Levon

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This morning, I found this video by The Band on one of my “coffee sites.” I didn’t realize is that this 1976 performance — from their Last Waltz farewell film — was the last time Levon Helm played “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but that’s the sort of thing you learn when you see a random video you enjoy, and start a little wandering on Wikipedia.

Sadly, I also discovered a bit of news that is almost certainly the reason the video was on Merlin’s Tumblr in the first place.

Yesterday, this was posted on Helm’s site:

Dear Friends,

Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer. Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey.

Thank you fans and music lovers who have made his life so filled with joy and celebration… he has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance! He did it every time he took the stage…

We appreciate all the love and support and concern.
From his daughter Amy, and wife Sandy

Godspeed, Levon.

Trent Richardson: Stand-Up Guy

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Courtney Alvis of Hueytown, Alabama got to spend her junior year of high school battling leukemia. She’s gotten well enough to go to her senior prom, but was without a date.

Trent Richardson, Heisman finalist and certain first-round pick at the NFL draft in 10 days — and perhaps more significantly the son of a cancer survivor — decided he’d solve the problem.

Alvis, for her part, was elected prom queen with Richardson at her side.

Timberlake and Kunis got nothing on this guy. Roll Tide, people.

Reigning In Prosecutors

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It’s often been said that a DA can get an indictment for a ham sandwich if they want, but few notice just exactly how awful it is that this is true.

Mr Balko has a couple posts on the subject worth your time:

  • One, noting that prosecutors don’t need to believe the guilt of those they try; and
  • Two, wherein he (with Glenn Reynolds) proposes the state be on the hook for the defense costs of those tried but not convicted, and even reimburse for unjust pretrial confinement.

Criminal justice is broken. No system with immunity for state actors can ever be just, because there is no punishment (realistically speaking) for runaway prosecutors who abuse their office to improve their stats.

Today’s Montrose Moment

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When I went out for the mail, four women dressed as flappers, purporting to be on a “Beer Hunt,” asked if they could (a) pretend my front yard was a public park and (b) photograph me leapfrogging them. Note that whether or not I was willing to leapfrog was never, apparently, at issue.

Sadly, this did not come to pass, as one of the flappers was insistent that my yard was in no way a public park, and that any resulting photograph would be unable to hide that fact, and that it was cheating besides.

So that happened.

The Steve Jobs of 8-Bit

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Jack Tramiel, the man behind the Commodore line of computers, has died.

It would not be wrong to say his computers had easily as much to do with the pervasive spread of computing as anyone else. I never had one — my parents swayed me to buy local and get something at Radio Shack, more’s the pity — but he looms large over generations of computer nerds like me.

Thing I did not know before today: Tramiel was born in Poland; he and his family spent the war in Auschwitz and other camps before Tramiel alone was rescued in 1945.

More at MeFi.

Dept. of Shit I Wish I Was Making Up

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Widely hated Wisconsin governor Scott Walker has repealed a law mandating equal pay in the Badger State. Walker ally and enthusiastic repeal backer Glenn Grothman has done no favors for the GOP, opining that money’s just more important to men, see, and dames have different life goals. And besides, he tells us Ann Coulter told him that there’s not really an income gap anyway.

No, I’m not making this up.

Six Degrees of Richard Speck in Mad Men

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Last night’s Mad Men included references to the Richard Speck murders in Chicago, which places the episode just after July 13, 1966. (The last ep was clearly dated by the reference to the death of Pete Fox on July 5.)

The excellent Mad Men Unbuttoned blog notes that Life Magazins’s archives are online, and that you can read their account of the Speck murders from scans (which, appropriately enough, preserve the period advertising).

Today’s fun fact: the author of the Life piece was Loudon Wainwright — father of the folk singer and grandfather to Rufus — who wrote and edited for the magazine for many years.

I’m not sure if it counts as spoilers, but this page might give us hints about upcoming background events. Of particular interest in the summer of 1966, we have:

  • Charles Whitman did his Longhorn Sniping on August 1.
  • On August 8, Star Trek premiers.
  • In October, Toyota releases the Corolla.
  • LSD was legal in the US until October 6 of this year.
  • The AFL-NFL merger gains Congressional approval on October 21.
  • In November, John Lennon meets Yoko Ono.
  • Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball happens on November 28.
  • Lenny Bruce dies on August 3.

Unlikely to be referenced: On October 29, One regenerates into Two.

Dept. of Geeky Upgrades

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My first DOS computer was a 286-based system. This was in a time when most folks still had 8088 or 8086 systems, so mine was the hot rod in my dorm at the time. It was pretty fast, for the era at least, and I never really had to wait on it doing many things. Of course, back then we didn’t ask our computers to do the sorts of things we ask them to do now, either.

Three years later, I bought a new computer. It was a stupid-fast 33Mhz 80386 system — top of the line at the time — and it was a complete fucking screamer. My buddy Mike and I spent hours basically marveling at how ridiculously quick it was at EVERYTHING. Even doing a directory list was blazingly quick. It was, truly, life in the future.

In the 21 years since that day, I’ve bought lots of computers, but I’ve never had an upgrade that blew me away like that again. Things got more incremental, as is the case with most progressions. The Pentium I replaced the 386 with was quicker, but Windows was more bloated, so the actual user experience uptick wasn’t that dramatic. That became the rule, even with the on-paper giant boosts in power that I’ve gained in my last few Macs. Quite frankly, for most people and most tasks, you’re nowhere nearly CPU bound — other things are in the way. Like, say, hard drive speeds.

That’s where the new development comes in. I say I haven’t had a “holy shit” upgrade experience in 21 years, but that’s no longer true. See, I bought one of these to replace the ailing traditional hard drive in my Macbook Pro, and when I booted it back up after the (lengthy) restore process, I was reminded of nothing so much as the first few minutes with that Gateway 386 in 1991.

Everything happens IMMEDIATELY now. There is never a disk delay. The absurdly fast processor is free to be, well, absurdly fast. Notoriously piggy apps (I’m looking at you, Office) spring to life like tiny utilities. Even Lightroom opens with a speed that beggars belief. Task switching? Trivial. My Windows VM sings. If I’d realized how dramatic this upgrade was going to be, I’d have done it years ago.

Vroom Vroom Sob.

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And now, an even MORE iconic obituary: Ferdinand Alexander Porsche, the man who designed the most beautiful car in the world, has passed away at 76.

Butzi was the third “Ferdinand Porsche,” and should not be confused with either of the other two.

The first was his grandfather, born in 1875, who founded the company and gained fame otherwise by designing (for the Nazis) the Volkswagen Beetle in 1934. He also had a hand in a number of German war machines, and was imprisoned for a time as a war criminal. Porsche the elder died in 1951.

The second was known as Ferry (b. 1909). Ferry designed the 356, and ran the company for many years including the critical postwar period. Ferry died in 1998.

I think I’ll go to lunch in my 911 now.

(h/t: Captain Butler)

Today in AWWWWW

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Baby hippo likes swimming.

If you, like me, find yourself curious about hippos after his video, Wikipedia is of course a great destination. Therein you will learn, if you read far enough, that Pablo Escobar’s private animal collection included four hippos — animals that the Columbian government found logistically impossible to seize after the drug lord’s downfall, so they left them unattended on the estate. By 2007, the population had grown to 16, and is presumably larger still today. However implausible, it pleases me to think of the drug lord’s river horses spreading gradually northward, like the menacing killer bees of my youth.

END Police Immunity. Seriously.

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This is what justice looks like in Bellaire, Texas. Radley’s on fire for this, as he should be:

Cop runs license check on a suspicious vehicle. Although they apparently committed no traffic violation, cop insists that his decision to run a check had nothing to do with the fact that the occupants were black, and happened to be driving in an affluent, predominately white neighborhood. The cop’s partner apparently then enters the wrong license number, which returns a car that had been reported stolen. So cop follows car into driveway, which happens to be the home of the driver’s parents, where he lives. Cop approaches driver and occupant with his gun drawn. Driver’s parents come out to see what’s causing the commotion. Cop roughs up driver’s mother. Driver gets up from ground to tell cop to lay off of his mother. Cop shoots driver, a full 32 seconds after pulling into the driveway.

The driver, who was unarmed, will now carry a bullet in his liver for the rest of his life. The cop was charged with first degree aggravated assault. A jury acquitted him. Now this week, U.S. District Judge Melinda Harmon dismissed the driver’s lawsuit against both the cop that fired his gun and the cop who entered the wrong license plate number, citing qualified immunity. According to Harmon, the officer acted “reasonably,” and moreover, wrongly accusing an unarmed man of stealing a car, pointing a gun at him, then shooting him in the liver, “did not violate [his] constitutional rights.”

Both cops are back on the force. The guy with the bullet in his liver? Tough luck. He’ll be paying his own medical bills.

Local coverage here. I hope the family appeals. I hope the get the cops’ houses. These jackasses are still on the force, still carrying guns, and are behaving as if they did nothing wrong. That’s fucking lunacy.

Gemini in Pictures

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The Atlantic’s excellent In Focus feature this week is about NASA’s Project Gemini. The shots are amazing; take a minute and look. The Gemini astronauts included many who would go on to the Apollo program, including household names like Neil Armstrong — but also Edward White (the subject of the first photo and the first American to walk in space) and Gus Grissom, who would die in a launch pad fire with Apollo 1 only a few years later.

The group also included then-34-year-old John Young; he looks like a distillation of “astronaut” to me. Young would go on to walk on the moon with Apollo 16 in 1972 — and pilot the first shuttle flight in 1981. He still lives in Houston, apparently.