NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
New York Football Giants
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Still early enough in the season that I don’t have much to say yet. Perhaps by next week the picture will come into greater focus.
She was one of the old time greats: she co-starred with Fred Astaire in “Royal Wedding”, and also had a starring role in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. Unfortunately, she had trouble finding good roles after that. She did some TV work, including appearances on “Fantasy Island” and “The Love Boat”, and was a semi-regular on “Growing Pains”.
She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”
She never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)
I don’t intend for this to be all Norm Macdonald all the time, and I know “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. But this is a cool story, and I believe this person is telling the truth.
story about norm found in youtube comments pic.twitter.com/Hvp8pd5iz9
— Syloson (@SylosonsCloak) September 17, 2021
Well. Well well well. Well.
…
The former client, Curtis Edward Smith, 61, of Walterboro, S.C., was arrested and charged with assisted suicide, aggravated assault and battery, and insurance fraud in connection with the shooting on Sept. 4, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said.
The state police agency said that Mr. Murdaugh, 53, had admitted to the scheme on Monday and that Mr. Smith had admitted to being at the scene and getting rid of the gun. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer did not respond to inquiries about the arrest, and it was not clear if Mr. Smith, who was booked in the Colleton County jail, had a lawyer.
…
I haven’t written a lot about the Backpage trial, though I have been following it from a distance. Yesterday’s development: the judge declared a mistrial. Why? Grotesque misconduct by the prosecution.
The government’s goal with prosecution is “not to win at any cost” but to “win by the rules, to see that justice is done,” [U.S. District Judge Susan] Brnovich pointed out. “If the government can prove that the defendants … knowingly facilitated prostitution, then they will be punished. But it should be done correctly.”
In her view, that hasn’t happened. The opening statement from federal prosecutor Reggie Jones “was close to causing mistrial,” she said. Then, despite agreeing “to minimize the focus on child sex trafficking” from then on out, the government continued to harp on it. And despite being told that witnesses could only talk about Backpage’s general reputation if it was tied to communication with specific defendants in this case, government witnesses like Sharon Cooper “talked about the reputation of Backpage untethered from communications with the defendants,” Brnovich pointed out.
This is a kind of long, but interesting (to me, anyway) piece about how corrupt San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection is.
Infamous engineer and permit expediter Rodrigo Santos has been hit with a bevy of both federal and local charges. Former DBI senior inspector Bernie Curran has resigned after being suspended for taking an undisclosed “loan” from a developer and then traveling out of his district to sign off that developer’s projects.
The feds on Friday announced fraud charges, in fact, against both Santos and Curran. The former is accused of expediting his permits by instructing his clients (in writing, and captured by the feds) to write charitable checks to Curran’s preferred youth hockey and rugby organizations. Curran then returned the favor by issuing certificates of final completion on these projects, however shoddy or incomplete they may be.
…
Norm Macdonald. THR. Variety. Lawrence. Ben Sixsmith.
(If there are any of my readers who are unfamiliar with Albert Fish, he was a real jerk, and I strongly encourage you to think twice before you DuckDuckGo him.)
Hacker News thread (pretty respectful, and lots of links).
https://t.co/xeBTkWrGV1 pic.twitter.com/1qaiGpPmzg
— shoe (@shoe0nhead) September 14, 2021
I thought about embedding some of his bits from YouTube, but Variety already pulled a bunch of those together (including OJ).
This one goes out to FotB Dave: Don Collier. He did a lot of work on Westerns: “The High Chaparral”, “Bonanza”, “Death Valley Days”, “Branded”, and so on. He also did some movie work, including “Seven Ways from Sundown” (with Audie Murphy) and “Tombstone” (credited as “High Roller”).
We’re back, baby!
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
Chicago
Green Bay
Dallas
Washington
New York Football Giants
Baltimore
Cleveland
New England
Buffalo
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Tennessee
Well, how about that?
We have our first college football firing, two games into the season.
Clay Helton out at the University of Southern California.
The precipitating incident seems to have been losing to Stanford on Saturday. Helton was 46-24 overall. But his record since 2018 was 19-15, and apparently the usual suspects (boosters) felt like they were consistently underperforming.
Interesting note: Ivan Jasper is going to coach quarterbacks for Navy. Why is this interesting? Jasper was fired as offensive coordinator on Saturday, but Navy’s head coach (Ken Niumatalolo) persuaded the athletic director (Chet Gladchuk) to re-instate him.
Also fired: assistant Billy Ray Stutzmann, who is being let go after his request for a religious exemption to getting the COVID vaccine was rejected.
Gilbert Seltzer has died at 106.
He was one of the last members of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. His death leaves only nine surviving members.
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was also known as the “Ghost Army”.
“We would move into the woods in the middle of the night, going through France, Belgium and Germany, and turn on the sound” — from blaring loudspeakers — “so it sounded like tanks were moving on the roads,” Mr. Seltzer told StoryCorps in 2019. “The natives would say to each other, ‘Did you see the tanks moving through town last night?’”
“They thought they were seeing them,” he added. “Imagination is unbelievable.”
…
Mr. Seltzer, an architect, was a platoon leader and later a lieutenant and adjutant of the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, whose ranks included men who would go on to work in advertising, art, architecture and illustration, among them the future fashion designer Bill Blass, the photographer Art Kane and the painter Ellsworth Kelly.
The battalion handled the Ghost Army’s visual fakery; the 3132nd Signal Service Company was in charge of sound deception; the Signal Company, Special, devised realistic-sounding radio messages to throw off the Germans. The 406th Combat Engineer Company provided security.
In March 1945, in one of their most elaborate feats of trickery — during the critical Rhine River campaign, designed to finally crush Germany — the 23rd set up 10 miles south of the spot where two American Ninth Army divisions were to cross the river. To simulate a buildup of those divisions at their decoy location, the Ghost Army used inflated tanks, cannons, planes and trucks; sent out misleading radio messages about the American troops’ movements; and used loudspeakers to simulate the sound of soldiers building pontoon boats.
The Germans fell for the ruse, firing on the 23rd’s divisions, while Ninth Army troops crossed the Rhine with nominal resistance.
Nino Castelnuovo, Italian actor who was perhaps most famous for a French film: he played opposite Catherine Deneuve in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”.
Peter O’Toole may have been one of the unluckiest men in movies.
This came up last night, and I’m not sure why. For some reason, Lawrence and I got into a discussion of O’Toole. (Last night’s movie was “United 93”, which, while fitting, does not have Mr. O’Toole in it.)
I would have sworn he’d won an Oscar for “My Favorite Year”, but Lawrence correctly pointed out he didn’t. His only Oscar was a honorary one in 2002 (and, according to Wikipedia, his family had a king-size job persuading him to accept it, as he felt like he wasn’t done acting yet).
But why unlucky? He was nominated eight times, which is a record for nominations without a win. But worse yet, a lot of his nominations were for fantastic roles…that just happened to go up against someone else who had a career defining role that year.
See what I mean, Vern?
Side note for Dave: the TV series in which Cloris Leachman played a Pilgrim was “Thanks“. It lasted for six episodes in 1999.
(This is a guest post from FotB RoadRich, who is speaking in his capacity as a private citizen, and not as a representative of any Federal, state, or local governmental body, or as a representative of any corporation or non-profit organization. –DB)
Good afternoon,
Twenty years ago today (well, this evening) I went to a baseball game.
I was with friends who were also members of an athletic performance team I’m a member of. It so happens many of these friends were from families who had emigrated from Vietnam to a better place. I had been in their care since a few days prior, when after returning home from an outing with them, I discovered one of my previous cat family’s last members was near the end of his life. I called up one of my friends who rushed over and helped us both get to a vet where my little friend was confirmed to be gone, having passed away in my arms enroute. It became a very long night. A local friend offered a spot on his ranch for a burial and heading back into town I was told I was staying over at my friends’ shared apartment rather than head to an empty apartment.
The next day another of our friends visited and thought it would be good to get out of the apartment and do something, so after a quick dinner we went out to the Dell Diamond for a ball game. We were running late, so we were in line outside buying tickets when the National Anthem began to play.
Absolutely everything stopped. Tickets stopped being sold. Those in line paused and put their hands over their hearts, or removed their ball caps. I could actually see through the gates to the other side of the ball field and it looked full. But it was absolutely and completely silent. And I was moved.
The date was September TENTH, 2001. In twelve hours my small concerns would be submarined but in this moment I already felt how united we were.
He was apparently most famous for “Police Academy 2” and “Police Academy 3”, but he had a pretty lengthy career before those. He was prolific on TV, appearing on “Movin’ On” and a lot of ’70s cop shows…
…including “Mannix”. (“Deathrun”, season 2, episode 13. This is one of the ones with an old Army buddy of Mannix: however, Mr. Metrano was not the Army buddy.)