Archive for October 21st, 2013

1,000 spoons when all you need is a knife.

Monday, October 21st, 2013

Bud Adams, owner of the Tennessee Titans, previously known as the Houston Oilers, and the man who fired Bum Philips and traded Earl Campbell for a “sack of doorknobs” (to steal Lawrence‘s phrase), has passed away at 90.

Wow. What timing. I’ll wait until tomorrow and see if there’s anything amusing in the HouChron.

(Subject line hattip.)

(Required link for any mention of “Ironic”.)

Edited to add: Oh, why wait?

The last NFL game Bud Adams attended was the Tennessee Titans’ overtime loss to the Texans on Sept. 15.

HouChron obit.

Edited to add 2:

A source said early indications are Adams’ death was of natural causes, but the source stressed the “early indications” aspect.

I realize he didn’t die under a doctor’s care, and protocol must be followed, but that’s just oddly phrased to me. I guess they just want to make sure he wasn’t whacked by a disgruntled Oilers fan? Speaking of which…

Adams lived alone and was found in the office at his River Oaks home. He had not been seen since Saturday, Houston police at the home said.

Which is mildly interesting, since the HouChron published a tribute to Bum from “Tennessee Titans owner K.S. ‘Bud’ Adams Jr. and the Titans organization” on Saturday morning. It seems like they were posting tributes to Bum as quickly as they got them and could edit them. Wouldn’t it be even more deeply “ironic” if Bud’s last act in life was writing a tribute to the man he fired?

Posted in Clippings, NFL, Obits | 1 Comment »

Making book.

Monday, October 21st, 2013

Not much going on today, so here’s a few links I found interesting.

  1. Jim Sherman at the HouChron‘s “Bookish” blog did a very nice tribute to George V. Higgins back in August. You may remember the late Mr. Higgins for The Friends of Eddie Coyle and other crime novels….

    No American novelist has ever mastered dialogue the way Higgins did. If anything, he may have had too fine an ear for the mainstream. I read Eddie Coyle when I was a Midwestern high school student, and I just didn’t get it. Then I spent 10 weeks in boot camp in the company of 20 or teenage boys from Southie and when I revisited the novel it made much more sense: Oh, that’s why he put that comma there! That’s why he murdered the verb tense deader than a stool pigeon! That’s the way those people talk!

  2. I don’t much like talking about religion, or my religious beliefs, here. But my brother forwarded me an article over the weekend that I’m going to make something of an exception for: “‘Mr. Spock goes to church’: How one Christian copes with Asperger’s syndrome“. I’m a little verklempt, so feel free to talk about this one in the comments.
  3. Not bookmark fodder, but I did want to point this one out: this year is the 100th anniversary of the introduction of Camel cigarettes, which inspires one LAT writer to invective. I don’t smoke cigarettes. I do smoke a very occasional cigar. But every time I read an article like this one, or see one of those TheTruth commercials, I’m tempted to start smoking just to spite these people.

    Robert N. Proctor is a professor of the history of science at Stanford University and the author of “Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition.”

    “the case for abolition”? We’ve seen how well prohibition worked for alcohol. We see how well it works for marijuana. If you outlaw cigarettes, I promise you: the resulting chaos will make Prohibition and the War on (Some) Drugs look like a Sunday School picnic.

Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Clippings | Comments Closed