Net loss.

February 19th, 2024

Jacque Vaughn out as coach of the Brooklyn Nets.

The team is 21-33 this season, and lost their last game before the break to Boston by 50 points. Vaughn was 71-68 in “two plus” seasons, and 0-8 in the playoffs.

In not exactly firings related news that I don’t have another place to put, I didn’t pay a darn bit of attention to the All Star game, but I did read the stories this morning.

The Eastern Conference won, 211-186. Yes, one team scored over 200 points. Yes, Adam Silver is peeved.

“And to the Eastern Conference All-Stars, you scored the most points,” Silver said flatly. “Well … congratulations.”

And the players still aren’t taking it seriously.

Instead, it was another game with virtually no defense and with little to no life inside the building — to the point that the Los Angeles Lakers’ Anthony Davis said his most memorable moment was when the hype teams from the Chicago Bulls and Indiana Pacers went through their dunk routines between the third and fourth quarters.
“I think the best [moment], we were talking about it, was the Bulls and the Pacers dunkers,” Davis said. “With the trampoline? They were very, very impressive.”

…

Then there was Minnesota Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards, who admitted he wasn’t interested in playing all that hard in an All-Star Game, period.
“For me, it’s an All-Star Game, so I will never look at it as being super competitive,” he said. “It’s always fun. I don’t know what they can do to make it more competitive. I don’t know. I think everyone looks at it … it’s a break, so I don’t think everyone wants to come here and compete.

I actually have a three part proposal for improving the All Star game:

1. Eliminate the All Star Game.
2. Shut down the NBA.
3. Profit.

Alternative proposal: no rules, no penalties, no substitutions, and the teams play until only one man is left standing.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Quick loser update: February 16, 2024.

February 16th, 2024

It looks like the NBA All-Star break is upon us.

How are the Detroit Pistons doing?

Well, at the break, they are 8-46, for a .148 winning percentage. The Washington Wizards are 9-45, for a .167 winning percentage.

Projecting this out, and assuming things remain the same, the Pistons will win about 12 games, and the Wizards 13.7 games.

That’s not good, but is it historically bad?

Actually, maybe, yes.

I had a hard time finding a list of worst NBA teams. You’d think that would be a Wikipedia page, but no. ESPN has one, but it hasn’t been updated recently.

I finally found this page (from December of last year).

The 1993-94 Dallas Mavericks and 2004-05 Atlanta Hawks both went 13-69, and are #9 and #8 on the list. The Wizards could fit comfortably in there.

The 2009-10 New Jersey Nets and 1986-87 Los Angeles Clippers all went 12-70, and are #7 and #6 on the list. Detroit could fit comfortably in there.

If I’m off by one (or two) in my projections, they could match the 1997-98 Denver Nuggets (11-71, #5) and the 1992-93 Dallas Mavericks (11-71, #4). I can’t see either team reaching the heights of the 2015-16 Philadelphia 76ers (10-72, #3) or the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers (9-73, #2, and the team I think most people agree is the worst ever).

#1 on the list is the 2011-12 Charlotte Bobcats, with a winning percentage of .106. However, there was a lockout that season, and they only played 66 games. As a personal rule, I generally do not take into account strike (or lockout) shortened seasons when I’m looking at this stuff.

Posted in Loser, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 16, 2024.

February 16th, 2024

Both the NYPost (archived for your pleasure) and Task and Purpose are reporting the death of Sgt. Chuck Mawhinney (USMC – ret.).

For those unfamiliar with Sgt. Mawhinney, he is considered to be the most successful sniper of the Vietnam War.

From 1968 to 1969, Mawhinney — still only a teenager — was credited with 103 confirmed kills.
An additional 216 kills were listed as “probable” since the enemies’ bodies were risky to verify in the active war zone.
Mawhinney had confirmed kills over 1,000 yards, with the average kill shot for snipers during the Vietnam War taken at a distance of 300 to 800 yards.

After the war, he kept his head down.

When Mawhinney returned home from the Vietnam War, he saw how veterans were being treated and quietly left his military life behind him. He loved to hunt and trap, and that’s what he did when he wasn’t working.

He worked for the Forest Service for 27 years.

Joseph Ward, one of his spotters, wrote a book in 1991. (Dear Mom: A Sniper’s Vietnam. Affiliate link.) The book didn’t get a lot of attention at first, but people found Ward’s mention of Sgt. Mawhinney’s record, and it rapidly became public knowledge.

Jim Lindsay, author of “The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time,” met Mawhinney in 1979 at the Idle Hour tavern in Baker City, Oregon. Lindsay said that people seemed to not believe Mawhinney, but he confirmed that he did, in fact, have 103 confirmed kills and 216 unconfirmed kills during his 16 months of duty in Vietnam.
“Chuck’s platoon leader had kept track of the kills. He had the kill sheets and verified Chuck’s numbers,” Lindsay said. “So, there was no argument then. His life changed overnight. All of a sudden, everybody knew him.”

The Sniper: The Untold Story of the Marine Corps’ Greatest Marksman of All Time on Amazon. (Affiliate link.)

Peter Senich, a military historian and author specializing in sniping and small arms, went to verify Ward’s claim in the Marine Corps archives and found he was wrong. Mawhinney didn’t have 101 kills — he had 103.
Mawhinney, a man who valued his privacy and was not seeking any fame for his actions in Vietnam, agreed to an interview with Senich in 1997, which was featured in the Baker City Herald.
“It’s an opportunity for me to get some recognition for a lot of the Vietnam vets that didn’t receive any recognition,” Mawhinney said.
“We were all there together. If I have to take recognition for it, that’s OK, because every time I talk to someone, I can talk about the vets. It gives me an opportunity to talk about what a great job they did.”

…

“He was a good man,” said Lindsay in an interview with The Oregonian Wednesday, sharing that Mawhinney never boasted about his kills and said he “did what I was trained to do.”
“He was a good father, a good husband and an asset to the community. He was a pretty cool cat.”

Not a bad way to be remembered.

Posted in Guns, Heroism, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Smoking hyenas: February 16, 2024.

February 16th, 2024

The hyenas aren’t flaming, yet, but there is smoke.

And it seems oddly ironic in the first case.

Yesterday, the FBI searched the homes of two senior chiefs in the New York City Fire Department. They also searched offices in the FDNY department headquarters.

What could a chief do that requires FBI intervention? The chiefs in question were responsible for overseeing safety inspections.

The coordinated searches in Staten Island and Harlem were carried out as part of a corruption investigation that was initially focused on whether the chiefs had been paid nearly $100,000 each in a scheme to help expedite or arrange building inspections, several of the people said. The investigation began late last summer and was being conducted by the F.B.I., the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and the New York City Department of Investigation.

Nobody seems to think this is related to the other ongoing corruption investigations, but there’s been no official statement. Because the chiefs haven’t been charged with any crime yet, I’m not naming them here.

As of late last year, the investigation into the chiefs was examining, at least in part, whether they had accepted the payments as part of an effort to help expedite or influence fire inspections on building projects, some of the people said.
The payments of $97,000 apiece to the chiefs came from a recently retired firefighter, and at least one was made to a limited liability company registered to [edited – DB] home address, the people said. In 2023, the Fire Department paid [edited – DB] $241,119 and [edited – DB] $235,462, according to city payroll records compiled by the watchdog group SeeThroughNY.net.

There’s some weird stuff I don’t want to try to explain (read the article: it’s archived) with the Turkish Consulate and (allegedly) Mayor Eric Adams.

That broader inquiry has focused at least in part on whether the Turkish government conspired with Mr. Adams’s campaign to funnel illegal foreign donations into its coffers. In that investigation, the F.B.I. and prosecutors have examined whether Mr. Adams, weeks before his election in 2021, pressured Fire Department officials to sign off on the Turkish government’s new high-rise consulate in Manhattan despite safety concerns, people with knowledge of the matter have said. Mr. Adams has said he did nothing improper, and he has not been accused of any wrongdoing.

In other news, Mike the Musicologist has been texting me updates about Tiffany Henyard, mayor of Dolton, Illinois. I haven’t written about her because she hasn’t been charged with a crime yet. But the NYPost has a good summary of her craziness.

She has come under scrutiny in recent weeks for a laundry list of antics, including accusations of blowing thousands in public funds on luxury travel and dining, turning local police into both her personal bodyguards and backup dancers for music videos, and hiring DJs for town meetings — all while the village falls $5 million into debt.

…

…Dolton Trustee Kiana Belcher said former Dolton Chief of Police Robert Collins admitted the mayor forced him to target people.
“She’ll have the police follow you and give tickets,” Belcher said. “I went out of town and she had one of the officers … give me tickets … It was a manipulation tactic.”
When she confronted Collins, Belcher said, the chief didn’t hesitate to blame Henyard.
“He looked down at me and said, ‘She told me to write them,’” Belcher said.

…

“It started probably two weeks after she had been in office as mayor. We got a bill for the inauguration. The bill was like $15,000.”
“It was a big party, basically,” Belcher said, explaining that Henyard promised to pay with campaign funds, but the town ended up footing the bill instead. And it was just the beginning of town-funded parties.
“The spending has become unbearable for the residents. It’s parties and a lot of events. It’s resources in reference to making it look like something is being done but we really can’t afford it.”

…

When a Post reporter and photographer showed up at the “Love on the Ice” Valentine’s Day dinner Wednesday night, four police officers blocked them from entering the event — despite it being on public property.
One officer said she received “an order” to ensure that they stay put on the sidewalk and she and another cop watched the pair for more than an hour as Henyard went igloo to igloo, taking selfies with residents, while R&B music and chants of “Super mayor!” blasted from speakers.
Henyard was flanked by an assistant and two cops — including the highest-ranking police official in Dolton, Deputy Police Chief Lewis Lacey, who acted like her bodyguard the entire night.

…

Beyond parties, Belcher said bills to the tune of $1 million have piled up from paying overtime to cops made to serve as Henyard’s personal security detail, first assigned after a protest over a shooting in 2021.
“She just latched on and kept the detail,” Belcher said. “The contract says that you can have a detail but it should be on their shift and it changes. But with her people, they pick up at 10 and drop off at 12, 1 in the morning, so it’s all overtime hours.”
“They pick up her daughter from school, they go shopping,” she said. “A million dollars of overtime for the police department is absurd. We can’t afford it.”

…

Henyard, who also serves as Thornton Township supervisor, lashed out at the village trustees last week after they filed a lawsuit alleging she forged checks and withheld financial records.
“You all should be ashamed of yourselves because you all are black. You all are black,” she said during a meeting on February 5. “And you all [are] sitting up here beating and attacking a black woman that’s in power.”
Henyard — who takes home $285,000 in salary from her political positions — has also faced criticism for a salary ordinance she proposed and passed that would cut by 90% the pay for whoever takes her seat if she loses the next election, Fox 32 reported. Her salary, however, would remain the same.

Posted in Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Firings watch.

February 15th, 2024

Very quick, because I have a meeting tonight (and maybe some smoking hyenas to update):

Jarmo Kekalainen out as general manager of the Columbus Blue Jackets.

ESPN:

The Blue Jackets have the worst record in the Eastern Conference with a .404 points percentage in 52 games (16-26-10). The Jackets last made the playoffs in 2019-20. Under Kekalainen, Columbus qualified for the postseason five times but won only a single playoff series — their shocking 2019 first-round upset of first-place Tampa Bay in a sweep.

San Francisco fired Steve Wilks as defensive coordinator yesterday.

In Wilks’ lone season with the Niners, the defense had its share of ups and downs. A unit that led the NFL in multiple categories in 2022 under DeMeco Ryans — including fewest points per game allowed (16.3) and defensive expected points added (89.58) — took a step back in 2023.
San Francisco still finished third in points allowed (17.5) this season, but the 49ers were ninth in defensive EPA (41.48) and sprung significant leaks against the run in the playoffs, allowing the Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions and Kansas City Chiefs to average 5.1 yards per carry and 149.3 yards per game in the postseason.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 15, 2024.

February 15th, 2024

Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, soprano.

Trained at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and later at the Juilliard School in New York City, Ms. Fernandez made her mark in the 1970s as Bess in the Houston Grand Opera’s international traveling production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” The tour took her to Europe, where she caught the eye of Rolf Liebermann, the impresario known for reviving the Paris Opera. He offered her a two-year contract.

…

…it was merely a prelude to a long career that included her New York City Opera debut in 1982, once again as Musetta in “La Bohème,” as well as performances throughout Europe.
In addition to making Musetta her own, she also made the title role in Verdi’s “Aida,” an Ethiopian princess held captive in ancient Egypt, a signature. At one point she even performed the role amid the temples of Luxor in Egypt itself.
In 1992, Ms. Fernandez won a Laurence Olivier Award, the British equivalent of a Tony, for best actress in a musical for her rendition of Carmen in “Carmen Jones.”

The prelude was her role in a movie, which is what she may be most famous for.

“Diva” was considered a high-water mark in the movement known as the cinéma du look, a high-sheen school of French film often centered on stylish, disaffected youth in the France of the 1980s and ’90s. A film with all the saturated color and gloss of a 1980s music video, it was an art-house hit that became a cult favorite for the initiated.
The story revolves around a young opera fan named Jules (played by Frédéric Andréi) who grows so infatuated with an American opera star named Cynthia Hawkins that he surreptitiously tapes one of her performances — despite her well-known decree that none of her work be recorded, since it would capture only a part of the power and immediacy of her grandeur.

Ms. Fernandez played Cynthia, and the tape plays the MacGuffin.

That grandeur is on full display in Ms. Fernandez’s opening scene, as she takes the stage in a hauntingly weathered old theater wearing a shimmering white gown and metallic eye shadow. She proceeds to mesmerize the house — and Jules — with a soaring rendition of the aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (“Well, then? I’ll go far away”) from Alfredo Catalani’s opera “La Wally.”

When this came out in 1981, Siskel and Ebert reviewed it, and I wanted to see it. A moped chase through a subway? I was there, man. But at that time, it was hard for me to see foreign films in a theater, or on home video. I don’t recall “Diva” being re-released or playing anywhere when I was in college, even at the Union when they still had a film program.

Now, of course, I have “Diva” on blu-ray from Kino Lorber. And it is on our big movie list. I’ve been waiting until we can watch it as a group.

“Diva” was her only film role as an actress, though IMDB also credits her with a 1980 “TV movie” of “La Bohème” in which she sang “Musetta”. (Kiri Te Kanawa sang “Mimi”.)

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 14, 2024.

February 14th, 2024

William Post, one of nature’s noblemen.

Mr. Post was the creator of the Pop-Tart.

Post did numerous interviews about his invention during his lifetime and every time he said the credit was shared.
“Bill would say, ‘I assembled an amazing team that developed Kellogg’s concept of a shelf-stable toaster pastry into a fine product that we could bring to market in the span of just four months,’,” his death notice states.

NYT (archived).

Posted in Food, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 13, 2024.

February 13th, 2024

Capt. Larry L. Taylor (United States Army – ret.) passed away on January 28th.

I wrote about Capt. Taylor back in September, when he received the Medal of Honor. Capt. Taylor is the guy who flew four men out of a hot LZ, with them hanging onto the sides of his Huey Cobra helicopter.

Bob Edwards, NPR guy. There was a time when I woke up to Bob Edwards in the morning…

Also among the dead Bobs: Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill. I’ve bought and used specialty products from Bob’s, though I never met Bob. 94 is a pretty good run.

David Bouley, prominent NYC chef.

Kelvin Kiptum, marathon runner. He was 24 and died in a car accident in Kenya.

This seems particularly sad. He set the men’s marathon record in Chicago last year: 2:00:35.

It was only his third marathon.

…

With hundreds of Kenyans having been barred from the sport in the past decade because of doping violations, his record drew not only wonderment, but also scrutiny. “My secret is training,” Kiptum, who was never accused of doping and had no drug suspensions, told reporters last fall. “Not any other thing.”

Many people think he had a shot at running a marathon in under two hours, which is sort of the Holy Grail of marathon running. He actually ran one in Vienna (in 2019) at 1:59:40, but that didn’t count as a record for reasons. He had said he was going to try to break the two-hour mark in Rotterdam in April.

Posted in Bread, Food, Heroism, Obits, Radio, Sports | 2 Comments »

TMQ Watch: February 13, 2024.

February 13th, 2024

So. It has come to this. The last TMQ of the 2023 season, and the last TMQ Watch.

After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in NFL, Planes, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | 1 Comment »

(Not quite) firings watch.

February 9th, 2024

Billy Eppler has not been fired as general manager of the Mets, because he actually resigned October 5th.

But he won’t be involved in baseball this year: Rob Manfred placed him on the ineligible list through the end of the 2024 baseball season.

Sadly, it’s just a year, not “permanently ineligible“, which is my favorite form of ineligible.

Prithee, good sir, you may ask. Why the suspension?

…he directed the team to fabricate injuries to create open roster spots…
Manfred said in a statement that Eppler directed “the deliberate fabrication of injuries; and the associated submission of documentation for the purposes of securing multiple improper injured list placements during the 2022 and 2023 seasons.”
The scheme involved fabricating injuries for up to a dozen players, sources told ESPN’s Jesse Rogers. Sources also said that an anonymous letter from within the organization tipped off MLB.

Posted in Firings, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 9, 2024.

February 9th, 2024

I wonder sometimes if I lean too much on the NYT for obits. I do try to pull obits from a variety of places (as long as they are trustworthy sources) and the paper of record doesn’t cover everyone, or cover them in a timely fashion.

But the Times also tends to publish obits for interesting people that I just don’t see elsewhere.

Two examples:

Si Spiegel. He was a pioneer of artificial Christmas trees.

In 1954, he finally landed a permanent position with the American Brush Machinery Company, which was based in Mount Vernon, N.Y. He operated machines that manufactured brushes from wire and other materials for various industrial functions, including cleaning and scrubbing wood and metal finishing.

…

After American Brush unsuccessfully branched out into the Christmas tree business, Mr. Spiegel, by then a senior machinist, was tasked with closing the artificial tree factory. Instead, he began studying natural conifers, tweaked the brush-making machines to emulate the real trees and patented new production techniques.
He left the renamed American Tree and Wreath Company in 1979 and founded Hudson Valley Tree Company two years later., which began mass-producing 800,000 trees a year on an assembly line that turned one out every four minutes.
By the late 1980s, his company was generating annual sales of $54 million and employed 800 workers in Newburgh, N.Y., and Evansville, Ind. He sold the Hudson Valley Tree Company in 1993, retired as a multimillionaire and turned his attention to cultural, educational and social justice philanthropy.

Yes, he was Jewish. I wouldn’t ordinarily say that, but it is a key part of his origin story: he applied for commercial piloting jobs after WWII, but was consistently rejected because he was Jewish.

Mr. Spiegel celebrated Jewish holidays with his children, but when they were young, a Christmas tree was a winter holiday staple — first a real one, then the best of his fake ones.
“They were pagan symbols,” he told The Times. “My kids liked them.”

The other reason he’s interesting: he flew 35 missions over Germany as a B-17 pilot. On his 33rd mission, his B-17 was shot down and crash-landed in Poland, which was occupied by the Russians at the time.

Uncertain what to do with putative allies, the Russians awaited orders from their superiors. But instead of staying put, Mr. Spiegel and his fellow officers surreptitiously removed an engine and a tire from their own plane to repair another hobbled B-17 that had crashed nearby. They bartered for fuel and, on March 17, the combined crews escaped to Foggia, Italy, where they were able to notify their families back home that they had survived. Mr. Spiegel led two more missions, then returned home to New York on Aug. 31, 1945, but he would go back to England and Poland for reunions of his crew from the 849th Bomb Squadron of the 490th Bomb Group.

Elleston Trevor, call your office, please. I don’t see any evidence that he ever wrote a book about his wartime experiences, but I wish he had: I am genuinely curious how they moved the B-17 engine.

Mr. Spiegel, who died at 99 on Jan. 21 at his home in Manhattan, was among the last surviving American B-17 pilots of World War II, his granddaughter Maya Ono said.

Walter Shawlee, who the Times describes as “the sovereign of slide rules”.

…Inspired by this encounter with his youth, he created a website dedicated to slide rules. Before long, nostalgic math whizzes of decades past came across the site. Emails poured into Mr. Shawlee’s inbox. He began spending eight hours a day researching, buying, fixing and reselling old slide rules.

…

In the early 2000s, he was earning $125,000 a year fixing and reselling slide rules. The business paid for his two children to go to college, and it sent one of them to law school. His customer base took its most organized form in the Oughtred Society, a club named in honor of William Oughtred, the Anglican minister generally recognized to have invented the slide rule in the early 1620s.
Mr. Shawlee’s website developed a subculture of its own, with a network of slide rule-o-philes from Arizona to Venezuela to Malaysia digging on Mr. Shawlee’s behalf through the mildewed wares of old stationery stores and estate sales and school district warehouses in search of slide rules. In Singapore, a civil servant, Foo Sheow Ming, visited the back room of a bookstore and found 40 unopened crates of more than 12,000 slide rules in multiple varieties. On his website, Mr. Shawlee called the find “the absolute El Dorado of slide rules,” and Mr. Foo told The Journal that it was “the mother lode.”

…

Mr. Shawlee’s inventory included remarkable artifacts of science history. He offered a slide rule made for machine gun operators, with calculations for wind, elevation and range. He offered a slide rule for measuring metabolic rates, with different settings for age, sex and height. And he used his website to explore recondite points of slide rule-iana, writing, for example, about slide rules made by the U.S. government for calculating nuclear bomb effects.

…

He also sold slide-rule cuff links and slide-rule tie clips, which in some cases had been made by major slide-rule manufacturers as promotional items during what Mr. Shawlee called “the golden age of slide rules.” The tie clips proved so popular on the Slide Rule Universe that Mr. Shawlee worked with a small foundry to start manufacturing them himself.

Lawrence gave me a slide rule tie clip one year, which looks like it may have come from Mr. Shawlee’s website. I treasure it, and wear it on special occasions.

Slide Rule Universe. I was previously unfamiliar with this site, but wow! It looks like a relic of the old school Web, which I absolutely love.

In a phone interview, Ms. Shawlee said that thousands of the devices were still in the family’s home. She said she planned to continue selling them. As far as she knows, there is no prospect of another collector-expert-fixer-dealer-romantic like Mr. Shawlee emerging in “the slide-rule racket.”

For the historical record: NYT obit for David Kahn.

The U.S. government considered [The Codebreakers] so volatile that the National Security Agency, the country’s premier cryptology arm, pondered how to block its publication. It even considered breaking into Mr. Kahn’s home in Great Neck, N.Y.
Eventually the agency chose more overt means, demanding that the publisher, Macmillan, not release it. The company refused; instead, MacMillan and Mr. Kahn submitted the text to the Department of Defense for review. Mr. Kahn agreed to cut a few paragraphs about Britain’s code-breaking efforts during World War II, which were still classified, but otherwise he kept the book intact.

…

In a curious twist, in 1993, the N.S.A. invited Mr. Kahn to be its scholar in residence. Despite the agency’s earlier efforts to sideline his work, by the 1990s it had come to respect him for advancing the field of cryptology. In 2020, he was even named to its hall of fame.

Seiji Ozawa, conductor.

Mr. Ozawa was the most prominent harbinger of a movement that has transformed the classical music world over the last half-century: a tremendous influx of East Asian musicians into the West, which has in turn helped spread the gospel of Western classical music to Korea, Japan and China.
For much of that time, a belief widespread even among knowledgeable critics held that although highly trained Asian musicians could develop consummate technical facility in Western music, they could never achieve a real understanding of its interpretive needs or a deep feeling for its emotional content. The irrepressible Mr. Ozawa surmounted this prejudice by dint of his outsize personality, thoroughgoing musicianship and sheer hard work.

…

He found himself near the top of the American orchestral world in 1973, when he was named music director of the Boston Symphony. He scored many successes over the years, proving especially adept at big, complex works that many others found unwieldy.He toured widely and recorded extensively with the orchestra. But his 29-year tenure was, many thought, too long for anyone’s good: his own, the orchestra’s or the subscribers’.
Though relatively inexperienced in opera, he left in 2002 to become music director of the august Vienna State Opera, where he stayed until 2010. The rest of his life was mainly consumed with health issues and with dreams of a major comeback on the concert stage, which he was never able to achieve.

Posted in Books, Christmas, Geek, Heroism, History, Music, Obits, Planes | 4 Comments »

Obit watch: February 8, 2024.

February 8th, 2024

Mojo Nixon. NYT (archived). THR.

“Before ‘Elvis is Everywhere’ there were just a lot of dudes at the Mojo show,” Nixon said. “It’s a sausage fest, and the women that are there are there in protest. ‘Yes, I’ll go and drive your drunk ass home if you go and watch this Jodie Foster movie with me.’ But after ‘Elvis Is Everywhere’ actual women came on their own, not coerced by their drunk husbands.”

…

Nixon summed up his career thus: “Mojo Nixon wanted to be Richard Pryor. He’s like Richard Pryor’s stupid cousin if he was white and played in a rockabilly band. I’d say things that simultaneously shocked people and spoke the truth.

Here’s a live version of one of my favorite Mojo songs, from 1989:

I’ve written a couple of times about the NYT‘s “Overlooked No More” obits. Here’s another interesting one: Henry Heard, tap dancer.

Of course, there’s more to the story than that.

He learned to dance at age 6 and was performing in clubs by the time he was 14. On Jan. 7, 1939, the car he was riding in with his group, the Three Dots, was struck by a train at an unguarded crossing in Memphis. Everyone in the car was killed except Henry, who suffered devastating injuries that necessitated the amputation of his right arm and right leg.
After multiple surgeries, he thought his life as a dancer was over and was tempted to give up. But he resolved not to. “I’d seen the blind and the crippled standing on street corners with their tin cups and pencils,” he told The Columbus Star in 1958, “and decided that I wanted to do more with my life than be the object of public curiosity and pity.”

He learned how to dance again, on one leg.

His innovative dancing was on display in “Boarding House Blues,” which starred Moms Mabley as the owner of a cash-strapped boardinghouse. To raise money, the tenants hold a show, and Heard is the opening act. He starts by using his crutch as he dances a Charleston step accompanied by Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra. He then slides his crutch offstage at the end of a turn and keeps on dancing, sculpting accents in the air with his free arm and punctuating a drum break with backward steps.

…

Wherever he traveled, Heard entertained patients at hospitals, including veterans hospitals, refuting the prevalent attitude that people with disabilities were charity cases to be pitied. He appeared at community events held by the N.A.A.C.P. as well as at Democratic Party fund-raisers, and he founded a long-running annual Christmas benefit for children at the Illinois School and Rehabilitation Center in Chicago, often using his own money for gifts and dinner and dressing as Santa.
Heard was one of a number of African American tap dancers, like Peg-Leg Bates, Big Time Crip and Jesse James, whose artistry made percussive use of a mobility aid.

…

On the TV variety show “You Asked for It,” Heard peppered three rapid-fire numbers with pyrotechnics: in the first, he interspersed double-time steps with triplets and trenches; in the second, he finger-snapped his way through a joyous rumba. For his finale, he tapped up and down stairs à la Bill Robinson.

He also did a lot of work with disability organizations, while at the same time being highly critical of them:

“They’re all very polite and want me to volunteer my services,” he told The Defender in 1971. “But no one is interested in hiring me to work full time with the people who need help. In fact, there just aren’t any substantial programs moving in that direction, and the handicapped, as a result, continue to struggle for the few ‘charity’ jobs they can get.”

Posted in Elvis, Music, Nixon, Obits | Comments Closed

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