Today is Cormac McCarthy’s 80th birthday. Reliable sources tell us that his presents include a giant box of punctuation.
(Hey, I loved No Country For Old Men. I can make that joke.)
A different reliable source just informed us of the death of Helen Thomas, which is confirmed by CNN.
I was tied up yesterday and couldn’t jump on the Detroit bankruptcy story. Here’s coverage from the NYT, the Detroit Free Press, and Lawrence.
The people who run the hospital want to close it, and are trying to wind down operations. But the unions that represent hospital workers are opposed to closing the hospital.
San Jose State made a deal with the online course provider Udacity to offer “low-cost, for-credit online courses” in “remedial math, college-level algebra and elementary statistics courses”. How’s that working for them? Not well. “Preliminary results from a spring pilot project found student pass rates of 20% to 44%”. SJSU and Udacity have suspended the courses while they re-evaluate. One thing that might have been a factor:
No, not your obedient servant.
The State of Texas has approved a $15,000 a year raise for all local DAs and district judges.
Tannhauser asks for her intercession with God, and dies of opera.
–Ken @ Popehat
Runner-up, also from Ken:
This story has been buried; I had to dig pretty far down in the HouChron sports section to find it.
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The sport in question is rhythmic gymnastics.
Obit watch: Eugene P. Wilkinson.
(94. Damn, that was a good run. Also: “He received the Silver Star for valor in the Pacific.”)
Congrats to Lawrence on his winning the Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award in the Bulwer-Lytton Contest. Sadly, according to Lawrence, he will not be getting the complete set of Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s novels, which is a shame, as I was looking forward to borrowing his copy of Paul Clifford.
Like Robert Ruark, I have a certain sentimental attachment to the Coast Guard. (Unlike Ruark, I didn’t grow up around the water, and nobody ever let me chase a rum-runner on a Coast Guard cutter.)
I have some more pictures of the Cleveland Fallen Firefighters Memorial in the tubes, but not all of them came out as well as I would have liked. I was trying to get some closeups of the memorial that would allow folks to actually read the names on it.
Well, not really “gone”. I hadn’t been back to Ohio for nine years, and it amazed me somewhat both how much and how little has changed.
For example, there’s an entire grocery chain that I don’t remember from my last trip…that takes the Discover card and cash. No Visa/AmEx/MasterCard/Diner’s Club, not even debt cards with a PIN, just cash and Discover. Who came up with this idea?
On the other hand, the tractor tire store that was a landmark on the way to Grandma’s place is still there, after 40 something years. And Grandma’s place still feels remote from everything, even though there’s major strip centers at the end of her road, and even though much of the land was sold off over the past few years (and now has houses sitting on it).
And the old NASA hanger is still visible from the airport. That was another landmark for us kids. (My dad worked there, back when it was still the Lewis Research Center, before it was renamed “NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field“. Which is a mouthful. Not that I’m bitter or anything over the renaming; by gosh, if anyone deserved to have a NASA facility named after him, it was John Glenn.)
This is shaping up to be a long post, and sort of “stream of consciousness”, so I’m going to put the rest of it behind a jump. Before I do, here’s Grandma’s obituary, just for the record.
At the break, Houston is 33-61, with a .351 winning percentage. Straight multiplication projects out to 105 losses. Cool Standings projects “103.6” losses (how do you lose .6 of a game?), Baseball Prospectus projects 101.7, and FanGraphs projects an even 101 losses.
Miami is at 35-58, with a .376 winning percentage. Straight multiplication projects out to 101 losses. FanGraphs projects 100 losses, Baseball Prospectus 97.4 losses, and Cool Standings 99.5 losses.
And King continued to publish books as Bachman long past the “early” point of his career, including The Regulators and Blaze. Sorry, something about the NYT‘s phrasing here annoys me. As does this:
Nice bit of casual snobbery there, pal.
(This is actually the first Rowling book I want to read, though I don’t intend to pay an inflated price for a first.)
My heart goes out to any of my readers who are in LA:
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This is one of the best things I’ve read in the past few days.
And this is another of the best things I’ve read in the past few days: “A Statistical Analysis of Nerf Blasters and Darts” by Shawn O’Neil and Kate Drueen.
Yes, that is a real road sign.
And where does River Styx Road go to? If you guessed “River Styx“, take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.
We would also accept “the River Styx Bridge” as a correct answer.
I’m not 100% happy with the way these photos turned out, but it was a hard subject to photograph: I think it would have been hard even with the big camera instead of an iPhone. While they aren’t perfect, I think they’re interesting enough to post.
(Interior, Cleveland Arcade, downtown Cleveland, Ohio.)
I’ve been thinking about picking up one of the Olloclip lens kits
Well, just one bridge, really.
I keep thinking of these as “Egyptian”, but they’re not, really: they’re Art Deco.
These are a couple of the pylons, known as the “Guardians of Traffic”, at the ends of the Hope Memorial Bridge in downtown Cleveland. (AKA the “Lorain-Carnegie Bridge”.) We drove across this bridge several times, since it is the best route to the Westside Market. (“The bridge connects Lorain Avenue on Cleveland’s west side and Carnegie Avenue on the east side, terminating just short of Progressive Field.” Heh. My mother observed that everywhere we went in Cleveland, it seemed like we had to drive past Progressive Field. By the end of the trip, she was rather tired of it. In comparison, I think we drove past Browns Stadium twice, and Quicken Loans Arena once.)
The “Hope” in “Hope Memorial” is William Henry Hope, Bob Hope’s father. Mr. Hope was a stonemason who worked on the pylons when the bridge was built.
A reliable source tells me:
When the Cavs were in the playoffs, the city put Cavs sweatbands on the foreheads of the two closest to the Q, where the Cavs play.
There’s really no good place to park near the bridge and the pylons, so these photos were taken either with the iPhone camera or compact cameras, by myself and my mother, out of or through the windows of a moving rental car, while trying not to obstruct traffic. If I get a chance to go back and the weather is nice, I plan to get some better pictures with the big camera.
Whether you’re eating Beef Bourguignon and drinking a good Burgundy, or storming a prison to get at the gunpowder inside, I hope your celebration is a happy one.
Ja, das ist eine schnitzel bank!
Supreme lager, always!
(Poster found on wall at Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland, Ohio.)
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