TMQ Watch: September 17, 2013.
September 17th, 2013The street finds its own uses for things.
September 17th, 2013WOW MT @mwa4 Globalization: Syrian rebel uses iPad accelerometer to aim homemade mortar http://t.co/ltbIaIz9Iu t.co/2BudEtToni
— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) September 16, 2013
Hattip on this to Big Bill Gibson and John Gruber.
Onion headline, or New York Times headline?
September 17th, 2013Pullet surprise.
September 17th, 2013More:
Of course, these chickens are not dining on stale loaves from grandmother’s breadbox. On a recent afternoon at the farm, where a few hundred creatures inhabit a peaceful, 15,000-square-foot coop that would dwarf the size of most New York apartments, they clucked and ambled around pans of bread soaked in fresh milk, and white buckets full of leafy trimmings that would make a tremendous tossed salad.
“Some of this is nicer stuff than I have to eat when I get home,” said Mike Charles, a local poultry expert involved in the project.
I could snark on this, but I actually think there’s a lot to be said for chicken that tastes like chicken. (Didn’t Nero Wolfe buy chickens from a farmer who fed them on acrorns? Or was that pigs, and the chickens were fed on something else? I don’t have any of my Wolfe books here at work.)
But:
Yeah, what’s the carbon footprint of these chickens? How sustainable is “driving two and a half hours” to deliver vegetable scraps? Especially since the Amish are likely to have vegetable scraps and day-old bread of their own?
Your loser update: week 2, 2013.
September 17th, 2013NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Pittsburgh
Cleveland (Quote blatantly stolen from a family member in Cleveland: “Apparently, the Browns now have to suck for Teddy Bridgewater!” And what’s even worse: “Suck for Bridgewater!” doesn’t even have the ring to it that “Suck for Luck!” did.)
Jacksonville
Washington
NY Giants
Minnesota
Tampa Bay
Carolina
Quote of the day.
September 16th, 2013Bloombergism is the sort of thing the Constitution was designed to prevent.
–“The Dashed Dreams of President Bloomberg”, Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
(Hattip to Popehat on the Twitter for this one.)
Dear Washington Post.
September 13th, 2013There’s something you might want to go read. Parts of it are engraved on a monument very near your headquarters. Here’s the relevant section:
I hope this helps. If you have any more questions, I recommend an extended session of meditation at the Jefferson Memorial, and perhaps a little bit of reading.
More schadenfreude!
September 12th, 2013I can’t help it. I’m enjoying this too much.
Hey, remember when folks were saying this was Weiner’s comeback?
We can hope.
“time-honored city tradition”. There’s really nothing I can say here, is there?
I wonder if this is a rejection of the nanny state exemplified by Bloomberg.
Note the paper of record’s use of “post-Bloomberg” there, too. Interesting.
(Edited to add: More on the “Bloomberg backlash” theme by way of Insta.)
Noted.
September 12th, 2013Oh, well, there’s always next year.
Random notes: September 12, 2013.
September 12th, 2013Two games in, and we have our first head coach firing of the college football season: Doug Williams is out at Grambling. The team lost the first two games of this season, and was 1-10 last season (0-9 in conference).
The Chicago City Council voted to do away with the city’s gun registry.
Or, as Iowahawk once noted, Chicago blames their violence problem on other states…that don’t have a violence problem. (I can’t find his exact quote. By the way, Twitter’s search features stink.)
Criminal experts say the gun registry database in Chicago, which contains more than 8,000 gun owners and about 22,000 firearms, has helped the police better understand the movement of weapons in the city as they put in place new law enforcement strategies. Adam Collins, a spokesman for the Police Department, said in a statement that officers would be able to use a new online database of permit holders maintained by the Illinois State Police under the law.
“There’s no scenario where this makes the jobs of police easier,” said Jen Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab, about having to repeal the registry.
Of course, because Chicago’s criminal class is composed of law-abiding permit holding individuals who register their illegally possessed guns.
Speaking of sad pandas:
Kind of interesting that the paper of record mentions Bloomberg specifically, and not the NRA.
Heh. Heh. Heh.
And among the many things Mexico needs: strict machete control.
Things that make me go “Interesting”…
September 11th, 2013- “… on Friday, after six years of legal wrangling and decades after he wrote the lyrics to the hit song “YMCA,” Victor Willis will gain control of his share of the copyright to that song and others he wrote when he was the lead singer of the 1970s disco group the Village People.”
- Wow. “YMCA” is 35 years old?
- Hey! You kids! Get off my lawn!
- “He added, however, that he is thinking of prohibiting the Village People — the band still exists and is touring this month and next, though with largely different members — from singing any of his songs, at least in the United States.” Is this an example of copyright being used for the public good?
- “‘We hired this guy,’ Stewart L. Levy, a lawyer for the companies that controlled the Village People song catalog, said last year. ‘He was an employee. We gave them the material and a studio to record in and controlled what was recorded, where, what hours and what they did.’ Eventually, though, that argument was withdrawn. If the ‘work for hire’ doctrine can’t be made to apply to a prefab group like the Village People, it stands little chance of surviving a test against other artists who emerged in the 1970s and who always had a much greater degree of autonomy, like Bruce Springsteen, the Eagles, Billy Joel and Parliament-Funkadelic.”
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! watch (#3 in a series)
September 11th, 2013Speaking of ESPN…
September 10th, 2013The Washington Generals? Dude, what are you smoking, and where can I get some?
TMQ Watch: September 10, 2013.
September 10th, 2013Football season again. Soon, the air will chill. Soon, the Christmas decorations will start appearing in stores. Soon, Gregg Easterbrook will be writing about TV shows and the blur offense.
Oh, wait. Did we say “soon”? We mean “now”. After El Jumpo…
Random notes: September 10, 2013.
September 10th, 2013You could hear the music on the AM radio…
(If you have to put this much effort into “saving” commercial radio, is it really worth saving?)
I’m not a huge NASCAR fan: if I’m home and a race is televised, I’ll put it on as background noise, and I’d happily go to a race if someone invited me. But my life doesn’t revolve around it. With that said, this is interesting:
Ryan Newman replaced Martin Truex Jr. in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship on Monday night when NASCAR penalized Michael Waltrip Racing for manipulating the outcome of last weekend’s race.
Michael Waltrip Racing was fined $300,000, and general manager Ty Norris received an indefinite suspension. Truex, Bowyer and Vickers were docked 50 points apiece — but Bowyer’s deduction does not affect his position in the Chase, which begins Sunday at Chicago.
Isn’t “manipulating the outcome” of a race pretty much what every racing team tries to do? Is this example just particularly egregious? (And I find it surprising that there’s been no FARK thread on this yet.)
(Edited to add: Thanks to Ben for his thoughtful and enlightening comments, which you should really go read now. Also, FARK did put up a thread after I posted this.)