Archive for July, 2021

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Obit watch: July 31, 2021.

Saturday, July 31st, 2021

Carl Levin, Senator from Michigan.

Richard Lamm, Colorado governor.

As a state lawmaker from 1966 to 1974, he also campaigned against Denver’s hosting the 1976 Olympics even though the city had been awarded the Games. He argued that it would damage the environment and sap state funds. Colorado voters rejected spending government money on the Games, and the event was shifted to Innsbruck, Austria.
Denver voters later passed an initiative requiring voter approval for any future proposals to host the Olympics. Mr. Lamm once said that he had been treated as a “pariah” by the business community over the episode.

Posted in History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Quick notes from the legal beat.

Friday, July 30th, 2021

Two quick legal stories that I find interesting, ripped from the pages of the NYT.

1. Remember the Bonhomme Richard fire, about a year ago? Totally wiped out the ship?

According to the U.S. Naval Institute, the ship, which cost an estimated $761 million to build, was sold for $3.66 million to a company in Brownsville, Texas, that will break it apart and sell the metal for scrap.

The Navy has charged one of the crew with aggravated arson and “willfully hazarding a vessel”. Which is just kind of…wow. I don’t know what to say.

2. Lawrence Handley has pled guilty to two counts of second-degree kidnapping and one count of attempted second-degree kidnapping. He could get anywhere from 15 to 35 years in prison, and frankly I’m surprised he’s not getting the death penalty, or a life sentence for felony murder.

Mr. Handley decided to hire two guys to kidnap his wife.

Mr. Handley’s lawyer, Kevin Stockstill, said in an interview that his client had been using methamphetamine and cocaine for days when he hatched the plan to have his wife kidnapped. He said that Mr. Handley had planned to “come in as a hero” and rescue Ms. Handley in an effort to “win her back.”
“It was certainly not logical thinking, but when you’re doing a lot of meth and cocaine, I guess it seemed rational to him,” Mr. Stockstill said. “It turned out to be a terrible decision.”

(As a side note, “Mr. Handley had run software and vitamin businesses and had been the chief executive of a series of drug treatment centers that sold in 2015 in a deal worth about $21 million…”)

Anyway, the two men pulled off the kidnapping successfully. But as they were making their getaway, sheriff’s deputies noticed the van driving “erratically” and tried to pull it over. They didn’t know anything about the kidnapping at the time.

A police chase ensued.

The men, Sylvester Bracey and Arsenio Haynes, drove off the interstate, turned down a dead-end gravel road, and were penned in by the police, prosecutors said. Both men tried to escape by swimming through a canal, prosecutors said. They drowned.

Posted in Boats, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 29, 2021.

Thursday, July 29th, 2021

Supplemental: NYT obit for Dusty Hill.

City Journal tribute to Jackie Mason. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Ron Popeil.

The quirky products certainly sounded like inventions Americans could live without — an Inside-the-Shell Electric Egg Scrambler, spray-on fake hair in a can, the Pocket Fisherman (“the biggest fishing invention since the hook … and still only $19.95!”), and the counter-size Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ (“Set it and forget it!”), one of his biggest successes.
His redesigned 1975 Veg-O-Matic is enshrined in the Smithsonian’s American Legacies collection alongside the Barbie doll, and comedian Dan Aykroyd vigorously parodied both salesman and machine in Bass-O-Matic skits on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1970s.

“I’ve gone by many titles: King of Hair, King of Pasta, King of Dehydration, or to use a more colloquial phrase, a pitchman or a hawker,” Mr. Popeil said in 1995. “I don’t like those phrases, but I am what I am. Pick a product, any product on your desk. Introduce the product. Tell all the problems relating to the product. Tell how the product solves all those problems. Tell the customer where he or she can buy it and how much it costs. Do this in one minute. Try it. You know what it sounds like? It comes out like this: Brrrrrrrrrrr.”

George Rhoads. I had not heard of him previously, but his work sounds really cool.

Mr. Rhoads’s colorful “audio-kinetic ball machines,” which evoked the workings of watches and roller coasters, were built of comically designed tracks and devices like loop-the-loops and helical ramps, and were usually six- to 10-feet high. Scores of the machines have been installed in children’s hospitals, malls, science museums and airports and elsewhere in a dozen countries, but mostly in the United States and Japan.
“Each pathway that the ball takes is a different drama, as I call it, because the events happen in a certain sequence, analogous to drama,” he said in an interview in 2014 with Creative Machines, which makes ball machines based on and inspired by his designs. “The ball gets into certain difficulties. It does a few things. Maybe there’s some conflict. They hit or they wander, whatever it is and then there’s some kind of dramatic conclusion.”
One of his most frequently viewed machines, “42nd Street Ballroom,” was installed in 1983 in the lobby of Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where it remained. Eight feet tall and eight feet wide, the sculpture shows its plates spin, its levers flip and its 24 billiard balls roll down ramps. As was typical of his machines, numerous balls move independently, letting gravity guide them and, when they reach the bottom, they are returned to the top by a motorized hoist.

Joey Jordison, drummer and founding member of Slipknot.

Rick Aiello, actor. (“Do The Right Thing”, lots of TV credits including “18 Wheels of Justice”)

For the record, he was Danny Aiello’s son.

Posted in Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2021

Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write. He distilled a lifetime of campaigning in order to have a “conversation” with you. We have been fighting on this planet for ten thousand years; it would be idiotic and unethical to not take advantage of such accumulated experiences. If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you. Any commander who claims he is “too busy to read” is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way. The consequences of incompetence in battle are final. History teaches that we face nothing new under the sun. The Commandant of the Marine Corps maintains a list of required reading for every rank. All Marines read a common set; in addition, sergeants read some books, and colonels read others. Even generals are assigned a new set of books that they must consume. At no rank is a Marine excused from studying. When I talked to any group of Marines, I knew from their ranks what books they had read. During planning and before going into battle, I could cite specific examples of how others had solved similar challenges. This provided my lads with a mental model as we adapted to our specific mission.
Reading shed light on the dark path ahead. By traveling into the past, I enhance my grasp of the present…

—Call Sign Chaos, Jim Mattis and Bing West

(Obviously, I like this quote. Gen. Mattis was speaking more in the context of history, especially military history. But I think this can be extended way out: the more I think about it, the more I think that all books – history, science, biography, books about farming, even fiction – are a honor and a gift from someone who sat down to have a “conversation” with you, and it is worth your time and effort, even if you are not a combat Marine, to “take advantage of such accumulated experiences”.

Of course, some of those people who are trying to have a conversation with you are the kind of person who would be called a “bore” in social circles. There’s no obligation to read, or to finish, everything: just to keep an open mind.)

Bonus quote of the day, from the same source:

“What is a Marine doing here?” Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin asked when I entered her office.
“Madam Ambassador,” I said, “I’m taking a few thousand of my best friends to Afghanistan to kill some people.” She smiled and said, “I think I can help you.” Never before had I personally experienced a diplomat’s impact so directly.

Posted in Books, History | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 28, 2021 (supplemental)

Wednesday, July 28th, 2021

I am seeing reports that Dusty Hill of ZZ Top has passed, but I have not yet found a reliable source for this.

I’ll update here if I do find one.

Edited to add: short preliminary obit from the Statesman. Variety.

EtA2: NYPost.

EtA3:

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 28, 2021.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2021

Jimmy Elidrissi.

This is another one of those NYT style obits for someone who wasn’t so famous, but was still a figure worth noting. Mr. Elidrissi emigrated from Morocco to the United States in 1966 and got a job as a bellhop at the Waldorf Astoria…

…where he worked until 2017.

On the day he retired after 51 years, he was its longest-serving employee and probably the longest-serving living bellhop in Manhattan, according to his union, the Hotel Trades Council.

…

He remembered encountering Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter.
“‘Here you go, Mr. President,’” he recalled saying in greeting the candidate, “and he goes, ‘No, no, don’t call me that yet!’ So I say, ‘Look, Mr. President, you’re going to win and when you win send me something for my son.’ Later that year, he sent us a signed picture made out to my son.”
When Reagan returned to the hotel years after leaving office, he greeted Mr. Elidrissi by saying, “‘You’re still here, Jim!’”

Stretching the definition of an obit just a wee bit…

Five high-ranking military leaders died in the span of just 10 days, according to the Cuban government — though it’s remained mum on the causes.

Spoiler: it looks like pretty much all of these guys were older than dirt.

Posted in History, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

With twelve you get eggroll.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2021

It seems that I have been blogging for twelve years as of today.

This is, frankly, a number that astonishes me. I really don’t know what to say, beyond the obligatory anniversary post.

And also, thanks to the readers and contributors: Borepatch, Lawrence, Joe D, tim kies, Glypto Dropem (who left a very perceptive comment the other day on chest seals and pennies), Jimmy McNulty, RoadRich, The Real Kurt, Heather Dobrott, and a bunch of other folks I’m probably unintentionally forgetting.

Twelve years. I mean, seriously, the mind boggles. The blogger goes to get another cup of coffee. (In the current official mug of WCD. There is a story behind this, which I may tell at some point: but for now, I do not get any royalties from the sale of these mugs by the NYPost Store.)

Posted in Admin | 4 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#70 in a series)

Tuesday, July 27th, 2021

Mike the Musicologist sent me a story that I missed.

The mayor of Rochester, New York, Lovely Warren, was indicted on July 16th. For the second time.

The first time was back in October for campaign finance violations.

This time? Would you believe…guns?

Both are charged with criminal possession of a firearm, a felony, and two counts each of endangering the welfare of a child and failure to lock/secure firearms in a dwelling, both misdemeanors; according to a statement from the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office. The couple have a 10-year-old daughter and, though separated, had continued living together.

The other half of the couple is Timothy Granison, her husband, who has his own set of problems. Specifically, he and five other people have been charged with “conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine”.

Warren has maintained she did nothing wrong. She previously said she did not know about her husband’s activities, nor the handgun and semi-automatic rifle that police found inside the house they shared. She did not immediately respond to a text message Friday. And her attorney Joseph Damelio did not immediately return messages.

Mayor Warren lost the Democratic primary last month, so she will not be serving another term. She has not been implicated in the dope ring, either.

Noted:

John Jay College will host a panel discussion titled, “Mayors Against Illegal Guns: How are Mayors Taking Responsibility for Addressing Gun Violence in Their Cities?,” featuring Mayors Lovely Warren of Rochester, NY; and Stephanie Miner of Syracuse, NY; as well as Eric Cumberbatch, Executive Director of Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence , New York, NY. Bill Keller, Editor-in Chief of The Marshall Project, will serve as the moderator.

Guess that answers that question.

Posted in Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 27, 2021.

Tuesday, July 27th, 2021

Michael Enzi, fomer Senator from Wyoming. He’s the second prominent person I’ve seen recently who has died as a result of a bicycle accident (the other one was Greg Knapp, an assistant coach for the Jets).

I guess the moral is: be careful out there.

Dale “Snort” Snodgrass was killed in a plane crash over the weekend. The Drive put up a very nice obit for him.

You may not have heard his name, and you wouldn’t recognize him from this photo. But if you follow military aviation at all, you will recognize this photo.

The huge barreling Tomcat screams by in a right-hand knife-edge pass so close to the ship people think the picture was photoshopped. In reality, it was a well-practiced maneuver with specific airspeed, altitude, and angle of bank performance metrics briefed before the flight and debriefed after.

…

The list of Snort’s career accomplishments is long. First nugget pilot selected for training in the F-14 Tomcat along with the most hours in the F-14 Tomcat for a pilot. A TOPGUN graduate and US Navy Fighter Pilot of the Year in 1985, plus a tour as Commanding Officer of VF-33 during Operation Desert Storm leading combat missions into Iraq. He rounded out his active duty career as Commander Fighter Wing Atlantic where he spearheaded adding precision strike capability for all Tomcats. In retirement, he would go on to fly some of the world’s most legendary aircraft on the air show circuit and was a founding member and pilot for commercial adversary services provider Draken International. But Snort stands above everyone else in one area: King of the Airshow circuit in the F-14 Tomcat.

I have not had a chance to watch this yet, but Ward Carroll did a live stream tribute to Mr. Snodgrass on Sunday night. Here it is for bookmark purposes (about 40 minutes):

Posted in Obits, Planes, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 26, 2021.

Monday, July 26th, 2021

Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.

Jackie Mason, comedian.

Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”

…

After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”

…

A play he starred in and wrote (with Mike Mortman), “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours,” went through a record-breaking 97 preview performances on Broadway before opening on June 14, 1969, to terrible reviews. It closed after one night, taking with it his $100,000 investment.

For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.

He also invested in “The Stoolie” (1972), a film in which he played a con man and improbable Romeo. It also failed, taking even more of his money. Roles in sitcoms and films eluded him, although he did make the most of small parts in Mel Brooks’s “History of the World: Part I” (1981) — he was “Jew No. 1” in the Spanish Inquisition sequence — and “The Jerk” (1979), in which he played the gas-station owner who employs Steve Martin.

…

Appearances on the cartoon series “The Simpsons,” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown, confirmed his newfound status, and earned him a second Emmy. Not even the 1988 bomb “Caddyshack II,” in which he was a last-minute replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, or the ill-fated “Chicken Soup,” a 1989 sitcom co-starring Lynn Redgrave that died quickly, could slow his improbable transformation from borscht belt relic into hot property.

Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.

Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.

After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”

The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.

She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.

A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.

A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.

…

In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Geek, Law, Media, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 24, 2021.

Saturday, July 24th, 2021

I am seeing reports that Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists, has died.

The University of Texas has a tribute up, but I have not found a mainstream news source reporting this yet.

In 1967, Weinberg published a seminal paper laying out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. “A Model of Leptons,” at barely three pages, predicted properties of elementary particles that at that time had never before been observed (the W, Z and Higgs boson) and theorized that “neutral weak currents” dictated how elementary particles interact with one another. Later experiments, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, would bear out each of his predictions.

…

By showing the unifying links behind weak forces and electromagnetism, which were previously believed to be completely different, Weinberg delivered the first pillar of the Standard Model, the half-century-old theory that explains particles and three of the four fundamental forces in the universe (the fourth being gravity). As critical as the model is in helping physical scientists understand the order driving everything from the first minutes after the Big Bang to the world around us, Weinberg continued to pursue, alongside other scientists, dreams of a “final theory” that would concisely and effectively explain current unknowns about the forces and particles in the universe, including gravity.

…

“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art,” he once told PBS. “Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves.”

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 23, 2021.

Friday, July 23rd, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit for Joe McKinney. He was a San Antonio based horror writer who won two Bram Stoker awards.

McKinney, who also worked as a San Antonio Police Department sergeant, frequently set his work in the Alamo City and incorporated elements of police procedural into his novels and short stories. He died in his sleep on Tuesday, according to multiple online posts by friends, and is survived by a wife and two daughters.

…

As an author, McKinney was known for brisk, action-oriented prose. His first novel, Dead City, came out in 2006, amid a wave of zombie pop culture, and it’s been cited in academic papers as a canonical work in modern zombie fiction. The book, which follows a San Antonio patrol cop as he tries to survive an undead apocalypse, spun into a four-novel series for Pinnacle Books.

He was 52.

The Cleveland Indians.

Posted in Books, Cops, Law, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

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