the hotel owners and the owner’s grandson.
This became a cold case until earlier this year, when the police were able to do more sophisticated DNA analysis. They eventually narrowed the pool of suspects down to two men, a Mr. Wang and Liu Yongbiao. Both have been arrested, and Mr. Liu has apparently confessed.
The twist? Mr. Liu went on to become a moderately successful Chinese mystery writer.
In the preface to his 2010 novel “The Guilty Secret,” the Chinese author Liu Yongbiao expressed his desire to write a suspense-filled detective story about an alluring female writer who dodges arrest despite committing a string of murders.
“I came up with the idea after reading some detective novels and watching crime shows and movies,” Mr. Liu wrote at the time. “The working title is: ‘The Beautiful Writer Who Killed.’”
(As far as I can tell, “The Guilty Secret” is not available in a US edition.)
You put that into a novel these days, people will just roll their eyes and say, “Yeah. Right.”
Tyler “Marginal Revolution” Cowen interviews Dave “Goat Boogers” Barry.
Link goes to the transcript on Medium, which is an annoying site, but I don’t have time to listen to any more podcasts than I already do. The conversation is actually surprisingly serious, for a guy as funny as Dave Barry is.
Apparently (I did not know this) there’s a whole series of “Conversations With Tyler” podcasts where he’s been interviewing some interesting folks: Atul Gawande, Fuchsia Dunlop (“She joined Tyler over dinner at one of his favorite restaurants in DC…” Sold!), and coming up, Mary “Stiff” Roach.
I was talking with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and she said something that triggered a mental connection. And then some other stuff happened that triggered some more connections. This is another one of these posts where I was thinking out loud when I wrote this, please forgive me if it goes astray.
I didn’t live back in the old days – 30s – 60s – but my impression (based on what I’ve read) is that, as a child, you were valued somewhat based on physical skills. That is, you were expected to be able to run, hit, and catch reasonably well. (Ruark talks about this a little in The Old Man and the Boy.) If you couldn’t, you were looked down upon by your peers. If you were actually physically incapable (lost a leg or an arm) you may have been looked upon with some pity rather than condescension, but there was still a feeling that the non-physically skilled were somehow inferior. It seems like that lasted well into the 1970s and possibly even into the late 80s.
(Question: what were the expectations for girls? I don’t have a good answer, not ever having been a girl.)
At some point, this changed. Physical skill, while still valued, began to be supplanted by other skills, specifically video games. If you couldn’t run, hit, or field well, being good at rescuing the princess from another castle or whatever the frack Sonic did could still gain you some level of respect. I don’t know exactly when this change started: I feel like it was after I went off to college, but before things changed again.
I still see parents getting their kids into sports, but soccer seems to be the thing now. And that seems to me to be less about the sport – there’s not that much talent required, just run and kick ball – and more about tiring the little s–ts out for a while so Mommy and Daddy can get stuff done. (There are other exceptions, such as Little League and youth football, but I have the impression that those sports are driven by parental nostalgia. “I loved Little League when I was a kid! Surely my kid will love it, too!”)
The third change was the growth of the Internet. Once that became commonplace and everywhere, it didn’t matter if you could run, hit, field, or what you were good at. If you had some kind of specific area of interest – something you were good at, something you were obsessed with – the Internet enabled you to find people just like you. Nobody knew you were a dog, or an awkward teenage boy. We accept you, one of us, one of us.
I used to think that was a good thing. I still do: I think it’s great that those awkward teenagers can find people who are just like them. I think the Internet has done a wonderful job helping people who are shut-in or disabled or just socially awkward interact with others. I think it’s incredibly empowering, and a good antidote to bullying and ostracism.
But recent events have me wondering: have we also built a bunch of individual echo chambers? Now that everyone can find people just like them, have we devalued social interaction and the ability to get along with other, different people? Are we raising generations of otaku?
I don’t want to seem like a cranky old man longing for a return to the good old days. There were bullies and thugs and cheaters and generally not nice people back then, there are now, and there always will be. “There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation.”
But could this be part of the reason why we have LARP Nazis?
This is ridiculous, and Costco should be ashamed.
Everybody knows that a beautiful bunch of ripe bananas hides the deadly black tarantula, not scorpions. Is this just cost-cutting on Costco’s part? Are scorpions cheaper than tarantulas?
(Sorry. I’m feeling a little punchy. You might even say me wanna go home.)
Remember that blog post from yesterday about the Toepperwein/Frye book?
I didn’t know anything about this at the time, and didn’t find out until great and good friend of the blog Karl (also official firearms trainer of WCD) sent along a link to the NRA Blog.
Ad Toepperwein’s Colt Target Revolver.
As you know, Bob, I’m a Smith and Wesson man myself, but I have to admit that is a pretty Colt.
She sounds like the kind of person very few people are lucky enough to find.
This also gives me a chance to mention something I forgot yesterday: Mr. Toepperwein was a native Texan, born in Bourne (between Austin and San Antonio), died in San Antonio.
(Also: I noticed that I wasn’t consistent in the spelling of his last name: “Toepperwein” versus “Topperwein”. I probably ought to go back and clean that up a little, but I’ve seen it rendered both ways in other sources. The NRA Blog says “Folks at Winchester weren’t slow to capitalize on the husband and wife combination and dubbed the pair, the ‘Famous Topperweins’. Ad had lost an ‘e’ from his surname with Winchester advertising, but had gained an enthusiastic partner.”)
The big announcement just dropped.
Where is Gregg Easterbrook’s “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” this year?
Would you believe…the Weekly Standard?
Yeah, that seems a little odd to me, too. Wikipedia characterizes it (fairly, I think) as “an American conservative opinion magazine”, and “conservative” is not a word I would use to describe Easterbrook. But, you know, whatever gets you through the night.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Will TMQ go back to the pre-NYT days, with 2,000 word digressions on how unrealistic a television show is? Or will this be the leaner, tighter, more disciplined TMQ we saw on the website for the paper of record?
And will there be cheerleader photos?
The Weekly Standard isn’t on our list of publications and websites we don’t read. (Heck, Lawrence even subscribes to it. Or did at one time: I’m not sure if he still does.) So yes, there will be a TMQ Watch when Easterbrook’s column resumes next week. Watch this space.