Archive for May, 2019

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Bagatelle (#12)

Friday, May 17th, 2019

With the Preakness Stakes running this weekend, I got to wondering:

The iconic cocktail of the Kentucky Derby is a mint julep, right? What’s the iconic cocktail of the Preakness? And the Belmont?

Since the Preakness is run in Baltimore (for now) I would have expected the iconic cocktail to be heroin. Or a 40 in a brown paper bag.

According to Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate information, I may not have been too far off. Until 2009, the race was “bring your own booze”, “formerly including kegs of beer but in the 2000s restricted to all the beer cans a person could carry in a cooler.” After 2009, something called “InfieldFest” was established, where you could buy a beer mug with unlimited refills.

But there is an official cocktail: the Black-Eyed Susan, “made with vodka, St-Germain liqueur and pineapple, lime and orange juices.” Here’s a 2018 article from Newsweek that calls for “one part bourbon, one part vodka, one part peach schnapps, two parts orange juice and two parts sour mix”, shaken with ice and served over crushed ice “with an orange wedge and cherries for garnish”. Newsweek also links to recipes from “US Racing” and the Washington Post if you want to descend down that rabbit hole.

And the Belmont Stakes? Recent history is troubled. It appears that up until 1997, the official drink was something called the “White Carnation“. In 1997, the official drink changed to the “Belmont Breeze“. That, in turn, got replaced by the “Belmont Jewel” in 2011, which at least has the virtue of simplicity.

Tragically, I have plans for Saturday, so I can’t drink my way through the Preakness. But my readers are welcome to, if they wish. Just don’t drink and race: your horse might hit a bump and spill your drink.

Posted in Bagatelle, Horses, Mixology | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 17, 2019.

Friday, May 17th, 2019

I.M. Pei. He was 102, and it sounds like he led a full rich life right up to the very end.

In retirement, Mr. Pei remained eager for news of both architecture and art and, until his last year, continued to make the occasional trip downtown to lunch with friends and consume his share of red Bordeaux.

Grumpy Cat.

Posted in Art, Mammals, Museums, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 16, 2019.

Thursday, May 16th, 2019

Dax Cowart passed away on April 28th.

The name may be familiar to some of you, for reasons I’ll get into shortly. For the rest: Mr. Cowart was horribly burned in an explosion in 1973.

Mr. Cowart lost both eyes, most of his nose, lips, eyelids and ears and all of his fingers, except for a portion of his left thumb. After multiple surgeries and skin grafts, his face was reconstructed, along with blue plastic eyes. After 14 months of hospitalization, he was released into his mother’s care.

During his treatment, he repeatedly requested that the doctors stop treating him and allow him to die. The doctors refused to honor his wishes.

“I didn’t feel his reaction — ‘I want to die’ — indicated what he really wanted,” Dr. Charles Baxter, an innovator in burn treatment who oversaw much of Mr. Cowart’s care (in 1963 he had tried to save President John F. Kennedy’s life at Parkland Memorial), was quoted as saying in The Sun. “He sort of was like the child who doesn’t want the shot but then holds out his arm to get it.”
Mr. Cowart’s mother, Ada, and the Cowart family lawyer, who were in charge of his care, wanted him to continue treatments, even after Robert B. White, a prominent psychiatrist, declared that he was mentally competent.

After his recovery, Mr. Cowart went on to earn a law degree from Texas Tech. He also became a leading advocate for patient’s rights.

In the face of what he saw as medical paternalism, he argued that patients should have more autonomy over what treatments they receive and a choice in whether they even receive any treatment at all.
In this he joined an ethical debate that led him to lecture at graduate schools, bioethics conferences and hospitals. His story inspired a book of medical and philosophical essays by others under the title “Dax’s Case.” Articles about him were published. The ABC News program “20/20” did a segment about him. And he was the subject of documentaries, “Please Let Me Die” (1974) and “Dax’s Case” (1984).

…

“I’m enjoying life now, and it feels good to be alive,” he said at the end of “Dax’s Case.” “I still feel that it was wrong to force me to undergo what I had to to be alive.
“To make this clear,” he added, “if the same thing were to occur tomorrow, and knowing that I could reach this point, I would still not want to be forced to undergo the pain and agony that I had to undergo to be alive now. I would want that choice to lie entirely with myself and no others.”

Posted in Obits | Comments Closed

When you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way…

Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

…at least, until the team fires you for being bad at your job.

Mike Maccagnan out as general manager. Also, Brian Heimerdinger out as VP of Player Personnel.

Maccagnan will leave with a 24-40 record, zero playoff appearances and the lowest winning percentage of any GM in franchise history who was employed more than two years. The Jets were one of the worst drafting teams in the NFL during his tenure and whiffed on multiple big free agent contracts.

Hattip: Lawrence. ESPN.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch+

Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

Isaac Kappy apparently committed suicide on Monday. He was 42 years old, and had parts in “Beerfest”, “Terminator: Salvation”, and “Thor”.

I don’t want to talk much more about this because I’m not sure I can without sounding like a jerk, or seeming to make light of a tragedy, so I’m going to link to the article Lawrence sent me instead. It sounds to me like he had problems, but treatable ones.

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

In other news, this is an actual headline from NBC News:

Georgia professor found dead near hot tub of man who kills himself, another man is arrested

If you’re having trouble parsing that, here’s the first paragraph:

A car salesman was charged Monday in the strangulation death of a University of Georgia professor who was found dead near a hot tub at the home of a man who killed himself after police arrived at the scene.

Fortunately, the article is short, and reading the entire thing lends some clarity to the situation and the allegations. This leaps out at me, though:

After placing Lillard in a patrol car, officers told Heindel that he would be separated from Lillard and interviewed, Massee said. Then they left him alone.
Heindel then went into his house and shot himself in his master bathroom, Massee said.

I’m not 100% sure I agree with your police work there, Lou. Good on the cops for sensing “the scene looked a little inappropriate”, but leaving a suspect unsupervised and in a position to grab a gun and kill himself?

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Quick obit watch update.

Wednesday, May 15th, 2019

The NYT updated their Tim Conway obit in place (and included the dentist sketch, which they didn’t previously).

I was going to link to the LAT obit…but I couldn’t find one. Mr. Conway’s death (in LA) got no play on the LAT homepage. I finally found, by searching the site, that they’d run the generic AP obit and apparently a few photos, but all of this was buried.

Cleveland Plain Dealer.

“Here’s this fellow from this town outside of Cleveland, Chagrin Falls,” Harvey Korman said of his friend and “Carol Burnett Show” co-star before they brought their “Together Again’’ show to Cleveland’s Palace Theatre in 2003. “His mother is a Rumanian seamstress. His father is an Irish groom. And their issue, one child, is this comedy genius. How does that happen? He is indeed one of the most inventive and innovative comedy minds in our business.
“I truly believe he was born too late. I think if he were born in the era of the Chaplins, the Keatons and the Lloyds, he would have been right up there with the great silent clowns.”

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Not exactly an obit watch…

Tuesday, May 14th, 2019

…but I wanted to post this now, in memory of Tim Conway. Fuller obits will come, probably tomorrow.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 14, 2019.

Tuesday, May 14th, 2019

Robert Maxwell, the kind of badass that’s rare these days.

September 7, 1944:

Technician Fifth Grade Maxwell and a few other G.I.s were on observation duty outside their battalion headquarters near the city of Besançon in eastern France when German soldiers got within yards of their outpost and opened fire.
The Germans blasted away with automatic weapons and even antiaircraft guns, seeking to destroy the stone house where the battalion commanders were stationed. The G.I.s on sentry duty were armed only with .45-caliber automatic pistols, but they fired back.
And then a grenade was hurled over the fence in front of the house’s courtyard and landed beside Technician Maxwell. Using an Army blanket for protection, he fell on the grenade.

…

The grenade exploded, knocking him unconscious, tearing away part of one foot and peppering his head and left arm with shrapnel. World War II was over for Technician Maxwell, but he received the Medal of Honor. It cited him for inspiring his fellow G.I.s to join with him in a firefight that delayed the German onslaught and then, having “unhesitatingly hurled himself squarely upon’’ the grenade, “using his blanket and his unprotected body to absorb the full force of the explosion.”
The citation called it an “act of instantaneous heroism” that “permanently maimed” him but “saved the lives of his comrades.”

Mr. Maxwell was 98 when he passed away Saturday. According to the NYT obit, there are three Medal of Honor recipients from WWII that are still alive.

Fleming Begaye Sr., one of the Navajo code talkers.

Mr. Begaye survived the Battle of Tarawa, a costly offensive on a Japanese-held Pacific atoll that took place in 1943. Out of 18,000 Marines who landed on Betio, more than 1,000 died.
“His landing craft was blown up and he literally had to swim to the beach to survive,” Mr. [Peter] MacDonald [also a code talker – DB] said of Mr. Begaye at the White House ceremony.
Mr. Begaye landed on Tinian, one of the Mariana Islands, in 1944 and was “shot up real badly,” Mr. MacDonald said. He spent a year in a naval hospital.

…

“He was proud to serve his country,” Ms. [Theodosia] Ott [his granddaughter – DB] said. “He said, ‘It was already our country anyway; we were just helping to make sure it stayed our country.’”

César González Barrón, aka “Silver King“, died last Saturday. Silver King was a lucha libre wrestler, who also played “Ramses” in “Nacho Libre”. He died during a match in London against “Youth Warrior” (Juventud Guerrera).

Mr. González Barrón was a star in Mexican wrestling, known as lucha libre, in which combatants wear elaborate masks and take on outlandish personas.
At the event in London, called the Greatest Show of Lucha Libre, Mr. González Barrón had reprised his role as the evil Ramses.
He was the son of a famous wrestler known as Dr. Wagner, and he had been wrestling professionally since 1985, according to his profile on the film website IMDB. During his career, he was a CMLL World Heavyweight champion, an AAA World Tag Team champion and had won many other championships.

Goro Shimura, mathematician, passed away about a week ago.

In 1955, Yutaka Taniyama, a colleague and friend of Dr. Shimura’s, posed some questions about mathematical objects called elliptic curves. Dr. Shimura helped refine Dr. Taniyama’s speculations into an assertion now known as the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

Elliptic curves are pretty important to modern cryptography, and Mr. Shimura’s work is foundational in that area. But there’s more to the story:

In 1986, Kenneth Ribet of the University of California, Berkeley, proved an intriguing connection: If Fermat’s Last Theorem were wrong, and there indeed existed a set of integers that fit the equation, that would generate an elliptic curve that violated the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

So basically, this reduced the problem of proving Fermat’s Last Theorem to proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture.

In the 1990s, Andrew Wiles, then also at Princeton, figured out how to do just that, and Fermat’s Last Theorem had finally been proved true.

The story I’ve heard (I wasn’t there) is that Wiles spent the better part of two days going through his proof of the conjecture, finally finished it…and then added, “Oh, by the way, by Ribert’s result, this means that Fermat’s Last Theorem is also true. Q.E.D.”

Posted in Geek, Heroism, History, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 13, 2019.

Monday, May 13th, 2019

I’ve avoided discussing the recent NRA issues because, frankly, I don’t trust anybody to cover them fairly and objectively. If you want to read a take on what’s going on, though, Lawrence put up a post last week on his blog: if you’re not a regular reader there, you might want to check it out.

Also brought up by Lawrence, though this was just a quick hit in the Linkswarm: the New Orleans Times-Picayune was bought out by The Advocate, and the entire Times Picayune staff was laid off. The NYT has a considerably more detailed story on what happened and why, if you care about New Orleans newspaper wars. Personally, I pretty much relied on nola.com for anything involving the city, so I’ll be interested in seeing what changes.

(Also, good to know that there are still places where you can get Baked Alaska.)

Posted in Food, Guns, Media, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 13, 2019.

Monday, May 13th, 2019

Doris Day.

I can’t find a good clip, but I rather liked Ms. Day in the 1956 version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much”. (I liked Jimmy Stewart in that movie, too, but I think the 1934 version moves faster and has a more satisfying climax. Don’t get me wrong: both are good Hitchcock films.)

Peggy Lipton, of “Mod Squad” and “Twin Peaks” fame. I wish I had more to say about her, but I was just a little too young for “The Mod Squad” and pretty much missed “Twin Peaks” the first time around.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2019.

Friday, May 10th, 2019

Jim Fowler, Marlin Perkins’s sidekick on “Wild Kingdom” and later frequent late-night talk show guest.

Here’s something we hope you really like:

Posted in 1970s, Mammals, Obits, Reptiles, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: May 6, 2019.

Monday, May 6th, 2019

Rachel Held Evans, Christian author.

An Episcopalian, Ms. Evans left the evangelical church in 2014 because, she said, she was done trying to end the church’s culture wars and wanted to focus instead on building a new community among the church’s “refugees”: women who wanted to become ministers, gay Christians and “those who refuse to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith.”
Ms. Evans’s spiritual journey and unique writing voice fostered a community of believers who yearned to seek God and challenge conservative Christian groups that they felt were often exclusionary.
Her congregation was online, and her Twitter feed became her church, a gathering place for thousands to question, find safety in their doubts and learn to believe in new ways.

…

Ms. Evans was known to challenge traditional — and largely male and conservative — authority structures. She would spar with evangelical men on Twitter, debating them on everything from human sexuality to politics to biblical inerrancy.
One of those men, Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, said that he was her theological opposite in almost every way, but that she had always treated him with kindness and humor.
“I was on the other side of her Twitter indignation many times, but I respected her because she was never a phony,” Mr. Moore said. “Even in her dissent, she made all of us think, and helped those of us who are theological conservatives to be better because of the way she would challenge us.”

She wasn’t someone I’d ever heard of (until I read the NYT obit) and I suspect there are a lot of things we’d disagree on. But there’s something about her story that touches me, and 37 years old is just too young to die.

Statement from her website.

It strikes me today that the liturgy of Ash Wednesday teaches something that nearly everyone can agree on. Whether you are part of a church or not, whether you believe today or your doubt, whether you are a Christian or an atheist or an agnostic or a so-called “none” (whose faith experiences far transcend the limits of that label) you know this truth deep in your bones: “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return.”
Death is a part of life.

Posted in Books, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

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