Remember the other day, I linked to a swell Christmas meditation from LawDog?
Well, he’s expanded it some, with the intent of publishing a children’s book for Christmas next year.
The spirit of Christmas 2.
December 17th, 2025Christmas car update.
December 16th, 2025The car passed the state emissions inspection with no problem. Other than a little bit of confusion because I’d never been to this place before, it was mostly a smooth process.
With an inspection in hand, I can renew my car registration.
The State of Texas used to have a simple and straightforward website for registration renewal.
Not any more. Oh, no. Everything has shifted to something called “Texas By Texas”. So, first of all, you have to set up an account if you’ve never used “Texas by Texas” before. (I had not: I think TxT is new this year.)
Not only do they want your email address, they also want all kinds of other information. Including your physical address, your mailing address, your driver’s license number, the audit code off your driver’s license, etc. etc. et bloody cetra.
Then, once you have your TxT account set up…as far as I can tell, that’s just for your driver’s license. You have to go through a separate step to link your car registration to TxT.
At least, once I finished that, I didn’t have to fill in a lot of information to actually get the renewal done. It didn’t even ask me for proof of insurance or inspection: I think all this stuff is linked by computer statewide these days.
Of course, there were the donations. Literally half a page of donations you could make while renewing your registration:
- “Support Texas Veterans”
- Texas state parks (as I recall, they want at least $5 for that)
- Organ donation
- Special Olympics
- “Ending Homelessness Fund”
- “Evidence Testing Grant Program”
- “Stop Human Trafficking”
And the registration itself is $78.25 before any donations. Including $10 for bridges, $1.50 for “child safety”, $7.50 for the “inspection replacement fee” (just because the state did away with safety inspections doesn’t mean that they don’t want their money), $2.75 for the “emissions inspection fee” (that’s over and above the $11.50 state fee for the emissions inspection, plus $7 for something, I’m not exactly sure what, plus 75 cents for using a credit card), and $4.75 for “processing and handling”. Tell you what, I’ll give you $2 for processing, and I’ll do the “handling” myself.
Nickels. Dimes. They add up, you know?
Obit watch: December 16, 2025.
December 16th, 2025Joe Ely, one of the great Texas musicians. Variety. NYT (wow!).
I’m generally a little cynical about Texas musicians, but even I have to acknowledge that he was one of the greats. And I could just post YouTube videos all day.
This isn’t an Ely original, but I prefer this to Robert Earl Keen. That is a controversial opinion, I know.
Lawrence describes this as the greatest song ever written about a fighting rooster. Can’t argue with that.
Interestingly, he was an early adopter: he had a BBS system, back in the day when BBS systems were a thing.
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He was 78.
Anthony Geary, actor. Other credits include “UHF”, “Project U.F.O.”, “Shaft” (the TV series)…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Way to Dusty Death”, season 7, episode 2. He was “Eddie Decken”.)
Christmas is coming.
December 15th, 2025I am officially on vacation as of today.
You know what that means, right?
Yes, it’s just not Christmas until I see Hans Gruber fall from the Nakatomi Tower.
For what it’s worth, the tree is up (but the lights are not plugged in yet) and the inflatable Christmas Corgi is going in the front yard today.
I still have to get the car inspected. Yes, Texas did away with safety inspections at the first of this year. But I’m in an area that requires emissions testing prior to renewing your registration. And the shop I used to use for inspections no longer has an inspection technician: they redirected me to a quickie inspection place located behind a drive-through liquor and daiquiri stand up the road a piece. And that place is only open during the week…
Obit watch: December 15, 2025.
December 15th, 2025Dave Ward, legendary Houston newscaster.
My family was a KPRC/Channel 2 family when I was growing up in Houston, but everyone was familiar with Dave Ward. Of course, this was back when there were only three channels…
Rob Reiner. I don’t know what to say about this: it seems to be a still breaking story, and the circumstances seem awful.
The spirit of Christmas.
December 12th, 2025Obit watch: December 12, 2025.
December 12th, 2025Lawrence emailed me that the great SF writer John Varley had passed away, but he couldn’t find an obit anywhere until Michael Swanwick posted one.
I haven’t read many of his novels, but I’ve read a lot of his short fiction. “The Persistence of Vision“. “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” (which is a fun story that was adapted into a horrible PBS movie, which you can (but shouldn’t) watch in the MST3K version on the ‘Tube). “Air Raid”, which was adapted into Millennium, the novel, which was turned into “Millennium”, the movie (which I hear is awful, but have not seen).
“Press Enter■”. I remember standing in a Bookstop in Austin reading that story when it was published in Asimov’s…and coming very close to vomiting all over the magazine when I got to a key point in the story. (If you’ve read it, you can probably guess where.)
Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters (part 15 in a series)
December 12th, 2025I’ve said before, I have a high barrier for linking to ESPN feature articles. (I don’t even really like linking to ESPN news articles, except maybe as supplemental material. Sometimes I have to, but I generally prefer local news sources.)
Obit watch: December 11, 2025.
December 11th, 2025Three obits today for people who aren’t as notable as usual, but who I find interesting for one reason or another.
Stephen Downing. He was a police officer with the LAPD. One day he picked up the phone at the precinct.
Jack Webb was on the other end of the line. He was looking for a technical advisor for “Adam-12”.
Mr. Downing — who had studied creative writing in the 1960s at what is now California State University, Los Angeles — got the job and quickly surmised that he could offer more than guidance on police policy and tactics. He wanted to write a script.
“Webb said, ‘It’s harder than it looks,’” Michael Downing said in an interview, recalling what his father told him. “My father went home, wrote the script over the weekend and sold it.”
He continued to write scripts (under pen names) while still working for the LAPD.
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IMDB.
Donald McIntyre, opera singer.
The booming voice of Mr. McIntyre, a giant of a man who once seemed destined for a rugby career in his native New Zealand, rang out for more than five decades in the world’s major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, where he had 16 major roles from 1975 to 1996.
But “the highlight of my career,” as he put it in his 2019 autobiography, was his performance at Bayreuth as Wotan, the king of the gods, in “Das Rheingold,” “Die Walküre” and “Siegfried” in a groundbreaking 1976 production of Wagner’s four-opera “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” directed by Patrice Chéreau.
I don’t get to use my “Wagner” tag enough. But anyway:
By presenting the operas, based on Germanic mythology, as a neo-Marxist allegory of capitalist exploitation in the 19th century, Mr. Chéreau’s production — the so-called centenary “Ring,” marking the 100th anniversary of the tetralogy’s premiere at Bayreuth — shattered norms and set the stage for decades of updatings of canonical operas.
Audiences around the world were used to seeing Wagner gods and heroes holding spears and wearing pseudo-Norse winged helmets. While some postwar Bayreuth productions had emptied out the stage for radically spare visions of the classic works, putting Mr. McIntyre’s Wotan in an Edwardian frock coat and dressing the Rhinemaidens as cancan girls caused a near riot at the tradition-encrusted summer festival.
As Mr. McIntyre recalled in his memoir, an enraged older lady beat another spectator over the head with an umbrella; “howls of fury” greeted his entrance onstage in the frock coat; and the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred Wagner, a onetime confidant of Hitler’s, told Mr. McIntyre that if she came across Mr. Chéreau, she would “shoot him” for politicizing the “Ring.”
Over four years, however, with the production revived, revised and refined each summer, many holdouts eventually warmed to it, and at the final performances, in 1980, there was a 45-minute standing ovation. When Winifred Wagner and Mr. Chéreau finally met, she admitted that “many times I wanted to kill you,” but added, “After all, isn’t it better to be furious than bored?”
There’s something to be said for that.
George Altman, baseball player. He was one of only three people who played in the Negro Leagues, MLB, and in Japan. (Don Newcombe and Larry Doby are the other two.)
At Tennessee A&I State University (now Tennessee State University), he played basketball and baseball. After graduating in 1955 with a degree in physical education, he landed a tryout with the Kansas City Monarchs, a Negro Leagues team managed by Buck O’Neil.
Altman took batting practice with the Monarchs before one of their games.
“Evidently I must have impressed them a little bit because as I was getting comfortable on the bench, sitting back to just enjoy the game, Buck came up to me and said, ‘Boy, you’re in there,’” Altman wrote. “It almost scared me to death.”
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After three months with the Monarchs, he signed with the Cubs and was assigned to the Burlington Bees, in Iowa, in the minor leagues. He was drafted into the Army in 1956, and then rejoined the Cubs organization in 1958. He was promoted to the major leagues the next year.
“The thing I like about Altman is the fact that he knows where the strike zone is,” [Ernie] Banks told The Sporting News in 1959. “That’s one thing most young ballplayers don’t know about. They swing at anything they can reach with the bat. Altman waits for his pitch.”
In need of pitching, the Cubs traded Altman to the Cardinals in 1962. St. Louis traded him to the Mets the next year, and the Mets traded him back to the Cubs before the 1965 season. By then, he was struggling with injuries, once joking that he played for Blue Cross.
After Altman hit just .111 in 15 games in 1967, his career in the majors was over. Unwilling to quit playing, he joined the Tokyo Orions in Japan. During seven seasons with the team, he hit 193 home runs, becoming a popular player for his slugging and willingness to learn Japanese phrases.
Firings watch.
December 10th, 2025Wow!
Sherrone Moore fired as head coach of the University of Michigan.
The team was 9-3 this season. But it wasn’t a football related firing.
“inappropriate relationship”. “with cause”.
He was 17-8 in two seasons. More from ESPN, but not much more.
Edited to add:
Obit watch: December 10, 2025.
December 10th, 2025Madeleine Wickham, also known as “Sophie Kinsella”, author. (Confessions of a Shopaholic). She was 55: a brain tumor got her.
John Noble Wilford, former science reporter for the NYT and Pulitzer Prize winner. He was most famous for covering Apollo 11, but he did a lot of other science reporting as well.
Obit watch: December 8, 2025.
December 8th, 2025Mary Kuczkir has passed away at the age of 92. She was also (and better) known as “Fern Michaels”.
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As Ms. Michaels often described it, it took a steely resolve to embark on a writing career in her 40s. “When my youngest went off to kindergarten,” she recounted on her website, “my husband told me to get off my ass and get a job. Those were his exact words. I didn’t know how to do anything except be a wife and mother.”
“Rather than face the outside world with no skills,” she added, “I decided to write a book. As my husband said at the time, stupid is as stupid does. Guess what, I don’t have that husband any more.” The couple never divorced, but parted ways in the early 1970s.
Obit watch: December 5, 2025.
December 5th, 2025Master Sergeant Charles Norman Shay (US Army – ret.) He was 101.
Mr. Shay, a member of the Penobscot Nation of Maine, was one of about 175 Native Americans among the 34,000 Allied troops who came ashore on [Omaha] beach, into the teeth of some of the bloodiest fighting of D-Day in the opening act of the liberation of France during World War II.
Mr. Shay was awarded the Silver Star for saving soldiers who had been cut down by heavy German machine-gun fire after disembarking from their landing craft into the waves. In 2007, he received France’s Legion of Honor for his actions that day.
“I saw there were many wounded men who were floundering in the water, who could not help themselves, and I knew that if nobody went to help them, they were doomed to die,” Mr. Shay recalled in a 2010 interview for the Library of Congress.
He continued: “I proceeded to get as many men as I could out of the water by turning them over on their backs and grabbing them under their shoulders. I don’t know where my strength came from, but they say once the adrenaline starts flowing in your body you can do unbelievable feats.”
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From 2018 until his death, Mr. Shay lived in northwestern France, in the home of a caretaker, Marie-Pascale Legrand, not far from the beaches where the World War II invasion took place. Ms. Legrand, who met Mr. Shay at a commemoration ceremony in Normandy in 2016, said in an interview that he had been lonely living in Maine and was not getting adequate health care. After visiting him there, she invited him to move to Normandy.
For several years, Mr. Shay performed a sage-burning ceremony overlooking Omaha Beach in honor of the dead. He was one of a very few American veterans able to attend D-Day commemorations in Normandy in 2020 and 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Frank Gehry. THR. The Onion (by way of Lawrence). Previously on WCD.
“You go into architecture to make the world a better place,” Mr. Gehry said in 2012. “A better place to live, to work, whatever. You don’t go into it as an ego trip.”
He added: “That comes later, with the press and all that stuff. In the beginning, it’s pretty innocent.”
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, actor. Other credits include “Thunder in Paradise”, “Renegade”, “Jake and the Fatman”, and a spin-off of a minor 1960s SF TV series.
“Toilets, toilets, toilets.”©
December 4th, 2025© Steve Ballmer, 2024.
One of my cow orkers sent me a link to a TechCrunch story (by way of Slashdot). I don’t think the actual TechCruch story is all that interesting: does the Kohler Dekoda actually use end-to-end encryption or not? The story is based on this blog post by Simon Fondrie-Teitler, a security researcher, and the answer seems to be “no”, at least in the way end-to-end encryption is defined:
What I think is more interesting is what the Kohler Dekoda actually is. Kohler, as you know, Bob, is a large plumbing and fixtures company.
The Kohler Dekoda is a camera.
Yeah. So what it’s doing is taking pictures of your bodily waste, “analyzing” them, and sending you reports on your health.
Of course it needs an app.
Thank God I can use the bathroom normally!
How much would you pay for a camera on your toilet that tracks your bodily wastes and sends you reports? $50? $100? Or would someone have to pay you?
The Kohler Dekoda sells for $600. But wait, there’s more! And I bet you already know what that “more” is!
Yes, it also requires a subscription. $7 a month ($70 a year) for a single user, or $13 a month ($130 a year) for a “family plan” that’s good for up to five users.
So if you have an average 2 1/2 bath home, and want to make sure you have coverage everywhere you “go”, you’d need to spend $1,800 on the hardware. It isn’t clear to me if the subscription covers multiple cameras, or if you need one subscription for every camera. It also isn’t clear to me how the camera would be able to distinguish between various users (husband/wife), or if you have to tell that app each time that you’re the one on the throne.
I get that there are some people with health conditions that might find this useful, though I question whether it would be $600 plus an ongoing $70 a year useful. I also get that “gut health” seems to be the next big health advance, though it seems to me that “gut health” has been a thing for a while, and what do we have to show for it?
As for hydration, you can print this and hang it above every toilet in your house for a couple of pennies worth of ink.
And if Kohler is using anonymized data to train AI models, I say: awesome! Because the last thing in the world I want is humans (outside of a specific medical context) analyzing bodily wastes, even if they are getting paid for it.
Obit watch: December 4, 2025.
December 4th, 2025Several people sent me obits for Steve Cropper, of Booker T. and the MG’s, and the Blues Brothers.
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Mr. Cropper achieved further acclaim in the late 1970s for his work with the Blues Brothers, the musical side project of the “Saturday Night Live” co-stars John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. By then, Stax had closed, having fallen into insolvency in 1975, and Mr. Cropper had begun immersing himself in freelance session and production work with artists like Art Garfunkel and Ringo Starr.
“Briefcase Full of Blues,” the Blues Brothers’ first album, included a remake of “Soul Man,” complete with a reprise of the shout “Play it, Steve!” from Mr. Belushi on the chorus. The single reached No. 14 on the pop chart in 1979, anticipating the release of the 1980 movie “The Blues Brothers,” starring Mr. Belushi and Mr. Aykroyd and featuring Mr. Cropper as Steve “the Colonel” Cropper, who plays in a band called Murph and the Magic Tones. (Born of Mr. Cropper’s tendency to take charge of situations, the Colonel was a childhood nickname that stuck with him even after he established himself as a musician.)
Here’s a blast from the past for you: Eugene Hasenfus.
“Eugene who?”
Yeah, that’s what Ronald Reagan said.
Mr. Hasenfus emerged out of obscurity on Oct. 5, 1986, when a missile fired by troops fighting for Nicaragua’s leftist government downed his plane while it was on a run to drop arms to right-wing rebel forces, known as contras, who were seeking to overthrow the country’s leaders.
The pilot, co-pilot and radio operator of the plane — a twin-engine turboprop of 1950s vintage — died in its fiery crash in a patch of jungle in southern Nicaragua. Mr. Hasenfus, who had been responsible for packing and dropping the arms, was the lone survivor.
An experienced skydiver and the only crewman with a parachute, he had leaped from the cargo compartment, which had been blasted open by the missile, as the aircraft began plummeting to earth.
He was captured and put on trial.
While awaiting his trial, Mr. Hasenfus told the CBS News correspondent Mike Wallace for a segment of “60 Minutes” that when he joined the mission, he believed that he was working for the C.I.A. Asked what an average American would think about the shoot-down, he replied, “He’s going to make that the government is backing this 100 percent, and that’s what I believe, too.”
President Ronald Reagan’s administration initially denied any American involvement in the flight. Those denials began unraveling when it was reported that the cargo plane belonged to Southern Air Transport, a charter carrier based in Miami that was formerly owned by the C.I.A.
Mr. Hasenfus’s capture led to investigations by Congress and by an independent counsel, Lawrence E. Walsh, and ultimately to revelations that the administration, defying Congress, had illegally sold arms to Iran and used some of the proceeds to secretly support the contras. The scandal shadowed the Reagan administration and later the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who was Mr. Reagan’s vice president before succeeding him in 1989.
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