From this point forward, I propose that the Wednesday before Thanksgiving be known as “Hawaiian Shirt Day”, and that everyone should wear their shirts to the office (or out and about, if you’re lucky enough not to be working).
Archive for November, 2012
A modest proposal.
Wednesday, November 21st, 2012Happy Spaghetti Carbonara Day: November 21, 2012.
Wednesday, November 21st, 2012Okay, technically, Spaghetti Carbonara Day is tomorrow, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to post tomorrow.
Plus, today’s NYT has an amusing article about the dish, complete with recipes.
Obit watch: former senator Warren B. Rudman, of Gramm-Rudman fame.
Oh, those Golden Bears…
Tuesday, November 20th, 2012Jeff Tedford: out as coach at the University of California, Berkeley.
Tedford’s overall record is 82-57, “the most wins in school history by the longest-tenured coach in school history“. The problem was, Tedford went 15-22 in his last three seasons, 9-18 in conference, and 0-3 against Stanford.
And this one goes out to Gregg Easterbrook:
Updates on the loser front.
Tuesday, November 20th, 2012Noted: this commentary from the Kansas City Star about the Chiefs and growing fan resentment:
The Washington Wizards are at 0-9, and remain the only NBA team with a shot at going 0-82.
Road trip?
Tuesday, November 20th, 2012I don’t think this would be a good SDC destination; while I’m sure you can get food at Buc-ee’s, it isn’t really an SDC sort of place.
However, we’ve had conversations about going to the Cooper’s in New Braunfels, so we could kill two birds with one stone…
Those kids today.
Monday, November 19th, 2012According to the study, “18.5% of 12th-grade students admitted to using a hookah in the previous year.” I’m trying to wrap my mind around this:
- Are they buying hookahs over the Internet? Or going to their local head shop and picking one up? Online, it appears that a hookah goes for about $100 (give or take a few dollars on either side).
- Are they hiding their hookahs from mom and dad?
- Okay. So you’ve got a hookah. You need tobacco to put in it. Isn’t shisha subject to the same laws as any other tobacco product; for example, the over age 18 requirement?
- Are kids going to hookah bars to smoke instead? We have some hookah bars in Austin; I’ve never been to one, not being much of a smoker, but I figured they wouldn’t admit anyone under 18.
- “In addition, the authors argue, because shisha is often smoked in designated hookah bars, which tend to be exempt from ‘no smoking’ rules, the rules must be changed to eliminate that exemption.” Huh? So basically, they won’t be satisfied until hookah bars are completely outlawed?
Maybe I’m stupid, but I just have a real hard time visualizing large numbers of teens either buying hookahs and tobacco off the Internet and smoking with their friends (and all the fuss that entails) or hanging out at the local hookah bar.
Unless by “teens” they mean “18 and 19 year olds”, in which case they need to smoke a heaping hookah of STFU flavored shisha.
Meanwhile, in the LA Unified School District, “student stores” are making money hand over fist selling food to students unhappy with the school cafeteria’s “healthy” options.
Street price for a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos is a buck, by the way.
Hang down your head, Derek Dooley.
Monday, November 19th, 2012My apologies for not noting this yesterday, but I was out with friends from early in the morning until late in the evening. Yes, I did have fun, thank you very much.
They’re dogs! And they’re playing poker!
Sunday, November 18th, 2012Lawrence blogged about our “Night Gallery” watching last night. At least, mostly about “Professor Peabody’s Last Lecture” and They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar”. A few notes I want to add:
- Lawrence is right: “Riley’s Bar” is a great story, with an ending I didn’t expect coming.
- William Windom is very good (he was nominated for an Emmy) but I’d also like to put in a good word for Diane Baker. Indeed, that’s pretty much the main reason I’m writing this post. She’s pivotal to this episode and…well…
…I’m sorry, but she’s just stunning in my books. (That image is from “Marnie”, not “Riley’s Bar”; I think she looks even better in the latter, but I can’t find a still from it.) If Ms. Baker ever comes down to Austin, I would be honored to take her out for a cheeseburger and the amusing house wine. It would be a chaste dinner: I’d just like to listen to her tell stories, as she’s had an interesting career. In addition to “Marnie”, she was Senator Martin in “Silence of the Lambs”, and Blythe House (among her other credits). And she’s still working. - We also watched “The Diary”. This is a well-executed and creepy episode, with an ending I didn’t see coming. But: can Patty Duke act? Her performance was basically one shrill note, held through much of the episode. And it struck me as being, in tone, very much like her performance in the “Hawaii 5-0” episode, “Thanks for the Honeymoon“.
- I know “Big Surprise” is based on a Richard Matheson script of one of his stories. I have a tremendous admiration for Matheson. It pains me to say that this segment didn’t work for me.
- I’d call “A Matter of Semantics” a bad “Saturday Night Live” skit, but it knows when to end. And it is very short. And there’s much to be said for this:
- It may just pale in comparison alongside “Riley’s Bar”, but I didn’t much like “The Last Laurel“, either.
Four years.
Saturday, November 17th, 2012Almost a year after he was convicted, former Spokane PD officer Karl Thompson has been sentenced for beating Otto Zehm to death. (Previously.)
Nine to eleven years. That doesn’t sound too bad.
So he gets a “downward variance” for being a cop, even thought the crime he committed was in the line of duty and under the color of his authority as a cop, and even though he and his fellow cops tried to cover up his actions? That’s…special.
(Hattip to Balko on this. I missed it earlier in the week.)
Another round of Earthquest updates.
Saturday, November 17th, 2012By way of Soapboxmom. And boy howdy, we’ve got a real doozy here.
http://www.ourtribune.com/article.php?id=14410
Don Allen Holbrook continued to receive payments from EMCID for the defunct Earthquest Institute charity that he helped to run into the ground as its CEO and president. Frank “The Bank” McCrady is also withholding documents showing what he has paid in legal fees for the Earthquest debacle being investigated. Disgusting!
I recommend clicking through to the link. As noted, EMCID is still funding Earthquest, “despite the fact that after eight years, the property developer declared bankruptcy, investigations have been launched by the Montgomery County District Attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI, and the voting public tossed out two incumbent board members.”
EMCID has also spent over $300,000 in lawyers in the first nine months of 2012.
The updates just keep coming:
http://www.ourtribune.com/article.php?id=14410
http://pvtimes.com/news/from-the-editor-congratulations-newly-minted-public-servants-get-to-work/
Thanks for your support!!!
To be honest, I am slightly butthurt by some of the comments in that second link, since:
- I am one of the “gun nuts” referred to.
- It is always interesting that people who don’t like guns say, “I don’t want to take away anyone’s guns, I just want to make sure that people who have them are properly trained”…and then sneer at anyone who engages in training.
That being said, though, I will give the Pahrump Valley Times editor a pass, since this brings to my attention something I was unaware of.
Don Holbrook’s latest scheme (or, at least, one of his latest) apparently involves getting the county to put $63,000, and the city of Pahrump another $63,000, to fund the expansion of a shooting range/training school. It sounds like the idea is similar to ECMID: create a “tax improvement” district, and the funds will come from sales taxes paid by all the people who flock there. Here’s an article from earlier in the year discussing the plan.
But we’re not just talking about any training facility. We’re talking about Front Sight, run by the man Tam refers to as “Four Weapon Combat Master Dr. Ignatius Piazza“. To put it mildly, Dr. Piazza has a colorful reputation in the gun community, complete with several lawsuits, at least two of which involved accusations that Dr. Piazza is a Scientologist. More here.
I haven’t been to Front Sight, so I can’t pass judgment on their training. (Nor do I want to go: if i was going to travel for training, I’d be going to Gunsite.) I don’t have a problem with Dr. Piazza being a Scientologist (if indeed he is one) as long as he doesn’t try to convert me. I do have a problem, though, with trying to get taxpayers to pay for the expansion of his facility, especially when he’s involved with Don Holbrook.
Joey deVilla has a blog?
Friday, November 16th, 2012I mean, other than “The Adventures of Accordian Guy in the Twenty-First Century“?
Yes, yes he does.
I ran across this on the Y Combinator Twitter yesterday, and thought I’d give FizzBuzz a shot. I’d estimate it took me just under 30 minutes to get the code you see here, which I believe “works”. Part of that time was taken up with assisting one of my cow orkers with a problem, though. An embarrassingly large chunk of that time was taken up by my having to look up the Perl syntax for “for”, “if”, and the modulo operator. I’m a bit rusty; the last time I wrote substantial Perl code was about a year ago (a Perl script that parses CSV data from a file and imports it into a SQL database).
Anyway, code:
#!/usr/bin/perl
for ($index = 1; $index < 101; $index++)
{
$div_by_3 = 0;
$div_by_5 = 0;
if ($index % 3 == 0) {
$div_by_3 = 1;
}
if ($index % 5 == 0) {
$div_by_5 = 1;
}
if ($div_by_3 == 1 && $div_by_5 == 1 ) {
printf "FizzBuzz\n";
} else {
if ($div_by_3 == 1) {
printf "Fizz\n";
} else {
if ($div_by_5 ==1){
printf "Buzz\n";
} else {
printf "$index\n";
}
}
}
}
As always, when I put stuff like this up, I welcome criticism or comment on how I could have done it better (or, in this case, “right” if I did it wrong). The way I see it, I can’t get any better if I don’t solicit and accept criticism.
(Followup from deVilla here.)
Edited to add: I was going to upload a Python version that I wrote in (about) 20 minutes (I think). I keep planning to sit down and learn Python, but then somebody calls and wants to go riding bikes or whatever…anyway, I couldn’t paste that here and have it come out the way I wanted to, so I’ve uploaded it here. (I had to change the extension from “.py” to “.txt” because WordPress didn’t like “.py”.)
Land of the free and home of the brave.
Friday, November 16th, 2012I intended to make note of this earlier in the week, but it got past me:
LAT article about what it’s like sailing on board the tall ship “Bill of Rights”.
I find this worthy of note for two reasons:
- I like ships. Especially tall ships. So sue me.
- You may, or may not, remember this, but the “Bill of Rights” is the tall ship that was accidentally shelled by the “Amazing Grace” back in September. This incident, by the way, goes unmentioned in the LAT article.
(Subject line hattip: probably a lot of things, but this in particular is what I had in mind. I get that song stuck in my head every so often.)