Archive for July, 2012

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Obit watch: July 9, 2012.

Monday, July 9th, 2012

I am becoming convinced that if you’re going to read only one obit for a prominent cultural figure, the obit to read is the Onion A/V Club’s. It seems to me that the writers for that site, especially Sean O’Neal, consistently manage to do a great job on tight deadlines summarizing why someone who just died was important, and do so with no snark or cruelty. In addition, the A/V Club doesn’t require logins or subscriptions.

Anyway, Ernest Borgnine: A/V Club. (I’m happy to see that so many of the obits mention his key role in The Wild Bunch.) LAT. NYT.

Edited to add: And, oddly enough, a nice tribute from Patrick at Popehat, guest blogging at Balko’s site.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Your loser update for July 8, 2012.

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

I haven’t been following the baseball losers this year: I plan to do a post at the All-Star break about who has the worst records.

But I did want to point out this article from the HouChron:

Along with the worst record in baseball at 32-52, the Astros are alone in last place in the National League Central for the first time this season. The nine-game skid matches the longest for the Astros since Sept. 13-22, 2009, and is two shy of the club record.

(The Astros lost today, to make their record 33-53, still the worst record in baseball. Second worst is a tie between the Colorado Rockies…and the Cubs, both at 33-52.)

Edited to add: Huh. Well. Whaddya know? I guess we’re at the All-Star break after tonight’s games finish. I had no idea…

Posted in Clippings, Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Kindle notes.

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

Thursday and Friday were kind of slow days at work. For various reasons (including a series of discussions with several co-workers) I ended up downloading the Shooter app, which does run on the Kindle Fire. (I find that slightly surprising, but I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth.)

Since the Kindle Fire lacks GPS and Bluetooth, you do miss out on a few features, such as interfacing with the Kestrel and GPS-based weather station input. On the other hand, I think the interface on a Kindle Fire may be slightly more pleasant; since you can apparently do cloud-based syncing, what I suspect will work out well is to do data entry on the Kindle Fire, sync with Shooter on your smart phone, and use the phone at the range.

This, in turn, led to me consider .22 LR ballistics. In turn, my consideration of same led me to start poking around on Amazon for some things I’d seen previously, such as The Complete Book of the .22: A Guide to the World’s Most Popular Guns (available used at a good price) and Rifleman’s Guide To Rimfire Ammunition (a book I want, but the Amazon prices aren’t that good; I’d rather support my local gunshop).

One of the books I found while poking around is a quaint and curious volume called The Art of Rimfire Accuracy by a gentleman named Bill Calfee. From what I can tell, Mr. Calfee has forgotten more about .22 accuracy than most people ever knew; he’s somewhat famous in the community as a .22 specialist gunsmith. (One thing that particularly amuses me is that Mr. Calfee builds custom .22 benchrest guns based on the XP-100 action; when I was six years old, I thought the XP-100 was the coolest gun in the world. I still want one chambered in .221 Fireball, but a Calfee .22 conversion sounds like it would be a neat thing to own as well.)

My understanding is that the book is mostly a collection of Mr. Calfee’s writings for Precision Shooting magazine: the book is 700+ pages long.

Mr. Calfee’s book is published by Authorhouse, a POD publisher and one that seems popular in the gun community. (Authorhouse also publishes The Rifleman’s Rifle: Winchester’s Model 70, 1936-1963, a book I want badly but can’t justify the $90 price tag for.)

Anyway, here’s my point: Mr. Calfee’s book in paperback is $42.63 with Prime shipping. Interestingly, it is also available on the Kindle…

…and the Kindle edition is $9.99. I’ve only made through the first three chapters so far, but it doesn’t look to me like there’s any photographic or other detail lost on the Kindle Fire. Welcome to the future of publishing. Now if we could only get more gun books on the Kindle, like History of Smith & Wesson or The Rifleman’s Rifle or Hatcher’s Notebook or even Applied Ballistics For Long-Range Shooting, things would be hopping…

(I can even see a version of the Litz book that runs as an application, and allows you not only to read the text, but also to do ballistic calculations based on Litz’s equations interactively within the book itself, instead of using the supplied CD. Hey, a fellow can dream, can’t he?)

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Kindleing | 1 Comment »

Horse tacos.

Sunday, July 8th, 2012

Today’s Statesman has a long backgrounder about Amado Pardo and Jovita’s. Jovita’s, you may recall, is the South Austin restaurant alleged to be at the center of a heroin distribution ring, and Pardo is one of the key figures in the indictment.

There’s some stuff in the article I was previously unaware of. Specifically:

  • Pardo’s political activism, not just for Democratic candidates, but specifically for Hispanic Democrats. (The Glen Maxey story, in particular, is interesting.)
  • Pardo was convicted of murder. Twice. The first murder was in 1971: he was sentenced to 12 years, and paroled in 1975 “after serving about four years” according to the Statesman. The second time was in 1983: he was sentenced to eight years, but paroled after four. He was also convicted of illegally possessing a firearm in 1978, and was released from prison on that charge in 1981. So he got almost as much time on the gun charge as he did on each of the two murders.
  • “….some who knew Pardo best said he appeared to have overcome his criminal past to become a community leader, a successful businessman and a strong patriarch to his large family.”
  • “Though the indictment accuses Pardo and the others of dealing heroin since May 2011, an FBI agent testified during a co-defendant’s detention hearing that he believes Pardo has been dealing the drug for more than 25 years — a period that predates Jovita’s.”

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law | 1 Comment »

Noted.

Friday, July 6th, 2012

The Onion A/V Club reviews the first set of digital comics from Chris Roberson’s new Monkeybrain Comics.

Mr. Roberson has previously been mentioned in this space, but I was not aware of his dispute with DC Comics. Then again, I really haven’t been keeping up with the comics world…

Posted in Books, Clippings | Comments Closed

If I put this into a novel, nobody would believe it.

Friday, July 6th, 2012

An apparently suicidal man was hit by a car on U.S. 281 while being chased by a person in a gorilla costume early today, police said.

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

Battleship!

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

I believe I’ve mentioned in the past that I’m a big fan of museums. Especially little museums, and especially military museums. I’ve had a lot of fun visiting official Navy museums, like the one at the Naval War College in Newport and the Submarine Force Museum in Groton. (However, I am not biased; I’ve been to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB twice, and loved that both times.)

It isn’t just the official museums I like. I want to get back over to the Nimitz Museum in Fredericksburg soon. (I know, it is now the “National Museum of the Pacific War”, but I still think of it as the Nimitz Museum.) It isn’t even just the military ones; there’s a whole host of little museums in Houston, for example, that I’d like to visit.

(We visited the San Jacinto Monument a lot when I was a child, but I don’t remember ever touring the battleship Texas. Odd that. I also never got to eat at the San Jacinto Inn during the glory days of that establishment. Not that I’m bitter or anything.)

The purpose of this long digression is to point out an article in today’s LAT (I know, I know, but they come in waves, and the Cudahy articles were actually yesterday; I just didn’t have time to blog them) tied to the battleship Iowa docking in San Pedro.

The basic point of the article is that warship museums may or may not work out. Why? It depends on the location: thank you, Captain Obvious!

In San Diego, the aircraft carrier Midway has topped 1-million visitors per year. Another carrier, the Intrepid, is a must-see museum in Manhattan, especially with the recent arrival of the space shuttle Enterprise.

I’d suggest both of those are very special cases; San Diego has a strong naval presence, so I’d expect a warship museum to work well there. And the Intrepid is, to my mind, an atypical warship museum, what with the space shuttle and the SR-71 and the glaven and the HEY NICE LADY!

Sorry.

On the other hand, I’m not exactly shocked that the battleship New Jersey in Camden, New Jersey has trouble attracting visitors.

“Don’t assume you know what the public wants,” said Midway marketing director Scott McGaugh when asked his advice for the Iowa. “Don’t build a museum just for History Channel buffs and retired military.”

I’d also note Chumlee and Rick have a full work schedule at the shop and can’t be running off to every warship in the country, and the Old Man is probably too grumpy to be a good docent.

Posted in Clippings, History, Museums | 7 Comments »

And while we’re talking about municipal corruption…

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

…let us turn our eyes to the West, and the state of California. It’s like a whole other country! Specifically, like a third world banana republic.

On Tuesday, the mayor of Cudahy, David M. Silva, resigned.

Silva, Councilman Osvaldo Conde and Angel Perales, the former head of code enforcement, are accused of taking $17,000 in bribes from a marijuana dispensary owner who was working as an FBI informant. The officials allegedly took the bribes in exchange for their help in opening a store in the small blue-collar city, according to federal authorities.

I’m intrigued by the idea that the FBI was using a marijuana dispensary owner as an informant, given the tensions between California and the Feds over medical pot. But there’s more to the story:

In the Cudahy case, a 146-page criminal complaint indicates that the arrests were part of a larger investigation that includes allegations of election fraud. The complaint also refers to the possible involvement of a towing company and a sheriff’s deputy. The federal document, which includes about 130 pages of wiretap transcripts, paints a picture of unchecked power by officials who boldly plotted taking bribes and talked about accepting cash as a way to avoid public disclosure required for campaign contributions.

There’s a complimentary story in the LAT that goes into more detail about the alleged election fraud. Two men who ran for city council seats had their cars vandalized, rocks and bricks thrown at their homes, and then…

Late one night, a surveillance camera on Garcia’s home captured a car stopping nearby. A man crouched behind Garcia’s pickup and hurled a Molotov cocktail at the house.

By the way, remember Maywood? The Maywood PD also patrolled Cudahy. A former Maywood PD chief is quoted in the article as having concerns about Cudahy’s elections and the “aura of intimidation”. (As far as I can tell, that chief came in at the very end of the police department’s existence, and did not have anything to do with the circumstances that led to the department being shut down.) The “towing company” involvement is interesting as well; as you may recall, there were some questionable things going on in Maywood with a towing company as well.

More:

In one of the wiretapped conversations, a Cudahy employee, Simon Rojas, spoke about the lengths to which he would go to protect his boss, Conde. Federal prosecutors said the pistol-packing code enforcement worker described “his willingness to commit acts of violence against anyone who” meddled with Conde.

Tough town, if the code enforcement folks need to carry guns.

Related: “What you have just said is among the most absurd things I have ever heard.”

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

Police watch: July 5, 2012.

Thursday, July 5th, 2012

There’s a town in Montgomery County, near Houston, called Patton Village. I have it in my head that Patton Village was one of the notorious Texas speedtraps up until a few years back, when The Ledge basically shut all of those down. (Edited to add: I hate using Wikipedia as a source, but it does seem to confirm my recollection with externally sourced links.)

Anyway, Patton Village is apparently trying to disband the city police department. I say “apparently” and “trying” because the mayor tried to hold a city council meeting yesterday. The meeting was posted at 8 PM on Tuesday.

This is a problem. You see, the Texas Open Meetings Act requires 72 hours notice for such meetings. (There is a “public emergency” exemption, but I gather the mayor did not declare such. And while I am not a lawyer or expert on the Open Records Act, I feel confident in declaring that the law strictly defines what constitutes a “public emergency”. Russian Chinese North Korean troops in the streets? Probably. Disbanding the police department? Probably not.)

Anyway, the mayor and two council members showed up for the meeting, but one of the council members walked out after declaring the meeting illegal. Shortly after that, the mayor apparently came out and told the police officers that she was shutting down the department and calling in the county sheriff. Shortly after that, when the media showed up, the mayor said there “were not enough there for the meeting and refused any other comment.”

But wait! The story gets better!

The mayor, two other city officials, and four police officers are under indictment!

A grand jury indicted [Mayor Pamela] Munoz on 10 corruption-related charges, ranging from abuse of official capacity to theft by a public servant.

(The others indicted are the city secretary, two court clerks, and the four police officers, who are named in the HouChron story.)

But wait! It gets even better! Why were these folks indicted?

The officials were accused of using police cars, bought with federal grant money, as collateral to get bank loans that they then dipped into for personal use, the Chronicle reported in March.

Somehow I missed this story when they were indicted. I must have been distracted by shiny objects.

Really, isn’t that just about the most stupid example of municipal corruption you’ve ever heard of? Using cop cars as loan collateral? And what about the banks? Don’t banks inspect the collateral before accepting it? I mean, I could see these folks claiming that they were personal vehicles, but I’d at least expect the bank to want to look at the title. (And I would assume the title would be in the name of  “City of Patton Village”, not “Pamala Munoz” or one of the others charged.)

Plus, you know, if I’m a bank officer, and I go out to look at the collateral being offered, and I see it has a light bar and sirens and a shotgun rack and a BIG FREAKING SEAL on the side saying “Patton Village Police Department”, I’m going to be asking some questions. Just saying. Perhaps I overestimate the intelligence of the average banker.

By the way, the HouChron story is largely (but not entirely) based on reporting by the Montgomery County Police Reporter, who the HouChron credits, and who I do want to provide a link to as well.

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Law, Politics | 1 Comment »

Morning obit roundup.

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

Andy Griffith: NYT. NYT appreciation. LAT. LAT appreciation by Ron Howard. Another one from the LAT. Onion A/V Club.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Useless without pics.

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

Though given my expressed aesthetic opinion, perhaps the lack of pictures is just as well. This is also noteworthy as a possible exception to The Journalist’s Guide to Firearms Identification:

A former U.S. Marine from Southern California could face up to 10 years in federal prison after being convicted of illegal possession of a chrome-plated AK-47 machine gun that authorities say he smuggled back from a tour of duty in Iraq and may have belonged to Saddam Hussein’s guards.

Posted in Clippings, Guns | Comments Closed

Random notes: July 3, 2012.

Tuesday, July 3rd, 2012

I think I’m going to wait until later tonight or tomorrow morning to do a roundup of Andy Griffith obits. In the meantime, how has the Criterion Collection not come out with an edition of “A Face In the Crowd”?

Here’s something I’m wondering about. There’s a story in the HouChron: I’ll link to it, but I won’t mention names. The gist of the story is that the sister of a state representative was arrested yesterday after a police raid found drugs and guns in her home. Reading between the lines of the honorable gentleman’s statement, it appears she has issues, if not a lifetime subscription and a complete set of bound volumes.

Question: why is this news? Would it have been newsworthy (outside of Corpus Christi) if her brother wasn’t a state rep? Does it matter that her brother happens to be a Republican? (I like to think I’d be asking the same question if he was a Democrat.)

In news that might actually be news: a while back, the Landry’s corporation got a tax abatement to build “The Inn at the Ballpark” . This was supposed to generate a certain number of jobs. According to a city audit, it didn’t generate the specified number.

So how did the Houston City Council respond? If you said “they voted not to ask Landry’s for the taxes they were previously exempted from”, take two gold stars…and you know the drill.

(Hattip: Lawrence. I’m aware that post has nothing to do with Landry’s, but I’ve been wanting to link it for a while.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Media, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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