Teresa Jacobo wrapped up her testimony yesterday in the Bell trial, and indicted former council member George Mirabal is testifying now.
Mirabel is pretty much echoing Jacobo: I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, I thought it was okay because the city attorney said so, and I did a lot of work outside of meetings for the city.
This Statesman story is notable because it avoids answering the key question: how does it smell?
Followup on the Tesla story: Elon Musk claims that the story is fake, and that the vehicle logs show something different than the NYT writer claims. The NYT vigorously denies this claim. Summary of the back and forth, with links, at Jimbo’s site.
The International Olympic Committee has decided to keep modern pentathlon in the 2020 Olympics. This makes me happy, as I have a fondness for modern pentathlon, the sport George S. Patton competed in. It strikes me as being a true test of all-around athleticism; the sort of sport true gentlemen compete in.
But wait, there’s more to the story: the IOC is keeping modern pentathlon…and dropping wrestling as a “core sport”. Yes, wrestling, a sport that was part of the first modern Olympics in 1896, and one that dates back to the ancient Greeks. I’m not a big wrestling fan, but this decision seems strange to me. Especially since the 2020 Olympics are also keeping taekwondo and field hockey.
The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, continued:
Sounds like a great guy, right? 105 years old, charismatic teacher, hangs with Leonard Cohen?
More:
(I have a short list of cars that I wouldn’t want as a primary daily driver, but would love to have as a second car just to knock around in. On that list: a VW Thing. Which I know isn’t strictly the same thing as the Kübelwagen, but close enough for a Nobel Peace Prize winner to order a drone strike.)
This post over at Andy Ihnatko’s site reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to blog about. I’m going to put that after a jump, and politely suggest that you read Mr. Ihnatko’s post first, because what I’m going to discuss will ruin his elaborately set up punch line.
S’awright? S’awright?. S’awright? S’okay.
(You know, as a kid, I didn’t get Señor Wences. As an adult, I miss him.)
Benny’s stepping down from the Papacy is going to be one of the biggest news stories of the year. I wanted to note it here because it gives me a chance to plug a book I really liked: Thomas J. Reese’s Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church
Reese devotes a fair amount of space to discussing questions about the papacy, such as: what happens if the Pope develops Alzheimer’s? What happens if he becomes totally incapacitated, say by a stroke? Or if he goes crazy? What happens if the Pope is in a coma (I know it’s serious)? And, can the Pope resign? I guess we have an answer to that last question: “Yes”.
I missed the 70th anniversary of the sinking of the troop transport Dorchester on February 3, 1943. You remember the story of the Dorchester, right? Or if you don’t remember the name of the ship…
They were:
I didn’t get a chance to post an update from Friday’s Bell trial, so let me do that now: Teresa Jacobo is still on the stand, and they’re still going over the “working full time for the city” thing.
In addition, nobody told Jacobo that “a certain number of meetings of those authorities” needed to be conducted at city council meetings, or that the meetings needed to last for a certain amount of time. Jacobo also claims that she gave out business cards with her home and cell numbers to her constituents; “Residents would often call her at all hours, she testified, for help with city issues.”
As I’ve said previously, a lot of the defense seems to be “it was all Rizzo”, as well as “nobody told me”, and “I assumed it was okay because the city attorney didn’t say it wasn’t”. I’m still thinking we’re going to end up with acquittals for the council members, and the bus is going to run over Rizzo, back up, and run over him again.
The ejection seat is not a toy.
(Top: my sister’s youngest boy. Bottom: the middle boy, who you may remember from here. Not shown: the oldest boy, Sir NotAppearingInThisSketch, who had a band thing going on and didn’t make the trip with us.)
I’m a little tied up at the moment: my sister and brother-in-law are away, and my mother and I are riding herd on my three nephews. Today’s agenda included a field trip to the Texas Military Forces Museum. (Photos to come.)
Thing one: The LA County Sheriff’s Department had a program called “Friends of the Sheriff”. No, really. (It still exists, but the name has changed.) The basic idea was that applications to LACSD from people who knew the sheriff, or other department officials, would be reviewed through this program.
Among the people hired through this program: Justin Bravo, Sheriff Lee Baca’s nephew.
He was hired anyway. Wanna take a guess as to why this coming up now?
A while back, I wrote about the case of Reverend John J. Hunter, who was transferred to the Bethel AME church, except Bethel didn’t want him for good and sufficient reasons.
Shoes are now dropping. Bethel AME officially fired Hunter. His petition to go back to his previous church, First AME in LA, has been rejected. And…
And First AME, in turn, is suing Hunter, “alleging that Hunter, his wife and a small ‘cabal’ of church leaders misappropriated millions of dollars in church and nonprofit funds.”
I’m with Tam: I don’t care that much about a car’s power source, as long as it can do what I want it to do.
That said, I find this pretty amusing: a NYT reporter sets out to drive a Tesla Model S from Washington to Boston. Hilarity ensues.
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In the approximately 24 hours I’ve had WP-Ban in place:
The one thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history:
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Yesterday’s developments:
Former councilman and assistant to the food bank administrator, Victor Bello, wasn’t just a rat. He’s also crazy, at least according to his lawyer.
It has been mentioned previously that Bello was banned from City Hall. But the reasons haven’t been discussed until now:
It could also have had something to do with the condom incident. Moving along, the first witness for the defense was Teresa Jacobo, one of the indicted council members.
And then one magic day, according to Jacobo, Robert “Ratso” Rizzo and Edward Lee, the city attorney, called her in and told her…
But Jacobo testifies that Ratso didn’t tell her how much she’d be making. I’m sorry, but if someone told me I could devote all my time and effort to the community and I’d be making a full-time salary, I’d freaking ask what that salary would be.
You can get botulism from prison wine, aka “pruno“, aka “that stuff that’s frequently fermented in a cell block toilet or other places just as disgusting”.
(You know where else you can get alcohol from, with less risk of botulism? Sourdough starter. No, really; the liquid that separates out and rises to the top if you leave it sit is somewhere between 12% and 14% alcohol. I haven’t tried drinking any of it, but I suspect it tastes a little better than pruno.)
My mother sent along an article from the WP that I had missed, “Better bread starts with a sponge“, which discusses some sourdough techniques for home bakers.
I appreciate her sending that along, and have already sent her some comments. But since they’re easy blog fodder, I’ll repeat them here. I don’t really have any problems with Marcy Goldman, or her article; I want to try her “Favorite French Bread“. But there are some questions I have and comments to make.
. I’d like to try that, but it takes 14 days to get to the point where you’re ready to bake with it, and it seems very fussy. While I was looking up Silverton’s starter, I found this starter recipe from Michael Ruhlman, which doesn’t take 14 days, doesn’t call for added yeast, and also looks like something worth trying.
and The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America
, the latter of which I paid $1 for at the Austin Public Library bookstore. At one point in Making, Ruhlman mentions a CIA chef who has a starter he’s kept going since 1985; the book came out in 1997, so that was at least a ten-year-old starter.)The volume of spam comments has gotten out of control again; there were more than 600 waiting to be cleaned out this morning. Akismet does a fine job of stopping the spam from being posted (and I can count the number of false positives since I started this blog on the fingers of one hand), but I still have to go through the queue and empty it at least once a day.
In an attempt to mitigate this problem, I have installed the WP-Ban plugin and will be configuring it to block IP addresses, or IP address ranges, that are a source of spam. I feel slightly bad about doing this, but in the 30 minutes I’ve had WP-Ban installed, it has blocked 15 spam attempts.
If anybody runs into problems with this, please let me know. I’ve added my contact email address to the WP-Ban page as well. We’ll see if the Beats by Dr. Dre scumbags, or any of the other spammers, try to contact me.
