Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

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What time is it, kids?

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

Not Howdy Doody time.

I promised I wasn’t going to do any more gun books until “Day of the .45, part 2.” went up. Now that I have posted it, I have a large stack to go through, including more than one Samworth, so I’m going to start trying to knock some of those off.

First, some ground rules:

I’m going be posting some newer books, ones that are readily available on Amazon or from the usual suspects. For those, I will be posting Amazon affiliate links, and I will be posting commentary if I’ve read the book, but I won’t be posting cover photos or a lot of bibliographic detail. The Amazon links should give you enough information to order the book, or to find it from some other vendor, if you’re really interested, and photos of readily available contemporary books will just make these posts longer.

One of my side projects that I won’t be documenting in a lot of detail here: I’ve decided that I want to try to accumulate a complete set of Gun Digest. I’ve found that GD frequently has interesting articles on either gun or gun book history, and I think it would be useful to have them around for reference. I probably won’t be documenting those here, though I may mention them in passing.

My self-imposed limits for this project are: I’m buying them used, in very good to excellent condition, and I’m trying not to pay more than $10 for each one. So far, I have the 1998 edition (which has a very good article on the Winchester Model 52) and the 2005 edition (nice article on the guns of Roy Chapman Andrews). The 2010 edition (with the profile of E.C. Crossman) is on the way, as is another Samworth book by Crossman.

With those ground rules set:

(more…)

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

Obit watch: July 20, 2023.

Thursday, July 20th, 2023

Kevin Mitnick, noted computer cracker/social engineer/security consultant. WP (archived). The NYT has one of their preliminary obits up, with a promise of a longer obit later. I’ll add that here when it is published.

Edited to add: NYT obit (archived) here.

After his release, Mr. Mitnick became a polarizing but regular presence in the cybersecurity community. He portrayed himself as a misunderstood “genius” and pioneer, and some supporters said he was a victim of overzealous prosecution and overhyped media coverage. Fans staged protests across more than a dozen cities when he was sentenced and adorned their cars with yellow “Free Kevin” bumper stickers after his arrest.

…

It was not clear if Mr. Mitnick made significant financial gains from cybercrime, though he had the opportunity to do so. “My motivation was a quest for knowledge, the intellectual challenge, the thrill and the escape from reality,” he told a Senate committee hearing several months after he was freed from incarceration.

James Reston Jr., historian, and author who was involved in the Frost/Nixon interviews.

Mr. Reston drafted a 96-page brief — an “interrogation strategy memo,” he called it — to gird Mr. Frost for nearly 29 hours of interviews that would be condensed into four 90-minute television programs.
“The resulting Frost-Nixon interviews — one in particular — indeed proved historic,” Mr. Reston wrote. “On May 4, 1977, 45 million Americans watched Frost elicit a sorrowful admission from Nixon about his part in the scandal: ‘I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me the rest of my life.’”
“In the broadcast,” Mr. Reston continued, “the interviewer’s victory seemed quick, and Nixon’s admission seemed to come seamlessly. In reality, it was painfully extracted from a slow, grinding process over two days.”

…

In another book, “The Accidental Victim: JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, and the Real Target in Dallas” (2013), he wrote that Mr. Connally, who was riding in the car with President John F. Kennedy when Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, had been Oswald’s intended target. Oswald, he wrote, may have blamed Mr. Connally for failing, as Navy secretary, to reconsider his dishonorable discharge from the Marines.

Ed Bressoud, baseball player. He played for both the New York Giants and the New York Mets. The only other person to do this was Willie Mays.

Following the 1961 season, he was selected by Houston in the MLB expansion draft but was traded to the Red Sox before even playing for the Colt 45s.

Nick Benedict, actor. Other credits include the original “Mission: Impossible”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, and the good “Hawaii 5-0”.

Posted in Books, Geek, Nixon, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 18, 2023.

Tuesday, July 18th, 2023

Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher and author.

Professor Frankfurt’s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will — people’s motivating wants and desires — at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life’s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.
Despite the ambition and inventiveness of this project — the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as “powerful and exciting philosophy” of great “depth and fecundity” — Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.
The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.
Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

That paper was republished as a book in 2005, On Bullshit (affiliate link), which became a best-seller. He also wrote On Truth (affiliate link) which seems to have been less successful.

Bold and daring in his ideas, Professor Frankfurt was somewhat aloof in style, with a dry wit and a strenuous aversion to pomposity. When asked what had inspired his interest in Descartes, the subject of his first book, “Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen” (1970), he admitted that he had liked that Descartes’s books were short.

For the record, and because Lawrence sent over an obit: Jane Birkin.

Over the weekend, my mother asked me: “How do you go from being a promising young journalist to being a swami?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but here’s the obit for Sally Kempton.

Robert Lieberman, director. Other credits include quite a few genre TV series, “Christmas in Tahoe”, “All I Want for Christmas”, and “Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy”.

Posted in Books, Media, Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 12, 2023.

Wednesday, July 12th, 2023

Kenneth Eberhart. He was one of my uncles on my mother’s side of the family, and passed away over the weekend. I’ve been waiting until I had something I could link to.

Milan Kundera. THR.

…he was twice expelled from the party he had supported from age 18, when the Communists seized power in 1948.
His first expulsion, for what he called a trivial remark, was imposed in 1950 and inspired the central plot of “The Joke.” He was nevertheless allowed to continue his studies; he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1952 and was then appointed to the faculty there as an instructor in world literature, counting among his students the film director Milos Forman.
Mr. Kundera was reinstated to the party in 1956 but kicked out again, in 1970, for advocating reform. This time it was forever, effectively erasing him as a person. He was driven from his job and, as he said, “No one had the right to offer me another.”

Jimmy Weldon, voice actor and ventriloquist. He also did some TV work.

Posted in Books, Obits | 2 Comments »

Travel notes: Glendale, AZ.

Thursday, June 29th, 2023

So where was I last week?

Glendale, Arizona, for the annual Smith and Wesson Collectors Association Symposium.

This ordinarily would have been a flying situation, but when Mike the Musicologist heard where the Symposium was, he offered to drive. He’s not a S&WCA member, but he is a gun guy, and I bought him a guest pass so he could look around. Plus he wanted to see Taliesin West, which he has been hosed out of seeing in the past. Plus driving allowed us to take guns more easily than flying.

MtM did see Taliesin West (finally) but they don’t offer guided tours during the summer. Which is odd to me, because I took a guided tour when the S&WCA Convention (it wasn’t a symposium back then) was in Tuscon in the summer of 2010. (I had a rental car and drove from Tuscon to Scottsdale on one of the off days.) MtM did get to take the audio tour, and had a good time as far as I can tell.

I can’t talk a lot about what goes on at the Symposium, since it is a private meeting. I don’t feel like I’m giving too much away by saying Smith and Wesson actually sent a factory rep (for the second year in a row!) to talk with us and hang out at the convention. The gentleman in question even sat at our table during the Saturday night banquet that closed the show, and both MtM and I were able to chat him up about some…things, which I will keep secret but expect to be announced soon.

(Full disclosure: I own some stock in Smith and Wesson Brands, the holding company for the gun business, and American Outdoor Brands, the holding company for the non-gun business.)

The Symposiums are always like old home week to me. I get to meet up with friends that I only see once a year, though some of those folks were missing this year for various reasons. I get to talk shop with my people. And I get to relax for a few days, or in this case an entire week.

The question people always ask me: “Did you buy any guns?” The short answer: no, just paper and trinkets. The long answer: I came very close to purchasing one, and even had a handshake deal with the seller. But we mutually called the deal off for reasons that I don’t think I need to go into here. MtM and I traveled about 2,700 miles round trip…and I did end up buying a gun, not at the Symposium, but about five miles from my house. (Photos to come after part 2 of Day of the .45.)

It was a two-day drive both ways. We decided to take a scenic route going out to Arizona and went down to Del Rio and along the Rio Grande, paralleling the river and stopping overnight in Marathon at the Gage Hotel (and eating at the 12 Gage Restaurant). We did drive through Marfa (and past the Prada Store, but we missed the world’s smallest Buc-ees by just a few days). We also drove through Alpine and past Sul Ross State University, which gave me both an excuse and a captive audience to talk about Jack O’Connor (who, as you know, Bob, taught English at Sul Ross for a while). The second day we drove through Hatch, New Mexico, and up into the national forests before reaching Glendale late in the afternoon.

For the curious: we were stopped by the Border Patrol three times, twice out and once back, though the third time they just waved us through the checkpoint. The longest exchange we had: “Are you both US citizens?” “Yes.” “Anybody else in the car?” “No.” “Okay, go ahead.”

I don’t think we had a bad meal on the trip, though we did eat catered hotel food two nights. (There’s a “cocktail party”, which is really more like a buffet dinner, on Thursday night of the Symposium, and a sit-down banquet to close things out on Saturday night. The hotel food was somewhat better than decent.) Mike and I ate at The Wild Thaiger on Tuesday night after we got in, and I thought that was very good (I had the Mi Dang and we split an order of Dragon Eggz). Wednesday night we took a couple of my friends to the Barrio Cafe, which was another solid choice that everyone loved. Friday night we took a larger group to Giuseppe’s on 28th, which was also universally beloved by everyone who went.

(MtM picked all the restaurants. His secret: he picks places that have been on “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives”.)

I heartily endorse all three of these restaurants, and The Old German Bakery and Restaurant in Fredericksburg.

We took advantage of one of the slower days to go visit some bookstores and some gun stores. The one bookstore we visited (Bookmans) I didn’t buy anything at, though I did think it was a good store. Tombstone Tactical was more of a modern firearms store. They had good prices on new guns, but I didn’t find anything I wanted. Legendary Guns, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of funky mixed gun shop I love. And I bought some books there.

We took I-10 coming back, and stopped for dinner at the Cattleman’s Steakhouse in Fabens (also heartily endorsed), staying overnight at the Hotel El Capitan before the final push back to Austin the following day.

Thanks to MtM for driving, and to everyone who attended the Symposium. Next year: back to Tulsa (which is not that far).

Posted in Beef, Books, Endorsements, Food, Guns, Smith and Wesson, Travel | Comments Closed

Happy Gavrilo Princip Day!

Wednesday, June 28th, 2023

It almost got past me again this year, but I made a spectacular last minute catch.

Please observe a moment of silence in honor of the late guffaw.

On a semi-related note, especially given past comments about Barbara Tuchman: I recently read The Zimmermann Telegram, and that’s a swell book that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Posted in Books, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 22, 2023.

Thursday, June 22nd, 2023

Still alive, just having more fun than humans should be allowed to have.

I did want to note the passing of Henry Petroski. I read To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Also: Teresa Taylor, of BH Surfers and “Slacker” notoriety.

Posted in Books, Geek, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 16, 2023.

Friday, June 16th, 2023

Daniel Ellsberg, notorious leaker.

The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people — plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.
It led to illegal countermeasures by the White House to discredit Mr. Ellsberg, halt leaks of government information and attack perceived political enemies, forming a constellation of crimes known as the Watergate scandal that led to the disgrace and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.
And it set up a First Amendment confrontation between the Nixon administration and The New York Times, whose publication of the papers was denounced by the government as an act of espionage that jeopardized national security. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the freedom of the press.
Mr. Ellsberg was charged with espionage, conspiracy and other crimes and tried in federal court in Los Angeles. But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Brett Hadley, actor. Other credits include “The Rockford Files”, “McMillan and Wife”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, and “The F.B.I.”.

Richard Severo, NYT reporter with an interesting backstory.

…while reporting for The Times’s science section, Mr. Severo ran afoul of his bosses when he decided to write a book drawn from his articles about a patient with neurofibromatosis — known as the “Elephant Man” disease — whose face was reconfigured after grueling surgery.
Accounts of what happened next vary, but The Times, through its publishing subsidiary Times Books, was said to have claimed first rights to the book because it was based on Mr. Severo’s work for the newspaper. Mr. Severo, however, through his agent, had already begun auctioning the rights to other publishers. Times Books eventually bid $37,500 (about $110,000 in today’s dollars), but Harper & Row, with an offer of $50,000 (about $145,000) won the rights.

The paper of record reassigned Mr. Severo to the metropolitan desk, which he considered to be a demotion and retaliatory behavior.

Four years of arbitration hearings ensued, during which Mr. Severo took an unpaid leave. Along the way an internal rebellion was mounted by a cadre of Pulitzer Prize winners when management demanded that Mr. Severo hand over his diaries and other personal papers. In the end, in September 1988, an arbitrator ruled in The Times’s favor.
Ending his leave, Mr. Severo returned and accepted the transfer to the metropolitan desk. He was later assigned to the obituaries desk, where he prepared many in-depth obituaries about luminaries in advance of their deaths.

According to the obit, current NYT policy is: reporters have to notify the paper in advance if they plan to write a book based on their work, and they are not allowed to accept a bid from another publisher until the NYT decides if they want to make a “competitive offer”.

Review of Lisa H: The True Story of an Extraordinary and Courageous Woman by the late and sorely missed David Shaw for the LAT. You can find used copies on Amazon cheap.

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

Obit watch: June 15, 2023.

Thursday, June 15th, 2023

Glenda Jackson. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “T.Bag’s Christmas Ding Dong”, “The Patricia Neal Story” (she played Patricia Neal), and “The Nelson Affair”.

Robert Gottlieb, noted editor.

Mr. Gottlieb edited novels by, among many others, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing and Chaim Potok; science fiction by Michael Crichton and Ray Bradbury; histories by Antonia Fraser and Barbara Tuchman; memoirs by former President Bill Clinton and Katharine Graham, the former publisher of The Washington Post; and works by Jessica Mitford and Anthony Burgess.

…

Then, in 1987, in an abrupt career change from the relative anonymity and serenity of book publishing, Mr. Gottlieb was named the third editor in the 62-year history of The New Yorker, one of American journalism’s highest-profile jobs. He replaced William Shawn, the magazine’s legendary editor for 35 years, who had succeeded the founding editor, Harold Ross.

…

His memoir offered a highlight reel of snarky critiques of authors — the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (“a snob”), Ms. Tuchman (“her sense of entitlement was sometimes hard to deal with”), William Gaddis (“unrelentingly disgruntled”), Roald Dahl (“erratic and churlish”).
“He wasn’t just an editor, he was the editor,” Mr. le Carré told The Times. “I never had an editor to touch him, in any country — nobody who could compare with him.” He noted that Mr. Gottlieb, using No. 2 pencils to mark up manuscripts, often signaled changes with hieroglyphics in the margins: a wavy line for language too florid, ellipses or question marks advising a writer to “think harder and try again.”

…

Mr. Gottlieb joined Knopf in 1968 as vice president and editor in chief. He edited Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974), cutting 400,000 words from a million-word manuscript with the author fuming at his elbow. Despite the brutal cuts, their collaboration endured for five decades and became the subject of a 2022 documentary, “Turn Every Page,” directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Mr. Gottlieb’s daughter.
“I have never encountered a publisher or editor with a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do — and how to help him do it,” Mr. Caro said in a statement on Mr. Gottlieb’s death.
Flashing his range, Mr. Gottlieb also edited “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life” (1981), by Henry Beard, ghosting for the Muppets starlet, and Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” (1988), which prompted the outraged Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa urging Muslims to kill the author.

LeAnn Mueller, co-owner of the highly regarded Austin barbecue restaurant la Barbecue and member of the prominent Mueller barbecue family. She was 51.

I have not seen any updates on the criminal case against the la Barbecue owners. The only obit I’ve found that even mentions it is from the Austin Chronicle.

Jim Turner, former kicker for the Jets.

Turner played professional football for 16 years, with the Jets from 1964 to 1970 and the Broncos from 1971 to 1979. In the 1968-69 season, he kicked 34 field goals and scored 145 points, setting records that stood until 1983, when the New York Giants kicker Ali Haji-Sheikh broke the first and the Washington Redskins kicker Mark Moseley broke the second.

…

The most memorable game of Turner’s career was the Jets’s face-off against the Baltimore Colts on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 1969.
The Colts belonged to the older and better established National Football League, while the Jets were part of its upstart competitor, the American Football League. The Super Bowl, held for the first time in 1967, then pitted the best team from each league against the other.
The Colts, led by quarterback Johnny Unitas and coach Don Shula, had beaten the powerhouse Green Bay Packers, winners of the previous two Super Bowls, en route to qualifying for the 1969 championship.
While Unitas and Shula epitomized the stoic masculinity that many fans associated with football, Namath, the Jets’ quarterback, nicknamed Broadway Joe, was a figure of loudmouth swagger, and none of his public comments had ever seemed less creditable than his guarantee that the Jets would become the first A.F.L. team to win the Super Bowl by beating the Colts.
Namath played well — completing 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards, earning him the Most Valuable Player Award — but it was Turner, a decidedly Off Off Broadway figure, who was the decisive player. He provided the Jets with their margin of victory and alone scored more points than the Colts did.

…

Namath’s prediction came true, and the Jets won, 16-7.

Homer Jones, wide receiver for the New York Football Giants.

Jones was a member of the Giants from 1964-1969, where he was named to the Pro Bowl in 1967 and 1968.
“Homer Jones had a unique combination of speed and power and was a threat to score whenever he touched the ball,” said John Mara, the Giants president and chief executive officer.
“He was one of the first players (if not the first) to spike the ball in the end zone after scoring a touchdown and he quickly became a fan favorite. I remember him as an easygoing, friendly individual who was well liked by his teammates and coaches.”

…

Jones, who played six seasons with Big Blue, ranks sixth all-time among Giants receivers with 4,845 receiving yards and 35 touchdowns.

Not quite an obit, but Nautilus reran a nice article about Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute by one of his co-workers.

The entrance to SFI also serves as a mail room. When I first entered the building there was behind the front desk a permanent massif of book boxes. It was clear that the boxes were constantly cleared and just as quickly replenished. In this way the boxes achieved a dynamical equilibrium. In the study of complex systems this is called self-organized criticality and was made famous as an explanation for the constant gradient of sand piles and the faces of sand dunes.
The agent of this critical state was Cormac, who busied himself digging—like Kobo Abe’s entomologist in Women in the Dunes—to ensure balance at SFI and the growth of his library.

Posted in Beef, Books, Food, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 14, 2023.

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023

Cormac McCarthy. NYT (archived). “Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner” (archived). THR. Publisher’s Weekly.

Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.
“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

I can’t find it now, but I saw the same story recounted in a tweet somewhere: in that version, the McCarthy’s were so poor, they couldn’t afford toothpaste. And that explains why she became the second ex-Mrs. McCarthy.

Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.

Noted:

A correction was made on June 13, 2023: An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to El Paso, where Mr. McCarthy moved in 1976. It is in Texas, not New Mexico.

Layers and layers of editors.

This tableau inspired one of the funniest pieces of wildcat food criticism I’ve ever read. The essay, by Helen Craig, was titled “A Meat Processing Professional Reviews Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’” It ran in 2014 on a website called The Toast.
Craig pointed out that such a “living larder” is wasteful. Every day they’re alive, she wrote, “these people will be depreciating in calorific value.” Craig suggested, as any good butcher would, that “the ribs will be good fresh, and a pickling and brining process for the thighs and haunches should result in a product that is similar to ham.”

“The Toast” essay (archived).

“Unless you have an old rancid stockpot that you can just sort of throw every horrible thing into — rotten turnips, dead cats, whatever — and let it simmer for about a month — you’re at a real disadvantage,” he says.

So it sometimes goes in McCarthy’s universe. He goes to great lengths to get details right, then throws his readers a curveball. After all, it’s fiction. Asked about the fettuccine via his publicist (because how could I not?), McCarthy responded, in pure Bobby Western fashion: “No goddamn clams! Put a note at the bottom of the page!”

Jacques Rozier, who the NYT describes as the “last of the French New Wave Directors”.

John Romita Sr., Marvel comics artist.

In 1966, Romita began a five-year run working Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee on The Amazing Spider-Man. He took over for artist Steve Ditko, who had created the famed webslinger with Lee in 1961 before leaving in a spat with the comic book legend.
Romita’s run on Spider-Man saw the introduction of a number of the property’s most memorable characters, including Spidey love interest Mary Jane Watson and crime boss Kingpin; it was during Romita’s time as artist that Spider-Man overtook Fantastic Four to become Marvel’s top-seller, with the masked man becoming the face of the company.

Patrick Gasienica, Olympic ski jumper. He was 24, and died in a motorcycle accident.

Park Soo Ryun. She was the star of a Disney+ show, “Snowdrop”. I note this because she was 29, and her death kind of scares me:

Ryun slipped down a flight of stairs Sunday at a property on Jeju Island, South Korea’s largest island, where she was scheduled to perform, according to the Mirror.
The actress was reportedly taken to the hospital for emergency treatment and was pronounced brain dead by medics after attempts to revive her failed.

…

Fellow “Snowdrop” star Kim Mi-soo also died unexpectedly at age 29 last year.

Posted in Books, Food, Media, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

It never fails.

Tuesday, June 13th, 2023

You post the obit watch on your lunch hour. You’re thinking, “Oh, it looks like a slow day. No big news is going to break after lunch.”

Big news breaks after lunch.

Cormac McCarthy obits tomorrow. The NYT‘s current one is a kind of lengthy preliminary one (probably pulled from the files) with the standard “A full obituary will appear shortly.” tag.

Posted in Books, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 9, 2023.

Friday, June 9th, 2023

James G. Watt, former Secretary of the Interior and notorious Beach Boys hater.

As planning for the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall began, Mr. Watt said that pop-music groups retained in recent years had attracted “the wrong element” — presumably young people drinking and taking drugs. The Mall’s most prominent band had been the Beach Boys, popular since the 1960s.
Mr. Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist who did not smoke or drink alcohol, proposed the Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton, whose signature song was “Danke Schoen,” and military bands, saying they would better represent the patriotic, family-oriented themes he preferred.

…

After leaving the government, Mr. Watt was a lobbyist for builders seeking contracts from the Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1984 to 1986. In 1995, he was charged with 25 counts of perjury and obstructing justice by a federal grand jury investigating fraud and influence-peddling during his lobbying at HUD. But the prosecution’s case deteriorated, the felony charges were dropped and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor and was sentenced to a $5,000 fine and 500 hours of community service.

Carroll Cooley, historical and legal footnote, has passed away at 87.

Mr. Cooley was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department. In that capacity, he was the person who took Ernesto Miranda’s original confession.

He wasn’t handcuffed because he was not yet under arrest, Detective Cooley said during a speaking engagement in 2016 quoted in an article in The Arizona Republic, and he wasn’t told that he needed a lawyer because there was no legal requirement to do so.

…

The Miranda case was by far the most significant of Detective Cooley’s law enforcement career. Mr. Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping by a Superior Court jury in June 1963; the conviction was upheld nearly two years later by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that his confession was admissible despite his not having had a lawyer present.
In late 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review four cases, including Mr. Miranda’s, in which indigent men had confessed after being interrogated. The next year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Fifth Amendment required the police to advise suspects that they had the right to remain silent once they were in custody and to have an attorney present during interrogations. The rights, almost from the day of the decision, became known as the Miranda warning.
Mr. Miranda’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, but he was retried on rape and kidnapping charges and found guilty again in 1967. (The confession was not used in that trial.) He was paroled in 1972 and stabbed to death four years later in a barroom fight. After his death, it was reported that he had been trading on his legal celebrity by selling Miranda warning cards for $1.50 each.

…

In 1976, he defended his actions in the Miranda case to The Republic, saying that Mr. Miranda’s confession had been written voluntarily and that Mr. Miranda knew his rights.
“He was not un-knowledgeable about his rights,” he said. “He was an ex-convict and served a year in prison” — for auto theft — “and had been through the routine before.”

Noreen Nash, actress. Other credits include the original “Dragnet” TV series, “77 Sunset Strip”, and ‘Yancy Derringer”.

On the advice of her son, she decided to quit show biz in 1962 and went back to study, enrolling at UCLA and graduating in 1971 with a Bachelor’s Degree in history. In 1980, she published her first novel, ‘By Love Fulfilled’, set in the 16th century and following the life of a physician at the court of Catherine de Medici. This was followed by ‘Agnès Sorel, Mistress of Beauty’ in 2013 and an autobiographical work of recollections, ‘Titans of the Muses: When Henry Miller Met Jean Renoir’ in 2015.

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

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