Authentic games. Voting. Space: not a frontier, at least for man. All this and more in this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
TMQ Watch: November 4, 2014.
November 5th, 2014Administrative and other notes: November 5, 2014.
November 5th, 2014Happy Guy Fawkes Day. While you’re out and about, please remember poor Guido, the last man to enter the Houses of Parliament with honorable intentions.
It seems kind of fitting that that the holiday falls today. Beyond that, I don’t have much to say about the elections for reasons of time and inclination. Battleswarm is a good place to go if you’re looking for that.
I will be updating the contact pages on this site, but I’m going to wait until after the runoffs are over, everyone is sworn in, and they actually have pages to link to. If this does get past me for some reason, please yell at me until it gets done.
I’m going to avoid my usual “what China needs” snark here, because this is a little scary: Brittney Griner attacked in China by a man with a knife.
How did Peter Siebold (the other Virgin Galactic pilot) survive a bailout from 50,000 feet without a pressure suit? Bonus: quotes from Bob Hoover. The Bill Weaver story is also touched on briefly: a fuller account can be found here.
Things may be slow from Thursday until Monday. We will see.
Headline of the day.
November 3rd, 2014For more information on the crack spider’s bitch, contact the Canadian Wildlife Service in Ottawa.
Obit watch: November 3, 2014.
November 3rd, 2014Tom Magliozzi, of “Car Talk” fame. NPR. Preliminary LAT obit. A/V Club. Car Talk.
A long time ago, I was a huge fan of “Car Talk”. My Monday nights were not complete without listening to the latest episode, and I tended to get cranky if that schedule was interrupted. (Kids, ask your parents about the time before podcasts.) I even – hold on to your hats, folks – donated money to our local NPR station at one point so I could show my support of “Car Talk”. (Oh, yeah. Like you never did anything stupid when you were young.)
Then our local station changed the schedule around so “Car Talk” was on at an inconvenient time, and I kind of dropped away from it. Then Tom and Ray started taking truly idiotic political positions (for example, advocating a federally enforced limit on horsepower to weight ratios) and I stopped being a “Car Talk” fan. As a matter of fact, I began to find the show grating. Not quite “I’d rather listen to Prairie Home Companion” grating, but grating enough. And frankly, I don’t understand why it is still on the air, since it has been nothing but re-runs since 2012. (Actually, I think I do understand why: I guess it brings in the bucks at pledge time.)
On the other hand, 77 is too damn young. Alzheimer’s sucks. I do kind of want to hear the tribute show. And he had a great beard.
Your loser update: week 9, 2014.
November 2nd, 2014Didn’t pay much attention to today’s games because reasons.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Oakland
Needful.
October 31st, 2014Do you know what Washington, DC needs?
Add this to the hatchet attack against the cops in NYC, and maybe what we need are tighter regulations for these deadly wood chopping implements. Does anybody really need a high-powered assault ax?
Happy Halloween, everyone!
October 31st, 2014I don’t have anything quite as spectacular as the FARK Scary Stories thread; heck, I don’t even have any really good scary stories. But:
Someone referenced Mike Warnke yesterday on one of the blogs I read. Who is Mike Warnke? He was a Christian evangelist and author; in 1973, he published a book called The Satan Seller about his experiences as a practicing Satanist until he found Christ and got his life in order.
Warnke became pretty popular, especially during the Satanic ritual abuse hysteria of the 1980s. But in 1991, a Christian magazine published a lengthy expose of Warnke; his chronology didn’t fit together, and basically everything he claimed could be disproven. (For example, he didn’t attend a Satanic ritual with Charles Manson; Manson was in prison at the time.) Warnke ended up folding his ministry in the wake of the expose and other press coverage (more about the aftermath here); he went on to start a new ministry and is still touring.
Cornerstone, the magazine that exposed Warnke, had done an earlier article on Lauren Stratford, another figure in the Satanic ritual abuse controversy. Stratford wrote several books, including Satan’s Underground, in which she claimed that she was used to breed babies for Satanic cult sacrifices. As it turned out, not a word of her story was true; Lauren Stratford wasn’t even her real name.
After Stratford was exposed, she started presenting herself as Laura Grabowski. And Laura Grabowski wasn’t a Christian survivor of Satanic ritual abuse; she was a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau who had been experimented on by Mengele himself. As you may have guessed, this was about as true as her SRA claims.
I don’t remember if I’ve ever linked this before – I think the Air Cooled Volkswagen Junkyard of Richfield, Ohio had gone off the web by the time I started this blog – but here you go, one of my favorite Halloween stories.
Obit watch: October 30, 2014.
October 30th, 2014Col. Jack Broughton (USAF – ret.) passed away last Friday.
Col. Broughton was a former Thunderbird and wrote several books, including Thud Ridge
He is perhaps most famous for an incident that occurred during the Vietnam War. At the time, Col. Broughton was vice commander of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing. One of his pilots approached him after a raid and stated that he might have accidentally hit a Soviet ship with cannon fire while he was bombing Vietnamese anti-aircraft positions located nearby. The next day, the Soviets complained that one of their ships had been bombed; Col. Broughton, in an attempt to protect his pilots, ordered the gun camera film from their aircraft destroyed.
Col. Broughton and two of his pilots were court-martialled for allegedly bombing the Soviet ship. However, the gun camera film was the only evidence of what happened; since it had been destroyed, there wasn’t any evidence that the ship had actually been bombed, and Col. Broughton and the pilots were acquitted on that charge. Col. Broughton was, however, found guilty of “destruction of government property” (the gun camera film, with an estimated worth of $5). His conviction was later overturned due to “undue command influence”.
Here’s a pretty good article reprinted from Vietnam magazine that covers the cases of Col. Broughton and Jack Lavelle. (I’ve also written about the Lavelle case; the linked article is from 1997, and doesn’t cover the more recent developments.)
TMQ Watch: October 28, 2014.
October 28th, 2014Musical interlude that has nothing to do with this week’s TMQ. We just needed a musical interlude right about now, and we find this particular version of the song haunting. Yes, we’re in a mood.
This week’s column after the jump.
Thank you, folks!
October 28th, 2014I made a few pennies off of Amazon referrals this month, so thank you, my readers, for making purchases and helping fight off entropy for a little while longer.
I hope the person who ordered Young Men and Fire
What am I going to buy with my Amazon earnings? Well, I already spent most of them on FloFost
That does remind me, however: with the holiday season coming up, I need to dig out that Harlequin NASCAR Christmas romance collection and do a “Quaint and Curious” entry on it.
Obit watch: October 28, 2014.
October 28th, 2014Chivas USA.
“What?”
The other Major League Soccer franchise in LA.
Not to worry, though. In a fantastic example of “it’s not working, do it even harder!”:
Soccer. The next big thing. Any day now.
Your loser update: week 8, 2014.
October 26th, 2014For various uninteresting reasons, we actually caught the last few minutes of the London game featuring loser favorites, the Detroit Lions. Rarely has “clown shoes” been a more accurate description.
TMQ’s football gods will be insufferable this week.
Tell us how you really feel, Steve.
Sounds like the Texans played well. And the Browns somehow managed not to be a factory of sadness this week. As much as I hate Buffalo, the game against the Jets filled me with glee, mostly because watching them struggle makes me even happier than watching Buffalo lose.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Oakland
I like the Raiders’ chances. Their next three games are against Seattle, Denver, and San Diego, none of whom should lose to Oakland.
Edited to add:
Detroit held 3 time outs and didnt use any at end of half — game only half over and already the Lions are phoning in.
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) October 26, 2014
Heh. Heh. Heh.
TMQ Watch: October 21, 2014.
October 23rd, 2014Pete and Repeat walk into bar in this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
Headline of the day.
October 23rd, 2014(This gives me a chance to repeat Karl‘s joke: “What’s the difference between Kenny G and an Uzi? An Uzi only repeats itself 20 times a second.”)
Obit watch: October 22, 2014.
October 22nd, 2014Apologies. It was a busy morning and a busy afternoon.
Probably the only Ben Bradlee obit you need to read. I think Bradlee’s legacy and influence (good and bad) will be debated in the coming days. And I note that the WP doesn’t shy away from mentioning “Jimmy” along with Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. But I like this:
(NYT obit for another perspective.)
Also among the dead: Nelson Bunker Hunt, of silver fame.