So instead, I’ll link to this:
and this:
and let my readers fill in the blank.
Obvious headline is obvious.
August 17th, 2012Banana republicans watch: August 17, 2012.
August 17th, 2012Haven’t had one of these in a while now. Let’s open up the bag and see what’s inside.
Caltrans, the state transportation agency, owns “hundreds of houses spanning a corridor through Pasadena, South Pasadena and Los Angeles”. These homes were purchased as part of a plan to extend the 710 freeway, and are supposed to be bulldozed when the extension is built. At this point, it looks like the extension is on indefinite hold.
So?
In one case, the agency spent $103,443 on a new roof. That leaked.
But wait, there’s more!
And more!
And even more: auditors traced the money to the Direct Construction Unit of the Department of General Services. The “Direct Construction Unit” apparently does the general repair work for state owned buildings. So basically, this was one branch of the state government taking money out of the pocket of the other branch. Which is fine; even if you’re just taking money from one pocket and putting it in another, you’ve got to account for it, right?
Except that the Direct Construction Unit was tacking on a 20% “management fee”. And they were hiring subcontractors “for minor chores as a kind of window dressing to ‘achieve the appearance’ of meeting goals to include small businesses in state work. ” It looks like the subcontractors may have known people inside the DCU: one particular subcontractor “repeatedly bought the exact items it would sell to the unit days before the jobs were put out to bid”.
And the punchline: this contractor was buying items at Home Depot and selling them to the DCU at an average markup of 35%.
And a by the way: “Four of the state employees found living in the houses worked for the Department of General Services.”
But, hey, LA isn’t the only city in California, right? Right. There’s also San Francisco. San Francisco has a sheriff, Ross Mirkarimi. Sheriff Mirkarimi has a domestic violence conviction on his record; based on my understanding of federal law, that bars him from possessing a firearm. Which is kind of a problem, if you’re the chief law enforcement officer of a major city.
Apparently, this doesn’t mean that he’s actually fired: the Board of Supervisors needs at least 9 out of 11 votes to terminate him.
Magnets. How do they work?
August 17th, 2012The NYT got around to covering the “Buckyballs” story. I put “Buckyballs” in quotes because there are actually other manufacturers involved.
And this is priceless:
Ms. Lopez’s child “swallowed four Buckyballs in March while pretending to have a pierced tongue”. Her daughter is 12.
And the bait is taken.
August 16th, 2012Today is the 35th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death.
Say what you will about the man and his music, but he had good taste in guns. I think that Savage 99A is pretty nice, though I’d have to start reloading .250-3000.
I want to say that Storied Firearms has a Field King for $650 (not listed on their website). That one has a Volksquarten trigger and barrel, if I’m remembering correctly.
And it looks like the going rate for a nice Python is around $2,000.
Random observation.
August 16th, 2012Celebrate Shark Week with 16 snack and appetizer recipe ideas!
And not a single one actually contains any shark.
Ancient Men and Fire.
August 16th, 2012You know, if I had it to do all over again, I’d seriously think about becoming a food anthropologist.
It doesn’t seem like this is a profession that rakes in the big money. But I think it’d be kind of fun to figure out how they made beer 9,000 years ago, or what the Anasazi indians ate, or how teosinte became corn. Why is meat inside some form of dough common across so many cultures?
What prompts this thought? Tuesday night, my mother and I went to see Steven Raichlen’s “Man Food Fire: The Evolution of Barbecue” lecture at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum. (We had a very nice meal at Lambert’s beforehand. I had forgotten how much I liked their charcuterie plate.)
I hadn’t really thought much about the relationship between evolutionary biology and cooking. Part of Raichlen’s lecture was that we went from this:
(Lucy, Australopithecus afarensis. Note the large jaw and the protruding attachment points for jaw muscles.)
to this:
(Homo erectus)
largely due to our ancestor’s use of fire to cook meat. I may be glossing over some subtleties here, but the short version is that cooking meat (and other foods) allowed our ancestors to use their food more efficiently, leading both to the evolution away from the large jaw and large jaw muscles, and to an increase in cranial capacity – thus, larger brains to fill the space. And that’s how we got to modern man.
(It isn’t that I don’t trust Raichlen, but I’d really like to sit down and talk about his ideas with someone like LabRat, who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. By the way, that linked post over at the Atomic Nerds site is well worth reading.)
Some other highlights:
- Raichlen (and, I assume, his escorts) hit three barbecue places for lunch: Franklin Barbecue, John Muller’s (“tx@bugmenot.com”, “texas”), and…Stiles Switch. I still haven’t made to Franklin (I’m waiting for the circus to die down), and I need to try Muller’s. But Stiles Switch is probably my current favorite barbecue joint (at least in the Austin area) so it fills me with delight that it earned the Raichlen seal of approval. Here’s a review of the Switch from the Statesman.
- This one goes out to our great and good friend Carol: grilled ice cream, an Azerbaijani recipe that I’d like to try. (Azerbaijan has TV chefs? I wonder if there is Azerbaijani public television, and if it has pledge drives.)
- This one goes out to our brother-in-law. Raichlen on ceramic cookers (like the Big Green Egg): there’s really not much difference between them, so go with the one that matches your patio furniture best.
- Packaged charcoal briquets actually originated with Henry Ford, as a method of recycling wood scraps from the Model T. Ford started converting them into charcoal, packaging them, and selling the bags; this venture became the Kingsford company.
- The Statesman pretty much f’ed up their coverage of this event. The first article I saw on it said it was free, you just had to call and RSVP. A few hours later, they amended that to “free for museum members, $4 for everyone else“, and blamed the museum for the error. I can tell you we were not museum members, and nobody was collecting money for admission. (They were selling Raichlen books, and he did do a signing after the talk.)
- Raichlen seems to me to be a pretty swell guy. I was impressed not just with his presentation, but his willingness to stay and answer questions afterwards. I think we would have been there all night long if the museum staff hadn’t cut off the Q&A (and he was still answering questions during the signing). My biggest surprise of the night: he has a degree…in French literature. Hmmmm. Maybe there’s hope for my food anthropology dreams after all.
- Raichlen’s blog, though he hasn’t put up anything from Austin yet. There is stuff in his Twitter feed.
Edited to add: Let me throw this in. The patron saint of barbecue and barbecue pitmasters? Saint Lawrence. This explains much.
Obit watch: August 15, 2012.
August 15th, 2012Various sources, including John Scalzi and the Onion A/V Club, are reporting the passing of noted SF writer and SFWA Grand Master Harry Harrison.
I never met Mr. Harrison (though I suspect we attended some of the same Worldcons) and I wasn’t well read in much of his work. I should probably get a copy of Make Room! Make Room!
But I was a big fan of the first five “Stainless Steel Rat” books, especially The Stainless Steel Rat for President
There was a quote in the first book that I found rather striking at the time:
When I first started using BBS systems, back in the early 80s, I took my online pseudonym from Harrison’s character, for precisely those reasons.
Rest in peace, Mr. Harrison.
Second chances?
August 15th, 2012At age 69, Betty Smithey learned that sometimes you really do get a second chance.
She’s 69 years old, she’s been in prison for 49 years, she needs a cane to walk. Is anybody going to hire her? Who is going to pay her medical bills? What kind of “second chance” is this?
And the reason she was in prison for 49 years is that she strangled a 15-month-old baby. I don’t see anyone giving Sandy Gerberick a “second chance”.
Honestly, I’m not sure what justice would be in this case. Should Ms. Smithey have died in prison? Maybe. I want to believe that people deserve a shot at redemption, though. My problem is less with the commutation of her sentence and the granting of parole by Arizona authorities (which I suspect was motivated at least in part by not wanting to pay the medical bills of an old woman), and more with the LAT‘s hopelessly optimistic characterization of releasing a woman who has spent the past half-century in prison as giving her “a second chance”.
More things I did not know until now.
August 15th, 2012I have no joke here, I just like saying “Eleven million dollars in counterfeit Canadian Tire money.”
Random notes: August 15, 2012.
August 15th, 2012I think today is going to be a day for food writing. I have a longer post planned about last night. But in the meantime, here are some random things for you to chew on.
The NYT has made several discoveries:
- There are places outside of Manhattan, and even outside of New York state, with exotic names like “Iowa”.
- People in those exotic places sometimes gather during the summer, in what are called “state fairs”.
- At those “state fairs” you can purchase food items on sticks.
(Quote from the slide show attached to the article: “The fascination with food on a stick is difficult to explain, but it usually means a 30 to 40 percent increase in sales.”)
(I would really like to know how well the vegetarian corn dogs are selling.)
Speaking of food, today would have been Julia Child’s 100th birthday. Expect festivities around the web, starting with the NYT. I kind of like Julia Moskin’s “The Gifts She Gave” and Jacques Pépin’s “Memories of a Friend, Sidekick and Foil“.
(I note, with some bitterness, that our local PBS station is showing something called “Julia Childs [sic] Memories: Bon Appetit” tonight. I say “some bitterness” because a) I expect this to not show any complete recipe preparations, from start to finish, and b) our local PBS station is in the middle of a pledge drive, so I expect constant “give us money” interruptions.)
Something I noticed over the weekend: the French Quarter Grille has opened a second location. In Round Rock. Specifically, in the old Gumbo’s location. Hmmmmm.
Obit watch for the record: Ron Palillo, “Horshack” on “Welcome Back, Kotter”.
The LAT has apparently discovered that used car dealers are…used car dealers.
Why, is this not Hell? And are we not already in it?
August 14th, 2012This is the single most amusing review of a NYC restaurant I’ve read since Frank Bruni reviewed Ninja for the NYT.
And a side reference on the EaterNY site led me to “Soul Daddy”. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with “Soul Daddy”: very few people were. The chain (of three restaurants: NY, LA, and the Mall of America) was the “prize” on an NBC reality series called America’s Next Great Restaurant, which nobody watched.
“Nobody” includes me, but I did follow the recaps on the A/V Club website. I hadn’t thought about “Soul Daddy” for the better part of a year, and wasn’t surprised to find out the restaurants were defunct. It did surprise me, though, that they only lasted just about two months. (Apparently, the NY and LA locations closed after six weeks so they could concentrate on the Mall of America location; that closed two weeks later.) LA Weekly has a good summary of why it failed. (Important safety tip: if you’re going to start a restaurant, it helps to have food that doesn’t suck.)
What I wonder is: how do you throw $3 million down the drain in two months? Were the locations that expensive? (Maybe.) Were the construction costs that high? (I can see that, especially if they were trying to keep the actual concept secret until the day after the last episode: that probably took a lot of bribes payments to the construction crew.) Or did they not actually burn through $3 million, and the investors just said “F— you” and pulled the plug after NBC cancelled the show?
Lying liars who lie.
August 14th, 2012Petros Bedi is doing a 42 1/2 year prison sentence. Twelve years ago, he was convicted of shooting a man in a nightclub.
The primary prosecution witness was a man named Seraphim Koumpouras, who agreed to testify after he was arrested on drug charges.
This was a lie, and the prosecution knew it, because they were the ones who paid Mr. Koumpouras: they gave him $3,000 in cash, and paid $16,640 in hotel bills.
Noted:
Toys, toys, toys.
August 13th, 2012Did you know that the promo code SUCKITGROUPON will get you 45% off your Buckyballs order from getbuckyballs.com?
I didn’t, either, until I saw it on Overlawyered. I already got my first set of Buckyballs, but I just ordered some more: this time, I got some BuckyBigs, so I can pretend to be Captain Queeg while I’m sitting at my desk.
(Note that I have no financial relationship with the BuckyBalls people; I just want the CPSC to die in a fire.)
In other news, the Germans have shipped my USB TV receiver.
Obit watch: August 13, 2012, part 2.
August 13th, 2012Wow.
August 13th, 2012I have not been paying much attention to the Olympics, but some of the images from the closing ceremony in this photo gallery are stunning.
In particular, the ballerina cum phoenix, translucent octopus bus, and pretty much all the fireworks related images knocked me off my feet. I wish someone could explain the Pet Shop Boys to me, though.