Archive for March, 2013

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Your loser update.

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

With the exception of my yearly $5 bet with Lawrence on Gonzaga, I don’t give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut about college basketball.

However, the remarkable achievement of the Grambling men’s basketball team must be noted here: “…at 0-27, they became the only men’s basketball team in Division I to finish the regular season without a victory.”

How bad is Grambling?

Nineteen of the Tigers’ 27 losses came by 20 points or more. They have not lost a game by less than 10…
…They rate last among 345 Division I teams in offense, the only one with an average below 50 points a game (49.6), and 340th in defense, having allowed 77 points a game. They struggle to score when the clock is running, shooting a 342nd-best 36.3 percent, and when it is stopped, hitting a 343rd-best 58.5 percent of their free throws. Shots are hardly plentiful to begin with; they have been outrebounded by 7.2 a game, making the Tigers better than only three teams in the country.

To be fair, Grambling has been hit hard by NCAA penalties tied to their low academic progress rate. Grambling also has funding issues, which have lead the team to adopt the role of “cupcake opponent” for hire:

Grambling played just nine home games, all against other teams from the Southwestern Athletic Conference. In one arduous span, Grambling lost at Houston, Texas Tech, Oregon State, Auburn and Southern Mississippi by an average of 41 points.

And this is amusing:

Time has not run out on the Tigers’ season. They play Alabama A&M again Wednesday in the conference tournament, part of a seven-team field shrunk by the absence of other academic progress underperformers and a rules violator.

At least, it’s amusing to Lawrence and I and anyone else who remembers the “Charlie Tuna Oceanographic University” series of strips from “Tank McNamara”. (CTOU ended up playing in the Rose Bowl because every other team in the conference had been sanctioned by the NCAA.)

Posted in Clippings, Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 4, 2013.

Monday, March 4th, 2013

At various times over the last year, Olbermann and his representatives have expressed interest in his return to the employer that made him famous: ESPN.

The drop in deaths from firearms and in slayings overall — over the past two decades, homicide declined by 80 percent in the District and overall crime fell by 75 percent in New York City — has come even as the economy has tanked, the number of guns owned by Americans has soared and the number of young people in the prime crime demographic has peaked.

Well, you don’t say. More guns. Less crime. And the WP admits it. Interesting.

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Tales to make you cry. (#X in an ongoing series)

Sunday, March 3rd, 2013

On October 5, 1973, a four year old boy named Josh Miele was horribly burned when his next-door neighbor poured acid on him.

Colonel Pruitt ran the Brooke Army Medical Center from 1968 until 1995, and still practices today in Texas. He had thousands of patients in those years but remembers Josh and his family quite vividly. “For such a devastating injury, they were very realistic about what to expect,” he said. Josh was burned over 17 percent of his body, with 11 percent third-degree burns, mostly to his face. Colonel Pruitt said his chief goal was to save the boy’s sight. But he knew right away that this was hopeless.

Wendell Jamieson was 7 at the time, and lived just around the corner from the Miele family in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. He vividly remembered his mother’s warnings after the incident. Nearly 40 years later, Mr. Jamieson is a writer for the NYT: he decided to track down Josh Miele.

Josh Miele is now Dr. Josh Miele. He’s married and has two kids.

Josh has a degree in physics and a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from the University of California at Berkeley. He took several breaks, years long, while getting his undergraduate degree, and worked full time for the technology company Berkeley Systems on software to help blind people navigate graphics-based computer programs.
He worked for NASA on software for the Mars Observer. He is the president of the board of directors of the San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind. He plays bass in a band. And he works as an associate scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, a nonprofit research center.

He’s also designed maps of the BART system for blind people. His latest project is the “Descriptive Video Exchange”…

…It’s a kind of crowd-sourced service that would allow, for example, a Trekkie to describe a “Star Trek” episode in a way that other devotees would appreciate. The first version, out this month, will work for any video on YouTube.

Nuts:

“It’s not that I don’t want to be written about,” he said. “I’d like to be as famous as the next person would, but I want to be famous for the right reasons, for the work I’ve done, and not for some stupid thing that happened to me 40 years ago.”

And:

“I never doubted that it was all going to work out,” he said. “It was a foregone conclusion that it was going to be O.K.”

Posted in Clippings, Law | 1 Comment »

“Free” booze!

Sunday, March 3rd, 2013

It seems that there is a “bar” called the White House in downtown Austin. I’d never heard of the White House before today; it opened “late last year” according to the paper.

I put “bar” in quotes because they don’t have a liquor license. So how do they sell alcohol?

They don’t. They give it away.

Signs on the walls of the bar, in an old frame house at 95 Rainey St., provide instructions to customers. They are directed to contribute money in exchange for tokens that they drop into a box to vote for one of 108 charities.

How do they make money if they are giving booze away? Volume, volume, volume! Actually, individual “setups” (which I assume consist of ice, cups and mixers) go for $5-$7 each, or as much as your average mixed drink goes for around here, and a “bottomless cup” is $20-$30.

More:

Thomas said she didn’t need a permit because White House sold only the cup, mixer and ice. The bar provided the liquor, wine and beer for free, she said.

TABC, of course, disagrees with this position, and has raided the White House. But they can’t shut it down:

Thomas “does not hold a TABC permit, so we don’t have any specific authority to shut down the location like we might with other TABC-permitted business,” Beck said in an email. “There is a legal way to conduct that business: by giving the drinks away for free without a required donation. For that reason, we can’t assume that because it’s still open means she is still violating the law.”

Mad props to the people behind the White House for figuring out a clever loophole, but I’m not sure I’d want to drink there.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Deep fried.

Saturday, March 2nd, 2013

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo kind of snuck up on me this year.

I actually don’t care that much about the musical acts at the rodeo, or the rodeo itself. But with the rodeo comes…rodeo food. I’ve been waiting for the HouChron‘s yearly slideshow of rodeo food items.

Turns out they published it a few days ago, but didn’t link it from anyplace I could find it until today. Here you go. Note that there’s a handy “View All” link, too: thanks, HouChron!

(I found out my nephews are going down to Houston for the Rodeo. I’ve made them promise to try the rodeo food; I already have a funnel cake commitment from one of them.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, On a stick | Comments Closed

Banana republicans on trial: March 1, 2013.

Friday, March 1st, 2013

I know I haven’t been posting updates on the Bell trial, but there’s a reason for that: the jury has been deliberating for the better part of a week.

Yesterday morning, the jury sent a note to the judge stating they were deadlocked. And another juror sent a note to the judge stating that one of the jurors had been doing “outside research” on the case. This is a Bad Thing.

The same juror made a tearful request Monday to be removed from the panel because she felt others were picking on her. Kennedy told the woman that although discussions can get heated, it was important to continue deliberating.
On Thursday, however, the juror again broke into tears and said she had spoken with her daughter about “the abuse I have suffered.” She said her daughter told her, “Mom, they’re trying to find the weak link.”
The woman said she had turned to the Internet to better understand the rules about jury deliberations and came across the word “coercion.” After her daughter helped her look up the word’s definition, she wrote it down on a piece of paper and brought it with her to court. When the judge asked to see the paper she went into the jury room to retrieve it.

That juror, known as “Juror #3”, has been dismissed and replaced with an alternate juror. The judge has told the jury to restart deliberations, and to pretend that the earlier deliberations never happened.

It kind of sounds like #3 was leaning towards acquittal, but nobody knows for sure.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: March 1, 2013.

Friday, March 1st, 2013

Obit watch: Bruce Reynolds, the man who planned the Great Train Robbery.

In the early morning of Aug. 8, 1963, a gang of 15 men stopped a Glasgow-to-London mail train about 45 miles short of its destination by tampering with a signal. The train, which usually carried large quantities of money in the second car behind the locomotive, was loaded even more heavily than normal because of a just-completed bank holiday in Scotland, and the thieves escaped with about 120 bags of cash, mostly in small bills, totaling about £2.6 million, or about $7 million at the time — the equivalent of about $60.5 million today.

I remember the murder of Jonathan Levin: it was a big deal at the time, mostly because his father was the chairman of Time Warner. Instead of going into business, Levin chose to teach high school:

The killing of Mr. Levin (pronounced luh-VIN) on May 30, 1997, sent his students and colleagues into waves of grief. His body was discovered, bound with duct tape, in his apartment on the Upper West Side. The police said he had been tortured with a knife for his bank card number and shot in the back of his head. At his funeral, some of his students propped a cardboard sign atop his plain wooden coffin with the words: “We are his kids.”

The Department of Education created the…

…Jonathan Levin High School for Media and Communications in the same South Bronx building where he had taught, declaring it “a living tribute” to the English teacher’s “spirit, values, commitment and impassioned belief” that every child has a right to a quality education.

Sadly, things haven’t worked out:

But in the past few years, a quality education at Levin High School became harder to come by. Money for a college scholarship in Mr. Levin’s name dried up. A ball field that a Mets official helped pay for fell into disrepair. Computers sat untouched, applications to the school fell and the graduation rate sank to 31 percent, the fifth-lowest in the city.
Now, just a decade after it opened, New York has deemed Levin High School a failure, and is preparing to close it down.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Obits | Comments Closed

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