Archive for March 17th, 2021

Obit watch: March 17, 2021.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2021

James Levine, “one of the world’s most influential and admired conductors”, according to the other paper of record.

Nicola Pagett, British actress. She was “Elizabeth Bellamy” on “Upstairs, Downstairs”.

Barbara Rickles, Don’s wife.

By many accounts, the Rickleses had one of the happiest marriages in show business. They socialized often with another enduring Hollywood couple, Bob and Ginny Newhart. Don Rickles died at 90 in 2017.
Barbara Rickles helped produce the Emmy-winning documentary “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project” (2007) and the 2020 release “Don Rickles Live in Concert.” Don Rickles, in serious moments, would note that he was nearly 40 on his wedding day and had struggled for years to find someone.
“I advise any young person that gets married, really, work at it. If you work at it, it’s delightful,” he said in 1986, during one of his many appearances on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, whom he would tease endlessly about his multiple marriages.

Burning in Hell watch: Ronald DeFeo.

Mr. DeFeo was convicted in 1975 on six counts of second-degree murder after he confessed to using a rifle to shoot and kill his father, Ronald DeFeo Sr.; his mother, Louise; his sisters, Dawn and Allison; and his brothers, Mark and John Matthew.
The victims were found in their beds with gunshot wounds on Nov. 13, 1974. Mr. DeFeo, the oldest of the siblings, was 23 at the time.

The historical significance of this is: the DeFeo’s old house in Amityville was sold to another couple a year later.

Yeah, that house.

That family, the Lutzes, stayed there for just 28 days and claimed that the house was haunted by poltergeists who slammed windows, banged walls and wrenched doors off their hinges.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

I haven’t laughed so hard since the hogs et my kid brother.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2021

Ja Rule is getting into the NFT space. The rapper plans to sell a piece of art that once hung at Fyre Media’s headquarters in New York City.

Ah, the Fyre Festival. Brings back memories.

Posted in Art, Stupid | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 351

Wednesday, March 17th, 2021

Today, some real history.

A while back, when Morlock Publishing’s Twitter feed was public, he retweeted a fascinating quote from someone’s book.

“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”
These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.

That someone turned out to Peter Brannen, and his book is The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (affiliate link).

Here’s a talk at Google from 2017. He does go off into climate change about 25 minutes in, so you could maybe punch out when you’ve had enough. I think his discussion of things like Chicxulub make this worth it. (I was actually not aware that there was a controversy over whether that killed the dinosaurs: I thought the science was settled.)

Bonus: since the Ides of March have just passed, how about an episode of “Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall Of An Empire” on Caesar?

Bonus #2: while I guess this is semi-thematically appropriate for St. Patrick’s Day, I’m bookmarking this here because of my interest in crime, law, and prison breaks.

“Unlocking the Maze”, about the escape of 38 IRA prisoners from the maximum security Long Kesh prison on September 25, 1983. Again, I am not making a political statement here: I just find prison breaks fascinating.

Posted in Bookmarks, History | Comments Closed