Archive for November 9th, 2011

Obit watch: November 9, 2011.

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

Bil “Family Circus” Keane.

In his honor, let me link to a couple of my favorite “Family Circus” strips.

Okay, that was a little mean and unfair. How about this one?

I can’t put it any better than Josh did: “Dolly, grinning like a meth-crazed demon, announces to a horrified gathering of Eisenhower-era matrons that she plans to end her little recital with a tune about a stab-happy killer from a Weimar-era Marxist agitprop musical.”

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Spider-Man, Spider-Man, sues whoever a spider can…

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

You’ll never guess who is suing the producers of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”.

No, really. Go ahead, try to guess.

Did you guess Julie Taymor? Very good. Take two gold stars and advance to the next blue square.

In recent months the producers of “Spider-Man” have been facing hard financial choices. Since opening to mixed reviews in June, “Spider-Man” has been one of the top-grossing shows on Broadway, regularly pulling in between $1.4 million and $1.6 million a week. Yet the weekly operating costs for this technically ambitious production total more than $1 million, and the producers have also had to make payments on loans they took out to mount “Spider-Man,” a show twice as expensive as any in Broadway history. Given the size of the production and the creative team, the producers also have an array of royalty obligations to several different artists.

Posted in Clippings, Schadenfreude, Theatre | Comments Closed

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

(Matthew 25:40)

Three senior officials at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, sacred ground for the military and the main entry point for the nation’s war dead, knew they had lost body parts of two service members killed in Afghanistan but did nothing to correct sloppy practices at the base mortuary, the Air Force said Tuesday.

Did you read that? They lost body parts.

(ETA: WP coverage.)

The investigation did not uncover what happened to the body parts, but held out the possibility that they fell out of plastic Ziploc bags while stored in a large refrigerator in the mortuary and ended up in tubs with the remains of another service member or perhaps cremated.

But hey! They manage to account for 99.5% of the body parts! Shouldn’t we give them a pass? After all, it isn’t like they work for Penn State…

Joe Paterno’s tenure as the coach of the Penn State football team will soon be over, perhaps within days or weeks, in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal that has implicated university officials, according to two people briefed on conversations among the university’s top officials.

I haven’t had much to say about the story because….well, I haven’t had much to say about the story. I’ve always had a certain fondness for Penn State (my dad went there for a couple of years, and Penn State was his college football team, to the extent that he followed sports), but what can you say about this?

For once, I’m going to point to a FARK thread, which actually contains some good information and links (in addition to the usual FARK Internet Tough Guy BS).

And remember our friendly Orleans Parish prosecutor’s office? They got their butts handed to them by the Supreme Court in oral arguments.

“There have been serious accusations against the practices of your office, not yours in particular, but prior ones,” Justice Sotomayor said. “It is disconcerting to me that when I asked you the question directly, should this material have been turned over, you gave an absolute no.”

“That’s really troubling,” Justice Sotomayor added.

Posted in Clippings, Firings, Law, Sports | Comments Closed