No Sleep Till Sunday.

June 8th, 2013

In my previous post, I talked a little about the non-technical “amenities” (for want of a better word) at YAPC 2013. In this post, I want to talk some about the technical presentations at the conference, and a bit about the social aspects.

One thing I really liked about YAPC was the “Hallway Track”, or “Hallway++”. The basic idea behind “Hallway++” appears to have come from a gentleman named Matt S. Trout, and is based on two key ideas:

  1. The most valuable discussions often take place, not during talks, but in the hallway between talks.
  2. Too many people are afraid of disturbing or bothering someone in the hallway, and thus discussions don’t get started.

Thus, Hallway++. Hallway++ participants wear a sticker on their badge, or some other indicator to show they’re participating in Hallway++.

If you see somebody with Hallway++ on their badge, or a group with a sign saying Hallway++ on their table, that tells you in advance that you won’t be interrupting.

At least, it means you won’t be rudely interrupting – you may walk up to me and be told “frantically working on slides, please find me sometime after my next talk”, or you may walk up to a group and be told “sorry, we’re discussing a startup idea, we’ll wave when we’re done”.

The point here is to flip the defaults – for this symbol to say “I would rather risk a brief disruption to whatever I’m doing than risk missing out on an interesting conversation.”

So the Hallway++ badge/sign tells you that this person would rather you did try to talk to them, and not to worry about it.

I like this idea. I like this idea a lot. I want to marry it and have babies with it. More seriously, I would like to see this idea extended beyond technical conferences; I am seriously considering taking it to WorldCon if I end up going.

Did it work? Well, I had a fair number of quick interactions with participants, but no deep technical conversations. That’s more on me, though; in retrospect, I should have sought out more Hallway++ participants and tried harder to strike up conversations. (This is, as everyone knows, a hard thing for me.) Mr. Trout made what I thought was an interesting point in his talk on Wednesday: he’d thought Hallway++ would be a signal to introverts that it was okay to talk to extroverts, but as it turned out it was more of a symbol to extroverts that it was okay to talk to the introverts.

Another social note: YAPC 2013 in particular, and I believe YAPC in general (but since this was my first one, I can’t prove it) is very welcoming to first-time attendees. Monday morning, we were told that we (the first-time attendees) were considered to be VIPs, and would be treated as such: from the point of view of the YAPC organizers, we are the future of the language, and thus they want to treat us well

In that vein, I’d like to publicly thank Wendy Van Dijk for taking myself and several other first-time attendees under her wing on Monday night and taking us to dinner with her, Gabor Szabo, and about eight other folks whose names I didn’t catch. Not only did Wendy drag invite us along, she even paid for part of the dinner. Thanks, Wendy, and if we’re ever at another YAPC together, or if I make it to the Netherlands, I hope to be able to reciprocate.

What of the talks? I didn’t take detailed DEFCON level notes on them, but here’s a list of the ones I went to, along with comments as appropriate. Things were structured so that there was a morning ‎plenary‎ session with breakfast (to cover important announcements) and a later afternoon single track of presentations by prominent figures, leading into the 10 minute lightning talks. So I did go to the “Welcome to YAPC” talk as well as Mark Keating’s “The Perl of Christmas Past”, since those were single tracks and the other option was to stand outside and eat pigs in a blanket.

Here’s some of the other stuff I liked. (Slides) indicates that the slides for that talk are available from the linked page at the time I write this. YAPC did live streaming video during the talks, and has a video page where they plan to upload talk videos post-conference:

tl,dr: YAPC 2013 was one of the best events I’ve been to, from both a technical standpoint and an organizational standpoint.

Would I go back? That’s a problem for me. I don’t program in Perl professionally, so I don’t have someone who will pay my way. If I’m paying out of my own pocket, with airfare and hotel it becomes a budget stretch, and I don’t feel like I can afford YAPC, the S&WCA convention, and DEFCON every year. (At the moment, I can’t even afford the latter two this year.)

But next time YAPC is in my backyard (defined as “someplace I can reasonably drive to”) I’ll stay at the Motel 6. Or the Motel 3 1/2.

Thanks again to Wendy, the YAPC 2013 organizers, the good folks at the job fair, the presenters, and anyone else I may have forgotten. (Please feel free to tell me I forgot you in the comments.)

(Subject line hattip.)

Posted in Apple, Perl, Programming Languages, Thanks | 4 Comments »

Tarkus!

June 8th, 2013

tarkus

Texas Memorial Museum, Austin, Texas.

Posted in Museums, Photography | Comments Closed

Quick notes: June 8, 2013.

June 8th, 2013

John Donne never met Richard Ramirez.

George Karl of the Denver Nuggets was this year’s NBA coach of the year.

George Karl of the Denver Nuggets was fired on Friday. He was 423-257 over nine seasons.

(Thanks to Lawrence for the hattip on this. I was away from the computer pretty much all day yesterday.)

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Firings, Law, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 7, 2013.

June 7th, 2013

Esther Williams: A/V Club. NYT. LAT.

Posted in Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes on YAPC 2013.

June 5th, 2013

I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways. One of those is that I’ve been able to attend a decent number of professional events.

DEFCON is…DEFCON. It is probably about as well organized as it is possible for a group of people trying to herd 20,000 hackers to make it. The Black Hat briefings I went to were well organized, but I haven’t been to one of those in about 8 years, and that much money plus that many attendees buys a lot of organization.

I commented earlier that Texas LINUX Fest seemed well organized this year.

So how was Yet Another Perl Conference 2013?

I paid $80 to get in. And it was among the best and most thoughtfully organized technical conferences I have attended. Black Hat is perhaps the only other conference that, in my experience, even comes close – and that’s four figures to get into, so the trains had better run on time.

Every talk I went to started on time, or within a minute of the scheduled time. The tracks were thoughtfully divided into sections of 45 minutes or 20 minutes, so you had a good mix of shorter and longer talks. I think the 45 minute/20 minute track strategy is something other conferences (cough cough DEFCON cough cough) could benefit from. Some of the talks ran a few minutes longer than scheduled, but that was okay…

…because people were interacting, and the organizers built in generous 15 to 25 minute breaks between each track, so you had time to linger or run over a bit and still make the next talk…

…and/or grab a snack, because the organizers also provided food and drink. There was a morning breakfast, a mid-morning snack, and a 25 minute late afternoon break with snacks provided as well. And they laid out a decent spread: coffee, tea, juice, pigs in a blanket, doughnuts, bagels, muffins, and fruit for breakfast. More coffee, tea, and packaged snacks for the morning break. Cheese, crackers, cookies, veggies and dip, and more coffee and tea for the afternoon snack. And sodas all the time. Pretty much unlimited sodas. I almost think I may have drunk $80 worth of Diet Dr. Pepper. And on Monday night, they had the most magical words in the English language…

…”open bar”. (This was a pre-dinner mixer, and they did ask folks to voluntarily restrict themselves to one free alcoholic drink.) But enough about the food. What about the…

…tchotchkes? The conference provided ones were very good: a t-shirt, coffee mug, pens, notepads, and some other things I’m forgetting. One omission: they did not provide any kind of bag. (A couple of exhibitors, including my friend whump’s company WhiteHat Security, provided bags, but those didn’t show up until the second day of the conference. WhiteHat also provided some of those neat flashy bouncy balls, which I’m sure will be a big hit with the younger set.)

…The organizers also set up a job fair, at which I got a fair number of leads and even more stuff. Shutterstock (Edited to add: thanks to Nick Patch for correcting my synaptic misfire on this.) gave me a pretty cool t-shirt, which I may try to get a photo of later. Also noteworthy: the 4GB flash drive from MediaMath (which should be awesome for setting up a bootable LINUX distro: right now, I’m thinking Debian), and the aluminum water bottles from Booking.com. I’m afraid I’m forgetting someone who gave me something really cool, but I got so much stuff I could hardly carry it all. If I did overlook someone, I’ll try to make up for it in a second post.

Speaking of a second post, I think I want to end this one here and write about the actual talks I went to in a second post, just to keep the length on this one down to something reasonable. I also want to say thanks to a couple of folks and talk about Hallway++.

I realize I’ve been talking more about the stuff around the conference than the actual conference itself, but those things go a long way towards making people feel comfortable and welcome. When they are well done, like at YAPC 2013, people are happy. Happy people tend to learn more and interact more with each other.

Posted in Perl, Programming Languages | 4 Comments »

Noted.

June 5th, 2013

I heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he’s depressed, life is harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in threatening world. Doctor says, “Treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town. Go see him. That should pick you up.” Man bursts into tears.”But doctor” He says, “I am Pagliacci.”

But doctor, I am Pagliacci.

(The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255.)

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

Quickies: June 5, 2013.

June 5th, 2013

Omar Bradley will not be the new mayor of Compton. (Previously.)

Former NYPD officer Ali Oklu could have had…

…a great career and a good future,” he said in a recent phone call. “I’d be studying for the sergeant’s exam right now.”

What happened?

Mr. Oklu is to report to prison on Wednesday to begin a 46-month sentence, in part because of accepting that “side job”: transporting an array of contraband — including from untaxed cigarettes and guns — at the direction of undercover F.B.I. agents. The resulting arrests were ultimately hailed as one of the largest corruption cases involving city police officers in years.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Alive.

June 4th, 2013

Just busier than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.

I did get to shake Larry Wall’s hand and say thanks to him. (For those of you who are not Perl people, this is like an observant Jew meeting Moses.)

I also got to spend some time with Bill “whump” Humphries, who was in town presenting “Perl Meets Modern Web UI”. I thought it was a great talk, but I’m biased: I’ve known Bill since our days in the CIA spying on student organizations at the University of Texas, though I haven’t seen as much of him as I’d like in the past few years.

More as time permits. The “Hack Your Mac With Perl” talk is about to start.

Posted in Admin, Apple, Perl, Programming Languages | 4 Comments »

Stuff and things.

June 2nd, 2013

Last week was not a good week. This coming week is shaping up to be pretty hectic (though I am hoping not as personally unpleasant), so there may be a blogging slowdown.

I spent all day yesterday at the 2013 edition of the Texas LINUX Fest. I haven’t been since 2010, but that had less to do with my frustrations with the 2010 organization and more to do with personal issues. (In 2011, that just turned out to be a bad weekend, with having to get my car inspected and deal with other things. Last year, it was in San Antonio; while that may be a welcome change of pace, the schedule wasn’t compelling enough to make me drive 150 miles round trip.)

I thought about doing detailed summaries of each session I attended, but frankly I’m a little worn out and a little lazy. I’d rather mention a handful of panels I did like. (There were some others that I went to, but don’t feel I can fairly evaluate because they weren’t what I was expecting, or I was distracted by other issues (see below), or, in one case, I just think it’d be a jerk move to badmouth the presenter.)

I really enjoyed Theo Schlossnagle’s “Scaling: Lessons Learned and Their Applications to Apache Culture” keynote speech, which covered a lot of good points about complex systems. He sees commonalities between building scalable systems and building communities to support them. Many of the points he made may not be hot news flashes but are worth repeating. Among those:

  • People get so caught up in how awesome it it to build stuff that they forget what the real world looks like.
  • Code is just a tool. It isn’t a child or a family member. You don’t have loyalty to it.
  • Engineers have a tendency to focus on the technology they love instead of the actual problems they face.
  • At the core of things, your job is to tell the computer what to do.
  • Unbalanced hyperspecialization leads to poorly constructed solutions.
  • The biggest challenge is that increasing scale and increasing performance demands lead to increased complexity.
  • Technological complexity is an emergent property of complex and changing business problems. This complexity has to be understood and managed, which is difficult for specialists.
  • If you don’t provide value, your [stuff] doesn’t matter.
  • In order to survive, we need generalists. Schlossnagle didn’t quote Heinlein, but he might as well have.

David Stokes from Oracle did what I thought was an excellent talk on “The Proper Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database”. I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been dabbling in MySQL, so I got a lot out of this. Some of it may have been obvious (more RAM, more disks, good things. Use decent hardware, not something you scavenged from the admin assistant because it was too slow to run the latest Office), but the two things we learn from history are that too many people don’t learn from history, and that the obvious often isn’t.

Philip Ballew’s “Ubuntu; Where We Were, and Where We Are” presentation was…amusing, shall we say, mostly for the level of skepticism directed at Ballew from the audience, many of whom seem to be skeptical about recent Ubuntu decisions like the replacement of X. I’m becoming increasingly skeptical of Ubuntu myself; I just upgraded to 13.04, and now I’m running into the “The system is running in low-graphics mode” error, which I haven’t had time to fully debug. The worst part is that I’m getting this only intermittently; I think it may be a timing issue, possibly with some Virtual Box kernel extensions.

Owen Delong’s “IPv6 – It’s Easy on LINUX” presentation was also very good. I haven’t even started to configure my systems for IPv6 (and I’m not sure everything supports it: I’m sure about the Mac and Project e, but less sure about some older gear), so I found Delong’s talk useful. I was surprised, though, that there was even more hostility and skepticism from the crowd than there was at the Ubuntu panel. Why is IPv6 an issue in 2013? And many of the questions from the crowd seemed to boil down to “How do I emulate this particular thing I do in IPv4 using IPv6, even though the reason this is needed in IPv4 is because we have a limited number of IPv4 addresses available, where in IPv6 we could give every single atom in the universe a unique address and not run out?”

Okay, that was a long question, but you get the point.

Brad Richardson’s “GPU based password recovery on LINUX” lightning talk is worth checking out. He was able to do the talk in about five minutes, instead of the allotted ten, and the subject is interesting; using reasonably priced GPUs, you can rapidly break MD5 hashes, orders of magnitude faster than throwing a general purpose CPU at the problem. (Richardson’s slides give specific performance figures: try 16 hours 46 minutes to brute-force a “8 character password with lowercase, uppercase, and numbers”, versus an estimated 36 days for a CPU based attack.)

Anyway. Tomorrow is the start (for me) of Yet Another Perl Conference 2013. (I registered for the conference itself, but couldn’t afford any of the training going on over the weekend or after the conference. Plus the training conflicted with the LINUX Fest.) I expect to be pretty tied up Monday through Wednesday, though I will try to blog from YAPC as downtime and network connectivity permits. I may even try to blog YAPC 2013 itself, but I can’t promise that.

Edited to add: Why did I not have a “Perl” category on this blog, but did have a “Python” category, given that I use Perl more often than Python? Fixed.

Edited to add 2: Thinking some more about it, it made sense to have a “Programming Languages” category and make Perl, Python, and others sub-categories below that. I’m still thinking about whether it makes sense to put the languages category under “CompSci”, but that way lies TJIC madness.

Edited to add 3: I realized there were two other points I wanted to make.

  1. I was much more favorably impressed with the organization of TXLF this year than I was in 2010. Of course, they’ve had four of these, so you would expect them to have the bugs fixed. Still, I was impressed at how smoothly almost everything from registration onwards ran. The only problem I saw was an unexplained 20 minute delay in the start of the lightning talks, but I didn’t feel that was a major issue.
  2. The quantity of tchotchkes available at TXLF? Very high. The quality of tchotchkes available? Still evaluating that, but I’m decently impressed. Favorites: the microfiber cleaning cloths from OrangeFS, and the SavvisDirect USB/12V adapters. Special mention goes to Hostgator, who were giving away a much wider variety of tchotchkes than any other single vendor.

Posted in asus_eee, Geek, linux, Perl, Programming Languages, project_e | 1 Comment »

Bad week for the APD.

May 31st, 2013

Another one down,
Another one down,
Another APD officer bites the dust…

Second firing in two days. Why did this one get the ax?

Police detained Officer Manuel Garcia about 7:15 p.m. on Feb. 2 at Fiesta Gardens on Comal Street in East Austin, where his car was parked in a dark, unlit parking lot known for drug use and prostitution, the memo says.

…

The woman told police that she and Garcia had “dated” several times and that they had agreed she would perform oral sex for $10, the memo says. Garcia was arrested for prostitution.

…

During an interview with internal affairs, Garcia said he lied to officers when he told him he knew the woman, and that he actually had never seen her before when she suddenly jumped into his truck and refused to get out, the memo says.

But he denied having an arrangement for the woman to perform oral sex on him, “despite evidence to the contrary, including but not limited to, the ten dollar bill that was found folded up in the air conditioning vent of his truck when he was arrested,” the memo says. Garcia said officers “put that into” the woman’s mind and led her on.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 31, 2013.

May 31st, 2013

Obit watch: Catholic priest and author Andrew M. Greeley.

“Sometimes I suspect that my obituary in The New York Times,” Father Greeley once wrote, “will read, ‘Andrew Greeley, Priest; Wrote Steamy Novels.’ ”

Also:

His niece Laura Durkin confirmed the death, saying he had died overnight in his sleep. She said he had been in poor health and under 24-hour care since suffering severe head injuries in 2008 when his clothing caught on the door of a taxi as it pulled away and he was thrown to the pavement.

I was not aware of this. What a lousy way to end your life.

Also: LAT obit for Jack Vance.

Julian Dawkins, a shuttle driver for “PBS NewsHour,” was found shot just before 1 a.m. on May 22 on Lynhaven Drive in Alexandria.

Police have made an arrest and filed charges in the case. The twist: the accused is a deputy sheriff.

The law of unintended consequences, continued: the city of Austin banned single-use bags effective March 1st.

Store managers and police say the ban, which went into effect March 1, has made it more difficult for them to distinguish between customers and shoplifters. They say people place items in their reusable bags while shopping and walk out of the store without paying.

(It is worth pointing out that reusable bags were common here even before the formal ban, and that there are no actual statistics as of yet showing an increase in shoplifting.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Cops, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Said it before. Say it again.

May 30th, 2013

If you’re going to scam, make it worth your while. Seven figures in front of the decimal point is a good start.

Don’t lose your job as a police officer for something stupid, like trying to scam free movie tickets.

(Especially at the Regal Westgate Stadium 11. But, as I’ve said before, I’m an Alamo Drafthouse snob.)

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Movies | Comments Closed

Please excuse me. I’m having an Ambulance Driver moment.

May 30th, 2013

From the Austin American Statesman:

Amid concerns that STAR Flight is being underused, Travis County officials have asked Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services to review why a ground ambulance was dispatchedinstead of a helicopter to take patients to the hospital in a handful of incidents.

It isn’t clear to me exactly who these “Travis County officials” are. However:

According to emails between county and EMS officials obtained by the American-Statesman, [STAR Flight program manager Casey] Ping aired concerns to EMS medical director Paul Hinchey and other EMS and county officials in February about “multiple cases” in which he said STAR Flight had responded to a call and was overhead when it was canceled. Meanwhile, he said, additional ambulances were requested or it took an ambulance a long time to get to the hospital.

Is there any evidence that these decisions compromised patient care?

Ernie Rodriguez, who heads EMS for the city, said he doesn’t know of any situations in which STAR Flight, which provides air ambulance service for the agency, should have been called but was not.

Let us consider some of the situations in question:

The county has made written requests to the city to review six incidents or issues regarding what resources were used to respond to a call, Ping said.

That’s six out of how many?

STAR Flight has flown patients in the county and the city about 600 times since fiscal 2009, according to county data, with the number of flights dropping slightly over the years. In fiscal 2009, STAR Flight took patients about 170 times. In 2010, there were about 160 such trips, about 130 in 2011 and 120 in 2012.

Let us talk about specific incidents.

One such incident, [Danny] Hobby [“who runs emergency services for the county”] said, was a lightning strike in Bee Cave on April 29 that injured three people. Medics took the three patients, two in critical condition, to University Medical Center Brackenridge, about 30 minutes away not accounting for traffic. He wondered why multiple EMS units stationed in the county were dispatched to respond to the call when STAR Flight could have been used.

This is kind of useless without knowing the actual transport time, as opposed to the 30 minutes without traffic estimate. I’m not an EMS guy; what I know about EMS I’ve picked up from reading AD’s blog and listening to “Confessions of an EMS Newbie“. But I’d be willing to bet that by the time you get STAR Flight dispatched, it gets on scene, you get a safe landing zone cleared, STAR Flight lands, loads up, leaves and gets to the hospital…you’re probably looking at close to 30 minutes, at least.

Again, note that there’s no indication that anyone believes patient care was compromised by the decision to use ground ambulances instead of STAR Flight.

In early February, Ping received an email from a STAR Flight paramedic wondering why it took 45 minutes to get a baby in serious condition to Dell Children’s Medical Center.

Man. Sick babies. That’s terrible. And 45 minutes to get one to a hospital?

Austin-Travis County EMS sent medics to the baby’s home at 5:11 p.m., according to the email, which doesn’t specify a date. When medics arrived, the baby’s condition was a “priority 1 trauma,” the email says. They left the home about 20 minutes after getting there, and 25 minutes later pulled into the hospital, where a trauma team took over.

Oh. So it was actually 25 minutes to get the baby to the hospital, not 45? And it sounds like the first 20 minutes were probably evaluating the baby’s condition and stabilizing it for transport.

(Again, no suggestion that patient care was compromised by taking 25 minutes instead of…well, how long would STAR Flight have taken, under those circumstances?)

Now this is interesting:

Considering rush-hour traffic, the STAR Flight paramedic asked the responding EMS medics why they hadn’t requested the helicopter, according to the email. They said it was because the computer-aided dispatch system EMS uses wouldn’t let them since it calculated the transport time — the time it takes medics to arrive at a scene — at less than 20 minutes.

In asking several EMS officials to review the incident, Ping said he was most concerned by “the perceived comments about what authority ATCEMS personnel have or do not have to make transport decisions. This is not the first time we have been told they aren’t allowed to request STAR Flight.”

This is a place where I’m on Ping’s side, and the side of the paramedics. As you know, Bob, I’m very much in favor of letting the guys in the field make decisions. If their decisions about whether STAR Flight is appropriate are being overridden because of decisions by some automated system, then let’s review that. But:

Jasper Brown, an acting assistant chief for EMS, said that the system recommends STAR Flight respond to calls flagged as having the highest and second-highest priorities if the closest ambulance is more than 20 minutes away from the scene of the call. But once medics arrive at the scene, they can request STAR Flight regardless of the call priority, Brown said, a decision that’s based on the patient’s medical condition, among other factors.

And, hey, who doesn’t love a cool helicopter ride? Buried in the final few paragraphs of the Statesman article is one good reason why paramedics may not want to call out STAR Flight:

A STAR Flight trip costs $3,400 plus $85 per loaded mile for Travis County residents and $7,500 plus $85 per loaded mile for people who don’t live in the county, Ping said. Insurance could cover those costs, he said, or patients can set up a payment plan, with some paying $20 per month.

Can I point out that you can get a decent used car for $7,500? Can I also point out that if I do some rough calculations based on someone I know who lives outside the county being STAR Flighted to UMC Brackenridge, I come up with a rough estimate of $8,945 for the trip? (I’m figuring about 17 miles by helicopter at $85/loaded mile.) At $20/month, they’d have that bill paid off in 447.25 months, or 37.27 years.

So that’s reason one why EMS may not want to use STAR Flight if patient care isn’t compromised; because it is freaking expensive.

Reason number two: helicopters are dangerous compared to ground transport. Kelly Grayson has been sounding alarms about the overuse of helicopters since I first started reading his blog, and that was a long darn time ago. Quoth the man himself:

I believe helicopter EMS is useful. I believe it saves lives. I also believe that it is vastly overused, inherently dangerous, and that the overhwelming majority of the people we fly don’t need a helicopter. I believe that a significant chunk of them don’t even need a trauma center. And I believe that we owe it to the HEMS crewmembers who make those flights, not to endanger them needlessly by sending them out for silly shit.

Going back to that lightning strike in Bee Cave, I don’t remember what the weather was like that day, but I suspect it was pretty sorry if people were getting stuck by lightning. Doesn’t do a whole lot of good to transport people by helicopter to get a better outcome if your outcome is that the helicopter is forced down by weather and everyone onboard dies.

That happens. More often than you might think.

So are “Travis County officials” worried that patient care is being compromised by paramedics avoiding STAR Flight? Or are they more worried that STAR Flight is not being used enough to justify the cost of maintaining it, for what may be very good reasons? You make the call.

Posted in Clippings | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 30, 2013.

May 30th, 2013

Noted SF author and SFWA Grand Master Jack Vance passed away on Sunday.

Tor.com. Statesman (by way of my mother). Lawrence.

(In case you’re wondering: nothing in the LAT, NYT, or on the A/V Club yet.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 29, 2013.

May 29th, 2013

The NYT is absolutely indignant that the ceremonial throwing out of the first pitch at baseball games has evolved from a…

…honor was extended only a few times a season to a rarefied group that included presidents, mayors and military veterans. These days, it is regarded as a marketing opportunity, a sweetener in sponsorship deals between baseball teams and groups that want a piece of the spotlight.

In other news, water is wet and fire is hot. More:

The rite, now carried out nightly, is handed to actors and reality television stars, sponsors’ representatives and contest winners, and people dressed as animals as well as actual animals.

A capuchin monkey carried the ball out for a San Diego Padres game in September. Twice in the last two seasons, the Los Angeles Dodgers have welcomed to the mound Hello Kitty, or, rather, a person dressed as Hello Kitty.

Sometimes, there are ceremonial second, third, fourth and fifth pitches. The day after making his major league debut this month, John Gast, a promising pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, crouched up and down to catch five pitches. The honorees that day were Edward Jones, a financial planning company; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; the Washington University School of Medicine; a local radio station; and the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Question left unanswered by the paper of record: do the ceremonial second, third, fourth, and fifth pitches cost less for the sponsors than the first pitch?

Also in the NYT: Antoni Krauze, a Polish film director, is working on a feature film called “Smolensk” about the 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 95 other people. But “some leading Polish actors have refused to participate”, and the NYT sees this, and other events, as reflecting deep divisions in Poland over the crash.

The range of conspiracy theories is dizzying. So-called truthers accuse the Kremlin of pumping artificial fog over the runway, planting explosives on the plane and doctoring and then sewing victims’ bodies back together in fake autopsies. Some even contend that the Kremlin murdered Kaczynski because he had traveled to Georgia in 2008 to support that country in its war with Russia.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Movies, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

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