Books of 2013, #23: Against the Odds, by John Pendergrass

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This one’s kind of a gimme: the author is a family friend (my brother and I went to high school with his kids) in addition to being my stepfather’s former medical partner. Pendergrass is about 10 years younger than my stepdad, and has always been substantially more athletic, so to say people were SURPRISED when he announced he’d start doing triathlons in his sixties would be incorrect. What surprised them was his plan: to do six of them, at the big-boy Ironman level, one on each (populated) continent, all before his 70th birthday.

N.B., if you didn’t bother to click that link, what “Ironman” means in this context:

  • 2.4 miles of open water swimming, followed by
  • 112 miles on a bike, followed by
  • a goddamn marathon, i.e. 26.2 miles running.

Yeah. Right. I’m 43, and can’t image one of them, let alone six, but John nails it. In Arizona, Brazil, Switzerland, New Zealand, and South Africa, he finished well ahead of the official cutoff time. Only in his last outing — at a miserably hot site in China — did he come up at all short. But even then he finished the race. That’s amazing and incredible.

The story is interesting, and it’s a fun read, but it also shows that the author is a physician by trade, not a writer. That matters less when you’ve got something clear to tell, and John certainly does. Obviously, too, this is the sort of thing a man in his sixties can really only contemplate if he’s already pretty well off — tri bikes are very expensive, to say nothing of the travel involved. It’s hard to gauge if this would be fun to read if you don’t know John, but obviously enough people think so that Random House bought the book, so there’s that.

Books of 2013, #22: Drinking with Men, by Rosie Schaap

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Wow, I’ve gotten behind on the posts, but at least I’m still keeping pace on the reading.

Drinking with Men somehow found its way onto my Kindle several months ago, probably after reading a review somewhere that suggested I’d enjoy it. Past-me is pretty good about that sort of thing, and I’m usually right.

I mostly was this time: Schaap’s memoir takes the form of a sort of bar travelogue: from her days sneaking into the cocktail car of a New York commuter train to her early adult life in Manhattan, she’s regularly become a regular of this or that local haunt. I understand the appeal, and have done it several places myself — hell, back in the 1990s, we used to invite Cecil’s to our parties, and it was a year or two after I stopping hanging out there before I finally stopped getting a Christmas card from the owner.

People who’ve never been regulars think of this as sad. They don’t know what they’re missing.

Anyway, Schaap is a talented writer, but a few times I felt the bar-to-bar structure of the book kind of limited it. She hints at, but never explores, her life outside these bars; it appears only inasmuch as it serves the story of her relationship to each watering hole, so to speak. Her courtship and marriage to her husband, for example, is only discussed as it connects to her bar life.

She’s not without circumspection about this tendency of hers; it troubles her more than once, and I wonder if it’s still something she does. I also wonder what she’ll write next, because — narrow focus aside — Drinking with Men is a great read.

Schneier on Snowden

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As always, he nails it:

Edward Snowden broke the law by releasing classified information. This isn’t under debate; it’s something everyone with a security clearance knows. It’s written in plain English on the documents you have to sign when you get a security clearance, and it’s part of the culture. The law is there for a good reason, and secrecy has an important role in military defense.

But before the Justice Department prosecutes Snowden, there are some other investigations that ought to happen.

We need to determine whether these National Security Agency programs are themselves legal. The administration has successfully barred anyone from bringing a lawsuit challenging these laws, on the grounds of national secrecy. Now that we know those arguments are without merit, it’s time for those court challenges.

It’s clear that some of the NSA programs exposed by Snowden violate the Constitution and others violate existing laws. Other people have an opposite view. The courts need to decide.

We need to determine whether classifying these programs is legal. Keeping things secret from the people is a very dangerous practice in a democracy, and the government is permitted to do so only under very specific circumstances. Reading the documents leaked so far, I don’t see anything that needs to be kept secret. The argument that exposing these documents helps the terrorists doesn’t even pass the laugh test; there’s nothing here that changes anything any potential terrorist would do or not do. But in any case, now that the documents are public, the courts need to rule on the legality of their secrecy.

And we need to determine how we treat whistle-blowers in this country. We have whistle-blower protection laws that apply in some cases, particularly when exposing fraud, and other illegal behavior. NSA officials have repeatedly lied about the existence, and details, of these programs to Congress.

Only after all of these legal issues have been resolved should any prosecution of Snowden move forward. Because only then will we know the full extent of what he did, and how much of it is justified.

I believe that history will hail Snowden as a hero — his whistle-blowing exposed a surveillance state and a secrecy machine run amok. I’m less optimistic of how the present day will treat him, and hope that the debate right now is less about the man and more about the government he exposed.

Three Felonies A Day

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You oughta go read this:

Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the government takes a dislike to you for any reason, they’ll dig in and find a felony you’re guilty of.

Case in point: I remember, but you probably don’t, that the telco Qwest refused to participate in some very, very broad and overreaching (and probably illegal) surveillance back before 9/11. Immediately, the DOJ terminated a whole slew of unrelated contracts with Qwest, and then things REALLY got fun:

And then the DoJ targeted him and prosecuted him and put him in prison for insider trading — on the theory that he knew of anticipated income from secret programs that QWest was planning for the government, while the public didn’t because it was classified and he couldn’t legally tell them, and then he bought or sold QWest stock knowing those things.

This CEO’s name is Joseph P. Nacchio and TODAY he’s still serving a trumped-up 6-year federal prison sentence today for quietly refusing an NSA demand to massively wiretap his customers.

The Internet Randomly Answers A Question I’ve Had For Years

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That question: “Are birthdays distributed evenly throughout the year, or are people more likely to be born in certain months?”

IO9 has part of the answer, via a heat map by NPR’s Matt Stiles that, in turn, was based on a table published in the NY Times showing the rank, in terms of births per day, of each date in the year (using US birth data, 1973-1999).

That’s interesting and all, but it leaves out a key bit of data: What’s the actual birth volume per day? I’d expect some minimal variation — no data set is perfectly even — but the ranking really only interesting if there’s meaningful variance.

Stiles noticed, and so his follow-up post shows as much birth volume data as he could get his hands on. The answer turns out to be that while September remains the most popular month in which to be born, it’s not by a meaningful margin. Generally speaking, the birthdays really ARE more or less evenly distributed.

In which we grouse about RSS readers

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So Google Reader is going away in 20 days, which is troubling. I’ve been a big fan of it for a long time, but — like Gmail — I only use it as a back-end service. Just as I never log into Gmail to read mail, I never log into Reader to read sites. I use nice, native clients way cooler, nicer, and more fully featured than a web app. GR just provides the back-end sync.

For most of my life with GR, I used the Reeder app on my Mac, my phone, and my iPad. It’s really, really great. A while back, though, the Mac version developed a problem where it wasn’t able to sync with GR anymore. No idea why, or if I was the only one with the problem, and I got no support from the author, so I fell back to using the venerable NetNewsWire on the Mac (which can sync with GR) and kept using Reeder on my iOS devices. I do most of my reading on the iPad anyway.

Except now I have to change, and change nearly always sucks. Especially in this case, as it turns out that my use case is that of a power-user, and nobody wants to take my money.

Following the glowing coverage, I looked first at NewBlur, and was about ready to make the jump until I discovered something troubling: Apparently, NewsBlur quietly and automatically marks any item more than two weeks old as read, and there’s no way to change that. Hope you weren’t saving that! That’s a serious dealbreaker — I leave items unread all the time as ticklers for later action — but at least I discovered it before I signed up for an annual subscription. NewsBlur is also wasting time and money (from my point of view) building out a sharing-and-discovery featureset I find utterly uninteresting. I’m already on Facebook and Twitter, and I post here. I don’t need to have a dialog with other users in my feedreader, and I don’t need to “train” my reader to find sites for me. Just work the list I give you, and be done with it. I have American money. I’ll pay you.

Then I looked at Feedly, which is one of those high-concept things. The first troubling aspect is that it’s apparently free, and I’ve been burned on that before (and in fact I’m being burned by that RIGHT NOW). Secondly, the app is just a disaster of overdesign. Where Reeder is quiet, minimalist, and fast, Feedly is cumbersome and too pleased with itself by half — really, I just want the text. I don’t need you to reformat the stories into a facsimile of a magazine, for Christ’s sake. Feedly also appears to be just a browser, not a reader that grabs your subscription updates and presents them to you locally. This matters, because sometimes, I don’t have a network connection. Also troubling: Feedly is built to use Google Reader, and while they’re working quickly they still haven’t launched their in-house sync back-end. The end of the month could be a very messy time for them. No thanks.

Finally, I looked at Feedbin, which is probably the most promising option since it’s the one the Reeder author is working towards, and if he gets done I’ll be back with the right apps again. However, at present there’s no acceptable way for me to USE it — the Reeder author has only completed the Feedbin port for the iPhone version, which is my least-used client. Feedbin itself has a web interface, but it’s pretty crappy. The only iPad client is something called “Slow Feeds” that insists on sorting your subscriptions by update frequency, not by subject, which seems utterly useless. (The stated point of SF is to keep the rarely-updated feeds from being lost in your subscription list. This is a problem I never, ever have with Reeder, because its default mode is to show you ONLY feeds with new stories. This seems like a much better way to solve the problem.)

As of now, I’m assuming that Reeder for Mac and iPad won’t be ready in three weeks, and that I’ll be back to running NetNewsWire on my Mac (which can’t sync with anything but GR, but is still a workable stand-alone reader) and not reading news at all on my phone or iPad, at least until Reeder finishes with the ports.

Just like 2004. Yay! Giant steps backwards!

Yet another reason to hate the TSA

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They tried to fuck with Chewbacca.

Peter Mayhew, the man who played Chewie, is over seven feet tall and, like many very-tall men when they get older, needs a cane. Given his height, it probably shouldn’t surprise you that his cane is rather long.

The TSA in Denver apparently thought the cane as too long, and were threatening to confiscate it — and would have, if Mayhew hadn’t Tweeted about the incident, and had enough Twitter followers to make sure the situation came to the attention of American Airlines, who prevailed upon the TSA to stop being douchebags.

This, of course, is only possible because he’s a celebrity with tens of thousands of Twitter followers, and because he’s a million-mile flier with American. Remove either of those factors, and the TSA would’ve bullied a man out of his goddamn cane.

Why You Should Shop At Costco

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BusinessWeek: The Cheapest, Happiest Company in the World.

The precis is simple: WalMart pays its workers badly, treats them poorly, and is in trouble. Costco is the anti-WalMart:

Despite the sagging economy and challenges to the industry, Costco pays its hourly workers an average of $20.89 an hour, not including overtime (vs. the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour). By comparison, Walmart said its average wage for full-time employees in the U.S. is $12.67 an hour, according to a letter it sent in April to activist Ralph Nader. Eighty-eight percent of Costco employees have company-sponsored health insurance; Walmart says that “more than half” of its do. Costco workers with coverage pay premiums that amount to less than 10 percent of the overall cost of their plans. It treats its employees well in the belief that a happier work environment will result in a more profitable company. “I just think people need to make a living wage with health benefits,” says [CEO Craig] Jelinek. “It also puts more money back into the economy and creates a healthier country. It’s really that simple.”

Generation X is Tired of Your Bullshit

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We’re old enough now that the “they’re lazy, they’re not like us, yadda yadda yadda” crap about the next generation is actually about somone other than us, and, frankly, most of it’s shit that was said first about us, and we don’t particularly want to put up with it:

Generation X is beyond all that bullshit now. It quit smoking and doing coke a long time ago. It has blood pressure issues and is heavier than it would like to be. It might still take some ecstasy, if it knew where to get some. But probably not. Generation X has to be up really early tomorrow morning.

Generation X is tired.

Must-Read Krugman on Obamacare in Red States

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The Spite Club:

Last year’s Supreme Court decision upholding the law’s constitutionality also gave states the right to opt out of one piece of the plan, a federally financed expansion of Medicaid. Sure enough, a number of Republican-dominated states seem set to reject Medicaid expansion, at least at first.

And why would they do this? They won’t save money. On the contrary, they will hurt their own budgets and damage their own economies. Nor will Medicaid rejectionism serve any clear political purpose. As I’ll explain later, it will probably hurt Republicans for years to come.

No, the only way to understand the refusal to expand Medicaid is as an act of sheer spite. And the cost of that spite won’t just come in the form of lost dollars; it will also come in the form of gratuitous hardship for some of our most vulnerable citizens.

It’s Prince’s Birthday

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In his honor, take time for at least one of these two amazing vids. Both have been on Heathen before, but they’re both worth a re-look.

First: The short one: this version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps is from the all-star tribute to George Harrison on VH1 some years ago. Prince handles the solo duties like the incredible player and amazing showman he’s always been. My favorite part: at the end, when he’s done, he throws his guitar up and struts off the stage.

The guitar never comes down.

Second: I found this a while back on Metafilter. It’s a story covering this video (note: not the link from the Hilobrow story; that one’s been DCMA’d off the net) of Prince and his band from the early 80s. He’s much younger; Wendy and Lisa are with him, and he’s not quite yet the superstar he’d become. That process starts with this performance, because it’s the very first time anyone ever heard Purple Rain.

It’s long. Make time. It’s the man’s birthday, for crying out loud.

What You Need To Know About the Xbox One

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From Twitter via Imgur via, probably, Reddit; no credit is obvious:

Drm4yjrw

It must be connected to the Internet every 24 hours, or you can’t play at all. You cannot disconnect the Kinect sensor. You cannot lend, rent, sell, or trade games easily, because fuck you. It’s basically designed to destroy the used game market entirely.

How about no? Is no good for you, Microsoft?

This is a SERIOUS FUCKING PROBLEM

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We’ve joked for years that the NSA was reading your mail, but it turns out they really are — and your providers are helping them.

PRISM is complete bullshit, and must stop.

The Times today, in reaction, echoes something I said after Bush’s power grabs: no Executive ever gave up power. Bush did lasting damage that subsequent presidents won’t undo:

“The administration has now lost all credibility,” the Times’ editors write. “Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the 9/11 attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.”

More from The Verge; providers allowing the NSA unfettered and direct back-end access without proper warrants (the only court oversight is, of course, a secret court) include Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Skype. AOL, too, which is kind of adorable. Dropbox is said to be joining the program soon.

These companies, when asked for comment today, are denying their participation — but one would do well to recall that even Senators could not discuss the program before due to legal prohibitions. It’s entirely possible that the PR flacks speaking for Microsoft, Apple, etc., either don’t know, or are legally enjoined for speaking truthfully. (It’s certainly well-known that PR folks can live without souls, so this is hardly surprising.)

Dear TSA, and everyone who works there:

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Eat SHIT, you know-nothing, cowardly whiners. Hysteria and idiocy reign, again.

Let’s play a game. It’s called “measure risk with math!” I know, I know: the TSA is no good at either measuring things OR at math, let along rational thought, but bear with me.

First, let’s figure out how many airline passengers there have been in this history of American commercial aviation. It’s going to be a big number, since the FAA reports that there were 732 million passengers in 2012 alone. Let’s assume we’re talking on the order of 10 billion, then, which is probably low, but is also probably in the right ballpark (though I will eagerly accept corrections, provided they come with a clear rationale or, better, data).

Now let’s estimate the number of knife injuries or attacks that have happened on planes, ever. That number is harder to get, so as an upper bound let’s just start with the entire death toll on 9/11. It’s obviously risible to consider all those deaths as the result of the box cutters, but using that enormous number should put to rest concerns that I’m underestimating actual knife attacks in the air.

So, out of an estimated 10 billion passengers, we had about 3,000 injuries/deaths.

Good thing the TSA is protecting us!

Let’s look at this another way, which is to compare average knife injuries per year to the number of passengers per year. By annualizing the data, we can compare it intelligently to the chances of death or injury from other unusual events, to better understand what other activities we should ban or limit using “knives on planes” as the clear, logical border for permissible vs. impermissible.

Again, I’ll put my thumb on the scale against my position here, and count all 3,000 losses in 2001 as knife losses, but I’m going to divide it by 13 to pull an average per year since then. That yields a laughable 230, but vs the 700 million person-flights a year (here, at last, I may be using a slightly-too-high figure for average person-flights, but I think it’ll come out in the wash).

Using these ludicrously-overstated figures, we see 0.00003 percent chance, per year, of a knife injury or death on a plane. You are significantly more likely to die in an accidental plane crash. Or be legally executed. Or be struck by lightning. Or die from a bee sting. Or an earthquake. Or be killed by a dog.

Obviously, the next logical steps should be to ban going outside in the rain; eradicate bees; forcibly relocate folks from fault zones; and euthanize any dog over 15 pounds, as all these ideas have as much logical backing as keeping small pocketknives off planes.

People are insanely, irrevocably stupid. And the TSA is worse than most.

The best thing I have EVER seen on Facebook, bar none

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In the “travel reports from far-flung Heathen cousins” category, we find this:

Screen Shot 2013 06 05 at 9 59 43 AM

Marijke is my mother’s first cousin’s daughter, which I believe makes her my second cousin (but you can check my work). I went to her parent’s wedding twenty-mumble years ago, but I think I’ve only ever met her as an infant.

Her father’s a Dutch banker who’s recently taken a job in Zambia, but it’s more fun without context, isn’t it?

So, yeah, about that IRS thing…

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Times:

When CVFC, a conservative veterans’ group in California, applied for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service, its biggest expenditure that year was several thousand dollars in radio ads backing a Republican candidate for Congress.

The Wetumpka Tea Party, from Alabama, sponsored training for a get-out-the-vote initiative dedicated to the “defeat of President Barack Obama” while the I.R.S. was weighing its application.

And the head of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, whose application languished with the I.R.S. for more than two years, sent out e-mails to members about Mitt Romney campaign events and organized members to distribute Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign literature.

Political groups are not eligible for tax-exempt status.

HOWTO: Come out as a Douchebag

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It’s easy! In a needlessly fawning profile in a more or less worthless glossy for the rich and shallow, be quoted thusly:

  • “Houston has a crush on Austin.” Seriously?
  • “In L.A., there’s like a thousand food trucks [. . .] so I wanted to bring that here.” Well, thank god for that; God knows there were NO food trucks AT ALL before this clown showed up OH WAIT.

I’ve been to Bermudez’s “flagship” bar, Royal Oak, once — but only as a meeting spot for the Karbach Brews Cruise monthly bike ride. At 6, it was okay, but it’s also pretty clear that by 8 or 9 it’d be completely jam packed with wall-to-wall douchebros.

I will say this: the article IS useful for providing a list of spots to skip if one wishes to avoid funding this kind of weaselry: Royal Oak; the new Pistolero; a variety of resale shops on Westheimer; and the Koagie Hots and Golden Grill trucks. Me, I’ll spend my money with the Clumsy Butchers.

My bet is you can’t find a cooler sounding language than this

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This video shows a native Zulu speaker discussing the local shibboleths used to tell local from foreigner.

Also, this may be the only time EVER I use the word “shibboleth” in its Biblical sense. Which is cool.

I was going to describe it as the “original, literal sense,” but that would be wrong; as you may recall from bible school or the West Wing, the term is actually a Hebrew word that was difficult to pronounce properly for nonnative Hebrew speakers:

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right . Judges 12:6

It wasn’t a made-up word; it meant “the part of the plant with grain in it.”

Exhibit Eleventy Billion in People v. Microsoft

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Ahem:

Screen Shot 2013 06 03 at 6 07 49 PM

“But Chief Heathen,” you must be wondering, “surely there’s a preference screen or something where you can change it to something sensible!”

You’d be wrong. Check it out. While it will, apparently, respect the formatting of text pasted into a sticky, the default is hardcoded and cannot be changed short of really goofy hacks.

WAT.

By contrast:

Screen Shot 2013 06 03 at 6 07 00 PM

Moreover, you can create a new default at any time by formatting a note’s color, font, etc., any old way you like, and then choosing “Note -> Use as Default” from the menu bar.

United: We Never Stop Fucking You; also, Hilton Hates You Too

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Apparently, there is now only one daily from the Naples area back to Houston, so despite being done early I’m still waiting until 5:12 PM to fly home.

This is my fifth — and final, it turns out — year attending this conference here in Naples. Each year, the flight options have gotten worse. United reducing service (because fuck you) is just one more reason I’m glad I won’t have to come back here, or to this hotel either.

You: The hotel? What’s wrong with the hotel?

I’m glad you asked! It’s called the “Waldorf Naples,” but this is a goddamn lie. At some point, Hilton bought the real Waldorf, and immediately set about ruining that venerable hotel name by applying it willy-nilly to garden variety “full service” properties in pseudo-lux destinations like Naples. It’s not a Waldorf. It’s a run-down Hilton with delusions of grandeur. The rooms are shabby, the carpet’s worn, and they’re too snooty to have vending so you have to use their shop or coffeebar if you want a Diet Coke. Before 8, it’s just the coffeebar — where a 12 ounce bottle of DC goes for $2.85. Because, again, fuck you.

Every time I’ve stayed in a hotel since 2009, I’ve mentally compared it to the Hyatt Place hotel I used in Overland Park. Absolutely no hotel emerges from such a comparison looking good. Hyatt’s created a line with everything you need and nothing you don’t, and with a brandwide culture of “yes” when guests ask for things. It’s not fancy, but it’s done very well. There’s no full service restaurant, but you can get sandwiches and whatnot made to order 24 x 7. The wifi works well, and is included. The free breakfast is full of fresh fruit and good cereal options. I love some high-end stuff in my life, but I’ve become increasingly convinced that the whole IDEA of “high end hotel” is being executed very, very poorly; I haven’t seen a single so-called fancy hotel in the last 4 years I’d choose over a Hyatt Place, if given the option.

Patrick Stewart is a goddamn hero.

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Here is why. Mrs Heathen and I were there at Comicpalooza for this; it was an astonishing and honest and open moment, and I would be a liar if I told you my eyes were dry by the end.

I’m glad this was captured, and I’m glad people can see it.

Dept. of Darkly Hilarious Corporate Infighting

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From Talking Points Memo, we find this story, attributed to internal documents recovered by the AP in a building abandoned by terrorists in Mali:

After years of trying to discipline him, the leaders of [this organization] sent one final letter to their most difficult employee. In page after scathing page, they described how he didn’t answer his phone when they called, failed to turn in his expense reports, ignored meetings and refused time and again to carry out orders.

Most of all, they claimed he had failed to carry out a single spectacular operation, despite the resources at his disposal.

The employee […] responded the way talented employees with bruised egos have in corporations the world over: He quit and formed his own competing group.

What makes this weirdly funny is that the organization is the North African branch of al-Qaida, and the employee is terrorist rising star Moktar Belmoktar. The funny stops quickly, thought: since leaving the old, hidebound organization, Belmoktar has

carried out two lethal operations that killed 101 people in all: one of the largest hostage-takings in history at a BP-operated gas plant in Algeria in January, and simultaneous bombings at a military base and a French uranium mine in Niger just last week.

Yikes.

Dept. of Whoa.

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This 14-year-old girl plays the everliving FUCK out of Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption.”

This should give new meaning to “plays like a girl.”

Also, it’s good to see that kids today still appreciate the classics. Had I as a 14-year-old tried to learn a piece of music of similar age, by the way, I’d have been kinda out of luck, since 1948 was basically a musical wasteland — rock and roll was years away, and musically interesting rock-specific guitar playing even farther.

It’s odd to consider now, but the middle 1970s were still pretty early in the development of modern popular music — Elvis’ commercial breakout was only 20 years before. If we consider 1957 as the first year of rock-and-roll hegemony on the charts (which may or may not be defensible for more than a blog post), then a Van Halen fan in 1977 has just 20 years of rock to draw from. Plus, the evolution of the form was so dramatic that few folks enjoyed both the hits of the late 1950s and the kind of post-Beatles, post-Hendrix, post-Zeppelin music that came in the next decade.

In 2013, we’re closing in on having SIXTY years of rock and roll to choose from, and even if we dismiss the first decade of essentially playful bits and start at 1967 instead, we have a half century. That’s a big buffet, and it makes it more remarkable that this kid found that first Van Halen record. (I suspect good parenting.)