Last one of the year.
Sonny Mehta, book guy.
Gen. Paul X. Kelley, former commandant of the United States Marines.
The Beirut bombing took place four months into his time as commandant.
Archive for December, 2019
Obit watch: December 31, 2019.
Tuesday, December 31st, 2019Firings watch.
Tuesday, December 31st, 2019On the road, but wanted to get this in.
John Dorsey out as the Browns general manager.
Cleveland.com is spinning this as the owners wanted him to take a reduced non-GM role, and he said no.
Obit watch: December 30, 2019.
Monday, December 30th, 2019Neil Innes, musical humorist.
In the early 1960s he was one of the first members of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, also known as simply the Bonzo Dog Band. He wrote the group’s biggest hit, “I’m the Urban Spaceman,” which climbed into the Top 10 on the British charts in 1968.
In the 1970s he wrote material for Monty Python, the groundbreaking six-member comedy troupe. Midway through that decade he and Eric Idle, a Python, came up with the Rutles, a deadpan parody of the Beatles; the group not only recorded albums but also made films, most notably the mock documentary “The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash” in 1978.
Sleepy LaBeef, noted rockabilly musician.
Lee Mendelson, producer of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
Blood in the streets!
Monday, December 30th, 2019Your Monday morning firings watch. I’ll try to keep this updated through the day.
Bruce Allen out as Redskins president. The team already fired head coach Jay Gruden earlier this year.
Update 1: the New York Football Giants have fired head coach Pat Shurmur. Two seasons, a 9-23 record, and the worst record in the NFL since 2017.
Update 2: Miami fired their offensive coordinator (Chad O’Shea) and two other guys.
You didn’t even wait to get him in the house watch…
Sunday, December 29th, 2019…also known as “the NFL firings that couldn’t even wait until Monday”.
So far: Freddie Kitchens out after one season in Cleveland, during which the team went 6-10 (and lost to the Bengals today).
Obit watch: December 28, 2019.
Saturday, December 28th, 2019Gratuitous gun porn (#6 in a series)
Friday, December 27th, 2019You know that guy who says “Nostalgia is a moron“? And has bought several guns because of his childhood nostalgia?
Remember that other guy who says that he thought the Remington XP-100 in .221 Fireball was the coolest gun in the world…when he was six years old?
And that guy who has this thing for small-bore handguns?
Remington XP-100 in .221 Remington Fireball. Burris pistol scope.
Purchased from a fellow S&WCA member at the 2019 Symposium (though we went out into the parking garage to make the transaction, rather than doing it in the exhibit hall/dealer’s room: and he was also a Texas resident, so this was a fully legal private sale). There was a discussion on the forum about grail guns, I mentioned this as one of mine, and he reached out to me and said he had one in his safe that wasn’t being used…
He made me what I thought was a very good deal, threw in 50 rounds of handloads and 50 rounds of empty brass, and was very flexible when it came to payment arrangements. Thank you, S&WCA member who shall remain nameless here to protect his privacy!
Obit watch: December 27, 2019.
Friday, December 27th, 2019Jerry Herman, composer and lyricist.
In a half-century of work, he scored a dozen Broadway musicals and five Off Broadway revues, composed many of the nation’s most popular songs and was showered with awards, including Tonys for “Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Folles.”
He also made stage history as the first composer-lyricist to have three musicals run more than 1,500 consecutive performances on Broadway — “Hello, Dolly!” with 2,844, “Mame” with 1,508 and “La Cage” with 1,761 — and remains one of only two to achieve that feat. (Stephen Schwartz, with “Pippin,” “The Magic Show” and “Wicked,” is the second.) And “La Cage” (1983) was the only Broadway musical to win the Tony for best revival twice, for 2004 and 2010 productions.
Obit watch: December 26, 2019.
Thursday, December 26th, 2019Death doesn’t take a holiday, but I do.
Now that I’m back…
Chuck Peddle. He was a key designer of the 6502 processor for MOS Technology.
One key reason for this is that the 6502 sold for $25 in 1975. The Motorola 6800 sold for $300.
Edward Aschoff, college football reporter for ESPN. The ESPN tribute makes it sound like he was a genuinely fun and well thought of guy. He was only 34 years old, and died after a short illness:
A slightly belated Christmas present…
Wednesday, December 25th, 2019The CBC Radio adaptation of Frederick Forsyth’s The Shepherd.
There’s a lot of good stuff (if you’re a plane buff) linked from that page and elsewhere, including:
- A recreation of the flight path in the story using X-Plane.
- Restoring a Mosquito.
- An interview with the late Dave Barrett, former Pathfinder.
- What was it like to fly a Mosquito.
If you are a plane buff, I commend both the CBC links and Forsyth’s work to your attention.
(For those who may be unfamiliar with the story: young pilot is flying home for Christmas and suffers a total electrical failure over the north Atlantic. He has virtually no instruments, fog has set in, and if he bails out, he’ll probably freeze to death in the ocean. At the last possible moment, he’s led to a safe landing at an old RAF base by a Mosquito. And then the story goes in some unexpected directions from there.)
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Wednesday, December 25th, 2019‘Do you know the poulterer’s in the next street but one, at the corner?’ Scrooge inquired.
‘I should hope I did,’ replied the lad.
‘An intelligent boy!’ said Scrooge. ‘A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they’ve sold the prize turkey that was hanging up there?—Not the little prize turkey: the big one?’
‘What! the one as big as me?’ returned the boy.
‘What a delightful boy!’ said Scrooge. ‘It’s a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!’
‘It’s hanging there now,’ replied the boy.
‘Is it?’ said Scrooge. ‘Go and buy it.’
‘Walk-er!’ exclaimed the boy.
‘No, no,’ said Scrooge. ‘I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell ’em to bring it here, that I may give them the directions where to take it. Come back with the man, and I’ll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes, and I’ll give you half-a-crown!’
The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half as fast.
There was another time I remember when my best beloved uncle came in one Christmas Eve just a little, you’ll pardon the expression, fried to the eyes. He fell into the Christmas tree, toppled it over, busted the decorations, and set fire to the drapes. We used candles in those days. Uncle Rob pulled himself up out of the mess, scraped some tinsel off one ear, and brushed some powdered glass from the smashed ornaments off his coat. He glared mistrustfully around him.
“God damn Santa Claus,” he said, and staggered off to bed, summarily dismissing Christmas for all time.
–Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy
Merry Christmas to all of you. Traveling mercies to those of you who are on the road, or will be on the road. Blessings to any of you who are standing the watch: as part of the military, as law enforcement or fire or EMS, or even holding down the fort at the gas station or answering support calls Christmas Day.
There are two people that I’d like to extend extra special good wishes to this season: Borepatch, for his continued support and driving traffic my way. And pigpen51, who has been leaving a lot of thoughtful comments recently. Especially on the obituary watches: he’s clearly been giving some thought to mortality and what it all means, and much of what he says overlaps things I’ve been thinking about myself.
God bless us all, every one.
Obit watch: December 23, 2019.
Monday, December 23rd, 2019In keeping with the official policy of this blog: Claudine Auger. Apparently, she was a very successful actress in Europe, and less so elsewhere. But: she was the Bond girl in “Thunderball”.
Johanna Lindsey, who I have actually heard of, but never read any of her books. She actually passed away October 27th, but her death was only recently announced.
Her books sold at least 60 million copies, according to her publisher, Simon & Schuster, and she ranked among the leading romance writers of her era, most notably Jude Deveraux, Judith McNaught, Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers.
“Since I was old enough to appreciate a good novel, I’ve been a romantic,” Ms. Lindsey was quoted as saying in the book “Love’s Leading Ladies” (1982), by Kathryn Falk. “I enjoy happy-ending love stories more than any other type of reading. Romance is what comes out of me.”
Ms. Lindsey set her passionate tales in many locales, including the Caribbean; the Barbary Coast; England as early as the year 873; Norway, when the Vikings ruled; 19th-century Texas, Wyoming and Montana; and the planet Kystran, in a series of science-fiction bodice-rippers.
…
Liz Perl, the marketing director of Simon & Schuster, said that Ms. Lindsey had been a shy, private person who only occasionally toured to promote her books.
“On several occasions, her mother would accompany her, which was really sweet,” Ms. Perl said by phone. “Her mother was quite outgoing, so Johanna would sign the books, and her mom would stand next to her and tell fans anecdotes about Johanna when she was young.”
She added, “When she turned her books in, she wouldn’t celebrate by buying a car or going to Paris, but by buying a video game and playing it for 12 hours before starting her next book.”
I have a feeling that I would have enjoyed hanging out with her.
Gen. Ahmed Gaïd Salah, who the paper of record describes as “Algeria’s de facto ruler”.
General Gaïd Salah’s unexpected death at 79 — his official age, though he was most likely older — less than two weeks after the army’s favored candidate was elected president, creates a power vacuum in the vast North African nation, a major oil and gas producer.
A survivor from the generation that led Algeria to independence from France in the early 1960s, General Gaïd Salah was the man who increasingly blocked the demands of the popular protest movement that has rocked the country’s politics since last February.
As chief of staff, General Gaïd Salah orchestrated a hardening crackdown on the movement, imposed a presidential election that the protesters rejected, and demanded, in regular if stiff televised speeches to other army officers, that the demonstrators back off.
The movement has rejected the newly elected president, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, as a mere figurehead, put in place to carry out the general’s wishes.
I try to leave geopolitics to Lawrence, so all I’ll say is: it should be interesting to watch this play out.
Elizabeth Spencer, another author I’d heard of but have not read. She was apparently most famous for “The Light in the Piazza”.
Baba Ram Dass, counterculture guy.
…
By the 1980s, Ram Dass had a change of mind and image. He shaved off the beard but left a neatly trimmed mustache. He tried to drop his Indian name — he no longer wanted to be a cult figure — but his publisher vetoed the idea. Ram Dass said that he had never intended to be a guru and that Harvard had been right to throw him out.
He continued to turn out books and recordings, however. He started or helped start foundations to promote his charities, to help prisoners and to spread his message of spiritual equanimity. He made sure his books and tapes were reasonably priced.
The old orthodoxies slipped away. He said he realized that his 400 LSD trips had not been nearly as enlightening as his drugless spiritual epiphanies — although, he said, he continued to take one or two drug trips a year for old time’s sake. He said other religions, including the Judaism that he had rejected as a young man, were as valid as the Eastern ones.