I probably would have posted these even if Lawrence hadn’t done a quote of the day, because: Derek Lowe! More “Things I Won’t Work With“!
But I can’t decide which one I like more:
Explosions are definitely underappreciated as a mixing technique…
Or:
“Spaying hyenas” has so many possible uses.
“How was work today, honey?”
“Spaying hyenas.”
(“Spaying Hyenas” is also the name of my next band. We do Daft Punk covers.)
About a month ago, I noted the case of Bruce Malkenhorst, former city administrator of the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon (later convicted of misappropriation of public funds) who was suing Vernon for the difference between the pension Vernon said they’d give him and the actual pension that he was given by the state.
Vernon has taken the gloves off. You see, back in 2002 or thereabouts, people were starting to become suspicious of Malkenhorst. The LAT was tailing him:
And the city attorney at the time, Eduardo Olivo, started investigating Malkenhorst as well.
There’s more. The full report ran to 85 pages. And of course the city responded by firing Malkenhorst.
Wait, did I say Malkenhorst? I meant Olivo, the city attorney that prepared the report. They also sued Olivo for “breach of contract”. And Vernon has gone to great efforts to keep the report and supporting data secret:
Greg Tsujiuchi, a former assistant to the city administrator, told a district attorney’s investigator about a particularly bizarre instance in which Fresch insisted that he burn magnetic tapes that were an important backup for original hard copies of city records.
Tsujiuchi said he took the tapes to one of Vernon’s fire stations and had baffled firefighters set them ablaze. He regretted doing so and told Olivo, who told Tsujiuchi about the report. Not long afterward, Tsujiuchi resigned.
“Fresch” is Eric T. Fresch, who replaced Olivo as city attorney, and later replaced Malkenhorst as city administrator. By the way, Fresch died last year.
Anyway, the gist of the story is: now that Malkenhorst is suing, all of the sudden, the notoriously corrupt city of Vernon is being very open about Olivo’s report, even providing copies of it to the LAT. I wish the paper would post the whole report as a PDF, but you can’t have everything. Otherwise, where would you put it?
(Side note: no change of venue for Robert “Ratso” Rizzo.)
I’ve quoted these lines from Ian Frazier’s On the Rez
If I had a film of SuAnne at Lead (as far as I know, no such film exists) I would study it in slow motion frame by frame. There’s a magic in what she did, along with the promise that public acts of courage are still alive out there somewhere. Mostly, I would run the film of SuAnne again and again for my own braveheart song. I refer to her, as I do to Crazy Horse, for proof that it’s a public service to be brave.
It’s a public service to be brave. Even if you don’t believe you are.
This week’s TMQ, after the jump…
I have written previously about the performance artist Marina Abramovic.
I was not aware of this, but she had a Kickstarter campaign going. She was trying to raise $600,000 for a “long durational” performance art center.
Well, she did it. She raised $661,452 from 4,765 backers.
And she’s promised every one of them (yes, even the $1 backers) a hug.
And if you’ve ever wanted to see a performance artist tell a light bulb joke, go here.
Back in July, I noted the rhythmic gymnastics scandal. There’s a new development:
More updates, this time on “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark”. It took in $966,952 last week. This is not good, as the cost of running the show is over $1 million a week.
Only the police should have guns department:
There were no deaths or injuries, as both sides “did not fire at each other, he said, but into the air”. Of course, what goes up must come down, somewhere…
It turns out that the rival gun-toting campers were both Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies.
But official misconduct and filing false records are.
Would you believe that IV fluid (specifically, normal saline) is almost as cheap as house-brand cola at the grocery store?
That is, if you buy it in bulk from the manufacturer. If you go to the hospital and get an IV…
Of course, there’s hospital overhead and such involved. You don’t expect to go to Best Buy and pay wholesale price for a laptop, so why would you expect to pay wholesale for IV fluid? But isn’t $786 a lot of markup?
At White Plains Hospital, a patient with private insurance from Aetna was charged $91 for one unit of Hospira IV that cost the hospital 86 cents, according to a hospital spokeswoman, Eliza O’Neill.
Ms. O’Neill defended the markup as “consistent with industry standards.” She said it reflected “not only the cost of the solution but a variety of related services and processes,” like procurement, biomedical handling and storage, apparently not included in a charge of $127 for administering the IV and $893 for emergency-room services.
SmarterTimes has one take on this. I have another. Actually, I have two:
This also gives me a chance to plug a forthcoming paperback that I’m very excited about: David Goldhill’s Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father–and How We Can Fix It
I’m not sure how applicable Goldhill’s prescriptions are to this incident. Much of what he talks about involves changes in routine health care, such as providing consumers with better cost information; being poisoned by monks at a dragon dance is the kind of catastrophic event you’d figure should be covered by insurance, and not the sort of thing where you shop around for the best deal on IV fluids and antibiotics.
Still, this does give me a chance to plug his book, which I was previously unaware of…
Ted Post, film and television director.
Among his credits: Hang ‘Em High and Magnum Force. I haven’t seen the former, but I’ve always felt Magnum Force was a worthy follow-up to Dirty Harry.
He did a lot of television, too, including Columbo and Twilight Zone. (Yeah, yeah, and Gunsmoke and Rawhide.)
Also worthy of note:
Among film buffs Mr. Post was probably best known for “Go Tell the Spartans,” set during the Vietnam War and based on the 1967 novel “Incident at Muc Wa,” by Daniel Ford.
Burt Lancaster starred as an American Army major who carries out orders to secure a remote jungle outpost in 1964 despite his fears that the mission will end badly, as it does. Mr. Lancaster put up his own money when budget problems threatened the film before it was completed.
The NYT suggests that Spartans was under appreciated on its first release, but has grown on film buffs since then. I wasn’t allowed to see it during the first run, but I bought the DVD and watched it a couple of years ago. In my opinion, it is a pretty good, but not great, Vietnam war film. I certainly liked it much better than Platoon.
Sometimes I think I feel sorry for people who maybe don’t deserve my sympathy.
For example, the SDC restaurant last night was in a strip center. There was another restaurant in that center, a Chinese buffet, that I’d been to a few times. The last time I went (over a year ago) it was pouring down rain, I had the beginnings of a cold, I went in…
…and water was pouring from a hole in the roof into buckets on the floor. And yet, the buffet was still going. (I’m not ashamed to admit I stayed, even with the roof leak; as I said, I wasn’t feeling well, and didn’t feel like driving anyplace else. Of course, I still didn’t feel well after I ate…)
Anyway, I thought I’d walk down and take a look, since they’d changed their sign from “Chinese Buffet” to “Asian BBQ”. What I found was:
In short, a trail of screwed-upness. I mentioned this to Lawrence, who suggested it might be blog fodder. I told him I wasn’t sure, and that I kind of felt sorry for these people. After all, they’re probably hard-working immigrants who got in over their heads (though that place has been there for years). Lawrence, in turn, felt they didn’t deserve any sympathy. After all, he said, he pays his tax bill to the comptroller’s office, and he pays what he owes on his property, and by not paying the TWC, they were probably screwing their workers, so why should I give them any breaks by not naming and shaming them? Not to mention photographing the collection of notices stuck to their front door?
I can’t answer that question. But I can compromise by writing here. If someone wants to name the place in the comments, they’re more than welcome to. I didn’t go back and photograph the array of notices because I was distracted by other things. (And I am curious about “Michael K.” from “Northridge, CA”, and his comment “I like Korea House, but hated driving out there. Now I found a better place even closer.” Where is he driving from, I wonder? If he lives anywhere along the 183 corridor, sorry, but Korea House isn’t that much more of a drive from where Restaurant X used to be.)
(Yes, I realize I just gave everyone the tools to figure it out if they use the Google and put in that phrase above, with the site:yelp.com modifier. Good for you.)
There’s another place I’ve been to a couple of times. Some very good friends of mine seemed to like it. We had an SDC there. I remember the menu had their origin story printed on the back; basically, as I recall, Mama retired from school administration, the family had money, so her children bought her the restaurant (formerly a Thomas Super Buffet) to give her something to do.
The food wasn’t horrible, but I never really thought it was very good. The burgers were the best thing on the menu, and the place always seemed kind of heavy on staffing, while the waitstaff mostly sat around, played with their phones, and looked bored. I feel bad saying this because my friends did like the place, but I felt it was begging for an intervention from Robert Irvine.
I went by the location today, on my way to Fry’s, as I’d heard rumors the place had closed and thought I’d check for myself. The rumors were correct. At least they didn’t have notices from the comptroller and TWC on the door; just the lockout notice from the landlord and a big warning sticker from the NuCO2 people.
Again, I really want to feel sorry for these people. But buying Mom a restaurant so she’d have something to do after she retires? That’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, but it is in the Top Ten. Let Mom enjoy her retirement. If she wants something to do, she can join the Red Hats. Actually, that’s probably an even better use of Mom’s talents, as she can criticize the food served at Red Hat meetings, without all the problems of running a restaurant.
I don’t know what I’m trying to say here. Maybe that it is sad and depressing when the hard-working family shuts down their Ethiopian place (even though there are better Ethiopian places in town, and what a weird thing it is to be able to say that these days), but it is full of schadenfreudeay goodness when some corporate monster without a soul closes their doors? Even though the corporate monster is probably throwing just as many people out of work? Possibly even more?
Or maybe I’m just looking for cheap blog fodder.
I believe it was Lee Goldberg who tipped me off to the Charles Kelly biography of Dan J. Marlowe, Gunshots in Another Room
Marlowe was an interesting guy. Details about his early life are vague, but he may have been a gambler before settling on a career as a writer. He’s mostly forgotten today (though Stephen King dedicated a book to him) but he spent many years knocking around in the Gold Medal publishing empire. Marlowe never had the breakthrough success of John D. MacDonald or some of the other Gold Medal writers; it seems, from Kelly’s biography, that he came close a few times, but was always foiled by some sort of hard luck.
His most famous book, The Name of the Game is Death
One of the interesting aspects of Marlowe’s story is that Name of the Game brought him into contact with a man named Al Nussbaum. Nussbaum is an important player, and Kelly devotes quite a bit of space to him, and the Nussbaum/Marlowe relationship. You see, Al Nussbaum was a professional bank robber, and a big fan of Name of the Game. Nussbaum actually wrote Marlowe a fan letter and telephoned him while on the run. After Nussbaum’s arrest and while he was in prison, he became a collaborator with Marlowe. Nussbaum provided advice on weapons, equipment, and techniques for Marlowe, and Marlowe in turn mentored Nussbaum as a writer. (Nussbaum went on to publish a fair number of stories in genre magazines.) Together, Nussbaum and Marlowe turned Name of the Game into a series, in which the sociopathic bank robber became an agent of the US government. (This was not as easy as it might sound, for reasons having to do with the ending of Name of the Game. I won’t spoil it here.)
Fairly late in life, Marlowe suffered some undetermined kind of cerebral event; possibly a stroke, but details are unclear. The end result was that he had near-total amnesia. He could still function – he was capable of reading and writing – but he didn’t remember anything about his past. When he was given a copy of one of his own books, and asked to write a review of it, it was clear that he didn’t remember writing it. In spite of this, and with help from Nussbaum, he was able to rebuild his career, at least to the point where he could get by until his death in 1986.
Gunshots is a surprisingly well-written biography of Marlowe and, to a lesser extent, Nussbaum. It captures a time that overlaps with my own life, though I am too young to remember it well. And it should serve to pique interest in Marlowe and his works. It looks like much of Marlowe’s back catalog is becoming available in Kindle format, but I’d still like to see Hard Case Crime bring out new print editions.
(Speaking of Hard Case, I’m delighted to see that they’re re-releasing the books Michael Crichton wrote as “John Lange”. Especially Binary, which is an interesting thriller that still has some resonance today. But great googly moogly, I really do not like that cover.)
===
Adela Rogers St. Johns is another one of those folks who led an interesting life, and is mostly forgotten today. She worked as a journalist for the Hearst papers, covering the Hauptmann trial, Huey Long’s death, and (at the age of 82) the Patty Hearst trial. She wrote screenplays during the silent film era. She appeared as herself in “Reds”. And she wrote the bestselling Final Verdict
Adela led a fascinating life. She mingled with the powerful and privileged as a young girl. Her first kiss was from a famous prizefighter. Jack London adopted her as his god-daughter.
But she wasn’t a bubble-headed socialite. She was raised to be a strong woman and independent thinker, at a time when those qualities were not highly valued. Her education was, to put it mildly, unconventional. Her childhood and young adulthood brought her into contact not just with the rich and famous, but also with the turn of the century anarchists and radicals. Final Verdict is the story of that childhood and young adult life, and her relationship with her father.
At this point, people who know me well are asking themselves why I would read this. A book about a random woman, famous though she may have been at one time? Concentrating on her relationship with her father? Why didn’t I just go read a Harlequin romance instead? Books about women, their fathers, and relationships are not typically up my alley.
All of this is true. But here is why I read Final Verdict: Adela’s father was Earl Rogers.
===
If you ask people to name a famous criminal defense attorney, who are they likely to come up with? Clarence Darrow, F. Lee Bailey, maybe Richard “Racehorse” Haynes if they grew up in Texas during a certain time period.
But nobody’s likely to name Earl Rogers, and that’s a shame. Because Earl Rodgers was a titan among defense lawyers. His record in murder trials was three losses out of 77 total trials. Erle Stanley Gardner based Perry Mason on Earl Rogers.
Here are two examples of how good Earl Rogers was:
Adela had a front seat for pretty much all of Earl Rogers’ trials. He treated her not as a child, but almost as an equal partner in his practice. He loved her dearly, even if his decisions may not always have been the best ones.
That’s the other part of the Earl Rogers story that Adela doesn’t shirk from. He was a great defense attorney, but he also had horrible problems with alcohol. Adela describes frantically searching for her father and having to drag him, drunk, out of brothels. And yet, he would get up the next morning and show up in court as if nothing had happened.
Unless he couldn’t. Then he’d get a note from a friendly doctor. And there were plenty of those for Earl.
He was most famous for his cross-examinations – it can be said that Earl Rogers pretty much invented modern cross-examination – so it seems fitting that Final Verdict‘s framing device is a cross-examination. Specifically, Earl cross-examining Adela, who was trying to have him committed in an effort to stop his drinking. Earl persuaded her to withdraw the petition, which Adela (from her perspective of almost 50 years later) regrets having done.
He died thirteen years before AA was founded, but I’m not sure that would have made a difference. I’m not a doctor, but from what Adela says, it seems like Earl may have been manic-depressive, and medicated himself with alcohol. He was 52 when he died in a flophouse.
Final Verdict does not deserve the obscurity that has fallen upon it. Adela’s voice is one of the few surviving contemporary accounts of the events and people she witnessed. In particular, she’s one of the few people who saw Darrow up close and wrote about him. Adela was clearly not found of Darrow or Mrs. Darrow, though she admits that her account is somewhat biased. (She particularly resents the way Darrow treated her father, and Darrow’s failure to pay her father’s bill for his defense.)
But it is also a sad and moving book, about a child trying to deal with the legacy of her famous and self-destructive father. She was a talented writer, who had adventures that most of us would envy, and this is a beautifully written book. It hasn’t become a rare book yet; if you find a copy at some used paperback store somewhere, I recommend picking it up.