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Obit watch: November 19, 2021.

Friday, November 19th, 2021

Wilbur Smith, author. He was another one of those guys whose books I often see in racks at the grocery store, which is a pretty good sign.

“I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women,” Mr. Smith said.

…

When he was 8, his father gave him a .22-caliber Remington rifle. “I shot my first animal shortly afterward and my father ritually smeared the animal’s blood on my face,” he wrote in his memoir, “On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures” (2018). “The blood was the mark of emerging manhood. I refused to bathe for days afterward.”

…

Mr. Smith had his detractors, who saw some of his writing as glorifying colonialism and furthering racial and gender stereotypes. And he was not always a favorite of critics.
He maintained, as he told the Australian publication The Age, that he paid little attention. “The snootiness of critics is so silly,” he said. “They’re judging Great Danes against Pekingese. I’m not writing that literature — I’ve never set out to write it. I’m writing stories.”

Lawrence sent over Ann Althouse’s obit for Justus Rosenberg yesterday. I can’t really do the man the justice she did, so I’ll just point you over there.

Posted in Books, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Stephen Hunter, call your office, please.

Thursday, November 18th, 2021

Spotted at a grocery store in Tulsa:

“…the man who holds the complete works of Aristotle in one hand, and a delicious sandwich in the other”. Well, who doesn’t love a delicious sandwich? But I think the Swagger I’m familiar with is more likely to have a .38 Super in the other hand.

(Swagger explained, for those who are unfamiliar with the works of Stephen Hunter. Those people should fix that soon: I’m personally fond of Pale Horse Coming, for reasons.)

Also spotted: Old Spice Krakengard. Which actually makes sense to me: if I can get a body wash that protects me from kraken, I am there, man.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books | Comments Closed

Fish heads, fish heads, rolly polly fish heads…

Friday, October 29th, 2021

I have food on my mind.

McThag put up a post over at his place about bagna cauda. This is something I’d like to try as well. And actually, I think I first heard about it from reading about “Babylon 5”.

(I have never seen a complete episode of “B5”. I feel like SF on TV has been dumbed down and mostly hasn’t been good since the first incarnation of “Twilight Zone” went off the air (though the second incarnation was a bright spot in some ways). I’ve never been a fan of that minor SF TV series from the 1960s or any of the followup products (though I would like to watch the adaptation of a Larry Niven story they did on the animated series). However, the more I read about “B5” and the more clips I watch on the ‘Tube, the stronger my impression gets that it was an actual thoughtful intelligent SF series with many of the right people involved, and it might be something that’s worth my time. Perhaps next time I see a box set at Half-Price.)

But I digress. I’m also kind of craving Swedish meatballs. A supper of bagna cauda and Swedish meatballs doesn’t sound too bad. Perhaps not really healthy, but not too bad…

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going to get bagna cauda or Swedish meatballs. I could make them myself, but I’m kind of hesitant about stinking up the kitchen with the former. As for the latter, I guess I could schlep out to Ikea and get some frozen ones, but that doesn’t seem like an optimal experience. And I don’t know any place in Austin that serves either one. If you do, please feel free to leave a comment.

(Also, while I can cook, the kitchen is really someone else’s territory, and I’m hesitant about treading in there. Especially if I’m cooking things they might find disgusting, like bagna cauda or anything with onions.)

(Something else I have a craving for, not related to anchovies: Vincent Price’s cocktail franks.)

(There! Vincent Price! There’s your Halloween content! Are you not entertained?!)

Something else I’ve been interested in for quite a while that is (semi-) related to anchovies, and prompted by “The Delicious Legacy” and food anthropology in general: the lost Roman condiment garum.

See also: “Culinary Detectives Try to Recover the Formula for a Deliciously Fishy Roman Condiment” by the same guy, Taras Grescoe. (I’ve read his book, The Devil’s Picnic (affiliate link), and based on that, I’d be willing to give Lost Supper a chance when it comes out.)

I’m also intrigued by The Story of Garum, but damn! $158! $37 for the Kindle edition! At those prices, it had better come with a case of garum! Or at least a six-pack.

(I’ve heard that this is the closest you can get today to garum. Amazon has the 40°N, but not the 50°N. I might have to order a bottle directly. And the Vincent Price cookbook.)

(This food anthropology thing rapidly gets expensive. And I haven’t even bought any imported anchovies yet.)

Anyway, McThag’s probably peeved at me by now for wandering all over the place. And I’m hungry. Time to rummage up something to eat. Then maybe order some fish sauce.

Never shop when you’re hungry.

Posted in Books, Fish, Food, Kindleing, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 29, 2021.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

Richard Hammer, author. He wrote two books on the My Lai massacre:

Mr. Hammer’s account of the My Lai slaughter in 1968, “One Morning in the War: The Tragedy of Son My” (1970), was frequently reviewed alongside one by Seymour M. Hersh, who had broken the story — “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath.” (The village of Son My included the hamlet of My Lai.)
“Richard Hammer — knowing perhaps that Hersh had the jump on him — tried to put the incident in perspective and thereby ended up writing the better book,” the book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times.“He took the time,” he added, “to explain the gradual depersonalization of the Vietnamese in American soldiers’ eyes — to make us understand how even women and children begin to seem hated and dangerous.”
Mr. Hammer followed up that book with another centered on the massacre, “The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,” which John Leonard of The Times numbered among “a handful of public-affairs books published in 1971 that people will be reading a generation from now.” William Styron, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial.”

…

Mr. Hammer also wrote and narrated the film “Interviews With My-Lai Veterans” (1970), which won an Oscar for best documentary (short subject).

Additionally, he was a two-time winner of the Edgar award for “best fact crime” for books unrelated to My-Lai: The CBS Murders: A True Account of Greed and Violence in New York’s Diamond District and The Vatican Connection: The True Story of a Billion-Dollar Conspiracy Between the Catholic Church and the Mafia (affiliate links).

Viktor Bryukhanov, the guy who took the rap for Chernobyl.

After serving five years in prison, Mr. Bryukhanov returned to government service in Ukraine to head the technical department in its Economic Development and Trade Ministry.

It really was a different country, wasn’t it?

Sonny Osborne, of the Osborne Brothers.

Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.
The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.

This is in the NYT article, and I’ve posted this before, but fark that: I’m in the mood right now for some insurrectionist music.

Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, of the von Trapp family.

Mrs. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.
Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Mrs. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.

Martha Henry. She was 83.

For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”
As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.

David DePatie, co-creator (with Friz Freleng) of “The Pink Panther”.

George Butler, documentary filmmaker. Among his credits: “Pumping Iron”, aka “the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star”.

NYT obit for Val Bisoglio.

In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.
“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 15, 2021.

Friday, October 15th, 2021

Gary Paulsen, author.

I was a little old for Hatchet (affiliate link) when it came out, and haven’t gotten around to reading it. But whenever I see discussions of young adult books people liked, or liked when they were that age, Hatchet always comes up. It seems to have had a strong influence on many young people.

And he was the kind of guy who could write that book.

When Gary was 4, his mother, Eunice (Moen) Paulsen, moved with him to Chicago, where she got a job in an ammunition factory. An alcoholic, she would dress Gary in a child-size soldier’s outfit and take him to bars, where she made him sing on tables as a way to get men to pay attention to her.
She could also be fiercely protective. Once he sneaked outside their apartment when she was sleeping. A man dragged him into an alley and began to molest him. Suddenly his mother appeared, beating and kicking the assailant into unconsciousness.
Eventually, her own mother forced her to send Gary to live with an aunt and uncle in northern Minnesota, where he learned to hunt, fish and live outdoors for long stretches.

…

In “Gone to the Woods,” a memoir published this year, Mr. Paulsen recalled how at one point the passengers watched in horror as a plane crash-landed nearby. As the plane’s passengers struggled in the water, a pack of sharks descended on them, pulling men and women and children below the water.
His family later returned to Minnesota, where his parents drank and fought constantly. To get away from them, Gary would take to the woods, exploring, hunting and trapping, or wander around their small town, Thief River Falls, near the Canadian border. He worked odd jobs, like setting pins at a bowling alley and delivering newspapers, and used the money to buy his own school supplies, as well as a .22-caliber rifle.
One day he ducked into a library to get warm. A librarian asked if he had a library card. When he said no, she gave him one, along with a Scripto notebook and a No. 2 pencil, with instructions to read everything he could and write down everything he thought.

…

When he was 14 he ran away and joined a carnival. He returned home just long enough to forge his father’s signature and join the Army.
The Army trained him in engineering, and he later tracked satellites for a government contractor at a facility in California. He also spent time in Los Angeles, writing dialogue for television shows like “Mission: Impossible.”
All along, he had been reading and writing, and one day in 1965 he decided to try his hand at a novel. He moved back to Minnesota, where he rented a cabin and went to work.
For several years he wrote westerns for adults under a pseudonym. He made just enough money to sustain a simple rural life, living off what he could grow and hunt.

…

He also fell in love with dog-sledding. He took part in the Iditarod, the grueling 1,000-mile race across Alaska, three times before giving up the sport in 1990, citing heart problems.
“When you run a thousand miles with a dog team, you enter a state of primitive exaltation,” he said in an interview with the American Writers Museum in January. “You go back 30,000 years, you and the dogs, and you’re never the same again.”

…

A proud Luddite and misanthrope, he considered the internet “just stupid, faster,” and said organized sports had become a perverse form of religion.

For the historical record: Sir David Amess, Conservative MP. Everybody’s covered this by now, and I don’t have anything to add.

Well, okay, perhaps one thing: I don’t mean to make fun of our friends in the UKOGBNI, nor do I mean to seem provincial. But “constituency surgery” is such an interesting term…

Posted in Books, Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 5, 2021.

Tuesday, October 5th, 2021

Alan Kalter, David Letterman’s announcer on CBS.

The red-haired Kalter took over for the retired Bill Wendell as the Late Show announcer in September 1995 — about two years after Letterman moved from NBC to CBS — and remained through the host’s final program on May 20, 2015. On his first day on the job, Letterman tossed him into a pool.
With musical accompaniment from Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra, Kalter announced the guests and cheekily introduced the host at the top of each show, then voiced the comic one-liner over the Worldwide Pants title card on the end credits.
In between, Kalter often acted in funny sketches that included hosting “Alan Kalter’s Celebrity Interview” after Letterman was finished with the guest and speaking from his announcer’s podium as the studio lights dimmed, trying to come on to lonely, divorced women as “Big Red” — much to the dismay of a “shocked” Letterman.

…

“When I came home and said I was offered the job as the announcer on the Late Show, I told my wife I wasn’t sure if I really wanted it because it would really rock the boat on those commercials I was doing around the country,” he recalled in 2019. “I wouldn’t be able to go away for three or four days at a time whenever I wanted to, to do that work. And my kids, who were in high school at the time, sort of immediately in chorus said, ‘Dad this is the first cool thing you’ve ever done in your life. Take it!’”

Pearl Tytell has passed away at 104. She was a leading examiner of questioned documents.

Mrs. Tytell worked with her husband, Martin, at their typewriter repair and rental business on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, which branched out into the scientific examination of documents in the early 1950s. A rare woman in a male-dominated field, Mrs. Tytell ran that end of the business and trained her son, Peter, a widely known examiner of documents until his death last year.
Mrs. Tytell was an expert witness for the federal government in 1982 in the tax-evasion case against the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the head of the Unification Church. By analyzing changes in his handwriting — particularly how his printed “S” had turned cursive — she testified that he signed checks in 1974, not in 1973 as his lawyers had said.
At another point, Mrs. Tytell used paper-mill records and her knowledge of watermarks to prove that a piece of paper had not been produced until after the date written on it.
“She was an exceptional witness,” Martin Flumenbaum, a prosecutor in the case, said in a phone interview. “She dominated the courtroom. I remember the jury being enthralled by her testimony.”

…

In one of her best-known cases, she was hired in 1972 by International Telephone and Telegraph to analyze a politically explosive memorandum written a year earlier by one of the company’s lobbyists, Dita Beard (who denied writing the memorandum). Its existence was revealed by the investigative journalist Jack Anderson.
It suggested a connection between the settlement of a government antitrust lawsuit against I.T.T. and a pledge by the company to pay $400,000 in costs for the 1972 Republican National Convention.
A report issued by I.T.T. said that Mrs. Tytell and a chemist, Walter McCrone, had used “microscopic, ultraviolet fluorescence and highly sophisticated micro chemical analyses” of the memorandum and other samples that had been typed on Mrs. Beard’s typewriter between June 25, 1971 (the date on the document) and February 1972. They determined that the memo had most likely been written in January 1972, nearly six months after the antitrust settlement, meaning a connection to the payment was not likely.
Their report — submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which investigated the financial pledge made in the memo — contradicted the F.B.I.’s analysis of the document, which suggested it had been written on June 25.

Todd Akin, former House member from Missouri. He gave up that seat to run for the Senate, and lost after making some controversial remarks about rape.

Angelo Codevilla, conservative author and theorist. (The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It)

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

More adventures in hoplobibliophila.

Sunday, October 3rd, 2021

The Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association Symposium has wrapped up.

I thought I’d stay over a day, relax, and kick around a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of the places I’d like to kick around are closed on Sundays. But my loss is your gain. At least if you like gun books.

Pistol and Revolver Shooting by Walter F. Roper. The colophon lists it as Macmillan, 1945, and “First Printing”, but the “Olympic Edition” on the cover makes me wonder. Maybe first printing in this edition?

Mr. Roper was a prominent gun guy and gun experimenter: here’s a short article by John Taffin from Guns magazine about him. Purchased for $40 from a fellow collector at the Symposium.

I would have sworn great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training had reviewed this book on his blog. But if he did, I can’t find the review now.

Two of a perfect pair:

(Previously on Experiments of a Handgunner.)

I do have a copy of what I believe is Mr. Roper’s only other book, Smith and Wesson Hand Guns (with Roy McHenry) but I didn’t bring it on the road with me, and my copy is a reprint anyway.

Not exactly a gun book, but worth noting, in my humble opinion:

Smith and Wesson ties, tie bar, and tie pin. The tie bar and pin were purchased from one collector, the ties were purchased from another. I think they add that subtle touch of class when I’m wearing a suit. And I paid $25 for both ties (and another $10 for the bar and pin).

There was another very classy S&W tie in the auction on Saturday: sadly, it got bid beyond what I was willing to pay early, and I did not get a photo of it. You’ll have to trust me when I say this tie was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

Final totally unrelated side note: of course there’s an Internet Movie Firearms Database entry for “Johnny Dangerously”. Just in case you were wondering what the “.88 Magnum” actually was.

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Random gun crankery, some filler.

Thursday, September 9th, 2021

Two things that I have absolutely no use for but find oddly appealing. Both of these are kind of old, but I just discovered them in the past couple of days:

1. Lone Wolf shows them as “low stock”, but they do apparently still have 9×18 Makarov barrels for the Glock 42.

I actually learned about this by way of Lucky Gunner’s ammo tests, which I am familiar with, but was reviewing to find data about a specific caliber. I don’t know what advantage this would give me over .380 (ballistically, I think very little), and if I wanted something in 9×18, why wouldn’t I just go out and get a surplus gun? But the idea is just weird enough to turn my crank a little bit. And it is threaded for a suppressor…

2. Speaking of guns in .380 Auto…the Cimarron 1862 Pocket Navy. This is a newly manufactured gun, designed to emulate the look and feel of a 1862 Colt Pocket Navy, but set up as a cartridge-fired gun (instead of a black powder one), and chambered in .380 Auto.

Again, I have no use for this, and why would I carry one over my Glock 42? But it is another one of those things that’s so freaking weird, it turns the crank again. If I saw one turn up used at a good price, it would be tempting.

In other news, I am back from my vacation, as of Tuesday. The original plan was to attend the NRA Annual Meeting in Houston…but that was not to be. So instead, Mike the Musicologist and I spent a few days bumming around looking at gun shops, some in the area around Abilene.

I’ll probably write more about our adventures later, but since this is “random gun crankery”, I’ll mention Caroline Colt Company, which is a nice shop with a lot of quality guns, and a surprisingly good (for the times we are in) selection of ammo.

Thanks to great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl for introducing me to the work of the Snub Gun Study Group. As a confirmed snubby guy, I like this idea and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.

My snubbies. Let me show them to you.
Top: S&W 19-3 in .357 Magnum with Tyler T-grip.
Bottom: S&W Model 36 (no dash?) fitted with an Apex Tactical spring kit

(And yes, I consider the 2 1/2″ Model 19 to be a snub gun. As I recall, so did Ed Lovette in his book, The Snubby Revolver. No Amazon link because this was an old Paladin Press volume and prices are through the roof.)

In a rare combination of Smith and Wesson crankery and movie crankery, you can buy Indiana Jones’s S&W. On GunBroker. The “buy it now” price, though, is $5,000,000.00. Which is also the minimum bid. Just for comparison, the gun that killed Billy the Kid went for $6,030,312 not too long ago. (Hattip: The Firearm Blog.)

Lawrence sent over a note earlier this morning: David Chipman’s nomination to head BATFE is being withdrawn. I’d like to believe this is a good thing: maybe it is, but I’m worried the Biden administration is going to nominate someone who is even worse.

Posted in Books, Guns, Movies, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 2, 2021.

Thursday, September 2nd, 2021

My sincere thanks to Alan Simpson for sending over a tribute from the Libertarian Futurist Society to L. Neil Smith.

In 2016, Smith received the Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement for his many contributions to liberty and libertarian sf. (Only four authors have received this prestigious lifetime award, including Poul Anderson, F. Paul Wilson and Vernor Vinge.)

…

Although not as widely recognized by mainstream critics for his social conscience and passion for justice and liberty during his lifetime as this principled and idealistic author deserved, Smith regularly incorporated such themes into both his fiction and nonfiction.
For instance, a dramatic exposure of the evils of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust was at the moral center of The Mitzvah, Smith’s novel (cowritten with Aaron Zelman) about a Catholic priest, influenced by socialist ideas of the 1960s, who discovers that the German immigrant parents who raised him actually adopted him and that his true parents were a Jewish couple murdered in the Holocaust.
Smith, a longtime libertarian activist, also wrote two non-fiction books, Lever Action and Down with Power, that expressed his libertarian views, and founded, and regularly contributed essays to, The Libertarian Enterprise, an anarcho-capitalist journal.

Carolyn Shoemaker, comet hunter.

“Carolyn Shoemaker is one of the most revered and respected astronomers in history,” Jennifer Wiseman, a senior scientist overseeing the Hubble Space Telescope, said in a phone interview. “Her discoveries, her tenacious care in how she did her work — those things have created a legacy and a reputation that has inspired people who have come into the field after her.”

…

In spite of feeling nervous around scientific instruments as simple as a calculator, she offered to help her husband, the revered planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker, with a project gathering data on comets and asteroids.
Dr. Shoemaker believed that collisions with Earth by comets had been responsible for transporting to the planet water and other elements necessary for life, meaning that humans “may truly be made of comet ‘stuff,’” Ms. Shoemaker wrote in her essay. Dr. Shoemaker also worried that a comet hitting Earth could threaten human civilization. Yet relatively little scientific attention had been paid to the frequency and effects of cometary collision with planets.
As the dark phase of the lunar cycle began, making it easier to see faint objects in outer space, the Shoemakers would travel to an observatory on Palomar Mountain near San Diego. To locate previously unknown comets and asteroids, they aimed to photograph as much of the night sky as possible. The chirping of birds signaled bedtime.In the afternoons, Dr. Shoemaker would take the film they had used the previous night and develop it in a darkroom, then turn over the negatives to Ms. Shoemaker. Using a stereoscope, she would compare exposures of the same block of sky at different times. If anything moved against the relatively fixed background of stars, it would appear to float in the viewing device’s eyepiece.
Ms. Shoemaker was charged with discerning what was the grain of the film (and perhaps dust on it) and what was an actual image of light emitted by an object hurtling through space. “With time,” she wrote, “I saw fainter and fainter objects.”
It took a few years before she found her first new comet, in 1983. By 1994, in addition to hundreds of asteroids, she had discovered 32 comets, a number considered by the United States Geological Survey and others to represent the world record at the time.

Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker are the “Shoemaker” in “Shoemaker-Levy 9”.

One comet, known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (named in part for their associate David Levy), had stood out from the rest. Rather than making a lonely journey through the cosmic vacuum, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. By detecting the comet shortly before impact, Ms. Shoemaker gave scientists an opportunity to examine whether or not comets slamming into planets represented major astronomical events — and to test the hypotheses of her husband’s work.
The result had all the drama the Shoemakers might have imagined: whirling fire balls, a plume of hot gas as tall as 360 Mount Everests and a series of huge wounds that appeared in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Amateur astronomers could witness much of it with store-bought telescopes.
Anticipation of Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the spectacular show it produced made the front page of The New York Times and the cover of Time magazine, which called the Shoemakers “a husband-and-wife scientific duo who spend their evenings scanning the skies for heavenly intruders.” The couple and Mr. Levy were featured in a Person of the Week segment of the nightly ABC News broadcast and met with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

…

Today, professional astronomers use remotely controlled telescopes and digital detection software. They tend not to pull all-nighters in remote mountain regions, guiding telescopes across the night sky and developing film in their own darkrooms, as the Shoemakers did. Yet scientists still depend on methods that Ms. Shoemaker perfected.
“She and her colleagues set the stage for how to identify what we would call minor bodies in our solar system, such as comets and asteroids,” Dr. Wiseman said. “We still use the technique of looking for the relatively fast transverse motions of comets and asteroids in our own solar system as compared to the slower or more fixed position of stars.”

Posted in Books, Obits, Science | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 31, 2021.

Tuesday, August 31st, 2021

I am seeing reports (from Lawrence and in other places) that the great libertarian SF writer L. Neil Smith has died.

However, I have been unable to find a source for this that I am willing to give credibility, links, or page views to. I’ll either update or post a new obit if this changes.

Posted in Books, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 26, 2021.

Thursday, August 26th, 2021

David Roberts, noted climber and climbing writer.

Michael Nader, actor. He was “Dex Dexter” in “Dynasty”, and “Dimitri Marick” on “All My Children”, among other credits.

Once again, pushing the boundaries of an obit, but: if you would prefer to read about Dorothy Parker’s tombstone in the NYT instead of the NYPost, well, here you go.

Posted in Books, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 24, 2021.

Tuesday, August 24th, 2021

Bill Clotworthy. You almost certainly never heard of him, but you’ve seen his work.

Or, perhaps more accurately, you haven’t seen his work.

Mr. Clotworthy was a long time “standards and practices executive” – in other words, a network censor – for NBC. His nickname was “Doctor No”.

Censors are “hard working, dedicated professionals trying to make television acceptable to a large and culturally diverse audience and, not incidentally, to keep the FCC and the U.S. Congress off the backs of their employers,” he wrote.

…

In a 2002 interview, Clotworthy described one SNL sketch that never made it to air:
It revolved around “a bunch of guys in a fraternity house trying to light farts,” he recalled. “You didn’t see anything, but you heard the voiceover and then there was this big explosion, and Joe Piscopo was dressed as Smokey the Bear, and he came out and said that should be a lesson to everyone — don’t fart with fire.”
He said he was OK with it but was overruled by his boss.

…

After his retirement, Clotworthy became a prolific author and lecturer who traveled the U.S. to conduct research for his books on George Washington and first ladies and for his guidebooks to presidential homes, libraries and notable sites. He was an enthusiastic genealogist for more than 50 years.

Those sound really cool. Amazon doesn’t list them, but there is a Kindle edition of Saturday Night Live: Equal Opportunity Offender: The Uncensored Censor.

Stretching the definition of an obit here, but: there was an unveiling ceremony for Dorothy Parker’s tombstone on Monday.

The story of Dorothy Parker’s ashes is almost as weird as the story of Evita’s body. After her death, her ashes sat in a crematory for six years, then in a filing cabinet in the former office of her (retired) lawyer. In 1988, her ashes were turned over to the NAACP (“In her will, she bequeathed her estate to Martin Luther King Jr., and upon King’s death, to the NAACP.“)

The NACCP set up a memorial outside their headquarters in Baltimore. But when they moved in 2020, the organization returned the ashes to her family, who reburied them in Woodlawn Cemetery.

The New York Distilling Company in Williamsburg issued a commemorative gin to pay for the headstone.
Along with the gin, mourners left red roses near Parker’s grave, which lies next to those of her parents and grandparents.
The family plot is in a section of the 400-acre cemetery that includes the graves of writers such as Herman Melville and E.L. Doctorow — as well as a man dubbed “The Father of Mixology,’’ 19th century New York City bartender Jerry Thomas.

Brian Travers, founding member of UB40. Brain tumor got him at 62.

Marilyn Eastman, “Helen Cooper” in “Night of the Living Dead”.

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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