Obit watch: October 13, 2026.
October 13th, 2026Drink!
October 13th, 2026Your NFL loser update: week 5, 2026.
October 11th, 2026NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
Miami
Tennessee
Chargers
Well, will you look at this? Miami is 0-5, but I can’t believe they are really that bad.
Someone had to win the Tennessee-Houston game, and it turned out to be Houston.
And the worthless Chargers are now 0-5 as well.
This is actually making me kind of happy.
It looks like Miami has a bye next week, and the worthless Chargers play Kansas City. KC is a heavy favorite in that game, of course. Tennessee plays Indianapolis: Indy is also a heavy favorite in that game.
Obit watch: October 10, 2026.
October 10th, 2026Short and quick: Mike Ditka. NFL.com. ESPN. Chicago Tribune (archived). Chicago Sun Times. NYT (share link, may require).
Noted:
Time enough at last!
October 10th, 2026
I have finally crossed enough off of my to-do list, and also resolved some things that other people wanted me to do, so I feel comfortable doing some gun book blogging.
I’m going to start out easy. Two duplicates of books I’ve already blogged (from the Springfield purchase) and two books that I didn’t previously have, but I’ve written about the authors previously.
After the jump…
Obit watch: October 9, 2026.
October 9th, 2026I know about Mike Ditka, but in keeping with this blog’s policy, I want to wait until tomorrow to do a round-up.
In the meantime:
Margaret Hamilton. No, not that one (though I did say to my mother when she asked me if I’d heard of her, “Wasn’t she the Wicked Witch of the West?”). This one led the team that developed the software for Apollo.
…
Cecily Gemmell. You’ve never heard of her, but she was the last tie to a particular era of history.
She was Winston Churchill’s last surviving personal secretary.
Ms. Gemmell, known as Chips, first entered Churchill’s orbit in the summer of 1947 at the age of 18, arriving in the still-stunned aftermath of his 1945 general election defeat as Britain’s wartime prime minister. His reputation as the man who had saved the world from Hitler’s tyranny was titanic, but his electoral ejection from No. 10 Downing Street before final victory — Germany had surrendered, Japan had not — remained humbling.
Youth was a requirement for a Churchill stenotyping secretary. “The Old Man,” as he was known, dictated so long and so late into the night, as a rule, that stamina was essential. Ms. Gemmell joined a team of extraordinarily bright and capable, if often exhausted, young women, and a proud line of exceptional Churchill personal secretaries (all but one of them female) that extended back through both world wars to 1902. At her death, Ms. Gemmell was the last.
…
Ms. Gemmell was initially assigned to Churchill’s literary assistant, Denis Kelly, cataloging the prime minister’s World War II papers in anticipation of Churchill writing his war memoirs. The cache was housed at Chartwell, Churchill’s country home in the county of Kent, and so a place was found for Ms. Gemmell to live in the nearby village of Westerham. She bicycled back and forth to Chartwell, pushing the bike up “an incredibly steep hill” that, at least, “was a cinch coming back down.”
She worked in what she described as the semi-basement of the Muniment Room at Chartwell — “completely untrained,” but tasked with organizing the monumental paper trail of Churchill’s wartime existence. She saw virtually no one other than Mr. Kelly, along with “everybody’s socks — the socks of the famous,” from her obscured vantage. She would “look up and see Anthony Eden’s pink socks leaving the room,” she recalled, referring to the foreign secretary who would later briefly become prime minister. “All I saw of the famous were their socks.”
…
Your Friday loser update.
October 9th, 2026NHL teams that still have a chance of going 0-84:
Philadelphia
Los Angeles Kings
Calgary
Still early, but I’m cautiously optimistic that we’re going to have at least one horrible team this year. And I don’t think it will be one of the Florida teams, which I hope will make McThag happy.
Firings watch.
October 8th, 2026I can’t find it now, but I recall the Titans wearing Oilers throwback uniforms during a fairly recent game. I also recall advocating for the public flogging of everyone involved in this decision.
Seven months later, the executives who oversaw the uniform and logo switch have been fired.
According to a statement to the Nashville Tennessean, the Titans have decided to move on from three vice presidents who oversaw marketing, creative and revenue.
“As the Titans prepare for the opening of our new stadium and the future of Titans football, we are making changes to how we lead the business side of the organization,” the Titans said in a statement to the Nashville Tennessean. “We will hire an Executive Vice President and Chief Business Officer to lead our revenue, marketing, and communications teams. As part of these changes, Adam Nuse, Erin Swartz, and Charles Jensen are leaving the organization. We are grateful for everything they have contributed to the Titans and wish them the best in future endeavors.”
I know, it is rooting for laundry, and more so than usual. But the Titans annoy me, and this is one of the reasons.
Obit watch: October 7, 2026.
October 7th, 2026Eva Marie Saint. NYT (share link, may require).
Other credits include “Grand Prix”, “The Last Days of Patton”, “When Hell Was in Session”, and “The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming”.
Burning in Hell watch: Bill Harris. You may remember him from hits like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, and the murder of Myrna Opsahl.
Nice use of the passive voice there, NYPost. “…shotgun went off”.
NYT (share link, may require).
“What Was the Symbionese Liberation Army?” (NYT share link, may require).
Obit watch: October 6, 2026.
October 6th, 2026Jim Bakker. NYT (share link, may require).
No offense intended, but I honestly thought he had died several years ago.
Jeffrey Archer, writer and convicted perjurer.
Sometimes, it seems like the judges in sketches on “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” are uncomfortably close to reality. “Fragrance”?
…another newspaper, The News of the World, reported allegations that Mr. Archer had committed perjury at the original libel trial in 1987, forcing him to withdraw from the mayoral race.
Those charges came to trial in September 2000, and in July 2001, he was given a four-year jail term for perjury and perverting the course of justice. After two years in a variety of correctional institutions, he was released, resuming his career as a prolific writer. He kept his title and retired from the House of Lords in 2024.
Obit watch: October 5, 2026.
October 5th, 2026Marjoe Gortner, who had one of the oddest career arcs in entertainment history.
He spoke eloquently as a child, so his parents, Vernon, a Christian evangelical minister, and mother, Marge, had him ordained as a preacher at age 4, when he performed a marriage ceremony for a Paramount newsreel.
Now a celebrity, the long-haired Gortner delivered gyrating, dramatic sermons at revival meetings across the U.S. as his family amassed a fortune estimated to be worth $3 million, but he said his father took off with the money shortly before Gortner turned 16.
He rejoined the ministry as a way to earn a living and in 1971 granted a film crew access to him during his final revival tour. The resulting 1972 documentary, Marjoe, produced and directed by Howard Smith and Sarah Kernochan, debuted at Cannes and won the Oscar for best feature documentary. (The poster called it “a real story millions of people refuse to believe.”)
He went on to become an actor. Other credits include “Starcrash”, “Acapulco Gold“, and “American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt”.
Burning in Hell watch: Dennis Hastert (R-pedo).
Your NFL loser update: week 4, 2026.
October 4th, 2026I think maybe panic is worth considering now.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
Miami
Houston
Tennessee
Chargers
Tampa Bay
Houston is 0-4, which surprises me. But…is there a chance, maybe a slim one, but a chance, that the worthless Chargers could go 0-17 this year?
A man can hope, can’t he? Isn’t hope what defines humanity?
NHL teams that still have a chance of going 0-84:
Detroit
Philadelphia
Dallas
Chicago
Los Angeles Kings
Calgary
Drink!
October 2nd, 2026Shot:
Chaser:
(I would really like to know what that gun is. It looks like a small 1911-style .380, like maybe a Colt Mustang or one of those SIG Sauer .380s?)
Obit watch: October 2, 2026.
October 2nd, 2026Playing catch-up:
Gordon Johncock, noted racing driver. He won the Indianapolis 500 twice. His first win was the notoriously bloody 1973 race. His second win was in 1982.
That race featured a spectacular duel in the final laps, with Johncock and Rick Mears vying side by side. Johncock, on the inside, driving a Wildcat/Cosworth, finished a few feet ahead of Mears, winning by 16-hundredths of a second, the slimmest margin in the race’s history at the time.
Johncock’s margin now ranks fifth. The closest finish came this year, when Felix Rosenqvist bested David Malukas by 0.0233 seconds.
Dennis Haskins, actor. Other credits include “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Cutter to Houston”, and “The Dukes of Hazzard”.
Your Friday loser update.
October 2nd, 2026Two things snuck up on me while I was on the road and/or down with the crud.
The first thing was the end of the MLB season. As I stated in a previous update, there were no historically bad teams this year. The Colorado Rockies were not good, but they finished 58-104, with a .358 winning percentage, the lowest this season. The White Sox were 84-78, for a .519 winning percentage, and are in the playoffs. The City Unknown Athletics finished 64-98, with a .395 winning percentage.
And the Astros went 81-81.
The other thing that sort of snuck up on me was the start of the NHL season. I knew it was coming, but I wanted to wait until today before posting a loser update.
NHL teams that still have a chance of going 0-84:
Detroit
Ottawa
Buffalo
Tampa Bay
Carolina
Philadelphia
Washington
New York Islanders
Dallas
St. Louis
Winnipeg
Nashville
Chicago
Anaheim
Los Angeles Kings
Calgary