Archive for February, 2020

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Obit watch: February 18, 2020.

Tuesday, February 18th, 2020

Charles Portis, author (True Grit, Norwood, The Dog of the South).

A lot of people I know (especially in the SF community) praise Portis. He’s on my list, but so far I’ve only read parts of True Grit. I need to go back and read the whole thing: the use of voice in this novel is fascinating.

The narrative voice of “True Grit” is that of a self-assured old woman, Mattie Ross, as she recalls an adventure she had in Arkansas’s Indian Territory when she was 14, on a quest to track down her father’s killer with Cogburn’s help.
Mr. Portis wanted her to sound determined to “get the story right,” he said in an interview for this obituary in 2012. The book has virtually no contractions, and the language is insistently old-fashioned.

I think more to the point that this is a book written from the point of view of a determined older woman, recounting a formative experience of her youth, and Portis manages to capture both the teen and the adult.

Mr. Portis shrank from the attention his more celebrated novels attracted. He steadfastly refused to be interviewed, although he made himself available to talk about his life for this obituary. When drawn into public gatherings, he dodged photographers. But he didn’t like to be called a recluse or compared to the likes of J.D. Salinger. He pointed out that his name was in the Little Rock phone book.

…

Mr. Portis’s reluctance to talk to the news media may have been traceable to his days as a reporter, when intruding on people’s lives was part of the job description. Mattie, his narrator in “True Grit,” may be voicing Mr. Portis’s own feelings when she speaks of the reporters who had sought her out to tell them her story of Rooster Cogburn.
“I do not fool around with newspapers,” Mattie says. “The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with their ‘scoops’ if they could ever get anything right.”

(Interestingly, this is another NYT obit where the subject outlived the obit writer.)

It may be kind of a cliche, but this section is quoted in the NYT obit. I’m also a sucker for John Wayne, and this is one of my favorite Wayne moments.

(“Fill your hand, you son-of-a-bitch!” Such a useful phrase.)

Kellye Nakahara Wallett. As Kellye Nakahara, she was perhaps best known as “Lt. Kellye Yamato” on M*A*S*H, a character who was mostly a bit player (though the character was featured in one episode near the end of the run). M*A*S*H Wiki entry.

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

Obit watch: February 17, 2020.

Monday, February 17th, 2020

It was another busy weekend, and there were several obits that meet at the intersection of crime and death. I’m trying to tread very carefully here, and I think I’m going to put the more crime related ones after a jump.

A.E. Hotchner has passed away at 102. Interesting guy: he was a close friend of Ernest Hemingway (“…Mary Hemingway, Ernest’s widow, tried unsuccessfully to stop publication of what turned out to be Mr. Hotchner’s most famous book, “Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir” (1966), which included closely observed and painfully revealed details of the paranoia and distress that preceded Hemingway’s suicide.“) and of Paul Newman: the two men co-founded Newman’s Own.

Tony Fernandez.

Fernandez won four straight Gold Gloves with the Blue Jays in the 1980s and holds club records for career hits and games played.

He was a five time All Star player.

He was a .288 hitter with 94 homers and 844 RBIs in 2,158 big league games. He remains the last Yankees player to hit for the cycle in a home game, accomplishing the feat in 1995.
Fernandez finished with 2,276 hits, 1,057 runs, 414 doubles, 92 triples, 246 stolen bases.

He did at 57 of kidney failure.

For the hysterical record: Barbara Remington. (Previously.)

Father George Coyne, former director of the Vatican Observatory.

Recognized among astronomers for his research into the birth of stars and his studies of the lunar surface (an asteroid is named after him), Father Coyne was also well known for seeking to reconcile science and religion. He applauded Pope Francis for addressing the role that humans play in climate change, and he challenged alternative theories to evolution like creationism and intelligent design.
“One thing the Bible is not,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 1994, “is a scientific textbook. Scripture is made up of myth, of poetry, of history. But it is simply not teaching science.”

…

During Father Coyne’s tenure, the Vatican publicly acknowledged that Galileo and Darwin might have been correct. Brother Consolmagno said it would be fair to say that Father Coyne had played a role in shifting the Vatican’s position.

…

“God in his infinite freedom,” he wrote, “continuously creates a world that reflects that freedom at all levels of the evolutionary process to greater and greater complexity. He is not continually intervening, but rather allows, participates, loves.”
He went further by finding fault with intelligent design.
“If they respect the results of modern science, and indeed the best of modern biblical research,” he wrote, “religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God or a designer God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly.”
He added, “Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent or as one who speaks encouraging and sustaining words.”

He was the director from 1978 until he retired in 2006.

In the Times Magazine interview, Father Coyne was asked, “How can you describe the universe as a vast empty infinitude, largely uninhabited, and still believe in — ”
“The centrality of man in the universe?” he interjected, completing the reporter’s thought.
“There’s no doubt about it,” he went on. “To our own knowledge of ourselves, we are unique in creation because of our self-reflexivity. I can know myself knowing. I am having a conversation with you, and I can remember that conversation. To this, the Catholic Church comes along and says, ‘The reason this is true is because you have an individual soul.’”

Caroline Flack. I had never heard of her, but apparently she was the host of a British reality TV show called “Love Island”. In December, she was charged with domestic assault of her boyfriend and suspended from the show.

She was 40 years old, and apparently committed suicide.

Two previous contestants died by suicide, Sophie Gradon in 2018 and Mike Thalassitis in 2019. Their deaths stirred a debate in Britain over the ethics of reality television and the duty that broadcasters have to care for contestants.

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.

After the jump, the more legal related entries…

(more…)

Posted in Law, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Today’s bulletin from Bizarro World.

Friday, February 14th, 2020

(Also, possible defensive gun use, but it is too early to be sure.)

I ran across this story in the Statesman yesterday, but I’m linking to the Dayton Daily News coverage instead, as it makes my head hurt less. (Which is a shame, as the author of the Statesman story is someone RoadRich and I met in our Citizen’s Police Academy class.)

Cutting to the chase: guy in Ohio comes home and is confronted in his driveway by his ex-wife’s current husband with a gun. Guy has an Ohio CCW permit, pulls out his own gun, and shoots current husband dead.

Ex-wife then shows up in the driveway as well, and pulls a gun on her ex-husband. Whereupon he shoots her dead too.

“I shot them, they came up and had a gun pointed at my wife’s head,” the man told the dispatcher while asking for authorities to get to his 3443 Grinnell Road home as quickly as possible.
Fischer said that about five years ago the homeowner told the sheriff’s office that he believed his ex-wife, Cheryl Sanders, was trying to hire someone to kill him. That was the only threat that the sheriff’s office received.

…

A camera system was set up in the area of the shooting, said Sheriff Gene Fischer. A phone found in Sanders’ [current husband – DB] car was reportedly receiving that video.

The whole husband/wife apparently (and allegedly) ambushing the ex-husband seems bizarre enough to me. The local spin on this Ohio story is that current husband and wife lived in Bee Cave (a suburb of Austin, just down the road from Lakeway). Also, the wife was a former stunt woman:

According to her online biography, Cheryl Sanders said her career as a stunt woman in the 1980s and ’90s included being a double for Brooke Shields, Sharon Stone, Rene Russo, Kathleen Turner and other A-list actresses. She did stunt double work for Jessica Alba in 2016.

And, by the way: Dave Chappelle was not involved in this incident. Really.

Posted in Guns, Law, Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 14, 2020.

Friday, February 14th, 2020

Paul English, Willie Nelson’s drummer. (Hat tip: Lawrence.)

For the historical record: the NYT obit for Dyanne Thorne.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 13, 2020.

Thursday, February 13th, 2020

Paula Kelly.

Ms. Kelly burst into the movies in 1969 in “Sweet Charity,” an adaptation of the stage musical about an ever-hopeful taxi dancer — a dance partner for hire — in a run-down Times Square dance hall. Ms. Kelly played the dancer Helene, one of two best friends of the title character, Charity Hope Valentine, played by Shirley MacLaine. Chita Rivera played the other.
Although lesser known than the movie’s big stars — Sammy Davis Jr. also had top billing — Ms. Kelly more than held her own, especially in the seductive number “Big Spender” and the energetic “There’s Got to Be Something Better Than This,” in which the three dance-hall girls express their determination to get respectable jobs.
Onstage, Ms. Kelly played Helene in the London production of “Sweet Charity” (with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and a book by Neil Simon). The director, Bob Fosse, who also directed and choreographed the show on Broadway, asked Ms. Kelly to reprise the role for the movie, which was to be his feature-film directorial debut.
He called her “the best dancer I’ve ever seen.”

She went on to other movie roles, including “The Andromeda Strain” (the original), “Soylent Green”, and “The Spook Who Sat By the Door”. She also did guest spots on a lot of 70s TV that wasn’t “Mannix”: “Cannon”, “Police Woman”, “The Streets of San Francisco”. She also played a public defender on “Night Court”.

Despite her many acting roles, Ms. Kelly’s first love was dance.
“The only time I feel complete expression is when I’m dancing,” she told the black weekly The New Pittsburgh Courier in 1968. “Then I feel I have no problems, no worries, no hangups. I feel I could do anything in the world.”

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

Obit watch: February 11, 2020.

Tuesday, February 11th, 2020

I’m not sure I would have posted an obit for Terry Hands, former head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, if it hadn’t been for one particular element in his resume.

Mr. Hands was with the Royal Shakespeare Company for almost a quarter-century, joining it in 1966 to run Theatregoround, an outreach program. In 1978 he became joint artistic director with Trevor Nunn, and from 1986 until his departure in 1990 he was the company’s chief executive.
One highlight of his tenure there was his work with the actor Alan Howard, whom he directed in an ambitious staging of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV, Part 1,” “Henry IV, Part 2” and “Henry V” at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1975, with Mr. Howard starting out as Prince Hal in the first play in the cycle and growing into the title character in “Henry V.”< Another noteworthy pairing came in the 1980s, when Mr. Hands directed Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac” and Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack starred in both, as Cyrano and Roxane in the first and as Benedick and Beatrice in the second. Mr. Hands moved both productions to Broadway in 1984, running them in repertory.

So what was that element? He also directed the original 1988 Broadway production of “Carrie”.

With music by Michael Gore, lyrics by Dean Pitchford and a book by Lawrence D. Cohen, the show had had a rocky start at Stratford-upon-Avon, but Mr. Hands, who directed, took it to New York anyway. Critics were unkind, to say the least. Mr. Rich, singling out a scene involving the slaughter of a pig, invoked another famous Broadway flop.
“Only the absence of antlers separates the pig murders of ‘Carrie’ from the ‘Moose Murders’ of Broadway lore,” he wrote in his review.
“Carrie” closed three days after it opened and has been something of a theatrical reference point — and not in a good way — ever since. Mr. Hands, though, who during his Royal Shakespeare tenure had pushed to expand that company beyond its comfort zone, had known that failure was a possibility and had embraced the challenge.

(“Moose Murders” explained.)

“I’m haunted by the specter of endless revivals of ‘Peter Pan’ to pay for endless revivals of ‘Peter Pan,’” he told The Associated Press in 1990 shortly before he left, referring to the J.M. Barrie play that has been a Christmas perennial.

Joseph Shabalala, founder of Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The current NYT obit is an early incomplete one, with promises of a full obit later.

Mr. Shabalala began leading choral groups at the end of the 1950s. By the early 1970s his Ladysmith Black Mambazo — in Zulu, “the black ax of Ladysmith,” a town in KwaZulu-Natal Province — had become one of South Africa’s most popular groups, singing about love, Zulu folklore, rural childhood memories, moral admonitions and Christian faith.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s collaborations with Paul Simon on the 1986 album “Graceland,” on the tracks “Homeless” and “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” introduced South African choral music to an international pop audience.

Posted in Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Farce.

Monday, February 10th, 2020

The first games in the new XFL season took place over the weekend.

The first firing took place today.

Pepper Johnson was fired as defensive coordinator of the Los Angeles Wildcats.

Also, Anthony Johnson, linebacker and one of the team captains, declared on Twitter that he’s a free agent.

I wonder if the check didn’t clear…

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Texican standoff.

Monday, February 10th, 2020

I keep hoping for a gunpoint standoff between some Federal law enforcement agency and some local government: pot, guns, it doesn’t matter to me what causes the standoff. I just like the idea of two law enforcement agencies pointing guns at each other: “Let’s settle this Federalism question once and for all, mofo!”

Why do I bring this up? Well, there was a story on the Statesman website yesterday about a possible standoff between the FBI and the Austin Police Department. Here’s what’s going on:

I’ve written before about the 1991 yogurt shop murders and the impact they had on the Austin psyche. Almost 30 years later, this something that’s still talked about, debated (was it crooked cops?), and cited as a defining moment for the city. I think part of what makes this the case is that there’s been no solution.

But there’s a new DNA technology called Y-STR. Apparently, with this technology, it’s possible to narrow down recovered DNA to just the male only component of the sample. So APD sent DNA samples to a lab and got a Y-STR profile, which doesn’t match any of the existing suspects or their family members. So they expanded their search:

They accounted for many of the customers at the shop that evening and got DNA samples from them. There was no match. They used yearbooks from the girls’ schools to build lists of their classmates, and then covertly gathered DNA samples from many of them off discarded soda cans or cigarette butts. Again, there was no match. Worried that first responders might have contaminated the scene, they tested every man who had gone into the burned-out yogurt shop. Still, no match.

Then they submitted the profile to an online Y-STR database…

The National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida operates the U.S. Y-STR Database containing 29,000 samples for population research. Its website says it has samples from “government, commercial and academic resources throughout the United States” and that “all forensic laboratories and institutions are invited to contribute.”
Today, the website contains a disclaimer, saying that it does not function as a law enforcement database and “cannot be used to identify a particular individual whose sample is in the database. All donors are anonymous (and samples) cannot be traced back to specific individuals.”

And they got a hit. But there’s a problem: the owners of the database, and the FBI, won’t release the data on who submitted the sample. (The FBI is involved because the sample was submitted by one of their forensic analysts.)

Montford said agency officials cited a 1994 federal law that created a national forensics database that law enforcement officials use for investigations. That law, they said, required officials to protect the identity of anonymous donors whose DNA was submitted to the Florida database for population research.
“They basically say, ‘We would love to help you, but we have a federal statute that says we can’t release it,’” Montford said.

Why would you put a law like that in place? Well, the DNA in the database can’t be used for a unique identification: at best, it would narrow the field down to “thousands of men” who have the same profile. APD seems to be fine with that: after all, cutting down the possible number of matches from about half of the people who lived in Austin in 1991 to a thousand or so might be useful. But the FBI and the people who run the database seem to be afraid of the possibility that innocent people might become suspects.

At their wits’ end, De La Fuente and other prosecutors began considering a subpoena for the information. They say they are still weighing such an unprecedented step, but fear the litigation would cost untold time and money.
In a statement to the Statesman, the bureau said, “The FBI did not perform forensic testing in this case and cannot speak to this case.”
The FBI acknowledged that it had provided anonymous male profiles to the Florida university for a study into how many of those profiles exist in a specific population and were legally allowed to do so. But the bureau said, “These profiles are not suitable for matching to an individual.”

Posted in Austin, Cops, FBI, Law, Politics | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: February 9, 2020.

Sunday, February 9th, 2020

Let’s get down to it.

Paul Farnes. He was 101, and the last surviving RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

…for three months, through the end of October, the R.A.F. battled the Luftwaffe for supremacy in the skies over Britain. Flying a Hurricane fighter for the 501 Squadron, Mr. Farnes, a sergeant pilot, proved supremely adept at attacking German aircraft.
In August alone he shot down three Junkers Ju Stuka bombers, a Dornier 17 light bomber and a Messerschmitt 109E fighter.At the end of September, as Mr. Farnes maneuvered his malfunctioning Hurricane back to the R.A.F.’s Kenley base, he spotted a German bomber flying directly at him at about 1,500 feet.
“I thought, ‘Good God,’ so I whipped out and had to reposition myself and managed to get ’round behind him,” he said in an interview with the website History of War in 2017. “I gave him a couple of bursts, and he crashed at Gatwick just on the point between the airport and the racecourse.”

…

Aerial warfare against the Germans meant breaking away from the squadron, finding something to shoot at, firing away, then breaking away to safety. But by Mr. Farnes’s account it was also enjoyable, because he was able to combine his love of flying with the mission to protect Britain.
“The C.O. would quite often pick the next members of the squadron that had to be at ‘readiness,’ and the two or three who weren’t picked would be pretty fed up,” he told History of War. “If you weren’t picked, you’d think, ‘Why can’t I go?’ I’m sure one or two must have felt, ‘Well, thank God I’m not going!’ But a lot of us were quite happy to go.”

Robert Conrad. THR. Variety.

I was a little young for “Wild Wild West” in first run; if it was syndicated in Houston when I was a kid, I don’t remember it. It could have been on the station we were never able to pick up (the same one OG “Star Trek” was on). And “Hawaiian Eye” was before my time. But if you’re my age or a little on either side of it, this was like candy for us:

He also appeared multiple times on “Mission: Impossible” and other series, either as the lead of some less than successful ones (“High Mountain Rangers”) or doing guest shots. He did do a “Mannix”. (“The Playground”, season 3, episode 4.) And I didn’t know this, but he played G. Gordon Liddy in the TV movie version of “Will”.

Orson Bean. Variety. THR. Interesting guy: I remember him from “Being John Malkovich” and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him on some of those old game shows on Buzzr. In the 1960s, he founded a progressive school in New York City.

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)
When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

In the 1980s, he settled down again and resumed acting. He was 91 years old when he died: he was hit by a car while walking, fell, and was run over by a second car (according to Variety).

After the jump, more obits.

(more…)

Posted in 1970s, Books, History, Law, Mannix, Movies, Nixon, Obits, Planes, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit meta watch.

Saturday, February 8th, 2020

There’s been a lot of news today.

I’m going to wait until tomorrow and get one mega post up covering everyone, including Orson Bean, Robert Conrad, Kevin Conway, and the last RAF ace from the Battle of Britain.

Not that I’m ignoring anyone, just won’t have time to do justice until tomorrow afternoon.

Posted in Admin, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 7, 2020.

Friday, February 7th, 2020

Roger Kahn, noted baseball writer.

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Scientific progress goes “Crap!”

Friday, February 7th, 2020

This is my favorite recent scientific paper:

Will Any Crap We Put into Graphene Increase Its Electrocatalytic Effect?

That’s the actual title, of an actual paper (not an April Fool’s joke) published on January 14th, although it isn’t clear to me if it was peer reviewed or what other publication controls exist on the “ACS Publications” website.

I’m not a chemist, much less a graphene chemist, but I’ll try to summarize: Graphene (“an atomic-scale hexagonal lattice made of carbon atoms“) has interesting properties for catalyzing electrochemical reactions. The authors of this paper seem to feel that there’s been a recent trend of adding impurities (“doping”) graphine to see how it behaves, and discovering that pretty much anything scientists add increases the electrocatalytic properties of graphine. They also seem to feel that this trend has become absurd.

One may exaggerate only a little by saying that if we spit on graphene it becomes a better electrocatalyst.

But instead of whinging, they decided to prove a point, by doping graphene with…guano. Yes, bird crap. Thus the title.

Guano has a great advantage for doping over using synthetic chemicals. It is available at low cost, it contains a plethora of elements (including N, P, S, Cl, etc.), and its use for graphene doping can be handled by a nonchemist. We show that we can create high-entropy, multiple-element-doped graphene with outstanding electrocatalytic properties for two industrially important reactions: oxygen reduction used in fuel cells and hydrogen evolution used in electrolyzers.

I especially appreciate the author’s callback to Haber–Bosch: after all, the whole reason the Haber–Bosch process exists is because of an impending world-wide shortage of guano for fertilizer.

Posted in Birds, Geek | Comments Closed

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