Archive for September 17th, 2020

When a drawbridge comes along, you must whippit…

Thursday, September 17th, 2020

Seemingly taking his Dodge Stratus’s “cloud car” nickname literally, the unnamed 26-year-old went airborne and cleared the gap, but managed to burst all four tires and smash his windshield upon landing and crashing on the other side of the bridge.
“Over he went, blew out all four of his tires, and then he crashed into the other gate,” said Locke, who likened the jump to a similar flight by a Dodge Monaco in 1980’s The Blues Brothers. “That’s a first for me.”
Police immediately received a call reporting a car had “Dukes of Hazzard-ed across” the bridge, and on response, found the driver with a canister of nitrous oxide in his car. Known as “whippits” due to its common use as propellant in canned whipped cream, NO2 is a dissociative sometimes inhaled to experience a “floating” sensation, per Australia’s Alcohol and Drug Foundation.

Based on the story, I think the police did try to detect it, but they didn’t have to try very hard.

There is no word so far on the status of the cream.

Posted in Cars, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 171

Thursday, September 17th, 2020

I thought it might be fun to visit France. But this time, on Air France!

“Discovering France”, from the 1960s.

I apologize for the fact that this is in French, without English subtitles. I feel the virtues of the vintage French scenery outweigh this.

But as a bonus: an old TWA promo film, “World On Parade”. This has three things going for it:

  • It is short.
  • More Paris.
  • O.J. Simpson and Arnold Palmer.

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 17, 2020.

Thursday, September 17th, 2020

Lawrence sent over a pointer to the NYT obit for Stanley Crouch.

Mr. Crouch defied easy categorization. A former Black nationalist who had been seared by witnessing the 1965 Watts race riots in his native Los Angeles, he transformed himself into a widely read essayist, syndicated newspaper columnist, novelist and MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner whose celebrity was built, in part, on his skewering — and even physical smackdowns — of his former intellectual comrades.
All the while he championed jazz, enlarging its presence in American culture by helping to found Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, one of the country’s premier showcases for that most American of musical genres, and by promoting the career of the celebrated trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who co-founded the jazz center in 1991 and remains its artistic director.

…

Espousing that pragmatism, he found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization. He vilified gangsta rap as “‘Birth of a Nation’ with a backbeat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton as a “buffoon,” the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “insane,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison “as American as P.T. Barnum” and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” as “opportunistic.”
By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.

…

After transplanting himself to New York in 1975, Mr. Crouch wrote for The Village Voice, where he was hired as a staff writer in 1980 and fired in 1988 after a fistfight with a fellow writer.
“The two best things that have ever happened to me were being fired by The Voice and being hired by The Voice, in that order,” he told The New Yorker.

…

Mr. Crouch said in an interview with The Times in 1990 that too many discussions of race were “simple-minded and overly influenced by the ideas of determinism — if you’re poor, you’re going to act a certain way” — a self-perpetuating path that, he said, his public-school teachers had stopped him from taking.
“These people were on a mission,” he said of his teachers. “They had a perfect philosophy: You will learn this. If you came in there and said, ‘I’m from a dysfunctional family and a single-parent household,’ they would say, ‘Boy, I’m going to ask you again, What is 8 times 8?’
“When I was coming up,” he continued, “there were no excuses except your house burned down and there was a murder in the family. Eight times eight was going to be 64 whether your family was dysfunctional or not. It’s something you needed to know!”

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