Archive for April 17th, 2018

Bagatelle (#7)

Tuesday, April 17th, 2018

Southwest Airlines is having a bad day.

…passengers cried, screamed, vomited, and sent goodbye texts to their families during the attempted landing.

Crying, screaming, vomiting, and texting? Sounds like every Southwest flight I’ve ever been on.

This, on the other hand, sounds more serious: an uncontained engine failure that sent shrapnel into the aircraft and possibly into the passenger cabin? I thought post-Sioux City the FAA had gotten a lot harder on manufacturers about that sort of thing. RoadRich, care to comment?

Edited to add: reports are now stating that at least one person is dead.

Facebook admits it does track non-users, for their own good

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
–C.S. Lewis

Typically a retailer may return unsold merchandise to the manufacturer. But in this case, Dick’s Sporting Goods has decided to destroy them.
“We are in the process of destroying all firearms and accessories that are no longer for sale as a result of our February 28th policy change,” a spokeswoman told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “We are destroying the firearms in accordance with federal guidelines and regulations.”

A few points:

1. Why does Dick’s still have modern sporting rifles in stock, five years after they announced they were going to stop selling them?

(That actually has an answer: Dick’s apparently fudged the truth, and has been selling modern sporting rifles at their “specialty Field and Stream stores”.)

2. If I were a Dick’s stockholder, I would be seriously peeved at the management for destroying inventory of a perfectly legal product to make a political point.

3. If I were a Dick’s stockholder, I’d also be seeking a sweeping change of management right about now.

Obit watch: April 17, 2018.

Tuesday, April 17th, 2018

Mike the Musicologist and I have a running joke: the decline of Western civilization began when men stopped wearing hats on a daily basis. We’re both doing our part to bring back the hat era.

I bring that up now because one of the great hat wearers of our time passed away yesterday.

Harry Anderson. Asheville Citizen-Times (more of a retrospective than an obit)

Of course, he wasn’t just a guy in a hat:

While he earned critical acclaim and amassed a devoted fan base on “Night Court,” Mr. Anderson never fancied himself an actor. “I’m a magician, or a performer, by nature, and that’s always what I’ve been,” Mr. Anderson told WGN-TV in Chicago in 2014.
“I was never really an actor,” he said. “I was a magician who fell into a part on ‘Cheers.’”

He was a good one, too. And for what it’s worth, I loved “Night Court” then, and I love it now. (I wish I could find video of Harry Stone revealing his custom bowling ball. If I could find someone to make me a bowling ball like that, I’d take up bowling.)

In honor of the late great Harry the Hat, why not go out and pick up a nice hat for yourself, or someone you love? Not a ballcap or a gimmie hat: I mean a real, genuine, honest to God hat, like a fedora or a porkpie or something. Let’s bring hats back, for Harry, and for civilization.