Archive for March, 2010

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Random notes: March 11, 2010.

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

The SF Weekly (owned by Village Voice Media) and the San Francisco Bay Guardian have been engaged in a bitter antitrust dispute. The Bay Guardian argues that the Weekly was selling ads below cost in an attempt to drive the Bay Guardian out of business. So far, the Bay Guardian has prevailed, and has a $21 million judgment against the Weekly. Now, the Bay Guardian has an order awarding it half of the Weekly‘s ad revenue. (Hattip: Jimbo.)

I wanted to point out this blog post at the Public Policy In Houston blog because it expresses concisely my thoughts about public transit, and about the people who complain about America’s “love of cars”. We talk about the freedom cars give us, and that’s true; but cars also give us time. Time with our families, time to go to school, time to improve our lives. (Hattip: BlogHouston.)

On the local front, Travis County terminated their agreement with the operator of the Manchaca firehall.

And our police chief, Art Acevedo, is one of six finalists for the job of chief in Dallas. Even though he’s just a finalist at this point, the city is offering him money to stay. I’ll just point out that you may remember Chief Acevedo from previous coverage on this blog.

The various stories about the 10th anniversary of the dot-com peak didn’t amuse me that much, but I did get a kick out of this piece on the founders of Flooz. You remember Flooz, right? It was just like money, except harder to use. (ETA: I forgot that I was going to single out this quote: “In late 1999, Beenz and Flooz announced that consumers could buy Flooz with Beenz…” But was it transitive? Could you buy Beenz with Flooz? Nope.)

Merlin Olsen, for the record.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Food, Geek, Law, Obits | 2 Comments »

Oh, no. All those oily rags.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

This deserves a post of its own, rather than being lumped into the random notes.

Derek Lowe’s latest entry in the “How Not to Do It” sweepstakes.

Choice quotes:

…two guys who scavenged a liquid oxygen Dewar from a scrap metal yard and decided to put it back into service. According to the most detailed report, they tried to rig up a connection to refill the cylinder, but found that it vented immediately through the pressure-relief valve. So. . .well, yeah, you know what’s coming next: they took the darn thing off and plugged it shut. No more pesky venting!

And..

…one member of the Cylinder Kings ended up being blown across five lanes of traffic, while his partner was launched forty feet in another direction.

Photos at the link.

Posted in Geek, Stupid | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 10, 2010.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The NYT, in the person of John T. Edge, covers the breakfast taco scene in Austin.

The NYT also gives us a short piece on The Gastronomica Reader. I’m somewhat excited about this collection, as I’m a semi-regular reader of Gastronomica.

The Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood has lost its lease! Everything must go! Seriously, this is an interesting story, with overtones of “Don’t tick off the Mouse.”

Shocked, shocked I am, that movie theaters don’t want to book a movie that’s already out on DVD, even if it did win the Academy Award.

The producers of “Iron Cross” sued Variety on Tuesday, claiming the trade lured the indie film into a $400,000 promotion campaign with promises of Oscar attention that would lead to a major distribution deal — then trashing it all with a scathing review.

Edited to add: This hasn’t gotten quite the attention I expected, so I’ll throw in a couple of links to LA Observed on the whale sushi scandal. I particularly like the Jonathan Gold quote: “Restaurants resort to gimmicks generally because their chefs just aren’t very good.” You don’t say?

It is unclear if the trial will continue without Brown’s presence, because under Texas law, he may be found to have “voluntarily absenced” himself, Gotro said.

This is for values of “voluntarily absenced himself” that include shooting himself in the head, in the front yard of a witness.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Movies | 2 Comments »

Obit watch.

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Willie Davis, former center fielder for the Dodgers and other teams, including the 1975 Texas Rangers.

(Obligatory.)

Edited to add: I’ll throw Corey Haim in here, too. This story hadn’t broken when I started working on the blog earlier today.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 9, 2010.

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

H.L. Mencken once said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Apparently, this applies to New Zealand as well.

The WP has a brief review of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, which actually sounds like a fun book. I do wonder if it mentions “Drowning Mona“. (Edited to add: Yes. Yes, it does.) (Edited to add 2: Also reviewed in Slate. Hattip: Lawrence.)

The papers of David Foster Wallace are going to the Ransom Center at UT.

Obit watch: Malcolm Glover. Yeah, you probably never heard of him, unless you lived in San Francisco. Glover spent 56 years working for the Examiner and the Chronicle, most of those as a police reporter. This is a guy who was hired personally by William Randolph Hearst at the age of 12 (he didn’t start working for the papers until he was 16). Glover must have had some amazing stories. I hope someone wrote some of them down. (Hattip: Jimbo.)

Houston’s Clear Thinkers links to an article from Spiegel Online about the crash of Air France Flight 447. The current theory of the crash (they haven’t recovered the black boxes yet) seems to be that the pitot tubes iced up; those tubes are a major component of the system that drives the airspeed indicators, so when they iced up, the airspeed indicators started giving bad readings. Worse yet, the airspeed indicators were feeding bad information to the Airbus flight computer; this may have resulted in a loss of control which led to the crash.

This is the kind of accident that chills me. There’s very little even an experienced pilot can do to get out of this type of failure, especially at night, over water, with almost no visual references. For me, the most disturbing segment of Charlie Victor Romeo is the Aeroperú 603 crash, which happened under similar (but not identical) circumstances. If you read the CVR transcript, or hear it performed live, the crew’s confusion and desperation comes across pretty clearly. (The same incident was also used for an early episode of the Air Emergency series, which goes by several other names as well.)

Posted in Books, Cars, Clippings, Movies, Planes, Stupid | Comments Closed

Generalities.

Sunday, March 7th, 2010

I was having lunch with The Usual Suspects earlier today. The TV on the wall in front of me was tuned to some ESPN channel; probably ESPN 8, “The Ocho”, since they were showing a Harlem Globetrotters/Washington Generals game.

The question came up; have the Generals ever won a game?

The answer is; yes, and no.

Here’s the (I know) Wikipedia entry on the Washington Generals. Apparently, they last won a game on January 5, 1971, but they were playing as the New Jersey Reds at the time.

“They looked at us like we killed Santa Claus.”

I was also previously unfamiliar with the term “kayfabe“.

By the way, the Nets are now 7-55, for a 0.113 percentage. Projected wins for an 82-game season: 9.266.

Posted in Loser | Comments Closed

They beat him up until the teardrops start, but he can’t be wounded because he’s got no heart…

Friday, March 5th, 2010

It looks like the Los Angeles Police Department is going to fire Detective Michael Slider, who has been on the force for 22 years.

Did he beat up a suspect on camera? No.

Did he kill someone? No.

What did he do to get fired? Detective Slider accessed case notes on an internal LAPD computer system, printed a copy, and gave it to a lawyer.

That sounds pretty bad. But there’s a catch.

The case notes were for a robbery case involving Detective Slider’s niece, Khristina Henry. Ms. Henry accused a prominent high school football player. Tyquan Knox, of the robbery. Ms. Henry and her mother, Pamela Lark (Det. Slider’s sister-in-law) were allegedly threatened by Knox and his associates after filing charges. Ms. Lark was eventually killed; Mr. Knox has been charged with her murder and the robbery of Ms. Henry, but the jury in the first trial was unable to reach a verdict on those charges. Mr. Knox is currently awaiting a retrial.

Detective Slider apparently believed that the detectives assigned to Ms. Henry’s case were not taking the threats seriously, and complained to their supervisor several times before the murder.

After the murder…

Saying he was blinded by grief and anger, Slider told the three-member disciplinary panel he had hoped leaking the internal document would help spur an investigation into the detectives’ handling of the case.

He said he was not motivated by the possibility of winning a monetary award — a claim the head of the panel said he believed.

This is a hard case. The LAT article, it seems to me, clearly wants to invoke sympathy for Detective Slider. And my first reaction is to be sympathetic. I can’t condone leaking internal LAPD documents to people outside the department, but I can easily believe that Det. Slider, motivated by grief and anger, made a mistake. I can easily argue that, under the circumstances, the LAPD should make allowances and impose some form of punishment short of firing.

I could even make an argument that, if Det. Slider felt the case was mishandled, felt that he had exhausted all remedies inside the department, and felt that the detectives supervisors were covering up their mishandling of the case, he had a right—even a duty—to bring police misconduct to the attention of outsiders.

The problem is that all we have right now is the LAT version of the story. Given the way the paper has covered the LAPD in the past, I don’t know how much of this story to believe. I can’t trust my initial reaction because I can’t trust the information I have right now. That’s the real tragedy of American newspapers.

I’m hoping that someone like Patterico (either himself, or in a guest post by “Jack Dunphy”) will add something to the LAT story.

Edited to add: Speaking of the LAPD, why is the 2010 California Homicide Investigators Association Conference being held in Las Vegas? Not that I have anything against Las Vegas (unlike Barack Obama) but it just seems strange.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law | 4 Comments »

Random notes: March 5, 2010.

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Serdar Argic, call your office, please.

Edited to add: Popehat is on a roll. Go here for more Armenian genocide commentary. Meanwhile, Ken has what I’ll go ahead and call the quote of the day:

Perhaps there is some equivalent in Louisiana law, which is cobbled together from the legal traditions of the French, the Deep South, riverboat gamblers, corrupt cops, bead-and-tit based economies, and people who clean up vomit for a living.

Ah, fair food. (Okay, so technically the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo isn’t a fair. I consider it to be close enough for government work.) Chicken-fried meatballs from the Mandola family.

Edited to add: The HouChron has thown up (and I use “thrown up” in multiple senses of the phrase) a slide show of items being sold at the rodeo. (Warning! Slide show!) By my count, of the 24 distinct items shown, six are “on a stick”. What’s that sound I hear? Oh, that’s my arteries slamming shut.

I was working on a post about this list of the “100 best crime books ever written” but I’m not sure I’m going to go through with it. The general tone of the post came across as kind of dickish and show-offy to me, plus I think The Rap Sheet says all that needs to be said. (Especially Ed Gorman in the comments.)

Instead, have this link to Terry Gross interviewing Henry Scott about his new book: Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential. I picked this up last week and haven’t had a chance to do much more than skim it, but it looks like a rather interesting book. I know at least one of my readers openly doesn’t care about Hollywood, or anything related to Hollywood gossip; even if you’re in the same boat with him, I still think there’s a fascinating aspect to this story. This is the only time in recent history (that I’m aware of; I welcome correction) that a government actually tried to put a magazine out of business through criminal prosecution, merely because some people didn’t like what that magazine was publishing.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

You tend to attract what you put into the world, and every second you spend being a dick is a second wasted. I’m 37, and while I’ve looked back on times I was a dick with great regret, I’ve never thought to myself, “You know, I really wish I’d spent more time being a dick to people.”

—Wil Wheaton

Posted in Clippings, Leadership | 1 Comment »

Academic update: Spring 2010.

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Grades are in for my advanced networking and computer security class.

Out of a possible 899.9 points, I got…899.9 points, and a final grade of 100.

This is a good thing, given my interests. Anything less would have been dishonorable.

Posted in School | 2 Comments »

Apropos of nothing in particular…

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

I’m wondering if any of my readers have the same reaction I do:

The more hype you hear for something, the less likely you are to actually partake of that something.

For example, I got so fed up with hearing about ET and Raiders of the Lost Ark that I’ve never seen either one of them. Likewise, I haven’t seen any Star Wars film other than the first.

This isn’t reliable: I have all five seasons of The Wire, but that also has something to do with being into David Simon’s work before Homicide (the TV series).

Really, this doesn’t have anything to do with anything in particular.

Posted in Lazyweb | 2 Comments »

Book notes: March 2, 2010.

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

And happy Texas Independence Day, everyone.

The problems with The Last Train from Hiroshima have reached critical mass: Henry Holt, the publisher, is withdrawing the book from circulation. Here’s a link to the NYT article. And here’s a link to a LAT article that I think goes into a little more detail.

There is no evidence that one person who appears in the book actually existed; Pellegrino says that he knew that already because he’d invented a pseudonym and forgot to mention it. Maybe there is as simple an explanation for the concerns over his C.V.: Pellegrino’s website says that he earned a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in 1982, a detail that has not been confirmed.

I find this odd. Pellegrino isn’t exactly an unknown author; if I remember correctly, at least one of his Titanic books was a Times bestseller. So why are these concerns coming up now?

Edited to add: I was going to mention: if you go to Amazon’s page, they still have the book in stock (3 copies as of 11:37 AM Central), but they’ve added a note, and the text of Holt’s statement, to the page.

Also in the LAT: a fun interview with John McPhee, who is finally filling in some of his personal history.

There’s a standing joke about the New Yorker running “a three-part series on corn by John McPhee” or some sort of other essay that sounds equally silly. Funny thing is, I’ll read pretty much anything McPhee writes, including that three-part series on corn; I always know that I’m going to find something in McPhee’s work that I didn’t know but am glad to know now, or that shakes up my world view. In the next couple of days, I’ll try to post a brief review of the most recent McPhee book I’ve read, Uncommon Carriers, which is interesting but a little bit frustrating.

Posted in Books, Clippings | 1 Comment »

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