Archive for March, 2020
Obit watch: March 17, 2020.
Tuesday, March 17th, 2020Apropos of nothing in particular…
Monday, March 16th, 2020“The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster.
“A Journal of the Plague Year” by Daniel Defoe from Project Gutenberg.
I’m not sure I’ve ever linked this before: the diary of Samuel Pepys in blog form.
Stuff’s getting serious watch: part II
Saturday, March 14th, 2020The April Wanenmacher’s Tulsa Arms Show has been cancelled.
In light of current events, we do not want to put our exhibitors, spectators or employees at risk. For over 65 years we have held two shows a year without exception until now. For the safety of everyone involved, this is the right thing to do.
Additionally, we are very concerned that the Governor of Oklahoma will follow the example of other states and limit the number of people allowed to gather in one space. Should this happen, we want to give everyone as much time as possible to change their travel plans.
Again, I don’t think this is any vast conspiracy: I think, as the Wanenmacher people say, they are just being cautious.
(And I can’t get that upset: Mike the Musicologist and I had put off going until November of this year, even though the April show is normally the one we’d go to in our rotation. This year, though, the S&WCA Symposium is in Tulsa in June, so we decided to push Wanenmacher’s out to November so my wallet would have time to recover.)
Happy Pi Day!
Saturday, March 14th, 2020Sadly, the celebration this year is more than a little subdued, and not just because Pi Day falls on a Saturday.
I had actually planned to do Pi Day (observed) on Monday at work. I’d even ordered pies six days in advance. Unfortunately, that was overtaken by events.
So, in lieu of pie, have some Pi: a blog post from Timothy Mullican about his record-setting calculation of Pi to 50 trillion digits, on what’s basically commodity hardware.
My culture!
Friday, March 13th, 2020They are appropriating it!
Seen at the HEB in Lakeway last night.
In other news, stuff’s getting serious: Buzzard Day in Hinkley, Ohio, has been “postponed”. It is not clear to me if anybody has conveyed this message to the buzzards.
Also, by way of Mike the Musicologist: the High Caliber gun show this weekend in Conroe has been cancelled by the city. I checked the Premier and Saxet web sites, and don’t see anything there about those shows. But none of these organizations is really good about updating their websites, in my opinion.
(For the record, I don’t see any grand conspiracy here to run gun shows out of business. I think it’s just precautionary. But I’m open to evidence otherwise.)
Also by way of MtM: Blue Bell has closed their “Visitor Center, Ice Cream Parlor, Country Store and Observation Deck” until further notice. The ice cream parlor and country store in Sylacauga are also closed until further notice.
And. of course, no bet with Lawrence on Gonzaga this year. That’s a shame, as I was pretty sure this was Gonzaga’s year.
Random notes: March 11, 2020.
Wednesday, March 11th, 2020Great and good FOTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl sent us a note yesterday: Hookers & Blow are touring.
Or is it “Hookers and Blow is touring”? “Hookers and Blow” is a singular collective noun, so it seems like it should be “is”, but somehow that rings false to my ear.
ANYWAY, “Hookers & Blow” is a band. Specifically, “the now legendary project formed by long time Guns N’ Roses keyboardist Dizzy Reed and Quiet Riot guitarist Alex Grossi”. Sadly, their tour is not taking them out of California: but they do have a new single coming out on March 23rd, which I’ve already pre-ordered.
Thanks, Karl! Looking forward to seeing you on the 29th!
In related news: 23 years for Harvey “I’m going to give the NRA my full attention” Weinstein. This is actually buried pretty far down the NYT front page: though, to be fair, the stuff above it is all corona virus or election news.
Interestingly:
Obit watch: March 10, 2020.
Tuesday, March 10th, 2020Man classed up everything he was in.
R.D. Call, movie and TV character actor. He was in “Born On the Fourth of July”, “Last Man Standing”, and “Waterworld”, as well as a fair amount of TV. Of particular note: he was in “L.A. Takedown”, the TV movie that later became “Heat”.
Obit watch: March 4, 2020.
Wednesday, March 4th, 2020I’m dropping into the obscure here, but I have reasons.
Rafael Cancel Miranda. Mr. Miranda was one of the four men who shot up the US Capital on March 1, 1954.
Mr. Cancel Miranda, a hero to many who favor independence for Puerto Rico but a terrorist to many others, was 23 when he and three companions attacked the Capitol, spraying gunfire from the gallery into the House chamber and injuring five congressmen as 243 House members were debating a bill involving migrant workers from Mexico.
The four — the others were Lolita Lebrón, Irvin Flores Rodríguez and Andres Figueroa Cordero — were not satisfied with the agreement that had made Puerto Rico a United States commonwealth in 1952, believing that it was a sham and that the island essentially remained an occupied colony.
Ms. Lebrón waved a Puerto Rican flag briefly and shouted about independence as the attack unfolded and House members sought cover. The four were overpowered and arrested.
Although the scene was chaotic, Mr. Cancel Miranda, at least, was convinced that most of those injured “got hurt by my gun,” as he put it when he was freed in 1979.
“No congressman in particular was the target,” he said then. “It was just an effort to shoot up the place. If we aimed to kill, believe me, that would have happened.”
All four men served “lengthy prison sentences”, at least by NYT standards. Wikipedia says that Mr. Miranda was sentenced to 85 years.
Mr. Miranda was the last surviving member of the quartet.
I’ve been going back and forth about this one, and came down on the side of inclusion. Not because this person was famous, but because this is another example of the kind of thing the paper of record does well: the obit for the person who was important to the community in some way, without necessarily being famous.
In this case, Matvey “Falafel” Natanzon, backgammon player.
…
In his short pants, sweatshirt and knitted wool hat, Mr. Natanzon could look like an amiable loser to his easy marks, as he baited them with his nonstop babble and swaggering hubris.
He would graduate to winning (and, on rarer occasions, losing) tens of thousands of dollars in as little as an hour; achieve celebrity status in a game that had migrated from black-tie casino tables to cheesy hotel ballrooms, where baseball caps worn backward were de rigeur; and be named the top player in an unofficial ranking by his peers, known as the Giants of Backgammon.
“Falafel is, without a doubt, backgammon’s No. 1 commentator and is probably its best-known celebrity,” Joe Russell, the chairman of the backgammon federation’s board, said when he awarded Mr. Natanzon the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. “He has been in the top 10 of the Giants list seven straight times, and has been voted No. 1 twice and No. 2 once.”
He was 51. A brain tumor got him.
Obit watch: March 3, 2020.
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2020James Lipton. THR. I wish I had more to say about him, but my anti-cable TV policy means that I never saw an episode of “Inside the Actor’s Studio”, and I’m way too young to remember “The Lone Ranger” on the radio.
One thing I don’t think I was consciously aware of until I read his obit: he also wrote An Exaltation of Larks.
Claudette Nevins. She was one of those knock-around actresses: she was in the original production of “Plaza Suite” and toured nationally with “The Great White Hope”. She also did a lot of TV, especially in the 70s: “Barnaby Jones”, “M*A*S*H” (she was the woman Charles Emerson Winchester “married” while drunk in Tokyo), “Mrs. Colombo”, “Switch”, “Lou Grant”, “The Rockford Files”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, “The F.B.I.”…and the list goes on. (She even did an episode of “Police Squad“. (“In Color”!)) Never did a “Mannix”, though, at least per IMDB.
Obit watch: March 2, 2020.
Monday, March 2nd, 2020I was going to make this a special true crime edition, but I got overtaken by events.
Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.
It was a time when successful, lavishly paid corporate executives were more admired than resented. Mr. Welch received a record severance payment of $417 million when he retired in 2001. Fortune magazine named him the “Manager of the Century,” and in 2000 The Financial Times named G.E. “the World’s Most Respected Company” for the third straight year.
Mr. Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time. “Jack: Straight from the Gut,” written with John A. Byrne, was published the next year and eventually sold 10 million copies worldwide.
…
He attacked bureaucracy and made sweeping payroll cuts, creating a more entrepreneurial, if more Darwinian, corporate culture. He led the globalization of G.E.’s business, both expanding sales and manufacturing overseas. And he made G.E. far more dependent on finance, as banking and investment grew as a share of the American economy.
Mr. Welch distilled his management concepts into one-sentence nuggets. “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” “Be candid with everyone.” “Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed.” “If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.”
His goal at G.E., Mr. Welch wrote in his autobiography, was to create “a company filled with self-confident entrepreneurs who would face reality every day.”
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Mr. Welch was also attacked when he was leading G.E., especially for slashing the G.E. work force, which earned him the nickname “Neutron Jack.” But most of the second thoughts about him and his management legacy have arisen in recent years. The superstar chief executive, laser-focused on enriching shareholders, is often criticized today as a symbol of corporate greed and economic inequity.
The widely diversified corporation that Mr. Welch built is also out of favor, an idea underlined by G.E.’s precipitous decline in the last few years.
The New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart wrote in 2017, “Hardly anyone considers Mr. Welch a management role model anymore, and the conglomerate model he championed at G.E. — that with strict discipline, you could successfully manage any business as long as your market share was first or second — has been thoroughly discredited, at least in the United States.”
Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s.
Linda Wolfe, writer. She started out writing short fiction, and was clipping true crime stories to use in novel plots…
A turning point of sorts came in 1975, when twin doctors, both gynecologists, were found dead in their trash-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It turned out that Ms. Wolfe had been the patient of one of them, years before — only briefly, but that was enough to propel her to investigate the case and turn to a life of writing about crime.
“This will sound callous,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, but she felt lucky that she had had “the ‘good fortune’ of knowing somebody involved in the kind of story I had been clipping.”
Both doctors had been barbiturate addicts and had died not of an overdose but of the drug’s typically severe withdrawal syndrome. Ms. Wolfe, by then working at New York magazine (she worked there for 25 years as a contributing editor, writer and restaurant reviewer), wrote a journalistic account of the case, “The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists.” Her article inspired the David Cronenberg movie “Dead Ringers” (1988), which starred Jeremy Irons.
She became a prominent true crime writer.
She would go on to write several books and magazine articles that delved behind some of the nation’s most sensational headlines. Her articles included “The Professor and the Prostitute” (1983), about a Tufts University professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved, and “From a Nice Family” (1981), about a teenager in Dallas who killed his mother and his father, who was the president of Arco Oil and Gas.
One of her best-known books was “Wasted: The Preppie Murder” (1989), so called because the perpetrator, Robert E. Chambers Jr., had bounced around various elite schools and lived on the Upper East Side. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the 1986 strangulation death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park after they had had sex behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was released in 2003 after serving 15 years in prison and subsequently went back to prison on drug charges.
I read parts of The Professor and the Prostitute quite a while back: it shows up pretty frequently at Half-Price Books. I might have to grab a copy next time I’m there.
Finally, Dr. Charles Friedgood. I’d never heard of him either, but this is one of those interesting true crime stories (for multiple reasons). Dr. Friedgood was convicted of killing his wife in 1975.
While he admitted that he had injected his wife, Sophie Friedgood, 48, with a painkiller, Dr. Friedgood insisted that he had not intended to kill her. She had suffered a stroke in 1959, when she was 33, and had become an invalid.
Dr. Friedgood was convicted of second-degree murder after prosecutors proved to a jury that he had deliberately given his wife an overdose at the family’s 18-room home in Great Neck, N.Y., where they had reared their six children.
Her cause of death was recorded as a stroke, but the police grew suspicious because Dr. Friedgood had signed the death certificate himself and rushed the body out of state for immediate burial in accordance with Jewish religious custom.
Five weeks later, he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport with more than $450,000 of his wife’s cash, negotiable bonds and jewelry. Prosecutors said he had intended to fly to Europe to join his paramour, a Danish nurse who had sometimes cared for Mrs. Friedgood and with whom he had fathered two children. He had begun his affair with the nurse in the late 1960s.
He was sentenced to 25 years to life. He was released on compassionate grounds in late 2007, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d served 31 years and was 88 when he was released.
He lived another 11 years after being released. According to the NYT, he died in May of 2018 at the age of 99, but his death had not been reported until now.