Personally, I kind of hope Rep. Collins turns out to be innocent, and it was a dingo who gave the stock tips.
This never happens.
August 7th, 2018But when it does, I can’t miss commenting on it.
Friday night, the Las Vegas Aces were scheduled to play a WNBA game against the Washington Mystics.
But things happened along the way. I can’t find specific details, but the general summary is that it took the Aces 26 hours to get from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C. They arrived around 3:45 PM on Friday. The game was scheduled to start at 8 PM Friday, so they’d been travelling all that time and had about four hours to rest and get ready for the game.
The team thought this was unacceptable. The Aces had already been in contact with the player’s union throughout the whole travel fiasco, trying to get the game delayed: but the WNBA schedule is so tight at the moment the league didn’t feel like they could delay.
So the Aces just refused to play.
The Aces felt like they could trust the league to make a decision. And the league decided today.
There was little precedent for the decision because the WNBA has never before canceled a game. There have been only a handful of instances over the past few decades in major sports in which teams have had to forfeit.
Most of those occurred because of fan involvement, notably the Chicago White Sox’s infamous Disco Demolition Night in 1979, when the field was so damaged the second game of a doubleheader could not be played.
As far as I can tell, while there is a Wikipedia page on forfeits in sport, and a seperate one for baseball specifically, I can’t tell if any basketball game – NCAA, NBA, or WNBA – has been forfeited before now. (The NCAA has voided wins, but that’s different.)
The last forfeit I know of in NCAA football – or in any other sport before now – was the Grambling State-Jackson State game in 2013. I welcome correction if anybody has a more recent example.
Edited to add: Ooops. Missed that California University of Pennsylvania forfeited one in 2014 after five players were charged with assault.
(“Don’t WNBA teams fly charter?” I think that’s covered in one of the links, but the short answer is: no, the league ordinarily doesn’t allow charter flights in order to keep a level playing field, since some teams have more resources than others. The league did give special permission to the Aces to arrange a charter while all of this was going on, but the team wasn’t able to arrange one on short notice.)
Obit watch: August 7, 2018.
August 7th, 2018Joël Robuchon, noted French chef.
Lawrence and I often joke about French cooking: “High prices. Small portions.” And I’ve never eaten at a Robuchon restaurant. But he sounds like someone who had the right ideas.
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Paul Laxalt, former Senator.
Tom Heckert, former general manager of the Cleveland Browns. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Amy Meselson. She was 46 years old, and had a reputation for defending immigrants to the United States. Her obit opens with a great story about her zealous advocacy for Amadou Ly, a Senegalese immigrant who was part of a winning robotics team at his high school.
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Ms. Meselson earned her middle name by surviving a life-threatening respiratory disease. Besides dealing with depression, she had recently been given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and extreme anxiety — all aggravated when she traveled to Greece two years ago to volunteer at a camp for Syrian refugees, Sarah Meselson said at a memorial service.
At the service, she said she wanted to recount her daughter’s maladies for two reasons.
“One,” she said, “is to emphasize what everyone already knows — that it is not always possible to comprehend the level of suffering that others may be experiencing, especially when they appear to be successful and to excel to the extent that Amy did.
“The other,” she added, “is to applaud my daughter for all that she accomplished despite her mental illness.”
In that vein, this is hard as hell to read, but worth it. (Hattip: Popehat on the Twitter.)
Obit watch: August 6, 2018.
August 6th, 2018Edited to add: NYT obit now up.
DEFCON 26/Black Hat 2018 preliminary notes.
August 5th, 2018DEFCON 26 and Black Hat 2018 start up later this week. Again, I’m not going, but I do feel like I’m inching closer to making a return. Full-timers from my group have been sent to Black Hat in the past, so who knows what’s going to happen next year?
What would I do if I was there? A quick skim of the Black Hat briefings schedule doesn’t show a whole lot that really jumps out at me. I’d probably just be hitting targets of opportunity, with a few exceptions:
- “Stress and Hacking: Understanding Cognitive Stress in Tactical Cyber Ops” by Celeste Paul and Josiah Dykstra, because cognitive stress under pressure is something I’m interested in and has wider implications.
- “Reversing a Japanese Wireless SD Card – From Zero to Code Execution” by Guillaume Valadon.
- “Mental Health Hacks: Fighting Burnout, Depression and Suicide in the Hacker Community” by Christian Dameff and Jay Radcliffe, for obvious reasons.
- “Open Sesame: Picking Locks with Cortana“, with Amichai Shulman, Ron Marcovich, Tal Be’ery, and Yuval Ron. The lockpicking in this case looks less like actual physical lock sport: “In this presentation, we will reveal the “Open Sesame” vulnerability, a much more powerful vulnerability in Cortana that allows attackers to take over a locked Windows machine and execute arbitrary code.”
- “Applied Self-Driving Car Security” because Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek.
What about DEFCON 26? After the jump…
The Washington Post makes me testy again.
August 2nd, 2018Headline:
The provocative Mike Daisey is a straight-shooter in his solo show about guns.
Dear WP:
The words you were looking for in that headline were “known liar“. “Known. Liar.”
You’re welcome.
Obit watch: August 1, 2018.
August 1st, 2018Captain Lawrence E. Dickson passed away on December 23, 1944.
On Dec. 23, 1944, Captain Dickson got into a P-51 Mustang fighter plane at Ramitelli Air Base in Italy for a reconnaissance mission. Later, as he piloted the plane during the return flight, it experienced engine failure, the agency said.
Ms. Andrews said she learned from a wingman who flew alongside her father that two other planes flew alongside Captain Dickson’s plane as it descended until it disappeared.
Some witnesses told officials that they saw the plane crash and roll over, the canopy jettisoned.
Officials from D.P.A.A. said Captain Dickson was not seen ejecting from the plane.
(Note: as far as I am aware, the P-51 in 1944 did not have ejection seats.)
Captain Dickson was one of the Tuskegee Airmen. The crash site was not found until 2012, remains were not recovered from the site until 2017, and DNA analysis was not completed until last Friday.
Obit watch: July 30, 2018.
July 30th, 2018Yesterday was a bad day for wrestling.
Nikolai Volkoff (an alias for Josip Nikolai Peruzovic) passed away on Sunday. He was 70.
Peruzovic, who was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005, was best known in the world of professional wrestling for his over-the-top Soviet/Russian character during his time in the World Wide Wrestling Federation (later the WWF) in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. In reality, Peruzovic was born in what was then Yugoslavia and now stands as part of Croatia.
Peruzovic’s most famous run came as part of the then-WWF’s explosion in popularity in the mid-1980s, as he teamed with the Iron Sheik to form one of the most successful heel teams in the history of pro wrestling while being managed by the legendary “Classy” Freddie Blassie. He famously sang the Soviet Union’s national anthem while the Iron Sheik taunted and stoked the anger of crowds around the world by playing upon real-life conflicts.
Volkoff and the Iron Sheik won the tag team championship in 1985.
Brian Christopher Lawler, son of Jerry Lawler, who wrestled as “Brian Christopher” also died on Sunday. Apparently, he was in jail on a DWI charge and committed suicide in his cell.
Ron Dellums, former Congressman.
Two obits that I thought made an interesting juxtaposition:
Mary Ellis, who died at 101.
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Oksana Shachko, who the paper of record describes as “a Ukrainian artist and a founder of Femen, a women’s rights group famous for its topless political protests”.
Together with the Pussy Riot punk group in Russia, Femen became part of a post-Soviet protest phenomenon that sometimes drew a violent reaction. In 2011, Femen said that Ms. Shachko and other activists had been abducted in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, after campaigning in front of the K.G.B. headquarters there. Several members were beaten up in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, in 2013 ahead of a visit by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
Ms. Shachko and several other activists from the university town of Khmelnytsky, Ukraine, founded Femen in 2008. After a few conventional protests, they decided to demonstrate topless, often with political slogans written on their bodies.
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In 2013, members of Femen ran topless in front of Mr. Putin as he visited Germany, drawing a grin and two thumbs up from him before guards wrestled the activists to the ground.
Ms. Shachko, along with several other Femen members, moved to Paris that same year and was granted political asylum by the French authorities. She maintained that the group’s members had been pursued by Russian special services and that the agents had planted a grenade in Femen’s office in Kiev, along with a photograph of Mr. Putin.
Ms. Shachko was 31. According to the NYT obituary, her death is being investigated as a suicide.
Nine years.
July 28th, 2018I’ve been doing this for nine years?
Where does the time go?
Thanks to everyone for their continued support. I can name a few people specifically: Borepatch, Joe D., Lawrence, Roadrich, Mike the Musicologist, South Texas Pistolero, Infidel de Manahatta, pigpen51, roadgeek, thinkingman, Chuck Pergiel, Morlock Publishing…and probably a whole host of others I’m forgetting now.
Thanks, everyone. Can I keep this up for nine more years? I intend to try.
Obit watch: July 28, 2018.
July 28th, 2018Bill Loud, patriarch of the Loud family, is dead at 97.
I’m not sure how many people remember the Loud family. They were the stars of what may have been the first television “reality” show: “An American Family”, which ran on PBS in 1973.
“An American Family” shocked Americans families. Aired with the imprimatur of public broadcasting, it was portrayed as sociological exploration, not exploitation, and although many people found it irresistible, it was also hard to watch.
It showed Mr. Loud’s wife, Pat, bluntly discussing his adultery with her brother and sister-in-law. It showed her telling her husband to move out. It captured the Louds’ oldest son, Lance, living an openly gay life in New York — startling images for many people at the time.
The Louds separated during the filming of the series, ended up divorcing…and thirty years later, moved back in together and cohabited until Mr. Loud’s death.
In the 1970s much of the outside world had taken moral measure of Mr. Loud and found him wanting. But Grant Loud said his father was not created by television and should not be defined by it. He noted that the family moved to Santa Barbara in 1962 with very little money, and that his father had created a successful business from scratch.
“It provided a family of five kids with a very comfortable life, and took him — and us — around the world,” he said by email in 2013. “As a kid, I never thought much about it. As a middle-aged guy, I can only shake my head in awe and respect.”
The Loud’s had five children. Four survive him: Lance passed away in 2001.
I’ve seen scammers on Fyre…
July 28th, 2018I’m sure we all remember the Fyre Festival, now a synonym for “legendary fiasco”.
Loyal readers of my blog, and perhaps others, may remember that one of the principals, William McFarland, pled guilty to wire fraud charges related to the festival.
You’re probably not going to believe this. I have trouble believing it myself. On Thursday, Mr. McFarland pled guilty to even more charges.
Astonishing part one: this had nothing to do with the Fyre Festival. From the Justice Department’s press release:
Astonishing part two: notice the dates? Yes! He was running this scam while under indictment for the Fyre Festival scam!
Max sentence, whale sushi, yadda yadda. But I would expect running a second scam while you’re under indictment for the first one to be what they call an “aggravating factor”, and I’d expect Mr. McFarland’s sentence to be on the high end of those ranges.
Of course, I Am Not a Lawyer, so take that with some salt.
Public service announcement.
July 27th, 2018If you need to do something with a car title, like a title transfer, please be aware of the following facts:
Universal Auto Title Service on Justin Lane in Austin is “permanently closed”. Their former location has a sign in the window directing you to the county tax assessor’s office on Airport Boulevard, which is open from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM.
While it is true that the Airport Boulevard office is open from 9:00 AM to 5:30 PM, they will not do any transactions involving vehicle titles after 4 PM.
If you are thinking about going to one of the many tax assessor’s satellite offices, such as the one in Oak Hill, those are all “temporarily closed” (except, I believe, the one in Pflugerville). (I did a sorry job of covering this, for which I apologize: there was a flap, with several arrests, because some employees of the various satellite offices were apparently diverting money into their own pockets.)
There is apparently a title and registration service still open in Oak Hill. I’ll report later on.
Obit watch: July 24, 2018.
July 24th, 2018Tony Sparano, offensive line coach for the Vikings and former head coach of the Dolphins and Raiders. StarTribune.
This is kind of a half-obit, but I want to bring it up here so I can call out a couple of things. Tess Henry was an opiate addict. Beth Macy, a writer for the NYT, covered her struggle to get off opiates using “medication-assisted treatment”. Sadly, that struggle ended last December: someone beat her head in and threw her in a dumpster.
This jumped out at me:
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So, on the one hand, we have the addict’s mother, who not only knows her better than just about anyone else, but who is also a nurse who has treated addicts. On the other hand, we have…a NYT reporter.
This, too:
The day of her funeral in January, Dan Polster, a federal judge in Cleveland, was presiding over a hearing in the continuing mass litigation case against opioid makers, distributors and retailers. “About 150 Americans are going to die today, just today, while we’re meeting,” Judge Polster said.
Last month, a lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs in that case called me to discuss a potential settlement. She wanted my ideas about how to treat the more than two million opioid-addicted Americans.
Settlement for what? We’ve decided we’re going to demonize the drug companies for making effective painkillers available, and make it harder for people with real, chronic, crippling pain to get the drugs those companies make – drugs that can improve their quality of life – because we’re so damn concerned with what other people put into their bodies.
I’m not exactly “pro-heroin”. But if Tess Henry had been able to spend $20 a day on a couple of shots – shots of known dosage and purity – would she have been able to work? Hold down a job? Take care of her child? Would she have been any different than the person who comes home at night and drinks some Scotch over ice?
Would Tess Henry be alive today, if we weren’t so insistent on the “demon opiates” line of thinking?
“the Drug Company That Addicted America”. I think we know where she’s coming from.
I deny the allegations and I defy the alligators.
July 23rd, 2018Contrary to what (some of) my friends believe, this is NOT my secret Twitter account:
To the dude at my local burger joint: NEVER, EVER PUT TOMATOES ON MY BURGER AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. I AM NO LONGER A MAN THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED FRUIT OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!
— Ordy's Summer Lovin' (@OrdyPackard) July 23, 2018
Though I do fully support the sentiment.
Damn!!! Maybe… and just maybe… you could take the tomatoes off? 🙈🙈😱
— Cami 💋 Your favorite Chilean🇨🇱 (@CamiMadeinChile) July 23, 2018
Yeah. That’s a negatory, GhostRider. First off, there’s tomato residue left on the burger. Second, and more importantly: when I go somewhere and order a burger (or, for that matter, most other foods) and I say “I want it this way, with these toppings,” I expect to get what I ordered. If I ask for “ketchup and onions only” I expect to get that, not something with lettuce, tomato, and a bunch of vile glop on top. Don’t tell me “scrape it off”: FIX MY FOOD THE WAY I ASKED!
(Sorry if it seems like I’m worked up, but I’ve lost count of the number of meals I’ve had ruined or had to send back because someone didn’t get my order right, or added things that weren’t listed on the menu, or or or…)
Obit watch: July 22, 2018.
July 22nd, 2018Jonathan Gold, restaurant critic for the LA Times and Pulitzer Prize winner. NYT.
This hit me kind of hard, and I’m not exactly sure why. I don’t live in LA, I barely even consider California to be part of the United States these days, and the LAT website has become so obnoxious I rarely read it. At most, I was an intermittent follower of Gold’s.
I know obituaries generally concentrate on the positive about the subject – I’ve seen very few that say, “Christ, what an a–hole” – but the tributes to him make him sound like an incredibly kind and funny guy who loved food, and even more loved telling people about food.
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He preferred to praise chefs rather than pan them. If Gold wrote about you, he generally liked your food. Earnest and slightly awkward in person, he would voice displeasure with a gentle rebuke instead of the gleeful excoriating that other critics tend to dabble in.
“He wasn’t looking down his nose at the world, he was looking out from the table and trying to put restaurants, meals and cuisines in context. Empathy, understanding, commensality: That’s what he brought to the game,” Meehan said. “Jonathan didn’t write restaurant reviews, he wrote about who we are and how we feed each other. He wasn’t just a better writer than the rest of us, he cared more, too.”
Also, he was only 57: pancreatic cancer got him so fast most people didn’t even know he was sick, according to the obits. I’ve linked to them before, but The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research still gets four stars from Charity Navigator.
Also among the dead: Shinobu Hashimoto, screenwriter perhaps most famous for his work with Akira Kurosawa (including “Rashomon”, “Ikiru”, and “Seven Samurai”.
Madeleine Kamman, noted French chef and author.
Last, least, and burning in Hell: Barry Mills, leader of the Aryan Brotherhood.