Vicky Tiel

Vicky Tiel's life story, as summarized in the NY Times article (August 19, 2011) reads like a novel loaded with sex, adventure, fame, and quotable lines: "I have a man.  I dress like this to show other women how to get one."

The NY Times article rightly says, "In between liaisons and her unlikely friendship with Ms. Taylor and Richard Burton, Ms. Tiel became the greatest designer you never heard of."  Certainly I don't think she ever crossed my radar.  (Not hard really.  When Us breathlessly reports that Sean is breaking up with Melissa or that Tiffany, Sam, and Fluffy are now a three-some I have no idea who they are.  If Tiel's name appeared in New York magazine I didn't note it.)

The article was occasioned by the publication of her book, “It’s All About the Dress: What I Learned in 40 Years About Men, Women, Sex, and Fashion”.

Jackson C. Frank Hard to Find?

An online biography states:

One of the most interesting and enigmatic cult figures of 1960s folk, Jackson Frank's reputation rests almost solely upon one hard-to-find album from the mid-'60s.

"Hard-to-find" is a peculiar term. A quick search found 16 offers for the CD on eBay and 33 videos on youtube. Not the record mind you, but in another era the tunes would be hard to find.  Now they're just a few clicks away.

Another manifestation of the glory of capitalism: if there is a market there will be a supplier.

I'm sure the postings to youtube violate all sorts of copyrights.   Never the less, his own version of "You Never Wanted Me" is reminiscent  of Bob Dylan's lyrics and Tim Buckley vocal mannerisms (with a more limited range). 

It's odd that Sandy Dennis's version of his song is more famous and until I looked for him on the web I'd heard either version.

"Dualing" Law Suits Over Sexuality Identity Question

In response to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education concerning Elmhurst College's including a question about sexual orientation and gender identity on its undergraduate admissions application poster 1272784 wrote:

So now, we wait for the conservative lawsuit that says they are discriminating, and the liberal lawsuit that says they're invading privacy, right? "Dualing" lawsuit time.

Clever, I thought.

Jason Edmiston Art

I stumbled over Jason Edmiston's drawings. Their style is reminiscent of the hot rod cartoons of the late 50's early 60's which showed gape mouthed grotesques in hot rods. Invariably, their right hands were held high on a Hirst shifter. Those were black and white drawings. These are in color.

Two appealed to me: the Creature in the Black Lagoon in a bubble bath with his rubber duckie and King Kong blogging on top of the Empire State building. Everyone will appreciate the banana substituting for the Apple logo.

About That Body ...

Here's the followup to the July 9th post about the unclaimed body, "Take My Body Please".

The headline for Jennifer Hewlett 's July 14th story in the Lexington Herald Leader read:

Unclaimed body to be buried; son says he was 'not a very nice man'

Robert George whose body had lain unclaimed in the Univeristy Kentucky Chandler Hospital morgue had been a guest of the state of Indiana for "criminal deviant conduct" and had been alienated from his family.   Married "six or seven times" his relations either wanted nothing to do with him or lacked the resources to bury him.
 
Quotes from his son, Robbie George sum up a sad life:
 
"I hate to sound mean and crass ... but he created this life for himself."
"It's an unfortunate set of circumstances. He was not a very nice man."
"This man here, he caused a lot of people a lot of grief."
"He took a plea bargain so it wouldn't reflect his actual, true crime."
"He only did one prison sentence out of many that he could have been charged for."

The story mentioned that the body didn't meet the criteria for bequeathal programs.

Exclusively New Zealand

Through the usual round about means I received a link to Minaret Station ("Tented Luxury in the Remote New Zealand Wilderness"*), an exclusive resort, accessible only by helicopter in New Zealand.  A web search led me to a video on Exclusively New Zealand.  The video opens with a didgeridoo and a drum over an image of the sun setting over the mountains.

The effect may be different south of the equator, but with live people appearing only half way through I felt I was being prepped for a terror-in-paradise/vacationing-with-psychopathic-killers/dormant-nameless-horror-awakes video.  Am I reading too much into this?

The shot below is typical of scenes preceding the attack on unsuspecting outsiders.  The heads of the attackers would com in from the lower  right of the screen.

The photos on the Minaret Station web site were taken by Fredrik Larsson.  He described of how he took the photos.  (Behind the scenes from the Minaret shoot in February of this year.)  There is a great shot of the Minaret Station in the snow - something not found on the resort's web site.

What struck me in looking at the photos was how unsuitable I am for a place like that.  (Yes, it's all about me.)  It's the nature of advertising to show off the subject.  Rooms should appear as large as possible.  Everything should sparkle or, if not sparkling (sparkling linen?) be as comfortable and luxurious as possible.  (I see your 350 thread count and raise you 50.)  

Maybe the target market doesn't want to see other people in room they themselves expect to occupy.  This is far different than clothing.   (Wow!   I'd look really great in that bathing suit.  I expect that there is some woman out there - there's got to be one - who'll believe that some dress will slim their thighs enough to make the man of their dreams fall in love with them.  Delusion does not require drugs.)   (Note to self: consider investigating correlations between thrift store shoppers and those who shop at budget stores. )

The images shown below prompted this post.  No books on the wall?  Why would I want to be there.  But look at the luxury!  Why two sinks?  Do people like to wash up side by side?  Is it a competition thing? I realize that commercial photography needs to make the subject appealing.  it's clear I'm not in the target audience.

A bathroom the size of a squash court certainly indicates luxury, but how many steps do you want to take from the toilet to the sink?  Why two sinks?  Do couples like to wash together?  Is sharing the same sink icky?  Is it a keeping up with the Jones thing? 

(Is this another manifestation of Thorstein Veblen's conspicuous consumption - a term I haven't heard in a good long while.  In talking to a friend about building a house, she said she'd definitely want her own bathroom so she wouldn't have to share it with her boys.  I was taken aback: bathrooms in my universe serve only a few limited purposes: 1) a sacred place to read the NY Times and 2) washing and brushing, 3) storing medicine, and 4) relieving oneself.  Maybe she was thinking about resale value while I was thinking of living in a place until I died.  Wasn't the problem with girls hogging a bathroom and getting boys into them to get washed?)

Must be my advancing age. My ideal vacation is becoming a nap in some comfortable spot where birds won't poop on my head and sap won't ruin my clothes or my book. Jeez  I'm no fun.

*That's the way I remember it.  What is actually on the site is a night time photograph captioned  "Luxury Tented Lodge in the Remote New Zealand Wilderness".

Hanlon's Razor and How Law School Students Lose the Grants Game

Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

On the other hand, an article by David Segal in the Sunday Business section of the NY Times from May 1 of this year, "Behind the Curve, How Law Student Lose the Grant Game and How Their Schools Win" indicated that law schools could be using grants to:

1. Boosting the school's ratings based of the quality of their entering classes 
2. Recovering revenue when the grant students' grades fall below a specified GPA.

The first reason is common among all schools of higher education, offering scholarships to students to increase their ranking and making the school more appealing to future students.  However, with law schools grading on a curve it becomes statistically more difficult for a student to achieve the specified GPA.  The difficult in calculating the odds of maintaining the grant is dependent on the median GPA of the school.

Note to presumptive law school grant recipients: learn to calculate standard deviations and learn the practical applications thereof.  The Golden Gate Law School for example requires a 3.0 GPA to maintain the grant.  50% of the class got a grant, but only a third of the students get a grade of 3.0 or better.  Do the math: a sizable portion of the students with grants are expected to lose them.

Once the student loses a grant the student is faced with deciding whether to continue at full fare (a win for the school as the student's undergraduate GPA has already served its purpose) or go to Plan B.

I passed a reference to the story to two profs who teach statistics for a toss off in class.

It is a companion piece to Segal's article about employment after law school, "Is Law School a Losing Game?" That earlier article pointed out quite clearly that the employment statistics published by law schools doesn't provide the details necessary for presumptive students to know how many of those jobs are behind the counter at Starbucks.

 

Pictogram Movie Posters by Viktor Hertz

Viktor Hertz has made a series of movie posters as pictograms. Rosemary's Baby was the one which appealed to me.

You can see the rest of the pictograms movie posters by clicking on the image below:

Death Cross

The financial news is trumpeting the "Death Cross" the day a short time moving average, typically 50 days falls below a long term moving average, typically a 100- or 200-day moving average.

The smart money (if such a thing exists) will head for the most stable stocks to preserve capital.  I'm guessing that companies that governments need will do well.  The only group I could identify which should do well in stringent financial times are those doing infrastructure testing and specialized maintenance.

The simplistic reasoning is this: governments trying to minimize expenses will hire these firms to verify where they can scrimp without jeopardizing public safety.  All it will take to give these firms a real boost is another incident like the Minneapolis bridge collapse in August of 2007.   (The thought sprung to mind because the Death Cross chart reminded me of images of the Interstate 35W bridge catastrophe.   On seeing the image again I admit that the lines don't cross.  Credit the association to the power of imagination.)

Shoplifing Plea Dooms Woman

The link will only take you to the first part of the story, but this is a good one.

A woman given only 6 months to live because of end-stage heart failure was released from jail this past January so she could be put on a heart transplant waiting list. Because she violated court orders by smoking and more importantly stealing stealing teeth-whitening strips, diet pills and Oil of Olay last month she's back in the slammer and is now ineligible for a transplant.

In reinstating her sentence the judge pointed out that the this was her 69th arrest, her 27th on felony charges.

There's not much to add, only to note that given 6 months to live in January, she beat the prediction by living into August.

13,000 MPH Test Plane Vanishes

Govenment Technology put it succinctly:

The Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2 (HTV-2) was launched aboard a rocket at 7:45 am Thursday, August 11 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Designed to reach any point on the planet in under an hour, the launch was the second test of the HTV-2 system. Following separation from a Minotaur IV rocket, the HTV-2 began flying at Mach 20. Shortly thereafter, contact was lost.

Air Force Maj. Chris Schulz, DARPA HTV-2 program manager said, “We know how to boost the aircraft to near space. We know how to insert the aircraft into atmospheric hypersonic flight. We do not yet know how to achieve the desired control during the aerodynamic phase of flight."

I imagine it is hard to track something moving about 17 times the speed of sound (by my calculations), but I would have expected that one of the first things they might have done was figure out how they were going to track it.

Ooooh! Second thought: wasn't there a James Bond film like this - Blofeld masterminding a scheme to kidnap satellites? Also, I wouldn't put it past Lex Luthor.

Spam from the "Internal Revenue Source"

I got a piece of e-mail today from the "Internal Revenue Source" informing me that it couldn't process my return as "field" (filed) because the "person identifiedas (identified as) the primary taxpayer" did not provide the necessary documentation.

I will not be keeping this for my records.

Years ago a columnist for one of the computer trade rags complained that the spam he was receiving showed that the spammers weren't even trying. If I remember correctly, the salutation contained the field name instead of his name, something like Dear {firstname} {Lastname}.

Satan Sandwich Diagram

Representative Rep. Emanuel Cleaver's (D-MO) description of the recent agreement to raise the debt ceiling as a "Satan Sandwich" got significant media play.  I think this cartoon makes things clear (http://www.npr.org/2011/08/07/139033731/double-take-toons-the-devils-details):

 

God stays in heaven because... / Torquemada

About a month ago I was going through some old newspapers when I spotted a column by Liz Smith from October 27, 2002.  The rest of the paper has long been recycled, but I've carried around the first part of the column ever since. She asked for the source of a note she wrote to herself:

God stays in heaven because He fears what he has created here on Earth.

I figured a web search would yield the result.  A couple of pages of links later I can say that many variants exist on the web.  One link lead to "Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams" on IMDB: "Do you think God lives in Heaven because He too lives in fear of what He created?" 

Maybe "God stays in heaven because ..." can be as popular as "Why did the chicken cross the road?"

Of the chicken crossing the road jokes, my favorite variants have various personalities offering explanations.  Of these my favorite still remains:

"I don't know, but give me 30 minutes with the chicken and I'll find out. - Torquemada

(If you follow the link to the chicken crossing the road jokes you'll see that in that version Torquemada estimated only 10 minutes to get to the truth. It was 30 minutes when I first heard the joke so I tell it that way.)

I once told the joke to some college students who found it funny even though they didn't know who Torquemada was.  They were stymied because they couldn't spell his name. I suggested that they look up the Spanish Inquisition.