Random notes: July 19, 2013.

July 19th, 2013

I was tied up yesterday and couldn’t jump on the Detroit bankruptcy story. Here’s coverage from the NYT, the Detroit Free Press, and Lawrence.

At Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, there are scores of doctors and nurses on duty around the clock at a cost of $3 million per week. But in the maternity ward, nurses sit and knit or idly watch afternoon television because there are no babies being delivered and most of the hospital is empty. It is meant to house 375 patients; it has 18.

The people who run the hospital want to close it, and are trying to wind down operations. But the unions that represent hospital workers are opposed to closing the hospital.

The hospital is losing $15 million a month, $12 million of it in payroll, with almost no money coming in. State officials said they expected to cover the losses through advances on federal financing given to hospitals with large numbers of poor and uninsured patients.

San Jose State made a deal with the online course provider Udacity to offer “low-cost, for-credit online courses” in “remedial math, college-level algebra and elementary statistics courses”. How’s that working for them? Not well. “Preliminary results from a spring pilot project found student pass rates of 20% to 44%”. SJSU and Udacity have suspended the courses while they re-evaluate. One thing that might have been a factor:

A large group were enrolled in the Oakland Military Institute, a college prep academy. Many of them didn’t have access to a computer — a fact that course mentors didn’t learn about until three weeks into the semester, Junn said.

In the Prince George’s jail, another of the busiest jails in Maryland, administrators have little information about inmates’ contact with the outside world. Unlike at most jails in the D.C. area, Prince George’s does not directly monitor or record visits with friends or family, and inmates routinely shield their calls from investigators monitoring recorded phone lines.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Politics, School | 2 Comments »

Guess who’s getting a raise?

July 18th, 2013

No, not your obedient servant.

The State of Texas has approved a $15,000 a year raise for all local DAs and district judges.

Including Rosemary Lehmberg.

Lehmberg is already the highest paid elected official in the county, making $125,000.00 per year in state funds. The county pays her $35,298 giving her a total salary of over $160,000.00.

Posted in Clippings, Law, TCDA | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

July 17th, 2013

Tannhauser asks for her intercession with God, and dies of opera.

–Ken @ Popehat

Runner-up, also from Ken:

Note: I have not used umlauts, because Hitler.

Posted in Music, Nazis, Wagner | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! watch. (#2 in a series)

July 17th, 2013

This story has been buried; I had to dig pretty far down in the HouChron sports section to find it.

Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone has been charged by German prosecutors with bribery in connection with the sale of a stake in the global racing series.
Ecclestone has been under investigation since a German banker was convicted of taking an illegal payment from him worth $44 million.

…

The court said in a statement Wednesday that Ecclestone had been charged with bribery and incitement to breach of trust in connection with [Gerhard] Gribkowsky’s [the German banker in question – DB] management of BayernLB’s stake in F1. It said the indictment was dated May 10 and has since been translated into English and delivered to Ecclestone and his lawyers.

…

Along with taking the money from Ecclestone, Gribkowsky used BayernLB’s funds to pay the F1 chief a commission of $41.4 million and agreed to pay a further $25 million to Bambino Trust, a company with which Ecclestone was affiliated, prosecutors maintained during the trial.

(Required for the tax-fattened hyena watch.)

Posted in Cars, Clippings, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: July 17, 2013.

July 17th, 2013

Judging scandals have upended high-profile sports like figure skating and gymnastics before, but this possible cheating episode serves as a reminder that even in the confines of obscure sports, the competition is every bit as cutthroat.
The fallout has been swift, with one top Olympic official already expelled and six others suspended. They include Caroline Hunt of the United States, along with officials from Egypt, Japan and Russia. Dozens of judges who took the tests have been implicated and questioned by F.I.G. investigators.

The sport in question is rhythmic gymnastics.

Investigators found that Maria Szyszkowska of Poland, the former president of the governing body’s rhythmic gymnastics technical committee, interfered with the computer program that calculated the scores. As a result, Mrs. Szyszkowska was stripped of her membership and prohibited from “any form of participation in all F.I.G. events and activities.”

Obit watch: Eugene P. Wilkinson.

As commander of the 324-foot, lead-lined, dirigible-shaped submarine, Admiral Wilkinson made headlines worldwide when he steered the Nautilus, propelled by its onboard reactor, out of a shipyard in Groton, Conn., into Long Island Sound on Jan. 17, 1955, and uttered his first radio message: “Under way on nuclear power.”

(94. Damn, that was a good run. Also: “He received the Silver Star for valor in the Pacific.”)

Congrats to Lawrence on his winning the Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award in the Bulwer-Lytton Contest. Sadly, according to Lawrence, he will not be getting the complete set of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, which is a shame, as I was looking forward to borrowing his copy of Paul Clifford.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Geek, History, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

You have to go out. You don’t have to come back.

July 16th, 2013

Like Robert Ruark, I have a certain sentimental attachment to the Coast Guard. (Unlike Ruark, I didn’t grow up around the water, and nobody ever let me chase a rum-runner on a Coast Guard cutter.)

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I have some more pictures of the Cleveland Fallen Firefighters Memorial in the tubes, but not all of them came out as well as I would have liked. I was trying to get some closeups of the memorial that would allow folks to actually read the names on it.

memorial2

Posted in Heroism, Photography, Ruark | Comments Closed

I went back to Ohio, but my city was gone.

July 15th, 2013

Well, not really “gone”. I hadn’t been back to Ohio for nine years, and it amazed me somewhat both how much and how little has changed.

For example, there’s an entire grocery chain that I don’t remember from my last trip…that takes the Discover card and cash. No Visa/AmEx/MasterCard/Diner’s Club, not even debt cards with a PIN, just cash and Discover. Who came up with this idea?

On the other hand, the tractor tire store that was a landmark on the way to Grandma’s place is still there, after 40 something years. And Grandma’s place still feels remote from everything, even though there’s major strip centers at the end of her road, and even though much of the land was sold off over the past few years (and now has houses sitting on it).

And the old NASA hanger is still visible from the airport. That was another landmark for us kids. (My dad worked there, back when it was still the Lewis Research Center, before it was renamed “NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field“. Which is a mouthful. Not that I’m bitter or anything over the renaming; by gosh, if anyone deserved to have a NASA facility named after him, it was John Glenn.)

This is shaping up to be a long post, and sort of “stream of consciousness”, so I’m going to put the rest of it behind a jump. Before I do, here’s Grandma’s obituary, just for the record.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Admin, Android, Apple, Books, Clippings, Food, Geek, Guns, Lizards, Mixology, Obits, Photography, Planes, Reptiles, Thanks, Travel | 3 Comments »

Your loser update: All-Star break edition.

July 15th, 2013

At the break, Houston is 33-61, with a .351 winning percentage. Straight multiplication projects out to 105 losses. Cool Standings projects “103.6” losses (how do you lose .6 of a game?), Baseball Prospectus projects 101.7, and FanGraphs projects an even 101 losses.

Miami is at 35-58, with a .376 winning percentage. Straight multiplication projects out to 101 losses. FanGraphs projects 100 losses, Baseball Prospectus 97.4 losses, and Cool Standings 99.5 losses.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: July 15, 2013.

July 15th, 2013

Early in his career, Stephen King published several novels using the name Richard Bachman. (In 1985, after he was exposed as the real Richard Bachman, Mr. King announced that Mr. Bachman had died of “cancer of the pseudonym, a rare form of schizonomia.”)

And King continued to publish books as Bachman long past the “early” point of his career, including The Regulators and Blaze. Sorry, something about the NYT‘s phrasing here annoys me. As does this:

He then started reading the book. “I said, ‘Nobody who was in the Army and now works in civilian security could write a book as good as this,’ ” he said.

Nice bit of casual snobbery there, pal.

(This is actually the first Rowling book I want to read, though I don’t intend to pay an inflated price for a first.)

My heart goes out to any of my readers who are in LA:

Ignite 8,500 gallons of gasoline in a two-lane freeway underpass just north of downtown, and you have a prescription for another round of Carmageddon come Monday morning.

…

The fire erupted when a tanker truck overturned in a small tunnel connecting the northbound lanes of the 2 Freeway with the northbound lanes of the 5. Thick black smoke was seen for miles.
The intensity of the tunnel fire has so compromised the roadbed of the 5 that freeway traffic at this point would lead to greater damage, Caltrans said.

…

Chandler reported that rebar was exposed. “It was so hot that the concrete is now brittle,” he said. “It is like a popcorn ceiling. Crews are chipping away at it with hammers.”
The narrow confines of the tunnel, about 300 feet long and only two lanes and a shoulder wide, magnified the intensity of the blaze.

This is one of the best things I’ve read in the past few days.

And this is another of the best things I’ve read in the past few days: “A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts” by Shawn O’Neil and Kate Drueen.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Geek, Roads | Comments Closed

As seen on the road…

July 14th, 2013

riverstyxroad

Yes, that is a real road sign.

And where does River Styx Road go to? If you guessed “River Styx“, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.

We would also accept “the River Styx Bridge” as a correct answer.

Posted in History, Photography, Roads, Trains | Comments Closed

(not) Fire.

July 14th, 2013

I’m not 100% happy with the way these photos turned out, but it was a hard subject to photograph: I think it would have been hard even with the big camera instead of an iPhone. While they aren’t perfect, I think they’re interesting enough to post.

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(Interior, Cleveland Arcade, downtown Cleveland, Ohio.)

I’ve been thinking about picking up one of the Olloclip lens kits soonish, depending on how things go. Anyone have any experience with these, or anything they’d recommend instead? I’m mostly interested in the wide-angle and macro lenses.

Posted in Apple, Photography, Travel | Comments Closed

The Bridges of Cuyahoga County.

July 14th, 2013

Well, just one bridge, really.

I keep thinking of these as “Egyptian”, but they’re not, really: they’re Art Deco.

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These are a couple of the pylons, known as the “Guardians of Traffic”, at the ends of the Hope Memorial Bridge in downtown Cleveland. (AKA the “Lorain-Carnegie Bridge”.) We drove across this bridge several times, since it is the best route to the Westside Market. (“The bridge connects Lorain Avenue on Cleveland’s west side and Carnegie Avenue on the east side, terminating just short of Progressive Field.” Heh. My mother observed that everywhere we went in Cleveland, it seemed like we had to drive past Progressive Field. By the end of the trip, she was rather tired of it. In comparison, I think we drove past Browns Stadium twice, and Quicken Loans Arena once.)

The “Hope” in “Hope Memorial” is William Henry Hope, Bob Hope’s father. Mr. Hope was a stonemason who worked on the pylons when the bridge was built.

A reliable source tells me:

When the Cavs were in the playoffs, the city put Cavs sweatbands on the foreheads of the two closest to the Q, where the Cavs play.

There’s really no good place to park near the bridge and the pylons, so these photos were taken either with the iPhone camera or compact cameras, by myself and my mother, out of or through the windows of a moving rental car, while trying not to obstruct traffic. If I get a chance to go back and the weather is nice, I plan to get some better pictures with the big camera.

Posted in Art, Bridges, Photography, Roads | Comments Closed

Happy Bastille Day, everyone!

July 14th, 2013

Whether you’re eating Beef Bourguignon and drinking a good Burgundy, or storming a prison to get at the gunpowder inside, I hope your celebration is a happy one.

(More from Lawrence here.)

Posted in Beef, Food, History, Law | Comments Closed

Ist das nicht eine schnitzel bank?

July 13th, 2013

schnitzelbank

Ja, das ist eine schnitzel bank!

Supreme lager, always!

(Poster found on wall at Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland, Ohio.)

Related:

Posted in Food, Photography, Travel | Comments Closed

Important safety tip. (#17 in a series)

July 12th, 2013

I shouldn’t have to say this, should I? People aren’t this stupid, are they?

Apparently, they are. So, safety tip:

If it is hot enough to fry an egg on the pavement, for the love of Ghu, please use a pan.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Safety | Comments Closed

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