“Hands on a Hardbody“, the Broadway musical, is closing this Saturday. The musical opened March 21st, and played 28 regular performances and 28 previews.
Background:
“Hands on a Hardbody” the movie.
“Hands on a Hardbody”: why they don’t do that any more.
Back in February, French President François Hollande visited Mali. While he was there, “grateful Malian authorities” gave him a baby camel.
This was, of course, a bad idea. “… the animal screeched constantly, and did not seem to enjoy the president’s attempt to pat it on the head.”
So he left it in the care of a local family.
The authorities in Mali are upset and embarrassed.
Two of my favorite websites intersect today.
XKCD’s “What if?” answers the question “What’s the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen?”
I want to start a Kickstarter in order to get someone to do this and put it on YouTube, where I can watch it from a safe distance. Anyway, this is how you get dioxygen difluoride, or FOOF.
The fun part is that XKCD goes on to quote Derek Lowe’s discussion of FOOF (yet another in the “Things I Won’t Work With” series). A part XKCD left out, discussing a scientific paper on the properties of FOOF:
This also gives me a transparent excuse to link another more recent Derek Lowe post, with YouTube video from France of some scientists doing science! Specifically, the French scientists in question are reacting chlorine trifluoride with various common laboratory objects: plexiglass, wood, and a gas mask, among other items. The results are entertaining, for values of entertaining that include “Gee, I’m glad these guys are doing it and not me.”
Somebody in the comments posted this link to the older version of Air Products Safetygram #39: the newer version is described as “sanitized”, and lacks the photos of raw chicken on fire.
One eyewitness described the incident by stating, “The concrete was on fire!”
…stolen from my great and good friend RoadRich:
The only thing I’d add to that is that I’m waiting for the victims of this particular act of violence to show up at a State of the Union address and testify before Congress, etc. etc. etc.
The LAT just put up a profile of noted gunsmith Terry Tussey.
I’ve heard of Mr. Tussey before. I’ve never had any work done by him, or handled any guns he’s worked on. But he is frequently mentioned in the pages of American Handgunner. I gather that he and the editor of AH are friends.
(I’m not implying that there’s anything wrong with that. Just saying.)
I’m happy to see this kind of thing in the LAT. I’m glad anytime I see gun ownership shown positively in the media.
But there are a couple of things that give me pause.
This comes across as kind of snobbish to me, even within the full context of the article. (Tussey is referring to “two revolvers purchased online” that cost “cost under $400 apiece” and are made of “polymer and metal”. No brand name is given.)
The reference to “plastic guns” also seems odd, given that:
He keeps a loaded 9mm Glock on his workbench and a 9mm Rohrbaugh in his pocket.
And then there’s this:
“can’t see a purpose for assault weapons or high-capacity magazines”, but “is a passionate supporter of the 2nd Amendment”. Uh-huh.
I am hesitant to jump down Mr. Tussey’s throat: it is possible that he was misquoted or misrepresented by the LAT. I’ve used the contact form at his site to ask if this is the case, and will report back if I get any response.
So Lawrence and I watched the latest SyFy channel disaster, “Chupacabra vs. the Alamo” Saturday night at the home of our friends who shall remain anonymous. (Thank you, anonymous friends!)
I’m hoping Lawrence will write a review so I don’t have to, but there’s one thing I did want to highlight.
Have any of you tactical operators given any thought to how you’re going to perform your tactical operations with an iPad (or other tablet) in one hand?
Are iPad operations something that’s covered in training these days? (Karl, I sense a great need.)
The Houston Astros won their opener…and have lost five straight games since.
(There are no MLB teams that have gone winless in this first week of the season. Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and San Diego are all 1-5. Also, the blog widget I was using to display MLB standings hasn’t been updated in two years, and doesn’t seem to work with the current version of WordPress.)
Perhaps because nobody pays attention to the rapidly dying W.N.B.A.? This entire NYT article strikes me as condescending: Brittney Griner can make her own decisions about where she plays, and who she plays against. She doesn’t need the NYT telling her what to do.
(Seriously, I don’t understand why people are paying so much attention to Mark Cuban’s comments. He didn’t say anything that every other owner in the NBA hasn’t thought. If Fred Phelps could hit the 3-point shot and sell tickets, Cuban would be waving bundles of cash under his nose. So would every other NBA owner.)
Magnus Carlsen is the top-ranked chess player in the world, and “the first world No. 1 from a Western country since Bobby Fischer“.
More:
I’m waiting for him to show up in a commercial for Citizen Eco-Drive watches, myself.
Anne Smedinghoff was killed by an IED in Afghanistan on Saturday. Four other Americans, who have not been identified, were killed as well. Ms. Smedinghoff and the others were part of a “delegation accompanying the governor of Zabul Province to inaugurate a new school in Qalat, the provincial capital. She was to help deliver donated books.”
I note this here because I actually heard about it before the NYT covered the story. I don’t know exactly how I found this, so I can’t give credit, but there’s a very nice tribute to Ms. Smedinghoff at a blog called “Email From The Embassy”.
I think there’s a lot that could be said about the importance of books, but I will let the author of “Email” say much of what I want to say:
Awful damn dusty in here. Maybe I need to clean the HEPA filter.
It hasn’t been a good few days for the movies.
Noted documentary filmmaker Les Blank passed away on Sunday. NYT. LAT. Edited to add: A/V Club (they were late in getting their obit up).
My favorite Les Blank story:
Blank’s most famous film is another one involving Herzog: “Burden of Dreams” about Herzog and the making of “Fitzcarraldo”.
Margaret Thatcher: LAT. NYT. Battleswarm. I apologize if I seem to be giving her short shrift: my feeling is that everyone who doesn’t live under a rock is aware of her passing, and I am just linking to the obits here for the historical record.
Two points of followup on “The War Within”:
Philadelphia magazine recently ran a story called “The War Within” about John P. Boudreau, a former Marine sniper “who says he’s haunted by his actions in the Middle East”.
Here’s the headline and subhead according to Google:
The War Within: Meet the Sniper Who Killed 2,200 People in Iraq
“killed 2,220 people in Iraq”? Alarm bells ringing yet? Carlos Hathcock, for comparison purposes, had 93 confirmed kills. Chuck Mawhinney is credited with 103: that makes him #1 on the Marine list. Vasily Zaytsev had 242 confirmed kills, and Simo Häyhä 505 with a rifle.
So this guy had about 22 times as many kills as Hathcock and Mawhinney, about nine times as many as Zaytsev, and four times as many as Simo Häyhä, the most bad-ass sniper ever? And nobody raised any questions: like, how did you get to 2,200 kills? After, say, kill #110, or #200, or somewhere long before #2,200, you’d think the Marines would be pulling this guy back to teach at the sniper school in Quantico (or Pendleton, or Lejeune).
So why didn’t they? And why haven’t I linked to the article yet, or even a Google cached version of it, so you can play “spot the problems” along with me?
Yep. It was all a fraud. The magazine, and the writer (a Philadelphia radio host) got suckered by Boudreau:
The magazine hasn’t even been able to confirm that Boudreau was a Marine. The article has been pulled from their website. (Google returns a search result for the original article, but the article has also been pulled from Google’s cache. Bing seems to have it cached, but I can only read page 1 and the comments.)
I don’t thnk the magazine was acting in bad faith, but it does bring to mind an observation that’s not original to me. I wouldn’t suggest we abandon the all-volunteer military, but back when we had a draft, you could count on the fact that a large percentage of the population – including the guys in the newsroom – had served in the military and could spot military related bullshit when they head it. If we still had a draft, I can imagine a Philadelphia magazine editor telling the writer, “I was in the Marines as a scout sniper myself. I talked to this guy: he doesn’t even know what color the boathouse at Pendleton is.”
Layers of fact checking, indeed.
(Forgot the hattip to Lord Jim.)
Tim Pernetti is apparently out as Rutgers AD over the Mike Rice scandal.
Also out: Jimmy Martelli, aka “Baby Rice”, an assistant coach.
Both of these are being spun as “resignations”, but my reading between the lines is that they were more like “I’m quitting now before I officially get canned.”
No kidding: this the actual quotation of the day in today’s NYT:
-Preet Bharara, United States attorney in Manhattan.
A long time ago, I wrote about the cases of Tyquan Knox and Michael Slider. Knox allegedly robbed a teenage girl, then tried to intimidate her and her mother into dropping charges against him. When that didn’t work, he killed the mother. Knox stood trial three times for the murder: the first two trials ended in hung juries, but Knox was convicted the third time and is serving life in prison.
Yesterday, Knox’s girlfriend, Keeairra Dashiell, was sentenced to “life in prison with the possibility of parole after 19 years” after pleading guilty to second-degree murder and attempted robbery. During the first two trials, she agreed to testify for the prosecution in return for a seven-year sentence:
Noted #1:
Noted #2: If this was reported at the time, I completely missed it. What ever happened to Detective Slider?
Thinking about what I wanted to write, I came to the realization that I’ve already written much of what I wanted to say: he was a huge influence on how I think about movies (for which I am grateful), his views on what is and is not art were questionable, and many of the political views he expressed later in his life were appalling. (Roger should have spent more time reading Mencken.)
A/V Club. Onion. There are several posts at Jimbo’s site, but this one in particular seems to be worth highlighting.
This whole thing is kind of odd, taken in the light of Roger’s April 2nd blog post, where he talks about launching a Kickstarter campaign to bring back “At the Movies”, relaunching RogerEbert.com, and various other projects. I wonder how things went downhill that fast.
And I also wonder what’s going to happen to RogerEbert.com. My understanding is that Ebert et al planned to move the site to their own servers, and off the Sun-Times site. That’s fine. But I went to the site for the first time in weeks yesterday and realized that I wasn’t all that interested any longer; only one of the current reviews was written by Ebert. Many of the others were written by Richard Roper (who I only tolerated because he was on the same show as Ebert), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Jim Emerson, and other reviewers who I don’t find interesting. I’m hoping the site stays up as an archive of Ebert’s writing (and it’d be nice if it also archived “At the Movies”), but it isn’t a place I’m going to go for movie criticism any longer.
That’s a little mean, but it is also the truth. Let’s end on an upbeat note. Or two.
They don’t make them like that any more. (Actually, they do, but only for the SyFy channel.)
I couldn’t find their “Worst Movies of 1992” show online, but here’s their original review of “Shining Through”, which was their pick for worst movie that year (this clip does include the strudel scene):
Someone’s done an IMDB list of all of Siskel and Ebert’s worst movies of the year, just in case you’re interested. A Google search will turn up clips from some, but not all, of those episodes.