I thought about covering this myself, but Lawrence did a much better job on the death of Patrick Day.
For the historical record: Rep. Elijah E. Cummings.
Archive for October, 2019
The lazy man’s obit watch: October 17, 2019.
Thursday, October 17th, 2019Obit watch: October 16, 2019.
Wednesday, October 16th, 2019I’m sorry I’m a little late on these: I had one of those “don’t feel much like blogging” days yesterday.
Harold Bloom, noted critic.
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Armed with a photographic memory, Professor Bloom could recite acres of poetry by heart — by his account, the whole of Shakespeare, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” all of William Blake, the Hebraic Bible and Edmund Spenser’s monumental “The Fairie Queen.” He relished epigraphs, gnomic remarks and unusual words: kenosis (emptying), tessera (completing), askesis (diminishing) and clinamen (swerving).
He quite enjoyed being likened to Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century critic, essayist, lexicographer and man about London, who, like Professor Bloom (“a Yiddisher Dr. Johnson” was one appellation), was rotund, erudite and often caustic in his opinions. (Professor Bloom even had a vaguely English accent, his Bronx roots notwithstanding.)Or if not Johnson, then the actor Zero Mostel, whom he resembled.
“I am Zero Mostel!” Professor Bloom once said.
John Giorno, avant-garde poet. Back when I shopped for compact discs, I used to see copies of “You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With” all over the place. Never bought one, though: I’m a big Laurie Anderson fan, but how often was I going to listen to spoken word stuff by Giorno and William S. Burroughs? Probably not very often, was my considered opinion.
(There’s a little bit of Giorno available from iTunes, mostly as tracks on compilation albums. They do have “The Best of William S. Burroughs from Giorno Poetry Systems”, but that’s $40 for 69 tracks.)
NYT obit for Robert Forster, just for the historical record.
Your loser update: week 6, 2019.
Monday, October 14th, 2019I knew that at least one team was going to come off the list (because of Washington – Miami). But I don’t think anyone was expecting Dallas to lose to the hapless Jets.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Miami
Cincinnati
I went back over my historical records, and it looks like we’re pretty much on track: the average number of teams with 0 wins at week 6 of the season is 1.6.
Obit watch: October 12, 2019.
Saturday, October 12th, 2019By way of Lawrence, Robert Forster.
Yeah, he was great in “Jackie Brown”, which I still think is Tarantino’s most restrained and disciplined movie. But he did a lot of other movie and TV work to varying degrees of success. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t a “Twin Peaks” guy, so I missed him there. But he was in “Avalanche”, “Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence”, and “The Black Hole”, he did guest shots on many series (“Magnum, P.I.”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Police Story”), and he was in a few unsuccessful series (“Banyon”, “Nakia”, “Karen Sisco”).
Aleksei Leonov, Russian cosmonaut and the first man to walk in space.
What Mr. Leonov did not reveal until many years later was that he and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel I. Belyayev, who was also an Air Force pilot, were fortunate to have survived.
Mr. Leonov’s specially designed suit had unexpectedly inflated during his walk, and its bulk was preventing him from getting back inside the Voskhod.
“I knew I could not afford to panic, but time was running out,” he recalled in the book “Two Sides of the Moon” (2004), written with the astronaut David Scott, about their experiences in space.
Mr. Leonov slowly deflated the suit by releasing oxygen from it, a procedure that threatened to leave him without life support. But with the reduced bulk, he finally made it inside.
“I was drenched with sweat, my heart racing,” he remembered.
But that, he added, “was just the start of dire emergencies which almost cost us our lives.”
The oxygen pressure in the spacecraft rose to a dangerous level, introducing the prospect that a spark in the electrical system could set off a disastrous explosion or fire.
It returned to a tolerable level, but the cosmonauts never figured out the reason for the surge.
When it came time for the return to Earth, the spacecraft’s automatic rocket-firing system did not work, forcing the cosmonauts to conduct imprecise manual maneuvers during the descent that left them in deep snow and freezing temperatures in a remote Russian forest, far from their intended landing point.
It took several hours for a search party to find them and drop supplies from a helicopter, and they spent two nights in the forest, the first one inside their spacecraft and the second one in a small log cabin built by a ground rescue crew, until rescuers arrived on skis. They then took a 12-mile ski trek to a clearing, where a helicopter evacuated them.
He also survived an attempt to kill Leonid Brezhnev, but you’ll have to read the obit for that story.
Anna Quayle. The name didn’t ring any bells with me, but she was in a bunch of stuff: “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Casino Royale” (the first one, with David Niven), “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off”, and the list goes on.
…died on Aug. 16, although her death was not announced by her family until early October. She was 86.
Her family did not say where she died or specify the cause. She had received a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia in 2012.
Obit watch: October 11, 2019.
Friday, October 11th, 2019The Francis Currey obit provoked a lively and delightful string of comments. Please go read them, if you haven’t already. And my thanks to Lawrence, pigpen51, and thinkingman.
I held this one from yesterday because I didn’t want to detract: Karen Pendleton, one of the original Mouseketeers.
In 1983, Ms. Pendleton was a passenger in a car accident that injured her spinal cord and left her paralyzed from the waist down. Eight years later, she earned a bachelor’s degree from California State University, Fresno; she went on to earn a master’s in psychology there.
After the accident, she became an advocate for disability rights — she served on the board of the California Association of the Physically Handicapped — and worked as a counselor at a shelter for abused women.
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Ms. Pendleton was often reminded that fans of the Mouseketeers felt great affection for the show. In 1986, when she was a judge for a beauty pageant for women in wheelchairs, she met a woman with polio who said she had been abused by her parents.
“She said, ‘Being able to see you on “The Mickey Mouse Club” was the only happy part of my childhood,’” Ms. Pendleton recalled in 1995. “My eyes just filled up with tears.”
Bjorn Thorbjarnarson. This is one of those obscure but interesting obits: Dr. Thorbjarnarson was a surgeon who specialized in operations involving the biliary tract. Among his patients: the Shah of Iran.
Dr. Thorbjarnarson led a team of surgeons in removing the shah’s gallbladder, a portion of his liver and several gallstones blocking a bile duct — all under highly unusual circumstances.
“Armed guards controlled the traffic to the patient’s room, and all blinds were always down,” Dr. Thorbjarnarson wrote in a letter in response to “The Shah’s Spleen: Its Impact on History,” an article in The Journal of the American College of Surgeons, in 2010. “Threatening calls were received by nurses attending, but none to me. Outside, the hospital was surrounded by a howling mob, controlled by barricades, calling for the shah’s head.”
He also operated on Andy Warhol, and was sued.
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I know it is an obit (De mortuis nil nisi bonum) and it is from the NYT, but i do think the paper makes a good case that Dr. Thorbjarnarson and the hospital weren’t responsible for Warhol’s death. Warhol was a gravely ill man who was deathly afraid of hospitals (being shot by Valerie Solanas will do that to you). He put off treatment until he couldn’t any longer, and even tried to talk Dr. Thorbjarnarson into treating him at Warhol’s home.
The case was settled out of court.
Oh, oh! Mr. Kapler! Me. Kapler!
Thursday, October 10th, 2019Gabe Kapler our as manager of the Phillies.
81-81 this past season.
Obit watch: October 10, 2019.
Thursday, October 10th, 2019My morning went down the drain (for reasons I’m not authorized to talk about) so I’m only getting to this now:
Francis Currey, American badass.
Here is his citation from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s website:
He was 94. His death leaves two surviving recipients of the Medal of Honor from WWII.
Obit watch: October 8, 2019.
Wednesday, October 9th, 2019Marshall Efron, public television personality of the early 70s.
I’d heard the name, but really didn’t have any association with him: I was very young when “The Great American Dream Machine” was on the air, and I wasn’t much older when “Marshall Efron’s Illustrated, Simplified and Painless Sunday School” came around the first time. (The latter was supposedly re-run frequently, but I’ve never seen an episode.)
Quick notes from the forensic beat.
Wednesday, October 9th, 2019Both by way of Hacker News.
“Obsessed fan finds Japanese idol’s home by zooming in on her eyes“.
Gil Grissom, call your office, please.
Ken Thompson’s UNIX password has been cracked.
I wonder if it would be worthwhile to add a dictionary of common chess openings to your hashcat runs?
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#59 in a series)
Wednesday, October 9th, 2019Hempstead, Texas, is perhaps best described as a suburb of Houston. (Technically, it is in Waller Caunty, while Houston is Harris County. Apple Maps says it is roughly an hour’s drive from Houston to Hempstead.)
Hempstead isn’t a big city: just under 6,000 people. Mike the Musicologist, who tipped me off to this, tells me that Mayor Michael Wolfe has been in that post for 15 years.
Now, being mayor of any decent sized city is probably a full time job, and being mayor of a 6,000 person city probably doesn’t pay very well. This is significant for reasons I’ll get into shortly.
Back a few months ago, the Texas Rangers started looking into “financial irregularities” discovered “during an audit of the city budget”. They turned up something interesting. You see, folks in Hempstead had until the 20th of each month to pay their utility bills, or else they’d get cut off. One of the city employees was responsible for generating a list of folks who hadn’t paid up. But that employee would then take the list over to the mayor, who’d mark off certain accounts on the list as being exempt from utility cutoffs.
Among those names: the mayor. And his daughter. Apparently, they were over $20,000 behind in their utility payments. Mayor Wolfe’s personal account was over $10,000 behind.
Okay, so this is sleazy. The good citizens of Hempstead who were paying their bills had to absorb the delinquency of the mayor and his daughter. No question about it, this is bad behavior. But is it a crime?
Yes!
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According to an affidavit, Shayne is believed to have “intentionally or knowingly misused government property, services, personnel, or any other thing of value belonging to the government that has come into the public servant’s custody or possession by virtue of the public servant’s office or employment”.
The document cites Texas Penal Code 39.02(a), Abuse of Official Capacity.
Texas Penal Code 39.02(a), Abuse of Official Capacity, for your reference and because I don’t trust nested links.
I kind of like “Abuse of Official Capacity”. It has a ring to it, though it doesn’t quite stir the soul in the same way “barratry” or “misprision” does.
And, once again, someone throws away their life and becomes a convicted felon over a relatively small amount of money. Seriously, dude, pay the darn bill. (Yes, yes, presumption of innocence, but according to the report, he’s pretty much confessed to the crime already, and is using the ‘nobody would have known about it if it wasn’t for those meddling auditors” defense.)
Obit watch: October 7, 2019.
Monday, October 7th, 2019Ginger Baker, noted drummer.
Random thought: could Mr. Baker play “YYZ”?
Mr. Baker’s appearance behind the drum kit — flaming red hair, flailing arms, eyes bulging with enthusiasm or shut tight in concentration — made an indelible impression. So, unfortunately, did his well-publicized drug problems and his volatile personality.
Mr. Baker, who by his own count quit heroin 29 times, was candid about his drug and alcohol abuse in his autobiography, “Hellraiser,” published in Britain in 2009.
Got to give it to the man: he was persistent.
Lawrence put “Beware of Mr. Baker” on our big movie list. We actually want to watch this, but man! That is a hard movie to find: the DVD and Blu-Ray are “unavailable” from Amazon, and they do list it under “Prime Video” but it’s currently “unavailable” there as well. The movie’s website is apparently now owned by a domain squatter who uses it to advertise casinos, and we haven’t been able to check Netflix or Hulu (not being subscribers to either one).
Rip Taylor, comedian and game show guy.
Mr. Taylor was often confused with the character actor Rip Torn, who died in July.
This.
I kind of got overtaken by stuff over the weekend, so here’s your historical record obit for Diahann Carroll. Little mentioned in her obits, but well known to us common sewers connoisseurs: she was also in “The Star Wars Holiday Special“.
Your loser update: week 5, 2019.
Monday, October 7th, 2019I didn’t think there was a whole lot to say this morning, but:
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Miami (bye week)
(Edited to add) Cincinnati (I think I accidentally deleted them when I was deleting Denver: thanks to Lawrence for pointing that out.)
Washington
As I was pulling this together, I started seeing reports that Jay Gruden is out as head coach of the Redskins. The reports are all “sources say” but there’s a press conference scheduled for 1 PM EDT.
Worth noting: next Sunday is this year’s edition of the “Who Cares?” bowl, in which Washington plays at Miami. I’m halfway tempted to watch this, as I kind of expect epic ineptitude on display.