Archive for November 14th, 2014

“Think of the extreme FUN!”

Friday, November 14th, 2014

Clif Bar, the people who make Clif Bars, gives out sponsorships to various athletes. There are a whole bunch of sponsored athletes in various sports, including mountain climbing.

Recently, the Clif Bar folks decided they were going to stop sponsoring five of those athletes. Four of them are mountain climbers, and one is a BASE jumper. According to the company:

Over a year ago, we started having conversations internally about our concerns with B.A.S.E. jumping, highlining and free-soloing. We concluded that these forms of the sport are pushing boundaries and taking the element of risk to a place where we as a company are no longer willing to go. We understand that some climbers feel these forms of climbing are pushing the sport to new frontiers. But we no longer feel good about benefiting from the amount of risk certain athletes are taking in areas of the sport where there is no margin for error; where there is no safety net.

One of the funny things about this is that several of these climbers were recently featured in a documentary, “Valley Uprising”; Clif Bar was a major sponsor of the documentary.

The NYT has more coverage of this issue, including quotes from the athletes in question.

This is an interesting debate, at least to me: Clif Bar isn’t saying “don’t do this stuff”; they’re saying “we won’t sponsor you to do stuff that we think is too far out on the edge”. And you can sort of understand that they don’t want to be associated with some guy who reduces himself to a thin red smear while BASE jumping. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem (from what the NYT is saying) that there’s any shortage of companies that are willing to step in where Clif Bar left off. On the gripping hand, if everyone free-soloed a rock, would you? Does it matter that other sponsors are stepping in; isn’t Clif just taking a moral stance? But if it is a moral stance, what about this documentary? Should they still be attaching their name to it?

I’ve got no idea. I just think it is an interesting debate.

Posted in Clippings, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 14, 2014.

Friday, November 14th, 2014

Gus Vlahavas, owner of Tom’s Restaurant in Brooklyn.

Noted here because this is a great example of the kind of obit the paper of record does well. Also because there’s a lot of dust in the room:

Mr. Vlahavas lived for Tom’s, almost literally so. To make sure he arrived promptly at 5 a.m. to fire up the grill, he bought a brownstone around the corner at a time when few people were moving into the neighborhood. His dedication was reciprocated by the loyalty of his neighbors, who by the 1960s were mainly blacks from the American South and the Caribbean, who replaced the Irish, Italians and Jews. During the blackout of 1965, when rioting erupted, local people formed a human chain to protect Tom’s.
“All my neighbors, my black American friends, they all held hands around the store, 70 of them,” Mr. Vlahavas told The Daily News in 2009. “It made me feel terrific because these people were very thoughtful and kind enough to protect me,” he continued. “This doesn’t happen every day in anyone’s life.”

Also among the dead: Jane Byrne, former mayor of Chicago.

Posted in Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

A couple of random notes: November 14, 2014.

Friday, November 14th, 2014

When asked whether disparities in treatment were based on race, gender, rank or nepotism, officers overwhelmingly said they believed decisions about discipline revolved around an officer’s rank and whether he or she was well liked by their superiors in the department. Command-level officers routinely received slaps on the wrist or no punishment, while lower-ranking officers were suspended for similar misconduct, officers wrote.

From the LAT archives, some spectacular photos of firefighters responding to a DC-6 crash.

Former Seattle Sonic Robert Swift has been charged with a gun crime one month after police claim to have seized drugs, guns and a grenade launcher from the Kirkland home where he was living.

What I find interesting about this story is that, with the exception of the standard “junk on the bunk” photo, all the weapons photos are of guns “similar to one police say was seized from Bjorkstam’s Kirkland home”. No photos of the actual guns? Also, heroin dealing must not be that lucrative if all you can afford is a Taurus.

Posted in California Über Alles, Clothing, Cops, Guns, Heroism, Law, Photography, Planes | Comments Closed