The Detroit Tigers did not fire general manager Brad Ausmus.
They just decided not to renew his contract.
Also out: Nebraska athletic director Shawn Eichorst.
Nebraska’s football team is currently 1-2.
Tiger, tiger, burning bright…
September 22nd, 2017Noted.
September 21st, 2017…
Another jogger who was carrying a flashlight and a handgun heard the victim scream and ran over to help.
The affidavit said the jogger told police he shined his light in the direction of the screams and saw the victim on her back and the attacker on his left side on top of the victim.
The jogger pointed his gun at the suspect and demanded he get off the victim. The attacker stood up and was naked from the waist down, the affidavit said.
Obit watch: September 21, 2017.
September 21st, 2017Lillian Ross, one of the old-time New Yorker writers. She was 99.
I didn’t grow up reading her work, but I was passingly familiar with her from her book Picture. Ms. Ross followed John Huston while he was making “The Red Badge of Courage” and wrote about the production. Which, oddly enough, turned out to be deeply troubled.
Julie Salamon cites Picture as a major influence for her own classic book, The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy Of A Hollywood Fiasco. It’s kind of interesting to contemplate these two books. Neither Ms. Ross (as far as I know) or Ms. Salamon (who explicitly states this in her forward) intended to write books about troubled movies. Both of them just simply wanted to document the process of making a Hollywood film: what was it like to do this in the 1950s, and what was it like in the 1980s? It’s odd that both movies turned out the way they did. And it’s interesting that nobody else has tried doing this in the last 25 years.
Bernie Casey, NFL wide receiver (for the San Francisco 49ers and the LA Rams) turned actor (“I’m Gonna Git You Sucka”).
For Mr. Casey, who also published books of poetry, the arts always came first. He considered football a steppingstone, but many viewed him as an athlete.
“It was just a gig,” he told The Washington Post in 1977 about football. “But it limits the way people perceive you. That can be frustrating. People have tremendous combinations of talents. A man can be a deep-sea diver and also make china.”
TMQ Watch: September 19, 2017.
September 20th, 2017TMQ Watch has our tropes, too. One of those is referring to the team by their full legal name, “The New York Football Giants”.
What are some of our other tropes? The only other two we can think of are:
- “autonomous 1911 and heroin-vending robots”, which in turn is derived from TJIC (though the original was “autonomous Glock and heroin-vending robots”, but only heathens use Glocks.)
- Pointing out that Easterbrook is wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong about the 1972 Dolphins.
Are we forgetting any recurring tropes, all of you huddled wretched masses yearning to breathe free? Please let us know in comments.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
From the flaming hyenas news desk…
September 20th, 2017Some of you may recall my entry the other day about the Travis County DA’s decision to suspend pursuing felony charges against State Representative Dawana Dukes.
Now we have some clarity on the reasoning behind that decision.
The guy who runs the House Business Office (which I guess is responsible for things like cutting checks for expenses and reimbursement) apparently told Ms. Dukes’s lawyers that “his office does not require a House member to travel to the Capitol building in order to receive per diem payments when the Legislature is not in session.” Illegally collecting those payments, when she wasn’t present in the Capital, was part of the case against her.
Gee, that seems like a bad screwup by the Travis County DA. Why wouldn’t they have checked on something like that before filing charges?
Answer: they did. And were told something completely different. By the same guy.
Prosecutors said they learned about Adrian’s contradictory statement when they visited with him two weeks ago to prepare for trial. In a sworn affidavit, he had told Dukes’ legal team that she did not need to be at the Capitol to qualify for reimbursement because House District 46, which she represents, is within 50 miles of the building.
Adrian said the House personnel manual did not expressly require a representative to travel to the Capitol building to receive payments. The implication is Dukes would still have been eligible for reimbursement if she was performing legislative duties from another location in Austin.
That seems like an…interesting…interpretation.
A former Dukes staffer told the Statesman last year that the lawmaker did not travel to the Capitol for all of the days that she claimed but directed her staff to prepare the forms as if she did.
Dukes, according to the grand jury indictment, did make “a false entry in a government record, and present and use said government record with knowledge of its falsity, by instructing her staff to add a false entry to her State of Texas Travel Voucher Form.”
So, basically, it seems like the argument is: it doesn’t matter, because she was close enough for government work. Good to know.
But in the meantime, the DA’s office did a new filing outlining some of the other “extraneous acts” they plan to bring up at the misdemeanor trial, which starts in October. A couple of selected high points:
Obit watch: September 20th, 2017.
September 20th, 2017Short shameful confession: I have never actually seen the movie. Need to fix that.
Robert Grays, a cornerback for Midwestern State (Division II) died yesterday from injuries he received in Saturday’s game against Texas A&M-Kingsville.
Your loser update: week 2, 2017.
September 19th, 2017NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Jets
Cleveland
Cincinnati
Indianapolis
Chargers
New York Football Giants
Chicago
New Orleans
San Francisco
Obit watch: September 18, 2017.
September 18th, 2017I don’t know exactly why this surprises me, but for the historical record: NYT obit for Jerry Pournelle.
The obit is actually pretty respectful (if a week late) and covers his work as a computer columnist almost as much as it does his SF writing.
Obit watch: September 16, 2017.
September 16th, 2017…until morale improves.
September 15th, 2017Two games into the season, the Cincinnati Bengals (currently 0-2) have fired Ken Zampese, their offensive coordinator.
Smells like desperation, doesn’t it?
Redemption.
September 15th, 2017I’ve been thinking a lot recently about redemption. What does it mean to be redeemed? Who decides when you’ve redeemed yourself? Can some people never be redeemed?
I will tell you now, I’m not sure that I have any answers. So I’m going to put a jump here: if you don’t want to read my meandering, you’re welcome to skip over it and go read “TMQ Watch” or “Gratuitous Gun Porn” or even the flaming hyenas entries. I won’t hold it against you.
Flaming hyenas watch.
September 15th, 2017Sorry about the delay: this news broke last night while I was downtown at the cop shop and couldn’t blog.
The DA is still prosecuting two misdemeanor charges “relating to allegations of her using legislative staffers for personal gain”. The charges the DA is not pursuing at this time are felonies related to misuse of travel vouchers.
I don’t quite know what to make of this.
District Attorney Margaret Moore confirmed to the American-Statesman on Thursday that prosecutors have obtained new information relating to the vouchers, which Dukes is accused of falsifying for financial gain. But Moore declined to elaborate on what the new information is.
“The district attorney’s office recently received new, unexpected information pertinent to that case and the new information has created a need for further investigation by this office and the Texas Rangers,” Moore said.
“New information”. Is it exculpatory? It seems to me that if there was exculpatory evidence, Ms. Dukes and her legal team would have offered it in her defense a long damn time ago, as well as spreading it to every media outlet they could find.
If it’s not exculpatory, is the DA playing hardball again, trying to get her to take a plea? “Look, we’ve got new leads. We’re turning the Rangers loose again. Take a plea now, resign, and we drop charges. Otherwise, we’re going to dig up even more dirt and you can spend the next 28 years experiencing the joy of busting rocks.”
I don’t have any idea, and I don’t think anyone outside of the highest levels of the DA’s office does either. Buy popcorn futures.
Obit watch: September 15, 2017.
September 15th, 2017Gastone Moschin, Italian actor perhaps most famous in the United States as “Don Fanucci” in “The Godfather Part II”.
Oddly, I had never seen Part II until just a few weeks ago: I’d seen Part 1 a couple of times, but for various reasons had just never watched Part II. I think, as a movie, I liked Part I better: some of the early stuff with the young Don Corleone is kind of weak.
But maybe the conventional opinion is right, and the two movies should be thought of as a single film about the tragedy of Michael Corleone.
Obit watch and random notes: September 14, 2017.
September 14th, 2017Obit watch: Pete Domenici, former Senator from New Mexico.
Long, but kind of fascinating, NYT article about the hunt for test models of the Avro Arrow.
For those of you who are not Canadian, the Avro Arrow was a legendary Canadian jet fighter project of the 1950s. It was pretty cutting edge for the time, but the project was cancelled in 1959.
The Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine ran a good article about the Arrow some time ago, but I can’t find it on their website or in Google. Sigh.
Remember, folks: that’s Detective Jeff Payne and Lt. James Tracy of the Salt Lake City Police Department. Detective Jeff Payne also failed to file a “use of force” report, which is another policy violation.
Investigators wrote Payne’s conduct was ”inappropriate, unreasonable, unwarranted, discourteous, disrespectful, and has brought significant disrepute on both you as a Police Officer and on the Department as a whole.
“You demonstrated extremely poor professional judgment (especially for an officer with 27 years of experience), which calls into question your ability to effectively serve the public and the Department in a manner that inspires the requisite trust, respect, and confidence,” the report adds.
And as for Lt. James Tracy:
Investigators took a similarly critical view of Tracy’s actions. They noted Wubbels had told them in an interview that she felt Tracy was “ultimately responsible for this incident.”
“[Y]our conduct, including both giving Det. Payne the order to arrest Ms. Wubbels and your subsequent telephone discussions with Hospital administrators, was discourteous and damages the positive working relationships the Department has worked hard to establish with the Hospital and other health care providers,” the report states.
And more:
The report says neither Tracy nor Payne fully understood current blood draw laws or hospital policies, and — unlike the nurse, Wubbels — they did not seek legal clarification from the department’s attorneys or other sources.
It also outlines how Payne visibly “lost control of his emotions” and his “self-control” over the course of the incident — yet no other law enforcement officers at the scene, including those from Salt Lake City and the University of Utah, thought to intervene.
Now I’m hungry.
September 13th, 2017Does anybody remember the Spaghetti Warehouse?
I only went to the one in Houston a handful of times. There used to be one in Austin that I went to more regularly, but it was downtown: parking was a complete word that rhymes with witch. And then they got rid of some of the menu items I loved, including the spaghetti with cheese sauce. Damn, I miss that. And I haven’t been able to find a copycat version online.
I did find a copycat spaghetti with garlic butter, which sounds good. Maybe if you threw some small mushrooms during the simmering process, you’d have a good replica of another of my favorite dishes. I may have to try that soon.
Not a Spaghetti Warehouse recipe, but I remember having this at the Old Spaghetti Factory in Boise (now closed) when I was there, and loving it. Might have to try that soon as well.
Edited to add: As long as we’re talking about pasta, the Olive Garden never ending pasta bowl is back. Not that I shill for Olive Garden (unlike the mass media, and which is why there are no links here) but this is mildly interesting: for $100, you can get a pass that lets you get “unlimited” servings for eight weeks.
For $200, you can get a pass that lets you get “unlimited” servings for eight weeks plus an eight day, seven night trip to Italy.
including:
Airfare
Ground transportation
Hotel
Meals
Daily activities
There’s got to be a catch here, but what? They can’t be looking for audiophiles that need blank cassette tapes. If I had to guess, I’d guess those $200 passes are extremely limited. Either that, or you’re flying in aircraft retired by Aeroflot and sleeping in a foxhole you dug yourself.
