Don’t have a lot of time for this right now (I’m stealing five minutes from work), but: Carlos Beltran out as Mets manager.
This seems to be being spun as a resignation, or a mutual decision, rather than an out and out firing.
Archive for January, 2020
Fallout II, Mets 0.
Thursday, January 16th, 2020Obit watch: January 16, 2020.
Thursday, January 16th, 2020Gladys Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain’s mom.
Anthony Bourdain became a hard-living chef, and in the late 1990s he wrote an article chronicling the seamier secrets of life in the restaurant business. He was struggling to publish it in 1999 when Ms. Bourdain mentioned to him that she knew a Times reporter, Esther Fein, who was married to David Remnick, the newly minted editor of The New Yorker magazine.
“She came over, and she said, ‘You know, your husband’s got this new job,’” Ms. Fein (who left The Times in 1999) said on Monday. “‘I hate to sound like a pushy mom, but I’m telling you this with my editor’s hat on, not my mother’s hat on. It’s really good, and it’s really interesting, but nobody will look at it, nobody will call him back or give it a second look. Could you put it in your husband’s hands?’”
Ms. Fein persuaded Mr. Remnick to read the article, and The New Yorker published it under the title “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” Mr. Bourdain later said that he had a book deal in a matter of days after that.
Matty Maher, of McSorley’s Old Ale House.
Mr. Maher, who could trace his career at McSorley’s to a bit of end-of-the-rainbow serendipity in Ireland, began by tending bar at the saloon in 1964 as an Irish immigrant.
He graduated to manager as the beer hall, surrounded by neighborhood blight near the Bowery, tottered at the brink of bankruptcy; survived the loss of a gender discrimination case in 1970 that forced McSorley’s to delete the last two words of its durable slogan vowing “Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies”; and endured a Health Department ordinance that, while it banned smoking, had the unintended consequence, Mr. Maher said, of encouraging customers to drink more.
Gary Starkweather, inventor of the laser printer.
And finally, Nelson Bryant, outdoor writer for the NYT for nearly 40 years.
I know: who knew the paper of record had an outdoor writer? But they did from 1967 to 2005.
Goofus and Gallant.
Wednesday, January 15th, 2020Goofus tells his players to high stick opponents.
Gerald Gallant gets fired by the Las Vegas Golden Knights.
Fallout.
Wednesday, January 15th, 2020The MLB cheating scandal claims another head: Alex Cora out as Red Sox manager.
Cora was a former Astros bench coach, and was implicated in setting up the Astros cheating scheme: MLB has not announced any discipline for him yet, but there are allegations that he also set up a cheating scheme with the 2018 Red Sox.
There’s an interesting piece at ESPN about how other teams are reacting to Rob Manfred’s disciplinary actions:
Multiple ownership-level sources told ESPN that dissatisfaction with the penalties had emerged following a conference call with Manfred, in which he explained how the Astros would be disciplined, then told teams to keep their thoughts to themselves.
“The impression,” one person familiar with the call told ESPN, “was that the penalty for complaining would be more than Houston got.”
…
Firings watch.
Monday, January 13th, 2020I just got back from the doctor and don’t feel much like extended blogging, but I wanted to get this up:
Astros GM Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch fired.
This is in the wake of MLB’s findings on the 2017 Astros cheating scandal (they were using video cameras to steal signs: both men have also been suspended by the commissioner for a year.
More from ESPN:
In addition, the Astros lost their first and second round draft picks in 2020 and 2021, and have been fined FIVE! MILLION! DOLLARS!
Obit watch: January 11, 2020.
Saturday, January 11th, 2020Seriously, yesterday afternoon and last night were incredibly hectic. Let’s start at the top and work our way down.
Neil Peart, drummer for Rush.
Okay, that was a cheat. How about this?
Sultan Qaboos bin Said of Oman.
Georges Duboeuf, wine guy.
Mr. Duboeuf was already a successful Beaujolais merchant in the 1970s when he set out to mass-market the local tradition of making primeur, a quick, joyous wine born of the year’s new grapes.
Many wine regions enjoyed a similar harvest ritual, a festive local practice among friends and colleagues. Beaujolais was an especially enjoyable wine to drink young. It was fresh and easy in a way that, say, young Bordeaux, with tannins that could be unpleasantly astringent, was not.
A thriving local market existed for the young wine. It expanded to the Paris bistros in the 1950s, when distributors began to compete in a race to see who could deliver the first bottles to the capital.
Beginning at 12:01 a.m. on the mid-November day that it became legal to ship the new wine, cartons were loaded onto trucks, and off they went as eager revelers waited. The official release date shifted from year to year, but the authorities eventually settled on the third Thursday of November.
Mr. Duboeuf took this annual race and, through energetic and endless promotion, turned it into much more. He enlisted countless French chefs, restaurants and celebrities to the cause.
A crucial ingredient in the promotion was a dollop of suspense. As the clock struck 12:01, Mr. Duboeuf made sure that cases and cases of the wine were loaded onto trucks, ships and eventually jets for shipment around the world, all duly recorded by cameras. The fact that much of the wine had been shipped in advance was irrelevant to the fun.
“Le Beaujolais Nouveau est arrivé” became an exultant international catchphrase. Television commercials would show the wine being delivered to, by Beaujolais standards, the remotest corners of the earth.
Alasdair Gray, Scottish novelist.
By way of Lawrence, Ken Fuson. Not a particularly famous guy, but this is one of those funny and touching self-written obits.
Harry Hains, actor. (“American Horror Story”, “The OA”.)
Also by way of Lawrence (as was the Harry Haines obit): Shozo Uehara.
Quick flaming hyenas update.
Saturday, January 11th, 2020Michael Shayne Wolfe, the mayor of Hempstead, Texas, has been officially indicted on one count of “theft of service by a public servant”.
(Previously.)
A quick weather report.
Friday, January 10th, 2020They are talking like we’re going to get near apocalyptic rain later on today.
That’s a good thing. Maybe it will wash all this damn dust out of the air.
Obit watch: January 10, 2020.
Friday, January 10th, 2020Edd “Kookie” Byrnes, noted for “77 Sunset Strip”. NYT.
Broadcast on ABC from 1958 to 1964, “77 Sunset Strip” starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Smith as a pair of suave Los Angeles private eyes and Mr. Byrnes as the parking-lot attendant at the restaurant next door to their office.
As he ministered tenderly to the Thunderbird convertible driven by Mr. Zimbalist in the show, Kookie (né Gerald Lloyd Kookson III) ran his omnipresent pocket comb through his lush ducktailed pompadour, cracked his devil-may-care grin and spouted aphorisms that even at midcentury had all the gnomic obscurity of Zen koans:
“A dark seven” (a depressing week); “piling up the Z’s” (getting some sleep); “headache grapplers” (aspirin); “buzzed by germsville” (to become ill); and, most emblematically, “Baby, you’re the ginchiest!” — a phrase of the highest Kookian approbation.
His character evolved from parking attendant to junior partner in the detective agency, but he was pretty much typecast after that. Deadline suggests that he partially inspired the Rick Dalton character in “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood”. He did go on to play the dance host in “Grease” and did a fair number of guest shots on TV shows…
…yes, including “Mannix”. (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6.)
Bob “Daddy-O” Wade, Texas sculptor of giant objects.
…
…
A few years after the boots were disassembled and moved to a mall in San Antonio on three flatbed trucks in 1980, Mr. Wade got a phone call from the mall’s manager. A homeless man had found his way into one of the boots and cooked his lunch there. The boot was on fire.
“It was the size of a small apartment, kind of a nice spot, and he was cooking lunch with cans of Sterno, and smoke was emerging from the top of the boots,” Mr. Wade said in “Too High, Too Wide and Too Long.”
Obit watch: January 9, 2020.
Thursday, January 9th, 2020The great Buck Henry.
He was a co-writer of “The Graduate”, co-created “Get Smart” with Mel Brooks, did guest stints on “Saturday Night Live” in the early days (and was the first five-timer), created “Quark”, wrote the screnplays for “Catch-22” and “The Day of the Dolphin”, co-wrote the legendary disaster “Town and Country“…man, what a career.
(Edited to add: NYT obit wasn’t up previously. It is now.)
Mike Resnick, noted SF writer. Lawrence has an excellent obit up at his site, and pretty much says everything I was going to say. I won’t say we were personal friends (I don’t think he would have passed Lawrence’s “pick me out of a police lineup” test) but he was a good and erudite guy who got me into Theodore Roosevelt and “Duck, You Sucker!” (among other things). His passing leaves the world a smaller, colder place.
Edited to add: found this, by way of Dean Bradley’s Twitter, and thought it was a nice tribute to Mr. Resnick.
“Science Fiction is the literature of warning: this bad thing will happen IF…”
All the possibilities in the world are loaded into that statement. I think about that whenever I sit down to write a sci fi story. And I always think of Mike when I do it.
RIP Mr Resnick. 3/3
— Daniel J Davis (@DanielJWrites) January 9, 2020
Edited to add 2: Michael Swanwick on Mr. Resnick.
I had not heard of Adela Holzer before her obit showed up in the paper of record, but her story is too good to ignore. She was married to a “shipping magnate” and was an early investor in the musical “Hair”. (Depending on which account you believe, she put in $57,000 and made $2 million, or she put in $7,500 and made $115,000.) She went on to produce the notorious flop “Dude“.
Then it got worse. You may ask: how much worse can it get than having your show close on opening night? This much worse:
At that point, theater was the least of Ms. Holzer’s problems. She had declared bankruptcy seven weeks earlier. She had been arrested on fraud charges over the summer and was free on $50,000 bail, awaiting the first of the three criminal trials that would shape the rest of her life.
The indictment, which finally came in 1979, was for a classic Ponzi scheme: paying her earliest victims “profits,” which were really just funds from her next group of investors, and so on. One of those early investors was Jeffrey Picower, who was later implicated in the Bernie Madoff scandal, a much larger Ponzi scheme.
She served two years in prison. Ms. Holzer tried to make a comeback in the 1980s with a musical about Joseph McCarthy that never opened.
She served four years (of an eight year sentence) for that.
Things had changed in 2001, when she was arrested yet again, this time charged with 39 counts of fraud. At the time, she was using a different surname, Rosian — she was living with a man named Vladimir Rosian on the Upper West Side — and the stakes were much lower. She had been charging immigrants $2,000 to $2,700 each, falsely telling them that she had influence on immigration legislation and could help them gain permanent resident status.
This time she was sentenced to nine to 18 years. When she was released in June 2010, she was in her 80s.
Noted:
Firings watch.
Tuesday, January 7th, 2020Peter Laviolette fired as coach of the Nashville Predators, who are a hockey team in the NHL. (Also out: “associate coach” Kevin McCarthy.) He was 248-143-60 over a little more than five seasons.
In the “questionable firings” bucket: Wade Phillips contract as defensive coordinator with the Rams has not been renewed. (Also out: Skip Peete, running backs coach.)
Obit watch: January 7, 2020.
Tuesday, January 7th, 2020Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation. She was 52.
The writer David Samuels, a friend since childhood, said the cause was metastatic breast cancer, a disease that resulted from the BRCA genetic mutation. Ms. Wurtzel had a double mastectomy in 2015. After her diagnosis, she became an advocate for BRCA testing — something she had not had — and wrote about her cancer experience in The New York Times.
“I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer,” she wrote. “I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.”