Archive for the ‘Kindleing’ Category

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Obit watch: June 3, 2022.

Friday, June 3rd, 2022

Brad Johnson, actor. Other credits include “The Outer Limits” (the 2000-ish revival), several appearances on “CSI: Original Recipe”, and “The Robinsons: Lost in Space”.

The last Howard Johnson’s. But there’s a quibble:

The Lake George, N.Y., location is closed, and the property is up for lease, listing agent Bill Moon of Exit Realty Empire Associates confirmed. However, Moon said, for the last several years, the restaurant wasn’t operated as a “traditional Howard Johnson’s experience.”
“It was a local lessee that was running a restaurant out of the Howard Johnson’s building,” he said.

Howard Johnson’s fried clams.

Apparently, there’s a Kindle edition of The Oranging of America and Other Stories by Max Apple. (The titular story is about Howard Johnson and his personal assistant. It is a fun collection. Affiliate link.)

Ten Restaurants That Changed America by Paul Freedman. HoJo’s was one of them.

The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacques Pépin. Mr. Pépin worked for HoJo’s in the early 1960s.

“Eat My Globe” interview with Mr. Pépin, which is notable for the following:

…But the dish that everybody loved was the fried clams from Howard Johnson’s.

Posted in Food, Kindleing, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Fish heads, fish heads, rolly polly fish heads…

Friday, October 29th, 2021

I have food on my mind.

McThag put up a post over at his place about bagna cauda. This is something I’d like to try as well. And actually, I think I first heard about it from reading about “Babylon 5”.

(I have never seen a complete episode of “B5”. I feel like SF on TV has been dumbed down and mostly hasn’t been good since the first incarnation of “Twilight Zone” went off the air (though the second incarnation was a bright spot in some ways). I’ve never been a fan of that minor SF TV series from the 1960s or any of the followup products (though I would like to watch the adaptation of a Larry Niven story they did on the animated series). However, the more I read about “B5” and the more clips I watch on the ‘Tube, the stronger my impression gets that it was an actual thoughtful intelligent SF series with many of the right people involved, and it might be something that’s worth my time. Perhaps next time I see a box set at Half-Price.)

But I digress. I’m also kind of craving Swedish meatballs. A supper of bagna cauda and Swedish meatballs doesn’t sound too bad. Perhaps not really healthy, but not too bad…

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going to get bagna cauda or Swedish meatballs. I could make them myself, but I’m kind of hesitant about stinking up the kitchen with the former. As for the latter, I guess I could schlep out to Ikea and get some frozen ones, but that doesn’t seem like an optimal experience. And I don’t know any place in Austin that serves either one. If you do, please feel free to leave a comment.

(Also, while I can cook, the kitchen is really someone else’s territory, and I’m hesitant about treading in there. Especially if I’m cooking things they might find disgusting, like bagna cauda or anything with onions.)

(Something else I have a craving for, not related to anchovies: Vincent Price’s cocktail franks.)

(There! Vincent Price! There’s your Halloween content! Are you not entertained?!)

Something else I’ve been interested in for quite a while that is (semi-) related to anchovies, and prompted by “The Delicious Legacy” and food anthropology in general: the lost Roman condiment garum.

See also: “Culinary Detectives Try to Recover the Formula for a Deliciously Fishy Roman Condiment” by the same guy, Taras Grescoe. (I’ve read his book, The Devil’s Picnic (affiliate link), and based on that, I’d be willing to give Lost Supper a chance when it comes out.)

I’m also intrigued by The Story of Garum, but damn! $158! $37 for the Kindle edition! At those prices, it had better come with a case of garum! Or at least a six-pack.

(I’ve heard that this is the closest you can get today to garum. Amazon has the 40°N, but not the 50°N. I might have to order a bottle directly. And the Vincent Price cookbook.)

(This food anthropology thing rapidly gets expensive. And I haven’t even bought any imported anchovies yet.)

Anyway, McThag’s probably peeved at me by now for wandering all over the place. And I’m hungry. Time to rummage up something to eat. Then maybe order some fish sauce.

Never shop when you’re hungry.

Posted in Books, Fish, Food, Kindleing, TV | 2 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 235

Friday, November 20th, 2020

This is another video that I just flat out could not pass up. People who know me well will understand why.

“The Devil’s Cigarette Lighter”, from 1962 and the Red Adair Company, featuring (of course) Red Adair.

Bonus video #1: Remember these commercials?

I have this mental image of Red Adair placing phone calls to get well heads…and charging them on his AmEx card. (In reality, I expect that his company probably had open accounts with everyone who provided equipment: no AmEx needed.)

(Side note: Red Adair’s biography is kind of pricey on Amazon, even in used paperback form. Interestingly, Boots Hansen’s book (affiliate link) is available in a Kindle edition.)

Bonus #2: this is a two-part biographical video about Red Adair. Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 2 does include a brief discussion of Piper Alpha and Adair’s role in putting out the fire.

Posted in Books, Explosives, History, Kindleing | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 218

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020

Thought I’d post some gun stuff today, for reasons.

Miami Police Department’s patrol rifle class:

Bonus #1, also a bookmark for me: Ryan Cleckner explains milliradians.

Bonus #2: this is kind of gun adjacent, but I’m posting this explicitly as Lawrence bait: “Greatest Tank Battles”, on “The Battle of 73 Easting”.

Bonus #3: “Japanese Guns of World War 2”, from LionHeart FilmWorks.

(See also. Affiliate link, but it delights me down to the bottom of my shriveled little coal black heart that a lot of this stuff is coming back in Kindle editions.)

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Cops, Guns, Kindleing, Law | 1 Comment »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#53 in a series)

Friday, April 5th, 2019

Kind of a brief one, but I didn’t get to use this trope last night, so what the heck:

The Baltimore Sun has a good summary of the “Healthy Holly” scandal that’s threatening to take down Mayor (and former state Senator) Catherine Pugh.

There’s also a “special section” that collects links to their other stories. My personal favorite so far:

How the rise of the self-publishing industry contributed to the problems for Baltimore’s mayor

I’m not kidding. That’s an actual headline from an actual article.

Pugh’s administration was beset by other problems long before her book deal came under attack. But Baltimoreans might wonder what would have happened if the Kindle had never been invented, or if the meteoric rise of the self-publishing industry had been delayed by perhaps three decades. Would “Healthy Holly” have remained Pugh’s own private brainchild instead of a roughly 80-page national embarrassment? And would she still occupy the Baltimore mayor’s office today?

Come on. It’s Baltimore, gentlemen: if it wasn’t this, it would have been something else. Grifters gonna grift, and technology doesn’t change that.

Posted in Books, Kindleing, Politics | Comments Closed

Quickies from the legal beat.

Friday, December 22nd, 2017

Some serious, some less so.

Stop! Hammer time!

Former Michigan state trooper charged with second degree murder in the death of a 15-year-old boy. He was a passenger in another trooper’s vehicle: they chased after the kid, who was driving an ATV, and the trooper fired a Taser out the window.

Struck and disabled by the Taser while traveling at up to 40 mph, Grimes lost control, struck a pickup and died.

(Hattip: Morlock Publishing on the Twitter. The Powers of the Earth is available in a Kindle edition, and would probably make a swell gift for the SF fan in your life. I already own a copy, but haven’t read it yet.)

Grandma got stopped by a state trooper,
Driving to Vermont for Christmas Eve.
People say “It’s just weed,”
But the state says “60 lbs is a felony.”

(Those lyrics probably need some work.)

Posted in Books, Cops, Kindleing, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 21, 2017.

Thursday, December 21st, 2017

Clifford Irving passed away on Tuesday.

Mr. Irving, for the younger set, was a somewhat prominent author and journalist in the 1960s and 1970s. Among his works is FAKE! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. I’ve actually been interested in reading that: nice to know there’s a cheap Kindle edition and I don’t have to seek out the hardcover.

But sometime in 1970, Mr. Irving came up with the idea that made him infamous: an autobiography of Howard Hughes. It didn’t make any difference that Hughes was extremely reclusive and didn’t talk to journalists.

After studying a Hughes letter reproduced in the Newsweek article, Mr. Irving forged letters from Hughes to back up the story. He began calling his publisher from exotic locations where, he claimed, he was meeting with Hughes and developing a close relationship. He was betting that Hughes hated the limelight so much that he would never step forward to debunk anything written about him.

He got $750,000 for the book, $400,000 for the paperback rights, and $250,000 for serial rights.

And he was wrong.

At the end of 1971, with McGraw-Hill and Life ready to go to press, the scheme began to unravel. Mr. Hughes went public and denied knowing Mr. Irving, first through a representative and later in a conference call with seven journalists based in Los Angeles.
Swiss banking investigators soon discovered that a Zurich bank account belonging to “H. R. Hughes” had been opened by Mr. Irving’s wife, Edith Irving, a German-born Swiss citizen, using a forged passport with the name Helga R. Hughes.
As the evidence piled up, the house of cards collapsed. In March 1972, the Irvings pleaded guilty to conspiracy in federal court. In state court, along with Mr. Irving’s research assistant, Richard Suskind, they pleaded guilty to conspiracy and grand larceny. Mr. Irving was given a prison sentence of two and a half years and served 17 months. Mr. Suskind received a sentence of six months, of which he served five.

Mr. Irving went on to write some novels and true crime books.

Orson Welles drew on “Fake!” and on the Hughes hoax when making his 1974 film, “F for Fake,” in which Mr. Irving plays a prominent role.

You can get “F for Fake” in a Criterion edition: I’ve seen it and recommend it.

You can also get The Hoax, Mr. Irving’s account of the affair, and Autobiography Of Howard Hughes: Confessions of an Unhappy Billionaire, the actual book, through Amazon as Kindle books.

Posted in Books, Kindleing, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Christmas giving note.

Wednesday, December 20th, 2017

I know we are inexorably drawing closer and closer to Christmas. I hope most, if not all, of you have your Christmas shopping done.

For the record, if you do not have your Christmas shopping done, and if you are, for reasons I cannot fathom, looking for a Christmas present for your humble blogger: please do not purchase this book for me. Thank you.

(If you do have someone in your life who is not cat allergic and likes spirituous liquor, Amazon does have this available with Prime shipping, so you can get it before Christmas. And there is even a Kindle edition, if you need to fill a gap on Christmas Day.)

Posted in Books, Christmas, Kindleing, Mammals, Mixology | Comments Closed

Bookity bookity bookity bookmark!

Tuesday, June 6th, 2017

By way of @newsycombinator:

A whole big bunch of free NASA e-books in various formats, including Kindle and PDF.

A few titles that pique my interest:

  • Unlimited Horizons: Design and Development of the U-2
  • X-15: Extending the Frontiers of Flight
  • Breaking the Mishap Chain: Human Factors Lessons Learned from Aerospace Accidents and Incidents in Research, Flight Test, and Development

I’ll admit some of these are a little geeky even by my standards. It takes either a professional or a special kind of person to want to read a history of pressure suit design, or one of the Langley wind tunnel. But guess what: I am that person, and I bet some of my readers are, too.

Besides, who doesn’t love the X-15 and the U-2?

(No, really, who doesn’t? Raise your hands. No, I’m not noting your IP address…)

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Geek, History, Kindleing, Planes | Comments Closed

Like an oncoming train.

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014

Christmas is coming. But you don’t have a lot of time to shop and get physical objects delivered.

What to do? What. To. Do.

Well, if the object of gift giving has a Kindle or something like it, ebooks make fine gifts. And they can be delivered, even on Christmas morning.

I just finished, and enthusiastically recommend, Brian Krebs’ Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-from Global Epidemic to Your Front Door. It isn’t quite the general book about spam I was expecting. His Krebsness is mostly writing about the Russian pharmacy spam gangs and their internecine warfare. There’s a lot of good stuff in Spam Nation; I’d recommend it for anyone in your life who has a interest in computers, computer security, or spam.

Another book that I really enjoyed this year is Amy Alkon’s Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck, an etiquette guide for the modern age. Much of her advice is based on the latest developments in cognitive science, too, so it isn’t just a list of arbitrary rules. Also enthusiastically recommended, for just about everyone. (With the possible exception of very small children. But if you have a late pre-teen or teenager on your list, I think they could get a lot out of this.)

Posted in Books, Christmas, Endorsements, Kindleing | Comments Closed

Merry Christmas to me! (Part 2)

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014

I like Joe R. Lansdale.

I like free stuff.

Joe’s Bullets and Fire is available for free on the Kindle.

(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist. Stuff from Joel’s Classical Shop makes swell gifts this time of year. And remember, the Twelve Days of Christmas begin on December 25th, and don’t end until January 6th. So you’ve got plenty of shopping days left!)

Posted in Books, Christmas, Kindleing | Comments Closed

Gratuitous gun porn (#3 in a series)

Sunday, June 15th, 2014

Before last week, I had not purchased a gun since July of 2012*.

There are reasons for that. One was that I went through a period of unemployment, where I wasn’t purchasing anything but essential items.

A second reason is that it has been hard to find things I’ve been interested in purchasing. My local gun shops have had very few used guns that I was interested in; it seems that people are mostly holding on to guns rather than trading them in. When Mike the Musicologist and I went down to San Antonio, I did find a few interesting used guns, but either the prices were out of line (in my opinion) or (at Nagel‘s) I didn’t have the ready cash available to make the purchase.

When I decided I was going to the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association symposium in Columbus, I thought there was a good chance that I’d break the drought. I don’t buy guns just for the sake of buying guns, but I generally have a mental list of “grail” guns at any given time. The S&WCA annual meetings are a good place to find at least some of those guns, since many of my “grail” guns are Smiths.

I was lucky enough to find two guns that I fell in love with, both at the table of noted dealer David Carroll. I was even luckier in that they were within price ranges I felt I could afford, and that Mr. Carroll was willing to work with me on payment and shipping. (Mr. Carroll is a swell guy. Go buy things from him. Please.)

(As a side note, it isn’t as easy to buy guns over the Internet or out of state as lying liars who lie would have you believe. The S&WCA meeting was in Ohio. I live in Texas. As a non-resident of Ohio who doesn’t have any type of Federal Firearms License (FFL), I couldn’t legally buy a gun in the state. Private sale or dealer, it wouldn’t make any difference; I’d be breaking the law, as would the person who sold it to me. I had to have my dealer in Texas send Mr. Carroll (who is a licensed dealer) a copy of his FFL, Mr. Carroll had to ship the guns to my FFL dealer, and then I had to go to my dealer, fill out a BATFE Form 4473, and provide my Texas concealed carry permit to my FFL dealer before I could take possession of the guns. If I didn’t have a Texas concealed carry permit, I still could have gone through with the purchase, but my dealer would have had to phone in a NICS check. The only thing my Texas concealed carry permit gets me is bypassing the phone call, since I’ve already been through a background check.)

(If I had a limited collectors license, what BATFE calls a “Curios and Relics” (or “C&R”) license, I probably could have brought one of the guns home with me. The “C&R” license is less expensive and less invasive than a full FFL, but it limits you (generally) to guns more than 50 years old. So I still would have had to have the second gun shipped to my FFL, plus there’s the whole “traveling with a gun on an airline” thing, which is kind of complicated.)

(And I’ll admit, it gave me more than a little thrill when I went to my FFL to pick up the guns, and the guy behind the counter said, “Oh, yeah. I saw those earlier. Those are pretty.” They especially admired the one I’m about to write about.)

(I’m sure many of my readers already know these things. The above is for the benefit of new readers, and people who may not be aware of the process. Remember: lying liars who lie, will lie.)

After the jump, photos and words and things.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Endorsements, Guns, Kindleing, Photography | Comments Closed

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