NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
New York Football Giants
Houston
New York Jets
In related loser and sports firings news, having started the season 0-4, the Houston Texans have fired Bill O’Brien.
You know, I’m liking the chances for someone to go 0-16 this year. Not necessarily the Texans, but one of these four teams.
Two Austin legal stories from the past couple of days that I wanted to cover:
Now, I’m sure you’re asking yourself: “How do you steal that much money from a library?” Answer: according to the indictment, he was purchasing printer toner with a city issued credit card and reselling it online.
“The library’s poor practices and procedures provided an opportunity for Whited to steal from the city during his tenure, leading to waste and overspending by the department,” according to the report. “Whited took advantage of poor purchasing reviews by his supervisors, former Financial Manager Victoria Rieger and Contract Management Specialist Monica McClure. Whited also took advantage of several other purchasing and budget-related shortcomings, such as having a role in the approval of his own purchases and insufficient oversight of the Library’s budget by Rieger and Assistant Director Dana McBee.”
As an accounting associate, Whited was responsible for making and approving purchases, cash receipts, billing, and other accounting transactions, the report states.
Bonus: this wasn’t his first go-around at the rodeo, but somehow the library put him in charge of all that stuff.
2) Strippers. Always with the strippers. A group of them are suing some of our finer local “gentleman’s clubs” (specifically, The Yellow Rose, Perfect 10 and Palazio, if you know Austin strip clubs).
The basis for the lawsuit is kind of unsurprising: the strippers claim that they were improperly categorized as “independent contractors” rather than employees.
The women signed documents agreeing to be independent contractors rather than employees, records show. However, Ellzey said the clubs treated them like employees — requiring them to work a certain shift, setting prices for dances and charging the women late fees if they did not arrive on time.
Under labor laws, that makes them employees, Ellzey said.
“The law looks to the conduct of the club … not the documents cooked up by the clubs,” Ellzey said. “The documents have no real legal significance.”
The responses from the clubs are about what you’d expect: the strippers wanted it that way.
Yellow Rose’s management also said that it’s in the dancers’ best interest to work as independent contractors.
“All Yellow Rose employees make at least minimum wage and generally far more than that,” the club said in a statement. “This case involves three — we have no clue who the fourth person in this lawsuit is — entertainers who knowingly and willingly worked as independent contractors, all of whom made a great deal more money than what they would have made had they been minimum wage employees. They now claim they were/are ‘actually’ employees and are due compensation directly from the Yellow Rose. We disagree.”
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Bishop said the independent contractor agreements gave performers the opportunity to avoid turning over their tips to the club. However, Ellzey said that, despite this, the club often required the performers to divide their tips among other employees, such as the DJ, the security guard and management.
“The performers are typically younger,” Ellzey said. “They go to work in these clubs, and the money they’re making on stage is sometimes really surprising. I think when an older club owner or a manager with apparent authority says, ‘This is what you have to do. This is what everyone does. You need to split your tips, you need to pay house fees,’ then a younger, more vulnerable dancer is just going to believe them.”
This is also another “not the first go-around at the rodeo” affair: there was a previous settlement in another lawsuit filed against four clubs in Houston.
I’m no employment lawyer, but: if they control your schedule, set prices, and charge “late fees”, that kind of sounds to me like the strippers may have a case.
I saw “Patton” (edited for television) at a very young and impressionable age. It follows that I’ve had an interest in the man for much of my life.
“Patton and the Third Army”. This is a 1960 episode of something called “The Twentieth Century”, and Walter Cronkite is our narrator.
Bonus video, also deliberate Lawrence bait: from our friends at the Tank Museum, their list of the bottom five tanks in the museum.
Missed this over the weekend, but Mike the Musicologist gave me the heads-up: the mayor of Rochester, New York, has been indicted on campaign finance charges.
Sandra Doorley, the Monroe County district attorney, said Ms. Warren participated in “a scheme to defraud” related to her official campaign fund and a political action committee working to help her get re-elected.
The indictment accused Ms. Warren, as well as her campaign treasurer and Rochester’s finance director, of “knowingly and willfully” working to evade contribution limits as well as engaging in “a systemic and ongoing course of conduct with the intent to defraud more than one person.”
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The investigation into her campaign finances had dogged her since two candidates who unsuccessfully ran against her in 2017 complained to the state Board of Elections. A subsequent investigation by the board led to a March report that Ms. Doorley said found “considerable evidence” of possible crimes.
At issue are transfers made from Ms. Warren’s political action committee to her campaign committee that far exceeded the $8,557 limit that a campaign could receive from an individual donor, the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester reported. That limit also applied to the political action committee.
More from the local paper. Local TV coverage.
In a just society, this would be considered “justifiable homicide”.
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According to FOX13, a neighbor heard Crocket say, “B—-, you know I don’t like mayonnaise on my hamburger,” when he received his meal order. According to the local news outlet, Crockett struck Aldrige once and Thomas three. Crockett turned himself in to police custody days after the shooting, according to the report.
FOX13 reported that a jury found Crockett guilty of first-degree murder and first-degree battery. Circuit Judge Ralph Wilson sentenced Crocket to up to 130 years in prison, due to his multiple counts including 75 years for first-degree murder, 40 years for first-degree battery, and an additional 15 years for possession of a firearm as a felon, the report said.
(Hattip: my mother.)
Science Sunday!
Today, I thought I’d reach back to the AT&T Tech Channel again. Let’s start with “Similiarities of Wave Behavior”, from 1959. I set this to start about 1:18 in, skipping the introduction.
And as a bonus, Dr. Walter Brattain on “Semiconductor Physics”. You may remember Dr. Brattain as one of the inventors of the transistor who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. (The other two were John Bardeen and William Shockley.)
I’m going back to military aviation today, even though I sort of covered that yesterday. It is shaping up to be a busy weekend, and I’m queuing Saturday and Sunday up in advance.
Today’s video: “The Second Seat”, a Naval recruiting film.
Edited to add 10/4: fixed the embedding on this one. Sorry about that: I don’t know what happened, and I wasn’t able to fix this yesterday.
Bonus video, a little on the long side, but it is Saturday, and I know at least one person will enjoy this: Brian Shul, author of “Sled Driver: Flying the World’s Fastest Jet”, speaks at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2016.
Terry Goodkind, noted fantasy writer.
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While Mr. Goodkind attracted numerous readers with his storytelling, he angered some others with his worldview and his criticisms of fantasy fiction. He was a follower of Ayn Rand, whose Objectivism prized the individual over the collective, and he spoke about her ideas publicly and inserted them into his novels. He also often distanced himself from the genre in which he had achieved fame.
He told an online audience on Reddit that he had “irrevocably changed the face of fantasy” and “injected thought into a tired, empty genre.”
In a phone interview, his literary agent, Russell Galen, said: “His fans were wrapped up in his work and Terry personally. And then there were people who literally despised him. Terry was unique in that field in delighting in controversy, delighting in stirring up verbal combat, delighting in stirring up criticism. He was very feisty.”
Bob Gibson, pitcher.
Gibson won both the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award and Cy Young Award, as its best pitcher, in 1968, when he won 22 games, struck out 268 batters, pitched 13 shutouts and posted an earned run average of 1.12. The following year, Major League Baseball lowered the pitchers’ mounds to give batters a break, but Gibson won 20 games and struck out 269.
He won at least 20 games five times and struck out 3,117 batters, relying on two kinds of fastballs, one breaking upward and other downward, and a slider that he threw at about three-quarters speed. He threw 56 career shutouts and captured a second Cy Young Award in 1970. He was an eight-time All-Star, won a Gold Glove award for fielding nine times and pitched a no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1971.
Pitching for three Cardinals pennant-winners, Gibson won seven World Series games in a row, losing in his first and last Series starts. His physique was not especially imposing — he was 6 feet 1 inch and 190 pounds or so — but he holds the records for most strikeouts in a World Series game, 17, and in a single World Series, 35, both against the Detroit Tigers in 1968.
He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, his first year of eligibility.
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Profiling Gibson for The New Yorker in September 1980, Roger Angell told how after his 17-strikeout game against Detroit, a reporter asked if Gibson had always been as competitive as he seemed that day.
“He said yes,” Angell wrote, “and he added that he had played several hundred games of tick-tack-toe against one of his young daughters and that she had yet to win a game from him. He said this with a little smile, but it seemed to me that he meant it: he couldn’t let himself lose to anyone. Then someone asked him if he had been surprised by what he had just done on the field, and Gibson said, ‘I’m never surprised by anything I do.’”
Derek Mahon, Irish poet.
Today is a day for randomness and a little self-indulgence on my part.
Jerry Miculek posted another cool video of another Smith and Wesson: this one a blued .45 ACP revolver, custom built for him by Roy Jinks. Y’all know I love me some .45 ACP revolver action.
Bonus video #1: shifting gears a little bit, “”Curiosity Killed a Cat”, a 1944 military training film about how when you’re in the field, you shouldn’t play with the crystals unexploded ordnance or things that might be booby-trapped.
Bonus #2: “Angel In Overalls”, another vintage WWII propaganda film. This one celebrates the P-38 Lightning.
Well, not really. But this is a surprisingly non-annoying NYT article from a few days ago about “dusty hunters”: people who search for unopened bottles of vintage liquor.
The most well-known dusty hunter today might be Eric Witz, 42, a senior production editor at the MIT Press, who posts his scores on Instagram at @aphonik, often with detailed analysis of the origins of each bottle. A lover of antiques and enthusiast of cocktail history, he began dusty hunting around 2010 with the purchase of a 1940s bottle of Forbidden Fruit, a strange grapefruit-and-honey liqueur which has not been on the market for decades. Mr. Witz collects not just whiskey, the obsession of most current dusty hunters, but vintage rum, brandy and Chartreuse, all of which are soaring in value at the moment.
“I love the idea of being able to taste something that was made a few generations ago,” he said. Spirits have a higher alcohol proof than wine, so they don’t really age in the bottle or go bad; in that way, they are like drinkable time capsules. In fact, most all dusty hunters believe vintage spirits are superior in taste to what is being made today, even if they can’t quite explain why. Maybe better quality materials and more artisanal production methods were being used back then, maybe international beverage conglomerates weren’t yet mucking up quality, or maybe something magical is happening in the glass over all these years.
Tying the article together is a guy who bought the contents of Cecil B. DeMille’s cellar.
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Travel Thursday!
Today I thought we’d all go out to Montreux, on the Lake Geneva shoreline.
“The Swiss Rivera”, sometime in the 1950s.
Bonus #1: Also from the 1950s, “Switzerland – Land of Contrasts”.
Bonus #2: This has little to do with travel, but I’m throwing it in here as a diversion: Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention play “Cosmik Debris”.
Bonus #3: Bringing it back around, a short interview with Frank Zappa about the Montreux casino fire. This is in French, but has English subtitles, and you can hear Zappa speaking under the translation.
I really enjoyed “Catch Me If You Can”, both the book and the movie. So here’s something on the long side for you: Frank Abagnale talks at Google.
Shorter bonus: the two red flags to look for.
Bad day for music.
Ms. Reddy’s first hit was a 1971 cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a hit from the award-winning stage show “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The success of “I Am Woman,” with Ms. Reddy’s lyrics and Ray Burton’s music, came a year later.
Ms. Reddy was a frequent guest in the early ’70s on variety, music and talk shows like “The Mike Douglas Show,” “The Carol Burnett Show,” “The David Frost Show,” “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.” “The Helen Reddy Show” (1973) was an eight-episode summer replacement series on NBC.
She made her big-screen debut in the disaster movie “Airport 1975” (released in 1974) as a guitar-playing nun who comforts a sick little girl (Linda Blair) on an almost certainly doomed 747. Ms. Reddy always liked to point out that Gloria Swanson and Myrna Loy were also in the cast.
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Mac Davis, good Lubbock boy.
Mr. Davis enjoyed early success as a songwriter in the late 1960s, supplying Presley with Top 10 pop hits like “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy” after spending much of the decade working in sales and publishing for independent record companies.
He also wrote “Something’s Burning,” a Top 20 pop single in 1970 for Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, and “I Believe in Music,” which was recorded by the Detroit pop group Gallery, reaching the Top 40 in 1972.
“I Believe in Music” was recorded by scores of artists and became Mr. Davis’s signature song; he closed his concerts with it for decades. “Watching Scotty Grow,” another of his best-known compositions, stalled just outside the pop Top 10 for Bobby Goldsboro in 1971.
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Genial, photogenic and fit, Mr. Davis had his own television variety hour, “The Mac Davis Show,” from 1974 to 1976 on NBC and was a regular guest on “The Tonight Show” and other talk shows in those years. He made his acting debut in the 1979 movie “North Dallas Forty,” a comedy that starred Nick Nolte as an aging football star and Mr. Davis as a calculating quarterback.
More recently, after years of inactivity on the charts, Mr. Davis enjoyed a revival as a songwriter, collaborating with latter-day pop artists like Avicii, the Swedish D.J. with whom he wrote the 2014 global pop hit “Addicted to You.” (Avicii died at 28 in 2018.)
He also wrote “Young Girls” with the pop star Bruno Mars; a version released by Mr. Mars in 2012 was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Mr. Davis’s other projects over the last few years included collaborations with the country star Keith Urban and the singer Rivers Cuomo of the band Weezer.
Missed this one until I was tipped off by, shockingly, Mike the Musicologist:
Doc Rivers was fired as head coach of the Clippers yesterday.
The precipitating incident for this seems to have been the team blowing a 3-1 lead in the playoffs and losing to Denver. He was 356-208 in seven seasons, but the team has struggled in the playoffs.
Also noteworthy:
Edited to add: fixed the poor formatting introduced by trying to use the visual editor in the WordPress app on the iPhone.
I feel like it has been a while since I’ve done anything with military aircraft, so here’s a nice one for you: “F-14 Tomcat The Total Fighter”, produced by Grumman sometime in the 1980s. It’s only about 10 minutes long, too.
Bonus #1, also short, also from Grumman: “F-14 Air Combat Maneuvering”, featuring F-14 pilots in training at Fighter Town USA (not to be confused with Flavor Town).
Bonus: as a tip of the hat to Ygolonac, please to enjoy the following: