Archive for May, 2019

« Older Entries

Obit watch: May 31, 2019.

Friday, May 31st, 2019

Leon Redbone has died. He was 127.

Well, that’s what the press release said. Most sources I see say he was 69, though Wikipedia footnotes that as “disputed”.

The “Variety” obit (hattip: Lawrence) is pretty good. If it seems like I’m giving Mr. Redbone short shrift, well, I don’t have a lot to say: I never really caught that particular gene. I’ve been told he was on “Prairie Home Companion” a lot, but since that show basically makes me want to stab myself in the thigh repeatedly with a spork…

Also among the dead: Thad Cochran, congressman for 45 years.

His 45-year tenure was the longest of any currently serving member of Congress. His 39 years in the Senate was the 10th-longest stretch in history, and he was that body’s third longest-serving incumbent, behind only Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah.

And finally, Claus von Bülow, who was not a murderer. Really. Two out of three courts said so.

Seriously, this was one of the great true crime circuses of the 1980s. Mr. von Bülow was charged with attempting to murder his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin. She went into hypoglycemic comas twice (in December of 1979 and December of 1980). She recovered the first time, but her second coma was irreversible.

Mr. von Bülow was convicted in his first trial, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. (His legal team included Alan Dershowitz, Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer, and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer.) He was tried a second time and acquitted.

I’m glossing over a lot of stuff here (because I don’t have time), including the testimony in the second trial from Truman Capote and Johnny Carson’s wife. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary, though you have to read both the Sunny and Claus articles. (There’s a great story in one of them about Norman Mailer and his wife attending a dinner party with Claus and Dershowitz. You have to read it: I won’t spoil the punchline.)

Sunny von Bülow never recovered from her second coma, and remained in a vegetative state until she died in 2008.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 30, 2019.

Thursday, May 30th, 2019

I haven’t found a print obituary to point to yet, but Lawrence tipped me off to a Facebook post: multiple award winning horror writer Dennis Etchison has passed on.

Also by way of Lawrence: Louis Levi Oakes, last of the Mohawk code talkers.

The veteran was one of 17 Mohawks from Akwesasne, which straddles the Quebec, Ontario and New York state borders, who received code-talker training while stationed in Louisiana.
Kanien’kéha, the Mohawk language, was one of 33 Indigenous languages used during the war to send encoded messages between Allied forces so enemies could not understand what was being said.

…

“I only knew Levi for a very short period of time, but he meant a tremendous amount to me,” said Marc Miller, parliamentary secretary to Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations. “I can only imagine what he meant to his family and his people who had the privilege of knowing him for far longer.
“Due to the secrecy of his mission in WW II, the extent of his contributions as a Mohawk code talker have only recently been known and honoured. My hope is that we continue to honour his memory and contributions in death much longer than we did in life.”

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

Obit watch: May 29, 2019.

Wednesday, May 29th, 2019

Tony Horwitz, prominent journalist and best-selling author. (Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes)

His wife, Geraldine Brooks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, said he had collapsed while walking in Chevy Chase, Md., and was declared dead at George Washington University Hospital. The cause has not yet been determined, she said.

He was only 60.

“Last week I saw my cardiologist,” Mr. Horwitz wrote in The Times last month. “He told me I drink too much.”
Mr. Horwitz acknowledged his occupational hazard, but made a case for what he called bar-stool democracy. His sojourn in the South, he said, had him discarding stereotypes and seeing blue-collar conservatives as “the three-dimensional individuals I drank and debated with in factory towns, Gulf Coast oil fields and distressed rural crossroads.”
He expressed the hope that they would remember him not as “one of those ‘coastal elites’ dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America,” he wrote, but “rather, as that guy from ‘up north’ who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down.”

Posted in Books, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 27, 2019.

Monday, May 27th, 2019

Bart Starr, one of the greatest of the Green Bay Packers. NYT.

Starr’s name may have been the most flamboyant thing about him. But he proved to be skilled, sly and, by at least one measure, incomparably successful: He won three N.F.L. championships (for the seasons played in 1961, ’62 and ’65) in the pre-Super Bowl era, and then the first two Super Bowls, in January of 1967 and ’68. That Packers’ run of N.F.L. championships helped bring new attention to professional football as it moved into the Super Bowl era. (With his victory in 2019, Tom Brady has won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots.)
Starr was named the league’s most valuable player in 1966 and received the same honor in Super Bowls I and II. He was selected to the Pro Bowl four times. And on a team known for running — with the flashy Paul Hornung and the rugged Jim Taylor (who died in October) — Starr was one of the league’s most efficient passers. He led the N.F.L. in that crucial category in three seasons and, on average, for all of the 1960s — even though his rival Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts was often viewed as better. Starr set career records for completion percentage, 57.4, and consecutive passes without an interception, 294.

Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist.

Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Dr. Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces — subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts. Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.
In a moment of whimsy, Dr. Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.
Looking deeper, Dr. Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components. He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”

Edmund Morris, biographer. I’m slowly working my way through his Theodore Roosevelt biographies, and I’d argue he’s at least as famous for those as he is for Dutch:

The columnist George Will attacked “Dutch” as “dishonorable,” and the writer Joan Didion accused Mr. Morris of resorting to the fictional device to conceal his own inadequacies as a fact-gatherer.
One of his toughest critics, Michiko Kakutani of The Times, called the book a “loony hodgepodge of fact and fiction” about a president that mimicked “the very blurring of reality and state-managed illusion that that president was often accused of perpetrating.”

No judgment intended here: this is in last place because it is breaking news. Bill Buckner passed away a short time ago.

Buckner was dependable at the plate, registering a .300 batting average in seven seasons and accumulating 2,715 hits and 174 home runs during his two decades in the Major Leagues. He won the National League’s batting title in 1980 and was an All-Star in 1981, when he was with the Chicago Cubs.

He was most famous, unfortunately, for bobbling a play during game 6 of the World Series in 1986, costing the Red Sox the game and probably the Series. But there are other Sox fans who can speak with more authority on Mr. Buckner and his legacy.

Posted in Books, NFL, Obits, Physics, Politics, Science, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 23, 2019.

Thursday, May 23rd, 2019

Dick Ellis, noted local TV anchorman and journalist.

Former KVUE anchor Judy Maggio, who sat next to Ellis at the anchor desk in the 1980s, said she considered Ellis a brother.
“We went through the golden years of TV together,” she said. “He never stopped wanting to be a newsman. He never stopped wanting to be a journalist. He just loved it.”

…

“From elections to tragedies, he told Austin about pivotal moments,” longtime Austin radio host Bob Cole said. “He helped define our community, not just with information but with a real human quality. People didn’t just trust him, they loved him.”

KVUE.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Historical note, semi-suitable for use in schools…

Thursday, May 23rd, 2019

…at least, if you want to teach kids that crime does not pay.

85 years ago today, Bonnie and Clyde got turned into chunky salsa by Frank Hamer and his posse.

FBI page: “At the time they were killed in 1934, they were believed to have committed 13 murders and several robberies and burglaries.” Those 13 murders include several police officers: these were not nice people.

I haven’t been able to get a copy of Boessenecker’s book yet, or watch “The Highwaymen”, but both are on my list.

Posted in History, Law | Comments Closed

Photo of the day.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019

Technically, this is a couple of days old, and I’m not going to reproduce it here, out of respect for the NYT‘s intellectual property rights.

But if you ever wanted to see a large photo of Thomas Harris (yes, the Hannibal guy) holding a live possum named Bruce…here you go.

Posted in Books, Mammals, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 22, 2019.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019

Stanton T. Friedman, UFOlogist.

Thomas Silverstein is dead.

Mr. Silverstein was serving three consecutive life terms for the killing of two fellow prisoners and a guard while behind bars. He had been incarcerated continuously since 1975, originally on an armed robbery conviction. He was said to have joined the Aryan Brotherhood, the white nationalist prison gang, while serving time at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.
He was in solitary confinement for 36 years, more than half his life. The American Civil Liberties Union has cited his case in its campaign against long-term solitary confinement.

More:

In 1981, Mr. Silverstein and another inmate, Clayton Fountain, were convicted of murdering Robert Chappelle, a member of the D.C. Blacks prison gang. During the trial, the gang’s national leader, Raymond (Cadillac) Smith, was transferred to Marion, apparently intent on killing Mr. Silverstein in revenge. (Prison officials, Mr. Silverstein said later, were aware of the threats but “didn’t take any action to make me safe.”)
Mr. Silverstein and Mr. Fountain got to Mr. Smith first, stabbing him 67 times with makeshift weapons, then dragging his body along prison catwalks as an object lesson. Mr. Silverstein received two more life sentences, for the murders of Mr. Chappelle and Mr. Smith. He insisted that he was innocent of the Chappelle murder and that he had killed Mr. Smith in self-defense.
By 1983 Mr. Silverstein had taken up art, teaching himself and becoming accomplished at it. One day, on his way back from showering, another prisoner handed him another makeshift knife and a homemade key. Using it, he managed to unlock his handcuffs and then fatally stabbed Merle E. Clutts, an unarmed correction officer, about 40 times.

His running buddy Mr. Fountain killed another guard that same day. These incidents are (at least in part) what prompted the construction of the SuperMax prison in Colorado.

Mildly interesting fact that I ran across last night: Clayton Fountain, who was also confined in solitary, took theology courses, converted to Catholicism, and was accepted as a lay brother by a Trappist order after his death.

Posted in Geek, Law, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 21, 2019.

Tuesday, May 21st, 2019

Niki Lauda, one of the greatest racing drivers ever.

In his 17-year career (1969-1985) in the open cockpit of Porsches, Ferraris, McLarens and other high-tech torpedoes on wheels, mostly in Formula One competition, Lauda won 25 Grand Prix races. Points are awarded to the top six finishers in a race, and by amassing the highest point total in 16 authorized races, Lauda won the Formula One world driving championships in 1975, 1977 and 1984.
Since the crowns were first awarded in 1950, only five drivers have surpassed Lauda’s three titles. The record, seven, was set by Michael Schumacher, of Germany, between 1994 and 2004.

I wasn’t an avid follower of Formula 1, but I kind of liked Mr. Lauda. Especially after reading about him in Reader’s Digest. (I want to say it was a “Drama In Real Life”.)

But in his next race, the German Grand Prix at Nürburgring, a 14-mile, 76-curve course, things went drastically wrong for Lauda and his 1,300-pound blood-red Ferrari.
It had rained and he hit a slippery patch at 140 miles per hour. He spun out, broke through a restraining fence that snagged and tore away his helmet, then hit an embankment and bounced back onto the track, where he was hit by several following cars. His ruptured fuel tank burst into flames that engulfed him in the cockpit.
By the time three other drivers pulled him from the wreckage, he had severe burns of the face, head and hands, a concussion, a broken collarbone and other fractures. His right ear was badly burned. Noxious smoke and gases from the car’s burning interior seared his lungs. He was rushed to a hospital in a coma, then to a burn center, seemingly near death.
On Lauda’s third day in intensive care, a Roman Catholic priest gave him the last rites of the church. Lauda was conscious, and the rites only made him angry. “I kept telling myself, if he wants to do that, O.K., but I’m not quitting,” Lauda told Newsday after he began a remarkable recovery.
He had a series of operations and skin grafts that left permanent scarring on his head. He lost part of his right ear, the hair on the right side of his head, his eyebrows and both eyelids. He chose to limit reconstructive surgery to the eyelids, and thereafter wore a red baseball cap to cover the worst disfigurements. But he began talking, walking and making plans for his return to racing.

See how powerful the last rites are? Either the person dies in a state of grace, or they get real angry and tell Death, “Not today, mofo.”

But I digress. Six weeks after the accident, Mr. Lauda finished fourth in the Italian Grand Prix. He finished the 1976 season in second place behind James Hunt, and won the championship in 1977.

For many years, Lauda championed safer racecar and track designs, and urged tighter controls over driving conditions and rules governing race organizers.
“Racing on substandard tracks or in unsafe weather doesn’t test courage,” Lauda told The Boston Globe in 1977. “At present, some of the Grand Prix circuits we drivers are asked to race on do not fulfill the most primitive safety requirements. Also, the decision to call off or stop a race can’t be left entirely to the organizers, who too often put prestige before the safety of the drivers. We need independent experts whose authority should be supreme.”

More:

Lauda, a licensed commercial pilot, founded and for years ran his own airline, Lauda Air, first as a charter, then as a scheduled carrier from Austria to Southeast Asia, Australia and the Americas. He sometimes piloted his airline’s flights. In 1991, a Lauda Air jetliner crashed in Thailand, killing all 223 people on board. Lauda was personally involved in the investigation, which was ruled an accident.

Lauda Air 004 crash from Wikipedia. This is one of those crashes that’s always fascinated and scared me: it seems unclear (the flight data recorder was badly damaged), but the apparent cause of the crash was that the thrust reverser on one engine deployed in flight causing the pilots to lose control, and the aircraft to break up.

“Personally involved” seems like a bit of an understatement. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Lauda was basically in Boeing’s face:

Lauda attempted the flight in the simulator 15 times, and in every instance he was unable to recover. He asked Boeing to issue a statement, but the legal department said it could not be issued because it would take three months to adjust the wording. Lauda asked for a press conference the following day, and told Boeing that if it was possible to recover, he would be willing to fly on a 767 with two pilots and have the thrust reverser deploy in air. Boeing told Lauda that it was not possible, so he asked Boeing to issue a statement saying that it would not be survivable, and Boeing issued it.

He established Lauda Air as a charter service in 1979, and in 1987 began scheduled flights. He sold Lauda Air in 1999. In 2003 he started a new budget airline, Niki, and often piloted its flights twice a week. It merged with Air Berlin in 2011. In 2016, he took over another charter airline, calling it Lauda Motion.

I would have liked to have met Mr. Lauda. He seems like another one of those kind of men they just don’t make these days.

Posted in Obits, Planes, Religion, Sports | Comments Closed

Sports firings.

Monday, May 20th, 2019

It is…well, not exactly “rare”, but at least uncommon for a player to be thrown out of a league completely. The most recent example I can think of before last week was Johnny Manziel’s CFL expulsion.

But we had two last week.

Lawrence pointed out that Tyreke Evans had been “dismissed and disqualified” from the NBA. Mr. Evans was a guard with the Indiana Pacers last season: his dismissal was for unspecified violations of the NBA’s anti-drug policy.

He can apply for reinstatement in two years, but that will require approval from both the NBA and the player’s association. More from ESPN.

Meanwhile, in Australia (we love you, amen) rugby player Israel Folau had his contract voided for a “high level breach of the players’ Code of Conduct”.

Apparently the breach involved Folau posting a Bible verse that condemned “homosexuals” as well as “drunks, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolators” on social media. (I’m not clear if this was a tweet or an Instagram post. I’m also not clear if the post is still up.)

Rod Dreher put up a couple of posts last week about this, and there’s lively discussion on both sides in the comments. He also suggests that Folau’s punishment may have been a factor in the election results. More on those from everyone’s favorite political blogger.

I’m not sure what side I come down on in the Folau situation, though I do think the parallels to Kapernick made by some of the commenters are instructive. Then again, as I’ve also said, if Kapernick could produce at the level of a Tom Brady or Drew Brees for an NFL team, nobody would give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what he said or thought. I don’t know enough about rugby to know if Folau is that kind of star player.

Posted in Firings, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 20, 2019.

Monday, May 20th, 2019

Machiko Kyo, noted Japanese actress.

Her US career was limited to “Teahouse of the August Moon”, but she was in a lot of significant Japanese film: Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu“, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s “Gate of Hell“, and she was the female lead in Kurosawa’s “Rashomon“.

During rehearsals, Kurosawa recalled, he had been “left speechless” by Ms. Kyo’s dedication to learning her craft.
“She came in to where I was sleeping in the morning and sat down with the script in hand,” he wrote in “Something Like an Autobiography” (1982), his memoir. “‘Please teach me what to do,’ she requested, and I lay there amazed.”

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 18, 2019.

Saturday, May 18th, 2019

Herman Wouk, noted author. (The Caine Mutiny, adapted into the Humphrey Bogart movie and a Broadway play, “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial”. The Winds of War, basis for the ABC mini-series. War and Remembrance, basis for another ABC mini-series.)

And the list goes on. He was quite prolific, and died just short of 104.

“In the long run justice is done,” he told Writer’s Digest in 1966. “In the short run geniuses, minor writers and mountebanks alike take their chance. Imaginative writing is a wonderful way of life, and no man who can live by it should ask for more.”

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

« Older Entries