Gas is expensive in California.
Gee, I wonder why that is?
You don’t say? Tell us more, Los Angeles Times.
But why doesn’t someone come into the California market and open new refineries? Or re-open some of the mothballed ones?
By the way:
Banana republicans watch: October 22, 2012.
October 22nd, 2012Obit watch: October 22, 2012.
October 22nd, 2012Russell Means, controversial Indian activist, actor, Libertarian Party presidential candidate, and vice-presidential nominee during Larry Flynt’s attempt to get the Republican nomination in 1984, has died. (LAT. NYT.)
Noted:
How’s that working for you?
I thought I’d give the George McGovern obits a day, which is why I didn’t post them on Sunday. For the record: NYT. LAT. WP.
Also worthy of immortalization.
October 22nd, 2012Another exchange from the weekend:
Me at the gun show, looking at a Remington XP-100: When I was six years old, I thought that was the coolest gun in the world.
My nephew: Why?
Me: Because I was six years old.
My nephew: (nods sagely, as if this actually makes sense to him).
(I still want an XP-100 chambered in the original .221 Fireball caliber. The one we were looking at was rechambered to .223, which I will admit is a lot more practical. However, the asking price on it was $1,300, which is much more than I’m willing to pay.)
(I also want a S&W Model 53, even though .22 Jet is even more impractical than .221 Fireball. I keep meaning to sit down and do the math to determine if you could actually do a .221 Fireball conversion of a Smith; off the top of my head, I think the cartridge length would require an N-frame or X-frame sized cylinder, so it wouldn’t exactly be a compact field gun like the Jet…)
Art, damn it, art! watch (#32 in a series).
October 22nd, 2012Once upon a time, there was an art gallery in New York City called Knoedler & Company.
Knoedler & Company made more than a fair amount of money selling art. As a matter of fact, they made a lot of money selling art supplied by one dealer, Glafira Rosales.
But there are some problems. Ms. Rosales’s “collection of works attributed to Modernist masters has no documented provenance and is the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.” One of the works that passed through her hands, a Mark Rothko painting, was sold by Knoedler for $8.3 million dollars, and has now been declared a fake.
Knoedler stopped selling works from Rosales in 2009, and immediately started losing money. They closed in 2011.
Juxaposition.
October 22nd, 2012I’m glad folks are out there doing this: cancer sucks. However, the Statesman doesn’t discuss how this figure differed from last years: did they get about the same number of riders, more, or less?
Meanwhile, Lance Armstrong is no longer a Tour de France winner. I wish I had something profound and insightful to say about this, but I need time to think.
Quote of the weekend
October 21st, 2012From dinner Friday night:
I was going to buy you a book, but I figured you already had one.
–my mother
(This is somewhat more amusing if you’ve seen my library. What she meant was that she had considered buying this
I would post a runner-up quote of the weekend, but:
- It would mostly be incomprehensible screaming, and
- I wasn’t there for it, since I left my sister’s house shortly before the end of regulation in the Texas Tech – TCU game. Between that and the UT game, I have to ask; has defense become a lost art?
Breaking!
October 19th, 2012Big Tex, the iconic symbol of the State Fair of Texas, has apparently caught fire and burned to the frame.
A friend of mine sent me a Facebook link to photos of the fire, which is also being reported by a Dallas TV station. However, I do not have any working links yet.
Edited to add: HouChron. Statesman. WFAA (probably has the best photos so far). Dallas Morning News.
Your Austin nightclub legal update: October 19, 2012.
October 19th, 2012When last we left the Brothers Yassine, two of them had been convicted of money laundering; the third brother, commonly known as “Steve” had been acquitted on the money laundering charge, but still faced drug charges.
The Statesman is reporting that “Steve” just pled guilty to a single drug charge, with the prosecution recommending a year and day sentence (with credit for time served). All of the remaining drug and weapons charges against him will be dropped under this plea agreement.
Additionally, “Steve” will be deported after he serves his time.
Banana republicans watch: October 18, 2012.
October 18th, 2012We may need a banana republicans police blotter, too.
The mayor of the city of Hawthorne has been charged with two counts of perjury.
The charges against Juarez allege that he took a $2,000 cash contribution from the manager of a Gold’s Gym in Hawthorne, and didn’t report it. This was in 2010:
Which makes me say, “Gold’s Gym needed a $2.5 million loan from a municipal government to open? They couldn’t get a private loan? Doesn’t that…I don’t know…tell you something?”
Salari, also indicted, allegedly “loaned” Noguez $180,000, and contributed $5,000 to his campaign. The indictment apparently alleges that the contribution and the “loans” were actually bribes; supposedly, bank records show that repayment of the “loans” started after the LAT began asking questions.
(The third person indicted is Mark McNeil, Noguez’s aide.)
Random notes: October 18, 2012.
October 18th, 2012Now that we’ve had the better part of a day, here’s the Statesman‘s coverage of Lance Armstrong’s resignation, as well as his dumping by Nike, Trek, Radio Shack, and 24-Hour Fitness.
On the other hand, the Ride for the Roses (Livestrong’s major annual event) is coming up this weekend; did that cause a donation spike, or is the increase in donations over and above the normal run-up to the event?
The HouChron has been running articles on events at the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. There’s a controversy over the organization’s grant approval process: the organization gave M.D. Anderson an $18 million grant to work on commercial production of cancer drugs, over the objections of various scientists who did scientific reviews and grant evaluations for the institute. Now, the agency’s two leading scientific officers (both of whom are Nobel laureates) and all of the other reviewers have resigned.
By the way, CPRIT is a state agency, established by a constitutional amendment in 2007, and funded with $3 billion in state issued bonds. And guess who was behind the campaign for CPRIT?
Newsweek has snuffed it. At least in print. The magazine is going all digital, which should be interesting; why would I pay for a subscription to a magazine that summarizes all the news I read online the week before?
Random notes: October 17, 2012.
October 17th, 2012This is just breaking, and I’ll probably have more to say about it later: Lance Armstrong is leaving his position as chairman of the Livestrong charity.
(I still haven’t had time to go through the USADA report. Sorry.)
Meanwhile, we have a couple of interesting things from the NYT:
There’s a longish piece about the “Rebecca” case, focusing on Ben Sprecher and how he claims he got taken.
More:
Somebody really wanted to believe. Either that, or there’s more going on here than meets the eye.
Have you ever wondered where escargot come from? If you order them in many restaurants, they were probably imported from France in a can. But if you order them in a higher-end restaurant…
…the NYT has a profile of Mary Stewart, snail rancher.
J. Peterman, call your office, please.
($39.75 a pound.)
TMQ watch: October 16, 2012.
October 16th, 2012Another Tuesday has rolled around, and it is time to take a stab at this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback. Once again, we’re going to slash our way through the thickets of Easterbrook’s prose, hacking away at logical fallacies when we see them and using our sharp wit to puncture pretense.
After the jump…
Running behind.
October 16th, 2012TMQ Watch will probably be up…later.
In the meantime, Lawrence has a review of “The Sentinel” up at his place. I watched it with him and some other folks (thanks for hosting, people whose identities I wish to protect) along with “The Mummy“. Some random thoughts:
- “The Mummy” is actually more erotic, at least in my opinion, than “The Sentinel”. “Mummy” has no nudity, but damn Zita Johann looks hot in that outfit. “The Sentinel” has nudity, but not from the right people; Cristina Raines is attractive, to be sure, but she never gets naked. And the people who do get naked…are not people you want to see naked.
- Zita Johann sure had an interesting life. She was basically in the movies for three years, then quit to work in theater with people like John Houseman (yes, that one: she was also married to him at one point) and Orson Welles, lived to the age of 89, and made her last film appearance at the age of 82.
- “The Sentinel” also has an uncredited, nonspeaking appearance by Richard Dreyfuss. You watch that scene and you can’t fail to recognize him; we were all, “Yeah, that’s Dreyfuss, all right.”
- Someone should do a documentary about Richard Dreyfuss and his career. I even have a title for it: “The Dreyfuss Affair”.
- Did you know that “The Mummy” is only one hour and thirteen minutes long? (Edited to add: “It’s Pat” is only five minutes longer.)
- Which is interesting, because stuff happens in “The Mummy”. Really. There’s not a whole lot of drag, although Sir Basil Exposition (or his grandfather) does appear quite a bit in the movie. But stuff happens, and it happens relatively fast. Karl Freund was no foot-dragger. Some of today’s directors could take lessons from him.
- Cheese louise, Jerry Orbach circa 1977 is weird to look at. Not in a “he’s ugly” way, but in a “hard to associate with Lennie Briscoe” way. (Yes, I’m fully aware that Jerry had a long and colorful career before “LawnOrder”. I’m just saying Lennie is such an icon that it is hard to see him any other way.) (Edited to add: Thank you, “CygnusDarius”, for this.)
- And as a reward for reading all the way to the end of this:
Quote of the day.
October 16th, 2012I am not an authority on lightning safety. I am a guy who draws pictures on the internet. I like when things catch fire and explode, which means I do not have your best interests in mind.
—XKCD
Random notes: October 16, 2012.
October 16th, 2012As expected, the NYT has a longer story on the “Rebecca” arrest.
It looks like Hotton was using some of the same phony “investors” to scam other people as well. And:
I’d never thought of that kind of scam before. That’s clever.
George Whitmore Jr. died a week ago Monday.
(waits for the cries of “Who?” to die out)
Whitmore was at the center of a famous criminal case in 1964. He was picked up for “questioning” by the police for an attempted rape; by the time the police finished their interrogation, he’d confessed to three murders (including the murders of Janice Wylie and Emily Hoffert, aka the “Career Girls” murder case).
Whitmore later recanted his confession, and the police developed evidence showing someone else was responsible for the Wylie/Hoffert murder. Ultimately, all the charges against Whitmore were dismissed.
The city of Eagle Rock, California, had an election over the weekend. Eagle Rock is engaged in a fight over medical marijuana dispensaries: the neighborhood council passed, and then repealed, a ban. On the pro-dispensary side is the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which has “organized workers at more than two dozen dispensaries across the city”.
Here’s interesting thing #1:
And here’s interesting thing #2:
Only two of the pro-dispensary candidates won, but I can’t tell from the LAT article how many seats were open, or what the pro/anti-dispensary breakdown on the council was before the election.
James Kwon is the “Maritime Director” of the port of Oakland. James Kwon was in Houston for a conference in 2008. James Kwon decided to take “about a dozen shipping industry executives” out for a party.
James Kwon decided to take them to Treasures. I probably don’t need to tell you what Treasures is, as I imagine you can guess. Strippers. Always with the strippers. Mr. Kwon spent $4,537 on this “drink and dinner” reception. (If you figure 13 people, including Mr. Kwon, that’s about $349 per person. That seems like a lot for strip club food, but I’ve never been to Treasures. Maybe they have Beef Wellington. And who knows what they paid per drink for strip club drinks.) Now port officials are asking questions, four years after the fact.
As the HouChron notes, Treasures also has a colorful history of “prostitution, drug dealing, weapons crimes and sexual assaults”.
I’ve written previously about the strange and sad case of Robert Middleton, and the legal wrangling over whether the boy who set him on fire can be tried for murder. New development: