A Round Rock police officer shot himself in the right foot Tuesday. I’ve avoided blogging this until now because the Statesman didn’t have much detail beyond that. But this is interesting:
Also, it gives me an excuse to embed this video, which never gets old:
The Statesman does not report a judicial ruling on the question of “how does it smell?”.
This has come up in conversation twice in the past seven days. I believe that is a sign that I have to make a blog post out of it.
“Django Unchained” is currently number 41 on the IMDB list of top 250 movies.
Here are some movies that the IMDB top 250 voters think “Django Unchained” is better than:
Feel free to go through the list and post your own “Django Unchained is better than…WTF?” moments in the comments. I, personally, promise not to refer to you as Grandpa Simpson, though I can’t say the same for other people.
…or are there other folks out there who see the Pocket Hose commercial and say to themselves “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn“? (I can’t get the video to start where I want it to, even with YouTube’s embed link, so fast-forward to about 56 seconds in to see what I’m talking about.)
(And how have I gotten by for this long without a “Cthulhu” tag? Fixed now.)
One of FARK’s ongoing tropes is the idea that NASCAR is the sport of white male rednecks. So the story of Tia Norfleet should push some buttons: she’s not just a woman, but she’s the first African-Amercian woman to race in NASCAR, or so she says on her website.
Her website also says that she plans to run a “full schedule” in the NASCAR Nationwide series, “one rung below the top-tier Sprint Cup series”. At least, that’s what the NYT says: I can’t find this claim on her actual website. She does have a schedule, but the schedule appears to be just a list of NASCAR races this year, with links going back to the race pages on NASCAR.com. She does not appear in the results for the Dollar General 200, or the DRIVE4COPD 300. I am unable to find any mention of Tia Norfleet on the NASCAR Nationwide drivers page.
You see where this is going, don’t you?
More:
And more:
In addition, Ms. Norfleet may have a bit of a criminal record for assault and “crossing a guard line at a jail with contraband and possession of marijuana“. That’s not necessarily a disqualifying factor, in my humble opinion: I’d certainly be willing to give someone a shot at redemption in NASCAR with that kind of record. But when you put that together with the other pieces, it raises alarm bells.
Noted without comment:
Edited to add: Ms. Norfleet has posted an Instagram photo purporting to prove she does have a license. I am not a NASCAR expert, but there are three things I wonder about:
By way of Borepatch, I found this rather amusing post on the 1899 Cleveland Spiders.
For those who don’t follow baseball history (or loser history) the Spiders were a major league baseball team. But you would have been hard pressed to tell in 1899: the team went 20-134, the worst record ever in baseball history. (That’s a .130 winning percentage.)
They finished 84 games out of first place. They lost 40 of their last 41 games.
(I would actually kind of like one of the hats, but I’m not sure it is a $49 hat. And the J. Thomas Hetrick book MISFITS! Baseball’s Worst Ever Team
My two favorite tributes to the late Hugo Chavez: here and here.
Both the NYT and the LAT are reporting arrests and confessions in the Bolshoi acid attack. (Previously.)
The NYT says one of the men has confessed: the LAT says both men and Dmitrichenko have confessed.
Roy Brown Jr. has died. Mr. Brown was a car designer for Ford. This was one of his designs:
Come all without, come all within. you’ll not see nothing like Mighty Quinn’s.
(Sorry.)
With the exception of my yearly $5 bet with Lawrence on Gonzaga, I don’t give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about college basketball.
However, the remarkable achievement of the Grambling men’s basketball team must be noted here: “…at 0-27, they became the only men’s basketball team in Division I to finish the regular season without a victory.”
How bad is Grambling?
To be fair, Grambling has been hit hard by NCAA penalties tied to their low academic progress rate. Grambling also has funding issues, which have lead the team to adopt the role of “cupcake opponent” for hire:
And this is amusing:
At least, it’s amusing to Lawrence and I and anyone else who remembers the “Charlie Tuna Oceanographic University” series of strips from “Tank McNamara”. (CTOU ended up playing in the Rose Bowl because every other team in the conference had been sanctioned by the NCAA.)
Well, you don’t say. More guns. Less crime. And the WP admits it. Interesting.
On October 5, 1973, a four year old boy named Josh Miele was horribly burned when his next-door neighbor poured acid on him.
Wendell Jamieson was 7 at the time, and lived just around the corner from the Miele family in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. He vividly remembered his mother’s warnings after the incident. Nearly 40 years later, Mr. Jamieson is a writer for the NYT: he decided to track down Josh Miele.
Josh Miele is now Dr. Josh Miele. He’s married and has two kids.
He’s also designed maps of the BART system for blind people. His latest project is the “Descriptive Video Exchange”…
Nuts:
And:
It seems that there is a “bar” called the White House in downtown Austin. I’d never heard of the White House before today; it opened “late last year” according to the paper.
I put “bar” in quotes because they don’t have a liquor license. So how do they sell alcohol?
They don’t. They give it away.
How do they make money if they are giving booze away? Volume, volume, volume! Actually, individual “setups” (which I assume consist of ice, cups and mixers) go for $5-$7 each, or as much as your average mixed drink goes for around here, and a “bottomless cup” is $20-$30.
More:
TABC, of course, disagrees with this position, and has raided the White House. But they can’t shut it down:
Mad props to the people behind the White House for figuring out a clever loophole, but I’m not sure I’d want to drink there.
The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo kind of snuck up on me this year.
I actually don’t care that much about the musical acts at the rodeo, or the rodeo itself. But with the rodeo comes…rodeo food. I’ve been waiting for the HouChron‘s yearly slideshow of rodeo food items.
Turns out they published it a few days ago, but didn’t link it from anyplace I could find it until today. Here you go. Note that there’s a handy “View All” link, too: thanks, HouChron!
(I found out my nephews are going down to Houston for the Rodeo. I’ve made them promise to try the rodeo food; I already have a funnel cake commitment from one of them.)
I know I haven’t been posting updates on the Bell trial, but there’s a reason for that: the jury has been deliberating for the better part of a week.
Yesterday morning, the jury sent a note to the judge stating they were deadlocked. And another juror sent a note to the judge stating that one of the jurors had been doing “outside research” on the case. This is a Bad Thing.
That juror, known as “Juror #3”, has been dismissed and replaced with an alternate juror. The judge has told the jury to restart deliberations, and to pretend that the earlier deliberations never happened.
It kind of sounds like #3 was leaning towards acquittal, but nobody knows for sure.
Obit watch: Bruce Reynolds, the man who planned the Great Train Robbery.
I remember the murder of Jonathan Levin: it was a big deal at the time, mostly because his father was the chairman of Time Warner. Instead of going into business, Levin chose to teach high school:
The Department of Education created the…
Sadly, things haven’t worked out:
Continuing our N.C.A.A. coverage:
Meanwhile, Joel Bauman is a wrestler on scholarship at the University of Minnesota. He’s also a musician, and wants to inspire people through his music.
So?
(I wonder: if he wasn’t selling the video on iTunes, would the N.C.A.A. still have an issue?)
In other news: your dog wants steak. Your dog does not want rodent poison. Your dog does not want people feeding it rodent poison, especially if it is in competition at Westminster.
(It strikes me as odd that a necropsy wasn’t done. “[Lynette] Blue [one of the owners] declined for Cruz to have a necropsy because she was confident that he swallowed poison, she said.” But wouldn’t it be better to have a necropsy done and to be sure, as well as having evidence for a possible criminal case?)
(Gee, wouldn’t this make a good episode of “Law and Order”, if that show was still on the air.)
Obit watch: Van Cliburn. LAT account of his 1994 appearance at the Hollywood Bowl. A/V Club.
Dale Robertson. No A/V Club obit yet.
A friend of mine tipped me off to item #35 on the Austin City Council’s agenda for tomorrow night’s meeting:
Approve a resolution signifying the City Council’s intent to endorse efforts to develop a comprehensive approach to reducing gun crime.
You can find the agenda and supporting materials here. “Supporting materials” includes a draft resolution:
The only thing on that list that would “ensure the safety of our citizens” is “prosecution of straw purchasers and gun traffickers”. The rest of the council’s proposals are the usual “what you do instead of doing something noise”, and none of those proposals will make the public any safer.
Fortunately, this is just a resolution:
In other words, the city council can’t do anything except pass resolutions. Think they’d like some cheese with that whine?
The listed sponsor is Kathie Tovo, with Laura Morrison and William Spelman listed as co-sponsors. You can find contact information for the council here. My suggestion is: be polite, be professional, and make it clear you have a plan to vote out every single one of the SOBs.