Archive for May, 2013

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Awards season.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Pop quiz:

Fäviken: Understanding the Genius Behind the World’s 34th Best Restaurant

Is that a headline from the Onion, or a real article from a food blog?

Answer: That’s a real article in the current “issue” of Dark Rye, which won the James Beard Award for “Best Group Food Blog” this year.

In conclusion, we introduce the RITUAL edition of Dark Rye, which is to say CIRCLES – that’s where it’s at. The essence of ritual. It all begins when we rise once again to make the perfect cup of coffee. We scramble eggs. Butter toast. Breakfast preparation as meditation.

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face.

Sorry. Where were we?

Again. Always again. Days as snakes that swallow their tails. Months, moon cycles. The ceaseless rotation of seasons. From Big Bang to apocalypse. From the eruption and destruction of every single moment – now, now, now. We’re born. We die. Who doesn’t dig a juggler?

I’d write more on the subject of “Dark Rye” (Why does the design make me stabby? Why are they endorsing the crank theory of Ayurveda?) but Ryan Sutton over at “The Bad Deal” has already made about as pithy a comment as I’ve seen.

(I know there are some people in my audience who feel that New York in general, and New York dining specifically, is overblown in the food news/food blog scene. I kind of agree with this in general: when it comes to Sandy, though, that was one of the most important food stories of the year, and there were lots of real food blogs that covered it well.)

In better news, the Edgar Award winners have been announced. I like Dennis Lehane a lot, so I’m pretty happy Live by Night won. I have a copy somewhere, I think, but I haven’t read it yet; or, for that matter, the other nominated novels. (I am also kind of happy that Ace Atkins got a nomination for a non-Spenser book.)

True crime: I didn’t read any of this year’s nominees. Midnight in Peking looks interesting, but I never got around to picking it up. I probably will next time I’m at Half-Price. The other book people were talking about was People Who Eat Darkness. My problem with that is: I’ve already read about the Lucie Blackman case in Jake Adelstein’s excellent Tokyo Vice, and I’m just not all that damn interested in reading about the case again.

Critical/biographical: I hope The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics is a swell book. I thought Books to Die For was a worthy nominee and a delightful book, so Scientific Sherlock darn well better be an even better book.

I finally got my hands on a copy of In Pursuit of Spenser just this past Friday, so I can’t comment on it yet. I suspect I will be writing a longer review/appreciation once I do finish that book. But it is a promising sign to me that three of this year’s nominees for best novel were also contributors to Pursuit. (Lehane, Atkins, and Lyndsay Faye, in case you were wondering.)

Posted in Books, Clippings, Food | Comments Closed

Can’t afford it.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Have no practical use for it.

Camera is not included.

Want one anyway.

(I wonder if you could build a business around this device.)

Posted in Photography, Planes | Comments Closed

Chester, Chester…

Monday, May 6th, 2013

Eric Toth is allegedly a bad guy. He stands accused of being a child molester and child pornographer. (I use the word “alleged” because he has not been convicted yet, though the evidence against him appears to be pretty strong.)

Toth was indicted on these charges in 2008 and went on the run. He managed to avoid capture, even though he was featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and made the FBI “10 Most Wanted” list, until a few weeks ago. Authorities found him in Nicaragua and shipped him back to the US to face charges.

Why do I note this here? Because there’s an Austin connection: Toth lived here for a while…

Colleagues knew the speaker under a different name as an Austin-based tech writer and computer technician they described as brilliant and friendly.

More:

The man people identified as Toth seemed to grow bolder. A few months earlier, he freelanced his first blog post for SMBNation, a small-business technology company, under an assumed name, according to people at the company and entries on the blog. In the months that followed, he contributed regularly to the blog on everything from Facebook’s initial public offering to cloud computing and wrote magazine articles.
An online biography says he was a “banker once upon a time” but didn’t much like it. The biography hints that “there’s even more to his story.”

He was invited to speak at a SMBNation conference in October, but skipped the country instead.

One of the big questions on my mind (and I’m sure other people in Austin are asking the same thing): did I ever meet this man?

Paul Mullen, the owner at the time [of P.C. Guru, where Toth worked – DB], said he had no reason to suspect the man, because his driver’s license and Social Security number checked out. Toth allegedly used bogus papers and stole identities during his time as a fugitive. The Post is withholding the name the man in Austin used because the identity may have been stolen, too.

I’m just going to point out that if you do a carefully crafted Google search using the phrase “banker once upon a time” and using the “site:smbnation.com” parameter, you’ll get results. And those results match the last name Toth was using when he was captured. (In Nicaragua, he was going by “Robert Shaw Walker“.)

I share some of the qualms the WP has, which is why I’m not directly linking to the bio on SMBNation. But I want to point out to the Posties that they’re not quite as clever as they think they are; the art of crafting Google searches like that is hardly arcane or mysterious.

(Also, SMBNation? You might want to address this somewhere on your site.)

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Week of Gatsby: Day 1.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

In honor of the forthcoming movie, I am declaring this week the “Week of Gatsby” on WCD. Mostly for my own personal amusement.

Today’s entry: The Great Gastby for NES, a browser based game in which you wander around Gatsby’s party, throwing your hat at various targets and searching for the titular character.

(Yes, I am planning to see the movie. Yes, in 3D. “Argo” was the last thing I saw in a theater, and I figure I could use the diversion. Even if it is a pile of crap.)

(And, yes, as it happens, I do like the book. A short defense of it is here.)

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Geek, Movies | Comments Closed

“Firing” watch

Sunday, May 5th, 2013

P.J. Carlesimo out as coach of the Brooklyn Nets.

I put “firing” in quotes because Carlesimo was acting as an interim coach: as you may recall, the team fired Avery Johnson in December. (Wasn’t he great in “Spenser: For Hire” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”?)

Carlesimo went 35-19 as interim coach, and the Nets did go to the playoffs. But apparently that wasn’t good enough, and the team is looking for a change.

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

Random notes: May 5, 2013.

Sunday, May 5th, 2013

Mildly interesting NYT article: Revisiting L.B.J.’s Austin, One Address at a Time. I would have liked for this article to be a little longer, but some of the places I have in mind (such as El Patio) are actually associated more with Mrs. Johnson than the president.

Weer’d is at the NRA convention, so I’m going to step on his “Gun Death” territory: we must ban the deadly killer assault limos! Nobody needs a high capacity vehicle to get anywhere: you can get by with a Smart Car!

(Also.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 4, 2013.

Saturday, May 4th, 2013

This is kind of surprising to see in the NYT: Tom Knapp, noted exhibition shooter.

From 1993 to 2004, Mr. Knapp made and broke his own records for the number of hand-thrown clay targets struck in a single round and for speed in doing so. His last record — 10 airborne targets hit (or “dusted,” in shooting-speak) in 2.2 seconds, each struck with a separate round — was set at an exhibition in Murfreesboro, Tenn., on Oct. 10, 2004.

More:

Mr. Knapp said he had been inspired by trick shooters of the next generation, most notably Herb Parsons, a showman who toured the country from the 1930s through the ’50s and often worked in Hollywood as a trick-shot stand-in for stars like Jimmy Stewart in “Winchester ’73” (1950), which involves a shooting contest.
“Parsons was probably the greatest of the modern era — and in my book, after him, Tom Knapp comes a very close second,” said Warren Newman, curator at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., a site of trick-shooting exhibitions. “What these two fellows did was always so much more than just shooting.”
He added: “What they did was amaze people, put on a real show. They were outstanding professionals.”

Posted in Clippings, Guns | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 4, 2013.

Saturday, May 4th, 2013

I feel sure I’ve written before about the Feds and their effort to shut down the Mongols Motorcycle Club by…seizing their trademarks. Because, of course, not having a logo will deter members of the Mongols from engaging in criminal activity, and they’d never think of something like adopting a new logo, or doing without. After all, how can you make meth without a snazzy logo?

Oddly, though, I can’t find that post. But by way of Reason‘s “Hit and Run”, I have discovered a couple of updates:

  1. The Feds first effort to seize the Mongols trademarks failed. Badly.

    Loy and Alan Mansfield, an attorney with the San Diego-based Consumer Law Group of California, successfully challenged the Justice Department’s last effort to seize the Mongols’ trademark through the tool of asset forfeiture. Citing the government’s “unlawful action based on an ungrounded and unsubstantiated legal theory,” a federal judge also ordered the Justice Department to reimburse the attorneys $253,206.

    So not only did the government not get what they were looking for, they have to pay out a quarter million dollars worth of taxpayer’s money and clean up the garbage.

  2. Typically for the Federal government, if it doesn’t work, do it harder: they’ve filed to seize the trademark again.

In other news, I was considering writing an extended rant about the Statesman and their forthcoming paywall. But now I don’t have to: Lawrence has saved me the trouble, in a post with charts and graphs and words and all that good stuff. I commend it to your attention.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Media | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 2, 2013.

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013

Jimmy Savile isn’t the only British entertainer caught up in scandal:

…what surely qualifies as one of the more ambitious, and possibly quixotic, law enforcement investigations in Britain in recent years: Operation Yewtree, a nationwide inquiry into sexual offenses that may or may not have been committed decades ago. In American terms, it is as if Captain Kangaroo, Dick Clark and Jerry Lewis were suddenly being accused of committing sexual crimes dating back 30 or 40 years.

I don’t want to seem like I’m trivializing this. But going on:

The result has been a flurry of arrests, about a dozen involving very public people. But even as women’s rights advocates and others applaud a new era of openness, in which once-cowed victims feel able to speak out, lawyers for the high-profile suspects say that in the current climate, the accusers appear to be going out of their way to opportunistically target celebrities.

Among the people caught up in this:

One of the biggest names on the list is Rolf Harris, 83, an Australian-born artist, singer and children’s television host who, according to British newspaper reports, has been accused by a woman of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager. Mr. Harris, also famous for his didgeridoo playing, performed for Queen Elizabeth II at her jubilee last year. Channel 5 pulled his two television programs off the air — “Olive the Ostrich” and “Rolf’s Animal Clinic,” which was showing in repeats — pending the investigation.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed

Crap. Crap crap crap crappity crap.

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Freewheeling Bicycles, official purveyor of bicycles, accessories, and repairs to sportsfirings.com, is closing at the end of May.

The business was still profitable but its location, at 2401 San Gabriel Street, “ended up being too expensive for a bike shop,” said owner Angela Prescott, 62. “Once the overlay plan went in, property taxes doubled, and that’s a huge thing to try to absorb. The percentage you pay out in rent is too high.”

This makes me sad. There are other bike shops in Austin: REI in particular isn’t a bad place to go. But the people at Freewheeling were always nice and helpful to me, and the store felt like it had a personality. That’s something lacking at REI, or Bicycle Sport Shop, or pretty much all the other shops I’ve found in Austin.

Posted in Clippings, Cycling, Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 1, 2013.

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Deanna Durbin, movie star of the 1930s and 1940s. NYT.

Ms. Durbin had remained determinedly out of public view since 1949, when she retired to a village in France with her third husband.

More:

Ms. Durbin, who gave almost no interviews after she left Hollywood, did send reporters a letter in 1958 that read in part: “I was a typical 13-year-old American girl. The character I was forced into had little or nothing in common with myself — or with other youth of my generation, for that matter. I could never believe that my contemporaries were my fans. They may have been impressed with my ‘success.’ but my fans were the parents, many of whom could not cope with their own youngsters. They sort of adopted me as their ‘perfect’ daughter.”

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

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