Events

Really a sad week in American entertainment. Lauren Bacall died today at 89. If you haven't seen To Have and Have Not, stream it tonight:

It is against U.S. law for the U.S. military to enforce local or state laws. That's a job for the police, or the National Guard (but only when acting under state authority). The law came about as part of a compromise to end reconstruction in the south. We still have it on the books because, among other things, the regular military's mission, training, and equipment makes it a really bad police force. So why do small towns have paramilitary police units? And don't they make things worse? Despite the fact...

(Hm. That didn't quite work, did it?) We're now in our final weekend (for the time being) in Cleveland, and another person from the client has offered to take us to another Indians game. Two things: 1. I hope they play. Tonight's forecast calls for thunderstorms and rain. 2. If they do play, I hope they do better than last week. The Indians are at .500, dead-center in the league, the division, and in all of baseball. Tonight they're (scheduled) to play the Diamondbacks, who are just one game ahead of...

Shazbat. A friend sends this clip:

Crain's has a good summary today of new moderate-alcohol beers that craft brewers in the area are making: In June, Temperance Beer Co. released the first batch of Greenwood Beach Blonde, a creamy ale that checks in at 4 percent alcohol. The beer became the Evanston brewery's second-most popular, and the first batch sold out so quickly at Temperance's taproom that owner Josh Gilbert decided to broaden his focus: When Temperance made a second batch last week, it was immediately canned and sent to...

My cousin, a professional musician, parted with his stage piano recently, so now I have it. Since I last took piano lessons during the Reagan administration, I worried I'd have to start from scratch. Nope. I remember a lot of the pieces I worked on as a kid (mainly from the Anna Magdalena Bach notebook), and I'm even making some of the same errors I did back then. It's pretty cool. And I found most of my old books, including exercises, which I'm also doing just fine except that my hands aren't as strong...

Forty years ago today, President Nixon resigned, and Gerald Ford was sworn in 38th President of the United States. Nixon's speech from the previous evening: Harry Shearer's recreation of the moments before this speech is worth seeing. (The blog post title is from Girlyman.)

As a city boy, the country occasionally surprises me. The Cleveland client has an office well outside Cleveland in rural Geauga County where we've spent some time over the last few weeks. One of the senior guys there hunts. And this is how I got to taste fresh, smoked pheasant last week—complete with a warning about birdshot:

He thinks we should all use GMT instead: [W]ithin a given time zone, the point of a common time is not to force everyone to do everything at the same time. It's to allow us to communicate unambiguously with each other about when we are doing things. If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it's dark out and work when it's light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the...

- There's something very important I forgot to tell you. - What? - Don't reboot Ghostbusters. - Why? - It would be bad. - Look, I'm fuzzy on the whole good-bad thing. What do you mean 'bad?' - Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. - Total studio reversal! - Right. That's bad. Okay. All right. Important safety tip. Thanks, Egon.