Death of a scam artist

Thomas Kinkade dies. And art critics everywhere rejoice that finally the supply of kitsch that his assembly line operation turned out is going to dry up.

Kinkade was a millionaire who made his millions the old fashioned way -- by scamming rich investors who were required to buy half a million dollars in inventory to open one of "his" Kinkade Galleries, money that they'd never get back when the works didn't sell and eventually were liquidated at Costco for pennies on the dollar, and by running an assembly-line operation to create "originals" that his brush never touched other than at the end of the assembly line to sign "his" originals, then convincing hundreds of thousands of Americans with more money than taste to spend hundreds of dollars on one of his "originals". He claimed this was legit because he "directed" the brush strokes of the low-paid art students who really painted the kitschy landscapes, but in the art world it was a minor scandal. There was a sense, in the art world, that if you were to declare that something was an "original", it should be something that your brush touched for more than your signature.

And now the scam is finished. Or is it? If you think his heirs are going to stop the scam simply because the originator of the scam is dead… hah! They’re going to be discovering "unknown works” for *years*! Watch and see.

- Badtux the Bad Art Penguin

R.I.P. Hitch

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011), dead of cancer, and no, no deathbed conversion to Christianity -- something he'd been worried about as the cancer ate into his body, causing enormous pain. Oddly enough, one of the best obituaries I've read was in World Nut Daily by one of the Christian Taliban true believers who debated him in one of those Christian-vs-atheist debates. Who of course was appalled by Hitch but also somewhat admiring of the way Hitch stood by his principles even to the death when it came to that whole religion thing.

As for Hitch's switch to pro-war political views after 9/11, the less said about that the better, I'm sure most of the lefty blogosphere's all down on that. All I'll say is that the man was a damn fine writer, even at the end and leave it at that.

-- Badtux the Obituaries Penguin

Another great American dies

You will have never heard of her. But for sixteen years, she took on the federal government over probably $1 TRILLION stolen from Native Americans over the past hundred years where the Federal government collected trillions of dollars in mineral and ranching lease royalties from Indian lands over the course of over a hundred years, and then didn't forward it all to the Indians that it was supposedly being held in trust for.

Today I got this message in my inbox:

Elouise Cobell, an enrolled member of Montana's Blackfeet Tribe who led a 16-year landmark legal fight to get the federal government to pay an estimated 500,000 Native Americans for mismanaging their trust accounts, died Sunday at Benefis Hospital in Great Falls, Mont.

A great granddaughter of Mountain Chief, one of the legendary Indian war chiefs, Elouise had been diagnosed with cancer a few weeks before her class-action lawsuit was given final approval by Judge Hogan in Washington, D.C. on June 20, 2011.

Born on the Blackfeet Reservation on Nov. 5, 1945, Ms. Cobell was one of eight children.

Her survivors include: her husband, Alvin Cobell of Blacktail, Mont., a son, Turk Cobell and his wife, Bobbie, of Las Vegas, two grandchildren, Olivia, and Gabriella, a brother, Dale Pepion of Browning, Mont., and three sisters, Julene Kennerly of Browning, Mont., Joy Ketah of Seattle and Karen Powell of Browning, Mont.

Ms. Cobell will be remembered as an extraordinary person as well as a warrior and uncommon leader. Ms. Cobell drew the line in the sand and told the government "no longer, no further, and no more." Against seemingly insurmountable odds, Ms. Cobell never backed down in her selfless fight for justice for the most vulnerable people in this country and concluded this long-running case for the largest settlement involving the government in American history. A true hero is gone today and everyone should be thankful for her sacrifice and enduring spirit. We may never see the likes of her again. And, while Elouise did not live to see the fruits of her labor, she saw over the horizon to a better world for all individual Indians.

Condolences and remembrances may be sent via email to InRemembranceofElouise@gcginc.com.

-- Badtux the Obituaries Penguin

Our national values

One of the principal innovators and inventors of the 20th century died recently. You are reading this message courtesy of his inventions. From his office in a major corporation's R&D lab, he created or oversaw the creation of the innovations that made pretty much everything in today's computer world possible. Whether you are using a Windows PC or a Mac, you're using a descendent of one of his inventions, and if you're viewing web sites or receiving email you're using even more.

So of course this man dying is major news. I mean, we're talking about a man who was to computers what Thomas Edison was to lightbulbs. And of course the San Jose Mercury News, the "Newspaper of Record of the Silicon Valley", would devote the majority of the front page to covering this man's life and career because, well, he was a legend, okay, right?

So I take the newspaper out of its bag and open the front page and... uhm... nothing. Indeed, the only mention of his death is a short obit on the obituaries page.

Meanwhile, the death of a marketing con artist and fashion icon got front page news in the Murky plus pages upon pages of section A space over the next few days. But then, Dennis Ritchie actually created stuff, while Steve Jobs was a celebrity pitchman for fashionable items. And being a celebrity is more important than, like, actually inventing the "C" language whose descendants power all current PC's, inventing the Unix operating system that MacOS and most of the Internet is based on, and so forth.

Dennis Ritchie, Sept 9, 1941 - (yesterday?). In a better world, in a better nation, his death would be front page news, and the death of a marketing con man with good fashion sense would have been buried on the obituaries page. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Geek Penguin

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

I never met Steve, or actually saw him in person. But his philosophy of what computers should do, how they should work, has irreparably affected my own opinions of how computers should work. Some things Steve taught me: 1) A beautiful design is one that is simple, straightforward, and solves the customer's problem without bothering the customers with details he doesn't care about. 2) The point is to solve the problem of the majority of customers, not to appeal to the 1% of customers who need just this one more feature that would make the problem less usable by the other 99% of customers. 3) Focus on quality, not quantity. If you put out garbage at the low end to appeal to the bottom 25% of your customers, you will get a reputation for garbage and be forever condemned to producing low-margin garbage. In the end, quality builds its own quantity. 4) The customer is NOT always right -- indeed, the customer usually doesn't even know what he wants, he just knows the problem he wants to solve and *thinks* he knows what he wants. Solve his problem in the best way possible while ignoring his suggestions of how to solve the problem, and you will win the world.

Steve by all accounts was not an easy person to work for or to know in his personal life -- various people say he was arrogant, opinionated, and difficult to sway. Supposedly Apple engineers worked for SIX YEARS, producing one prototype after another that Steve rejected, before he finally signed off on the first iPhone. But that seems to be what's needed sometimes to change the world, for better or for worse. And that's what Steve did, in the end, even though he never wrote a line of code or designed a single computer card in his entire life, by simply knowing what he wanted computers and devices to be -- and brow-beating his engineers until they produced it.

-- Badtux the Computer Penguin

Goodbye, Joe

You were a by-god Man, with a capital M. I didn't always agree with your ornery ass, but you had a keen eye and intelligence to go with it, and weren't shy about saying what you thought about what you saw.

Joe Bageant, 1946-2011. Another one of the good guys gone. R.I.P. Too bad there ain't a Heaven or a Hell, I'm sure you'd be having a high time with Molly Ivins right about now if there was...

-- Badtux the Obits Penguin

Senator Robert Byrd dead at 92

Rest in peace, ye olde warrior. He was the only voice in the Senate questioning the Chimperor's march to war, and all too prescient when he called the war resolution "Bush's Gulf of Tonkin resolution" -- given that he'd voted for the original, he shoulda known. And he did.

-- Badtux the News Penguin

A sad juxtaposition

I be hooked on Teabonics, the new dialect for Teabaggers. Like "ebonics", it is the language of uneducated people who fail at the basics of English grammar and spelling.

Texas Board of Education defiantly stands by their decision to drop Thomas Jefferson from Texas world history standards. And not only did they drop Tommy Boy -- they dropped the entire Enlightenment. Because, of course, that rejection of Church authoritah just could not stand, man.

Jaime Escalante is dead. He was a difficult man who was used by right-wingers during the 1980's to get a lot of nonsense passed, such as the TAAS (Texas Assessment of Academic Skills) in Texas, which was supposed to end social promotion and promote mastery but instead mostly just caused the majority of students to drop out at the end of middle school (not officially -- they simply never showed up at high school and were never counted as dropouts -- but they wuz *gone* -- hey look, I can do Teabonics too!). Jaime was fine with being used by right-wingers, assuming that all teachers were as good as he was and thus his ideas could be implemented by mere mortals without his direct supervision. When it became clear that was not true, he bitterly resigned and headed back to his native Bolivia to finish his teaching career. Despite his orneriness, he did a lot of good for a lot of children -- he was a genuinely talented teacher who had a lot of success with kids who others might have given up on. Just goes to show that skill in one area (teaching in his case) does not necessarily translate to skill in other areas (promoting educational reform, politics, etc.).

So there you have it. Two groups of people determined to inflict stupidity and ignorance upon the world, and one man who dedicated his life, however imperfectly, to bringing education and intelligence to the world. It does seem that those determined to inflict stupidity and ignorance upon the world are winning, sigh...

-- Badtux the Obituary Penguin

Folk music loses a great

Kate McGarrigle, a national treasure of Canada and of folk music in general.

-- Badtux the Folkie Penguin

Another flower gone

Peter Paul & Mary didn't write many songs. Most of their hits were written by someone else. "Where have all the flowers gone" was written by Pete Seeger, an old folkie who was never part of the band, while "Blowing in the Wind" was written by Bob Dylan. But it doesn't matter... Mary Traver's beautiful voice (and her beauty, period) and the crooning of her co-members made those songs theirs, to the point where you see dozens of references to those songs being written by "Peter Paul & Mary" if you scour the Internet.

Mary Travers died yesterday of cancer at age 72. Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to graveyards in the end, one by one...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The obligatory

I suppose, since I am a "liberal" (a word attached to any sane person by today's insane Republicans), I should write a long laudatory note about the late Teddy Kennedy, who died last night. Well, fuck that. What I remember most about Teddy was how he sucked up all of Jimmy Carter's campaign cash with a hard-fought primary campaign in 1980 that he had absolutely no chance of winning because of his own demons of rum and women, and contributed to the election of that bastard Ronald Reagan, who dismantled the New Deal systems that had led to the greatest gains in prosperity for the average American that this nation had ever known. Teddy Kennedy was an ego in search of an agenda, a liberal out of habit rather than conviction, the best you can say is that, unlike most politicians today, he was not a monster who wanted to enrich the elites at the expense of children and the working man. Sad to say, that made him a giant amongst today's politicians but then, it is not difficult to be a giant amongst pygmies.

I'm not saying that Teddy Kennedy was a bad man. He wasn't. He was a flawed man, but who isn't. I'm just not much for all the idealizing bullshit that goes around whenever a prominent politician dies. At least with Teddy it's not like the bullshit that happened when Richard Nixon died (Hunter S. Thompson's was the only honest obituary there), but sheesh. Let's get real, okay?

-- Badtux the Grumpy Penguin

Dead children, dead dreams, and lies

Palo Alto is nick-named "Shallow Alto" by locals from Berkeley. It is a place where BMW's and Mercedes Benzes are as common as Toyotas in other parts of the Bay area, where exclusive homes hide behind bushes or boldly proclaim the affluence of their owners depending upon whether it's old money or new money (old money doesn't proclaim, new money does), where upscale shops are the rule and big boxes need not apply, where the schools are the best and have all the college AP courses that any aspiring Stanford student would ever want or need, where... where in the past four months, four young people have deliberately walked out in front of trains to die.

Palo Alto, it seems, is a place where the American Dream has gone to make its last stand, where the desperation of parents to make sure that their own children do not fall out of the comfortable upper-middle-class affluence to which they are accustomed has led to pressures upon children that they are not capable of handling, where every child is instilled with a desperation, a fear, that if they are not the best, if they are not at the top of their class, if they are not popular, if they don't take all the right extracurriculars or are lousy at sports so do not look good to recruiters from top colleges looking for "well-rounded" students, then they are failures, doomed to be one of those people who shuffle around pushing a shopping cart, a piteous beggar in the cornucopia of America.

Palo Alto. It is a kingdom of fear, in the end, fear of failure, fear of falling out of the upper middle class, fear that this generation will be the last generation of upper middle class America as the American Dream turns into the American Nightmare of Mexico North, a nation of piteous ill-educated peasants and a small upper crust of masters who rule them all, a place where an ill-defined sense of panic clutches each heart in a deadly grip. And a place where children, overwhelmed, step out in front of trains and end it all.

Palo Alto. It is where the American Dream has gone to die, and with it... so, too, do the children die, killed by dreams turned to nightmares, dreams turned to lies.

-- Badtux the Sombre Penguin

Yes, it took me all day to write this post. It wasn't an easy one to write. I only wish I could do it right.

Is Count Novakula really dead?

Okay, so I keep hearing that columnist Robert Novak, the scumbag who revealed a CIA agent to the world and set back nuclear anti-proliferation efforts by years due to all the hundreds of CIA assets subsequently killed by their host governments, has died and that I should write an obituary for him. Thing is, I'm not sure an obituary is really warranted. Not unless I see the body.

See, here's the thing. Count Novakula was a vile undead thing who did the bidding of evil and sadistic people like Dick "The Big Dick" Cheney. So yeah, I've heard he's dead. But look. Until I see his body with a big-ass fucking stake driven through the black shriveled mass of corruption that was Count Novakula's heart, I just don't believe it.

So, anybody seen the body? Was there a big ass fucking stake through Count Novakula's heart? If not, keep an eye on that grave. My guess is that there's going to be some loose dirt moved shortly as this festering pustule of evil emerges to resume his feasting upon the carcass of our decaying and disintegrating Republic. Either that, or I'm a penguin. Oh wait...

-- Badtux the "Speaking Evil of the Dead" Penguin

Silent key

A couple of years ago I finally got around to signing up for my university's alumni association. Not that I really care about them, but just in case one of my former classmates wants to track me down, they'll be able to do so through the alumni association. At the same time I noticed that an old friend was still employed by the university, and sent him some email. He responded. Turns out he was coming up on 30 years of employment, and looking forward to his retirement at the end of the summer. Going to do some fishing. Design some circuit boards for digital ham radio. Other stuff of that sort. Maybe travel some, he'd been tied to a desk at the university for thirty years, rising from a lowly sysadmin to head of Information and Communications Services, on call most of that time in case a disaster struck such as both air conditioning units for the mainframe blowing up at the same time. In his spare time, he'd maintained one of the ham packet BBS packages and contributed to various Linux and amateur radio related software projects. He had lots of friends around the country because of that. It'd be nice to visit some of them in person, instead of just talk to them via email or HF radio.

He was happy to be retiring, actually. Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina not only destroyed major swathes of South Louisiana, but they destroyed Louisiana's budget too. He had been required to lay off long-time workers who'd been with the university for decades, and was doing their job as well as his own job. The stress was killing him, and as a nice guy he was heartbroken about having to fire people who'd given their entire careers to the university and had no hope of employment elsewhere unless they moved far away from their families and friends. But it was only three months until retirement, and then he could go fishing. Or travel. Or something.

I sent him one last email offering my futon if he was traveling this direction, and got no reply back. I assumed that he'd just gotten busy. Getting ready to retire. Training his successor. Packing his boxes. Planning that fishing trip. I thought nothing of it, and moved on with life, he'd get back to me when he got back to me, and eventually I forgot all about it. If I thought of him at all, it was as a happily retired man, doing some fishing, doing some traveling, finally getting to meet in person all those call letters that he'd talked to over his ham radio or via email over the years.

A couple of days ago I got an email from another friend from that era. We swapped emails. While reminiscing, he noted that N5KNX had died some time back, of a heart attack he thought. I checked the obituaries and found that yes, he had died... at around the same time that I sent my last email to him, at age 56.

I guess he never got to take that fishing trip. Damn.

- Badtux the Saddened Penguin

Paul Harvey, propagandist for evil

Once upon a time, we had smart conservatives, conservatives who knew that, if they were to sell their conservative snake oil to a gullible public, they'd have to dress up their evil in some nice friendly clothes. Some of the smart conservatives of that ilk were William F. Buckley Jr., who was everybody's smart conservative voice, Ronald Reagan, who was capable of dressing up evil in such nice clothes that everybody was convinced evil was good, and, of course, the recently deceased Paul Harvey, who died Saturday in Phoenix.

Like Reagan, Paul Harvey was a master of the fake folksy. Pure evil became not evil, but, rather, "common sense". No discussion was necessary at that point, no proof, because Paul Harvey, like Ronald Reagan, was a master at making the bizarro world of conservatives seem like just by shucks all-American thought, and if you disagreed, it made you look un-American somehow, even though in reality it was the people like Paul Harvey and Ronald Reagan who espoused un-American values such as selfishness and greed. You could bring all the facts in the world to the table, and they didn't matter when you went up against a Paul Harvey or Ronald Reagan. They'd look at you as if you were throwing mud at a beautiful Norman Rockwell picture. Point out that they were evil motherfuckers who advocated killing babies and grannies (but only POST-born babies who were to be allowed to starve to death in Conservatopia -- PRE-born babies were to be cherished, of course), and you looked like a downright heel.

Nowdays smart conservatives of that sort just don't exist. Instead you got morons like Rush Limpdick and Michael Sewage, who don't bother trying to dress up their mean-spirited evil with any soft-spoken awe-shucks manner. Smart conservatives like Paul Harvey and Ronald Reagan made you like them even though you knew they were evil. The only people who like Rush Limpdick and Michael Sewage are mean-spirited small-minded people who are just like Rush Limpdick and Michael Sewage. Which is great for the Democratic Party, which looks downright magnificent in its shambolic mess by comparison, so I suppose we should offer a toast. To Paul Harvey, last of the smart Republicans. May you be the last of that breed to walk this mortal coil, because the last thing we need is folksy awe-shucks selling of evil pushing the nation on the wrong path again.

-- Badtux the Propaganda-sniffin' Penguin

Somehow I missed this...

Forest J. Ackerman passed away December 4.

If you don't know who Forrie was, don't bother. At one time he had the largest collection of science fiction items in the world. Then he got bankrupted by winning a lawsuit and had to liquidate it. Yes, that's the U.S. legal system... the person he won the lawsuit against declared bankruptcy, the bankruptcy court wiped out the judgement and voila, suddenly Forrie had to pay $400K worth of legal expenses out of his own pocket. Some "justice".

So that was Forrie, and that was his later years, pretty much forgotten, his prized collection sold off at garage sales to make ends meet, eventually dying in a small rental home after he had to sell his "Ackermansion" because of winning the lawsuit. Yeppers, the American Dream at work, eh?

-- Badtux the Obituary Penguin

A giant is gone

Bye bye, Studs Terkel.

Curiosity did not kill this cat. Being 96 years old killed him. I can only hope to live that long. Sadly, penguins don't :-(. Especially penguins that spent too many of their formative years inhaling silica and fiberglass dust and toxic fumes from oil refineries and etc.

Studs wrote about our future, our future that is happening now, even though he supposedly was writing "history". Read.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Generation's end

42 talks about his Uncle Ernie, last of the WWII generation in his family. The last of that generation in my family also died recently. Coincidentally, his name was Ernest too. He was my great-uncle on my mother's side, and was one of my grandmother's brothers.

Those guys are pretty much all gone now. A lot of history going with them, because they never did talk much about what they did, and what they did was something amazing that had never been done before and never will be done again because we just are not the nation that we were in 1941, for better or for worse. We may be more tolerant now, but for lack of a better word, we lack grit. Those dudes storming ashore at Normandy weren't wimps. Most folks today... crap, they shit their britches on command whenever Dear Leader says "Boo!".

Those old farts weren't perfect by any means. They were all too willing to believe anything that anybody in authority told them to believe, they were racist as all get-out (though at least fair-minded enough to pass civil rights laws -- they might not have wanted to send their child to the same school as nigras, but laws giving blacks fewer civil rights stuck in their craw), and they did a terrible job of raising their children, the Baby Boomers. Still, the nation and the world are poorer for their departure.

-- Badtux the Memorial Penguin

R.I.P. Cary Aspy

Cary Aspy was the creator of the 685 and 705cc overbore kits and "Big Valve" modification for the Kawasaki KLR-650. He was involved in a fatal motorcycle accident Monday evening when a SUV hit him while he was riding his KLR on his way home from a weekend riding trip to Tennessee.

Dangerous hobby, we motorcyclists have. I was thinking about buying one of his 685cc kits for my KLR, which is getting a bit tired in the engine department. Now... I guess not :-(.

-- Badtux the Saddened Penguin

Cross-posted with more info to Moto-Tux

Steve Fosset's plane found

Wreckage of Steve Fosset's plane found near Mammoth Lakes, California. Apparently he ran into a mountain. No body was found, but the plane disintegrated upon impact because it apparently slammed into the mountain at full speed, so you wouldn't expect one -- the animals and the elements would take care of that. Though now the Sheriff says they found enough remains for DNA testing...

That solves one mystery, anyhow. So those of us who had hopes that Fosset was partying in the Caribbean after he disappeared over a year ago... oh well.

-- Badtux the Saddened Penguin