Headline of the day.

May 7th, 2024

Slain beauty queen Landy Párraga may have tipped off killers by posting photo of octopus ceviche

I really do need to do that OPSEC post, don’t I?

Her food pic showed the distinctive-looking seafood dish and a side of eggs with a restaurant logo on either a placemat or menu on the table.

They didn’t even have to look at the EXIF data.

Also, she was making the sign of the two-backed beast with a convicted drug lord, who was married to someone else.

“If my wife comes across anything about her, I’m screwed,” Norero had said of Párraga to Ángulo.
He reportedly added: “My friend, her name cannot come out anywhere. Otherwise, my world will come crashing down.”

The drug lord got whacked in prison. Authorities suspect that his widow is behind the assassination of Ms. Párraga.

Posted in Food, Law, Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 7, 2024.

May 7th, 2024

Both Lawrence and Joe D. sent over additional obits for Dick Rutan: AP. AVWeb (which was not there when I looked yesterday). Air Force Times. My thanks to both gentlemen.

C.J. Sansom, mystery author. I’d never heard of him, but now I want to read his books. He specialized in historical mysteries, and had an ongoing series with “Matthew Shardlake”, a “hunchbacked lawyer-turned-detective” in Tudor England.

His first book, “Dissolution,” is set in a remote monastery in 1537, as Henry VIII is dispossessing Catholic monks of their lands and riches after the king’s rupture with Rome. Shardlake is sent there by his patron, Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, to investigate a murder. He finds corruption, sexual depravity and more suspicious deaths.
Published in 2003, “Dissolution” was a popular success, and Mr. Sansom was signed to a multibook deal. He went on to publish six more Shardlake mysteries over 15 years. More than three million copies are in print.
His second installment, “Dark Fire” (2005), set during a sweltering London summer, includes child murder and culminates in Cromwell’s real-life execution in 1540. A reviewer, Stella Duffy, writing in The Guardian, praised Mr. Sansom for offering a dizzying window on the times: “Tudor housing to rival Rachman, Dickensian prisons, a sewage-glutted Thames, beggars in gutters, conspiracies at court and a political system predicated on birth not merit, intrigue not intelligence.”

You know, I feel like between Mr. Sansom and Hilary Mantel, at some point, I’m going to have to go to the Cromwell…

Posted in Books, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Noted.

May 6th, 2024

There was an election in Austin this past weekend.

Because of changes in state law, areas of Austin that were previously annexed by the city could vote to de-annex from the city.

Some of those results are interesting.

For example, Proposition B, “Disannex Mooreland Addition” received 0 votes against…and 0 votes for.

Proposition C, “Disannex Blue Goose Road”, got 3 votes for…and none against.

Proposition E, “Disannex Wildhorse/Webb” also ended up in a 0-0 tie.

And Proposition F, “Disannex River Place Outparcels”, won, 1-0. See, one vote can matter.

In case you were wondering, Proposition A, “Disannex Lost Creek”, won, 1,447 – 138. Proposition D, “Disannex Lennar at Malone”, won lost 110 – 2.

Edited to add 5/7: Actually, I mis-read the results. Proposition D, “Disannex Lennar at Malone”, was defeated.

I don’t know that there’s any major trends to be drawn from this. I want to say that the results prove general unhappiness with the city, and a desire to be well separated from it. But I feel like that can only be said for the areas covered by propositions A and D, since those seem to be the only ones with a significant number of voters.

Election results from KXAN.

Edited to add 5/7: Thanks to T. Migratorious for his comments.

Also, KVUE has a post election follow-up article.

Katieva Kizer lives on Blue Goose Road in northeast Austin, which is one of the six neighborhoods that voted on whether to leave Austin’s city limits on Saturday.

…

“My grandfather fought the annexation of this little area the whole time here until he died in 2015,” Kizer said. “He was the kind of guy that would call the county … call the city and tell them, ‘You need to come do things.’”Kizer said they never got any benefits from the city in the seven years they were annexed and that their roads and water infrastructure deteriorated.
“I did call and contact the city for services, and they’re like, ‘No, we’re not up to date in your area to provide those services,'” Kizer said. “Huge potholes everywhere … They didn’t actually come and fix our road until they started doing new construction in the rest of the area. It was only to benefit the newcomers to the area, not anybody that’s already been here and paying taxes.”

…

Disannexing means the residents will no longer receive certain city services, like fire or police protection, street maintenance, public health sanitation and more.
“There weren’t a lot of things to look forward to or that they were giving us,” Kizer said. “So, the major benefit is that I get to go back to being county taxed.”

Posted in Austin, Politics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 6, 2024.

May 6th, 2024

Bernard Hill. NYT. IMDB.

Frank Stella, artist.

Mr. Stella was a dominant figure in postwar American art, a restless, relentless innovator whose explorations of color and form made him an outsize presence, endlessly discussed and constantly on exhibit.
Few American artists of the 20th century arrived with quite his éclat. He was in his early 20s when his large-scale black paintings — precisely delineated black stripes separated by thin lines of blank canvas — took the art world by storm. Austere, self-referential, opaque, they cast a chilling spell.

Jeannie Epper, stuntwoman. 161 stunt credits in IMDB (and another 39 actress credits). Seems like she was working pretty steadily from 1964 all the way to 2021, including “Play Misty For Me”, “Soylent Green”, “Blazing Saddles”, “The Blues Brothers”, and “Road House” (the good one).

Lawrence sent over an obit for Edgar Lansbury. I had seen this elsewhere and didn’t think he was noteworthy enough, but Lawrence pointed out that he produced “Squirm“.

Lawrence also sent over an obit for Dick Rutan, legendary pilot. He’s the guy who, with Jeana Yeager, flew non-stop around the world in nine days, three minutes, and 44 seconds in “Voyager”. Unfortunately, the obit Lawrence sent me came from a blog by way of a blog, and I’d rather have something more substantial to link to: none of the flying news publications I know of have this story yet. I’ll link to a better obit when I find one.

Posted in 1970s, Art, Movies, Obits, Planes, TV | 2 Comments »

All right, give me a Hamm on five, hold the Mayo.

May 3rd, 2024

Darvin Ham out as head coach of the Lakers.

The Lakers went 47-35 this season, the eighth-best record in the West. They won their play-in tournament game and advanced to face the Nuggets, who they again lost to in a tightly contested five-game series.

Why can’t LeBron James make change for a dollar?

Because he doesn’t have a 4th quarter.

Ham, who had two years remaining on his contract, went 90-74 (.549) during the regular season and 9-12 (.429) in the postseason — which does not include his two play-in tournament wins — since being hired to replace Frank Vogel in 2022. He also guided the Lakers to the inaugural in-season tournament title in Las Vegas in December.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#117 in a series)

May 3rd, 2024

This was rumored all morning, but it was just rumors until now.

An indictment accusing U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, of accepting bribes from foreign entities was unsealed Friday.

His wife Imelda has also been indicted.

Court documents accuse the two of accepting $600,000 in bribes from two foreign companies; an oil and gas company controlled by the Government of Azerbaijan and a bank in Mexico City. The alleged scheme began in December 2014 and continued through at least November 2021, authorities said.

…

The two each face the following charges:

Each of the money laundering counts carry a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. The case was investigated by the FBI and DOS-OIG.

Of course, Rep. Cuellar and his wife are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

You dry-docked my battleship! Part 2!

May 3rd, 2024

Hey! Guess what!

The battleship New Jersey is in dry dock.

Being completely fair, this is a good story, especially if you’re interested in history, ships, the Navy, or some combination of those three.

It was years overdue for the routine maintenance required to keep it safely afloat for the next couple of decades in the Delaware River. And preparations for pulling the 887.7-foot ship about six miles, from Camden to Paulsboro, N.J., and then to Philadelphia, were complete even before the $10 million it will cost to finish the job was secured.

But it isn’t without annoyances.

“They don’t do this, anywhere, very often,” said Libby Jones, the museum’s director of education. “If you’re into this kind of stuff, this is it — this is the Super Bowl.”

Ahem. Ahem.

The Texas also cost a lot more, but it had gone without maintenance for much longer, too.

(Also being scrupulously fair, the Texas is now out of dry dock and in a new permanent location. On the other hand, the Texas was in dry dock for 18 months, not the two months estimated for the New Jersey, and anyone who wanted to had plenty of opportunities to go see it.)

A YouTube channel [Ryan Szimanski] and Ms. Jones created at the start of the pandemic to offer programming while the museum was closed now has nearly 240,000 subscribers. Tickets for the dry-dock tours that Mr. Szimanski leads are selling for $1,000. (Tours led by other guides are $225.)

$1,000? Really? Nothing against Mr. Szimanski: I do watch the New Jersey YouTube channel sometimes. But $775 seems like a steep YouTube premium. (As I recall, the dry dock tour of the Texas was $150.)

It is kind of nice to see the New Jersey is selling merch (though they already had an online store). But can you get Battleship New Jersey 1911 grips? As far as I can tell, no.

(Okay, that’s a trick question: you can’t get Battleship Texas 1911 grips either. Except for the deck pattern ones, which I personally don’t like. The other two patterns seem to come into stock and sell out very fast. One of these days I might be lucky enough to snag a pair.)

What’s the takeway from this, other than dry dock tours of old battleships are fun?

Posted in 1911, Guns, History, Ships | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 3, 2024.

May 3rd, 2024

The NYT ran two obits recently for people who were a little outside the mainstream of celebrity.

Larry Young passed away in March at the age of 56. Dr. Young was a neuroscientist, who got his PhD from UT Austin.

Professor Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, used prairie voles in a series of experiments that revealed the chemical process for the pirouette of heart-fluttering emotions that poets have tried to put into words for centuries.

…

With their beady eyes, thick tails and sharp claws, prairie voles are not exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: They are monogamous, and the males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.
“Prairie voles, if you take away their partner, they show behavior similar to depression,” Professor Young told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost as if there’s withdrawal from their partner.”
That made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.
In a study published in 1999, Professor Young and his colleagues exploited the gene in prairie voles associated with the signaling of vasopressin, a hormone that modulates social behavior. They boosted vasopressin signaling in mice, which are highly promiscuous.

…

Professor Young followed up with other prairie vole studies that focused on oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates contractions during childbirth and is involved in the bonding between mothers and newborns.
“Because we knew that oxytocin was involved in mother-infant bonding, we explored whether oxytocin might be involved in this partner bonding,” he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019.
It was.

…

“Love doesn’t really fly in and out,” Professor Young wrote in “The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex, and the Science of Attraction” (2012, with Brian Alexander). “The complex behaviors surrounding these emotions are driven by a few molecules in our brains. It’s these molecules, acting on defined neural circuits, that so powerfully influence some of the biggest, most life-changing decisions we’ll ever make.”

Frank Wakefield, mandolin guy.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Mr. Wakefield played with a host of bluegrass luminaries, including Jimmy Martin and the Stanley Brothers.

…

While still a teenager, Mr. Wakefield mastered the heavily syncopated “chop” chord of the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, whom he met in 1961 and who immediately recognized Mr. Wakefield’s prowess as a mandolinist.
“You can play like me as good — or near as good — as I can,” Mr. Wakefield, in a 2022 interview with the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, recalled Mr. Monroe saying at their initial meeting. “Now you’ve got to go out and find your own style.”
Heeding Mr. Monroe’s advice, Mr. Wakefield did exactly that. He devised his own sound by alternating up and down strokes on his instrument with equal force to produce a clear, ringing tone and sustained rhythm, which he likened to a sledgehammer striking a steel rail in a 1998 interview with the bluegrass website Candlewater.com.

…

David Grisman, a student of Mr. Wakefield’s and a mandolin virtuoso in his own right, said in an often quoted passage from Frets magazine that Mr. Wakefield had “split the bluegrass mandolin atom” by taking the instrument beyond where Mr. Monroe had.
“Bluegrass,” the album that Mr. Wakefield made with Mr. Allen for Folkways Records in 1964 (and that a 19-year-old Mr. Grisman produced), proved ample confirmation of that claim: It featured versions of two of Mr. Wakefield’s most enduring originals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip,” both of which, with their developments in melody, tunings and chord changes, pushed the limits of what then constituted bluegrass.
Mr. Wakefield’s innovations didn’t stop there, though. By the mid-1960s he had begun composing sonatas for the mandolin and arranging classical pieces for traditional bluegrass ensembles. He performed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1967 and made a guest appearance with the Boston Pops orchestra the next year.

Posted in Geek, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 2, 2024.

May 2nd, 2024

Duane Eddy. NYT (archived).

Posted in Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 1, 2024.

May 1st, 2024

Paul Auster, author. (The New York Trilogy)

I wish I could say more about this. I know Auster was an important mainstream writer, but I’ve never read anything by him.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#116 in a series)

May 1st, 2024

Federal agents have launched a criminal probe into the embattled mayor of a Chicago suburb, Tiffany Henyard, issuing a subpoena to the self-proclaimed “super mayor” last week for a trove of business records and financial reports.

I have no joke here, I just like saying “Wonderful thing, a subpoena.”

Mike the Musicologist also tells me that Ms. Henyard’s current lawyers have asked to withdraw from the case…because Ms. Henyard isn’t paying her legal bills.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

NERFed.

April 30th, 2024

First, we had the NERF machine gun.

How do you follow that?

Would you believe…NERF night vision?

It looks like a camera with (probably) a cheap magnifying lens that’s also IR sensitive. It almost certainly isn’t great, but for $35 it might be fun to play with.

And it seems like there’s already a hacker community around it, mostly on Reddit. (No link, because Reddit.)

Hattip to awa over at Gun Free Zone, who points out there’s a meme around this too.

Posted in 1911, Bagatelle, Geek, Guns | Comments Closed

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