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Things I didn’t know about until today.

Wednesday, July 24th, 2024

But which I find interesting:

1. The Romance Writers of America filed for bankruptcy at the end of May.

2. The RWA convention is in Austin this year. Maybe. According to the article, it was supposed to take place at the end of July, but is now scheduled for October. Except, when I went to the registration page, it doesn’t seem to be allowing registrations.

Edited to add 7/26: conference registration is now open. Dates are October 11th – 13th, and the cost is $349 ($399 if you’re not a member of RWA).

How did they manage to go bankrupt? The way you’d expect: they angered a bunch of their members, who are now ex-members.

Today, the group’s membership hovers at around 2,000, and it owes approximately $3 million in hotel contracts for the group’s past annual conferences.

I kind of want to keep this post short-ish, so I’m not going into details about how RWA made so many people angry: the linked article discusses the Courtney Milan affair (which I remember reading about as it was unfolding: as much as I hate linking to Wikipedia, that entry fills in some missing details) and the 2021 VIVIAN controversy (I know, two Wiki links in a row, but the primary source link is broken and the other links are to sites I don’t link to, or are not good sources). You can click through if you want more details on those issues: I just find the collapse of RWA interesting, and a little sad. I feel like writers need strong organizations to protect them from predatory publishers and publishing practices, so I’ll be unhappy to see RWA go.

“It would have been easier if I could have just said, ‘Well, deeply racist organization gone forever,’” she said. “But that’s not the story as I saw it. For me, and for a lot of people in Romancelandia, this was a group where they had made lifelong friendships, where there were very promising signs of progress in terms of redressing past mistakes.”

And if RWA goes away, that’s going to reduce my chances to network and sell my gunsmith romance series.

(Also, another year, another Hugo controversy. But I already knew about that, and I don’t have any sites I’m willing to link to. Very short version: someone was trying to buy votes, and did it so clumsily a seven-year-old could have figured it out.)

3. On a happier note, at least for me – because I hate the Olympics – the IOC is threatening to revoke Salt Lake City’s hosting status for the Winter 2034 games.

The IOC seems to be upset that…wait for it…the United States government, specifically Congress and the Department of Justice, are looking into how the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) handled the case of the Chinese swimmers.

But many American athletes say they don’t trust WADA’s procedures and want probes to continue.
“What the athletes think, they want transparency,” said Katie Ledecky, the star U.S. swimmer, who spoke at a separate press conference on Wednesday. “They want further answers to the questions that still remain.”
In a statement, Travis Tygart head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) blasted the IOC for linking the China scandal to Salt Lake City’s bid.
“It is shocking to see the IOC itself stooping to threats in an apparent effort to silence those seeking answers,” Tygart said. “It seems more apparent than ever that WADA violated the rules and needs accountability and reform.”

…

“Russia and China have been too big to fail in [WADA’s] eyes and they get a different set of rules than the rest of the world does unfortunately,” Tygart said.

I’m excited about this. I hope the IOC pulls the Salt Lake City bid, I hope they have to frantically scramble to find a new host city, I hope they completely fail because nobody wants to host the Olympics because they are a giant money pit with no financial returns, and I hope some folks from the IOC and WADA wind up in prison.

Posted in Books, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 24, 2024.

Wednesday, July 24th, 2024

John Mayall, massively influential British bluesman. NYT (archived).

Though he played piano, organ, guitar and harmonica and sang lead vocals in his own bands with a high, reedy tenor, Mr. Mayall earned his reputation as “the godfather of British blues” not for his own playing or singing but for recruiting and polishing the talents of one gifted young lead guitarist after another.
In his most fertile period, between 1965 and 1969, those budding stars included Eric Clapton, who left to form the band Cream and eventually became a hugely successful solo artist; Peter Green, who left to found Fleetwood Mac; and Mick Taylor, who was snatched from the Mayall band by the Rolling Stones.
A more complete list of the alumni of Mr. Mayall’s band of that era, known as the Bluesbreakers, reads like a Who’s Who of British pop royalty. The drummer Mick Fleetwood and the bassist John McVie were also founding members of Fleetwood Mac. The bassist Jack Bruce joined Mr. Clapton in Cream. The bassist Andy Fraser was an original member of Free. Aynsley Dunbar would go on to play drums for Frank Zappa, Journey and Jefferson Starship.

As you know, Bob, music – especially music of this period – is outside of my area of competence, so I am going to defer to valued commenter pigpen51 for additional comment on Mr. Mayall and his legacy.

Also outside of my area of competence (Hello, pigpen51! Really, I should give you posting privileges here.): Duke Fakir, of the Four Tops.

His family said in a statement that the cause was heart failure.

“Heart failure,” MacAdoo said in an almost sorrowful tone.
“Heart seizure,” Haere said automatically.
“What’s the difference?”
‘Everyone dies of heart failure.”

–Ross Thomas, Missionary Stew

Lewis H. Lapham, of “Harper’s Magazine” and “Lapham’s Quarterly”.

This might just be me, and I may very well be speaking ill of the dead. But when I see someone described as a “scholarly patrician”, I mentally translate that to: someone who thinks they are better and smarter than you are, therefore they know better than you how to run your life, and believe the government should enforce their point of view on you.

Finally, one I’ve been holding for a couple of days and want to get in: Robert L. Allen, “writer, activist and academic”. I knew of Mr. Allen because he wrote the book on “The Port Chicago Mutiny“, which was proceeded by the Port Chicago explosion.

There were a large number of black soldiers stationed at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, loading and unloading ammunition. Safety procedures may not have been what they should have been. On July 17, 1944, the E.A. Bryan exploded during the loading process. It was a massive explosion which destroyed everything within 1,000 feet, including another ship. 320 people died, many of them black sailors.

White officers were given leave to recover, but Black sailors were soon ordered to continue their dangerous work loading munitions at a nearby port. They did not know why the ships had exploded — a cause has never been determined — and 258 refused to keep working, leading an admiral to threaten to execute them by firing squad, Mr. Allen said.

…

Of the 258 men, 208 returned to work, but they were still court-martialed for disobeying orders. The 50 others, in a summary court-martial, were convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny and sentenced to eight to 15 years of confinement.

Interestingly, Mr. Allen’s death apparently prompted the Navy to exonerate all the sailors last week.

“The secretary of the Navy called to offer condolences,” Ms. Carter said in an interview, referring to Carlos Del Toro. “And he said, ‘I’m going to do more than that — I’m going to exonerate these sailors.’”

I haven’t read Mr. Allen’s book, though I kind of want to. I know about the book and the incident from a long piece John Marr wrote in the late and very much missed “Murder Can Be Fun” zine (issue #11).

Posted in Books, History, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Sunday is my gun book day…

Sunday, July 21st, 2024

…and given the breaking news today, I suspect it’s going to be a manic Monday. (Also, I have to go to the eye doctor tomorrow.) So how about a little distraction?

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Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, O'Connor | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 16, 2024.

Tuesday, July 16th, 2024

Evan Wright, journalist and author. (Generation Kill)

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline.

Posted in Books, Media, Obits | 1 Comment »

I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy…

Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024

…and what could be more patriotic than guns and gun books?

This isn’t quite as patriotic as it could be, since the first two of these are about Africa. And the second two are duplicates of existing books in my collection, so I’m not going to spend as much time on them as I usually do.

El jumperino here…

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

Obit watch: June 27, 2024.

Thursday, June 27th, 2024

This is breaking, and I may have more later on: “Kinky” Friedman, Texas musician, author, and politician. KVUE. KSAT. HouChron (archived). (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Bill Cobbs, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “A Mighty Wind”, “The Slap Maxwell Story”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Finally, a weird one:

Shahjahan Bhuiya, who hanged some of Bangladesh’s highest-profile death row inmates in exchange for reductions in his own robbery and murder sentences, then briefly became a TikTok star after his release from prison, died on Monday in Dhaka, the nation’s capital.

…

Last year, Mr. Bhuiya told the local news media that he was 74. But according to Mr. Bhuiya’s national identity card, provided by Mr. Kashem, he was 66 at the time of his death.

…

In a memoir that he published after his release, “What the Life of a Hangman Was Like,” Mr. Bhuiya wrote that he had put 60 inmates to death. Prison officials have said that the correct figure was 26.

…

After his release from prison, Mr. Bhuiya published his book and briefly became a TikTok star. His videos often featured his sexually suggestive conversations with young women.

Posted in Austin, Books, Movies, Music, Obits, Politics, Texas, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 25, 2024.

Tuesday, June 25th, 2024

Frederick Crews, literary critic and anti-Freudian.

He was a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books, where his essays and reviews explored the works Melville, Twain and Flannery O’Connor, among other authors. He also examined broader subjects like recovered memory therapy, the Rorschach test, alien abduction cases and, particularly, psychoanalysis, which he considered a pseudoscience, as well as the scourge of what he called Freudolatry.

…

Essentially, Professor Crews came to regard Freud as a charlatan. In a debate with the psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach in 2017, published in The Guardian, he maintained that Freud had “contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their ‘resistance’ to ideas of his own — ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.” In the process, he said, Freud created a myth about himself and his findings that failed to live up to empirical scrutiny.

…

One unlikely cause that he devoted himself to in recent years was to assert the innocence of Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant football coach who was convicted in 2012 of sexually abusing young boys and is now in prison.
“I joined the small group of skeptics who have concluded that America’s paramount sexual villain is nothing of the sort,” Professor Crews wrote in one article in 2021, adding, “believe it or not, there isn’t a shred of credible evidence that he ever molested anyone.”

Tamayo Perry, surfer and actor. He was 49, and apparently died after a shark attack.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Trip report: Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Wednesday, June 19th, 2024

“Back to Tulsa AGAIN? You were just there in November.”

True that. But the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association tries to rotate the symposiums around the country: “West Coast” one year (that was last year’s Glendale symposium), “East Coast” one year (Concord in 2022 and again next year), and “Central” (Tulsa this year).

I’m glad to say that this year’s hotel (which we were also at in 2021) was very very happy to see us. Last year’s hotel…wasn’t, and I’ll just leave it at that. The Renaissance Tulsa Hotel & Convention Center, on the other hand, could not have been more accomodating. (They did have “No Firearms or Weapons” stickers on the doors, but I never heard anything about anybody being hassled by the hotel staff.) I was privy to a conversation between one of my friends (who is a S&WCA officer) and one of the hotel managers, and the manager was very excited about having us back. We tip well, we don’t throw loud obnoxious parties, we have our own security, and we don’t trash the place.

There are two popular questions people ask me. Well, maybe one “popular” question and one not-so-popular.

“Did I buy any guns?” Answer: yes, but we’re still going through the transfer process. Once that’s complete, I plan to do a post. Here’s a hint:

“Did I buy any books?” asked nobody, ever. Answer: Yes! My book buddy from the Association came down from Canada and brought a stack of books. He thought I might be interested in “some” of them and planned to put the others on his sales table. I bought the whole lot, which came out to ten books by my count. This includes two new-to-me Samworths, one duplicate Samworth that’s in better shape than my copy, three Jack O’Connor books that I didn’t have, and some miscellaneous books from other publishers. I will be annoying my loyal reader with posts on those books as time permits.

Additionally, I happened to be working the registration table with another gentleman who, it turned out, was also a gun book person. He had somehow wound up with a spare copy of a recent gun book and gifted his spare to me.

I also picked up a fair amount of old paper, some of which my book buddy threw in as part of my purchase and some of which I bought from other dealers. I may scan and post some of this, especially when I do the gun post.

(And as a side note: the night before I left, I got two huge and heavy packages from an auction lot I’d placed a lowball bid on, and won. The lot was for old “gun and ammo” books. So I’ll be sharing interesting bits from that lot as well.)

Since Sunday was an off day, I drove up to Oklahoma City specifically to see the 45th Infantry Division Museum, which is now known as the Oklahoma National Guard Museum (and which is moving to a new facility). You may recognize the 45th Infantry Division Museum from such hits as:

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

I thought it was a very nice museum. They had me when I discovered there was an entire room devoted to Bill Mauldin.

Here. Have a random photo of some bazookas.

I’m very glad I went, especially now. As I noted above, the museum is moving to a new location. And I got into a conversation with the curator, who told me that they are planning to deaccession some things, as the new museum will be placing more emphasis on “telling stories”. I think that’s kind of a shame. Where else are you going to see this?

Except maybe in “The Green Berets“.

I encourage you to go now, if you’re in the area and have the opportunity. I would actually like to spend more time at the museum, but I wanted to get back in time for dinner and to take a couple of photos in Muskogee:

The first Girl Scout cookie sale took place in Muskogee in 1917. I could not find a reference to price at the time, but in 1922, the Girl Scouts recommended selling home-baked cookies for “25 to 30 cents per dozen”. $6 in 2024 money works out to 32 cents in 1922 money, and 24 cents in 1917 money, according to the inflation calculator I like to use.

I took a group of my friends to Siegi’s Sausage Factory and, as far as I could tell, everyone loved it. Another large group of my friends took me to the White River Fish Market and Restaurant, which I liked, but which was in a really gritty part of Tulsa.

We also went to an Abuelo’s one night, because it was very near the hotel. I went by myself one night to a place Mike the Musicologist calls “The Laugh-In Restaurant”: Sake 2 Me Sushi. It is all-you-can-eat, but I wasn’t wild about the sushi.

And Sunday night’s celebratory dinner was at The Chalkboard, because I haven’t been in forever and wanted some Beef Wellington.

Everything went smoothly. No complaints here, except that eight hours in a car does get a little tiring.

Usual thanks to the usual suspects. You know who you are. (It appears that word has gotten around within S&WCA circles that I have a blog.)

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Nazis, O'Connor, Smith and Wesson, Travel | 1 Comment »

Gun Books ‘R Us.

Friday, June 7th, 2024

Seriously, I thought by now I’d have a clever intro for this. But I don’t. My Strategic Clever Reserves are exhausted. So why don’t we jump into this one? Warning: I think this is longer than usual…

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Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Ruark | 1 Comment »

I hear the train a ‘coming…

Wednesday, May 29th, 2024

…it’s rolling ’round the bend,
And I ain’t gun book blogged
Since I don’t know when…

Sort of scans, don’t it? And it was April 25th.

Anyway, I have a stack downstairs that’s getting precarious, even more so than the stack upstairs. So here’s a few for today, and maybe a few more in the next few days.

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Planes, Smith and Wesson, Travel | Comments Closed