Darvin Ham out as head coach of the Lakers.
Why can’t LeBron James make change for a dollar?
Because he doesn’t have a 4th quarter.
Archive for May 3rd, 2024
All right, give me a Hamm on five, hold the Mayo.
Friday, May 3rd, 2024You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#117 in a series)
Friday, May 3rd, 2024This was rumored all morning, but it was just rumors until now.
His wife Imelda has also been indicted.
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The two each face the following charges:
- Two counts of conspiracy to commit bribery of a federal official and to have a public official act as an agent of a foreign principal
- Two counts of bribery of a federal official
- Two counts of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud
- Two counts of violating the ban on public officials acting as agents of a foreign principal
- One count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering
- Five counts of money laundering
Of course, Rep. Cuellar and his wife are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
You dry-docked my battleship! Part 2!
Friday, May 3rd, 2024Hey! Guess what!
The battleship New Jersey is in dry dock.
Being completely fair, this is a good story, especially if you’re interested in history, ships, the Navy, or some combination of those three.
But it isn’t without annoyances.
The Texas also cost a lot more, but it had gone without maintenance for much longer, too.
(Also being scrupulously fair, the Texas is now out of dry dock and in a new permanent location. On the other hand, the Texas was in dry dock for 18 months, not the two months estimated for the New Jersey, and anyone who wanted to had plenty of opportunities to go see it.)
$1,000? Really? Nothing against Mr. Szimanski: I do watch the New Jersey YouTube channel sometimes. But $775 seems like a steep YouTube premium. (As I recall, the dry dock tour of the Texas was $150.)
It is kind of nice to see the New Jersey is selling merch (though they already had an online store). But can you get Battleship New Jersey 1911 grips? As far as I can tell, no.
(Okay, that’s a trick question: you can’t get Battleship Texas 1911 grips either. Except for the deck pattern ones, which I personally don’t like. The other two patterns seem to come into stock and sell out very fast. One of these days I might be lucky enough to snag a pair.)
What’s the takeway from this, other than dry dock tours of old battleships are fun?
Obit watch: May 3, 2024.
Friday, May 3rd, 2024The NYT ran two obits recently for people who were a little outside the mainstream of celebrity.
Larry Young passed away in March at the age of 56. Dr. Young was a neuroscientist, who got his PhD from UT Austin.
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With their beady eyes, thick tails and sharp claws, prairie voles are not exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: They are monogamous, and the males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.
“Prairie voles, if you take away their partner, they show behavior similar to depression,” Professor Young told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost as if there’s withdrawal from their partner.”
That made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.
In a study published in 1999, Professor Young and his colleagues exploited the gene in prairie voles associated with the signaling of vasopressin, a hormone that modulates social behavior. They boosted vasopressin signaling in mice, which are highly promiscuous.
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Professor Young followed up with other prairie vole studies that focused on oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates contractions during childbirth and is involved in the bonding between mothers and newborns.
“Because we knew that oxytocin was involved in mother-infant bonding, we explored whether oxytocin might be involved in this partner bonding,” he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019.
It was.
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Frank Wakefield, mandolin guy.
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While still a teenager, Mr. Wakefield mastered the heavily syncopated “chop” chord of the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, whom he met in 1961 and who immediately recognized Mr. Wakefield’s prowess as a mandolinist.
“You can play like me as good — or near as good — as I can,” Mr. Wakefield, in a 2022 interview with the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, recalled Mr. Monroe saying at their initial meeting. “Now you’ve got to go out and find your own style.”
Heeding Mr. Monroe’s advice, Mr. Wakefield did exactly that. He devised his own sound by alternating up and down strokes on his instrument with equal force to produce a clear, ringing tone and sustained rhythm, which he likened to a sledgehammer striking a steel rail in a 1998 interview with the bluegrass website Candlewater.com.
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David Grisman, a student of Mr. Wakefield’s and a mandolin virtuoso in his own right, said in an often quoted passage from Frets magazine that Mr. Wakefield had “split the bluegrass mandolin atom” by taking the instrument beyond where Mr. Monroe had.
“Bluegrass,” the album that Mr. Wakefield made with Mr. Allen for Folkways Records in 1964 (and that a 19-year-old Mr. Grisman produced), proved ample confirmation of that claim: It featured versions of two of Mr. Wakefield’s most enduring originals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip,” both of which, with their developments in melody, tunings and chord changes, pushed the limits of what then constituted bluegrass.
Mr. Wakefield’s innovations didn’t stop there, though. By the mid-1960s he had begun composing sonatas for the mandolin and arranging classical pieces for traditional bluegrass ensembles. He performed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1967 and made a guest appearance with the Boston Pops orchestra the next year.