Archive for March, 2020

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…

Tuesday, March 31st, 2020

…I’m gonna go have me some fun!
And what do you consider fun?
Fun, natural fun!”
–Tom Tom Club, “Genius of Love”

Now that I’m on indefinite home confinement (like the rest of Travis County) I’ve found myself not just reading more, but also watching more crap on YouTube.

“Crap” may not actually be fair. I’ve enjoyed the USCSB videos for a while now. AOPA’s Air Safety Institute videos are educational as well. And, yes, I’ve been watching my share of Ian’s videos in these times of struggle. Shamefully, I’ve also been watching clips from “Bar Rescue”.

My point, and I do have one, is: some interesting things have been showing up in my YouTube recommendations, and I thought I’d start highlighting those. At least, until the crisis passes.

Rules: I want to keep them short, and ideally want to pick ones that people haven’t heard of. So no “Surviving Edged Weapons”, because that’s close to an hour and half and has been highlighted on Red Letter Media. But I think at least some of these will be vintage police training videos…

…let’s start with this one, “Vehicle Ambush: Counterattacks”. If for no other reason than that awesome 1970’s wakka jawakka opening soundtrack.

Tomorrow: I’m trying to decide if I want to go with Jack Webb (although I don’t think the video quality is all that great) or possibly a vintage US Navy training film. (Nothing about VD, though.)

Posted in Cars, Cops, Guns, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 30, 2020.

Monday, March 30th, 2020

Krzysztof Penderecki, noted contemporary classical composer.

Mr. Penderecki was most widely known for choral compositions evoking Poland’s ardent Catholicism and history of foreign domination, and for his early experimental works, with their massive tone clusters and disregard for melody and harmony. Those ideas would reverberate for decades after he himself had pronounced them “more destructive than constructive” and changed course toward neo-Romanticism.
(His decision to move on was partly political: The Polish avant-garde movement had created an unhealthy illusion of freedom in a country living under Communism, he said. But it was also artistic: Experimentation had reached an impasse, he told a Canadian interviewer in 1998, because “we discovered everything!”)
Still, it was compositions from the wild first decade of his career, including “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” (1960), “Polymorphia” (1961) and the “St. Luke Passion” (1966) that brought him lasting international recognition while he was still a young man.
The threnody, in particular, is a much-studied example of startling emotional effects created from abstract concepts. Following a score that often looks more like geometry homework than conventional notation, it forces an ensemble of 52 string instruments to produce relentless, nerve-jangling sounds that can suggest nuclear annihilation. Yet it was said that Mr. Penderecki dedicated it to the victims of Hiroshima only after hearing the piece performed.

John Callahan, soap opera actor. (“Falcon Crest”, “Santa Barbara”, “All My Children”, “Desperate Housewives”, “Days of our Lives.”)

David Schramm. He was “Roy Biggins” on “Wings”, and also did some Broadway and off-Broadway work.

Joe Diffie, country music star. Borepatch has a much better tribute than I could write.

Posted in Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 27, 2020.

Friday, March 27th, 2020

The gentleman who blogs at “Say Uncle” lost his wife earlier this week.

I check out Uncle’s site somewhere between every other day and every day: he’s been on top of what’s going on in the gun sphere for as long as I’ve been following him. I join with everyone else in that sphere in extending my condolences to him and to his people.

Fred “Curly” Neal, legendary Harlem Globetrotter.

In one of the most highly anticipated elements of the Globetrotters’ routine, Neal would dribble all over the court, frequently sliding on his knees, never losing control of the ball no matter how close to the hardwood he had lowered himself. Then he would bounce the ball through a flailing defender’s legs near the free-throw line and dribble in for an uncontested layup to finish off the move.
“Oh my gosh, he revolutionized ball handling,” Nancy Lieberman, who played for the Generals against the Globetrotters in 1988, said in a phone interview. “Everything you see Kyrie Irving doing and Steph Curry doing now, all of it started with the Trotters. The Trotters made dribbling a show.”
Neal’s trickery and showmanship established him as one of the team’s foremost stars, alongside the likes of Meadowlark Lemon and Hubert “Geese” Ausbie. Known for wearing ever-present white pads over his knees and an array of red, white and blue wristbands, Neal helped the Globetrotters’ barnstorming ensemble become a regular feature of ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” in an era when the National Basketball Association did not have a robust national television presence as it does now.

Mark Blum, knock-around actor. He worked on Broadway, was in “Crocodile Dundee”, did some other movies, and a non-trivial number of TV guest shots.

Mr. Blum was an omnipresent figure in the Off Broadway world for decades, but his biggest moment in the spotlight came in 1989 after he played a time-traveling 20th-century playwright who befriends Gustav Mahler, in the Playwrights Horizons production of Albert Innaurato’s “Gus and Al.”

…

He had a notable Broadway career as well, appearing in nine productions over three and a half decades. He made his Broadway debut as a particularly versatile theater professional — playing an unnamed Venetian (one of four), understudying two roles and acting as assistant stage manager in “The Merchant” (1977), set in 16th-century Venice and inspired by a certain Shakespearean classic.
Other Broadway roles included Eddie, the young main character’s recently widowed and debt-ridden father, in Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” (1991), with Irene Worth; Spalding Gray’s campaign manager in “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2000), a role he reprised as a replacement in the 2012 revival; Leo Herman, a.k.a. Chuckles the Chipmunk, the detestable host of a children’s television show, in “A Thousand Clowns” (2001); and Juror No. 1, the reasonable foreman, in “Twelve Angry Men” (2004).

…

He appeared in almost 30 films, including “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985), as a married hot-tub salesman; “Crocodile Dundee” (1986); and “Shattered Glass” (2003). His most recent, “The Pleasure of Your Presence,” a romantic comedy about a wedding in the Hamptons, has been completed but not yet scheduled for release.
Over the decades he appeared on dozens of prime-time series — among them “Miami Vice,” “Roseanne,” “Frasier” and three shows in the “Law & Order” franchise — and he remained active into 2020. He appeared in 30 episodes of the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle” as Union Bob, a rules-obsessed symphony orchestra piccolo player. His most recent roles were on the drama series “You,” as a mysterious bookstore owner and stroke victim; “Succession” (2018-19); and “Billions,” in an episode scheduled to air in May.

Posted in Guns, Movies, Obits, Sports, Theatre | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 26, 2020.

Thursday, March 26th, 2020

Lawrence sent me this the other day, but I forgot to note it in yesterday’s roundup.

Stuart Gordon, director and writer. THR.

He was probably most famous for “Re-Animator” (which, as you know, Bob, was based on an H.P. Lovecraft story). He also directed “From Beyond”, and some less well known works (“Space Truckers”, “Robot Jox”).

Posted in Lovecraft, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

I heartily endorse this event or product. (#18 and #19 in a series)

Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

I’ve actually never been to the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City. I haven’t been to NYC in more than 30 years.

But I’ve ordered a few things from them online. I’m not a steady customer, but I do like them. I also like Otto Penzler. I’ve never met him, but I hope to one of these days (assuming we’re not all dead by then).

The Mysterious Bookshop has always struck me as being kind the kind of place that just barely hangs on. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense: pretty much any bookshop exists on the edge, doubly so if it is a specialty shop, and triply so if it is a specialty shop in NYC.

As you might guess, they’ve been hit pretty hard by recent events, and could use a little help. Why not go pick up something from them? I have (or else I wouldn’t be asking you). If you’re not a mystery fan, maybe you know someone who is. If you can’t think of anything you’d like to pick up right now, they sell gift cards (for you, or that other person who is a mystery fan).

I’d hate to see them close for good behind this thing. If you’ve still got a job, and have a little money that you’re not spending at bars or eating out or on gas for your car, how about throwing them a few dollars?

===

Based on the recommendation of FOTB (and official firearms trainer for WCD) Karl Rehn, I ordered a copy of FBI Miami Firefight: Five Minutes that Changed the Bureau from Ed Mireles’s website.

I ordered it on Friday, because it isn’t like I don’t have enough books to read while I’m under confinement. (I’d actually been meaning to order it for a while: I didn’t want it to disappear on me.) It was in the mailbox on Tuesday. Which I personally think is pretty darn impressive, under the current circumstances.

I flipped through it some last night, and, while I haven’t read all of it, my first impression is: I’m liking it more than I am the other true crime book I’m reading at the moment (which deals with another famous shootout: I may write more about that one after I finish it.) I do want to throw an endorsement Mr. Mireles’s way, though, just based on him getting the book out the door that fast.

Posted in Books, Endorsements, Guns | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 25, 2020.

Wednesday, March 25th, 2020

Terrence McNally, noted playwright.

Mr. McNally’s Tony Awards attest to his versatility. Two were for books for musicals, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (1993) and “Ragtime” (1998), and two were for plays, and vastly different ones: “Love! Valour! Compassion!” (1995), about gay men who share a vacation house, and “Master Class” (1996), in which the opera diva Maria Callas reflects on her career.
And those prize winners were only a small part of his oeuvre. With some three dozen plays to his credit, as well as the books for 10 musicals, the librettos for four operas and a handful of screenplays for film and television, Mr. McNally was a remarkably prolific and consistent dramatist.

Hattip on this to Lawrence, who also pointed out that Mr. McNally did a guest shot on “The Greatest American Hero”. He actually did guest shots on a small hand full of TV shows, including “Salvage I” (that sounds like a “blink and you’d miss it” appearance), “CHiPs”, and “The Young and the Restless”.

Speaking of hattips, great and good FOTB Borepatch sent over an obit for Albert Uderzo, co-creator (with the late René Goscinny) of Asterix and Obelix.

Edited to add: NYT obit.

A followup from “The Drive” that I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of days: Kenny Rogers, dirt racer.

Rogers paired up with Sprint Car Hall of Famer C.K. Spurlock and campaigned his own team for several years before the two formed Gambler Chassis Company. Taking its name from Rogers’ famous song The Gambler, this project was anything but a gimmick. The company would go on to win races with stars like Steve Kinser, Sammy Swindell, and Doug Wolfgang behind the wheel. Simply put, Gambler cars were consistently some of the fastest in the United States, taking victories at primetime events like the Knoxville Nationals.

Posted in 1970s, Cars, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 24, 2020.

Tuesday, March 24th, 2020

Lawrence sent over an obit for prolific British actor David Collings, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation from another site.

Eric Weissberg, multi-instrumentalist musician, but perhaps most famous as a banjo guy. Specifically, “Dueling Banjos”.

As a session player he appeared on Judy Collins’s “Fifth Album,” contributing guitar to her 1965 version of “Pack Up Your Sorrows.” He played banjo on John Denver’s 1971 Top 10 pop hit, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” His fretwork was heard on albums like Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” (1974), Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) and the Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures” (1985). He collaborated with jazz musicians like Bob James and Herbie Mann as well.
“Dueling Banjos” did not, as the song’s title suggests, involve two banjoists pitting their skills against each other. Instead it showcased Mr. Weissberg’s three-finger Earl Scruggs-style banjo in a sprightly call-and-response — more of a dance than a fight — with the flat-picked acoustic guitar of his collaborator, Steve Mandell.

…

When it appeared on the soundtrack for “Deliverance,” a movie based on the James Dickey novel of the same name, it was mistakenly copyrighted to Mr. Weissberg.
A lawsuit was settled in Mr. Smith’s favor. Mr. Weissberg always maintained that Warner Bros. had credited him as the song’s composer without his knowledge or consent.

Eli Miller. No, you probably never heard of him. He was one of the last of New York City’s door to door seltzer delivery men, who worked “from 1960 until he retired in 2017.”

When Mr. Miller started his business, hundreds of seltzer men plied the streets; when he retired, there were only a handful. Through all of the intervening decades, he appeared at his customers’ homes bearing a wooden box of pewter-topped bottles filled with authentic seltzer.
“It’s not the stuff you buy in the plastic bottles in the store, which has about five pounds of pressure,” Mr. Miller said in a video that accompanied an article about him in The New York Times in 2013.
What Mr. Miller brought customers, he said, was triple-filtered New York City water, without salt, sugar or other additives, pressurized to about 60 to 80 pounds per square inch — perfect for enjoying plain or spritzing into an egg cream.

…

Mr. Miller was inducted into the Brooklyn Jewish Hall of Fame in 2017. His fellow inductees that year included the television personality Judge Judy Sheindlin and Ira Glasser, a former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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

Obit watch: March 21, 2020.

Saturday, March 21st, 2020

Kenny Rogers. Borepatch.

He was an avid photographer as well. He published two volumes of his work: “Kenny Rogers’ America” (1986), an assortment of photos of national landmarks and other places of interest, and “Your Friends and Mine” (1987), a collection of portraits of fellow celebrities like Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson.

…

Mr. Rogers was also a successful entrepreneur. His best-known enterprise was Kenny Rogers Roasters, a chain of chicken restaurants he opened with John Y. Brown Jr., the former governor of Kentucky and chief executive of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Opened in 1991, the chain — which was, among other things, the subject of a memorable episode of “Seinfeld” — closed in the United States 20 years later but has continued to prosper overseas, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Boris Yaro, LAT photographer. He famously took multiple photos of Robert Kennedy immediately after the shooting.

There’s another story about Mr. Yaro’s photography: that one involves a suicidal man and Muhammad Ali, but you’ll have to read the obit for that one.

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

Obit watch: March 20, 2020.

Friday, March 20th, 2020

Molly Brodak. She was a poet, and wrote a book about her childhood, Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir.

“Bandit,” her first published nonfiction work, was an unsparing account of her dysfunctional childhood with her father, Joseph Brodak, a tool and die worker who began robbing banks in the summer of 1994 to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, Molly was barely a teenager.
Mr. Brodak robbed 11 banks in and around Detroit that summer. He would hand a teller a note demanding cash and gesture that he had a gun in his jacket pocket (he didn’t). He wore a floppy hat and a fake mustache that earned him the sobriquet “the Super Mario Brothers Bandit,” after the similarly attired video game character. He was caught, spent seven years in prison and was released in 2001, then served another prison sentence for robbing more banks in 2009.

She was only 39 years old. The NYT quotes her husband as stating she died by suicide.

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.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Roy Hudd, prominent British actor. He played “Archie Shuttleworth” on “Coronation Street”, and, according to Lawrence, did a fair amount of horror.

Posted in Books, Law, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 19, 2020.

Thursday, March 19th, 2020

Alfred M. Worden, Apollo 15 astronaut. NASA tribute page.

Apollo 15 was NASA’s first moon mission devoted mainly to science. The flight of Apollo 11 in July 1969 had fulfilled President John F. Kennedy’s call for America to reach the moon by the end of the 1960s. But the three lunar landings that preceded Apollo 15 had yielded relatively modest insight into the moon’s origin and composition.
Major Worden, of the Air Force, spent three days in orbit operating a pair of cameras in his space capsule Endeavour.
Those photos provided the sharpest images ever taken of the moon, an achievement that led to the mapping of its rugged terrain. Major Worden also operated an extensive package of instruments to enhance knowledge of space and the moon itself.
En route home, he released a “sub-satellite” — carried by Endeavour and weighing about 78 pounds — that was designed to orbit the moon for at least a year and radio back data on its gravitational field and other technical information. It was the first time such a space vehicle had been deployed.
He also undertook the first walk in deep space, spending 38 minutes tethered to Endeavour while more than 196,000 miles from Earth as he retrieved canisters of film attached to the skin of the craft.
The other Apollo 15 crewmen — Col. David R. Scott and Lt. Col. James B. Irwin, also Air Force officers — became the seventh and eighth men to land on the moon, having descended in their Lunar Module, Falcon, from the space capsule piloted by Major Worden. They spent 18½ hours exploring its surface and covered about 17½ miles in their rover — both NASA records — and returned to the capsule for the flight home with some 170 pounds of rock and soil samples.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 18, 2020.

Wednesday, March 18th, 2020

Stuart Whitman, another one of those knock-around TV and movie actors. THR.

He was “Marshal Jim Crown” on “Cimarron Strip”, played a child molester in a British movie called “The Mark”, was “Sergeant Walters” on “Highway Patrol”, and did guest shots on a whole lot of 70’s TV. (No “Mannix”, though.)

Lyle Waggoner. Things I didn’t know: he tried out for “Batman”. He was the first “Playgirl” centerfold. He did guest shots on “Lost in Space” (the original) and “Supertrain”. And he was in “Catalina Caper“.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

The return of hoplobibliophilia.

Tuesday, March 17th, 2020

Half-Price Books had another coupon sale last week (before everything went to heck in a handbasket), and I managed to hit most of the sale days. (I missed Monday and Thursday, for reasons.)

On the non-gun book front, I picked up mostly small beer: a copy of Laura Shapiro’s What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories for $8.49 plus tax. I know it sounds awfully feminist, but I’m interested in food history and food anthropology, and I’ve enjoyed Shapiro’s other books.

My other non-gun book purchase was the three volume non-abridged (I’m pretty sure) Modern Library edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (in the ugly brown covers) which I got on Sunday using a 50% off coupon: originally $40 for the set, so $20 plus tax. It seems to be in at least good, if not very good, condition, and I probably could have gotten it for about that price plus shipping through Amazon’s used market, but this was just easier. (Yes, I could also have downloaded it for free from Project Gutenberg: indeed, I actually have. But I’ve found it hard to read the PG edition, and it was worth $20 to me to have a printed copy.)

And what of gun books? Well, I did find a few of those…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

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