Apropos of nothing in particular.
Archive for June, 2018
Musical interlude.
Friday, June 29th, 2018Harlan Ellison.
Friday, June 29th, 2018LAT. LAT tribute by John Scalzi. Appreciations. The WP just reprinted the AP obit, but they did also run a nice retrospective. Lawrence.
The paper of record has not yet seen fit to publish an obit for Mr. Ellison (or, for that matter, Gardner Dozois.)
Edited to add: NYT partial obit. “A complete obituary will appear soon.”
Other people knew him better and probably have smarter things to say. This one is hard for me, because his stories and essays and criticism have been a huge part of my life for about 40 years now.
It is sometimes said that everyone in science fiction has their own Harlan Ellison story, which they will be glad to tell you anytime his name comes up. Here’s mine: I worked on a couple of Ellison projects a while back. (Basically, I was just retyping his manuscripts into a computer for later typesetting, etc.) While working on those projects, I talked to him a couple of times on the phone. I think he knew that I was nervous talking to him, but he never treated me with anything but respect and courtesy.
I think we would have disagreed on most major issues of the day, but he was a great and underappreciated writer, and I will miss him.
Susan Ellison has asked me to announce the passing of writer Harlan Ellison, in his sleep, earlier today. “For a brief time I was here, and for a brief time, I mattered.”—HE, 1934-2018. Arrangements for a celebration of his life are pending.
— Christine Valada, J.D. (@mcvalada) June 28, 2018
Quick update from the police beat.
Friday, June 29th, 2018Remember the fentanyl laced flyers from earlier this week?
Turns out it wasn’t fentanyl after all:
More than a dozen flyers placed on Harris County Sheriff’s Office vehicles have tested negative for fentanyl after a sergeant was hospitalized earlier this week from touching a paper originally believed to be laced with the sometimes-deadly opioid.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences tested 13 flyers, as well as clothing items and blood and urine samples from the sergeant who had symptoms related to drug-exposure. Those tests were all negative.
Apparently the initial positive was from a field test. This raises some questions that I just don’t have time to discuss right now, but which I sort of alluded to in the first post, and which I’d like to come back to later.
Edited to add: Well well well. Since I posted this update, the HouChron article has itself been updated with quotes from the sheriff’s office about the field test kits.
The Houston Chronicle reported in July 2016 that 298 people had been convicted of drug possession, even though complete lab tests later found no controlled substances in the samples tested at the scene.
All 298 people pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanors before the field samples had been tested in the county’s forensic laboratory. Many of those people pleaded guilty based on the initial testing kits indicated the substance recovered at the scene was positive for drugs. Those test kits cannot be used in trial as evidence under Texas law.
Obit watch: June 28, 2018.
Thursday, June 28th, 2018Daisy Kadibil, Aboriginal Australian.
When she was eight…
Daisy was taken from her home in Jigalong, an Indigenous community in the Pilbara region in northwestern Australia, where she had grown up. A sister, Molly, and a cousin, Gracie, were also seized, and all three girls were sent to an Indigenous settlement near the Moore River, just north of Perth, the nearest city, about 800 miles to the south.
There, longing for home, they sought to escape. In 1931 they succeeded, embarking on foot on a treacherous nine-week trek north across rough terrain and using as their guide a barbed-wire fence that had been built to keep rabbits away from pastureland — an astonishing feat that inspired a book and the acclaimed 2002 Australian movie “Rabbit-Proof Fence.”
Daisy was the last survivor of the three.
For the historical record: Joe Jackson.
Memo from the police beat.
Tuesday, June 26th, 2018Oddly, this one is mostly Houston based this time, though there is an APD connection that I’ll mention at the end.
Somebody put flyers on some Harris County Sheriff’s cars parked outside of one of their buildings.
The flyers promoted the organization Targeted Individuals, an organization which believes that the “Deep State” targets certain individuals.
The group believes the FBI and CIA purposefully inflict mental, physical and emotional stress on enemies of the “Deep State,” in part, by shooting microwave technology at their heads in order to cause brain damage, according to the group’s website.
I think this is their website. At least this is the one linked in the HouChron article. There’s another site called “Targeted Individuals” which seems to cover similar ground. I haven’t had time to dig deeply into either of these sites yet, though I’m generally familiar with the whole beaming microwaves/gangstalking/etc. theory.
But that’s not what makes this story weird. A deputy with HCSO went out, found one of the flyers on her car window, and removed it.
Apparently, the flyer was laced with fentanyl.
She initially did not think anything of it but soon started to feel light-headed and showed other fentanyl-related symptoms.
She was rushed to the hospital and is expected to survive as authorities investigate the flyers’ origination. She was released around 4:30 p.m., authorities said.
My first thought was: “How do they know?” Could it just have been heat-related stress or some other condition, and everyone jumped to the conclusion it was fentanyl? According to the HouChron, at least one flyer (I assume it was the one the deputy handled) “tested positive” for fentanyl, and the remaining flyers are being analyzed by the county forensic lab. No idea if the positive test was a field test, or something more sophisticated.
If someone is actually putting drug-laced flyers on cars in an effort to hurt or kill police officers, that’s a pretty serious escalation. I’m hoping it isn’t true, but in the meantime: paranoia and gloves are your friends.
A while back, I wrote about the cases of Terry Thompson and his wife. Briefly: Terry Thompson confronted a man for public urination at a Denny’s and pinned him to the ground. His wife, a HCSO officer at the time, helped him hold the man down. (The wife has since been fired.) The man passed out and died three days later. Mr. Thompson and his wife were charged with murder.
Terry Thompson’s trial was last week. It ended in a mistrial. The Harris County DA announced yesterday that they plan to retry the case. But:
Although all the jurors agreed deadly force was justified under the circumstances, [Scot] Courtney [Thompson’s attorney – DB] said, one refused to find him not guilty of the murder charge.
“One of the jurors said that he could not, he would not vote not guilty – and he hung up the jury for a day,” Courtney said. “It’s disappointing that a juror was seated and swore an oath to follow the law and then ultimately didn’t.”
On the lesser charge of manslaughter, 10 jurors voted not guilty and on the count of criminally negligent homicide eight voted not guilty, Courtney said.
And finally, noted for the record and without much comment, because I just don’t know what to make of it:
…
Hyenas on fire.
Tuesday, June 26th, 2018Quick update on (now former) state Senator Carlos Uresti:
(Previously. Previously. Previously.)
(Note how far down you have to scroll in the article before former Senator Uresti’s party affiliation is mentioned.)
Headline of the day.
Tuesday, June 26th, 2018Obit watch: June 26, 2018.
Tuesday, June 26th, 2018For the record: Richard Benjamin Harrison, of “Pawn Stars” fame.
Deanna Lund, noted for “Land of the Giants”.
Obit watch: June 23, 2018.
Saturday, June 23rd, 2018It’s been a rough week and I got sidetracked yesterday. For the record: Charles Krauthammer. NYT. WP.
Thread:
I would like to share a story about Charles Krauthammer.
— Nash Jenkins (@pnashjenkins) June 21, 2018
Obit watch: June 21, 2018.
Thursday, June 21st, 2018NYT obit for Matt “Guitar” Murphy.
Richard Valeriani, noted NBC news correspondent.
The paper of record still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.
Dumber than a bag of hair.
Tuesday, June 19th, 2018I missed the first part of this story last week, but I caught the second part when it came across the Hacker News Twitter feed.
There is a company called Tapplock that makes a $99 “smart” padlock. No, this isn’t the same company that makes a “smart” padlock that’s “completely invincible” to anybody that doesn’t have a screwdriver. Different company, different lock.
But it does have a fingerprint scanner and Bluetooth.
Part 1:
Among other features, you can set up multiple fingerprint profiles, so you can enable multiple people to unlock the padlock with their fingerprints.
Except: their protocol doesn’t gracefully handle revocation. The lock communicates over HTTP: there’s no encryption, and…
I could see that a string of “random” looking data was sent to the lock over BLE each time I connected to it. Without this data, the lock would not respond to commands.
But it was also noted that this data did not change, no matter how many times I connected. A couple of lines of commands in gatttool and it was apparent that the lock was vulnerable to trivial replay attacks…
…I shared the lock with another user, and sniffed the BLE data. It was identical to the normal unlocking data. Even if you revoke permissions, you have already given the other user all the information they need to authenticate with the lock, in perpetuity.
But wait, there’s more! It turns out that that random data, that unique key…is derived directly from the lock’s MAC address! The one that’s constantly broadcast by the lock so you can access it over Bluetooth!
Part 2:
But wait, there’s more! Another security researcher, who didn’t have a Tapplock (“I am out of IoT budget for this month as my wife has -kindly- informed me”), decided to play around with the Tapplock’s cloud based admin tools…
…and discovered that, once you logged in with a valid account, you could access any other account simply by incrementing the account ID.
As a result, Stykas could not only add himself as an authorised user to anyone else’s lock, but also read out personal information from that person’s account, including the last location (if known) where the Tapplock was opened.
Incredibly, Tapplock’s back-end system would not only let him open other people’s locks using the official app, but also tell him where to find the locks he could now open!
References:
The Pen Test Partners initial attack.
Art, damn it, art! watch (#55 in a series)
Tuesday, June 19th, 2018I haven’t done one of these in a while. But there’s news!
Christo has a new project! Actual NYT headline:
Christo’s Latest Work Weighs 650 Tons. And It Floats.
Photos at the link. As is usual for Christo projects, this was entirely self-funded at an estimated cost of three million pounds.
Flaming hyenas update.
Monday, June 18th, 2018Democratic state senator Carlos Uresti is resigning his seat.
Obit watch: June 18, 2018.
Monday, June 18th, 2018A large handful of interesting obits showed up over the weekend. I decided I’d save them and do a round-up today.
Officer Norberto Ramon of the Houston Police Department passed away on Friday. He had been undergoing treatment for colon cancer, but was told it had spread and was incurable. He intended to seek medical treatment in Oklahoma, but, as it turned out, this was right before Harvey hit Houston…
Prior to the storm, Ramon had been assigned desk duty. Flooding prevented him from getting to the office, so he went to the nearest station, the Lake Patrol, to help while the storm raged.
At Lake Patrol, he filled in for an officer of the seven-man squad. He worked nonstop for three days, seeing adults, seniors and mostly children to safety.
The HPD estimates he rescued 1,500 people during the storm. Officer Ramon was 55 years old, and had been with HPD for 25 years.
Reinhard Hardegen, German submarine commander who sank two ships off Long Island in 1942.
Yvette Horner, noted French accordion player.
William Reese, rare book dealer. I was previously unaware of Mr. Reese or his shop, but after reading his obit, I want a copy of Six Score: The 120 Best Books on the Range Cattle Industry. Stuff like that is already up my alley anyway.
Stephen Reid, bank robber and author.
Along with Patrick Mitchell, who was known as Paddy, and Lionel Wright, Mr. Reid was a member of a group of well-dressed bandits who came to be known as the The Stop Watch Gang. The name appeared to have come from F.B.I. investigators who noticed that at least one gang member, usually Mr. Reid, wore a stopwatch around his neck to keep holdups within the group’s self-imposed two-minute time limit.
While there is no precise accounting of their crimes, the police have estimated that the gang participated in at least 100 holdups during the 1970s and ′80s, getting away with about $15 million.
Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Blues Brother and noted sideman.
Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post has published an obit for Gardner Dozois, as best as I can tell.
Some days you get the bull…
Friday, June 15th, 2018I’m not a huge fan of bull riding (though I do think it is much more interesting than soccer), and I don’t care much for “People” magazine.
But, as an amateur medical geek, when I see a phrase like “first person to survive the procedure at the hospital this century”, it kind of makes me take notice.
Wyatt Bruesch was competing in an Idaho rodeo when the bull he was riding bucked him off and trampled him fatally.
The emergency department decided on a hail mary pass: an “emergency department thoracotomy.”
Here’s the Trauma.org page on the subject (it’s also linked in the article itself).
Emergency department thoracotomy is a life-saving procedure in a select group of patients. Exactly who these patients are is a matter of some controversy in the trauma literature. There is a significant amount of published data on the indications for and outcomes of resuscitative thoracotomy. However the results of interventions varies widely, as does each unit’s experience, puclished data ranging for 11 patients in 10 years to 950 patients in 23 years…
Overall survival of patients undergoing emergency thoracotomy is between 4 and 33% depending on the protocols used in individual departments. The main determinants for survivability of an emergency thoracotomy are the mechanism of injury (stab, gunshot or blunt), location of injury and the presence or absence of vital signs.
Anyway:
Acting quickly, trauma surgeon Jorge Amorim cut Wyatt’s chest open and massaged his heart by hand to get it beating again.
“He basically saved his life,” McRoberts said. “He also did something else. Dr. Amorim reached into the chest cavity and squeezed and held the hilum of the lung where the great vessels come into the lung. He continued to squeeze for 15 minutes, which stopped the bleeding as Wyatt was rushed to an operating room.”
Mr. Bruesch is at home, recovering. In addition to the injuries that required an emergency thoracotomy, he also broke three ribs and eight vertebrae. In spite of this, he says he’s going to continue bull riding.
Meanwhile, in Pocatello, there’s a trauma surgeon shopping for a wheelbarrow to carry his giant brass testicles.
Short memo from the police beat.
Thursday, June 14th, 2018After 18 months, countless hours of debate, and several public meetings (one of which interfered with the Austin Citizen’s Police Academy graduation, not that I’m BITTER or anything), the Austin Police Department finally has a non-interim chief…
…Punch Rockgroin! Brian Manley.
As I’ve said before, he seems to me to be a good guy with a truly macho name and a good leader with local ties. We’ll have to see how his tenure plays out, but I am cautiously optimistic.
In other news, the felony perjury and misdemeanor official misconduct charges against Joel Abelove, the district attorney of Rensselaer County (in upstate New York) have been dropped.
I would have sworn I wrote about this at the time, but apparently I didn’t. It’s rare to see a sitting DA charged with a crime, and the backstory is interesting.
In April of 2016, a man named Edson Thevenin was stopped by police in Troy on “suspicion of drunk driving”. The stop escalated, there was a “brief chase”, and somewhere in there a police officer became pinned between his cruiser and Mr. Thevenin’s car: Mr. Thevenin was shot eight times and killed.
I can see two ways of spinning this: former AG and known abuser Schneiderman was peeved that the state couldn’t go after a cop who was involved in a shooting, and tried to take it out on the DA instead. Or: Abelove was trying to manipulate the grand jury system and cover for a cop in a bad shooting.
Mr. Schneiderman, a Democrat who resigned in disgrace last month after allegations that he had physically abused romantic partners, was empowered to investigate Mr. Abelove under a 2015 executive order from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The order allowed the state attorney general to serve as a special prosecutor for investigations into the deaths of “unarmed civilians caused by law enforcement officers.”
In the case of Mr. Thevenin, Mr. Cuomo issued a second executive order that allowed Mr. Schneiderman to specifically examine Mr. Abelove’s handling of the investigation, including “its grand jury presentation.”
What led to the decision to drop the charges?
Justice Jonathan D. Nichols questioned the scope of the authority included in the Thevenin executive order and ruled that the attorney general’s office “was without jurisdiction and hence unauthorized to appear in front of the grand jury,” in relation to the perjury charge.
“The court finds the integrity of the grand jury was impaired in this case,” Justice Nichols wrote. “And impaired to the extent that prejudice to the defendant is clearly possible.”
After action report: Reno, NV.
Wednesday, June 13th, 2018Yet another excuse to post photos and links and some ramblings. I’ll put a jump here since some of the photos might take time to load…
Short note from the legal beat.
Tuesday, June 12th, 2018Rose McGowan has been indicted in Virginia on one count of felony possession of cocaine.
Apparently, she left her wallet on an airline flight in January of 2017: when it was found, there were two “baggies” of coke inside.
Ms. McGowan’s defense: there weren’t any drugs in her wallet when she saw it last, and she thinks the drugs were planted by…
…wait for it…
…Harvey Weinstein.
I usually don’t buy the “b—h set me up” (or “b—–d set me up”) defense. And I’m unlikely to be called to sit on a jury in Virginia. And if I were called, I would listen to both sides of the case, and try to render a fair judgement based on the facts.
But: given that this is Harvey Weinstein we’re talking about, I’m more than a little inclined to throw some reasonable doubt Ms. McGowan’s way.
Obit watch: June 12, 2018.
Tuesday, June 12th, 2018Eunice Gayson. You may not recognize the name, but you may recognize the face: she was “Sylvia Trench” in “Dr. No”, the very first Bond girl.
…
I’ve been holding on to this one for a couple of days, because I wasn’t sure if I could note it without coming across as a jerk.
Charlotte Fox passed away on May 24th. She was a mountain climber: she was the first woman to summit Gasherbrum II and Cho Oyu, both over 26,000 feet high.
She also summited Everest, making her the first woman to summit three mountains over 26,000 feet high. More interesting: her Everest summit attempt was during the 1996 expedition chronicled in Into Thin Air.
…
“My eyes were frozen,” she was quoted as saying in “Into Thin Air.” “I didn’t see how we were going to get out of it alive.”
“I didn’t think I could endure it anymore,” she added. “I just curled up in a ball and hoped death would come quickly.”
She survived a husband and a boyfriend: one was killed in an avalanche, and the other in a paragliding crash.
I think the death of any survivor of the 1996 expedition would be worthy of note. But this is the part that makes me afraid of sounding like a jerk: Ms. Fox died apparently as a result of a fall in her home.
I guess this is just another reminder that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.
By the way, the paper of record, as far as I can tell, still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.
I lit out from Reno…
Monday, June 11th, 2018Travel day today. Early morning flight, long layover in Denver, so I may have a chance to blog.
If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight.
Talk amongst yourselves.
Obit watch: June 8, 2018.
Friday, June 8th, 2018I don’t remember now what prompted me to pick up Kitchen Confidential, but I’m glad I did: it was a wild, fun, and funny book that I enjoyed immensely. I think at this point I’ve read almost everything Mr. Bourdain wrote that was bound between covers. I wasn’t as up on his TV shows, what with the whole not having cable thing. And I really wanted to meet him sometime when he wasn’t frantically searching for a bathroom in an airport and say thanks.
I had been reading Appetites: A Cookbook right before I left, and I remember him talking about how much he loved his family and friends, and cooking for them. That was pretty much the whole point of the book: cooking well for the people you love. I guess I sort of half-consciously knew that he went through a divorce after that…
There are plenty of people who have lives you think you’d like to live. But you wouldn’t want to live the life they lived inside. https://t.co/eHCUH5eKYy
— NarrowlyDecidedHat (@Popehat) 8 June 2018
Bethany Mandel wrote a good piece for the NYPost the other day about suicide and what it does to the people left behind. I commend it to your attention, especially the last paragraph.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.
Obit watch: June 7, 2018.
Thursday, June 7th, 2018Jerry Maren, one of the Munchkins in “The Wizard of Oz” and the last surviving little person from that group. (According to the NYT, some young girls were also hired to fill out the Munchkin ranks, and some of them are still alive.)
With a friend and fellow actor, Billy Barty, Mr. Maren in 1957 founded Little People of America, a nonprofit advocacy organization that says it has roughly 6,000 members.
“He took it as his responsibility to show, through a strong sense of self and speaking out and personal example, that little people are just people,” Mr. Cox said. “All of the other Munchkins had a great deal of respect for Jerry.”
Mel Weinberg, of ABSCAM fame.
…
Travel day.
Wednesday, June 6th, 2018Blogging will be catch-as-catch-can, especially since the latest update to the WordPress app on IOS appears to have broken either the app or the connection between the app and my blog.
Talk among yourselves. I’ll start: the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire. Discuss.
Okay, slightly more seriously: I’m about halfway through Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence and expect to finish it on the plane tomorrow. I’m liking it a lot, though not quite as much as Public Enemies or The Big Rich.
The most striking thing to me: just how many bathrooms the Weathermen blew up. There are parts of the book that are just a litany of “blew up a men’s room”, “blew up a ladies room”, “destroyed a bathroom”, “blew up a bathroom in the Pentagon”. It’s like these people didn’t do anything except blow up bathrooms (and, of course, themselves).
The whole book is a veritable catalog of certified bat guano insanity. And I haven’t even gotten to the part about the guy with one eye and one thumb (he lost the other eye and nine fingers when his homemade bomb detonated prematurely) who escaped from jail by cutting the metal grate out of his window (ever tried using wire cutters with no fingers and one thumb?) and dropping 40 feet…
Obit watch: June 5, 2018.
Tuesday, June 5th, 2018Prominent fashion designer Kate Spade has passed away at 55.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.
Robert Mandan, television actor perhaps most famous as “Chester Tate” on “Soap”.
Barbara Kafka, noted cookbook author. When I was younger, I cooked a lot of meals out of her Microwave Gourmet.
For the record, the paper of same still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.
Historical note, suitable for use in schools.
Monday, June 4th, 2018Approximately 50 years ago today
LAT retrospective. Steve Lopez column.
In case you were wondering, Sirhan is still alive, still in prison, and his next parole hearing will be in 2021.
I wish I could say more about this: I was barely three at the time.