Once again, I’ve bet Lawrence $5 that the Cubs will win the World Series this year. This post is to document that bet.
(I actually have his money for the Gonzaga bet, and will pay him next time I see him.)
Hope springs eternal.
April 1st, 2013J’accuse!
April 1st, 2013I, and the many other Americans I speak for, and the voices in my head (who I also speak for) demand to know:
Why has the Obama Administration not taken decisive action to resolve the Iowahawk hostage crisis, which is now in day 175?
Does the administration want people to believe they can’t spare even one AC-130 set to “frappe”?
The American people want answers, Mister President!
Happy April Fool’s day!
April 1st, 2013Roundup:
The EFF’s EFFector newsletter, especially “New FOIA Docs Reveal Shocking Facts From DHS” and “Google’s Good and Evil Divisions Reportedly in Talks Over Precious”. Also, drones.
I’m very fond of “The Incomparable”, and I appreciate the loving craftsmanship they put into episode 133. But it just didn’t click with me.
None of ThinkGeek’s fake products this year strike me as being that outrageous. Or funny. Or impractical (Okay, maybe the Play-Doh 3D Printer. Can I make standard capacity magazines for my modern sporting rifles with it?)
(Seriously, I’m sure there are people who would pay $300 for the Eye Of Sauron Desk Lamp. I’m also sure that should be more like $49, not $300, and anyone who does pay $300 for it if ThinkGeek ever produces one should be taxed at the same confiscatory tax rates I would apply to people who spend $5,000 on a turntable for their 78 RPM records.)
I did get a chuckle out of LA Police Gear’s “Drone Oriented Gear-Carrying System“, maybe because I’d like some tactical bullets.
Did Locus Online decide not to do anything for April Fool’s this year, or are they just slow in posting?
Updates to follow.
Edited to add 1: By way of Jimbo, “UFOs, Nessie seen near Shoals“. With photo.
Edited to add 2: Locus Online is just slow in posting.
Edited to add 3: I am removing the links to Locus Online for reasons that I will explain later. For the moment, I’m just going to say that I refuse to give them any more traffic.
Edited to add 4: Why I removed the Locus Online links.
Edited to add 5: 12 gauge 3″ anti-drone shells. 9 pellets of depleted uranium. I’d buy a box. (Hattip: Borepatch.)
Quote of the day.
April 1st, 2013“It is not surprising that this champion of the damned was, in his adult years, a Chicago Cubs fan.”
–John A. Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned
Verbing weirds language.
March 31st, 2013Oooooh crap did that guy’s leg just get Theismanned?That looked awful.
— Popehat (@Popehat) March 31, 2013
“Theismanned”? (That guy in question.)
Watching Duke/ Louisville my heart goes out to Kevin Ware.
— Joe Theismann (@Theismann7) March 31, 2013
(Subject line hattip, more or less. If you put “verbing weirds language” into Google, you can find the original C&H strip.)
Something for everyone, a new book tonight!
March 30th, 2013Jack Viertel has a book coming out in late 2016.
Mr. Viertel is the artistic director of New York City Center Encores! The book is called (at least for now) “The Secret Life of the Broadway Musical: How Broadway Shows are Built”.
Mr. Viertel goes on to argue that “Oklahoma” established a “blueprint” for musicals, which was then subverted in the 1970s by “the Hal Prince-Stephen Sondheim shows – ‘Company,’ ‘Follies,’ several others”, and by the “cultural ferment” of that period. But, he suggests, current hit Broadway musicals have a similar architecture to the “golden age” ones.
From the description, it sounds like Mr. Viertel is, at least in part, applying failure analysis to Broadway musicals. This sounds like it will be an excellent companion volume to my own favorite book on the subject, Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops
Edited to add: While the Sondheim reference is in the article, I included it as deliberate Mike the Musicologist bait. This resulted in a text message conversation, excerpted below. (I’ve left out some asides which aren’t relevant to the conversation, mostly dealing with “Beat the Devil
MtM: From the description I think that book could also be titled “Get Off My Lawn: Musicals Were Better When I Was A Kid”.
Me: Could be.
MtM: Or perhaps “Musicals In Amber: Why I Think Art Shouldn’t Change”.
Me: But I think the argument that successful musicals share structural commonalities is a legit one to make.
Me: I’m not sure I’d AGREE, but it doesn’t strike me as crazy.
MtM: Which they also share with unsuccessful ones.
Me: Of course, that can be extended.
Me: “Audiences want things that are safe, predictable, and expected.”
Me: “Audiences don’t want to be challenged.”
MtM: The traditional process of putting a show together, as well as the R&H structure, is interesting. I would recommend Everything Was Possible
for a study of how a show is created.
MtM: But bemoaning that shows make money through touring over an extended Broadway run? Please.
Me: Is he bemoaning that, or just saying that’s the way the economics works today?
MtM: Curious. Amazon search for “everything was possible” returned a 16GB iPod touch as the 4th result.
MtM: I got the impression he is unhappy that Broadway is no longer the ultimate goal for a show.
Me: I didn’t pick that up. But if he does feel that way, I’d like to read why.
Me: From my POV: more touring = more people exposed to musicals = healthy and vibrant musical community.
MtM: I just got a sense from the article that this book is going to be “if shows were still done like this then musicals would still be central to our culture” which grates with me on many points.
MtM: The basic subject – how dramatic/musical structure, book doctoring, etc. is interesting. If that’s his focus then Yay.
As an Austin resident…
March 29th, 2013…let me just say this: I agree with Iowahawk.
Dear North Korea: if you are going to nuke Austin, please do it during SXSW statesman.com/news/news/aust…
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 29, 2013
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold…
March 29th, 2013Steven Brooks was arrested last night near Barstow, California.
Up until Thursday, Mr. Brooks was a member of the Nevada State Assembly (a Democrat, representing District 17, which includes North Las Vegas). He was expelled from office earlier in the day.
Mr. Brooks has had an interesting few months. On January 19th, he was arrested on allegations that he had threatened Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick. The Reno newspaper states that there was “a gun and dozens of rounds of ammunition” in his car; however, no charges have been filed against Mr. Brooks as of this writing.
Mr. Brooks was arrested and charged after an incident in February “after a disturbance at the home of his estranged wife, when police say he tried to grab an officer’s gun”.
He’s also “been banned from meetings with party colleagues in the Assembly and was banished from the Nevada Legislature Building“.
I don’t know what to make of this: the fact that he hasn’t been charged in the alleged threats against Speaker Kirkpatrick after two months is strange. The domestic violence incident, well, this is why we have a legal system: to sort out conflicting claims. The denial of the gun purchase was probably a result of the domestic violence incident. The rest of his behavior could charitably be described as “eccentric”, but I’m not sure, based on the reporting, that it rises to the level of “danger to himself and others”. There are reports in both articles that Mr. Brooks was under psychiatric observation for a period of time: the Reno paper says his commitment was involuntary.
Leading the police on a high-speed chase and making them use spike strips to stop you? That goes past “eccentric” and into full-on “crazy”. Speaking of crazy:
Authorities said it was unclear why Brooks was in California.
Obit watch part II.
March 29th, 2013I missed this one the other day, because of reasons. I also missed this story when it happened, because I was 5 at the time.
Mr. Rose was convicted of murdering Pierre Laporte, the Quebec government’s minister of labor. Mr. Laporte was kidnapped by Mr. Rose’s F.L.Q. cell on October 10, 1970, and was found strangled in the trunk of a car on October 18th. Mr. Rose made statements implicating himself in the kidnapping, but “an investigation by a Montreal prosecutor concluded in 1980 that Mr. Rose could not have been present at the killing”. Mr. Rose served 11 years in prison.
Also among the dead, Richard Griffiths. Most of the obits I have seen have concentrated on his Harry Potter role, but his full list of credits is even more interesting: “Withnail and I”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”, and “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear”, along with a lot of TV work.
(I’d kind of like to see “The Brides in the Bath”, simply because the George Joseph Smith case is one of the seminal cases in British legal history.)
Obit watch: March 29, 2013.
March 29th, 2013Paul S. Williams, noted music critic, founder of Crawdaddy. Hollywood Reporter. Locus Online.
The Locus Online obit touches on this briefly, but Mr. Williams was a friend of Philip K. Dick and, after Dick’s death, his literary executor. Mr. Williams founded the Philip K. Dick Society, which was a major force in getting Dick’s works out in front of the public. I did volunteer work as a secretary for the PKD Society for a period of time; Mr. Williams was always incredibly nice to me when we spoke, but I get the feeling he was the kind of person who was incredibly nice to everyone he met.
Post-PKD Society, he also was the force behind The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, which would make him a hero of mine even without the PKD connection.
If you want to get a feel for his writing and his philosophy, I commend to your attention his book The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: A Top 40 List
More unintended consequences.
March 28th, 2013Picked this up from Overlawyered, and thought it deserved wider circulation.
Woman and a friend are having coffee. Friend mentions that her daughter just had her first baby. The daughter works in a job that pays just above minimum wage, so money is tight. Daughter stretches her money by shopping the second-hand market for baby stuff. But daughter can’t find any used cribs for sale.
Daughter is trying to make do with a used “play yard”. “One of its sides is broken but it has been mended with a metal rod and tape.” Not the safest thing in the world.
Here’s the punchline: the author of that blog entry is CPSC commissioner Nancy Nord.
I’m willing to bet that people warned commissioner Nord, and the other commissioners, that this kind of thing would happen: you dry up the used crib market, and people are going to resort to alternatives that may be even less safe than a used crib. I’m also willing to bet that commissioner Nord ignored those warnings. I’m glad she’s had her moment on the road to Damascus, but it seems to me to be too little, too late.
Random notes: March 28, 2013.
March 28th, 2013Lawrence threw me a nice backlink yesterday, pointing out that Bloomberg’s tobacco proposals will just put money in the pockets of organized crime.
But surely there’s hope for NYC? Surely they’ve learned and will elect someone unlike Bloomberg?
Nope. The NYT profiles Joseph J. Lhota, deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and censorious asshat.
Hahahhahaha. Bloomberg, champion of free speech. Unless it is about guns. Or tobacco. Or soda. Or food.
Obit watch: James Herbert, noted British horror novelist.
Don’t be evil (part 2)
March 27th, 2013Great idea. Why don’t we have it?
One word: Intuit.
This doesn’t come as a great shock to me, but I stopped using Intuit products years ago: TurboTax was DRM infested, and the Mac versions of Quicken became steaming piles of crap. I haven’t seen anything that would make me want to go back to using an Intuit product again, ever.
Random notes: March 27, 2013.
March 27th, 2013State Senator John Whitmire is the head of the Texas Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee. As head of that committee, it isn’t unusual for him to hear from prison inmates. Sometimes, those communications come in the form of death threats. (Sen. Whitmire was in the news a few years back over the whole “inmates with illegal cell phones” issue.)
Anyway, death threats aren’t unusual and aren’t generally worth reporting. But this one deserves notice. Whitmire
More:
Mmmmmm-hmmmm. It isn’t the “scam” part that gets me: if I was in a Texas prison, I’d probably do everything I could to get my sentence reduced. It’s the “some of it credible” part. Apparently they’ve used this guy as an informant in the past; now that they’ve established he’s a scammer, how do we know any of the evidence he’s provided is credible? And are they going to go back and review the other cases he’s been involved in?
Does the government have the legal authority to set a minimum price for goods? What if the goods in question are tobacco products?
Don’t be evil.
March 26th, 2013This isn’t about Google Reader or Google Keep (though I do like this take on the latter). I ran across this story on the Y Combinator Twitter feed the other day, and this is the first chance I’ve had to blog it; I would like to see it get more attention.
In brief, there is a company called the Knife Depot that sells knives online. I have never bought anything from the Knife Depot, but that’s just because I haven’t been buying a lot of knives online; I certainly have not heard anything bad about the company.
The Knife Depot also had a Google Adwords account, which brought in “a good slice of its revenue”.
The Knife Depot sells what are commonly known as “assisted opening” knives. These are not switchblades, but knives that can be opened with one hand by applying pressure on a part of the knife. (The Knife Depot blog has a good video explaining the difference between “assisted opening” and “switchblade” knives.) Obviously, “assisted opening” knives are very useful things if you’re missing an arm, or frequently operate in situations where you only have one hand free, or have certain physical disabilities, or just like knives. “Assisted opening” knives are legal pretty much everywhere in the United States, including New York City (in spite of what the criminals who run NYC believe).
However, somebody in the Google Adwords department got bent out of shape and told the Knife Depot: either stop selling “assisted opening” knives, or lose your Adwords account.
Note that Google didn’t just say “you can’t advertise these knives using Adwords”. Even if the Knife Depot agreed not to use Adwords to advertise “assisted opening” knives, Google would still yank their Adwords account if they continued to sell those knives on their site.
The Knife Depot, being good and honorable people, told Google to take their Adwords account and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
“So what?” you say. “Google is a private business and can set whatever policies they want for Adwords. Why get bent out of shape over this?”
Here’s why: at the same time Google was threatening the Knife Depot, Google continued to allow Adwords advertising of “assisted opening” knives from other vendors. Like Amazon. And Wal-Mart. And Bass Pro Shops. I believe Google is still allowing Adwords advertising of “assisted opening” knives from those vendors, based on the results of a Google search for “Kershaw knives” done as I was writing this post.
Yes, this is hypocritical and evil. So much so that the Knife Depot blog entry quotes an email from a Google employee who called out the policy discrepancy, requested an explanation of why other vendors were allowed to use Adwords and the Knife Depot was not…and never got a reply.
I’ve had it in my head to do a post about Android/iPhone based on some things said in recent podcasts. I may still do that, though time has sort of gotten past me. The key thing that bothers me is that some people seem to prefer Android/Google because “Google does a better job of knowing about me”, without realizing that’s a problem. You are giving your information to a company that, to be polite, hasn’t proven it can be trusted with it. The Knife Depot is just example #947 of why Google hasn’t proven that.
I commented to someone, back a decade ago, that we didn’t have to worry about the government or big corporations invading our privacy without our consent; we’d happily give up our privacy for 75 cents off a box of Pop-Tarts. It is worse than I thought ten years ago; now we’re giving up our privacy for…what, exactly? A substitute notepad application? A free copy of The Da Vinci Code?