I have no joke here, I just like saying “Eleven million dollars in counterfeit Canadian Tire money.”
More things I did not know until now.
August 15th, 2012Random notes: August 15, 2012.
August 15th, 2012I think today is going to be a day for food writing. I have a longer post planned about last night. But in the meantime, here are some random things for you to chew on.
The NYT has made several discoveries:
- There are places outside of Manhattan, and even outside of New York state, with exotic names like “Iowa”.
- People in those exotic places sometimes gather during the summer, in what are called “state fairs”.
- At those “state fairs” you can purchase food items on sticks.
(Quote from the slide show attached to the article: “The fascination with food on a stick is difficult to explain, but it usually means a 30 to 40 percent increase in sales.”)
(I would really like to know how well the vegetarian corn dogs are selling.)
Speaking of food, today would have been Julia Child’s 100th birthday. Expect festivities around the web, starting with the NYT. I kind of like Julia Moskin’s “The Gifts She Gave” and Jacques Pépin’s “Memories of a Friend, Sidekick and Foil“.
(I note, with some bitterness, that our local PBS station is showing something called “Julia Childs [sic] Memories: Bon Appetit” tonight. I say “some bitterness” because a) I expect this to not show any complete recipe preparations, from start to finish, and b) our local PBS station is in the middle of a pledge drive, so I expect constant “give us money” interruptions.)
Something I noticed over the weekend: the French Quarter Grille has opened a second location. In Round Rock. Specifically, in the old Gumbo’s location. Hmmmmm.
Obit watch for the record: Ron Palillo, “Horshack” on “Welcome Back, Kotter”.
The LAT has apparently discovered that used car dealers are…used car dealers.
Why, is this not Hell? And are we not already in it?
August 14th, 2012This is the single most amusing review of a NYC restaurant I’ve read since Frank Bruni reviewed Ninja for the NYT.
And a side reference on the EaterNY site led me to “Soul Daddy”. Don’t worry if you’re not familiar with “Soul Daddy”: very few people were. The chain (of three restaurants: NY, LA, and the Mall of America) was the “prize” on an NBC reality series called America’s Next Great Restaurant, which nobody watched.
“Nobody” includes me, but I did follow the recaps on the A/V Club website. I hadn’t thought about “Soul Daddy” for the better part of a year, and wasn’t surprised to find out the restaurants were defunct. It did surprise me, though, that they only lasted just about two months. (Apparently, the NY and LA locations closed after six weeks so they could concentrate on the Mall of America location; that closed two weeks later.) LA Weekly has a good summary of why it failed. (Important safety tip: if you’re going to start a restaurant, it helps to have food that doesn’t suck.)
What I wonder is: how do you throw $3 million down the drain in two months? Were the locations that expensive? (Maybe.) Were the construction costs that high? (I can see that, especially if they were trying to keep the actual concept secret until the day after the last episode: that probably took a lot of bribes payments to the construction crew.) Or did they not actually burn through $3 million, and the investors just said “F— you” and pulled the plug after NBC cancelled the show?
Lying liars who lie.
August 14th, 2012Petros Bedi is doing a 42 1/2 year prison sentence. Twelve years ago, he was convicted of shooting a man in a nightclub.
The primary prosecution witness was a man named Seraphim Koumpouras, who agreed to testify after he was arrested on drug charges.
This was a lie, and the prosecution knew it, because they were the ones who paid Mr. Koumpouras: they gave him $3,000 in cash, and paid $16,640 in hotel bills.
Noted:
Toys, toys, toys.
August 13th, 2012Did you know that the promo code SUCKITGROUPON will get you 45% off your Buckyballs order from getbuckyballs.com?
I didn’t, either, until I saw it on Overlawyered. I already got my first set of Buckyballs, but I just ordered some more: this time, I got some BuckyBigs, so I can pretend to be Captain Queeg while I’m sitting at my desk.
(Note that I have no financial relationship with the BuckyBalls people; I just want the CPSC to die in a fire.)
In other news, the Germans have shipped my USB TV receiver.
Obit watch: August 13, 2012, part 2.
August 13th, 2012Wow.
August 13th, 2012I have not been paying much attention to the Olympics, but some of the images from the closing ceremony in this photo gallery are stunning.
In particular, the ballerina cum phoenix, translucent octopus bus, and pretty much all the fireworks related images knocked me off my feet. I wish someone could explain the Pet Shop Boys to me, though.
Obit watch: August 13, 2012.
August 13th, 2012Gregory Powell, one of the two Onion Field killers, is dead.
Officer Ian Campbell was unavailable for comment.
Edited to add: Longer obit in the LAT. Karl Hettinger was also unavailable for comment. But Big Joe Wambaugh did have something to say.
We’re getting the brand back together.
August 13th, 2012Headline in the HouChron:
Well, actually, I don’t miss that Monte Cristo, because there’s a food trailer on South Congress that makes a better one than Bennigan’s ever did. (I can’t find it online, but it is located in the same lot as Crepes Mille, which does an awesome panang curry crepe.)
Anyway, the gist of the HouChron‘s piece is that certain well-known brands are coming back to the city:
- There’s a new Bennigan’s at Westheimer and Dunvale.
- There’s a Del Taco somewhere on Westheimer, and the owner has plans to open “40 more”. I haven’t been to a Del Taco in years; there was one near my house in the early 1980s.
- Steak ‘n Shake is expanding, and gets their own separate article. I’m sure Roger Ebert is delighted, but as a food critic, he should stick to reviewing movies.
- “Shoney’s On the Go, a counter-service version of a traditional Shoney’s restaurant, is open at 12350 Westheimer.” I think we ate at Shoney’s a few times on family vacations (or am I confusing Shoney’s and Big Boy?), but I never really caught the bug. (Huh. It looks like there’s an actual Shoney’s near San Antonio, but the nearest Big Boy is 1,052 miles away according to Google.)
- Totally unrelated to food, but Gulf Oil is making a comeback as well. There’s one fairly near my apartment, and they have decent prices. But that particular station has rebranded itself so many times (mostly just generic gas, though they were a BP station until the great oil spill, at which point they dropped that like a hot potato) that I don’t trust them.
Thank you, Captain Obvious!
More things I did not know.
August 9th, 2012Chain of causality: one of my cow-orkers was bitten by a dog (not seriously) which led to a discussion of The People’s Court (which, when I was watching it, seemed to be dominated by dog and dog-bite cases), which led to a discussion of Judge Marilyn Milan, which in turn led us inevitably to Wapner and Rusty the bailiff.
From the Wikipedia entry on The People’s Court:
Patty Hearst, Chessman, Manson and the Onion Field? Rusty must have had some great stories to tell.
The Law of Unintended Consequences.
August 8th, 2012HFC-22 is a common coolant used in things that require cooling, like air conditioners and refrigerators.
The process of producing HFC-22 yields another gas, HFC-23, as a waste product.
The United Nations has a system that rates gases based on their atmospheric effects.
The result? Companies that produce HFC-22 are making it like it is going out of style, so they can produce HFC-23 as a waste product. Then they destroy the HFC-23 so they can get “waste gas credits”. Then they sell the “waste gas credits” on the open market. Step 4: profit.
More:
August 8th updates.
August 8th, 2012Longer Marvin Hamlisch: NYT, LAT.
Speaking of obits, noted astronomer and pioneer of radio telescopy, Sir Bernard Lovell, passed away on Monday.
There was an update to the Sheri Sangji story while I was on vacation that I wasn’t able to blog. Luckily, Derek Lowe was on the case. For those of you who don’t remember the story, Ms. Sangji was working with t-butyl lithium in a UCLA lab; the substance, which catches fire when exposed to air, spilled, Ms. Sangji was severely burned, and died 18 days later. The university and the primary researcher, Dr. Patrick Harran, faced felony charges.
While I was gone, the charges against the university were dropped. Apparently, UCLA made a deal with the prosecution. The charges against Dr. Harran still stand.
But then it gets weird. Dr. Harran’s defense team is trying to discredit the OSHA report on the accident, based on the accusation that the author of the report participated in a murder when he was 16 years old and failed to disclose this to his employers. I’m not sure at this point if it was actually established that the author of the report and the murderer were the same person, but the author resigned his position anyway.
This is intended to be a short update. The Derek Lowe blog entry linked above has a longer summary, including links to various other sources; I commend it to your attention.
Banana republicans watch: August 7, 2012, special “blood in the streets” edition
August 7th, 2012The “Blue Line” runs from Long Beach to downtown Los Angeles. That’s about 22 miles. (The Houston METRORail is 7.5 miles long, just for comparison.)
It would be nice to know what the accidents per mile traveled figure is, and how that compares to other systems. There’s no miles traveled figure in the LAT article. And finding information on METRORail crashes is nearly impossible these days; the transit authority doesn’t release that information, and the Houston-area bloggers who were maintaining counts have all moved on to other things.
In other news, the California city of Fullerton is considering shutting down the Fullerton PD and contracting out police services to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. You may remember the Fullerton PD from the beating death of Kelly Thomas (graphic image at that link):
But folks say it isn’t about Kelly Thomas, it is about the money:
Obit watch: August 7, 2012.
August 7th, 2012Noted art critic Robert Hughes.
A/V Club obit for Marvin Hamlisch. I expect fuller obits in the daily papers tomorrow. (I did not know, until I read it in one of the current obits, that Hamlisch was an EGOT recipient, and one of only two people to receive a Pulitzer Prize in addition to the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards. Richard Rodgers was the other one.)
The NYT is also reporting the passing of noted film critic Judith Crist.
Obit watch: August 6, 2012.
August 6th, 2012This was on FARK’s entertainment tab over the weekend, but I wanted to make note of it here as well.
De’Andre McCullough, one of the pivotal characters in David Simon and Ed Burns’ book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
I’m not sure what else I can say about this, other than to recommend the Simon and Burns book if you haven’t read it. There’s a surprisingly decent discussion going on in the FARK comments thread.
And for what it may be worth, here’s De’Andre as Lamar in “The Wire”:
Edited to add: I couldn’t pull this up before, but David Simon has a nice post on his blog.