Archive for May, 2021

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Obit watch: May 14, 2021.

Friday, May 14th, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit from one of the Indianapolis TV stations for Edgar Harrell and James W. Smith, both of whom passed away this week. They were 96 years old.

Both men were survivors of the USS Indianapolis sinking.

Harrell was the last surviving Marine. The Facebook page’s tribute to Harrell said, “During his time aboard ship, he helped guard components of the atomic bomb. After the torpedoing, he was a hero amongst his shipmates.”
Smith had served the longest aboard the ship, beginning in December 1943. The Facebook page’s tribute to Smith said, “During weekly zoom calls, James would regale the group with tales of wartime as a young sailor… tales filled with mischief, adventure, fear, heroism, and brotherhood… and of course girls and a few stashed bottles of moonshine that got him into trouble.”

I’ve been meaning to note this one for a couple of days now: Colt Brennan. He was a star quarterback at the University of Hawaii.

In 2006, he set what was then an N.C.A.A. record for touchdown passes — 58 — in a single season, raising the possibility that he would be recruited by the N.F.L. after his junior year.
Instead, he stayed on for his final year. The Rainbow Warriors finished the season 12-0 and made their only football bowl series appearance, in the Sugar Bowl, against Georgia on Jan. 1, 2008. Mr. Brennan was a Heisman Trophy finalist that season.

He was drafted by Washington in 2008 as a backup, was cut two years later, went to the Raiders, and was cut again.

According to his family, he was in a car crash in 2010 and was never the same: “…broke his collarbone and ribs, caused head trauma, and resulted in blood clots that would plague him the rest of his life”. He descended into addiction. Recently, he had spent four months in a rehab center.

Mr. Brennan tried to enroll in a detox facility over the weekend but was turned away because it was full, his father said.

Instead, he met up with some people at a hotel and (according to his family) overdosed on fentanyl. He was 37.

NYT obit for Billie Hayes.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 408

Thursday, May 13th, 2021

Travel Thursday!

Since I know there’s at least one person out there who loves Greyhound (“…the awful smell of stale cigarettes, recirculated air with the BO of 50 other people that would linger for a day or two after my 6 hour Greyhound ride from college to home.“) here’s a promo film: “Would You Believe It?” from 1957, promoting the company’s “Escorted Tour” services. In color, even.

The one time I took the ‘Hound on the ground, it was only about three hours each way (Austin-Houston and back), and I think by that time smoking was verboten on Greyhound buses. However, in the interest of fairness…

Bonus #1: “10 BAD Things That WILL Happen on the GREYHOUND BUS” from the “Frugal Travel Guru”.

Bonus #2: This one’s a long one, but probably somewhat more pleasant than traveling by bus. Especially if you have a good car: a man with a good car doesn’t need to be justified.

“100 Years on the Lincoln Highway”, a Wyoming PBS documentary about the first coast to coast road.

Posted in Cars, History, Roads, Travel | Comments Closed

Tiger, tiger…

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

I missed this story the other day, but wanted to make note of it here, if only for this quote:

“Obviously, if you see a Cherokee with a big tiger in it, it would be good to call us,” Ronald Borza, a commander with the Houston Police Department, said at a news conference on Monday afternoon before Mr. Cuevas was taken into custody.

Also:

“We have reports that he does have monkeys,” Commander Borza said.

Also:

The emergency dispatcher wasn’t exactly sure how to handle the situation, he said.
“Who do you want us to send? The police, the Fire Department, you know, the priest?” Mr. Ramos said the dispatcher told him.

How about “all of the above”? Is “all of the above” an option?

Posted in Bagatelle, Mammals, Monkeys, Primates | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 407

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

It has been about two weeks since I’ve done any gun crankery, so I think the cycle has come around again. Today, let’s talk about a subject that is close to my heart, and that certain people are probably tired of hearing me go on about: the pre-1964 Winchester.

Target Suite covers the pre-64 Model 94 versus the post-64 Model 94.

My own Model 94 is a 1963. I only have one of those.

“WINCHESTER 70 ‘PRE-‘64’: what’s the BIG deal?”

“WINCHESTER MODEL 70: Past & Present Rifles”.

And finally: “Winchester Model 70 Post 64 Review”.

I’m lucky enough to have temporary custody of three Model 70 rifles: one in .270 Winchester that appears to be from 1951, one in .30-06 that seems to be from 1937, and one in .308 that, as best as I (and the guy at Cabela’s) can tell was early 1964 production.

(I haven’t written off for history letters on any of these: the dates are based on the serial number tables in Roger Rule’s The Rifleman’s Rifle (affiliate link), a book I recommend if you have any interest in the Model 70. Yes, I know, the price is enough to give you the leaping fantods, but I think it’s a great book. And not just because I would get a small kickback if you bought it.)

Posted in Books, Guns, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 12, 2021.

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021

Norman Lloyd. THR.

I think many people of my age remember him as “Dr. Auschlander” on “St. Elsewhere”, but man, what a career before that.

His first love was the theater, and he was asked by Welles and John Houseman to join their legendary Mercury Theatre in the mid-1930s. He played Cinna the Poet in Welles’ anti-fascist adaptation of Julius Caesar, the 1937 Broadway production that landed Welles, then 22, on the cover of Time magazine.

He would have been in Welles’ “Heart of Darkness”, if RKO hadn’t pulled the plug on that. He had a wife and a baby and needed work, so he left Welles before his next project: an obscure film called “Citizen Kane”.

His work as the bad guy Fry in Saboteur (1942) launched a relationship with Hitchcock that would span nearly four decades and include a role in Spellbound (1945) and work as a producer and director on the classic TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents and its follow-up, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
On Hitchcock Presents, Lloyd directed a 1960 installment, “The Man From the South,” an adaptation of a Roald Dahl short story in which a young gambler (Steve McQueen) makes a bet that his cigarette lighter can work 10 straight times. If it does, he wins a car from Peter Lorre’s character; if it doesn’t, Lorre will chop off McQueen’s finger with a hatchet.

Lawrence sent me this obit: Neil Connery, Sean’s brother. Neil did a little acting himself, including “O.K. Connery”, aka “Operation Kid Brother”, aka “Operation Double 007”, aka “episode 508 of MST3K“.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 406

Tuesday, May 11th, 2021

I want to post some more safety related videos, but it feels too early for that. I am tempted to make “Safety Saturday” a thing. But I probably won’t, for reasons.

In the meantime, how about some cars?

No, the other ones. At least a couple of folks seemed to like that General Tire promo video I posted a while back (how can you go wrong with children and firearms?) so here’s something from DuPont: “Facts About Tires”.

Bonus #1: “Why the Ford Model A is the best American car ever made.”

I don’t know that I would call it the “best American car”. But there is something pleasing about the looks, you can work on it yourself…

Bonus #2: Speaking of working on it yourself, back in the day, my dad changed his own oil. And he always put STP into his cars. These days, you don’t hear much about STP. (At least, not the oil treatment. Maybe more the octane booster and gas treatment. You can get all this stuff from Amazon. (affiliate link))

“The Racer’s Edge”, a promo film about the history of the STP racing teams, featuring Andy Granatelli.

Posted in Cars, History, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 10, 2021.

Monday, May 10th, 2021

Frank McRae, actor. He was in “License to Kill” and “Last Action Hero”, and did a few TV guest shots (“Quincy”, “Rockford Files”, etc.)

Pete du Pont, former Deleware governor and presidential candidate.

NYT obit for George Jung.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 405

Monday, May 10th, 2021

Military History Monday!

Here’s something that is a little more contemporary than I’ve been posting: “SAC: The Global Shield” from 1980.

Bonus: Something older, but for good reason: “The Air Force Missile Mission”, from 1959. The good reason: this is yet another military propaganda film featuring Brigadier General James Maitland Stewart.

Posted in History, Planes | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 404

Sunday, May 9th, 2021

Science Sunday!

My paternal grandmother was a teacher. There were always books and magazines around the house, many of which were appropriate for the younger set.

One book that I vividly remember (and wish I could find today) was a book published by Scholastic about the coelacanth: specifically, about how it was thought to be extinct, until a museum curator found one in the daily catch of a local fisherman.

I was fascinated by this. Still am: I haven’t found the original Scholastic book, but Samantha Weinberg’s A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth (affiliate link) is a pretty swell book, and is targeted more at the adult reader. And I think my grandmother would have endorsed this (ditto).

(I was hardly a “reluctant reader”, but I believe the kids she taught sometimes fell into that category.)

“Diving With Coelacanths”. Be warned: the people in this video are doing highly technical diving at great depth. Which means mixed gasses. Which means they sound like Donald Duck. There are subtitles: but as some of the comments point out, what’s in the subtitles doesn’t always match up with what’s actually being said.

Bonus: Another one of the Scholastic books she had lying around was a biography of Clyde Tombaugh and how he discovered Pluto.

“Reflections on Clyde Tombaugh” from NASA.

And here’s an approximately 30 minute interview with Dr. Tombaugh from 1997, shortly before his death.

Bonus #2: This is borderline science and/or technology, but I have a reason for posting this. A week ago Saturday, for some reason, we got into a discussion of auto racing and racing technology. I mentioned, but could not recall the details at the time, that there was a gas turbine powered car that competed in the Indianapolis 500, back when you could still do stuff like that. You know, before everything became standardized and homogenized and experimentation was limited…

“The Silent Screamer”, a short-ish (17 minutes) documentary about Andy Granatelli’s turbine powered car at the 1967 Indy 500.

Posted in Books, Cars, Fish, Geek, History, Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 9, 2021.

Sunday, May 9th, 2021

Tawny Kitaen, 80s figure.

With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the music video for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”

She once described working with Paula Abdul, who was a choreographer at the time, on the set of one video.
As Ms. Kitaen recalled, Ms. Abdul asked her what she could do, and Ms. Kitaen showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” And then, Ms. Kitaen said, she left.
“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”

…

She married David Coverdale, the frontman of Whitesnake, in 1989. The couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a pitcher with the Anaheim Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.

Tawny Finley, in a declaration to the Orange County Superior Court, claimed Finley used steroids among other drugs. She also claimed he bragged about being able to circumvent MLB’s testing policy. When told of his wife’s accusations, which also included heavy marijuana use and alcohol abuse, Finley replied: “I can’t believe she left out the cross-dressing.”

Ed Ward, music critic. He wrote for “Crawdaddy” and “Rolling Stone”:

Mr. Ward’s review of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” (1969) in Rolling Stone demonstrated his tough side: He called “Sun King” the album’s “biggest bomb” and its second side “a disaster.”
“They’ve been shucking us a lot lately and it’s a shame because they don’t have to,” he wrote. “Surely they have enough talent and intelligence to do better than this. Or do they?”

…

Mr. Ward was fired from Rolling Stone after a few months (he didn’t get along with Jann Wenner, the publisher), then became the West Coast correspondent for the rock magazine Creem, a post he held for most of the 1970s. He left in 1979 to write about the thriving music scene in Austin as a music critic at The American-Statesman.
“Ed brought a reputation to Austin as an unflinching critic — Rolling Stone had a lot of clout — and he was not diplomatic in his writing,” said his friend and fellow writer Joe Nick Patoski, who described Mr. Ward as cantankerous and difficult. “Early on, there was a reaction to some of the things he wrote and it started a ‘Dump Ed Ward’ movement that had bumper stickers and T shirts.”

…

Over the next decade, Mr. Ward was a music and food critic (sometimes, while he was still at The American-Statesman, under the pseudonym Petaluma Pete) for the alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle; one of three authors of “Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll” (1986), in which he focused on the 1950s; and, in 1987, one of several founders of the South by Southwest music, film and technology festival in Austin.

…

He returned to Austin in 2013 and set to work on “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” which was published in 2016. A second volume, taking the music’s history up to 1977, was published in 2019. But his publisher declined to publish a third one because the second book’s sales had not been as good the first one’s.

Ernest Angley, televangelist. Or, as I liked to call him, “the man who took over Rex Humbard’s soup kitchen“.

These last two by way of Lawrence: George Jung, cocaine smuggler.

Japanese composer Shunsuke Kikuchi. Among his credits: “Dragon Ball”, “Dragon Ball Z”, and several “Gamera” films.

Posted in Books, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 403

Saturday, May 8th, 2021

There have been a couple of incidents recently involving old guys falling off boats into the water and dying.

I’m not making fun of them: mad props to these guys for being out there. But, as Lawrence put it: “Important safety tip: try not to fall off the boat.”

From the National Safety Council, circa 1972: “Find a Float”.

Bonus #1: in honor of the late Bobby Unser, “Hazards of Mountain Driving”.

Bonus #2: “Blasting Cap Danger” brought to you by the “Institute of Makers of Explosives” circa 1957.

I remember when I was young and reading “Boy’s Life”, every now and then they’d have a public service advertisement depicting various types of blasting caps and warning young Boy Scouts not to mess with them. My question was: why? Was there a real problem with people just leaving blasting caps lying around for kids to find?

Posted in 1970s, Boats, Cars, Explosives, History, Safety | 1 Comment »

Well!

Friday, May 7th, 2021

A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of a former U.S. representative from Florida who had been accused of running a sham charity and had served time in prison, with the judges finding that a juror had been wrongfully dismissed for saying that the Holy Spirit had told him that the former congresswoman was innocent.

Previous coverage of Corrine Brown.

More:

But the court’s majority found on Thursday that the judge who had presided over Ms. Brown’s case in U.S. District Court in Jacksonville had violated her constitutional right to a unanimous jury verdict when he removed a juror and replaced him with an alternate during the panel’s deliberations.
Shortly after deliberations had begun, the juror told the other members of the jury he had received divine guidance, prompting another juror to bring his comments to the attention of Judge Timothy Corrigan.
In a majority opinion, the appeals court wrote that Judge Corrigan had not had cause to dismiss the unidentified juror, known as Juror No. 13, whom he had questioned about the role of his faith in deliberations.
“We ask whether Juror No. 13’s religious statements amounted to proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he could not render a verdict based solely on the evidence and the law, thereby disqualifying him, despite substantial evidence that he was fulfilling the duty he had sworn to render,” the court’s majority wrote. “They did not.”

The decision was 7-4.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

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