Somehow “tax-fattened hyena” doesn’t seem fitting, and crustacean related jokes seem inappropriate.
So. Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow: guilty.
On 162 counts, “including murder in the service of racketeering, murder conspiracy and racketeering.”
(They said “murder” and “racketeering” twice. They must like “racketeering”. And “murder”.)
LAT. SFGate. SF Examiner. Of course the defense plans to appeal.
I’m still kind of hoping for an obituary from a more mainstream news source, but Florence King, writer and National Review columnist, has died. Tributes from Tam and Lawrence.
This was a little surprising:
Amen. Florence King was the cat's meow, which would have meant something to her. https://t.co/8MVKXMs1M9
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) January 7, 2016
I’m not going to say she was as influential on my writing as P.J.: I came to her relatively late in life. But she was a damn funny writer (even if I can’t quote some of my favorite lines here), and the world is a lesser place for her passing. Frankly, we could do a lot worse than a monarchy. Especially one run by Florence King.
Interesting career. He started out on “The Jack Paar Show” (or “The Steve Allen Show”, depending on which obit you read).
Of course, he was most famous as Schneider on “One Day at a Time”.
Ashraf Pahlavi, sister of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Really? I wonder where the NYT got access to this “internal secret history”.
It took us a non-trivial amount of digging to find this, but:
The case against Chow went to the jury on Tuesday.
We will keep an eye out for the verdict, or lack of one.
Lovie Smith out as coach of hapless the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. 8-24 in two seasons.
Happy 2016. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Tom Coughlin out as head coach of the New York Football Giants. ESPN. It seems that this is being spun as a resignation, though I suspect it was more “mutual agreement”.
The Tennessee Titans are “not renewing the contract” of general manager Ruston Webster. You may recall that they fired head coach Ken Whisenhunt in November.
The Chargers have fired offensive coordinator Frank Reich, but apparently plan to keep Mike McCoy as head coach.
Bad time for cinematographers.
Both the LAT and the A/V Club are reporting the passing of noted cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
He won an Oscar for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, and worked on a whole boatload of other stuff: “Deliverance”, “The Deer Hunter”, “The Long Goodbye”, “Sugarland Express”…
In the immortal words of Snoop, “Damn… you ain’t even wait to get the (expletive deleted) in the house!”
Jim Tomsula out after one season (5-11) with the San Francisco 49ers.
Head coach Mike Pettine and general manager Ray Farmer out in Cleveland.
Found at Blood Bath and Beyond, and also available from Amazon: Presidents of The United States Volume 8 – Pez Limited Edition Collectible Gift Set
A better view with some of the packaging removed:
Seriously. How did I live this long without a Richard Nixon Pez dispenser?
All I need now is Lyndon Johnson (who is in Volume 7
(Well, okay, technically, I guess I would also need a Gary Busey Pez dispenser and maybe a Keanu Reeves one, too.)
(“The part of Keanu Reeves is being played by a tongue depressor.”)
(And I should probably get Volume 3
A few nights ago, I had an excellent dinner with a bunch of my friends.
Recent events resulted in the dinner conversation going off on a tangent about Quaaludes and “roofies”, which prompted me to look up Wikipedia’s entry on Quaaludes.
I wasn’t even aware there was such a thing as “Vatican bearer bonds”.
Dr. Wouter Basson is a cardiologist who somehow managed to become head of the South African government’s chemical and biological warfare projects (the “Project Coast” mentioned above).
A metric ton of Quaaludes. Jordan Belfort, call your office, please.
Fiction has to be believable. You can’t put something like a government produced cache containing a metric ton of quaaludes, or a guy walking around with $40 million in bearer bonds from the Vatican, into a novel and expect people to believe you.
Unfortunately, his death seems to have fallen into the holiday gap, so everyone’s running the same AP obit. The LAT link above seems to be the most complete version.
Okay, so it isn’t exactly Ninja Part 3: The Ninjaing. But I was entertained by Pete Wells’ review of Señor Frog’s in the NYT.
(Spoiler: he still liked it better than Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar.)
From the HouChron: off-duty HPD officer lists a couple of personal firearms on Texas Gun Trader, meets up with potential customers, and gets into a shootout.
Mildly interesting, but I call it out here for this quote:
“…from about $300 to almost $2,000”. Wow. That certainly narrows it down.
Seriously, if you don’t have specific information on what Curry (the HPD officer) was selling and how much he was asking, why put that in? Does the HouChron even have editors these days?
…early in the evening on December 30, 1905, Frank Steunenberg, the former governor of Idaho, returned to his home in Caldwell after a busy day downtown. (Among other tasks, Steunenberg renewed his life insurance policy.) He opened the side gate to his home…
…and set off a massive explosion that gravely wounded him. He was carried into his home by family and neighbors, and lingered for a short period of time before succumbing to his injuries around 7:10 PM.
For days thereafter, passerby were picking “little bits” of the governor out of the debris.
What was TMQ’s belated Christmas present?
Oh, nothing, really. Just Chip Kelly being fired as coach of the Eagles. ESPN. Philly.com.
As you may recall, TMQ has been banging the drum for months now, promoting his expectation that Kelly would go back to coaching college ball after this season. Well, he got the first part of his wish. Now let’s see if he gets the second part; we’re thinking there will be some job openings next Monday, and Kelly might be a good fit for another NFL gig.
We hope all of our readers had a good Christmas, and that Santa or Krampus brought you everything you wanted. Sadly, Robot Santa Claus failed to bring us everything we wanted, as far too many of our enemies remain alive. Maybe in 2016. Or maybe we should submit our wish list to Morbo.
It looks like TMQ got what he wanted; a Panthers loss. Does this mean what we fear it means? After the jump, this week’s TMQ…