Archive for the ‘Clippings’ Category
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! watch (#3 in a series)
Wednesday, September 11th, 2013Speaking of ESPN…
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013The Washington Generals? Dude, what are you smoking, and where can I get some?
TMQ Watch: September 10, 2013.
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013Football season again. Soon, the air will chill. Soon, the Christmas decorations will start appearing in stores. Soon, Gregg Easterbrook will be writing about TV shows and the blur offense.
Oh, wait. Did we say “soon”? We mean “now”. After El Jumpo…
Random notes: September 10, 2013.
Tuesday, September 10th, 2013You could hear the music on the AM radio…
(If you have to put this much effort into “saving” commercial radio, is it really worth saving?)
I’m not a huge NASCAR fan: if I’m home and a race is televised, I’ll put it on as background noise, and I’d happily go to a race if someone invited me. But my life doesn’t revolve around it. With that said, this is interesting:
Ryan Newman replaced Martin Truex Jr. in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship on Monday night when NASCAR penalized Michael Waltrip Racing for manipulating the outcome of last weekend’s race.
Michael Waltrip Racing was fined $300,000, and general manager Ty Norris received an indefinite suspension. Truex, Bowyer and Vickers were docked 50 points apiece — but Bowyer’s deduction does not affect his position in the Chase, which begins Sunday at Chicago.
Isn’t “manipulating the outcome” of a race pretty much what every racing team tries to do? Is this example just particularly egregious? (And I find it surprising that there’s been no FARK thread on this yet.)
(Edited to add: Thanks to Ben for his thoughtful and enlightening comments, which you should really go read now. Also, FARK did put up a thread after I posted this.)
For the future is where we will spend the rest of our lives.
Sunday, September 8th, 2013I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction:
This is Mack Brown’s last season coaching at the University of Texas.
The big questions in my mind are: who else does he fire, and does he finish out the season or get canned part way through?
(By the way, NFL loser update resumes Tuesday, for obvious reasons.)
Random notes: September 6, 2013.
Friday, September 6th, 2013How long is forever?
If you bought a memorial stone at the former Crystal Cathedral, forever ends soon:
By the way, Robert Schuller has been diagnosed with cancer.
There’s a new update in the case of Bruce Malkenhorst, former city administrator of the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon: the California legislature is considering a new bill…
Under the bill, to be introduced Friday, executives convicted of felonies could appeal the reduction of retirement benefits only to the public retirement system that cuts the checks. They could sue that agency but not their former employer.
Cities would be responsible only for benefits approved by officials of the appropriate retirement system. In the case of Malkenhorst, that is CalPERS.
My first thought on this: aren’t we talking about an ex post facto law?
A better argument comes later in the article:
I’ve written previously about Louis Scarcella, the former NYPD detective whose cases are being re-investigated. The NYT asks a fair question: where were the prosecutors when all this was going on?
Answer: la la la la I can’t hear you…
But even some of those who were suspicious of Mr. Scarcella acknowledged that they mostly kept their concerns to themselves, saying that his ability to clear cases had made him popular with the bosses.
“Some prosecutors were leery; they didn’t trust it,” said one former investigator, who did not want to be identified publicly while criticizing his former supervisors. “He was one of the best detectives in the city. He’s turning over all these cases, and the bosses loved him. You’re going to go to the boss and say, ‘This doesn’t look right’?’”
More:
Jeffrey I. Ginsberg, a former assistant district attorney who also prosecuted two of the convictions under review, said the cases might look bad in retrospect, but they needed to be considered in the context of the 1980s and ’90s, when the crack epidemic was helping fuel a crime wave.
“The witnesses often came in orange jumpsuits,” said Mr. Ginsberg, referring to the outfit worn by inmates. “I was not afraid to go to trial on a weak case. I was not afraid to lose. I was not lying and cheating to get a conviction.”
The economics of selling hot dogs.
Thursday, September 5th, 2013And other things, at least in NYC. Have you ever wondered about those pushcarts?
The guy who owns the cart at the entrance to the Central Park Zoo (“Fifth Avenue and East 62nd Street”) pays $289,500 a year to the city parks department.
Can you make money doing this? Apparently so: “…while vendors are adamant about not divulging details about what they make, most pushcart sites presumably turn a profit or they would not attract such high bids.”
More:
A decade ago, the fee paid for the pushcart at the Central Park Zoo entrance was $120,000, less than half what Mr. Mastafa paid most recently. The second most expensive cart is on the West Drive at West 67th Street near Tavern on the Green, where the fee is $266,850.
For many other parks, especially those in parks outside Manhattan, the fees are much lower — $14,000 in Astoria Park in Queens, $3,200 in Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn and $1,100 in Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. The lowest fee, $700, is paid by the owner of a pushcart near the soccer fields in Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan.
The biggest selling item? Apparently, $3 bottled water. That sounds surprisingly reasonable for NYC, but:
Maximum prices for snacks and beverages are set by the department.
Obit watch: September 4, 2013.
Wednesday, September 4th, 2013Frederik Pohl: a nice long obit in the NYT. LAT/AP.
(Edited to add: A/V Club, which I really didn’t expect. And it isn’t up to their usual standard.)
(Edited to add 2: Patterico.)
Also: Ronald Coase, winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. LAT.
Obit watch: September 3, 2013.
Tuesday, September 3rd, 2013Several sources, including SF Signal, are reporting the death yesterday of noted SF writer Frederik Pohl. I hope to have more on this later.
Paul Poberezny, founder of the Experimental Aircraft Association, passed away on August 22nd, though the NYT didn’t get around to mentioning it until today. He was 91 years old, and his life “spanned more than 70 years of flight at the controls of more than 500 different types of aircraft“.
Damn. What a ride.
Obit watch: September 1, 2013.
Sunday, September 1st, 2013Harris County DA Mike Anderson.
I don’t have any thoughts about how this is going to play out. I’m out of town, WiFi is catch as catch can, and I’m blogging from the Kindle. Check in tomorrow or Tuesday.
Quote(s) of the day.
Friday, August 30th, 2013I probably would have posted these even if Lawrence hadn’t done a quote of the day, because: Derek Lowe! More “Things I Won’t Work With“!
But I can’t decide which one I like more:
Explosions are definitely underappreciated as a mixing technique…
Or:
“Spaying hyenas” has so many possible uses.
“How was work today, honey?”
“Spaying hyenas.”
(“Spaying Hyenas” is also the name of my next band. We do Daft Punk covers.)
Banana republicans watch: August 30, 2013.
Friday, August 30th, 2013About a month ago, I noted the case of Bruce Malkenhorst, former city administrator of the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon (later convicted of misappropriation of public funds) who was suing Vernon for the difference between the pension Vernon said they’d give him and the actual pension that he was given by the state.
Vernon has taken the gloves off. You see, back in 2002 or thereabouts, people were starting to become suspicious of Malkenhorst. The LAT was tailing him:
And the city attorney at the time, Eduardo Olivo, started investigating Malkenhorst as well.
There’s more. The full report ran to 85 pages. And of course the city responded by firing Malkenhorst.
Wait, did I say Malkenhorst? I meant Olivo, the city attorney that prepared the report. They also sued Olivo for “breach of contract”. And Vernon has gone to great efforts to keep the report and supporting data secret:
Greg Tsujiuchi, a former assistant to the city administrator, told a district attorney’s investigator about a particularly bizarre instance in which Fresch insisted that he burn magnetic tapes that were an important backup for original hard copies of city records.
Tsujiuchi said he took the tapes to one of Vernon’s fire stations and had baffled firefighters set them ablaze. He regretted doing so and told Olivo, who told Tsujiuchi about the report. Not long afterward, Tsujiuchi resigned.
“Fresch” is Eric T. Fresch, who replaced Olivo as city attorney, and later replaced Malkenhorst as city administrator. By the way, Fresch died last year.
Anyway, the gist of the story is: now that Malkenhorst is suing, all of the sudden, the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon is being very open about Olivo’s report, even providing copies of it to the LAT. I wish the paper would post the whole report as a PDF, but you can’t have everything. Otherwise, where would you put it?
(Side note: no change of venue for Robert “Ratso” Rizzo.)