David Lee Powell has been executed.
Edited to add: Here’s a link to updated Statesman coverage.
Eyes Wide Shut.
June 15th, 2010L’affair Rodenstock.
June 15th, 2010Mike Steinberger has an interesting article in Slate about Daniel Oliveros and Jeff Sokolin, two prominent NYC wine dealers who specialized in very old and very famous wines (for example, 1945 Mouton Rothschild in magnums).
It seems that their dealership may actually have been a major source of counterfeit wines; this ties into the Koch/Rodenstock affray, previously noted in this space, and well summarized in the article.
Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters (part 4 of a series).
June 15th, 2010By way of Houston’s Clear Thinkers, we have discovered The American Scholar‘s reprint of a speech given by William Deresiewicz at West Point in October.
Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.
…
Will you have the courage to do what’s right? Will you even know what the right thing is? It’s easy to read a code of conduct, not so easy to put it into practice, especially if you risk losing the loyalty of the people serving under you, or the trust of your peer officers, or the approval of your superiors. What if you’re not the commanding officer, but you see your superiors condoning something you think is wrong?
How will you find the strength and wisdom to challenge an unwise order or question a wrongheaded policy? What will you do the first time you have to write a letter to the mother of a slain soldier? How will you find words of comfort that are more than just empty formulas?
Go. Read.
Eye on the Killer Guy.
June 15th, 2010David Lee Powell’s latest appeal has been rejected at the state level.
Barring intervention at the federal level by the Supreme Court, his execution is scheduled for sometime after 6 PM tonight.
Edited to add: Powell has filed a new appeal, based on allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
Edited to add 2: Denied.
“This isn’t the sort of job that rewards competence, you know.”
June 15th, 2010The Hidden World of Girls.
June 14th, 2010I’m a day late and a few bucks short on this (somehow I missed it the first time around) but I did want to put up a link to this story from NPR’s “The Hidden World of Girls” project, featuring my friend Pat Cadigan.
(Lawrence and I discussed this: I get the Pat Cadigan beat, he gets the giant spider beat. Seems like a fair split to me.)
Why does a Yugo have a rear window defroster?
June 14th, 2010Quick thoughts on Jason Vuic’s The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
- This is almost as much a biography of Malcolm Bricklin as it is a history of the Yugo. I’ve hung around with enough car people to have heard of Bricklin, but not at the level of detail Vuic provides. One might say that Bricklin is a “colorful” character. One might also say that some of his business dealings pre-Yugo, Yugo, and post-Yugo, were…well, in the interest of avoiding lawsuits, let’s just say “a touch irregular”.
- Vuic makes an interesting argument that the Yugo wasn’t actually that bad a car. The short summary of his reasoning is: it was sold in the United States, therefore, it wasn’t that bad. A more elaborate summary of Vuic’s reasoning is that any car sold in the U.S. has to meet a certain minimum set of Federal standards; any car that can meet those standards is, almost by definition, not that bad a car. He goes on to argue that the Subaru 360 (a car I’d never heard of, but I was three years old when Subaru started importing it) is actually a much worse car. (I think Vuic undercuts his argument when he points out that the 360 was not sold as a car; it was actually sold as a “covered motorcycle” to get around U.S. safety standards. And guess who imported the 360 into the U.S.? Bricklin.)
- Vuic also manages to make Yugoslavian geopolitics somewhat interesting.
- He has a good sampling of Yugo jokes.
- And his endnotes show that he did his homework; he’s got citations to things like Composite World magazine and biographies of obscure Canadian (wait, is “obscure Canadian” redundant?) politicians. Reading the endnotes, I often found myself wondering, “Where did he dig that up?”
I was expecting, based on the reviews and excerpts I’d read online, that this would be at least a halfway decent book. The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History
I heartily endorse this event or product. (#6 in a series)
June 14th, 2010When I first started shooting, I needed ear protection. So I bought a $20 pair of no-name passive ear muffs, and have been using those for the better part of the past nine years.
There were two problems with the passive muffs:
- They were less than comfortable. I found myself slipping them off (sometimes at very bad moments) to adjust the fit or give my ears some relief.
- I had problems hearing things, like range officer instructions, when I was on the line. I sometimes found myself slipping off the passive muffs so I could hear the range officer, then slipping them back on and trying to get them adjusted and get my head back in the game before I shot.
After I shot the USPSA match in April, I decided it was time for a change. Karl recommended the Pro Ears line to me, so I ordered a pair. I didn’t actually get a chance to use them until I took Karl’s “Competition Pistol” course at the end of May. Now that I have…
Wow. The difference between the Pro Ears and the $20 passive muffs is like night and day. I had no trouble hearing range instructions; at the same time, the active muffs actually seemed (and this may just be a subjective perception on my part) to do a better job of muffling gunshots. I probably wore the Pro Ears for close to four and half hours without ever feeling the need to remove them.
I won’t say the Pro Ears are perfect. They are not cheap. (The set I purchased was the Predator Gold
If you’re serious about shooting and haven’t tried active hearing protection, like the Pro Ears, I strongly recommend that you do so. If you’ve had good experiences with brands of active hearing protection other than Pro Ears, you’re welcome to post recommendations for those brands in the comments.
Monday loser update.
June 14th, 2010The Astros are no longer in last place in the division? What the heck!
Baltimore is now at 17-46, for a .270 winning percentage. That’s a projected 43.74 wins over the 162 game season; or, to put it another way, they’re on a pace to lose roughly 118 games.
Perhaps he should have gotten the flambé license.
June 14th, 2010Prominent NYC bartender and absinthe advocate arrested for pouring booze on the bar and lighting it.
Chief Byrnes said that the fire, set around 2 a.m. along the roughly 15-foot-long bar, was six feet wide and had flames that leapt two to three feet in the air. It burned for several minutes and then extinguished itself. No one was hurt, and no curtains singed, but Mr. Trummer was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment and criminal nuisance, both misdemeanors.
(The photo at the top of the first linked article is interesting, especially in light of the detail from the second linked article about Mr. Trummer’s previous citations.)
Edited to add: Lawrence sends along a link to this YouTube video of bartenders at Apotheke playing with fire. I’m linking instead of embedding because I find YouTube videos a PITA to get properly embedded.
Administrative note.
June 11th, 2010Well, this stinks. Just when Jay G. adds me to his blogroll (and thank you very much, Jay), I’m going to be tied up most of the weekend.
Blogging will either be light or heavy, depending on how busy I am and the availability of wifi.
(I do have two endorsement posts I want to write, and at least one draft post I’ve been trying to put finishing touches on for months. In honor of Jay, I’m also thinking about doing some light gun porn, but we’ll see.)
Sometimes, you’ve just got to shake your head…
June 10th, 2010…and say “Wow”.
Tim Rutten reviews the new Chuck Barris book, Della: A Memoir of My Daughter, in the LAT.
Pull quote:
…it is difficult to understand how a reputable house like Simon & Schuster came to publish this wretched volume.
Ring, ring, ring, banana phone!
June 10th, 2010The International Banana Museum is moving.
Obit watch: Abraham Nathanson, inventor of Bananagrams.
And the judge in the Nicaraguan banana pesticide fraud case feels threatened.
“Houston on fire. Will history blame me, or the bees?”
June 9th, 2010Obit watch: Arthur Herzog III,
(Subject line hattip. Question: was that, or “Jaws: The Revenge”, Michael Caine’s worst movie role?)
Edited to add: Well, Lawrence decided to challenge me. Therefore…
.mobi dick
June 9th, 2010Was your retirement fund heavily invested in speculating on “.mobi” domain names?
How’s that working for you?
The problem, of course, is that the iPhone and other mobile devices have rendered .mobi useless.
If only someone had told Schwartz that before he shelled out $200,000 for “flowers.mobi” in 2006.
In unrelated news, here’s the latest update I’ve been able to find on progress in building nanoscale violins.