We previously noted that the White House was considering awarding the Medal of Honor to a living recipient, for the first time since the Vietnam War.
The decision has been made.
US Army Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta will be awarded the Medal of Honor for charging into the middle of a Taliban ambush and rescuing three wounded members of his platoon.
(Hattip: Ace of Spades.)
The end of the baseball season and the start of real sports both slouch ever closer, like something that slouches a lot. Our first NFL loser update for the season should post early Tuesday.
In the meantime:
Pittsburgh: 47-92, .338 winning percentage, 54.756 projected wins.
Baltimore: 53-87, .379 winning percentage, 61.398 projected wins.
Houston: 67-73, .479 winning percentage, 77.598 projected wins.
As noted previously, I finally resolved the phone issue. (And AT&T can still die in a fire.)
The number one question I’ve been getting (replacing “Where did you get that shirt?” at the top of the charts) is: “How do you like your new phone?”
Answer: I like it just fine, but…below are some preliminary thoughts on Android (at least, as implemented on the EVO 4G; I do realize that some of these may be issues with the built-in apps, rather than the Android OS itself):
. This makes me mildly cranky.Again, I generally like the phone; most of these are just minor quibbles that I can probably solve one way or another.
Two interesting stories I’ve run across in the past few days.
Story #1 is the guy in Long Island who held off a street gang with “an AK-47“, fired several “warning shots” in the process…and was arrested for “reckless endangerment“. This has been getting a lot of buzz on the gun blogs; some good takes on this story are Lawrence’s, Jay G’s, and SayUncle’s. SayUncle and Jay G. make the point I’d want to make on this; warning shots are generally not a good idea. If you’re justified in shooting, put your rounds into the SOB. Plus, those warning shots are going to go somewhere, and it may not be where you’d like.
Lawrence also tipped me to a story I haven’t seen elsewhere: the city of Carrollton, up near Dallas, is debating a proposition that would ban gun stores within a certain (unspecified) distance of liquor stores “and certain other (also unspecified -DB) retail establishments”.
As Lawrence puts it, “Somehow, I’m not seeing the sort of person who shotguns a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20 in a parking lot as being the same sort of person who has either a few hundred dollars burning a hole in their pocket, or a valid credit card.”
I don’t have anything to add to that, so instead I’ll link to the Hobo With a Shotgun trailer.
Tropical Storm Igor forms in the Atlantic.
(Subject line hattip. Really, I had to do it.)
By way of Mike the Musicologist, we find out what Damien “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.” Hirst has been up to recently.
(I love the caption on that NYT photo: “Damien Hirst with a spare frozen shark.” Because, you know, all serious artists keep a spare frozen shark around. You never know when a dead frozen shark might come in handy.)
Bespoke stainless steel wheel covers for your 4×4.
This is the kind of thing I could see myself purchasing. If I had a 4×4. And if I had money to burn. And if I was a moron.
This week, haiku. And for the second week in a row, no “TMQ Trailer”.
TMQ Watch is not going to re-type all of Easterbrook’s haiku, as that would be unfair to Easterbrook and ESPN. Nor are we going to write our own responses in haiku; one of WCD’s limitations (“A man’s got to know his limitations.“) is a total inability to write haiku.
Easing our toe into the waters…
In the same package, the Times asks why, if going for it, kicking onside and deuce tries make sense, NFL coaches rarely attempt these stratagems. The answer the Times proposes — that coaches don’t want to be blamed for failed gambles — is a running theme of Tuesday Morning Quarterback. I’ve even been saying this for 10 years, since this column began on Slate.com, which was then a radical innovation on that new Interweb thing.
Not just a trope, but a trope Easterbrook admits to!
Next week, the start of the season, and Easterbrook steps up his game. We hope.
I’ve been trying to find a way into this for the past couple of days now, which is why I’m a little behind.
Paul Conrad, former cartoonist for the LAT.
Robert Schimmel, stand-up comic.
Larry Ashmead, prominent book editor. Ashmead edited books by a lot of people I like, including some well-known mystery writers.
Joe Domenici, local Austin thriller writer (Bringing Back the Dead
Lawrence and Bill Crider both have posts up at their sites about Joe. I’m not going to pretend I knew Joe real well; both Mike the Musicologist and Lawrence knew him better than I did. I basically just saw Joe every year at Armadillocon, and the occasional convention in between. But he was always happy to see me, and I was glad to see him around. When Bringing Back the Dead came out, I thought it was a pretty spiffy book, and I’m glad I had a chance to tell Joe that. I don’t know why he seemed stunned by that; after all, the truth is the truth. You can’t have opinions about the truth.
Mike and I both got email from Joe quite a while back asking for permission to Tuckerize us in the next book. I’m not sure what Mike’s response was; mine was basically, “F- yeah!”. I was enormously pleased and honored that Joe would do something like that. Joe emailed us both back in early May to let us know the next book, The Death Factory, was tentatively scheduled for “Sping/Summer 2011”. I’m hoping it comes out and doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Joe deserves better than that.
Hello, I am a Customer Care rep for AT&T and I would like to say that I really do understand how this was aggravating for you from the very beginning, and I apoligize that you had so much difficulty upgrading your equipment. Honestly, you should have went to an AT&T Company Owned Retail store from the beginning. Best buy is a “National Retailer” and they do not have as much training or access to your account as the internal sales channels do. It is possible the the Best Buy reps either 1. Did not know what to do. Or, 2. did not even have access to the information they needed to figure out what was wrong.
This issue that you experienced was due to network and billing system conversion that has been going on for years. In the billing system, it requires all “Blue” customers to convert to the “Orange” network before they can do an equipment upgrade. We call this the “Migration Process.” AT&T has put blocks in the billing system that requires customers to eventually Migrate to the Orange network. This entails getting a new SIM card, a compatible phone and often changing rate plans also, since the “blue” rate plans are normally very old and are sales expired.
This is a very rare issue that impacts customer’s that have been with us for many many years and still have fairly old equipment. It is not a common issue, which may be why you had so much difficulty, and once again I apologize, on a lighter note I hope your enjoying your new phone!
As always, thank you for choosing AT&T, we really appreciate your business and have a pleasant day… 🙂
Dear anonymous AT&T rep:
Yes, as a matter of fact, I am enjoying my new phone very much.
By the way, that phone is a HTC EVO 4G, on the Sprint network. I’ve terminated my service with AT&T after six years.
Have a nice day.
We’re a little less than a week away from the start of the football season, and about eleven days from the start of the NFL loser update, for those of you playing along at home. In the meantime…
Pittsburgh’s at 44-89, .331 winning percentage, 53.622 projected wins. That’s about 108 losses; we can consider the 110 loss goal still in play.
Baltimore’s at 49-85, .366 winning percentage, 59.292 projected wins.
And the Astros have moved into third (3rd!) place in the division, with a 62-71 record, .466 winning percentage, and 75.492 projected wins.
I’ve been involved in a discussion over at Jay G’s site about famous mass murders that didn’t involve guns. As part of that, I went over to Wikipedia to refresh my memory about a couple of famous incidents and discovered the following interesting bits of information.
The Happy Land social club fire:
Found guilty on August 19, 1991, of 87 counts of arson and 87 counts of murder, [Julio] González was sentenced to 174 twenty-five year sentences, to be served consecutively (a total of 4,350 years) . It was the most substantial prison term ever imposed in the state of New York. He will be eligible for parole in March 2015.
Of the three employees accused of the fire, only one, Héctor Escudero Aponte, is still in prison. Armando Jimenez and José Francisco Rivera Lopez were released from federal prison in 2001 and 2002 respectively.
(And if you want to read about something both horrible and forgotten, look up the Bath School disaster.)
The Cardiff Botanical Society, in Cardiff-By-The-Sea, California, spent $120,000 to put up a 16-foot statue of a “surfer”. That is, for values of “surfer” that look a lot like…well, maybe, me on a surfboard.
Hilarity ensues, complete with people using the “Cardiff Kook” (as the statue is known) as a jumping off point to create their own works of art.
(Hattip: Reason’s “Hit and Run“.)