Archive for December 28th, 2010

A poll, for your amusement.

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010
Who is worse than Rob Enderle?
Joseph Stalin.
Adolf Hitler.
Barack Obama.
Jimmy Carter.
Fidel Castro.
Che Guevara.
M. Night Shamalamadingdong, or whatever his name is.
The Black Plague.
Ebola.
Broccoli.
After Last Season.
The Bataan Death March.
The cast of Glee.
None of the above. There is nobody worse than Rob Enderle.
pollcode.com free polls

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

TMQ Watch: December 28, 2010.

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

TMQ has his party bus, WCD has our party van. Let’s get this party started, shall we?

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

By way of Daring Fireball, in a roundabout way (and, yes, it is kind of old, but it still tickled my gigglebox):

For the benefit of Sony Ericsson’s QA division, I’ve compiled a list of phrases you do not want associated with your product:

* Regret

* Buyer’s remorse

* Hatred

* Oh sweet God Almighty get it off me

From Jon22, a site I was previously unaware of, but which I am now considering adding to the blogroll. I actually had a lot of trouble picking just one quote of the day from his site: there was also “Rob Enderle is the Sarah Palin of the technology world, minus all the fun jokes about the front-door view of Russia.” and “I find myself expanding the English language to properly encompass the unremitting catastrophe that is M. Night Shyamalan’s latest work, inventing words like omnihorrific and vomitacious and spectacuturd.“

Posted in Clippings | 2 Comments »

Kubiak watch (and other stupid norts spews).

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

One HouChron writer says “Fire him now; don’t let him coach the final game.”

Another HouChron writer says “Firing him now is pointless.”

Meanwhile, the fans are restless and organizing a “Fire Kubiak” rally for Sunday.

And in today’s bulletin from a failing chain of restaurants desperately crying out for relevance, T.G.I. Friday’s is apparently lobbying to have their particular style of bartending (which has a name that I will not dignify by giving it here) made an Olympic sport.

Posted in Clippings, Firings, NFL, Stupid | Comments Closed

L’affair Bell.

Tuesday, December 28th, 2010

The LAT has a longish summary of how the city of Bell got to where it is today, along with some background on Robert “Ratso” Rizzo.

A few choice quotes:

It was 1993, a bleak, recession-bit year, and Robert Rizzo arrived in Bell trailing the vague whiff of scandal. His last city administrator job, in the high desert city of Hesperia, had ended badly, with accusations that he’d steered city improvement funds toward salaries.

Hmmm. Perhaps someone should have been reading documents.

Diminutive and rotund, Rizzo was self-conscious about his appearance. Behind his back, people called him the Penguin, a reference to the “Batman” villain. He liked to mention his bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and said that everything he’d achieved was the result of dogged effort.

…

Only rarely did Rizzo draw attention to himself, as on one election night at City Hall. People who were there recall that he had too much to drink. Peter Werrlein, a former mayor who had served prison time for holding a hidden interest in the poker club, said he confronted him.

Wait a minute. There was a former mayor who did time? That’s an interesting detail I don’t recall hearing before.

…although the Police Department swallowed more than half the city budget, it generated less than 10% of the revenue.

“He said, ‘You guys are costing me this and you’re only bringing in that? You’re not holding your own,'” [former police chief Michael] Trevis said. He said Rizzo encouraged officers to write more tickets and impound cars, and he monitored which cops were “earning their way.” He said Rizzo justified the tactic with a veiled threat: “Hey, if we don’t do this, we might not have a Police Department.'”

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | 1 Comment »