Quotulatiousness

September 5, 2016

Vikings sign 10 to their 2017 practice squad

Filed under: Football — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Twenty-four hours after the “final” roster cuts are made, any players who were claimed off the waiver wire join their new teams and players not claimed are eligible to be signed to a team’s 10-man practice squad. There were a couple of surprises, as the Green Bay Packers put in a waiver claim for running back Jhurell Pressley after his impressive two-touchdown performance in the final preseason game, and wide receiver Isaac Fruechte chose to sign with the Detroit Lions practice squad instead of the Vikings (he pointed out that Detroit only has four receivers on the 53-man roster, while the Vikings have six, and he preferred the odds of eventually getting on the field in Detroit).

Signed to the practice squad today were:

  • G Willie Beavers 64
  • WR Moritz Böhringer 81
  • TE Kyle Carter 86
  • G Isame Faciane 69
  • S Shamiel Gary (spent preseason with the Miami Dolphins, not yet listed on the Vikings roster page)
  • RB C.J. Ham 30
  • DT Toby Johnson 90
  • CB Tre Roberson 36
  • QB Joel Stave 2
  • DE Stephen Weatherly 91

Another fascinating historical character – Julie d’Aubigny, Mademoiselle La Maupin

Filed under: France, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

After briefly recounting the you-couldn’t-make-it-up life of…

… a fellow called Ignaz Trebitsch-Lincoln (Wikipedia biography here), who was (variously) a Jewish, Presbyterian, Buddhist, spy, British MP, Nazi, propagandist, and would-be Balkan oil cartel mogul. Oh, I forgot to mention: claimed reincarnation of the Dalai Lama and Japanese-backed candidate for the Emperor of China. (Not bad for a poor shtetl boy who started out as a Hungarian orthodox Jewish yeshiva student.) Nothing about this man makes any sense whatsoever unless he’s a character from a movie script written by Thomas Pynchon for Woody Allen.

Charles Stross then outlines the life of an even earlier gender-bending character from the French royal court (we’d already been introduced to the Chevalier d’Eon last month):

This was going to be a bumper-pack of implausible larger-than-life characters from history, but I sort of overran my target. If you want some homework, though, you could do a lot worse than read up on Julie d’Aubigny, Mademoiselle La Maupin (1673-1707), cross-dressing swordswoman, opera diva, lethal duelist and seducer of nuns (and briefly mistress of Maximillian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria).

As wikipedia notes, dead-pan, “due to Mademoiselle de Maupin’s beautiful voice, her acting skill, and her androgynous appearance, she became quite popular with the audience, although her relationship with her fellow actors and actresses was sometimes tempestuous … Her Paris career was interrupted around 1695, when she kissed a young woman at a society ball and was challenged to duels by three different noblemen. She beat them all, but fell afoul of the king’s law that forbade duels in Paris” (so she fled to Brussels and waited for the fuss to die down while having an affair with a foreign head of state).

Or, as Badass of the Week puts it, “Julie D’Aubigny was a 17th-century bisexual French opera singer and fencing master who killed or wounded at least ten men in life-or-death duels, performed nightly shows on the biggest and most highly-respected opera stage in the world, and once took the Holy Orders just so that she could sneak into a convent and bang a nun. If nothing in that sentence at least marginally interests you, I have no idea why you’re visiting this website.” Nothing particularly unusual here: just another 17th century bisexual Annie Lennox clone and opera star with a side-line in sword-fighting.

Asymmetric Information and Used Cars

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 8 Jan 2015

George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, analyzed the theory of adverse selection – which occurs when an offer conveys negative information about what is being offered. In the market for used cars, Akerlof posited that sellers have more information about the car’s quality than buyers. He argued that this leads to the death spiral of the market, and market failure. However, the market has developed solutions such as warrantees, guarantees, branding, and inspections to offset information asymmetry.

QotD: Critical gun safety tips for when the police arrive at the crime scene

Filed under: Law, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There were other stories, and commercial breaks, and about thirty minutes later came an update to the shot burglar story: The newscaster now said that it was apparent that the police had shot the homewowner and more details would be forthcoming.

I said to Bobbi: “Dude thinks there’s a robber with a gun outside his house, calls the cops, goes outside with a gun his ownself. Then cops show up, the light on the homeowner’s ‘I’m A Good Guy’ IFF beacon is burnt out, the cops yell ‘Drop the gun, Buddy!’, he thinks ‘Surely they don’t mean me!’, turns toward them, and gets hisself popped.”

Looking at the TV station’s freshly-updated webpage, it looks like that’s more or less what happened […]

Lessons:

  1. Once the cops have been called, you don’t need to be running around outside with a gun in your hand. The chances for a blue-on-blue shooting skyrocket in incidences like that. Plainclothes officers get shot all the damn time in similar circumstances. It’s easy to tell who the responding officers are because they show up in a car with blinking lights and they’re all dressed the same. You want to not be on the playing field wearing the other team’s uniform when they show up.
  2. If you are on the playing field when they show up and you hear “Drop the gun!” then you need to drop the gun. Seriously. Like it just turned white-hot. (This is a good reason to carry drop-safe pistols, BTW. I realize that carrying that 1904 Ruritanian army surplus Schnellblitzenselbstlader in 8.3mm semi-rimmed is really cool, but aren’t you going to feel funny getting shot twice when you drop it: Once in the junk by your own gun when it hits the ground ass-end first, and again in the gut by the responding officer because he’s startled by the gunshot?)

Tamara Keel, “Breaking News…”, View From The Porch, 2016-08-23.

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