Archive for March, 2018

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have…

Thursday, March 29th, 2018

…water slides.

This is one of those things that I intended to note earlier, but then I got busy and it got past me.

Schlitterbahn and Tyler Miles (the local operations manager for their Kansas City park) were indicted last week on involuntary manslaughter charges. This is related to the death of a ten-year-old boy who was decapitated on the Verrückt waterslide.

Texas Monthly online has a pretty good summary of the indictment and what led up to it. The spin here, based on the criminal indictment, is that these people supposedly had no idea what they were doing.

According to the indictment, lead designer John Schooley “possessed no engineering credential relevant to amusement ride design or safety,” and neither did Schlitterbahn co-owner Jeff Henry, whose emails describe a desire to “micro manage” the project because “speed is 100% required.”

Why was speed “100% required”? Allegedly, Henry was trying to impress reality show producers.

…Henry’s statements as quoted in the indictment are troubling. “[Verrückt] could hurt me, it could kill me, it is a seriously dangerous piece of equipment today because there are things that we don’t know about it. Every day we learn more,” he’s quoted as saying. “I’ve seen what this one has done to the crash dummies and to the boats we sent down it. Ever since the prototype. And we had boats flying in the prototype too. It’s complex, it’s fast, it’s mean. If we mess up, it could be the end. I could die going down this ride.”

…Henry seems to cast the industry’s guidelines as arbitrary and unnecessary—at one point, he’s quoted as saying, “we’re gonna redefine many of the definables that have been defined in the industry that we couldn’t find good reasons for. Like a 48-inch height rule. Why 48 inches? I could never figure out why not 47 inches. It made no sense to me. And so we’re gonna change all that now in this park, and hopefully change it worldwide in all parks and get back to rational reasonable scientific decisions as to why and how we run our facilities.” Furthermore, the indictment lists twelve different examples of the ride violating standards set by the American Society for Testing & Materials, which creates guidelines for amusement park rides. Schooley signed a document certifying that the ride was in compliance. The indictment describes the netting and support hoops above the ride as “obviously defective and ultimately lethal.”

Kind of burying the lede, and something I didn’t see reported as widely as the first indictment: Henry has also been arrested, and is charged with “murder, twelve counts of aggravated battery, and five counts of aggravated endangerment of a child”. The indictment against Henry hadn’t been released when the TM article hit the web, so indictment details are scanty.

It is worth remembering that most of what’s in the TM story is the prosecution’s case from the indictment, that Henry, Miles and Schlitterbahn have a different story that their lawyers will be presenting at trial, and that all parties should, of course, be presumed innocent.

Obit watch: March 29, 2018.

Thursday, March 29th, 2018

Philip Kerr, noted author.

I read A Philosophical Investigation based on someone’s recommendation: I wish I could remember who it was. (I feel pretty strongly that it was either Andy Watson or Pat Cadigan, but I’m getting old. It could have been an entirely different person.)

Anyway, I liked it well enough that I intended to read more of Kerr’s work. The Bernie Gunther stuff in particular intrigues me, but too many books, too little time. Also, I’m thinking I got tangled up somewhere with chronology issues in the Gunther books. I’m kind of sad that there won’t be any more – except for the forthcoming Gunther origin story mentioned in the obit – but, at the same time, this settles the chronology issue pretty thoroughly.

First…

Wednesday, March 28th, 2018

they came for the gun magazines, and I didn’t say anything: because I wasn’t a gun owner, and it’s not censorship if a private business does it, amirite?

Then they came for Cosmopolitan, and I said, “Hey! Wait a minute!”

(Semi-related.)

(More seriously, my First Amendment absolutism is really coming into conflict with my “sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander” philosophy, as well as my desire to see the gun-grabbers at Cosmo get theirs good and hard.)

Obit watch: special norts spews edition, March 26, 2018.

Monday, March 26th, 2018

H. Wayne Huizenga. Special bonus obit content: Field of Schemes.

When guns are outlawed…

Monday, March 26th, 2018

Me, in an email conversation:

You know what Siberia needs?
Smoke detectors and fire alarms. Also, maybe, strict lighter control.

Karl of KR Training (official firearms trainer of WCD):

Also a big public march where people hate on the lighter fluid and fireplace industry.

(And let’s not forget Big Foam Rubber.)

This is a song about Carla.

Thursday, March 22nd, 2018

And about the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

The selection process is open to the public in its early stages, though Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden makes the final decisions after recommendations from the board. This year, songs with the greatest public support included “If I Didn’t Care,” the 1939 standard by vocal group the Ink Spots, Kenny Rogers’s “The Gambler” and Kenny Loggins’s “Footloose.”

I’m not as excited about this year’s list as I have been in the past, though there are a couple of highlights other than “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”. I do love me some Groucho Marx. “New Sounds in Electronic Music” is a welcome surprise. And I’m happy to see K-Log get a nod, though I would have put “Danger Zone” in before “Footloose”.

When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have…

Wednesday, March 21st, 2018

…live bees.

A woman from Spain died after having an allergic reaction to an acupuncture procedure where bee stings are used instead of needles.

Obit watch: March 21, 2018.

Wednesday, March 21st, 2018

Nelda Wells Spears, former Travis County tax assessor-collector. I remember having to write checks to her, back in the pre-Internet days…

Earl Cooley, prominent Austin SF fan, influential early BBS guy, and a personal friend.

The Mad Midnight Bomber What Bombs At Midnight. They haven’t released a name yet, but even if they did, I wouldn’t give him the publicity.

Obit watch: March 20, 2018.

Tuesday, March 20th, 2018

Nokie Edwards, guitar player for The Ventures.

This is here mostly as a transparent excuse for a musical interlude. I’ll put in a jump.

(more…)

Before it gets away from me…

Monday, March 19th, 2018

…I should document, for the hysterical record, that Lawrence and I renewed our $5 bet on Gonzaga. (I take Gonzaga, he takes the field.)

After all, it is the Year of the Dog.

Obit watch: March 19, 2018.

Monday, March 19th, 2018

Noted SF writer Kate Wilhelm passed away on March 8th.

I genuinely wish I had more to say about this, but I don’t right now.

He shoots, he scores!

Sunday, March 18th, 2018

This week was another Half-Price Books coupon week. And I picked up a few things. Most of the books I bought were firearms related, so I thought I’d pull a Lawrence and document some of them here.

Small Arms Profile 17: Smith and Wesson Tip-Up Revolvers. This is a thin little pamphlet dated January 1973, and published by Profile Publications Ltd. in the UK. Profile had at least 17 other books on various types of small arms (including one specifically on ammunition). It also looks like they had separate series for aircraft, cars, and warships: I think they catered, at least in part, to model makers. This had a cover price of $2 US/40p UK in 1973 dollars: sources tell me that’s closer to $20 in 2018 money.

I was a little hesitant to shell out $6 for an 18 page British handgun publication, until I opened the front cover and saw “By Roy G. Jinks”. That’s pretty much a “must buy” flag.

Defensive Pistol Fundamentals by Grant Cunningham. This isn’t particularly rare or hard to find, but I note it here because it is one of KR Training‘s recommended books. $10 with no coupon discount (because I used the coupon for other things), which is inline with Amazon’s new price, but this is pretty much “like new” as well. I don’t feel rooked.

And I’ve written before about how much I like picking up those Firearms Classics books at a steep discount. I added a few more to the collection:

Not from the Firearms Classics library, but a limited edition reprint (#1383 of 1500) from “Wolfe Library Classics”: Big Game Rifles and Cartridges by Elmer Keith. (Originally published by Thomas G. Samworth, much like so many of these other books in my library.) $12 after 40% off coupon.

(Damn. I really ought to pick that up.)

Firearms Curiosa by Lewis Winant. I’ve only had a chance to flip quickly through this since I bought it on Friday, but it looks like a whole lot of fun: there’s an entire chapter, for example, on “Knife Pistols and Cane Guns”. Not a Samworth book, oddly. $6 after 40% off coupon.

Actual Firearms Classics Library reprints of actual Samworth books: With British Snipers to the Reich by “Captain C. Shore” (“a classic hands-on, nuts and bolts, how to sniping book” according to the intro), and Shots Fired In Anger by Lt. Col. John B. George. What I didn’t know, until I flipped through the introduction to Shots, is that these two books complete my quartet of Samworth “war” books (the other two being McBride’s A Rifleman Went to War and Dunlap’s Ordnance Went Up Front). Together, the two of these with one coupon were $22.50: I probably could have gotten away with making three trips instead of just two, but I didn’t want to push my luck. And I’d been looking for a copy of With British Snipers for several months now.

Finally, this is in the Firearms Classics Library, but I think this copy may be a true first (I’m having trouble tracking down bibliographic information):

Experiments of a Handgunner by Walter F. Roper. Roper was a somewhat famous gun guy: among other accomplishments, he designed the N-frame “Target” grip for Smith and Wesson revolvers. Yeah, the dust jacket is pretty badly worn (it has a plastic cover protector). But I’ve never seen a copy of this before – Firearms Classics or otherwise – and it was $12.50 after coupon.