The first question I had when I heard this was: are they going to even have a ceremony, if nobody was elected? Answer:
The Toronto Maple Leafs have fired their general manager, Brian Burke. The Maple Leafs, as I understand it, play an obscure sport known as “hockey” which is popular in Canada.
The recipe came from Brody and Apter’s Bread Machine Baking
Slight modifications:
End result? Well, the photo of the loaf I took before cutting it turned out crappy. I’m mostly happy with the way the top crust turned out, but there’s a weird indentation on the bottom at one side of the loaf; almost as if it didn’t rise and expand around the bread paddle. I’m not sure what happened there.
As for the inside:
It has a slightly coarse, but not unpleasant, mouth feel (probably due to the cornmeal). In terms of taste, this is a really assertive bread. It isn’t overwhelmingly hot, but there’s a slight and lingering spice burn to it. I wouldn’t recommend this as a morning breakfast bread, but it tastes pretty good for lunch with some leftover fresh cheddar on top, or just with some butter and perhaps a little honey. I think it’d go well with chili or perhaps something Cajun.
I think I’m going to give this a B, mostly because of the bottom crust problem. I’d make it again, especially as an accompaniment to something that would stand up to the flavor. Next time, I’d take the two teaspoons of salt the recipe calls for and substitute a small amount of ghost pepper salt for part of that. (Trust me: a little ghost pepper salt goes a long way.)
Next up, I was considering making a sourdough goat cheese bread, but the recipe calls for “powdered goat’s milk”. I can actually get that at Sprouts, but they want $13 for a large can that I won’t use all of in eight weeks. I’ll have to see if I can find a smaller size.
Comments and criticisms welcome below.
Film director David R. Ellis. (NYT. A/V Club for all your “Snakes on a Plane” needs.)
Reporter and Pulitzer winner Richard Ben Cramer. Cramer may have been most famous for one of the greatest Esquire stories, “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?“
Yeah, we know. We got caught up in a bunch of stuff around January 1st, and last week’s TMQ totally slipped away from us. We figure we’ll do this week’s TMQ tonight, loop back and catch up with last week’s TMQ tomorrow (we’re doing them out of order because there’s some stuff we want to address in last week’s column), and then we should be in good shape all the way through to the end of the season.
At least, we hope so.
After the jump…
Austin Rifle Club sent out an email late last night stating that the Travis County Commissioners Court was considering the gun show ban today. I didn’t see that email until this morning, otherwise I would have considered going down to report.
According to the Statesman, the commissioners “discussed” the proposal, and heard testimony from residents, but did not take a vote. So you still have time to contact them.
So Judge Biscoe thinks gun shows are a threat to public safety, but not one that we need to act on immediately? One that can wait “three or four months”? Option two is that Judge Biscoe is a political hack who wants to be seen as “doing something” when he’s really doing nothing. But that can’t be true: political hackery on the commissioners court? Why, that’s unheard of! (Option three is that Judge Biscoe figures things will blow over in “three or four months”, we can return to the current status quo, and voters will forget his actions. My message to Judge Biscoe: “He’d seen how ‘civilized’ men behaved. He never forgot and he never forgave.”)
And, again, I’ll make the points that:
The Statesman does not give a breakdown of how many people spoke at the meeting, nor does it give any indication how many supported or opposed the measure.
And, once again, I’ll mention that Judge Biscoe is wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong! Here’s some legal precedent from the 5th Circuit for you, Judge Biscoe. The tl;dr version: the city of Houston tried something similar and ended up paying $50,000+ in legal fees to a gun show operator.
Keep that in mind. The opposition managed to get 200 people to support their illegal proposal. I think we can do much better.
Edited to add: Forgot something else I was going to mention: I updated the .CSV files of the county commissioners and the city council members with fax numbers, just in case anyone finds that useful. Someone yesterday (and I forget who it was) made the comment that they can ignore emails, but they have to answer the phone and they have to put paper in the fax machine. I am slightly dubious about the latter, what with modern technology and all, but the fax numbers are there if you can use them.
Edited to add 2: Updated story from the Statesman:
You don’t say?
And edited to add again: by way of Lawrence over at Battleswarm, ““If Austin or Travis Co. try to ban gun shows they better be ready for a double-barreled lawsuit.” Click through to find out who said that. Hint: it wasn’t someone who runs gun shows. Hint 2: it was someone who can unleash hell on the city and county.
Those of you who have been following Radley Balko and The Agitator know that Balko’s been on the story of Mississippi forensic pathologist Dr. Steven T. Hayne like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst exhibition.
For those of you who don’t follow Balko (I don’t click through as regularly since he moved to the Huffington Post), the NYT summarizes the story:
More:
Worth noting for the record: the Innocence Project has also been involved with Dr. Hayne. Dr. Hayne and the project settled a lawsuit out of court last year, and the project paid him $100,000. The NYT article touches on this some: one key point is that, in the process of preparing their defense, the project claims to have discovered new evidence that contradicts Dr. Hayne’s sworn testimony in various cases.
Bob Dylan: The Copyright Extension Collection, Vol. 1. No, that’s the real title.
Just finished calling all the Austin City Council members (none were available to talk to me, so I left messages with their staff), and sending emails through the forms on the city website.
My message was short and simple:
I can be a real mean SOB if I want to be. (“Take a jam to make you think. Take a challenge to make you great.”)
I plan to back this up with physical letters, which will probably go out tomorrow (assuming I can get my printer working).
Here’s something that folks might find useful: a MSWord merge file of all the council members, with addresses and office phone numbers. The email addresses come off the copies of the emails I sent through the contact forms; the “PO Box 1088” physical address is the one they all list on their contact pages. The phone numbers come from their contact pages as well.
(I could add fax numbers, I guess. If anyone uses fax machines these days.)
Edited to add: At Lawrence’s instigation, here’s a CSV version of the Austin City Council members. And here’s a CSV version of the Travis County Commissioners Court, both commissioners and their executive assistants, including phone numbers and email addresses.
Battery life on my Android phone has always been an issue.
Not too long ago (I think slightly more than a year) I bought a 1750 mAh hour battery from Best Buy. That worked okay for a while, but over the past few days, it has become clear that battery is dying.
“No problem,” I thought. “I’ll get another one from Best Buy.”
Went to Best Buy. Looked for batteries. Couldn’t find any. Got a clerk’s attention.
Best Buy no longer carries any cell phone batteries. At all. They’ve got car chargers. They’ve got cases out the wazoo. But no batteries for any cell phones, even the ones they currently sell.
The clerk told me “go to Batteries Plus”.
(Batteries Plus wanted $43 for a standard capacity Evo 4G battery, and didn’t have any 1750 mAh batteries. Screw that. I can get two 2000 mAh batteries from Newegg for $11.29. And I still have my original Evo 4G battery, plus a 3500 mAh battery that I paid $4.99 for a while back. I haven’t been using the 3500 mAh one because it is a physically larger battery that requires putting a custom back on the phone (included with the original purchase), which would in turn require removing the case I have on the phone. But it is there if I need it while I wait for the Newegg ones to come in.)
(Yes, I know it was CompUSA, not Best Buy, but this is still obligatory.)
Back in March of 2011, I noted the arrest of Timothy Durham, the CEO of National Lampoon Inc., on fraud charges. Specifically, he was accused of running a giant Ponzi scheme.
I missed the followup on this; it doesn’t seem to have gotten a lot of play in the press, plus it took place shortly after things went south for the winter for me. Anyway, Durham was tried, convicted, and sentenced at the end of November:
Durham was sentenced to 50 years in prison. The prosecution was asking for up to 225 years.
Durham’s co-conspirators, James Cochran and Rick Snow, were also convicted. Cochran got 25 years (against 145 years requested by the prosecution) and Snow got 10 years (the prosecution was asking for 85).
But, apparently, nobody did. Including “representatives of the organization that was most closely connected to the Austin Police Department and had the easiest access to criminal records: Blue Santa.”
Way to go, APD.
Also interesting: the “board” (or the former board, depending on how you look at it) is remaining silent. One former president, and the guy who set up the organization’s PayPal account, “declined through his lawyer to comment due to the ongoing investigation.” A second former president, who allegedly brought Shon Washington into the organization, also declined to comment.
“Like a dolphin into a tuna net.” I cannot lie: I live for analogies like that.
(Previously. Previously.)
What we do instead of doing something:
…
And:
Time to make some phone calls Monday morning.
Edited to add: Giving this some more thought, Charles Harris of Storied Firearms (who is quoted in the article) deserves some praise. He could easily have thrown the gun shows under the bus. After all, that’d drive business to his place. But no.
If you live in the greater Austin area, why not stop by Storied Firearms and pick up a little something? I visit there fairly regularly and find it to be a very nice shop. If you’re not in the Austin area, but support gun rights, there’s a contact form on their website that you could use to send a “thank you” to Mr. Harris.
Picked this up from Insta, but I don’t care that he already linked it; this is one of those stories.
People who have been reading this blog regularly know that I’m fascinated by magic and the history of magic. You know that my admiration for Penn and Teller is like the universe itself; finite but unbounded.
Penn and Teller are only in this story as sort of peripheral figures, but I commend it to your attention: a New Yorker profile of Apollo Robins, the world’s greatest pickpocket.
Part of what makes this story so interesting to me, other than the magic angle, is that Robbins’ work, and the techniques he’s developed, reveal really interesting things about the mind and human perception.
This is the best thing I’ve read so far in 2013. It may be the best magazine article of the year; I expect it to be in contention if we’re all still here in December.
Nobody needs a Ferrari to drive to the grocery store! We have to do something about these killer assault cars! Two deaths this week! And that’s just in California!
Hey, remember Bloody Monday? Wasn’t that a time?
Remember how the Kansas City Chiefs fired Romeo Crennel as head coach, but didn’t fire Scott Pioli as general manager?
Well, about that…
And this is sportsfirings.com, not sportshirings.com, but we have to add this note:
The move clears the way for the Chiefs to hire…
For God’s sake, people, you’re adults. Act like it.
“Egging” someone’s house as a “prank” is just dumb.
Especially if that someone is your boss.
And especially if you’re a cop.