Ronnie Darnell Bell, 30, was arrested in Dallas in February 1998 and charged with attempting to rob the Federal Reserve Bank. (In the 1995 movie “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” knocking off the New York Fed required a small army of men and truckloads of weapons.) According to police, Bell was initially confused because there are no tellers, and so handed a security guard his note, reading, “This is a bank robbery of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, of Dallas, Texas, give me all the money. Thank you, Ronnie Darnell Bell.” The guard pushed a silent alarm while an oblivious Bell chatted amiably, revealing that only minutes earlier he had tried to rob a Postal Service office, but that, “They threw me out.” [Dallas Morning News, 2-27-98]
Jennifer Gale, 1960-2008
Austin City Council meetings and mayoral races will never be the same. She was a true character, one that you would be hard-pressed to find anywhere else but Austin. The first time Megan and I came across Jennifer was while we were watching the Austin Music Network back in 2004. They were playing Christmas music videos and they showed a clip of Jennifer singing at a City Council meeting, much like the clip below. We were immediately confounded, amazed, and smitten. Bye, Jennifer, and thanks for making the world a more interesting place.
NOVEMBER 12–Meet Kyle Drinkwine. The Wisconsin man, 24, allegedly became so incensed by a lackluster karaoke performance of a heavy metal song that he assaulted the singer and a second man, police charge. According to a River Falls Police Department report, Drinkwine throttled singer James Mischler, 28, and his friend Cyrus Kozub, 29, “over one’s ability to sing karaoke.” Though cops did not specify which song set Drinkwine off last week, Kozub told TSG that Mischler was performing “Holy Diver,” the title cut on Dio’s 1983 debut album (the band is fronted by Ronnie James Dio, the former Black Sabbath lead singer). [In a subsequent interview, Mischler told TSG that when Drinkwine and some cronies started heckling him, he responded with a putdown about the "big gaudy crucifix" worn by Drinkwine. "I told him he should find a better vending machine for his jewelry," Mischler recalled, adding that the comment angered the heckler, who himself had earlier performed an Eminem song. Mischler said he was concerned about reports claiming that he did a mocking version of "Holy Diver." "I genuinely love Ronnie James Dio," he said.] Following the assaults, police apprehended Drinkwine after a short foot chase. A subsequent Breathalyzer test recorded his blood alcohol content at .169, more than twice the state limit. Drinkwine was booked into the Pierce County Jail on battery and disorderly conduct counts. He is pictured below in a November 7 mug shot snapped in neighboring St. Croix County, where he was charged with violating probation on a prior case. Though Drinkwine declined to speak with cops following his arrest, an officer overheard him, during a jail phone call, tell a friend he “fucked up” and was arrested for fighting. This is the second time in 15 months that a karaoke singer has been attacked over their song styling. Last August, a Washington man was punched by a female bar patron who thought his cover of “Yellow,” a Coldplay song, “really sucked.”
When I read this article on how AC/DC is shunning online mp3 sales of their new album, I wasn’t so much surprised at that revelation as I was by the fact that they’re going solely with Wal-Mart to sell their disc. But then it occurred to me that, aside from the Best Buy, what other national music retailer is even in existence? Tower’s gone. Mall stores are likely irrelevant. K-Mart? Target? Maybe, but I guess it’s a sign of the times when you can go it solo with Wally with confidence.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – For those about to rock, AC/DC salutes you. Unless, that is, you want to buy the Australian heavy metal group’s newest album, “Black Ice,” on iTunes, or anywhere but Wal-Mart when it drops in record stores on October 20.
“Maybe I’m just being old-fashioned, but this iTunes, God bless ‘em, it’s going to kill music if they’re not careful,” lead singer Brian Johnson, 61, told Reuters.
AC/DC, formed by brothers Angus and Malcolm Young in 1973, is among only a handful of musicians to refuse to put their music on the popular download website in a move that Johnson defended as a bid to protect the album format from the Internet’s emphasis on buying single songs.
“It’s a…monster, this thing,” he said. “It just worries me. And I’m sure they’re just doing it all in the interest of making as much…cash as possible. Let’s put it this way, it’s certainly not for the…love, let’s get that out of the way, right away,” he said.
The 15 songs on “Black Ice” stick closely to the bluesy power riffs AC/DC has laid down on their 14 earlier albums that together have sold an estimated 200 million copies worldwide.
Their album “Back in Black” — the fifth-best selling album ever in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America — became a heavy metal landmark. The title track, as well as “You Shook Me All Night Long,” remain radio standards nearly 30 years after their release.
The follow-up album “For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)”, a play on the ancient Roman gladiators salute, rocketed to No. 1 on U.S. charts and became a rock classic.
After a break of nearly seven years following 2000’s “Stiff Upper Lip,” AC/DC reassembled to make “Black Ice,” and Johnson recalled getting goose bumps when Angus and Malcolm took their guitars to The Warehouse Studio in Vancouver, Canada.
Yet, Johnson’s dislike of recording studios drove him out to the receptionist’s desk, where producer Brendan O’Brien set up a microphone and Johnson recorded his vocals — one more sign of idiosyncratic behavior in the band’s storied career.
Selling songs online is another issue, too. While music downloads from iTunes to iPods and from other music-oriented Web sites to digital players has become standard practice for music lovers, it strikes the wrong chord for AC/DC.
Under its new contract with Sony’s Columbia Music, “Black Ice” will be available only at retailer Wal-Mart and its Sam’s Club stores, as well as AC/DC’s website.
“A lot of people were saying ‘Ah man, you’re going to the big Wal-Mart, you’re selling out,’ Johnson said.
“Wal-Mart were the only big store to stock all of our albums, every single one of them, and they’ve never deviated. And they sold AC/DC shirts and pajamas for kids, which we thought was really cool,” he said.
Fans have snapped up tickets to AC/DC’s world tour that begins in the United States later this month, and Johnson said he was working out to keep pace with the frenetic Angus Young, who is famous for sporting a schoolboy outfit on stage.
Johnson, who also races cars, has hired a trainer to get into shape, and hopefully he will be able to make the leap to the rope beneath the giant bell that AC/DC traditionally lowers at the start of rock anthem “Hells Bells.”
“The bell’s going to come down again and I’m saying to myself, ‘Should I jump that 10 feet?’” said Johnson. “Can I still do it?”
Despite the band’s hiatus, fan appetite for AC/DC remains strong, with its latest single from the new album, “Rock’n Roll Train,” hitting No. 2 on Billboard’s Mainstream rock chart.
“Now we’ve got kids of eight or nine (years-old) who are fans, and their dads are fans. And it’s quite mind-blowing,” Johnson said.
Still, he was philosophical on whether the band had another album in them. “I’m going to leave it in the hands of the gods. Life is what it is, y’know. You start trying to plan too carefully, it’ll come kick you right in the a**,” he said.
“Rush Hour” director Brett Ratner has been denied the chance to direct a film based on the “Guitar Hero” video game series.
Ratner tells Entertainment Weekly that “I’d really like to do it, but they’re not letting me… I expressed my interest, but because it’s such a success, it’s like now there’s no reason to make a movie about it…. The game is wish-fulfilling, everyone can be a rock star… I might prevail… I usually do.”
Ratner’s schedule remains busy however with a fourth “Beverly Hills Cop” and an adaptation of the video game “God of War”.
September 4, 2008 at 11:20 am · Filed under In the News
Why does it seem like natural disasters are getting worse and worse every year? Is it because of global warming, which has wreaked all kinds of meteorological havoc all across the natural landscsape? Probably not. It’s because we’re building so much more in places that are susceptible to natural disaster. In this case, the coastal areas of the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. (Mike Davis also tackles this issue in regards to Los Angeles’ rampant development in his pre-A Convenient Truth book Ecology of Fear.)
In the space of two weeks, Hurricane Gustav has caused an estimated $3 billion in losses in the U.S. and killed about 110 people in the U.S. and the Caribbean, catastrophic floods in northern India have left a million people homeless, and a 6.2-magnitude earthquake has rocked China’s southwest, smashing over 400,000 homes.
If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it’s because they are. But some disasters do seem to be affecting us worse – and not for the reasons you may think. Floods and storms have led to most of the excess damage. The number of flood and storm disasters has gone up by 7.4% every year in recent decades, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. (Between 2000 and 2007, the growth was even faster – with an average annual rate of increase of 8.4%.) Of the total 197 million people affected by disasters in 2007, 164 million were affected by floods.
It is tempting to look at the line-up of storms in the Atlantic (Hanna, Ike, Josephine) and, in the name of everything green, blame climate change for this state of affairs. But there is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not just how we live.
In recent decades, people around the world have moved en masse to big cities near water. The population of Miami-Dade County in Florida was about 150,000 in the 1930s, a decade fraught with severe hurricanes. Since then, the population of Miami-Dade County has rocketed 1,600% to 2,400,000.
So the same intensity hurricane today wreaks all sorts of havoc that wouldn’t have occurred had human beings not migrated. (To see how your own coastal county has changed in population, check out this cool graphing tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)
If climate change is having an effect on the intensities of storms, it’s not obvious in the historical weather data. And whatever effect it is having is much, much smaller than the effect of development along the coastlines. In fact, if you look at all storms from 1900 to 2005 and imagine we had today’s populations on the coasts, as Roger Pielke, Jr., and his colleagues did in a 2008 Natural Hazards Review paper, you would see that the worst hurricane would have actually happened in 1926.
If it happened today, the Great Miami storm would have caused $140 to $157 billion in damages. (Hurricane Katrina, the costliest storm in U.S. history, caused $100 billion in losses.) “There has been no trend in the number or intensity of storms at landfall since 1900,”says Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. “The storms themselves haven’t changed.”
What’s changed is what we’ve put in the storm’s way. Crowding together in coastal cities puts us at risk on a few levels. First, it is harder for us to evacuate before a storm because of gridlock. And in much of the developing world, people don’t get the kinds of early warnings that Americans get. So large migrant populations – usually living in flimsy housing – get flooded out year after year. That helps explain why Asia has repeatedly been the hardest hit by disasters in recent years.
Secondly, even if we get all the humans to safety, we still have more stuff in harm’s way. So each big hurricane costs more than the big one before it, even controlling for inflation.
But the most insidious effect of building condos and industry along the water is that we are systematically stripping the coasts of the protection that used to cushion the blow of extreme weather. Three years after Katrina, southern Louisiana is still losing a football field worth of wetlands every 38 minutes.
Human beings have been clearing away our best protections all over the world, says Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “The natural protections are diminishing – whether you’re talking about mangrove forests in areas affected by the Indian ocean tsunami, wetlands in the Gulf Coast or forests, which offer protection against landslides and mudslides.”
Before we become hopelessly lost in despair, however, there is good news: we can do something about this problem. We can enact meaningful building codes and stop keeping insurance premiums artificially low in flood zones.
But first we need to understand that disasters aren’t just caused by FEMA and greenhouse gases. Says Tierney: “I don’t think that people have an understanding of questions they should be asking – about where they live, about design and construction, about building inspection, fire protection. These just aren’t things that are on people’s minds.”
Increasingly, climate change is on people’s minds, and that is all for the better. Even if climate change has not been the primary driver of disaster losses, it is likely to cause far deadlier disasters in the future if left unchecked.
But even if greenhouse gas emissions plummeted miraculously next year, we would not expect to see a big change in disaster losses. So it’s important to stay focused on the real cause of the problem, says Pielke. “Talking about land-use policies in coastal Mississippi may not be the sexiest topic, but that’s what’s going to make the most difference on this issue.”
July 29, 2008 at 9:06 am · Filed under In the News
It’s my guess that the sabotage is an inside job perpetrated by the oil companies in an effort to reverse the (very recent) trend in declining oil prices. The existence of rebels just makes it that much more easy to cover up.
LAGOS (AFP) – Royal Dutch Shell said Tuesday it was suspending some crude deliveries after militants sabotaged a pipeline, sending oil prices rising above 126 dollars a barrel.
The Anglo-Dutch giant warned it may not be able to meet some supply contracts at its major Bonny terminal before the end of September.
It declared a “force majeure” — a legal clause allowing producers to miss contracted deliveries because of circumstances beyond their control — for the remainder of July, August and September
It did not indicate the quantity of crude involved, but observers believe given that Bonny is one of Shell’s two main terminals in Nigeria, it is likely to involve significant volumes.
The announcement had an immediate effect on the oil price, Brent North Sea crude for September delivery gaining 18 cents to 126.02 dollars a barrel in electronic deals in London around midday.
New York’s main contract, light sweet crude for September, climbed 32 cents to 125.05 dollars a barrel.
Shell’s move follows an attack early Monday by rebels from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) on Shell pipelines in southern Rivers state, Nigeria’s main oil producing region.
A Shell spokesman confirmed damage to the Kula pipeline but was unable to confirm rebel claims of an attack on a second pipeline.
A constant target of sabotage attacks from the MEND, Tuesday’s announcement is the fourth time Shell has resorted to force majeure this year.
Most recently, in June, it was forced to cut production at its offshore Bonga oilfield, following an attack by the same militant group. It resumed full production only on July 9.
The attack on the Bongo terminal, 120 kilometres (74 miles) off the Nigerian coast, caused heightened concern over the rebels ability to strike at the heart of the oil industry.
Several foreign firms, including French tyre company Michelin and oil servicing firm Wilbros, have left the Niger Delta because of security problems.
The unrest has reduced Nigeria’s oil output by a quarter, causing it to lose its position as Africa’s biggest oil producer to Angola, according to figures from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).
July 16, 2008 at 9:20 pm · Filed under In the News
Well, who knew that it was against the law to hail cabs in LA? Granted, I lived there for 8 years and I probably only stepped in a cab two or three times. Still, that sounds like a lame law.
And I would like to point out the poor quality of the article, which refers to someone named “Bartleight” as if we should already know who in tarnation they are; further, we’re supposed to believe that this person speaks for all Downtown residents. Which I don’t believe for a second, because no one who lives in LA has ever considered it a “non-city.” It’s the best city in the world! That’s right, I said it. And anyone who lives there and is snooty enough to want to live in some fancy downtown loft will agree with me.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters Life!) – Hailing a taxicab on the streets of Los Angeles finally got the go-ahead on Wednesday, bringing the city into line with most major urban centers around the world.
Baffled tourists and frustrated residents of the city have long been restricted to phoning for cabs, or trying to find the odd taxi stand, because of city laws restricting casual passenger pickups on the street.
But the Los Angeles city council has now approved a six-month pilot program in the Downtown and Hollywood areas of Los Angeles that allow pedestrians to hail a passing taxi.
Council members said the program would particularly benefit tourists who are used to being able to hail a cab anywhere.
“Los Angeles, a major, global, world-class city, should not be an exception,” said councilwoman Jan Perry, who proposed the program.
The proposal had been held up for months because of fears that taxis stopping for passengers would disrupt traffic in the city where the car is king.
Downtown residents were delighted. “This is great news! Another small step for Los Angeles towards becoming a real city,” wrote Bartleight on the www.blogdowntown.com Web site on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Jill Serjeant; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)
