“It is not surprising that this champion of the damned was, in his adult years, a Chicago Cubs fan.”
–John A. Farrell, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned
Quote of the day.
April 1st, 2013
Verbing weirds language.
March 31st, 2013Oooooh crap did that guy’s leg just get Theismanned?That looked awful.
— Popehat (@Popehat) March 31, 2013
“Theismanned”? (That guy in question.)
Watching Duke/ Louisville my heart goes out to Kevin Ware.
— Joe Theismann (@Theismann7) March 31, 2013
(Subject line hattip, more or less. If you put “verbing weirds language” into Google, you can find the original C&H strip.)
Something for everyone, a new book tonight!
March 30th, 2013Jack Viertel has a book coming out in late 2016.
Mr. Viertel is the artistic director of New York City Center Encores! The book is called (at least for now) “The Secret Life of the Broadway Musical: How Broadway Shows are Built”.
Mr. Viertel goes on to argue that “Oklahoma” established a “blueprint” for musicals, which was then subverted in the 1970s by “the Hal Prince-Stephen Sondheim shows – ‘Company,’ ‘Follies,’ several others”, and by the “cultural ferment” of that period. But, he suggests, current hit Broadway musicals have a similar architecture to the “golden age” ones.
From the description, it sounds like Mr. Viertel is, at least in part, applying failure analysis to Broadway musicals. This sounds like it will be an excellent companion volume to my own favorite book on the subject, Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops
Edited to add: While the Sondheim reference is in the article, I included it as deliberate Mike the Musicologist bait. This resulted in a text message conversation, excerpted below. (I’ve left out some asides which aren’t relevant to the conversation, mostly dealing with “Beat the Devil
MtM: From the description I think that book could also be titled “Get Off My Lawn: Musicals Were Better When I Was A Kid”.
Me: Could be.
MtM: Or perhaps “Musicals In Amber: Why I Think Art Shouldn’t Change”.
Me: But I think the argument that successful musicals share structural commonalities is a legit one to make.
Me: I’m not sure I’d AGREE, but it doesn’t strike me as crazy.
MtM: Which they also share with unsuccessful ones.
Me: Of course, that can be extended.
Me: “Audiences want things that are safe, predictable, and expected.”
Me: “Audiences don’t want to be challenged.”
MtM: The traditional process of putting a show together, as well as the R&H structure, is interesting. I would recommend Everything Was Possible
for a study of how a show is created.
MtM: But bemoaning that shows make money through touring over an extended Broadway run? Please.
Me: Is he bemoaning that, or just saying that’s the way the economics works today?
MtM: Curious. Amazon search for “everything was possible” returned a 16GB iPod touch as the 4th result.
MtM: I got the impression he is unhappy that Broadway is no longer the ultimate goal for a show.
Me: I didn’t pick that up. But if he does feel that way, I’d like to read why.
Me: From my POV: more touring = more people exposed to musicals = healthy and vibrant musical community.
MtM: I just got a sense from the article that this book is going to be “if shows were still done like this then musicals would still be central to our culture” which grates with me on many points.
MtM: The basic subject – how dramatic/musical structure, book doctoring, etc. is interesting. If that’s his focus then Yay.
As an Austin resident…
March 29th, 2013…let me just say this: I agree with Iowahawk.
Dear North Korea: if you are going to nuke Austin, please do it during SXSW statesman.com/news/news/aust…
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 29, 2013
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold…
March 29th, 2013Steven Brooks was arrested last night near Barstow, California.
Up until Thursday, Mr. Brooks was a member of the Nevada State Assembly (a Democrat, representing District 17, which includes North Las Vegas). He was expelled from office earlier in the day.
Mr. Brooks has had an interesting few months. On January 19th, he was arrested on allegations that he had threatened Assembly Speaker Marilyn Kirkpatrick. The Reno newspaper states that there was “a gun and dozens of rounds of ammunition” in his car; however, no charges have been filed against Mr. Brooks as of this writing.
Mr. Brooks was arrested and charged after an incident in February “after a disturbance at the home of his estranged wife, when police say he tried to grab an officer’s gun”.
He’s also “been banned from meetings with party colleagues in the Assembly and was banished from the Nevada Legislature Building“.
I don’t know what to make of this: the fact that he hasn’t been charged in the alleged threats against Speaker Kirkpatrick after two months is strange. The domestic violence incident, well, this is why we have a legal system: to sort out conflicting claims. The denial of the gun purchase was probably a result of the domestic violence incident. The rest of his behavior could charitably be described as “eccentric”, but I’m not sure, based on the reporting, that it rises to the level of “danger to himself and others”. There are reports in both articles that Mr. Brooks was under psychiatric observation for a period of time: the Reno paper says his commitment was involuntary.
Leading the police on a high-speed chase and making them use spike strips to stop you? That goes past “eccentric” and into full-on “crazy”. Speaking of crazy:
Authorities said it was unclear why Brooks was in California.
Obit watch part II.
March 29th, 2013I missed this one the other day, because of reasons. I also missed this story when it happened, because I was 5 at the time.
Mr. Rose was convicted of murdering Pierre Laporte, the Quebec government’s minister of labor. Mr. Laporte was kidnapped by Mr. Rose’s F.L.Q. cell on October 10, 1970, and was found strangled in the trunk of a car on October 18th. Mr. Rose made statements implicating himself in the kidnapping, but “an investigation by a Montreal prosecutor concluded in 1980 that Mr. Rose could not have been present at the killing”. Mr. Rose served 11 years in prison.
Also among the dead, Richard Griffiths. Most of the obits I have seen have concentrated on his Harry Potter role, but his full list of credits is even more interesting: “Withnail and I”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”, and “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear”, along with a lot of TV work.
(I’d kind of like to see “The Brides in the Bath”, simply because the George Joseph Smith case is one of the seminal cases in British legal history.)
Obit watch: March 29, 2013.
March 29th, 2013Paul S. Williams, noted music critic, founder of Crawdaddy. Hollywood Reporter. Locus Online.
The Locus Online obit touches on this briefly, but Mr. Williams was a friend of Philip K. Dick and, after Dick’s death, his literary executor. Mr. Williams founded the Philip K. Dick Society, which was a major force in getting Dick’s works out in front of the public. I did volunteer work as a secretary for the PKD Society for a period of time; Mr. Williams was always incredibly nice to me when we spoke, but I get the feeling he was the kind of person who was incredibly nice to everyone he met.
Post-PKD Society, he also was the force behind The Complete Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, which would make him a hero of mine even without the PKD connection.
If you want to get a feel for his writing and his philosophy, I commend to your attention his book The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: A Top 40 List
More unintended consequences.
March 28th, 2013Picked this up from Overlawyered, and thought it deserved wider circulation.
Woman and a friend are having coffee. Friend mentions that her daughter just had her first baby. The daughter works in a job that pays just above minimum wage, so money is tight. Daughter stretches her money by shopping the second-hand market for baby stuff. But daughter can’t find any used cribs for sale.
Daughter is trying to make do with a used “play yard”. “One of its sides is broken but it has been mended with a metal rod and tape.” Not the safest thing in the world.
Here’s the punchline: the author of that blog entry is CPSC commissioner Nancy Nord.
I’m willing to bet that people warned commissioner Nord, and the other commissioners, that this kind of thing would happen: you dry up the used crib market, and people are going to resort to alternatives that may be even less safe than a used crib. I’m also willing to bet that commissioner Nord ignored those warnings. I’m glad she’s had her moment on the road to Damascus, but it seems to me to be too little, too late.
Random notes: March 28, 2013.
March 28th, 2013Lawrence threw me a nice backlink yesterday, pointing out that Bloomberg’s tobacco proposals will just put money in the pockets of organized crime.
But surely there’s hope for NYC? Surely they’ve learned and will elect someone unlike Bloomberg?
Nope. The NYT profiles Joseph J. Lhota, deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and censorious asshat.
Hahahhahaha. Bloomberg, champion of free speech. Unless it is about guns. Or tobacco. Or soda. Or food.
Obit watch: James Herbert, noted British horror novelist.
Don’t be evil (part 2)
March 27th, 2013Great idea. Why don’t we have it?
One word: Intuit.
This doesn’t come as a great shock to me, but I stopped using Intuit products years ago: TurboTax was DRM infested, and the Mac versions of Quicken became steaming piles of crap. I haven’t seen anything that would make me want to go back to using an Intuit product again, ever.
Random notes: March 27, 2013.
March 27th, 2013State Senator John Whitmire is the head of the Texas Senate’s Criminal Justice Committee. As head of that committee, it isn’t unusual for him to hear from prison inmates. Sometimes, those communications come in the form of death threats. (Sen. Whitmire was in the news a few years back over the whole “inmates with illegal cell phones” issue.)
Anyway, death threats aren’t unusual and aren’t generally worth reporting. But this one deserves notice. Whitmire
More:
Mmmmmm-hmmmm. It isn’t the “scam” part that gets me: if I was in a Texas prison, I’d probably do everything I could to get my sentence reduced. It’s the “some of it credible” part. Apparently they’ve used this guy as an informant in the past; now that they’ve established he’s a scammer, how do we know any of the evidence he’s provided is credible? And are they going to go back and review the other cases he’s been involved in?
Does the government have the legal authority to set a minimum price for goods? What if the goods in question are tobacco products?
Don’t be evil.
March 26th, 2013This isn’t about Google Reader or Google Keep (though I do like this take on the latter). I ran across this story on the Y Combinator Twitter feed the other day, and this is the first chance I’ve had to blog it; I would like to see it get more attention.
In brief, there is a company called the Knife Depot that sells knives online. I have never bought anything from the Knife Depot, but that’s just because I haven’t been buying a lot of knives online; I certainly have not heard anything bad about the company.
The Knife Depot also had a Google Adwords account, which brought in “a good slice of its revenue”.
The Knife Depot sells what are commonly known as “assisted opening” knives. These are not switchblades, but knives that can be opened with one hand by applying pressure on a part of the knife. (The Knife Depot blog has a good video explaining the difference between “assisted opening” and “switchblade” knives.) Obviously, “assisted opening” knives are very useful things if you’re missing an arm, or frequently operate in situations where you only have one hand free, or have certain physical disabilities, or just like knives. “Assisted opening” knives are legal pretty much everywhere in the United States, including New York City (in spite of what the criminals who run NYC believe).
However, somebody in the Google Adwords department got bent out of shape and told the Knife Depot: either stop selling “assisted opening” knives, or lose your Adwords account.
Note that Google didn’t just say “you can’t advertise these knives using Adwords”. Even if the Knife Depot agreed not to use Adwords to advertise “assisted opening” knives, Google would still yank their Adwords account if they continued to sell those knives on their site.
The Knife Depot, being good and honorable people, told Google to take their Adwords account and stick it where the sun don’t shine.
“So what?” you say. “Google is a private business and can set whatever policies they want for Adwords. Why get bent out of shape over this?”
Here’s why: at the same time Google was threatening the Knife Depot, Google continued to allow Adwords advertising of “assisted opening” knives from other vendors. Like Amazon. And Wal-Mart. And Bass Pro Shops. I believe Google is still allowing Adwords advertising of “assisted opening” knives from those vendors, based on the results of a Google search for “Kershaw knives” done as I was writing this post.
Yes, this is hypocritical and evil. So much so that the Knife Depot blog entry quotes an email from a Google employee who called out the policy discrepancy, requested an explanation of why other vendors were allowed to use Adwords and the Knife Depot was not…and never got a reply.
I’ve had it in my head to do a post about Android/iPhone based on some things said in recent podcasts. I may still do that, though time has sort of gotten past me. The key thing that bothers me is that some people seem to prefer Android/Google because “Google does a better job of knowing about me”, without realizing that’s a problem. You are giving your information to a company that, to be polite, hasn’t proven it can be trusted with it. The Knife Depot is just example #947 of why Google hasn’t proven that.
I commented to someone, back a decade ago, that we didn’t have to worry about the government or big corporations invading our privacy without our consent; we’d happily give up our privacy for 75 cents off a box of Pop-Tarts. It is worse than I thought ten years ago; now we’re giving up our privacy for…what, exactly? A substitute notepad application? A free copy of The Da Vinci Code?
Firing watch.
March 26th, 2013In great haste, because I am tied up and down with stuff:
Tubby Smith out as coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers.
Which would you rather have?
March 24th, 2013I’m on the firetruck side. Along I-35, in the general area of Round Rock, there are two places that appear to have used fire trucks for sale. I haven’t actually checked out either one, because I didn’t know what to look for in a used fire truck and I wasn’t sure I could afford one anyway. So this article delights me. Key points:
- Used firetrucks can be very cheap. Like almost couch change cheap.
- “…buy a truck from an active fire department (as opposed to a private owner) because many older private firetrucks have been neglected and no longer have functioning pumps.”
- Buying a used firetruck is another instance where it is a good idea to buy local. I would not have thought of this, and did not realize this, but: “firetrucks aren’t built to drive highway miles or drive at highway speeds”. This does make sense, but it leaves you with a problem; if you don’t buy local, how do you get it home? (In the author’s case, by truck from Ohio to Montana, and it cost more to transport the truck than he paid for it.)
- It is worth the time to research local laws.
- It is also worth the time to think about where you’re going to park your fire truck. Not just at home (will it fit in the garage?) but when you go to the store to get butter and cheese.
I do wonder what an auto liability policy on a used firetruck runs per year, but I’m not going to ask: the author’s blog uses the Gawker comments system, which I refuse to register for.
Face Palm Sunday.
March 24th, 2013Gee, wouldn’t that depend on what charges Jesus was being prosecuted under, and whether any of those charges are capital crimes?
Mmmmm-hmmmm.
And maybe Christians make this distinction because Jesus didn’t kill his eight-year-old son for insurance money. Maybe Christians make this distinction because Jesus didn’t rape an 11-year-old girl and her mother and set their house on fire. Just saying.
I am not a lawyer, but to the best of my knowledge:
- The state of Texas does not have a blasphemy law.
- If the state does have a blasphemy law, it probably would not pass constitutional muster and could not be enforced.
- If the state of Texas did have a blasphemy law, and if such a law did pass constitutional muster, I seriously doubt that it would carry the death penalty, and if it did, that also probably would not pass constitutional muster. If the Supreme Court is unwilling to allow the death penalty for raping a minor, how likely would they be to allow it for “blasphemy”?
I think it is worth having a discussion about the death penalty. I know I keep threatening to do this, but I still want to write an essay about the death penalty, my qualms about it, and why I still believe it should be an option.
And part of that context is that horrible people do horrible things to other people, and forfeit their right to be a part of society. It is worth debating whether that forfeit should be a lifetime behind bars, or a needle in the arm. But by framing this in the context of “would we do this to Jesus?” without considering that Jesus committed no crime under Texas law – indeed, rigging the game so that Jesus has already been convicted of a non-crime, and the jury is only supposed to consider punishment – well, my feeling is that Osler and Bishop are framing their challenge in a dishonest way.
Jesus taught a lot of other stuff, too. Like
and
Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.
If ministers want to visit prisons and provide religious council to the inmates, even the ones on death row, that’s awesome. More power to them. But their dominion is the heavens, not Earth. As a friend of mine used to say about some folks, “Jesus may love you, but I think you’re s–t wrapped in skin.”
Edited to add: Mike the Musicologist made a good point, which I am ashamed to admit I missed. This whole debate is stupid for another reason: Christ’s sacrifice on the cross to redeem mankind’s sins is the central concept of the Christian religion.
You can sit there and debate whether Christ should or should not have gotten the death penalty. But without the crucifixion of Christ, you don’t have the redemption of mankind from sin. Without Christ getting the death penalty, you don’t have Christianity (or Catholicism). At best, what you’ve got is Judaism where Christ is an important prophet of the Second Coming.
Christ has to die. That’s the entire plan. And this debate ignores that point.
(Mike’s point reminds me of another one I’ve been thinking about for a while. Namely, Judas gets a bum rap, and is probably sitting on God’s right hand in heaven. Without the betrayal by Judas, there’s no trial, there’s no crucifixion, there’s no resurrection, and again there’s no Christianity. All Judas did was set in motion the plan that had been in the works for thousands of years. Judas was doing what he had to do to fulfill the plan; blaming him is like blaming the last snowflake in an avalanche.)
Edited to add 2: You know, I bet the idea that “Judas got a bum rap” is probably one of the many heresies (like the Manichaean heresy) that existed in the early church. But I have yet to find an example of it in practice, or even a name for it.