Krewe du Boo Trash Talk

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Okay, another late start to Trash. Now if you have not heard, there is some bad bongos in Nawlins. The Hard Rock Hotel (not just a restaurant, this thing was to be huge), has collapsed in what will be an insanely huge liability claim for about thirty different fronts. People have died and their bodies still not recovered. An entire critical section of NOLA evacuated as a danger zone.

And, now, for insult onto injury, the Krewe du Boo Halloween parade has been cancelled. While not exactly the Krewe du Vieux and the other Krewes for Mardis Gras, this was kind of a thing, apparently, for NOLA. Keep your eye out for the litigation for this mammoth fuck up in engineering and development. It will be large, fascinating, and going on for a long time. Sad, in every way imaginable.

In the collegiate ranks, the Florida/South Carolina game is already interesting. After what SC did to Georgia, that has to worry Jim White. I’ll still take the Gators, but the game is in the Gamecocks stadium. Oregon at Washington Huskies is worth the watch. Michigan at Penn State is a huge game. I don’t know that it will get better for Harbaugh in Happy Valley, but it will be interesting.

ASU at Utah could, and should, be a great game. The Sun Devils of Herm Edwards are at an improbable 5-1 heading in to Salt Lake to visit a similarly situated 5-1 Utah, except nobody predicted Utah losing to USC earlier. Rice-Eccles Stadium is not a huge venue, but it is a compact and intimidating place to play on the road. Note my time in Rice-Eccles was for a couple of days on a Rolling Stones show I was working, not a football game. It is pretty, especially at the time of day the game is scheduled. If you can get the game on your carrier, it may be worth the watch.

For the Pros, the Chefs already clouted the Donkos, but lost Pat Mahomes for a couple of weeks. No problem, they just have the Packers and Vikings the next two weeks. But Matt Moore is not a scrub, Kansas City can still play with him at the helm. Speaking of the Vikings, they are at Detroit, and I smell an upset by the Kittehs. Oakland is at the Packers, and that could be a far better game than you would think. Philly at the ‘Boys could be okay. For you noisy 49ers fans, no, they are playing the Skins. They should win.

Arizona at the Gents is not a great game, but could get very interesting. Kyler Murray and the Cards offense has been better than expected, and the beleaguered AZ defense gets Patrick Peterson back, and he is still one of the best corners in football. Saints at Bears “should” be good, but Teddy Bridgewater has the Saints plugging along, I’ll take them. Ravens at Squawks is a matchup of two of the three best running QB’s in the league. Should be fascinating, but it is in Seattle, and man is that a tough place to play on the road. Lastly, the Pats visit the Jets on MNF. Jets are a LOT better with Sam Darnold back. Is that enough for a huge upset? I doubt it, but it may be close.

Lastly, MLB. It is the time of year where baseball counts, even here. The Natinals have already swept St. Louis and have their place in the World Series locked up while resting their superb starting pitchers. Astros up 3-2 on the Yanks, and heading back to Houston town for games 6 and 7. They will have the ridiculously good so far in the playoffs Gerrit Cole ready to go for one of them. It was supposed that would be for game 6, but that does not seem to be a given, they may save him for a knock out game 7. How that pitching decision plays out will be fascinating. I think I’d go ahead and let him throw game 6.

That is it for this week folks. Music by the great Lowell George and Little Feat.

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97 replies
  1. P J Evans says:

    I’m mildly surprised that the only way the “experts” can figure to take down the two cranes in that mess is to implode them. Surely there’s safer ways.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      I assume the approach means that either or both the underlying structure and that of the cranes themselves are compromised, and, therefore, the cranes can’t be disassembled in the ordinary way.

      • P J Evans says:

        I gather that the damage must be in the lower parts of the cranes. But they’re not really saying much about any part of it.

        • earlofhuntingdon says:

          It’s a clusterfuck of liability, all fact dependent. Nobody will want to say anything. Eventually, it will come out in the legal wash.

    • John K says:

      The demolition has been postponed until later today because the placement of the explosives will be “trickier than previously thought”, according to this morning’s New Orleans Advocate/Times Picayune. This episode of New Orleans’ uniqueness will definitely be some must watch television. Probably worth switching away from any football game for a few minutes. I think it’s going to be livestreamed on Facebook.

      • P J Evans says:

        One mostly ended up in the street, and the other is draped mostly over the top of the building, so it’s fairly stable and they can cut it up safely. (Link on the other end of the thread)

    • e.a.f. says:

      “blowing up’ the cranes may be a good method to hide shoody work. A little fire or explosion always goes a long way.

  3. Jim White says:

    Gators have had a great fourth quarter to pull this one out. South Carolina fans started throwing in the towels, literally, early in the fourth quarter. The officials have been horrible, with many missed calls on both sides. Muschamp got an unsportsmanlike and the fans should have, too, for all the towels and water bottles they threw n the endzone. The polls tomorrow will be interesting. ESPN analysts are now saying Gators have improved to the point the Gators could win the SEC Championship.

    Oh, and I’m very fond of brownies!

    • DMM says:

      What kind of brownies are the ESPNers eating?
      The Gators have improved to the point they could win the SEC Championship… a week after they got beat by 2 touchdowns by LSU??

      • Jim White says:

        Game was in doubt until very late. In Atlanta on a neutral field and if Gators can get back the injured defensive linemen they were without in Baton Rouge, I like our chances.

        • DMM says:

          Okay, but what has changed in the last 7 days that would warrant that conclusion? Maybe if the Gators had gotten back some crucial players or something.

          I think our psychological biases play on fans a lot.
          The 4th quarter is just as much part of the game as the 1st, and while we think that our team “almost won” when an opponent scores late, it’s really no more true than if they’d scored at another point. After all, wearing down a defense is part of the game strategy. {Believe me, as a Vols fan who has been daggered by the Gators late in the 4th quarter a couple of time recently, I know this feeling well.]

          For that matter, Florida scored 2 TDs on plays against Scarolina that they should have been penalized on. We’ll never know if they might have scored on subsequent plays anyway, but just assuming those points would have been earned anyway is cognitive wish fulfillment.

    • Scorpio Jones, III says:

      It was a lovely night in the Classic City. Lovely.
      ‘
      These mist covered mountains
      Are a home now for me
      But my home is the lowlands
      And always will be
      Someday you’ll return to
      Your valleys and your farms
      And you’ll no longer burn to be
      Brothers in arms
      Through these fields of destruction
      Baptisms of fire
      I’ve witnessed your suffering
      As the battle raged high
      And though they did hurt me so bad
      In the fear and alarm
      You did not desert me
      My brothers in arms

      On to Duval Street.

    • punaise says:

      That was pretty bad. Couldn’t hold a tenuous lead.

      But what’s with the 11:30 a.m. start? Thanks, Pac-12, in your infinite wisdom. We were out for our morning constitutional up the hill (not far from the Claremont Hotel) and the police convoys were already escorting a bus-icade (bus motorcade) presumably chock full of Oregon State fans.

  5. Mary M McCurnin says:

    The architect that designed the building was my father’s best friend. Well, actually is was his son that designed the building. Weird how some things stick to the bottom of your shoe.

    • bmaz says:

      Ooof, wish him or her the best. But they will be stuck deep in the middle of this, and it will go on for years by my bet.

      • posaune says:

        Is there a sense that the building failure was structural? or use-related? Still, I can only imagine (as you say, bmaz), the numbers of professionals dragged into litigation: developer, architect, all the subs (civil, M&E, utilities), interior finishes, materials specs, soils specs, etc. Then the construction GC, HVAC, etc. All of it. Every person involved in A/E/C will need decades of tail insurance after he/she retires.

    • somecallmetim says:

      Hmmm, a close game the duckies climbed back to win late – second year in a row. Despite their record,Oregon looks not quite solid (I graduated in ’81 – permanently gunshy from cold rainy 2-9 seasons), and Dawgs scoring 3 straight TDs made things look bad for most of the game.. Washington’s passing game looked very good most of the game.

  8. K_L_Carten says:

    When I worked construction, that was part of the contract, bonding was in place before anything happened, period. Insurance had to be in place, I worked union so the union bonded the contractors by their contract with the National Electrical Contractors Association. Anytime there is an accident OSHA would shut down the site and investigate, didn’t matter if there was a death or injury. Construction is a dangerous job and anyone that does it knows the dangers. First thing they teach you in the apprenticeship safety first, one of the reasons you are union. Just a perspective from the construction side of things. It’s horrible when something happens like this, I don’t know how many times scaffolding failed or shoring up a trench and the walls didn’t hold. It’s scary when the walls cave in, and the engineer claims that the soil had more moisture than the expected. I don’t know how many times I had to get a engineer out of his office to show him that in reality his computer didn’t have the right data. I had no use for engineers, always a fight, but a code book and attitude would get the point across. I was young and a woman, so it could be tough, like smashing your head in a brick wall. On the upside, being a woman worked for our advantage, when we put our bids in I would talk and get an idea if we had a chance on winning the bid. Downside, I had to wear a dress and heels, it’s hard to dress up when your use to wearing work boots, jeans and t-shirts.

    • P J Evans says:

      Reminds me of the driving instructor I had where I worked (department manager insisted that all his people pass driver training (full course or annual refresher) every year, or find another job). Instructor was a safety guy, and he got a lot of amusement telling us about getting a manager in suit and street shoes into the bottom of an excavation. (It was, of course, muddy at the bottom.)

    • scribe says:

      Back in the day before I went to law school, say the mid-80s, I was a soils engineer. Worked on site doing the preliminary explorations (borings, test pits), in the lab, and on the worksite (excavations, foundation inspections, backfill, etc.). I’ve been in more excavations than I can count. To this day, when someone ranks on unions I remind them that I always liked working a union site because I knew, in the event the trench or excavation collapsed, the operators on site had to prove, before they got their union card, that they could dig someone out of a collapsed excavation without killing the person in the process.
      Then, when I started in the law, my first job was plaintiff’s side of construction claims litigation. Mostly for steel fabricators, but some other areas, too. Also had a crane company for a client, though most of our work for them was collecting bills. Did that for a few years before moving on.

      Most of what has been said above I agree with and won’t reiterate. A couple things I will add. When the Superdome was being built 40 or so years ago), there was a lot of discussion on whether the methods they used in the zero-blow-count clays* found in NOLA would hold up. Since we get to discuss Drew Fookin’ Brees and friends still playing there, I think the Superdome’s design and construction has held up. But as I recall it there’s a pretty substantial apron of open space around the Superdome which contributes to its support by providing for load-spreading. Moreover, because what the Superdome did was a quantum leap forward, there was a lot of extra care (and probably over-engineering and over-building) involved – when you do something the first time, you cross all the i’s and dot all the t’s with exceptional care and attention to detail.
      I suspect the folks building the Hard Rock did not have that kind of area to provide load-spreading, first. Second, putting up tower cranes is an endeavor fraught with danger. It never ceases to amaze me that more of them do not fall down. In the Hard Rock context, I’m willing to bet there are three major components to the crane failure: 1) inadequate and/or improper cribbing under the crane, resulting in a very concentrated load on soft soils, followed by failure in one direction or another; 2) possible thixotropic** failure of the soil under the crane, stemming from mechanical vibration; 3) bad execution of good crane emplacement/operation design; 4) inadequate information or an unexpected/unfound anomaly in the subsurface conditions, making for a “weak spot” that led to crane failure. Also, in connection with 1) and 4) above, consider that the crane was emplaced directly adjacent to the newly installed building and its foundation which, in the soft conditions found there, doubtless changed the subsurface conditions. In other words, it’s possible the crane design would have been fine if the stresses on the subsurface materials had been only from the crane. It’s also possible the building design would have been fine if the stresses on the subsurface materials had been only from the building. But, put the two sets of stresses together and the picture can be entirely different. Whether that had been adequately investigated will be a real point in contention.
      And, of course, the crane operator could have made a mistake or been hurrying. And the developer/builder surely was pushing. Corners were cut. That’s a given. They’re cut on every project.
      One more thing lurking in the background. The professor heading the Civil Engineering faculty in my college days was adamant, time and again pounding into us one thing: when you design anything, remember that sometimes the greatest stresses a structure has to bear occur during construction, not when the structure is complete, so you have to design for those during-construction stresses. At every stage.
      I could go on, but I guess a good analog to this case is the 1981 Kansas City Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyatt_Regency_walkway_collapse The gist of the failure there, which killed 114 and injured twice that number was bad engineering/design, bad communication, and corner-cutting. While I think it will turn out that the failure in NOLA will have a more subtle causal chain than in KC, the same will turn up here.
      One truism – this will keep forensic engineers and architects, and their lawyers, busy for years.

      *”zero-blow-count clays” is a technical term for clay soil considerably softer and more subject to penetration and failure than … play-doh. Somewhat harder than chocolate pudding would be a good estimation.
      **thixotropic materials are “solid” but soft but, when subjected to vibration tend to liquefy. Ketchup is a good example of a thixotropic material. It sits, unmoving and solid, in the bottle until you vibrate the bottle sufficiently, at which point it goes liquid and sprays all over your plate. Many clays are thixotropic – the mass flows in connection with the 1964 Alaska Good Friday earthquake are a paradigm.
      Thing is, 1

      • P J Evans says:

        Sheathing helps stabilize framing, if I understand it correctly, and the pics look like they were pouring concrete flooring on floors that were otherwise only framing.
        (The closest I’ve come to building construction in the last 10 years is watching them put up light-industrial stuff across the tracks from my train station. They did it in an odd order: foundation, reinforced cinder-block walls, then the floor slab, then the roof.)

        • Pete T says:

          That sounds like it could be a stem wall – cinder block on top of concrete footer – followed by the pour of a floating reinforced slab over compacted soil, vapor barrier.

          I’ve poured/placed and finished a lot of concrete in my youth. No engineering/design work though.

          One anecdotal story is that when you place upper floor slabs – usually supported framing (think plywood) to hold the bottom of the floor in place between beams – you learn to stand on the beams when the bucket is dumped or the mud is pumped in. Otherwise if the underfloor framing breaks you are on your way down with potentially tons of wet concrete and a iffy outcome.

      • bmaz says:

        Scribe – I do not have the technical/experience background you, and K_L_Carten above have, and great comment. It strikes me that they violated the rule of “build from the ground up”, which I believe you went into in excellent detail. Also wonder if they were not over using the cranes as bastardized structural support while they did so.

        • Jim White says:

          For those of you who do have the technical expertise, I just spent some time noodling around on Google maps for the site. On satellite (and it’s new 3D enhancement), there’s a very good snapshot of where the project was some time back. Two cranes are in place, and it looks like they were only at about 5 or six stories high when the image was made (somebody better versed in Google maps can probably get the date off it).

          What looks interesting to me is that a substantial portion of the side of the building facing Canal Street, at least when viewed from the west, looks like it was planned as parking garage. Presumably, even though lots of pillars run through, there would be far fewer internal walls in this area to help bear the load.
          Have at it, fellow nerds! I’d love to hear the reactions of those who have the expertise and time to look. I suspect the image won’t be left up very much longer…

        • bmaz says:

          I just don’t have the background to go any further than I did, that is what expert witnesses are for. But from what I have learned over the years, what Scribe relates sounds right.

          The other thing he is right about is that a LOT of lawyers, investigators and experts are going to be employed for years, if not a decade, over this. Everybody gets sued, and everybody countersues and cross-sues. It is going to be a mess. That part I do know and can speak to.

        • Jim White says:

          Oh, absolutely. I’m betting Scribe is on the trail of the primary issues with the soil. But it’s interesting to poke around and see what other factors may have played a role and it seems this snapshot from earlier might be useful to someone with the appropriate background.

        • Geoguy says:

          The date of the Google Earth street views are marked as taken in January 2019. There are newer plan views that are unuseable: they are too fuzzy or obsured by clouds. The building is almost certainly not a parking garage. Parking garages are massive because of the dynamic loads from moving and stopping cars. The framing does look somewhat light. It’s also unusual because it’s an all concrete building. There is a whole forest of issues and potential problems when constructing a concrete building, especially the connections of the floors to the columns. A Michael Dalle captured video of the collapse as it happened. The view is on North Rampart looking southwest. I saw it on WWL-TV and a lot of news websites showed it. At the start of the video the collapse had already started. It looks like upper floors disconnected from the columns.

        • P J Evans says:

          Some of the views from the crane demolition show that floors had disconnected from the wall framing. There are links way downthread.

        • scribe says:

          Actually, that they appear to have tied the cranes to the structure as it rose, floor by floor, is not exceptional. Nor is it bracing the structure. Rather, tying to the structure the very slender framework pier on which the tower crane stands allows using a very slender framework to support the tower crane. In other words, it’s the structure bracing the crane.
          In fine, each time the tower is tied to the structure shortens the length of the framework pier so as to avoid buckling. One can get the idea pretty easily with the following thought experiment: take a generic wooden yardstick, stand it vertically with its narrow end on the floor (so it’s standing 36 inches tall) and try to put a 10 pound weight on top. Assuming the weight is on the top end (remember, this is a thought experiment), that yardstick is going to buckle: too much weight on too thin a column over too long a length.
          Now, take the same yardstick and repeat the thought experiment, but this time have a lateral support between the yardstick and the wall solidly connecting the two every 4 inches. For determining whether the column will buckle, the length of the column is no longer 36 inches, but rather 4 inches. Every reduction of the column length makes a huge difference in how big the column’s cross-sectional area has to be. As should be obvious, the most critical section of the column will be the bottom 4 inches because that will be bearing all the 10 pounds of weight you put on top plus all the weight of the yardstick.
          This should be obvious to you – you probably played something like this in the sandbox when you were a kid.
          Back to the tower crane: as the structure rises, the tower rises, too, by adding more sections of the very slender framework and bracing each of them to the building as it goes into place.
          As engineers would say: an elegant solution.
          (FWIW, this is not the way super-high skyscrapers are built. For those, the cranes climb the building as it goes up and rely on the building’s strength to support them without the cranes having any independent connection to the ground. How do you think they got steel girders to the tippy-top of WTC 1 and 2? Of course, looking back to my professor’s dictum, the stresses from adding those cranes’ weight (they work as teams) have to be designed and built into the buildings.)
          Second, on the “how you design” front, it’s a little more subtle than that. You start with “the client wants a 30 story building with the following characteristics” The most important considerations at the start are those concerning the top floors. Knowing what the client wants there then allows you to go down a floor and add those loads to the loads at the next-to-top floor and design the next-to-top floor. And you go floor by floor from top to bottom.
          Once you get to the bottom you look at how much weight you’re smashing into the ground and realize “there’s no way this is going to work without making the first couple floors at ground level into nothing but structural supports for the top floors.
          This explains why no one ever built the mile-high towers visionary architects of the interwar era came up with – the bottom half mile would have wound up being solid concrete, possibly without any room for elevator shafts and utility passageways. It also explains why anyone looking for a solid house that will outlive them and their grandchildren will do well to buy the house with the slate roof – if it has to carry that heavy slate, the rest of the house will be quite stout.
          Anyway, once you got to ground level and can take into account the bearing capacity of the soil you start shaving pounds to get down to a weight per unit area the soil under the building will support. Maybe you can come up with a foundation design or approach that will allow a greater weight. Different foundations for different subsurface conditions….
          In Manhattan, for example, the height of the skyline is dictated by the subsurface conditions. Midtown is built atop solid rock, igneous/metamorphic bedrock. Many of the skyscrapers there are literally doweled into the living rock. On the other hand, parts of downtown like the twenties and West Village and the Lower East Side are built atop old swamp or soft ground and are accordingly low-rise. IIRC the Christopher Street PATH station has to be pumped regularly not because of seawater infiltration but rather because there used to be a spring-fed trout stream there. Under city streets the spring still exists and produces lots of water that has to be disposed of.
          In soft clay soils, pilings are frequently used to support buildings, which are built atop a “piling cap”, often a mass of concrete connecting all the pilings into one unit. People think pilings work by finding a hard spot below ground where the tip of the piling comes to rest. This is false. Pilings gain their ability to support weight because of the friction between the sides of the piling and the earth. In soft clays, the friction might not be enough such that longer piles have to be used than might be needed in stronger soils.
          Anyway, once you get to the ground and have worked in the foundation design, then you look again at the client requirements and go back up to the top. And once you get to the top you look at complying with the client requirements and what you got, then go back down to the ground doing the same thing.
          Oh, yeah. There’s also the building codes you’ll have to wrestle with and comply with. And insurance requirements, fire protection, adding in the capacity for the building to incorporate new technology over its expected lifetime (e.g., since I graduated college things went from lots of copper wire to fiber to wireless, and that’s just in the communications/telecom world).
          This is a process of optimization that will have to go on until you finally arrive at something that works, by which time the client will have decided to change some things, and back you go.
          But, we’re not talking a bunch of Vogons here. There’s a lot of art atop a lot more science involved. In NOLA, someone screwed up and big.

        • P J Evans says:

          Downtown L.A. has some places that have fairly good rock underneath, and others where they have to construct a lot of substructure to hold up the building. (I know there are at least seven floors of basement-with-parking under the 50 floors of the Gas Company tower, near the Central Library. I don’t know what’s under Library Tower, but it has four floors right up against the side of the hill, plus the 60-some above those.)

        • P J Evans says:

          I’ve seen tower cranes like that being used to build 5 or 6-story apartments, where they set up the crane in the center of the building footprint, and build it up around the crane. (Don’t ask me how they get the crane out, because I don’t know.)

        • Geoguy says:

          I have been a soils engineer for over 30 years and concur with everything scribe posted. I think it will be shown that the building failed because of construction sequence related problems. My guess is that as the building fell, the struts bracing the crane towers were torn off and some of the building fell on the towers. This could have compromised the foundations. Tower cranes operate as columns because the counterweights move with the load to keep everything in balance. Video shows tower sway as the building collapsed. It’s a miracle that one or both didn’t fall. It’s an unfortunate tragedy that will be alive for a long ime.

      • Peterr says:

        The Hyatt walkway collapse is exactly what went through the minds of a sizable chuck of KC when this news from NOLA reached us. If KC is a guide, NOLA can look forward to lots of finger pointing and blame shifting with this — but they can also look forward to a revolution in the local building industry from architects to contractors to inspectors, and everyone in between.

        The day after this collapsed, every construction project in NOLA changed. Now, when someone says “wait a minute,” be they the chief architect or the lowliest apprentice lugging tools around, damn near everyone will pretty happily wait until whatever got noticed is checked out. They may grumble at delays, but no one — absolutely NO ONE — wants to be working the *next* building to collapse during construction.

  9. Robin Hood says:

    The Warriors will win the West and the NBA Championship and decline an invitation to the White House by President Pence.
    But will accept an invitation the following year from President Warren.

  10. Robin Hood says:

    Have I been rejected? I am crushed, but will continue to follow this great site. I will take it like I took the loss of Kevon Durant.

    • bmaz says:

      I see nothing rejected from you. I also hope the Dubs win another title. They have far more competition now, and no Durant security blanket. That is okay, they have proven they can win before Durant. Going to be tough until Klay gets back though.

      • Jim Huntington says:

        Then I am relieved and will not use the forbidden word since I am in complete cowardly agreement with you about its precise usage.
        The cast off from Phoenix will help the Dubs this year.

        • bmaz says:

          Hi Robin Hood/Jim Huntington, you cannot use multiple handles here. And, yes, we know when you do.

          Thank you sincerely for the comments, and please keep doing so. But do, please, do so under a consistent handle. We ask that of everybody here.

        • Robin Hood says:

          Of course, this Robin Hood knows well, but he is of an age where there now are occasional blank spaces where synapses once fired with carefree agility.
          Apologies.

        • bmaz says:

          Ha! No worries. That we understand. Also, jump in more often and you will always remember your handle! Also, Robin Hood is kind of a cool one.

      • BobCon says:

        A much smaller tragedy for NO is the injury to Zion Williamson. He looked really scary in preseason, and in a way that even vets will struggle to stop. When he’s healthy, he should be as electrifying as Giannis A.

  11. greengiant says:

    A thing I learned. The 2016 GOP/DEM spread delta between college graduates and non college graduates widened 19 points from 2012. For whites, the spread widened from 9 to 35 points for a 26 point GOP spread gain.
    Non college graduate white males, exit polls were 22 percent Clinton, 71 for Trump. Not many votes for Warren to lose by calling out GOP operatives incels.
    A friend said I should watch the movie “Brexit” where part of the plot line was the dark micro targeting of non voters who could be flipped into the voting booths. Already a pattern of official and unofficial poll watchers whose effect is to discourage voting.
    https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/
    https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls

  12. Trent says:

    Working a Stones show, heh. Sure that was a nice gig. Roadie, security, A&R guy? Do tell.

    Oh yeah, more Dawgshit tonight. Guess we’ll see who’s the best in the SEC east in a couple of weeks at the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party. Right Jim?

    • bmaz says:

      Heh, no, lawyer on call for the promoter running the gig. They knew me from similar duties in AZ before that and had kind of an emergency, so up to Salt Lake I went.

      • rosalind says:

        wait, wut? i knew we had to have doctor’s on call for certain shows, but never heard of a laywer on call. learn something new every day…

        • scribe says:

          Early in my legal career I worked for a lawyer who had several prominent clients. He was their personal lawyer and therefore their lawyer on call – if the phone rang at 0300, he answered.

          These folks had pretty plain-vanilla private lives so there were very few such calls.

          Don’t ask me who because you likely wouldn’t believe me if I told and if you did you’d want gossip I wouldn’t give. Not the Stones, BTW.

          Entertainment agencies have 24/7 response built in for their clients. Obviously, the more prominent (and profitable) the client, the more elaborate the suite of responses available. This would include lawyers, doctors, wads of cash, etc. Using the response gets tacked on to the bill, of course.

          Having a lawyer on call also allows burying inconvenient facts/discussions behind the attorney-client privilege. And the definition of “paralegal” and the agency relationship between all kinds of professionals and the lawyer is nearly infinitely pliable.

          Ask Plaxico Burris – remember how he accidentally shot himself while clubbing in NYC a month or so after defeating Biebs, Cheatin’ Bill and the Cheating Cheaters in one of Lemon-sucking Eli’s SB wins? (No genius – 1) he relied on an elastic waistband in some sweats to hold his handgun rather than spring for and wear a proper holster, 2) IIRC he thought his Florida carry permit worked in NYC, and 3) he was hanging out in clubs whose nature led him to believe he needed to go armed.) He went to the hospital and was being treated and the Giants knew well before the NYPD did. That, in the face of mandatory reporting of gunshot wounds. He likely would have gotten away with it were it not for then-Mayor Bloomberg amping up his anti-gun tirade and demanding prison time for him, presumption of innocence and mayors shouldn’t tamper with juries be damned.

        • Molly Pitcher says:

          I am sure he is mentioned in the new book about Jerry Garcia. He now lives in Sun Valley and is an artist, doing monumental steel sculptures. I knew him and his family when we all lived in Piedmont, in the Bay Area. Various Dead members were often at his home.

  14. Eureka says:

    That is some cold Nestor rain in East Rutherford, we are having it here, too. Post tropical cyclone. Dog not happy with it at all.

  16. punaise says:

    Fascinating thread about the structural and geotech issues. Further validates keeping my small arch. practice mostly in single family residential work – there’s only so much that can go wrong! (Just stay away from condo HOAs and the ambulance-chasing attorneys who egg them on).

    I do feel for al the professionals involved in the NOLA tragedy, especially if it proves to have been a design flaw, structural or otherwise. Means and methods of construction *should* be clearly the responsibility of the general contractor, pertinent subs, and field engineers (shoring design, etc.), but there may be plenty of blame to go around.

  17. P J Evans says:

    Paul Allen’s underwater exploration people have found another Japanese ship that sank at Midway. They don’t know which it is yet, but they believe it’s either Hiryu or Soryu. (Last week they found the carrier Kaga.)

  20. Bay State Librul says:

    Tora! Tora! Tora!
    I’m predicting that the Patriots will lose to the Jets in a shoot out.
    “Slingin’ Sammy Darnold is no Baugh, but will break New England’s balls tonight.
    All trading ends at 4PM (New York time) on October 29th so Belichick has been in distraction mode.
    Look for a 34-31 upset.

  21. scribe says:

    Cheaters delivering ass-whipping, now in progress.
    But it’s the J-E-T-S JETS JETS JETS, so nothing new under the sun here.

    • Bay State Librul says:

      Twenty-First-Century Patriot haters gather at the House that Emptywheel built, longing for the latest installment of Scribe’s diatribes,
      and this is all you can say?
      Pathetic
      I was wrong myself and readily admit my folly.
      Finally, next week, we have a 4:00 PM drinking game with Cleveland.
      1:00PM games suck!
      Darnold was seeing ghosts, what will the Browns unveil to counter Tom?

      • Eureka says:

        Yes BSL! 1pm games have become the bane of my existence, at least I got a week’s pause on whether I need to take up day-drinking.

        Did you all hear that Sam Adams is coming out with another $210/bottle beer, 28% ABV? I bet it tastes like deep regret.

        I was going to ask you sometime back how you liked the addition of Michael Bennett, but I saw he hasn’t played much for the Pats. He did well enough for the Eagles last year (my late-season hobby was checking evolution of the injury reports for him & Fletcher Cox), and I (have) had a *bad feeling* since the March trade about his absence (replacements to date injured/not working out). I know he has a history of trouble, so…there’s that.

        I very much enjoyed the earthy building commentary, made me feel grounded. So I’m glad scribe and everyone focused their energies there. Spouse’s workplace was threatened with a mass-shooting recently… takes the mind, and priorities, back to basics.

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