Might as well jump right into the first TMQ of the regular season…
TMQ Watch: September 9, 2014.
September 10th, 2014Quote of the day
September 9th, 2014Lincoln, Robert Todd, xi, 3, 4, 22, 210.
See also Jinxy McDeath;
Presidential Angel of Death
—index entry in Charles Lachman’s The Last Lincolns: The Rise & Fall of a Great American Family
(Explained.)
(I just started reading Lachman’s book yesterday. For some reason, I found Chapter 2, about Willie, Tad, and the president’s relationship with the boys, really hard to get through. You want sad? That’s a sad sundae with sad sauce and chopped sad sprinkled over it.)
Your loser update: week 1, 2014.
September 9th, 2014Like Ebola or toenail fungus, we have returned for another year of the loser update.
Are there any teams that we think have a chance of going 0-16 this year? We haven’t given this a lot of thought, but off the top of our heads, maybe Oakland or Jacksonville?
In the meantime, NFL teams that actually still have a chance to go 0-16:
New England
Cleveland
Baltimore
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
San Diego
Oakland
Kansas City
New York Football Giants
Washington
Dallas
Chicago
Green Bay
New Orleans
Tampa Bay
St. Louis
TMQ Watch: September 2, 2014.
September 5th, 2014Yes, we know. We’re still a little behind. Our schedule was thrown off yesterday because we actually went “golfing”. (Technically, we went to a driving range. Yes, we know that seems odd; it was a corporate outing, and we were in it more to be social than to hit balls.)
Anyway, haiku after the jump….
There’s all kinds of stupid.
September 3rd, 2014Many of which I have written about here.
But forging a court order in an attempt to get content you don’t like removed is a whole new kind of stupid, even for sleazy telemarketers.
(Is “sleazy telemarketer” redundant?)
Today in journalism fraud.
September 3rd, 2014I have read and admired a fair amount of William Langewiesche’s work. He did some excellent reporting on Pakistan’s nuclear program, and is one of the better mass-market writers on aviation related subjects.
But.
Some of you may have been following Chevron Corp. v. Donziger. For those who haven’t, briefly: Donziger filed a lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador alleging that Chevron polluted drilling sites. Donziger won a $19 billion judgment in the Ecuadorian courts, but it turns out that there was massive fraud perpetrated by Donziger and the Ecuadorian courts. Overlawyered has a Chevron tag if you want more details.
The point, and I do have one, is: Langewiesche was asked by Vanity Fair to do a story on the suit. (Interesting point: “Donziger’s wife at the time worked in corporate communications at Condé Nast, the magazine’s publisher.“)
Langewiesche did the story.
But it wasn’t just “sympathetic”.
The reporter asks Donziger to prepare lists of dozens of questions to be asked of Chevron. And he begs Donziger to help him prepare arguments about why there’s no need for him to do face-to-face interviews with Chevron officials, as they’ve requested, even though he spent days meeting with Donziger and his legal staff.
“I want to avoid a meeting, simply because I do NOT have the time. But I don’t want to go on record refusing a meeting,” writes Langewiesche. “Perhaps I could say that my travel schedule is intense . . . ” He not only submits his emails to Chevron for Donziger’s approval (“What say, Steve. I gotta send this tonight”) and even lets him rewrite them. “Let me know if this works,” Donziger says in a note returning one of them. “I was a little aggressive in the editing.”
Langewiesche also sent Donziger a copy of the story before it was printed. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that is a violation of journalism ethics. Especially since
And, of course, there were errors. Including one major one: an expert hired by Donziger was quoted as saying cleanup would cost $6 billion.
I am looking forward to reading VF‘s response. Certainly, these are just accusations, but they are accusations backed up by Donzinger’s email, which was obtained as part of a court order related to the ongoing fraud case.
(Hattip: JR.)
Speaking of food…
September 2nd, 2014…by way of the Hacker News Twitter feed, I’ve learned of a relatively new blog, “Cooking in the Archives“.
Subtitled “Updating Early Modern Recipes (1600-1800) in a Modern Kitchen”, the basic premise is this: Alyssa Connell and Marissa Nicosia, the authors, pull recipes published between 1600 and 1800, adapt them for a modern kitchen, cook them, and report.
Sometimes, this works well: maccarony cheese, anyone?
And sometimes you get…fish custard.
This should be interesting to follow. I commend it to your attention.
Ancient trade secret, huh?
September 2nd, 2014This is a couple of days old, but I was waiting to find a non-paywalled report.
Kreuz Market (yes, the barbecue place in Lockhart) is accusing a former employee of stealing trade secrets.
That’s pretty much the nut. The rest of the story is a decent overview of Kreuz Market history and expansion plans, probably worth reading if you don’t follow Texas barbecue obsessively.
(For my younger readers, subject line hattip.)
How ’bout those Astros?
September 1st, 2014They’ve actually been doing better this year; the various sites I use have been projecting around 92 losses this season.
Better, but not better enough.
Obit watch: August 30, 2014.
August 30th, 2014Werner Franz passed away on August 13th at the age of 92, though his death does not appear to have been widely reported until now.
Mr. Franz is believed to have been the last surviving crew member of the Hindenburg.
Obit watch: August 29, 2014.
August 29th, 2014This has been circulating for a couple of days, but I wanted to wait until I was able to confirm it.
Jeremiah Healy, mystery writer.
I haven’t read any of the John Francis Cuddy mysteries, though they’ve been on my radar. Healy did one of the essays for In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255 (TALK).
TMQ Watch: August 26, 2014.
August 28th, 2014Cowboys! Indians! Notre Dame! Da Bears! All in this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
Buddy watch.
August 27th, 2014I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, or if it is a well known fact, but former Providence mayor “Buddy” Cianci has his own line of marinara sauce, which is sold around the city. (At the time I was regularly in Rhode Island, he also had his own line of coffee, but I’m not sure if he still does.)
Profits from the Mayor’s Marinara go to a scholarship fund for kids.
The AP thought this story was so fantastic, they gave it a special award. I have some reservations about this:
Is it possible they weren’t making money because former Mayor Cianci was kind of out of the public eye during this period? (He got out of prison in 2007, and had some radio and television gigs, but I don’t know what kind of public visibility those brought him. At least one of the shows he hosted was the “weekend public affairs program” Four Leather Chairs Against a Blue Background On the Record with Buddy Cianci. What kind of ratings do those get?)
More:
This story, for some reason, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. To be fair, though, there’s a related story by the same author that’s a little more interesting. You know that scholarship fund mentioned earlier?
…
I hate to keep sounding like Buddy Cianci’s defender. But if this is a scam, it seems to be a very penny-ante scam. It sounds like something that started out as a PR opportunity and went a little off the rails.
(ETA: Forgot to give Romenesko credit.)
Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Poor guy.
August 27th, 2014I’ve mentioned previously that I watched COPS on a regular basis, at least until it left Fox for the wilderness of basic cable. I’ll still watch it if I catch it on somewhere.
I remember seeing some fairly shocking and disturbing things during that time; fatal highway accidents, one carload of police officers (with a camera crew on board) being broadsided during a high-speed chase by another cop car. But I never thought anything like this would happen.
…
The World-Herald claims that the police were the only ones shooting, and that “at least 30 shots” were fired during the incident.
I’m not sure what else I can say about this, other than it is sad and awful, and I’ll pass along any significant updates.
Busted, again.
August 26th, 2014General hattip on all of this to Romenesko.
A while back, I wrote about Busted, Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Lasker’s book about their coverage of corrupt cops in Philadelphia. At that time, I asked what they had accomplished, given that the bad cops were still on the street.
Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer (the other daily newspaper, and the one that got soundly beat by Ruderman and Lasker on the story) ran a piece “Why an accused Phila. officer is still on the force” purporting to answer the question of why Thomas Tolstoy hadn’t been fired yet, even though he’d been accused of sexually assaulting three women. There are various reasons, but the Inquirer‘s key one:
The documents also show that actions the victim ascribed to two Philadelphia Daily News reporters who wrote about her assault further undermined the criminal case by damaging her credibility and complicating a federal investigation.
The woman told investigators that the reporters – whose account of the assault and other police abuses would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2010 – provided her with gifts, paid her bills, offered her money to hire a lawyer, and told her that she could collect a financial windfall if she talked to them and not to law enforcement officials, according to the documents.
She also told investigators that the reporters were aware that an associate of hers had pressured her to lie about the circumstances of the attack. And she said one of the reporters encouraged her to give an exaggerated account of the raid, saying it would help in a potential lawsuit.
The woman’s accusations of impropriety by the reporters – included in detailed interview summaries signed by FBI agents – imperiled an already precarious case, according to three high-ranking officials familiar with the investigation.
Uh-huh. Ruderman and Lasker deny this, of course. Ruderman has posted a response on Facebook. And it’s worth pointing out that these accusations only involve one of the three women, and have nothing to do with the separate allegation that Tolstoy was one of the cops caught on tape stealing from bodegas.
Philadephia magazine has published their own piece about the problems of the Inquirer story. Points:
- “Tolstoy was placed on desk duty and being investigated for allegedly attacking Naomi nearly a year before the Daily News printed her story.”
- “Naomi wasn’t the only woman to make sex assault allegations against Tolstoy.”
- And, of course, “Philadelphia Police don’t excel at making cases stick against fellow cops.” This probably bears some deeper examination:
I’ve lost track at this point, so I can’t tell you how many APD officers have been fired and reinstated. But I don’t think it’s near 90%. (This is the last breakdown I have, from 2011, and covers disciplinary cases short of firing as well as firings.)
I’m trying to keep an open mind here. But right now, the Inquirer story strikes me as a major daily newspaper carrying water for a bunch of dirty cops.