Archive for September, 2021

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TMQ Watch watch.

Thursday, September 9th, 2021

But that’s not going to stop TMQ:

Yes. Because two teams that had bad records last year, and turnover in the off season, will automatically be playing a bad game to start off the new season.

In other news, the loser update returns Tuesday.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Random gun crankery, some filler.

Thursday, September 9th, 2021

Two things that I have absolutely no use for but find oddly appealing. Both of these are kind of old, but I just discovered them in the past couple of days:

1. Lone Wolf shows them as “low stock”, but they do apparently still have 9×18 Makarov barrels for the Glock 42.

I actually learned about this by way of Lucky Gunner’s ammo tests, which I am familiar with, but was reviewing to find data about a specific caliber. I don’t know what advantage this would give me over .380 (ballistically, I think very little), and if I wanted something in 9×18, why wouldn’t I just go out and get a surplus gun? But the idea is just weird enough to turn my crank a little bit. And it is threaded for a suppressor…

2. Speaking of guns in .380 Auto…the Cimarron 1862 Pocket Navy. This is a newly manufactured gun, designed to emulate the look and feel of a 1862 Colt Pocket Navy, but set up as a cartridge-fired gun (instead of a black powder one), and chambered in .380 Auto.

Again, I have no use for this, and why would I carry one over my Glock 42? But it is another one of those things that’s so freaking weird, it turns the crank again. If I saw one turn up used at a good price, it would be tempting.

In other news, I am back from my vacation, as of Tuesday. The original plan was to attend the NRA Annual Meeting in Houston…but that was not to be. So instead, Mike the Musicologist and I spent a few days bumming around looking at gun shops, some in the area around Abilene.

I’ll probably write more about our adventures later, but since this is “random gun crankery”, I’ll mention Caroline Colt Company, which is a nice shop with a lot of quality guns, and a surprisingly good (for the times we are in) selection of ammo.

Thanks to great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl for introducing me to the work of the Snub Gun Study Group. As a confirmed snubby guy, I like this idea and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.

My snubbies. Let me show them to you.
Top: S&W 19-3 in .357 Magnum with Tyler T-grip.
Bottom: S&W Model 36 (no dash?) fitted with an Apex Tactical spring kit

(And yes, I consider the 2 1/2″ Model 19 to be a snub gun. As I recall, so did Ed Lovette in his book, The Snubby Revolver. No Amazon link because this was an old Paladin Press volume and prices are through the roof.)

In a rare combination of Smith and Wesson crankery and movie crankery, you can buy Indiana Jones’s S&W. On GunBroker. The “buy it now” price, though, is $5,000,000.00. Which is also the minimum bid. Just for comparison, the gun that killed Billy the Kid went for $6,030,312 not too long ago. (Hattip: The Firearm Blog.)

Lawrence sent over a note earlier this morning: David Chipman’s nomination to head BATFE is being withdrawn. I’d like to believe this is a good thing: maybe it is, but I’m worried the Biden administration is going to nominate someone who is even worse.

Posted in Books, Guns, Movies, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 9, 2021.

Thursday, September 9th, 2021

Michael Constantine, noted actor.

He gets a lot of press for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” but he did a lot of other work before (and after) that. No “Mannix”, but “Kojack”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Law and Order: Original Recipe”, “Hunter”, multiple appearances on “Quincy, M.E.”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, late period “Perry Mason”, and the list goes on. He was even in “The Hustler”, which we watched just a few weeks ago.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 8, 2021.

Wednesday, September 8th, 2021

I don’t do NetFlix. I’ve never watched an episode of “Tiger King”, and I’m not sure if any of my readers have.

But just in case: Erik Cowie.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

We’re through the looking glass here, people!

Tuesday, September 7th, 2021

The Murdaugh story just gets stranger.

Alex Murdaugh, the prominent South Carolina lawyer whose wife and son were shot to death months ago in an unsolved murder mystery that has captivated the state and confounded the police, was pushed out of his powerful law firm over claims that he had misused funds the day before he called 911 from a rural road to say that he had been shot in the head, the firm disclosed on Monday.
Leaders of the Hampton, S.C., firm said they had discovered that Mr. Murdaugh had misappropriated money from the law office and that he had resigned on Friday. The next day, Mr. Murdaugh told the police he had been changing a tire at the side of a road in Hampton County — where members of his family have established a powerful legal dynasty over three generations — when someone in a truck pulled up and shot him in the head.

…

Mr. Murdaugh, 53, was a partner at the law firm P.M.P.E.D. — known by the initials of its partners — which was founded by Mr. Murdaugh’s great-grandfather more than a century ago and is well-known in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. In a statement to The New York Times, the firm said that it had hired a forensic accounting firm to investigate the suspected misappropriation of funds and that it had also notified the police and the South Carolina Bar.
The law firm said it had told Mr. Murdaugh of the accusations on Friday, and that he and the firm agreed that he should resign. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer said his client had expressed his “regret and sorrow.”
The law office did not say how much money was missing, but a member of the firm, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose company information, said the amount was in the millions.

Posted in Law, Murdaugh | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 7, 2021.

Tuesday, September 7th, 2021

Damn.

Michael K. Williams, “Omar” on “The Wire”, “Leonard” in “Hap and Leonard”, “Chalky White” on “Boardwalk Empire”, and lots of other stuff. THR.

Keith McCants. He was picked fourth overall by Tampa Bay in the 1990 draft, but turned into a bust. Tampa Bay let him go after three years, he bounced around a bit (playing with Houston and Arizona) before leaving football, and fell into addiction. He was 53, and apparently died of an overdose.

Jean-Paul Belmondo, legendary French New Wave star. (“Breathless”, among other credits.)

Tony Selby, British actor. (“Doctor Who”, “Eastenders”).

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Quick miscellany.

Monday, September 6th, 2021

I’m on vacation, but I’ve got a little bit of time, so a couple of quick notes:

Remember the Murdaugh murders I wrote about a few months ago?

On Saturday, someone shot Alex Murdaugh. Mr. Murdaugh is the father of Paul and husband of Maggie. Reports are that he was shot in the head, but the wound is “superficial” and he’s expected to recover.

Obit watch: Willard Scott.

Mr. Scott, who had earlier played both Bozo the Clown and the original Ronald McDonald on television, was among the first of a generation of television weathermen who stressed showmanship over science. Throughout the late 20th century, he was also a ubiquitous television pitchman.

…

Though he was meant to represent the new, late-model television weatherman, Mr. Scott brought to the job a brand of shtick that harked back to earlier times. He seemed simultaneously to embody the jovial, backslapping Rotarian of the mid-20th century, the midway barker of the 19th and, in the opinion of at least some critics, the court jester of the Middle Ages.
There was the time, for instance, that he delivered the forecast dressed as Boy George. There was the time he did so dressed as Carmen Miranda, the “Brazilian bombshell” of an earlier era, dancing before the weather map in high heels, ruffled pink gown, copious jewelry and vast fruited hat. There was the time, reporting from an outdoor event, that he kissed a pig on camera.
The pig did not take kindly to being kissed and squealed mightily.

…

From 1952 to 1962, Mr. Scott also played the title character on “Bozo the Clown,” the WRC-TV version of a syndicated children’s show. In the early ’60s, on the strength of his Bozo, McDonald’s asked him to develop a clown character to be used in its advertising.
As Ronald McDonald, Mr. Scott did several local TV commercials for the franchise but was passed over — in consequence of his corpulence, he later said — as its national representative.

Posted in Law, Murdaugh, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

David Janssen!

Thursday, September 2nd, 2021

As someone who enjoys mystery fiction and well-written true crime, I find CrimeReads to be about 50% interesting…and about 50% woke bushwa.

On the interesting side: “Remembering Harry O, The Seventies’ Second Best, Mostly Forgotten Private Eye Series” by J. Kingston Pierce (editor of “The Rap Sheet“).

I was a school kid during Harry O’s prime-time run, and its weekly installments commenced past my bedtime. So I didn’t catch up with the series until decades later. That it was waiting around for me to enjoy—that it existed at all!—owed a great deal to the audacity of its creator, the appeal of its headliner, and not a little good luck.

I’m pretty much in the same boat: “Harry O” was right at the edge of my consciousness, but I don’t remember ever seeing an episode. (As the author notes, the series has been released on DVD, but Amazon shows them as “temporarily out of stock”, and it isn’t on Prime.)

I was thinking about this yesterday, and I kind of put David Janssen and Darren McGavin into the same mental bucket: they both seem to me to be two guys who has some success as actors, but were still the kind of people you could have a shot and a beer and a conversation with.

In case you were wondering about that “second best”, I kind of think my readers can draw their own conclusion about which series was the best. But if you’re still wondering, at the tone leave your name and message, I’ll get back to you.

Posted in 1970s, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 2, 2021.

Thursday, September 2nd, 2021

My sincere thanks to Alan Simpson for sending over a tribute from the Libertarian Futurist Society to L. Neil Smith.

In 2016, Smith received the Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement for his many contributions to liberty and libertarian sf. (Only four authors have received this prestigious lifetime award, including Poul Anderson, F. Paul Wilson and Vernor Vinge.)

…

Although not as widely recognized by mainstream critics for his social conscience and passion for justice and liberty during his lifetime as this principled and idealistic author deserved, Smith regularly incorporated such themes into both his fiction and nonfiction.
For instance, a dramatic exposure of the evils of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust was at the moral center of The Mitzvah, Smith’s novel (cowritten with Aaron Zelman) about a Catholic priest, influenced by socialist ideas of the 1960s, who discovers that the German immigrant parents who raised him actually adopted him and that his true parents were a Jewish couple murdered in the Holocaust.
Smith, a longtime libertarian activist, also wrote two non-fiction books, Lever Action and Down with Power, that expressed his libertarian views, and founded, and regularly contributed essays to, The Libertarian Enterprise, an anarcho-capitalist journal.

Carolyn Shoemaker, comet hunter.

“Carolyn Shoemaker is one of the most revered and respected astronomers in history,” Jennifer Wiseman, a senior scientist overseeing the Hubble Space Telescope, said in a phone interview. “Her discoveries, her tenacious care in how she did her work — those things have created a legacy and a reputation that has inspired people who have come into the field after her.”

…

In spite of feeling nervous around scientific instruments as simple as a calculator, she offered to help her husband, the revered planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker, with a project gathering data on comets and asteroids.
Dr. Shoemaker believed that collisions with Earth by comets had been responsible for transporting to the planet water and other elements necessary for life, meaning that humans “may truly be made of comet ‘stuff,’” Ms. Shoemaker wrote in her essay. Dr. Shoemaker also worried that a comet hitting Earth could threaten human civilization. Yet relatively little scientific attention had been paid to the frequency and effects of cometary collision with planets.
As the dark phase of the lunar cycle began, making it easier to see faint objects in outer space, the Shoemakers would travel to an observatory on Palomar Mountain near San Diego. To locate previously unknown comets and asteroids, they aimed to photograph as much of the night sky as possible. The chirping of birds signaled bedtime.In the afternoons, Dr. Shoemaker would take the film they had used the previous night and develop it in a darkroom, then turn over the negatives to Ms. Shoemaker. Using a stereoscope, she would compare exposures of the same block of sky at different times. If anything moved against the relatively fixed background of stars, it would appear to float in the viewing device’s eyepiece.
Ms. Shoemaker was charged with discerning what was the grain of the film (and perhaps dust on it) and what was an actual image of light emitted by an object hurtling through space. “With time,” she wrote, “I saw fainter and fainter objects.”
It took a few years before she found her first new comet, in 1983. By 1994, in addition to hundreds of asteroids, she had discovered 32 comets, a number considered by the United States Geological Survey and others to represent the world record at the time.

Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker are the “Shoemaker” in “Shoemaker-Levy 9”.

One comet, known as Shoemaker-Levy 9 (named in part for their associate David Levy), had stood out from the rest. Rather than making a lonely journey through the cosmic vacuum, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was on a collision course with Jupiter. By detecting the comet shortly before impact, Ms. Shoemaker gave scientists an opportunity to examine whether or not comets slamming into planets represented major astronomical events — and to test the hypotheses of her husband’s work.
The result had all the drama the Shoemakers might have imagined: whirling fire balls, a plume of hot gas as tall as 360 Mount Everests and a series of huge wounds that appeared in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Amateur astronomers could witness much of it with store-bought telescopes.
Anticipation of Shoemaker-Levy 9 and the spectacular show it produced made the front page of The New York Times and the cover of Time magazine, which called the Shoemakers “a husband-and-wife scientific duo who spend their evenings scanning the skies for heavenly intruders.” The couple and Mr. Levy were featured in a Person of the Week segment of the nightly ABC News broadcast and met with President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore.

…

Today, professional astronomers use remotely controlled telescopes and digital detection software. They tend not to pull all-nighters in remote mountain regions, guiding telescopes across the night sky and developing film in their own darkrooms, as the Shoemakers did. Yet scientists still depend on methods that Ms. Shoemaker perfected.
“She and her colleagues set the stage for how to identify what we would call minor bodies in our solar system, such as comets and asteroids,” Dr. Wiseman said. “We still use the technique of looking for the relatively fast transverse motions of comets and asteroids in our own solar system as compared to the slower or more fixed position of stars.”

Posted in Books, Obits, Science | 1 Comment »

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