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Harlan Ellison.

Friday, June 29th, 2018

LAT. LAT tribute by John Scalzi. Appreciations. The WP just reprinted the AP obit, but they did also run a nice retrospective. Lawrence.

The paper of record has not yet seen fit to publish an obit for Mr. Ellison (or, for that matter, Gardner Dozois.)

Edited to add: NYT partial obit. “A complete obituary will appear soon.”

Other people knew him better and probably have smarter things to say. This one is hard for me, because his stories and essays and criticism have been a huge part of my life for about 40 years now.

It is sometimes said that everyone in science fiction has their own Harlan Ellison story, which they will be glad to tell you anytime his name comes up. Here’s mine: I worked on a couple of Ellison projects a while back. (Basically, I was just retyping his manuscripts into a computer for later typesetting, etc.) While working on those projects, I talked to him a couple of times on the phone. I think he knew that I was nervous talking to him, but he never treated me with anything but respect and courtesy.

I think we would have disagreed on most major issues of the day, but he was a great and underappreciated writer, and I will miss him.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 18, 2018.

Monday, June 18th, 2018

A large handful of interesting obits showed up over the weekend. I decided I’d save them and do a round-up today.

Officer Norberto Ramon of the Houston Police Department passed away on Friday. He had been undergoing treatment for colon cancer, but was told it had spread and was incurable. He intended to seek medical treatment in Oklahoma, but, as it turned out, this was right before Harvey hit Houston…

Prior to the storm, Ramon had been assigned desk duty. Flooding prevented him from getting to the office, so he went to the nearest station, the Lake Patrol, to help while the storm raged.
At Lake Patrol, he filled in for an officer of the seven-man squad. He worked nonstop for three days, seeing adults, seniors and mostly children to safety.

The HPD estimates he rescued 1,500 people during the storm. Officer Ramon was 55 years old, and had been with HPD for 25 years.

Reinhard Hardegen, German submarine commander who sank two ships off Long Island in 1942.

Yvette Horner, noted French accordion player.

…her considerable legend was rooted in the years she spent as a distinctive part of the grand caravan that accompanies the Tour de France, the sprawling French bicycle race. For more than a decade in the 1950s and ’60s she played for the crowds from atop one vehicle or another as the caravan made its way along the tour route ahead of the cyclists.

William Reese, rare book dealer. I was previously unaware of Mr. Reese or his shop, but after reading his obit, I want a copy of Six Score: The 120 Best Books on the Range Cattle Industry. Stuff like that is already up my alley anyway.

Stephen Reid, bank robber and author.

Along with Patrick Mitchell, who was known as Paddy, and Lionel Wright, Mr. Reid was a member of a group of well-dressed bandits who came to be known as the The Stop Watch Gang. The name appeared to have come from F.B.I. investigators who noticed that at least one gang member, usually Mr. Reid, wore a stopwatch around his neck to keep holdups within the group’s self-imposed two-minute time limit.
While there is no precise accounting of their crimes, the police have estimated that the gang participated in at least 100 holdups during the 1970s and ′80s, getting away with about $15 million.

Matt “Guitar” Murphy, Blues Brother and noted sideman.

Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post has published an obit for Gardner Dozois, as best as I can tell.

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Law, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 8, 2018.

Friday, June 8th, 2018

Anthony Bourdain.

I don’t remember now what prompted me to pick up Kitchen Confidential, but I’m glad I did: it was a wild, fun, and funny book that I enjoyed immensely. I think at this point I’ve read almost everything Mr. Bourdain wrote that was bound between covers. I wasn’t as up on his TV shows, what with the whole not having cable thing. And I really wanted to meet him sometime when he wasn’t frantically searching for a bathroom in an airport and say thanks.

I had been reading Appetites: A Cookbook right before I left, and I remember him talking about how much he loved his family and friends, and cooking for them. That was pretty much the whole point of the book: cooking well for the people you love. I guess I sort of half-consciously knew that he went through a divorce after that…

Bethany Mandel wrote a good piece for the NYPost the other day about suicide and what it does to the people left behind. I commend it to your attention, especially the last paragraph.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Posted in Books, Food, Obits, Travel, TV | Comments Closed

Travel day.

Wednesday, June 6th, 2018

Blogging will be catch-as-catch-can, especially since the latest update to the WordPress app on IOS appears to have broken either the app or the connection between the app and my blog.

Talk among yourselves. I’ll start: the Holy Roman Empire was neither Holy nor Roman, nor an Empire. Discuss.

Okay, slightly more seriously: I’m about halfway through Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence and expect to finish it on the plane tomorrow. I’m liking it a lot, though not quite as much as Public Enemies or The Big Rich.

The most striking thing to me: just how many bathrooms the Weathermen blew up. There are parts of the book that are just a litany of “blew up a men’s room”, “blew up a ladies room”, “destroyed a bathroom”, “blew up a bathroom in the Pentagon”. It’s like these people didn’t do anything except blow up bathrooms (and, of course, themselves).

The whole book is a veritable catalog of certified bat guano insanity. And I haven’t even gotten to the part about the guy with one eye and one thumb (he lost the other eye and nine fingers when his homemade bomb detonated prematurely) who escaped from jail by cutting the metal grate out of his window (ever tried using wire cutters with no fingers and one thumb?) and dropping 40 feet…

Posted in Books, Law, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 5, 2018.

Tuesday, June 5th, 2018

Prominent fashion designer Kate Spade has passed away at 55.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States, TVTropes has a surprisingly good page of additional resources.

Robert Mandan, television actor perhaps most famous as “Chester Tate” on “Soap”.

Barbara Kafka, noted cookbook author. When I was younger, I cooked a lot of meals out of her Microwave Gourmet.

For the record, the paper of same still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Food, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

If you like your revolver, you can keep your revolver.

Friday, June 1st, 2018

The New York Police Department is getting rid of their revolvers.

“What’s that?” you say. “I thought the NYPD all carried Glocks or SIG with the NY-2 trigger.”

Mostly right you are, Bob, and you’re also a perceptive reader of my blog. But NYPD grandfathered in officers who chose to continue carrying revolvers after the department transitioned to semi-auto pistols in 1993. Yes, there are NYPD officers still on the job, still carrying revolvers, after 25 years.

More than 2,000 city police officers still held on to the revolvers over a decade after Sig Sauer and Glock pistols became standard. Their numbers dwindled with each wave of retirements, to 160 by the time the Police Department announced in November that it was phasing out revolvers completely and permanently.

The paper of record estimates that “about 50 officers” are still carrying revolvers. The department decided in November that everyone would transition to semi-auto pistols by the end of August.

“After this class, the days of seeing a police officer out there carrying a swivel holster or a .38 holster with a .38 in there are basically nonexistent,” Inspector Richard G. DiBlasio, the commanding officer of the Firearms and Tactics Section, said. “It’s tradition and some people don’t want to let go of it, but tactics is always number one.”

…

But the change has been met with resistance from officers reluctant to set aside the revolvers that they regard as old friends for unfamiliar pistols that have twice the capacity but are susceptible to jamming. Officer Mary Lawrence, a crime prevention officer in the 103rd precinct in Queens, said that was never a concern with the Smith & Wesson revolver that she has used over her 26 years with the department.
“I’m proud of this uniform that I’m wearing and I’m proud of my gun that I carry because it’s been reliable to me,” she said. “I didn’t think that I needed extra firepower at all.”

The Firearm Blog actually covered this when the announcement was made in November, but I’m blogging the NYT story here because I think it’s an interesting piece of “human interest” journalism (hysteria about “increasing gun violence” aside). Especially that photo at the top of the article.

I wish someone could ask Jim Cirillo if he would feel undergunned with his Model 10 today, and if he thinks “gun violence” has increased since the early 1970s. (Also, I hope someone picks up the reprint rights to Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights now that Paladin is out of business.)

Posted in Books, Cops, Guns, NYPD | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 31, 2018.

Thursday, May 31st, 2018

Josh Greenfeld, writer.

Mr. Greenfeld shared an Oscar nomination with Paul Mazursky for the screenplay of “Harry and Tonto”. (They lost to “Chinatown”. Man, 1974 was a heck of a year.) He also wrote plays, reviews, and features.

But he was most famous for three books about his severely autistic son: A Child Called Noah, A Place for Noah, and A Client Called Noah.

Karl Greenfeld, who continued telling Noah’s story in his own book, “Boy Alone: A Brother’s Memoir” (2009), said his brother, now 51, is in an assisted living home in Lawndale, Calif. “My parents went to see him every weekend until my father’s condition deteriorated over the last three years,” he said.

Philly.com obit for Gardner Dozois. The paper of record has not seen fit to publish an obit yet.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 28, 2018.

Monday, May 28th, 2018

For the historical record: Alan Bean. NYT. NASA.

“At one-sixth gravity in that suit, you have to move in a different way,” he said. “One of the paintings that I did was called ‘Tip Toeing on The Ocean of Storms.’ And it shows that I’m up on my tip toes as I’m moving around. And we did that a lot. On Earth, I weighed 150 pounds; my suit and backpack weighed another 150. 300 pounds. Up there, I weighed only 50. So I could prance around on my toes. It was quite easy to do. And if you remember back to some of the television we saw, Buzz and Neil on the Moon with Apollo 11. Black and white. They were bouncing around a lot. They were really bouncing on their tip toes. Quite fun to do. Someday maybe be a great place for a vacation.”

Gardner Dozois, one of the great figures of science fiction, passed away yesterday. Michael Swanwick. Lawrence.

He was a fantastic writer: “Dinner Party”, “A Special Kind of Morning”, “Chains of the Sea”, “The Peacemaker”, “Flash Point”, “Solace”.

He didn’t write as much as I would have liked, because he became an editor. Well, not just an editor, but one of the greatest editors science fiction ever saw. He edited Asimov’s Science Fiction for 20 years, “… winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times in 17 years from 1988 to his retirement from Asimov’s in 2004.” He also edited thirty four volumes of the massive Year’s Best Science Fiction collection: “Stories selected by Gardner Dozois for the annual best-of-year volumes have won, as of December 2015, 44 Hugos, 41 Nebulas, 32 Locus, 10 World Fantasy and 18 Sturgeon Awards.”

He was also a personal friend of mine. I wrote about this a little, a long time ago, and I’m still more than a little raw over Gardner’s death. During the 90s, we spent a lot of time online in the old Delphi system. There was a regular Wednesday night book-ish SF chat. And then Gardner and his life partner Susan Casper and some other folks (not named here for their privacy) and I had a smaller, private chat at 11:59 on Friday night, where we commiserated over each other’s struggles and celebrated our successes. We were all a lot younger then, and could stay up until 2 or 3 AM solving the problems of the world.

Gardner was also a veteran, though he didn’t see combat. I would retell the safety column story here, but I can’t do it justice: maybe someone else can. I will say that one of my enduring memories of Gardner is “…OR YOU WILL DIE!”

The ending of “A Special Kind of Morning” has always resonated with me, ever since I first read it.

So, empathy’s the thing that binds life together, it’s the flame we share against fear. Warmth’s the only answer to the old cold questions.
So I went through life, boy; made mistakes, did a lot of things, got kicked around a lot more, loved a little, and ended up on Kos, waiting for evening.
But night’s a relative thing. It always ends. It does; because even if you’re not around to watch it, the sun always comes up, and someone’ll be there to see.
It’s a fine, beautiful morning.
It’s always a beautiful morning somewhere, even on the day you die.
You’re young—that doesn’t comfort you yet.
But you’ll learn.

It was a beautiful morning yesterday, Gardner.

This is not quite an obit, but seems fitting: in memory of PFC Joshua Fleming.

Posted in Books, Geek, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 23, 2018.

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018

Philip Roth, noted American novelist.

I wish I had more to say about this, but: I just found out about his death, I’ve never read a Roth novel, and I don’t much like liver.

Clint Walker, actor. He was the star of “Cheyenne”, and appeared in “The Dirty Dozen” (among other credits).

As shooting of the show’s first season began, Mr. Walker confessed to the crew that he did not have a great deal of experience on horseback. He later recalled the response: “You’ll either be a good rider, or a dead one.”

Robert Indiana, visual artist, passed away on Saturday. He was most famous for his rendering of “L-O-V-E”:

I’m not sure I ordinarily would have noted this, but:

Mr. Indiana believed the piracy of the image harmed his reputation in the New York art world, and he retreated to Maine in 1978.

More:

Mr. Indiana, whose career was made, and nearly consumed, by his creation of the sculpture “LOVE,” had sought refuge here four decades ago, an exile from a New York art world he had come to resent, and settled into a rambling Victorian lodge hall overlooking Penobscot Bay, where he was, more or less, left alone to create his art.

He had become increasingly reclusive over the years, and his friends and associates wondered why. Turns out that, on Friday, the day before Mr. Indiana died:

…a company that says it has long held the rights to several of Mr. Indiana’s best-known works proposed an answer, arguing in court papers that the caretaker and a New York art publisher had tucked the artist away while they churned out unauthorized or adulterated versions of his work.

“They have isolated Indiana from his friends and supporters, forged some of Indiana’s most recognizable works, exhibited the fraudulent works in museums, and sold the fraudulent works to unsuspecting collectors,” said the lawsuit filed last week by Morgan Art Foundation Ltd. in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

They filed the lawsuit on Friday. Mr. Indiana’s death was announced on Saturday. Very interesting.

Posted in Art, Books, Law, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Smart people writing smart stuff.

Thursday, May 17th, 2018

This isn’t me being lazy, hand to God: this is me pointing out some things other people wrote that deserve wider attention.

1. There’s a good (and by “good”, I mean “reflects my biases”) op-end in the Statesman that’s a response to the complaints about the academy (previously discussed here):

While our police should be both guardians and warriors, they should eschew militarization, in which a preference for use of force is the answer to all problems. As guardians, our officers must be willing and able to use appropriate force as a warrior but understand it is not the preferred course of action.

…

Skill level is part of what determines the justification for force; therefore, highly skilled officers are desired. Officers should prefer de-escalation — an important part of their training — but also be capable of escalation, and not just to the final option of a firearm that less capable officers are limited to. Unfit or less capable officers are a liability to themselves and to the public. Weeding them out is properly done in the academy.

2. Pat Cadigan (who, as we all know, is two orders of magnitude smarter than I am) takes apart a misguided recommendation from the Macmillan Cancer Support folks: avoid using the “fighting” metaphor.

Macmillan, honey, it’s not the fighting metaphor that makes patients feel guilty about admitting fear and preventing them from planning properly for their death––it’s the fact that they have frickin’ terminal cancer––literally, not metaphorically!

3. South Texas Pistolero on two recent books about Pearl Harbor and Curtis LeMay.

Also, both Kimmel and Short knew they were woefully undergunned; they repeatedly begged for more weapons from Washington and were refused every time. And we haven’t even gotten into the monumental amount of intercepted communications between Japanese forces in the months leading up to the attack that were kept from them.

The Summers and Swan book looks interesting: I plan to keep an eye out for it. I have heard the Kimmel and Short theory before, though: when we rewatched “Tora! Tora! Tora!” recently, one of the themes that stood out for me was that Kimmel and Short got the shaft because of stupid decisions above them.

You know that an invasion of Japan would have brought about more of that if they had managed to somehow gain the upper hand. And even if they had not, they were all still going to fight to the death. It was going to be brutal either way. The bombings sucked, but in the end, I think it’s safe to say they saved lives on both sides.

See also: “Thank God For the Atom Bomb” by Paul Fussel.

Posted in Austin, Books, Cops, History, Law, Politics | 1 Comment »

Historical note, fun for use in schools.

Wednesday, May 16th, 2018

I missed it, but I hope not by too much.

May 5th was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Herb Parsons. I, of course, was on the road at the time: even if I hadn’t been, I was unaware of this until yesterday, when a copy of Showman Shooter: The Life and Times of Herb Parsons came into my hands.

Who was Herb Parsons? He was a famous exhibition shooter: he worked for Winchester from 1929 until his untimely death in 1959 (with, of course, a break during WWII, where he served as a gunnery instructor). Quoting from the Showman Shooter website:

He would toss seven clay pigeons into the sky and shatter the last while pieces from the first were hitting the ground. He would “center” a handful of eggs between his legs, wheel around with a shotgun and scramble ’em, one at a time. He would suspend a can of gasoline over a candle inside a 55-gallon barrel, then render the whole works to a towering inferno from a safe distance. Using a mirror and two rifles, he would break two targets at the same instant—one in front, the other directly behind him.

His sons, Lynn and Jerry, are working to keep Herb’s legacy alive. The Showman Shooter website offers copies of the book, and videos of Herb, Ad and Plinky Toepperwein, John Satterwhite, and the excellent compilation, “Fast and Fancy Shooters”, along with some more background about Herb. I commend the site to your attention, and will be sending off a check for the DVD soon.

Here are a couple of videos that aren’t on the website, but that I think are interesting:

Posted in Books, Guns | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 16, 2018.

Wednesday, May 16th, 2018

Tom Wolfe roundup: NYT.

Young Tom was educated at a private boys’ school in Richmond. He graduated cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in English and enough skill as a pitcher to earn a tryout with the New York Giants. He did not make the cut.

Quoted for the benefit of the Washington and Lee graduates in my audience. Wolfe was apparently quite the mover and shaker at W&L:

Upon graduation in 1947, he turned down admission to Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University. At Washington and Lee, Wolfe was a member of the Phi Kappa Sigma fraternity. He majored in English, was sports editor of the college newspaper, and helped found a literary magazine, Shenandoah, giving him opportunities to practice his writing both inside and outside the classroom.

He enrolled at Yale University in the American studies program and received his Ph.D. in 1957.

As for his remarkable attire, he called it “a harmless form of aggression.”
“I found early in the game that for me there’s no use trying to blend in,” he told The Paris Review. “I might as well be the village information-gatherer, the man from Mars who simply wants to know. Fortunately the world is full of people with information-compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don’t know.”

NYT appreciation. NYT appreciation of his style:

Whether thrift or canniness inspired Mr. Wolfe to persist in wearing the suit into the following season, the effect was instantaneous, as he once said, “annoying people enormously.’’ Just by wearing white after Labor Day, he became the talk of any room he entered, and getting dressed each morning evolved for him into “a harmless form of assault.’’

WP.

He entered the world of stock-car driver Junior Johnson — the title figure of a 20,000-word Esquire article, “The Last American Hero” — so completely that he described the chickens walking across Johnson’s yard in Ingle Hollow, N.C.

Lawrence is a huge fan of this essay, especially for Wolfe’s observation that in Johnson’s part of the country, they grew courage like it was a natural resource. I’d happily link to it, but Esquire wants you to pay a subscription fee to access their archive, and I refuse to give those sumitches any money.

LAT:

“He had this kind of cynicism about liberalism,” said writer and friend Ann Louise Bardach. “If you look at what upset Tom, it was the card-carrying, raving, bring-down-the-barricade liberalism, but more than that, he was contrarian and a cynic in the sense that every great reporter is.”
He would later attend a state dinner at the White House during the Reagan administration, support President George W. Bush and complain against having to pay too much income tax. Walking the crowded streets of New York, Wolfe would wear a American flag lapel pin that he likened to “holding up a cross to werewolves.”

Borepatch sent over a nice note, and made a similar observation:

…my thoughts are that Wolfe and Reagan are inextricably linked. Political Correctness would not have allowed Bonfires to be published post-Reagan.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

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