Radio silence.

April 25th, 2013

There just hasn’t been much newsworthy in the past day or so. I’m having trouble working up energy to write about TMQ’s mock draft column (further proof that Easterbrook is more funny to himself than he is to real people). I’m also having trouble with the latest Travis County DA development:

More than 170 Texas attorneys filed a brief Thursday in support of jailed Travis County district attorney Rosemary Lehmberg.
Austin criminal defense attorney Betty Blackwell said that Lehmberg, who pleaded guilty Friday to driving while intoxicated, has received a harsh sentence of 45 days in jail, a $4,000 fine and a 180-day drivers license suspension.

“Hey, Rosemary? Betty. How are you doing?”
“Oh, I’m so glad to hear that. Listen, Rosemary, I need a favor.”
“Well, Rosemary, I’ve got this client…”
“Look, Rosemary, when you were in jail and needed a hand, I stood up for you. Now you’re not willing to help me out with a little deal here?”

This is exactly the kind of thing I was afraid was going to happen. And, you know, I’m not sure it makes a difference. The petition to remove Lehmberg is based on the law, and the law says you can get thrown out for being intoxicated. Lehmberg’s confessed to DWI. As far as I know, the law doesn’t say you can get thrown out for being intoxicated unless you get a bunch of your friends to testify about what a great person you are.

Anyway, instead of content, have a couple of photos.

austin1

This is the Austin skyline, facing south from the 27th floor observation deck of the Main Building at the University of Texas. (Yes, that observation deck.) Taken at 1/60 and f/22, with the Nikon 55-200 VR zoom at 55mm. Just to the right of the Capitol, you can see the Frost Bank Tower, or as some of us like to call it, “the nose hair clippers”.

capital1

This is the upper portion of the Capitol, taken at 1/30 and f/22 with the same zoom at 200mm, and cropped some in iPhoto.

Posted in Law, Photography, TCDA, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

I heartily endorse this event or product. (#8 in a series)

April 23rd, 2013

Silvercar.

This endorsement may be of limited utility to most of you, since Silvercar currently only operates in DFW and Austin. But I am hopeful that they will expand to other cities.

What are they? Silvercar is a car rental firm, but they’re different from your normal car rental company.

First of all, they only rent one type of car: silver Audi A4s. That’s not so bad, for reasons I’ll get into in a bit.

Second of all, their prices are reasonable: right now, they’re charging $75/day on weekdays and $50/day on weekends. That’s actually about what you’d pay for anything from Enterprise at the airport. (I just checked the Enterprise site: cheapest is $66.99 for a full-size car, going up to $127.56 for a “luxury” car.) That is with unlimited milage.

Thirdly, the experience is nowhere near as annoying as your average car rental agency is:

  • They pick you up at the airport. You pick your car. You scan the QR code with the Silvercar app on your phone. You drive away with your rental. If you want, they’ll give you a briefing on how to use the navigation and audio systems. If you need help, they have some very pleasant people available to walk you through the process.
  • Unlimited mileage.
  • Fuel is charged based on what you actually use (at prevailing market rate) plus $5 if you don’t return the car with a full tank.
  • They don’t get pushy about the “collision damage waver”. As a matter of fact, I don’t think they have such a thing.
  • Those nice people they have on duty kept asking if we’d like a bottle of water or something while we picked up and dropped off the car. When’s the last time Hertz asked you if you wanted a bottle of water?

And the Audi A4s they rent are fun cars. Yes, they have Bluetooth. They also have WiFi. Seriously. You can use your rental car as a WiFi hotspot while driving. Most of this stuff is your basic Audi features, as far as I know, including the navigation and audio. But it is still really nice to have these features in a rental car, especially at this price.

I should note that I didn’t actually rent the car: Mike the Musicologist came up for a visit and handled the interaction with Silvercar. But I was along for the pickup and dropoff, and from what I saw it was the most friction-free car rental experience ever.

We drove the Audi down to New Braunfels Sunday night to have barbecue at the Cooper’s there (which I liked very much). Then we drove back through the city and stopped at the Buc-ees (yes, the one that won the “America’s Best Restroom” contest – and, yes, it is a darn nice men’s room). Monday, MtM and I drove down to Boerne and had lunch at a wonderful German restaurant called Little Gretel. I want to go back. Actually, what I want to do is take a long weekend, book a motel room in Boerne, and stay for a day or two, eating at Little Gretel, feeding the ducks in the creek across the street, and exploring the surrounding area.

We drove back to Austin by way of Fredericksburg (stopping briefly at the shop for the Nimitz Museum/Museum of the Pacific War) and the Audi never missed a beat. It felt like it was on rails even when I pushed it close to 100 MPH, and we got around 26 MPG for the entire Monday trip.

The one small issue I’d bring up with Silvercar, if they asked me, is that they only provide an iPod connector for the Audi MMI system. It’d be nice to have at least the Audi USB connectors as well. (I was unable to find a USB port in the car: the MMI system does have two SD card slots, though, as well as a SIM card slot.)

So, anyway, if you need a good rental car in Austin (or DFW), give Silvercar a try. And thanks to Mike for organizing this adventure.

Posted in Beef, Bluetooth, Cars, Endorsements, Food, Radio, WiFi | Comments Closed

Know when to fold up…

April 23rd, 2013

Texas, like some other states, has a sunset law. In short, and with certain exceptions, every state agency is subject to being abolished 12 years after it is created, or after the Legislature votes to continue the agency’s existence. In order for an agency to keep going, the Legislature has to pass a law authorizing the agency to continue.

Earlier this afternoon, the Texas House voted 65-81 against a bill that would continue the operations of the Texas Lottery Commission. From what I can tell, this would effectively end the state lottery (and “all charitable bingo, including games at churches and veterans’ halls”).

This is…unexpected. Reading the Statesman‘s coverage, it looks like a lot of the legislators voting against the bill have philosophical problems with the idea of a state lottery. Of course, if they do away with the lottery, that blows a $2 billion hole in the state budget, so there’s a chance that the ledge might reconsider. But for right now, this looks like this year’s “pass the popcorn” Texas Legislature moment.

Edited to add: Well, isn’t this special? The House took a lunch break not long after the vote. Then they came back and voted again: this time, the bill continuing the lottery commission was approved 91-53.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Firings, obits, and other things: April 23, 2013.

April 23rd, 2013

Firings: Mike Dunlap, Charlotte Bobcats head coach. One season, 21-61.

Obits: Richie Havens. NYT. LAT. A/V Club.

E. L. Konigsburg, noted author (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler). NYT. LAT.

This is one of those little tidbits that I find fascinating: “From the Mixed-Up Files…” won the Newbery Medal in 1968. That was Ms. Konigsburg’s second book. Her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth was the runner-up that year. (She won a second Newbery medal in 1997 for The View from Saturday.)

Mrs. Konigsburg, who spent a year teaching high school science, was an unabashed information-pusher. Children’s books, she once said, are “the key to the accumulated wisdom, wit, gossip, truth, myth, history, philosophy, and recipes for salting potatoes during the past 6,000 years of civilization.”

There will probably be more to say about this tomorrow, but Allan Arbus has also passed away.

In other news, while I was out and about having fun, Lawrence was working. Specifically, he’s been posting video of the Travis County DA being arrested for DWI, and of the DA in jail.

And what do I have to offer to compare with that? Pictures, maybe?

IMG_0607

Here we see the elusive Mike the Musicologist. While Jim attempts to throw a net over him, let me tell you about Mutual of Omaha…

And one for my great and good friend Weer’d Beard: ducks!

ducks

Posted in Books, Clippings, Firings, Law, Music, Sports, TCDA, TV | Comments Closed

Random notes: April 22, 2013.

April 22nd, 2013

Busy having fun today. More later.

In the meantime, have this NYT article about the disaster area the Jets have become:

Of course, trading Revis makes it much more difficult to imagine a Jets future that includes Ryan. It doesn’t say much good about a franchise that it can be forced by circumstances of its own creation to trade its best player. The Jets have been so mismanaged, so hamstrung by their own misguided talent evaluations and bad accounting, this was the only correct move in what is now a down-to-the-studs rebuilding.

And this breakfast interview with one of my heros, Ricky Jay.

“The standard con man’s line is you can only con someone with larceny in their heart,” Mr. Jay replied. “I can show you 800 ways in which that’s not true, but it’s what every con man will say. Certainly it is true to some extent. I mean, you’re promising people unbelievable returns. Anybody with a brain would be suspicious. Anybody with greed as their motivator wouldn’t care.”

There’s a common variant on that saying: “You can’t cheat a honest person.” I often respond to that by bringing up the bank examiner scam, which works because it targets people’s honesty (and desire to help “law enforcement” catch “bad guys”). But it is nice to see Jay make the same point…

Posted in Clippings, Magic, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Where do we get such men?

April 21st, 2013

The Statesman and other papers are reporting that 14 people are confirmed dead in West.

[Dr. George] Smith [EMS director for West] said four of the confirmed dead were among 18 EMS students who rushed to the scene. Another five volunteer firefighters died. “We had a class at the EMS station that was baptized under fire,” he told residents at the town hall meeting, tearing up as about 250 residents stood in unison and applauded.

The Waco paper is maintaing a list.

Volunteer Fireman's Monument, Texas S

Volunteer Fireman’s Monument, Texas State Capitol

Detailed article on the Dumas-Sunray disaster from Industrial Fire World.

Posted in Clippings, Heroism, Photography | Comments Closed

Shhhhhsh. The baby’s observing.

April 20th, 2013

A team of French neuroscientists who compared brain waves of adults and babies has come up with a tentative answer: At 5 months, infants appear to have the internal architecture in place to perceive objects in adult-like ways, even though they can’t tell us.

This is…interesting. (And the photo of the wired-up baby is a little creepy.) I’ve been spending a fair amount of time recently around a baby (and a toddler), and I’m not 100% sure I agree with their police work there, Lou. What does “perceive objects in an adult-like way” mean, exactly? Because the baby I’ve been hanging with doesn’t seem to understand adult-like concepts like “you can’t go through a solid object”.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that. She is, after all, a baby. At least we haven’t had to have the conversation about how riding the dog like it’s a small horse is FROWNED UPON IN THIS ESTABLISHMENT.)

Charles Nelson, director of developmental medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, cautioned that the French scientists may be over-interpreting data…
Brain wave data and brain activity measured by functional MRI scans alone cannot imply a behavioral state, Nelson warned.
“If that were true, I should be able to look at your [electroencephalogram and MRI] response and know what you’re thinking or feeling, and we know that is not the case,” he said.

Posted in Clippings, Neuroscience | Comments Closed

Obit watch, random notes, and open thread: April 20, 2013.

April 20th, 2013

Al Neuharth, creator of USA Today. USA Today obit.

In 1984, in an effort to push USA Today executives to cut costs, he invited them to a dinner near his home in Cocoa Beach. They arrived to see a long table set with matzo and Manischewitz wine in a mock tableau of the Last Supper and a Passover Seder. At the center sat Mr. Neuharth, a crown of thorns on his head and a huge wooden cross behind him.
“I am the crucified one,” he told the stunned executives, and warned them that they would be “passed over” if the newspaper foundered.

Headline:

Rutgers Men’s Coach Suspended With Pay Amid Investigation

This is not a repeat from two weeks ago.

Today is my birthday. I’m going to be out of pocket most of the day: going to the gun shop, then over to the capitol to take pictures, then on a tour of the UT Tower, and then to dinner. In my absence, consider this an open thread to talk about things you want to talk about: Boston, West, Michael Morton and Ken Anderson, the Astros, the vertical integration of the broiler industry, etc.

(As always, if this is your first time posting, I have to approve your comment. Once you’ve been approved, additional comments should go through without requiring moderation. Comment approval is one blog function I can do fairly easily from my phone, so you should not have to wait too long. Unless I’m driving.)

Posted in Admin, Clippings, Media, Obits | 3 Comments »

When I take over and declare martial law…

April 19th, 2013

…the radio stations will be all theremin, all the time. Except when I want to provide the people with important updates on the progress of our flying monkeys.

Posted in Clippings, Music, Radio, Sarcasm | Comments Closed

DAs Gone Wild!

April 19th, 2013

Order now! Only $19.95!

Lehmberg had been placed in an isolation cell for protective custody but she refused several orders to stop kicking the cell door and was put in “the emergency restraint chair,” the records say.

More:

According to an inmate incident report, Lehmberg also resisted a pat-down, refused to comply with officers, tried to scratch and grab an officer’s hand and yelled.
She was handcuffed and “leg-ironed,” according to the report.

And updating: in addition to the 45 days in jail, she was fined $4,000 and her license has been suspended for 180 days.

I know what you’re wondering: who will run the show while she’s doing hard time? Answer: “operational aspects of the office will be handled by senior staff“.

But DA Lehmberg isn’t the only local DA who has run aground on the shoals of the law. And at least she didn’t hurt anybody.

Former Williamson County District Attorney Ken Anderson was ordered arrested and booked into jail for the “intentionally harmful act” of hiding favorable evidence to secure Michael Morton’s 1987 conviction for murder, the court of inquiry found.
“This court cannot think of a more intentionally harmful act than a prosecutor’s conscious choice to hide mitigating evidence so as to create an uneven playing field for a defendant facing a murder charge and a life sentence,” District Judge Louis Sturns ruled.

I did not write a lot about the Michael Morton case and the court of inquiry into Anderson’s conduct because…well, I was a little distracted at the time, the case is complex, and it was being well covered by other people. Texas Monthly did a two-part series on the case itself, and covered the court of inquiry as well.

The short version of the story: Morton came home from work one day in 1986 and found his wife had been murdered. Morton was charged with and convicted of her murder, and served 25 years in prison. In 2011, DNA testing established another man committed the crime: Morton was released from prison, exonerated, and the other man was convicted of the murder in late March of this year. During the proceedings leading to Morton’s release, there were accusations that Anderson and the Williamson County DA’s office had intentionally withheld evidence from Morton and his defense during the original murder trial: these accusations resulted in the court of inquiry and the charges against Anderson.

Posted in Clippings, Law, TCDA | 1 Comment »

Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!

April 19th, 2013

The weather here yesterday was spectacularly crappy.

Today is beautiful. The sun is shining, the temperature is moderate – a perfect spring day.

For various reasons, including how nice a day it is (as well as some others that I don’t want to touch on just now) I thought it’d be fun to go down to the state capitol and take some photos.

So I loaded up the Honda with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction the big Nikon with the camera bag and lenses, as well as my tripod. Headed downtown to the capitol, got rockstar parking, and went inside to see a man about a racehorse before I started shooting. (Officious guard: “Sir, where are you going?” Me: “CHL holder.” OG: “Oh.”)

(For those who don’t know, the Texas capitol has a separate line for CHL holders that bypasses the metal detector.)

Anyway, get back outside, set stuff down, take out the camera…

…and the GD battery is dead. And, unlike my SD1000, I don’t have a spare Nikon battery.

Oh, well. I’m going to be down in that general area with the camera tomorrow as well, so I’ll plan on taking my photos tomorrow.

(And I stopped by Precision Camera on the way home so I could fix the “no spare Nikon battery” problem.)

(I’ve been meaning to mention this, but Precision Camera’s new store is really swell. Parking is a vast improvement over the old store, there’s much more space to move around and for them to display stuff, and the men’s room would get three stars if I was rating it for the SDC.)

Posted in Endorsements, Photography, Stupid | 1 Comment »

Your loser update: April 19, 2013.

April 19th, 2013

I wasn’t planning to do these as a regular thing this season. But I figure with everything else going on, folks could use a distraction while we wait.

Surprisingly, the Astros do not have the worst record in baseball. The Marlins are at 3-13, for a .188 winning percentage. That works out to an estimated 132 losses this season if trends continue: not quite Cleveland Spiders level, but good enough for third on the all-time list.

Houston is at 4-11, for a .267 winning percentage. That works out to an estimated 119 losses, which would be a record for the Astros, and would get them on the list right around where the 2003 Detroit Tigers are.

Posted in Clippings, Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Breaking!

April 19th, 2013

Not Boston: Travis County DA Rosesmary Lehmberg has pled guilty to DWI and been sentenced to 45 days in jail.

The Statesman reports she had a 0.23 BAC when she was stopped. The significance of this:

First-offense drunken driving is a Class B misdemeanor, punishable by as much as six months in jail and a $2,000 fine. But last legislative session, lawmakers upped the charge to a Class A misdemeanor if a suspect’s breath or blood test shows a blood alcohol level of 0.15 or above. A Class A misdemeanor carries a sentence of up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

Posted in Clippings, Law, TCDA | Comments Closed

Random notes: April 19, 2013.

April 19th, 2013

Holy crap!

Heard on the CBS coverage: “How do you lock down an entire city?” (Nobody had a really good answer to that question.)

Ten officers were being evaluated at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center in Brighton early this morning, according to a source, who said the officers said they were hurt from grenades being thrown from the window of a car during a car chase.

More:

“It was more than gunshot wounds,’’ Wolfe told reporters about 5:30 a.m. today. “It was a combination of injuries. We believe a combination of of blasts, multiple gunshot wounds.”
Wolfe said it looked like the man had been hurt by an “explosive device’’ and that the man was struck by “shrapnel.’’ The man was pronounced dead at 1:35 a.m. The hospital officials said they did not know his name.

(CBS, or the local CBS affiliate – I’m not sure which – just ran a commercial featuring an exploding air conditioner. Bad timing, guys.)

I may come back to this later. I want to do some research and possibly talk to Lawrence. In other news:

As a result of last week’s settlement in the legal battle over Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” Ms. Taymor’s directing credit on the musical has been enhanced – and it is now listed above the credit for Philip Wm. McKinley, who replaced Ms. Taymor after its producers fired her in March 2011.

Jimmy Haslam recently bought the Cleveland Browns. Haslam made a pile of money off of the Pilot Flying J chain of truck stops and “travel centers”. Yesterday, the FBI raided the Pilot Flying J headquarters:

A 120-page affidavit for a search warrant filed in U.S. District Court in Knoxville, Tenn., says Pilot Flying J sales employees withheld fuel price rebates and discounts from certain companies to boost the profitability of the company and increase their sales commissions. The affidavit says FBI and IRS agents are investigating charges of conspiracy, mail fraud and wire fraud.

More:

The document says “the rebate fraud has occurred with the knowledge of Pilot’s current President Mark Hazelwood and Pilot’s Chief Executive Officer James A. “Jimmy” Haslam III, due to the fact that the rebate fraud-related activities have been discussed during sales meetings in Knoxville, Tenn., in which Hazelwood and Haslam have been present.”

The Browns just can’t catch a break, can they? It will be interesting to see how this plays out as we get closer to the NFL season.

(Heard on CBS: “I was going into this thinking there was some connection to somewhere.” No s–t, Sherlock.)

Edited to add: Since folks are distracted by Boston at the moment, let me note here: the confirmed death toll in West stands at 12.

The State Firemen’s and Fire Marshals’ Association said Friday morning that it believes 11 firefighters died in the explosion, including four who were emergency medical service personnel.

According to the association, one of those firefighters was from Dallas: all of the others were volunteer firefighters with the West Fire Department.

Posted in Clippings, Explosives, Law, NFL, Sarcasm, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Thanks to the Statesman…

April 18th, 2013

…for the reminder that West, Texas was also the location of the Great Crush Crash.

(Technically, the Great Crush Crash actually took place in Crush. But Crush was a temporary city erected specifically for the event, and named after William George Crush, “passenger agent for the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad”.)

“The Great Crush Crash?” you say. Indeed.

On September 15, 1896, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad ran two railroad locomotives into each other. Head on. At an estimated 45 MPH. I remember reading an article in the Old Farmer’s Almanac many years ago about staged locomotive crashes; apparently, this was a fairly popular form of entertainment back in the old days. The Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad made a big deal out of this particular crash, which was Crush’s idea; they laid on special trains to the site, with reduced fares and what not. The entire city of Crush was built from the ground up:

In early September 500 workmen laid four miles of track for the collision run and constructed a grandstand for “honored guests,” three speaker’s stands, two telegraph offices, a stand for reporters, and a bandstand. A restaurant was set up in a borrowed Ringling Brothers circus tent, and a huge carnival midway with dozens of medicine shows, game booths, and lemonade and soft-drink stands was built. Finally, workmen erected a special depot with a platform 2,100 feet long, and a sign was painted to inform passengers that they had arrived at Crush, Texas.

An estimated 40,000 people showed up to watch the collision.

So how did that work out for them?

When the two locomotives, one painted bright green, the other bright red, collided at about 45 mph, their boilers exploded, killing three people and injuring a half-dozen more as debris was blown into spectator-filled areas.

In retrospect, this may not have been a smart thing to do. It appears that the railroad’s engineers repeatedly assured officials that there was no way the boilers would explode. But this was 1896:

People began to leave for home, the tents, stands, and midway booths came down, and by nightfall Crush, Texas, ceased to exist. The Katy quickly settled all damage claims brought against it with cash and lifetime rail passes.

And Mr. Crush? “…the railroad fired him that evening but relented and rehired him the next day.”

Why, yes, there is a historical marker. And here’s another article with some photos of the event itself.

Posted in Clippings, History, Trains | 1 Comment »

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