Obit watch: November 9, 2022.

November 9th, 2022

Leslie Phillips. THR.

Other credits include “The Longest Day”, “Love on a Branch Line”, and “The Last Detective” TV series.

Susan Tolsky. “Pretty Maids All in a Row” is on my Amazon list: I need to pull the trigger on that and talk the Saturday Movie Group into it. Other credits include “Barney Miller”, “Quincy M.E.”, “Darkwing Duck”, and “Crazy Like a Fox”.

Jeff Cook, co-founder of Alabama.

Dan McCafferty, lead singer for Nazareth.

I wasn’t a big enough fan of either Alabama or Nazareth to be able to comment intelligently on either of these deaths. But my readers are welcome to comment if they’d like.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Norts spews.

November 7th, 2022

I feel like I am obligated to say something about the Houston Astros winning the World Series.

With that out of the way, I wanted to mention my Theory of Compensatory Suckage.

The Astros won the World Series. The Houston Texans are 1-6-1 so far this season, which gives them the worst record in the NFL at the moment. The Houston Rockets are currently 1-9, which is the worst record in basketball at the moment. Seems like everything balances out.

In other news: Frank Reich out as head coach of the Indianapolis Colts.

40-34-1 over roughly four and a half seasons.

… the coach’s tenure in Indianapolis began to go wrong when Reich “stuck his neck out” for the team to bring in Carson Wentz in 2021, a decision that ultimately led to a potential playoff team’s collapse in the final two games, and the collapse of a 2022 team that many national experts picked to win the AFC South ultimately ended Reich’s tenure, nine games into his fifth season.

The triggering event seems to have been the Colts losing 26-3 to New England on Sunday, and putting up 121 yards of offense in the process.

Posted in Bagatelle, Firings, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

A fresh, steaming batch of hoplobibilophilia.

November 4th, 2022

I’m still a little behind documenting recent acquisitions, but I should be caught up in a week or two. Just in time for a new batch.

I thought I’d document some books I bought new. Not ABE purchases: those will be the next post.

After the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Smith and Wesson | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 4, 2022.

November 4th, 2022

Andrew Prine, actor.

Interesting set of credits. Quite a few Westerns, and quite a few cop/law shows: “The F.B.I.”, “Banacek”, “Quincy M.E.”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”.

Also: “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” and “Barbary Coast”.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

Very brief update.

November 3rd, 2022

Former Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith: Guilty on every count.

Posted in California Über Alles, Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Brief random gun crankery.

November 3rd, 2022

If I had a million dollars…

…I’d put in a bid on this. It does push two of my hot buttons:

  • Smith and Wessons.
  • Theodore Roosevelt.

But that might not be enough: the estimate is $800,000 – $1,400,000. That’s a lot of money, but still less than a vintage warbird or car. And it would be cheaper to maintain…

(I don’t know if you can get factory loaded .38 Long Colt ammo. Starline does offer brass, so you could load your own, but they currently list it as “backordered”.)

I think I actually saw this gun earlier this year, but I did not handle it. Nor did I ask to. Further, deponent sayeth not.

Posted in Bagatelle, Guns, History, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 3, 2022.

November 3rd, 2022

George Booth, New Yorker cartoonist.

But the hands-down readers’ favorite was Mr. Booth’s mad-as-a-hatter bull terrier, who whirled in circles until dizzy, scratched himself a lot and posed glowering on a lawn beside a sign warning: “Beware! Skittish Dog.” He adorned New Yorker T-shirts and became the magazine’s unofficial mascot, nearly as notable as the top-hat-wearing Eustace Tilley, who appears on the cover once a year. As Lee Lorenz, The New Yorker’s art editor, once put it, “If you can’t recognize a Booth cartoon, you need the magazine in Braille.”

…

After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, The New Yorker said it would not run cartoons that week. But Mr. Booth submitted one anyway, showing Mrs. Ritterhouse, a recurring character modeled after his mother, with head down and hands folded in prayer. Her cat covered its face with its paws. It was the only cartoon The New Yorker ran that week.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Erica Hoy, Australian actress. IMDB. She was 26, and died in a car crash.

Ray Guy, punter. He was a first round draft choice for the Raiders in 1973:

It was the first time a punter had ever been picked in the first round, and it’s only happened one other time since — Steve Little, in 1978 by the Cardinals, and he was also a kicker.
Guy played with the Raiders, who moved to Los Angeles in 1982, through the end of his career in 1986. He made the Pro Bowl seven times and was a first-team All-Pro in six different seasons. He played a role in three Super Bowl championships.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#98 in a series)

November 2nd, 2022

Good news, everyone!

Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith resigned Monday morning.

You may remember that former Sheriff Smith was indicted by a civil grand jury last December on corruption charges. You may also remember that those corruption charges (mostly) involved her issuing concealed carry permits to large campaign contributors.

What you may not know (and I missed it too) is that the corruption trial is going on right now, and the jury is actively deliberating whether she should be removed from office. Obviously, the fact that she’s resigned sort of takes the air out of the jury deliberations.

Which seemed to be part of her evil plan:

But in court Monday afternoon, her attorney, Allen Ruby, asked the judge in the corruption trial to dismiss the charges against Smith, arguing the primary penalty she faces — removal from office — is now meaningless since the jury cannot oust Smith from a job she no longer holds.

Except it didn’t work:

A judge has ruled that the civil corruption trial for Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith will continue even after Smith suddenly resigned Monday and asked the court to dismiss the case now that she can’t be kicked out of office.

…

Fineman’s response to the arguments highlighted the lack of precedent for removal-from-office trials spurred by a civil grand jury; the only other one in known memory in the South Bay was in 2002 when a Mountain View city councilmember was ousted. The trial is conducted in the same structure of a criminal trial and adheres to a reasonable doubt standard for guilt, but is held in civil court. Fineman is presiding because the local judiciary recused itself, and the county also recused itself, which is why the prosecution is headed by Markoff, a San Francisco assistant district attorney.

…

Markoff and Ruby also sparred over the collateral consequences of not allowing a verdict to be reached. Fineman and Markoff mentioned pension implications and eligibility to hold office in the future.
That touched on another ambiguity by the hybrid standing of the trial. A 2013 law penalizes a public official’s pension benefits if they are found guilty of a felony corruption crime, and bars them from holding public office again. Both Fineman and Markoff discussed how the law might apply because some of the current trial counts allege criminal elements.

…

A guilty verdict on any of the counts would prompt the court to expel Smith from office two months before her previously planned retirement, at the end of her sixth term in January. Her resignation undercut the trial, now in its final stages, by effectively removing its stakes and throwing into question whether the jury should be allowed to reach a verdict.
Both legal observers and Smith’s critics suspected that was a strategic move for her legacy, since an aborted trial means she can’t be formally cast in the public record as a corrupt public official thrown out of office for wrongdoing.

It isn’t clear to me: if she resigns and then is found not guilty, can she run again for the same office in the next election? If she is found guilty, is she barred from running for that office again? For any office in California?

As noted above, there’s not a lot of precedent for this. It does seem, based on the article quoted above, that it is very likely she will be found guilty of at least one charge:

Larsen and other experts nitoring the trial also believed the resignation was influenced at least in part by Smith and her attorney’s anticipation that jurors would come back with a guilty verdict on at least one of counts she was facing. Three of the counts were relatively cut-and-dry, asking jurors to decide if she accepted a San Jose Sharks luxury suite — which violates gift limits for public officials — and if she intentionally masked the suite use by buying cheaper tickets for the same game. Detailed and direct testimony from Smith’s staff seemingly confirmed those allegations.

(Hattip: Mike the Musicologist.)

Posted in California Über Alles, Guns, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Net loss.

November 1st, 2022

And the latest on the firings front: Steve Nash out as coach of the Brooklyn Nets.

94-67 over roughly two years.

But wait, it gets even better! Though this is technically not part of the firings watch: Ime Udoka is rumored to be next up as Nets coach.

That’s Ime Udoka, who was suspended for a year by the Boston Celtics for having an inappropriate relationship with a female subordinate.

Personally, I’m thinking: this is not a good look.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 1, 2022.

November 1st, 2022

Gael Greene, noted restaurant reviewer for New York magazine.

After graduation, she was hired by United Press International, which on one memorable occasion sent her to cover a show by Elvis Presley in Detroit. She wangled an invitation to the singer’s hotel room, where one thing led to another. As she left, Presley asked her to order him a fried egg sandwich from room service.
Later, she wrote in her 2006 memoir “Insatiable: Tales From a Life of Delicious Excess,” she could not remember much about the sex, but the sandwich stayed in her mind: “Yes, the totemic fried egg sandwich. At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn’t know it yet.”

…

In no time, her swaggering, fearless style made her one of the magazine’s star writers. She made short work of the Colony, an old society standby, and skewered the snobbery of Manhattan’s finer French restaurants.
In a town where snob, snoot and snub flower in perpetual renaissance, Lafayette is the ‘most,’” she wrote in one review. “Here the spleen is infinitely more memorable than the sweetbreads.”

Julie Powell, of the “Julie/Julia Project” and later Julie and Julia: My Years of Cooking Dangerously (affiliate link). She was 49.

In 2002, Ms. Powell was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan. She was about to turn 30 and had no real career prospects. It was, she said in an interview with The New York Times, “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments.”
To lend structure to her days, she set out to cook all 524 recipes from her mother’s well-worn copy of Mrs. Child’s 1961 classic “Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.” But as an untrained cook who lived in a small Long Island City loft, she found the road to be long, sweaty and bumpy.
In a blog for Salon.com that she called the Julie/Julia Project, she wrote long updates, punctuated by vodka gimlets and filled with entertaining, profane tirades about the difficulties of finding ingredients, the minor disappointments of adult life and the bigger challenges of finding purpose as a member of Generation X.

…

Ms. Powell’s second book, “Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession,” published in 2009, dived deeply into their relationship, which sometimes flourished and sometimes faltered. She described in detail her struggle with an extramarital affair she had and, later, one her husband had. This time, the food connection was darker: She juxtaposed her apprenticeship as a butcher with a dissection of her moods and the marriage.
Without the sauciness and celebrity connection of her first book, “Cleaving” was not well received, and although Ms. Powell continued writing, it was her last book.
“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” said Judy Clain, editor in chief of Little, Brown, who was Ms. Powell’s editor. “I only wish she could have found the next thing.”

Posted in Books, Elvis, Food, Obits | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

November 1st, 2022

Bryan Harsin out as Auburn football coach.

Harsin’s tenure on the Plains lasted just more than 22 months, and he finishes with a 9-12 record at Auburn that included a 4-11 mark against Power 5 opponents. He’s the first Auburn coach to finish his tenure with a losing record since Earl Brown’s three-year stint wrapped with a 3-22-4 record between 1948-50.

He was two years into a six year contract. He was also the subject of an inquiry by the university back in February:

Former players spoke out publicly about their experience with Harsin last season, while current players rallied around the embattled coach. After an eight-day investigation and uncertainty about whether Harsin would see a Year 2, Auburn announced its decision to retain the coach, with Gogue releasing a statement on the matter, explaining that it “would have been an abdication of the university’s responsibilities” to not investigate concerns raised about the football program. Gogue added that the university was committed to Harsin and providing him the support necessary to achieve his goals as head coach.

Ultimately, though, it was the on-field product:

After starting 6-2 in Year 1, Auburn spiraled to close out the 2021 season, ending the year on a five-game losing streak. That skid included blown double-digit leads against Mississippi State, South Carolina and Alabama, ultimately losing the Iron Bowl in a quadruple-overtime classic at Jordan-Hare Stadium. The year was capped with a loss to Houston in the Birmingham Bowl, which solidified the program’s first losing season since 2012 and its first five-game losing streak to end a season since 1950.

…

Two uneven performances against opponents from the FCS and Group of 5 to open the [2022 – DB] season, followed by a humiliating loss to Penn State that marked the program’s worst at home in a decade. Auburn escaped its SEC opener against Missouri in overtime before losing each of its next three. The death knell came in the form of Saturday’s double-digit loss to the Razorbacks, which dropped the Tigers to 3-10 in the last calendar year and brought an end to a coaching tenure that was uncomfortable, unfounded and ultimately didn’t work.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: October 31, 2022.

October 31st, 2022

The LA Lakers finally won a game.

There are no NBA teams that have a chance at going 0-82 this year.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »