We were trying to come up with a clever introduction to the return of Tuesday Morning Quarterback (and, thus, the TMQ Watch) but we couldn’t. On the other hand, we were also suffering from a bad case of 70s nostalgia (brought about by many things, but exacerbated by the death of Bert Lance). So we thought we’d throw some vintage music your way before cracking open this week’s TMQ after the jump. Oddly enough, it turns out to be fitting for reasons we’ll see later on…
Archive for the ‘Clippings’ Category
TMQ Watch: August 13, 2013.
Friday, August 16th, 2013Random notes: August 16, 2013.
Friday, August 16th, 2013Mark Sutton, best known as “that guy dressed as James Bond who parachuted out of a helicopter during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremonies”, died yesterday while piloting a wingsuit in Switzerland.
Also among the dead: Barbara Mertz, noted author, Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, and Egyptologist. You may perhaps know her better as “Elizabeth Peters” and “Barbara Michaels”. (Oddly enough, I don’t own any Peters or Michaels books, but I think I have a copy of Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs.)
And Bert Lance. Remember Bert Lance? Remember the Carter administration? Bank of Credit and Commerce International?
That sounds like something out of a Ross Thomas novel.
The punchline: all of those paintings were done by one guy in a garage in Queens.
(Speaking of art, this has already been on FARK, but I do want to note it here for the “Art, damn it! art watch”:
I also want to make note of it because that’s one of the rare FARK headlines that’s pretty much accurate. If you have any doubts, click through to the article and look at the photo.)
(“a dictatorship of art”?)
That time of year.
Thursday, August 15th, 2013New NFL season. New Tuesday Morning Quarterback. TMQ Watch to resume soonish.
Random notes: August 14, 2013.
Wednesday, August 14th, 2013Ford stopped making the police variant of the Crown Victoria in 2011. We’re now in 2013, and police departments are starting to retire the last of the Crown Vics.
I have flirted from time to time with the idea of purchasing a former cop car as a backup vehicle. (“It’s got a cop motor, a 440 cubic inch plant, it’s got cop tires, cop suspensions, cop shocks.”) Problem is, the state surplus store wants nearly $6K for used DPS cars; at that price, I could go get a used Miata or Outback instead.
The 1933 double eagle is on display at the New York Historical Society. I’ve written previously about the strange history of the 1933 double eagle, and the linked NYT article contains a good summary, too.
Well, what do you know?
Monday, August 12th, 2013Whitey Bulger: guilty of 11 murders.
Boston.com:
He was also found guilty of “…two counts of racketeering, six acts of extortion, as well as narcotics distribution, money laundering, and illegal firearms charges.”
I would link to the Boston Globe coverage, but they’ve put it behind a paywall, so to heck with them.
Obit watch: August 9, 2013.
Friday, August 9th, 2013Your Karen Black obit roundup: NYT. LAT. A/V Club.
I don’t do Facebook, but here’s The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black’s Facebook page.
Random notes: August 8, 2013.
Thursday, August 8th, 2013I’m not all that interested in the digital Leicas, though. The Leicas I drool over are the vintage film ones. Yes, I shoot digital, but I still have a secret fondness for film and certain film cameras.
Speaking of low-light lenses, I’ve been wanting to link this:
Kubrick used those lenses to shoot scenes lit only by candlelight in Barry Lyndon (which, I have to admit, I haven’t seen yet: I’ve often heard it called “Boring London”, but it is one of those movies I feel obligated to see). Anyway, these lenses still exist, and you can rent them along with a camera modified to take the lenses if you really need to shoot something in very very low light.
The family of Henrietta Lacks has made a deal with the National Institute of Health:
This is kind of a big deal, for reasons outlined in the NYT article. The very short version: Ms. Lacks died of cancer in 1951. Scientists discovered that cells from her cancer were able to survive in lab environments, and those cells have been used in research since her death. However, her family was never compensated for the use of her cells, and didn’t even know her cells were being used until many years later.
The above is a very simplified version of the story. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Grammer Nazi.
Wednesday, August 7th, 2013Headline and lead of a story on the Statesman web site: actual story is behind their paywall.
Pioneering egg farmer, organic feed mill founder dies
Jeremiah “Jerry” Cunningham, who founded the state’s first and only organic feed mill, Coyote Creek Organic Feed Mill and Farm, and the eponymous World’s Best Egg company, died Tuesday at the age of 76.
Now, I’m sure Mr. Cunningham was a nice guy, and liked his chickens. But: here’s the definition of the word “eponymous”:
How is “World’s Best Egg Compay” eponymous? Do I not understand the definition? Am I missing something?
Random notes: August 6, 2013.
Tuesday, August 6th, 2013Thinking about the WP sale some more:
- I don’t think I was clear in my implication yesterday. Yes, the reports are that Bezos is going to run it as an independent company, instead of an arm of Amazon. I question how long that’s going to last: does Bezos want to be Charles Foster Kane? (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Or is he playing a long game here?
- Interesting point from the NYT: the sale does not include Slate (or The Root and Foreign Policy). I wonder how much longer Slate has.
We must do something about the deadly killer trees! (See also.)
(Insert joke about “Empire” here.)
Holy crap!
Monday, August 5th, 2013Breaking news: the Washington Post has been sold.
To Jeff Bezos. Yeah, that Jeff Bezos.
For $250 million in cash. First reaction: the WP was only worth that much?
Second reaction: is this part of some grand Amazon content strategy? Well…
Or, to put it another way: reply hazy, ask again later.
DEFCON 21, BlackHat, and related stuff: August 2, 2013.
Friday, August 2nd, 2013The questions ask themselves:
Did that say “toilet”?
Yes. Yes, it did. A toilet with an Android application. And a hardcoded Bluetooth PIN of “0000”.
I have no joke here, I just like saying “discomfort or distress to user”.
On a more serious note, Borepatch has a post up about one of the Black Hat presentations. The math is a little over my head, but the short version is that there’s been a lot of progress made recently in the mathematics that underpin some of the fundamental cryptography used to secure the Internet. According to the presenters:
There is a small but real chance that both RSA and non ECC DH will soon become unusable.
The link above will take you to a PDF of the presentation from Black Hat. Worth noting: Thomas Ptacek is one of the people behind this.
I’m trying to find copies of the presentations I’m interested in; as I dig stuff up and have time, I’ll post links, but I’m not having a lot of luck right now.
Random notes: August 1, 2013.
Thursday, August 1st, 2013Look, I don’t like drunk drivers. I don’t like drunk drivers who kill people while driving drunk. If I had my way, they’d be charged with murder.
That said, there’s something wrong with this WP editorial arguing that a bar should bear responsibility for the death of a ten-year-old girl “who liked dogs, horses and dancing”. (Would it have been less tragic if she hated horses?)
So that’s 18 drinks in five hours, or 3.6 drinks an hour on average. The WP doesn’t tell us how much Mr. Eaton weighed, or whether his drinks were evenly distributed over the five hours (as opposed to him being there for 4:30, and then slamming down 17 Coronas and a shot in the last half hour). But assuming he weighed 200 pounds, and the drinks were evenly distributed…according to this chart, he’d be right on the borderline between 0.06 and 0.08. I’m not convinced that’s the sort of visibly drunk that would make the bar responsible for letting him leave.
(It is interesting that none of the articles on this case specify Mr. Eaton’s BAC, but perhaps that has something to do with the fact that he fled the scene and turned himself in 12 hours later. It is also interesting that the WP editorial blaming the bar doesn’t mention Mr. Eaton’s “previous convictions for drunk driving, reckless driving, selling marijuana and speeding “.)
In other news, the Austin PD fired another officer. The twist here is that the fired officer was already on probation and had been suspended for “temporarily ignoring a dispatch and disengaging the tracking system in his patrol car for just over twenty minutes”: even after being placed on probation and suspended, he still turned off the tracking system (and apparently the cameras) in his patrol car another 60 times.
Obit watch: Noted Texas writer John Graves. At some point, I need to read Goodbye to a River
Speaking of Las Vegas, people are coming back. But they aren’t gambling as much, or spending as much money on other things.
And speaking of DEFCON/Black Hat: WP coverage of the NSA director’s speech.
I’m hoping for some good coverage of Black Hat/DEFCON from Brian Krebs, who, by the way, has an interesting tale to tell:
(Also, credit card and PIN skimmers just keep getting better and better.)