TMQ Watch: December 15, 2015.

December 15th, 2015

After last week’s “slit your wrists” opening, we were hoping to find something light and funny for this week. We didn’t have much luck, alas.

We did briefly consider doing something with “All I want for Christmas is a goat”. But then we listened to “Holy Night”. Or at least we tried to; we had to shut it off 30 seconds in. With all due respect to ActionAid, they could use this to torture prisoners at Gitmo.

So the heck with trying to find something light and funny. Let’s just jump into this week’s TMQ…

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Posted in Christmas, Music, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 1 Comment »

TMQ Watch: December 8, 2015.

December 10th, 2015

Instead of snark, and before jumping into this week’s TMQ, we wanted to throw up a link to something we found by way of a retweet from Popehat:

So let me be really clear about what happened to me. From the moment I got my first pair of hockey skates at five years old, I got the living shit kicked out of me every single day. Every day after hockey, no matter how many goals I scored, he would hit me. The man was 6-foot-2, 250 lbs. It would start as soon as we got in the car, and sometimes right out in the parking lot.

…

When I tell people the insane details of my childhood, they have the same two questions.
Why in the hell would anyone do this to their own son?
And then …
Why in the hell didn’t anyone put a stop to it?

Please go read this now, if you haven’t already. This week’s TMQ will be here when you return…

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Yearly administrative note.

December 4th, 2015

This is your yearly reminder: if you use the Amazon search box on the right hand side of the page to buy stuff, I get a small kickback.

Said small kickback, as you all know, goes to purchasing toys for crippled orphans supporting this blog, mostly by enabling our purchases of Robert Ruark and Jack O’Connor books, along with other crap in general.

(Speaking of Ruark, I’m reminded that I have two historical notes coming up back to back before the year is over. One of those should be of some interest to Lawrence…)

(And speaking of Lawrence, I would be remiss if I did not note, as I do every year, that books from Lame Excuse Books make fine presents for the holidays, especially if you have SF or horror fans on your shopping list.)

I believe I recommended Amy Alkon’s Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck last year, but I’ll plug it again as she deserves it.

Another book that was loaned to me by a friend, and that I’ve almost finished – I will be purchasing my own copy, so I have no qualms about recommending it – is Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I somehow missed this when it came out in 2012, but it’s a very good book about the psychology of introversion, how to cope with being an introvert, and how to cope with significant others/family members who are introverts (if you’re an extrovert) or extroverts (if you’re an introvert).

I don’t see a shipping date for Archer Season 6 yet, but How to Archer: The Ultimate Guide to Espionage and Style and Women and Also Cocktails Ever Written made me laugh more than a cheap TV tie-in book by some anonymous ghostwriter had any right to. (But get the Kindle edition, or a used copy.)

cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra

Edited to add: Also. If I’ve managed to irritate you, please consider supporting the fine folks at Popehat through their Amazon link instead.

Also also: I haven’t given them any money, but I’ve always been kind of fond of the HouChron‘s “Goodfellows” program.

Also also also: the Reason Foundation is having their annual fundraising drive. And they will accept bitcoins, too.

Posted in Admin, Books, Christmas, Neuroscience, Reptiles, Snakes, TV | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: December 1, 2015.

December 3rd, 2015

Have you ever had one of those days when you don’t want to even look at the newspaper, or do much of anything except curl up in a ball and shut out the world?

Yeah. Us too. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

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Art, damn it, art! watch (#49 in a series)

December 1st, 2015

By way of Borepatch: Cassius Marcellus Coolidge’s most famous work sold at auction for $658,000.

Sotheby’s auction link. Yes, that did include the buyer’s premium.

Obligatory.

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Flames, hyenas, etc.

December 1st, 2015

I wanted to wait a little bit for the paper of record to fully update their coverage. Now that they have:

Sheldon Silver, former speaker of the New York State assembly: Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

Mr. Silver, 71, a Manhattan Democrat, was convicted on all seven counts against him. The charges of honest services fraud, extortion and money laundering stemmed from schemes by which he obtained nearly $4 million in exchange for using his position to help benefit a cancer researcher and two real estate developers.

I am worried, though, about the jury issues:

Last week, as the jury first convened to deliberate, a juror sent a note to the judge, Valerie E. Caproni, asking to be excused from the case and saying she was “feeling pressured, stressed out … told that I’m not using my common sense, my heart is pounding and my head feels weird.”

…

On Monday, a second juror asked to be removed from the case, citing a conflict of interest related to his job. The juror, Kenneth Graham, a taxi driver, told the judge he had learned during the Thanksgiving recess that the owner of the medallion cab he drove was a good friend of Mr. Silver’s, and belonged to the same synagogue as the assemblyman.

I’m hoping this doesn’t give Silver grounds for a successful appeal.

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Bloody Sunday.

November 29th, 2015

Bad day for college football coaches.

Mark Richt out at the University of Georgia. He’d been there for 15 seasons…

With a 145-51 record, Richt ranks second on Georgia’s all-time wins list and has guided the Bulldogs to a bowl game in each of his 15 seasons at the helm. He won SEC championships in 2002 and 2005, and his teams played for league titles three other times.

Rutgers fired both head coach Kyle Flood and AD Julie Hermann. Flood was 27-24 overall, and the team went 4-8 this year. But it looks like the main reason for this firing was off-field issues:

Flood was suspended three games earlier this season for emailing a professor and later scheduling an in-person meeting to discuss the academic standing of former Scarlet Knights defensive back Nadir Barnwell.
In addition, seven Rutgers players were arrested this season for offenses varying from home invasion to assault.

Mike London is out as head coach at the University of Virginia. This is being called a “resignation”, but it sounds like “you can’t fire me, I quit”.

Virginia was 27-45 under London’s command. He was 0-6 against Virginia Tech, the foe Cavaliers players and fans most want to defeat.

…

Only once under London’s guidance – in 2011, his lone bowl season – did Virginia win more than five games. It lost seven or more in five of his six seasons.

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Time flies.

November 27th, 2015

Damn. It has been a year since that asshole tried to shoot up the police department and got center-punched for his trouble? Where does the time go?

One year later article from the Statesman, which has some details I either didn’t know or forgot.

Johnson turned protective. Still holding on tightly to the horses’ reins with his left hand, he pressed his chest against one of the garage’s concrete pillars and drew his weapon, the Police Department’s standard-issue Smith & Wesson M&P 40.

…

The bizarre nature of the incident and his incredible gunshot come up nearly every day. According to a ballistics investigation, the .40-caliber bullet fired from Johnson’s gun traveled 314 feet in less than a second. The bullet nicked the driver’s door frame of McQuilliams’ vehicle and continued tumbling sideways 5 more feet before it hit McQuilliams.

Yes. That was a 100 yard, one-handed shot with an M&P .40.

That was the only shot police fired that night.

It was also the decisive one.

I can’t find it online, and my memory is a little sketchy, but I’m reminded of an “Ayoob Files” from some years ago. Briefly: bad guy armed with a rifle is holding off cops (and kills one dead). Cops are only armed with handguns, and try to take the guy out, but he has them pinned down 80 to 100 yards away. My recollection of Ayoob’s account is that at least one of the responding officers tried making shots at that range with his duty gun; when the bad guy was finally taken down (as I recall, by someone who arrived on scene with a shotgun and hit him with a rifled slug), they found a fairly tight group of bullet holes…just above where the bad guy’s head would have been.

One of Ayoob’s points, which I thought was well taken was: maybe every once in a while you should try taking long range shots with your duty weapon, just so you have some idea of what it can do and where you might need to hold. Then again…

Johnson, 40, loves his unit and his job, a perfect fit for someone who had grown up riding horses on a ranch and practiced shooting with a .22-caliber rifle from his back porch.

…if you grew up shooting off the back porch, maybe you don’t need that advice.

(Also, Massad Ayoob, if you happen to be reading this: this incident, and Sgt. Johnson in particular, might make for a good “Ayoob Files” installment. Just saying.)

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A small dose of the unusual for Black Friday.

November 27th, 2015

Just in case you’re stuck at work, or have decided to stay home and avoid the rush, here’s a couple of things you might find interesting:

1) Lawrence sent me this link the other day: Showmen’s Rest: Chicago’s Clown Graveyard.

The story behind this is that Showman’s Rest is where many of the dead from the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train disaster were buried.

The Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train disaster? Yes: on June 22, 1918, the train carrying the members of the circus was rammed by another train whose engineer had fallen asleep. 86 members of the circus were either killed outright or burned to death in the fire that resulted.

2) A retweet from Popehat led me to look up Count Dante, who I was previously unaware of. Count Dante was “The Deadliest Man Alive!” and the founder of the Black Dragon Fighting Society; he advertised heavily in comic books during the 1960s and 1970s.

Count Dante (really John Keehan; he changed his name in 1967 to “Count Jerjer Raphael Danté, explaining the name change by stating that his parents fled Spain during the Spanish Civil War, changed their names, and obscured their noble heritage in order to effectively hide in America.“) was one of Chicago’s leading martial artists during the 1960s.

He and a buddy were arrested in 1965 for trying to blow up a competing dojo. In 1970, he and some friends went to another competing dojo to “settle a beef with a member”: in the process, one man died.

In 1971 the judge in the case dismissed all charges but not before upbraiding both sides: “You’re each as guilty as the other,” Cooley recalls him bellowing.

Count Dante may also have been involved in a 1974 robbery of $4 million. He died in May of 1975 at the age of 36.

Chicago Reader article, “The Life and Death of the Deadliest Man Alive”. The article is tied to a documentary in progress, “The Search for Count Dante”: film website here.

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Obit watch: November 27, 2015.

November 27th, 2015

Guy V. Lewis, former basketball coach at the University of Houston.

With his signature red polka-dot towel in hand, Lewis was the winningest coach in UH history, compiling 592 victories and making five Final Four trips while coaching such stars as Elvin Hayes, Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler in 30 seasons from 1956 to 1986.

Off the court, he was regarded as a visionary and innovator for putting together the 1968 “Game of the Century” against top-ranked UCLA at the Astrodome and for being one of the first college basketball coaches to embrace racial integration in the South.

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Obit watch: November 25, 2015.

November 25th, 2015

The NYT is reporting the death of actor Rex Reason.

He appeared with Hayworth in “Salome” in 1953 and with Gable and Sidney Poitier in “Band of Angels” in 1957. In 1956 he played Dr. Thomas Morgan in “The Creature Walks Among Us,” the last installment in the last of the so-called Gill Man trilogy.

Mr. Reason was perhaps most famous for playing Cal Meacham in “This Island Earth”, which I almost think I’d like to watch again for real (as opposed to the MST3K movie version).

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: November 24, 2015.

November 24th, 2015

Old man yells at cloud!

This week’s TMQ, after the jump…

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Obit watch and random notes: November 24, 2015.

November 24th, 2015

I’ve written previously about Ron Reynolds, a state representative and lawyer who was charged with barratry.

Well, it has been a while. The other seven people who were arrested with Rep. Reynolds took pleas, but Rep. Reynolds went to trial. And…?

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena!

The Fort Bend County Democrat was convicted Friday of five counts of illegally soliciting clients, or misdemeanor barratry. A six-person jury on Monday rejected his plea for probation, and instead sentenced him to 12 months behind bars and a fine of several thousand dollars.

I’ve also written about Kelly Thomas, who was beaten to death by the Fullerton PD. The city (meaning local taxpayers) is going to pay out $4.9 million to his family, in settlement of their wrongful death lawsuit.

Obit watch: noted elsewhere, but I did want to mention the passing of Ken Johnson, former player for the Houston Astros (and the Colt .45s, their predecessor), and the only pitcher ever to “complete a nine-inning game without yielding a hit and still manage to lose it.”

(Oddly enough, there’s a good explanation of how this happened in the FARK discussion thread.)

Also among the dead: Adele Mailer, Norman’s ex-wife and the woman he stabbed in a drunken rage.

Some guests recalled that the point of no return came when she told her husband that he was not as good as Dostoyevsky.

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

Norts spews.

November 20th, 2015

By way of the NYT, we learn of a controversy sweeping the world of curling: “high-tech” brooms.

Perhaps unsurprising for a sport that has something in common with a household chore, the issue involves fabric — specifically, something called directional fabric. The use of this material in broom pads is the latest escalation in an arms race among manufacturers seeking to help the world’s best curlers guide their 44-pound stones along a sheet of ice as if they were controlled by joysticks.

More:

Many, but not all, of the sport’s top competitors signed an agreement last month to shun the newest brooms. But with few regulations on the books and Olympic qualifying tournaments underway this month, the World Curling Federation stepped in Wednesday and issued new rules that set severe restrictions on the types of brooms that can be used.

It is not going back to hog’s hair, but it is close — banning waterproofed fabric and “stiffening” inserts, and requiring all brooms to be available for purchase at a retailer.

“a retailer”? Like a grocery store? Or like a curling specialty shop?

(Steve’s Curling Supplies sells both the Balance Plus and the Hardline.)

Wednesday was the 30th anniversary of Joe Theismann’s leg injury, and the WP ran a story tied to that.

“The pain was excruciating,” he said. “I’ve had people come up and say ‘Did it hurt?’ And my suggestion to anyone, if you want to know what it felt like, go hang your foot over a curb and let somebody drive a car over it and you’ll get an idea of the severity of it. But the amazing thing about the human body is it hurt tremendously in an instant, and then from the knee down, my leg went completely numb.

Speaking from recent bitter personal experience, this.

So they’re lifting me off the stretcher, and my right leg just drops down like a wet noodle. And I turned to the attendant, I said ‘Excuse me, can you just pick up the rest of me please?’ Didn’t feel a thing. Did not feel one thing.

(Also, I love the detail about the black and white TV with the coat hanger. The ER at Brackenridge has cable TV, so at least you’ve got something to distract you. If you happen to be conscious.)

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TMQ Watch: November 17, 2015.

November 19th, 2015

You know what we miss from the new, tighter, TMQ?

We’ll tell you. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

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