NMissCommentor » Open Threads

Monday Morning Various

NMC — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:59:02 +0000

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know we were going to be trying the case today.” said the prosecutor in the Zimmerman bail hearing. The prosecution was startlingly unprepared for that hearing on Friday, and defense counsel used it to their advantage. Defense called the chief investigator for the state– who said, “I was not planning on testifying,” and worked through the evidence (or lack of it) behind statements made in the affidavit on which the prosecution was based. If this and the affidavit itself are indications of how this prosecution is going to go, it will not go well for the state. I was a little startled that this was not much covered in a couple of news accounts I read; you can get the details from the Guardian’s live blog of the hearing.
Paige Williams, a journalist who teaches at Harvard’s Neiman School, was at Ole Miss and a Chi Omega at the time of the accident on Highway 6 in which five of her sorority sisters died. She has a very intense story about the accident in Oprah Magazine.
At the other end of the insight and self-reflection scale: McSweeney’s magazine has an annual contest picking five columnists, and this year one is being written by an Ole Miss freshman from Alabama, Mary Marge Locker, who apparently arrived with two big ambitions, the main one being to get in the “right” sorority, which she thinks she accomplished. The column consists of one sorority girl activity after another, and I kept reading wondering if anything would be said that would justify its existence. If you’ve read it and are curious which one is “Sorority H”: it’s Tri Delta. Oh, and her other big ambition was to take a class from Jack Pendarvis.
Headline of the day (well, Saturday): “Two Late Touchdowns Lift Yankees To Surreal Victory in Boston.” Waah? Well, down 9-1 in the Seventh, the scored seven runs in that inning and seven more in the eighth to win. Keep your gloating to a minimum, Chico.
This entertaining New York Times profile, revisited, reminds me of Joseph Mitchell’s discovery of the truth about Joe Gould.
Yesterday’s Times had a spectacular long story about corruption in Wal-Mart’s Mexico operations.

Wednesday Morning Various

NMC — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 15:47:03 +0000

The picture above is the John Wilkes Booth bobblehead that was on sale at the park service gift center in Gettysburg until someone came to their senses. I’m guessing it would sell rather well in certain areas rife with Sons of the Confederacy members. Obviously, what the world needs next is a Ross Barnett bobble head to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Meredith crisis this Fall.
Thanks to a methane-trapping foam no one understands, the manure pits in industrial hog farms in the upper Midwest are occasionally exploding. That’s possibly all you need to know from this story on Wired.
In Outside Magazine, Rowan Jacobsen goes out with Louisiana commercial fishermen in search of gumbo ingredients and learns that all is not well even this long after the BP oil spill.
iPhoneJD reviews this $9.99 app, PDFPen, that allows you to edit PDFs on your iPad.

Friday morning various

NMC — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:14:06 +0000

Scott Horton was not impressed with Eric Holder’s speech about drone assassinations.
Slate’s explainer on the decline in number of Klan “chapters” is one of the silliest things I’ve read on Slate. Typical sentence: ”Young racists tend to think of the Klan as their grandfathers’ hate group, and of its members as rural, uneducated, and technologically unsophisticated.”
According to this map, the Mitt Romney-associated superpac has already spent over $500K attacking Santorum. I’ve not seen the ads myself, but then, as I previously suggested, I’m not exactly their target audience.
The Paris Review blog had a nice piece on Eudora Welty’s house and garden.
Marc Smirnoff of the Oxford American is really, really pissed off about Garden and Gun magazine and just finally had to vent.
Going through the New York Times online morgue of decades of unpublished photographs, the LIvely Morgue, has been on my todo-list for days and I’ve still not got around to it.
Janet Maslin really liked R.J. Smith’s new James Brown biography, and pretty much convinces me to read it.
National Park archivists at the Edison labs are still cataloguing unlabeled cylinder recordings, and have come up with recordings of Otto von Bismark and Helmuth von Moltke, who was born in 1800 a couple of months before the end of the 18th century. He was recorded at age 90. You can listen to the recordings online.

Monday Morning Various

NMC — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 15:00:18 +0000

Barbour thinks the fight for the Republican nomination could go to the convention.
Next month, the last volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English comes out. It’s volume five of a project that started in the 60s, and it ends with the word zydeco. Well, not exactly the last volume– there will apparently be a sixth volume that includes maps and an index of some sort, according to the D.A.R.E. site.
Wilkileaks, partnering with Anonymous, has put out more than five million emails from the security/intelligence firm Stratfor.

Thursday Morning Various

NMC — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:41:27 +0000

Dahlia Lithwick has an entertaining account of the oral argument in the medal of honor case– over whether it violates the First Amendment to make it a crime to say you won medals in the military. By her account, first the Solicitor General was pretty well beaten up during his argument but then the tide turned entirely as the respondent made concessions right and left.
Cormac McCarthy is an enemy of semicolons and exclamation marks. According to the Chronicle of Higher Learning, McCarthy read Lawrence Krauss’s biography of Richard Feynman, Quantum Man, and liked it enough to write Krauss and say so, and then offer to edit it for the paperback edition, an effort that is acknowledged in the back cover of the book. Among the changes: “To start with,” Krauss writes, “he made me promise he could excise all exclamation points and semicolons, both of which he said have no place in literature.”
Campbell Robertson visited East Tennessee to instructions about changing the settings.
Here’s a tale of a fateful ship. Previously, I’d only known William D. Porter as the Union navy officer known for actions in the Vicksburg campaign. Turns out there was a WWII Fletcher class destroyer named after him, and the destroyer was doomed to mishap after mishap, peaking with the time it launched an armed torpedo in the direction of the battleship Iowa at a time the president happened to be riding on it. This lead to the arrest of the entire ships crew after they’d been sent away, an event that never happened to any other ship in the history of the navy. And that’s just one of a series of spectacular mishaps, starting with its first effort to leave port after its initial shakedown cruise. The blog post I linked was so over-the-top I checked the story out on Wikipedia, which has a quite similar account of the ship’s ill-fated history. h/t Brad DeLong’s twitter feed.
William Saletan, a Slate writer I often find annoying (particularly in science writing), has a very long piece up about Romney’s evolving views about choice and related issues. The piece has links to video and audio and long quotes from contemporary articles and documents, and provides more than one ever would want to know about the subject while setting forth Saletan’s view about how Romney operates. Did I say the piece was really long? It does seem to really have the goods on this subject. Huffington Post, meanwhile, has a 1995 Philadelphia Magazine quote from Santorum, who said that he was pro-choice until he ran for Congress. He credits deciding to read up on the issue with his change of heart, a simpler account than was required for Romney’s longer record.
Emptywheel observed that Sen. Grassley’s Twitter feed is truly strange. And it is.

Monday Morning Various

NMC — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:58:26 +0000

A while ago, the Daily Journal had an article about a new historical trail around Bryce’s Crossroads (NW of Tupelo) that ranges across history including the site where Chief Tishomingo lived before Chickasaw removal, history relating by churches founded by former slaves after the Civil War, and, of course, sites related to the battle at Bryce’s Crossroads itself. Sounds interesting to me.
Square Books has in a new biography of William Alexander Percy (author of Lanterns on the Levee, etc.) by Benjamin Wise, a history professor at Florida, titled William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Southern Planter and Sexual Freethinker, published by U. of N.C. Press. I’m curious about it.
Texas food writer Rob Walsh is writing a bbq books with Rufus Lovett, and has decided to put his bbq blog posts on a free-standing site, ZenBBQ. The most recent post is about a backyard pit for whole hog cookery, a subject dear to me. And the cinder block pit is the way to go.
Filmmaker Joe York is profiled by Ruth Tobias at Zester, focusing on the big southern food documentary he’s got coming out this Fall.
There’s a long article by John Nova Lomax about music research Mack McCormick on the Houston Press page. Mack was in the first generation of serious jazz and blues researchers– all the known facts about Robert Johnson came to light as a result of his research locating Johnson’s family, and Mack introduced the world to the word zydeco. A conversation with Mack courses over the entire history of American music (at least one of the ones I had did that). H/t to Scott.
Slate has a map showing the percentage of Mormons in each county in the US. Amite County (county seat is Liberty) has the highest at over 4%, by several multiples. What’s that about?
Lee from comments wants all of you to know that your cat is making you crazy. So that’s what it is.

Thursday Morning Various

NMC — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:54:17 +0000

The Clarion Ledger ran an AP report on the Supreme Court’s decision to take the pardons case. In at least one way it’s a traditional C/L report, though: There are comments by Matt Steffey (According to the report, Steffey thought this a positive development. Interestingly, Jim Hood says that he thought so, too, saying: ”This is a good development.”). CNN– which has had a truck in Oxford and is apparently running a story on Anderson Cooper’s show tonight– reports the development along with details about Ozment, the pardonee served with process while in Wyoming. Reuters has a report that doesn’t add much other than confusing county court and circuit court (hint to Reuters: ”trial court” would have worked).
Mitt Romney, divider not a uniter: ”I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Yep, Mitt Romney said that, yesterday morning to Soledad O’Brien. It was one of those moments that make one think that, as smart as Romney seems to be, his people ought not let him unscripted near a microphone. He went on to dig in further, I mean, to explain (and, no, I don’t think saying “the poor have a safety net,” or that he’d fix it if it tore made it all right. He said the poor are covered so he doesn’t worry about them). Gail Collins in a NY Times op ed has more.
Did you ever have the impression that Boar’s Head meats and cheese just came out of nowhere, sort of mysteriously? And they weren’t really as good as they were supposed to be? Well, you aren’t alone, and Slate has a bit of the story.
In 1865, Col. P.H. Anderson of Tennessee wrote one of his former slaves, asking him to return to work for him. He apparently got a pretty memorable reply that was run in contemporary newspapers. Hilarious and worth reading.
Clive Stafford Smith, the lawyer who handled death penalty cases across the south for years and is now at Reprieve in the UK, where he’s represented Guantanamo inmates and others, has written a new book (probably not available in the US yet) about the death penalty, focusing on a Florida case of his own. Here’s an interview.
Michael Hasting’s book The Operator (worked up from his time with Gen. Stanley McChrystal) is on my to-read-soon pile. Now his interview of Julian Assage is in my online cue. h/t Lee.

Tuesday Morning Various

NMC — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:13:08 +0000

The picture above is Will Campbell, on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel immediately after Martin Luther King had been killed there. Life has online a sequence of previously unpublished pictures from that night.

The legislature has started making its mischief. Kingfish writes about the bill designed to set limits on the attorney general’s ability to contract with outside attorneys which is being described as a direct personal attack on Jim Hood. I read one of the bills. While I think a provision making hourly charge documents subject to the Open Records Act is dubious because it seems to allow a demand for that information while suit is pending, the rest of the bill– requiring findings with reasons if Hood doesn’t take bids in a a process that doesn’t require accepting low bids, for instance~~, and setting some limits on the amounts but allowing the limits to be exceeded where the hours and expenses justify it~~– doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. I am expecting a lot worse from this legislature. On the other hand, the other proposed bill on the subject seems inconsistent with the first and designed primarily to undercut the power of the attorney general rather than solve a percieved problem.

Speaking of Open Records, Anita Lee in the Sun Herald commended Delbert Hosemann’s office for the way they immediately set about to make the Barbour pardon documents fully available to the public immediately when the pardons were signed.

Joe York has a new short movie out, Eggers, about caviar harvesting in the Mississippi River.

The Guardian uses a lawsuit filed by Ezra Pound’s daughter against neo-fascists using Pounds name as an opportunity to describe her life, and visit her castle in the Italian alps. She has had an amazing life, worth a read. H/t Bookslut.

The New York Times writes optimistically about Beth Henley’s new play, about to open in New York. It’s called “The Jacksonian,” and is the first play she’s set in her hometown.

Kim Severson in the New York Times has the story of a black minister in Laurens, South Carolina became the landlord of a closed movie theater housing The Redneck Shop, a store of Klan memorabilia and rebel flags.

Steven Colbert last night: ”Growing up in South Carolina, I was taught that freedom was why we started the Civil War.”

Update

Paragraph on attorney general bill changed with deletions struck through and additions underlined, based on first two comments.

Monday Morning Various

NMC — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 15:16:14 +0000

Who won Iowa? “Look for those final results in about a week and a half” says a party official in a story out of Iowa about that fact that there might just have been a 20 or so vote discrepancy that would change the outcome of the primary there to a Santorum victory. The story was broken by a local TV station that talked to a Paul supporter who said the state level reporting for his precinct was wrong, giving Romney 20 extra votes (and in an update reported the quote, above). The Des Moines Register found county officials who corroborated the report, which has been picked up by blogs and some national media. Given this is operating at the level of margins of error, does it matter? Probably some, because one of the things Romney is doing is trying to create the impression he is a juggernaut rolling toward inevitable victory. H/T to Lee for the blog reports.
I’m getting some hits about Clarksdale Dr. Roger Weiner (here’s where charges against him were dismissed), who is apparently going to qualify to run against Roger Wicker for Senate. In addition to practicing medicine, he’s at present a member of the Coahoma County Board of Supervisors.
A Planet Money podcast recounts how lard got a bad name, basically starting with Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (you really don’t want to know what he wrote would turn up in those rendering tanks. Worse than rats), and then with advertising for a new thing, hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is worse for you than lard. I’ve heard that in the 80s, when Phoebe Cates and Ally Sheedy were in Oxford filming “Heart of Dixie,” several of the actresses went to Smitty’s. One asked the waitress what made the biscuits so good. ”Lard,” said the waitress. The biscuits were immediately put down.
There’s a nice piece in the Times Picayune about the trend there in pop-up restaurants, with sufficient details to allow you to check them out. There’s one in Stein’s Deli on Sundays that sounds interesting. I’m not sure I’m inspired by one called “Noodle and Pie.”
So, is the suspect in the illegal killing of a black bear in Amite County, Mississippi a crazed Colonel Reb supporter or a Mississippi State fan emulating the guy who killed the oaks at Auburn? And are we to assume that the federal government’s almost simultaneousauthorizing of the killing of Golden Eagles is a coincidence?
And then there’s this: Best what? Some dog has put a billboard up in Oxford that’s causing some consternation. This sort of hubris cries out for punishment by the fates.
An essay about the first volume of Hemingway’s letters and a semi-biography that uses his cabin cruiser as a centerpiece gives details about Hemingway-as-jerk and writes about his war wound.
The New York Times has a really endearing review of Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s fiftieth anniversary concert in Preservation Hall.

Friday Morning Various

NMC — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:12:00 +0000

Click here to view the embedded video.

Update: The ad above may be from a Ron Paul supporter but I’m assuming is from no one connected to his campaign directly. It may even be from someone trying to injure Ron Paul. I too-quickly read James Fallows’ post about the ad and posted it here; I wonder now if both of us should have waited until authorship was clearer. I’ve edited the following (underline is new and strikethrough removed as inaccurate). The ad above seems to me a supporter of Ron Paul’s effort to channel and revisit the emotional and moral tone of his old newsletters. ~~I think this clearly opens Paul to questions about his pretense that someone else is responsible for the racism and other obnoxiousness in those newsletters. And w~~ What’s the point of this repulsive xenophobic attack on Jon Huntsman? Why Huntsman? Is whoever created it he going to do an attack advertisement with Romney speaking French next? James Fallows pointed it out on his blog as the worst ad of the campaign.
The LA police have proposed that they will drop charges against Occupy LA members if the members agree to attend police-run free speech classes. Seriously. H/t Boing Boing.
Here’s a unique product liability defense: Pepsi says that the mouse carcass a Mountain Dew drinker claims to have found in a can of the drink could not have been in the Mountain Dew because it would have dissolved into a gelatin-y goo if it had really been left in there any length of time.
Even if you have been following the case of Tina Funderburk, the woman ruled incompetent to stand trial who has been held in the Hinds County jail rather than a mental hospital, you might be surprised by the latest development: There’s a Steven Hayne angle, and, once again, he seems to be pushing the envelope in expressing medical opinions:

In 2003, forensic anthropologist Dr. Marie Danforth examined the remains believed to be the girl. She concluded there appeared to be skull injuries suggesting the likelihood of trauma but that she could not determine the cause or manner of death.Pathologist Dr. Steven Hayne ruled the death a homicide, saying the girl’s injuries were consistent with suffocation.

After examining the reports by Danforth and Hayne, renowned New York pathologist Dr. Michael Baden concluded this week, “There is no autopsy evidence of intentional murder by deliberate suffocation or head trauma.”

In fact, the child’s death is entirely consistent with environmental exposure, he said. “Many changes do occur to a dead body over a period of three months due to the environment, including rain, wind, temperature, maggots, insects, rodents and larger animals.”

Wednesday, Judge Green ruled that Funderburk will not likely ever bee competent to stand trial, ordered the criminal case retired to the files and sent it to Chancery Court for a commitment proceeding.