Archive for September, 2019

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Callbacks to old jokes are the best kind of humor.

Tuesday, September 17th, 2019

I brought in some cookies for the office yesterday.

The good news is: Choco Leibniz are fairly cheap on Amazon with prime shipping.

Bad news 1: that package is pretty small.

Bad news 2: Amazon stuffed the package into my mailbox, where it sat in the Texas heat for several hours until I got home, causing the Choco in the Choco Leibniz to melt. If I do this again, I’m either going to have to find a local gourmet store that stocks them, or wait until winter in Texas, when the temperature drops below 90 degrees.

(Callback.)

Posted in Food | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 2, 2019.

Tuesday, September 17th, 2019

Well, things are shaping up. The Jets are using a practice squad quarterback as their starter, Pittsburgh lost their starting quarterback for the season, the Saints lost theirs for six weeks…and the Browns won. Even with the Browns winning, I’m excited about the prospects for an 0-16 team this year.

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

New York Jets
Miami
Cincinnati
Pittsburgh
Jacksonville
Denver
Washington
New York Football Giants
Carolina

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 16, 2019.

Monday, September 16th, 2019

Ric Ocasek, co-founder of The Cars and a good Cleveland boy.

Anne Rivers Siddons, novelist. She was one of those writers I’d heard of, and about, but I’ve never read any of her books.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 13, 2019.

Friday, September 13th, 2019

Eddie Money.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 12, 2019.

Thursday, September 12th, 2019

T. Boone Pickens. Oklahoma State football hardest hit.

Diet Eman has passed away at 99.

Ms. Eman, at 20, was living with her parents and bicycling to work at the Twentsche Bank in The Hague when, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands. Her sister’s fiancé was killed on the first of five days of fighting. (A brother died later in a Japanese prison camp.)
Some of her neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Ms. Eman — herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage and, for the most part, even lying to others — could find no justification for such evil.
She and her boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group (coincidentally called HEIN, an acronym translated as “Help each other in need”). They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal.

…

A plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Ms. Eman’s at the bank, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food and gas ration cards, forging identity papers and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews.
She said of the German occupiers, “It was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for the Jews.”
Ms. Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even toilet flushing risked raising the suspicions of neighbors, who knew only that a woman had been living there alone.

Ms. Eman was captured at one point and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp: she managed to convince the Germans she was an innocent housemaid who knew nothing. Her fiance was also captured and was killed at Dachau.

In 1982, President Ronald Reagan hailed Ms. Eman in a letter for risking her safety “to adhere to a higher law of decency and morality.” In 1998, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel, granted her the title of Righteous Among the Nations, given to non-Jews for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust; she was cited for her leadership in sheltering them. In 2015, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, during a stop in Grand Rapids on a promotional tour for Dutch businesses, lauded Ms. Eman as “one of our national heroes.” (She became a United States citizen in 2007.)

It has been a bad week for photographers.

Robert Frank, noted for “The Americans”.

“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means immediate. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.”

Neil Montanus. He worked in several different areas of photography, including underwater and microscopic. But he was perhaps most famous as one of Kodak’s leading “Colorama” photographers: he took 55 out of the 565 photos, which were displayed in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990.

Every weekday, 650,000 commuters and visitors who jostled through the main concourse could gaze up at Kodak’s Coloramas, the giant photographs that measured 18 feet high and 60 feet wide, each backlit by a mile of cold cathode tubing, displaying idealized visions of postwar family life — not to mention the wonders of color film.

I kind of wish “On Taking Pictures” was still doing new shows, as I figure Jeffery Saddoris and Bill Wadman would have a lot to say about these two.

Finally: Daniel Johnston, singer/songwriter and Austin icon. Don’t have much to say: for me, he fell into the same category as Roky Erickson.

Posted in Heroism, History, Music, Nazis, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 1, 2019.

Tuesday, September 10th, 2019

Welcome back, folks. Another year, another tie in the first game of the season, which means that the Lions and Cardinals (per our policy) are out of 0-16 contention.

Fortunately, there are a couple of teams that we think have a good shot at going all the way this year. In honor of the late great Manhattan Infidel, though, we plan to avoid jokes and snark at the expense of the Giants. Well, mostly.

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

da Bears
New York Jets
Miami
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Pittsburgh
Houston
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Denver
Washington
New York Football Giants
Carolina
Atlanta
Tampa Bay

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 7, 2019.

Saturday, September 7th, 2019

Carol Lynley, actress.

The paper of record seems rather dismissive of her acting career post 1967 or thereabouts (“..she was never directly in the public eye again”) but she did a lot of guest shots on various 1970s TV: “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Kojack”, “Quincy M.E”, “Police Woman”, “Hawaii 5-0”, multiple appearances on “Fantasy Island”, “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”, and the list goes on…

…and she was Kolchak’s girlfriend in “The Night Stalker”…

…and, yes, she did do a “Mannix” (“Voice In the Dark”).

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

Obit watch: September 6, 2019.

Friday, September 6th, 2019

Sharing the same riff with other folks, but: Robert Mugabe is burning in Hell.

Unemployment exceeded 80 percent. At one point, inflation ran at an almost incomprehensible 230 million percent: When a bank note with a face value of 10 trillion dollars was introduced in early 2009, it was worth only about $8 on the black market. Zimbabwe’s money became so worthless that it was effectively replaced by outside currencies, including the South African rand, the United States dollar and China’s yuan.
Mr. Mugabe morphed into a caricature of dictatorship: vain and capricious, encircled by the flashy spending of his second wife and other family members, who lived in luxury at home and went on shopping sprees and long annual vacations in the Far East. (That wife, the former Grace Marufu, had been his secretary and mistress, and Mr. Mugabe, despite a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, fathered two children with her while still married to his first wife, Sally Hayfron.)

…

Starting around 2000, Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants sent squads of young men to invade hundreds of white-owned farms and chase away their owners. The campaign took a huge toll.
Over two years, nearly all of the country’s white-owned land had been redistributed to about 300,000 black families, among them 50,000 aspiring black commercial farmers and many of Mr. Mugabe’s loyalists. By late 2002, only about 600 of the country’s 4,500 white farmers had kept parts of their land.
The violent agricultural revolution had come with a heavy price: The economy was collapsing as farmland fell into disuse and peasant farmers struggled to grow crops without fertilizer, irrigation, farm equipment, money or seeds. Food shortages, at first ascribed to drought, only worsened as farmers were forced to stop farming. When food aid arrived, people who had opposed Mr. Mugabe said government officials had denied them handouts to punish them.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

More hoplobibilophilia.

Monday, September 2nd, 2019

Half-Price Books is having a 20% off sale over the long holiday weekend.

I haven’t found a lot of good stuff at the past few sales, but that didn’t stop me from going. And I think I see a break in the drought. I found some non-firearms related stuff:

I wouldn’t be posting, though, if I hadn’t gotten lucky and found some gun books. Which I will put after the jump…

(more…)

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

Obit watch: September 2, 2019.

Monday, September 2nd, 2019

For the historical record: Valerie “Rhoda” Harper.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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