Archive for October, 2021

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Obit watch: October 30, 2021.

Saturday, October 30th, 2021

Jo-Carroll Dennison was born on Dec. 16, 1923, in a men’s state prison in Arizona.

She died on October 18 at the age of 97. She was the oldest living Miss America.

With World War II raging, she visited military bases on the home front, sang and danced for the troops and sold war bonds. According to Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, photos of her in Life magazine made her the G.I.s’ second most popular “pinup girl,” after Betty Grable.
And Hollywood came calling. Ms. Dennison landed small parts in numerous movies, notably in the war propaganda film “Winged Victory” (1944) and “The Jolson Story” (1946), about the entertainer Al Jolson. She appeared on television with Frank Sinatra and Ed Sullivan and in a few episodes of the series “Dick Tracy” in 1950.
While she never achieved stardom as an actress, she spent decades in the company of Hollywood royalty. Through her brief marriage to the comedian Phil Silvers, she became a regular at Gene Kelly’s Saturday night parties and song fests, where André Previn played the piano and she rubbed shoulders with Judy Garland and Gregory Peck. Writers like Ray Bradbury gave her guidance on what books to read; Leonard Bernstein took her to concerts and advised her on which recordings to buy.

…

In addition to entertaining the troops, her reign as Miss America called for her to appear in her swimsuit. She felt this would be demeaning, she wrote, especially in some of the low-rent venues where she was sent; she refused to do it and even cut her tour short, though this received little public notice. The rebellious Yolande Betbeze Fox, Miss America 1951, got far more attention for rejecting swimwear on her tour because the pageant was sponsored by a bathing suit company, but Ms. Dennison preceded her by almost a decade.

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

Fish heads, fish heads, rolly polly fish heads…

Friday, October 29th, 2021

I have food on my mind.

McThag put up a post over at his place about bagna cauda. This is something I’d like to try as well. And actually, I think I first heard about it from reading about “Babylon 5”.

(I have never seen a complete episode of “B5”. I feel like SF on TV has been dumbed down and mostly hasn’t been good since the first incarnation of “Twilight Zone” went off the air (though the second incarnation was a bright spot in some ways). I’ve never been a fan of that minor SF TV series from the 1960s or any of the followup products (though I would like to watch the adaptation of a Larry Niven story they did on the animated series). However, the more I read about “B5” and the more clips I watch on the ‘Tube, the stronger my impression gets that it was an actual thoughtful intelligent SF series with many of the right people involved, and it might be something that’s worth my time. Perhaps next time I see a box set at Half-Price.)

But I digress. I’m also kind of craving Swedish meatballs. A supper of bagna cauda and Swedish meatballs doesn’t sound too bad. Perhaps not really healthy, but not too bad…

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going to get bagna cauda or Swedish meatballs. I could make them myself, but I’m kind of hesitant about stinking up the kitchen with the former. As for the latter, I guess I could schlep out to Ikea and get some frozen ones, but that doesn’t seem like an optimal experience. And I don’t know any place in Austin that serves either one. If you do, please feel free to leave a comment.

(Also, while I can cook, the kitchen is really someone else’s territory, and I’m hesitant about treading in there. Especially if I’m cooking things they might find disgusting, like bagna cauda or anything with onions.)

(Something else I have a craving for, not related to anchovies: Vincent Price’s cocktail franks.)

(There! Vincent Price! There’s your Halloween content! Are you not entertained?!)

Something else I’ve been interested in for quite a while that is (semi-) related to anchovies, and prompted by “The Delicious Legacy” and food anthropology in general: the lost Roman condiment garum.

See also: “Culinary Detectives Try to Recover the Formula for a Deliciously Fishy Roman Condiment” by the same guy, Taras Grescoe. (I’ve read his book, The Devil’s Picnic (affiliate link), and based on that, I’d be willing to give Lost Supper a chance when it comes out.)

I’m also intrigued by The Story of Garum, but damn! $158! $37 for the Kindle edition! At those prices, it had better come with a case of garum! Or at least a six-pack.

(I’ve heard that this is the closest you can get today to garum. Amazon has the 40°N, but not the 50°N. I might have to order a bottle directly. And the Vincent Price cookbook.)

(This food anthropology thing rapidly gets expensive. And I haven’t even bought any imported anchovies yet.)

Anyway, McThag’s probably peeved at me by now for wandering all over the place. And I’m hungry. Time to rummage up something to eat. Then maybe order some fish sauce.

Never shop when you’re hungry.

Posted in Books, Fish, Food, Kindleing, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 29, 2021.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

Richard Hammer, author. He wrote two books on the My Lai massacre:

Mr. Hammer’s account of the My Lai slaughter in 1968, “One Morning in the War: The Tragedy of Son My” (1970), was frequently reviewed alongside one by Seymour M. Hersh, who had broken the story — “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath.” (The village of Son My included the hamlet of My Lai.)
“Richard Hammer — knowing perhaps that Hersh had the jump on him — tried to put the incident in perspective and thereby ended up writing the better book,” the book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times.“He took the time,” he added, “to explain the gradual depersonalization of the Vietnamese in American soldiers’ eyes — to make us understand how even women and children begin to seem hated and dangerous.”
Mr. Hammer followed up that book with another centered on the massacre, “The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,” which John Leonard of The Times numbered among “a handful of public-affairs books published in 1971 that people will be reading a generation from now.” William Styron, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial.”

…

Mr. Hammer also wrote and narrated the film “Interviews With My-Lai Veterans” (1970), which won an Oscar for best documentary (short subject).

Additionally, he was a two-time winner of the Edgar award for “best fact crime” for books unrelated to My-Lai: The CBS Murders: A True Account of Greed and Violence in New York’s Diamond District and The Vatican Connection: The True Story of a Billion-Dollar Conspiracy Between the Catholic Church and the Mafia (affiliate links).

Viktor Bryukhanov, the guy who took the rap for Chernobyl.

After serving five years in prison, Mr. Bryukhanov returned to government service in Ukraine to head the technical department in its Economic Development and Trade Ministry.

It really was a different country, wasn’t it?

Sonny Osborne, of the Osborne Brothers.

Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.
The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.

This is in the NYT article, and I’ve posted this before, but fark that: I’m in the mood right now for some insurrectionist music.

Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, of the von Trapp family.

Mrs. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.
Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Mrs. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.

Martha Henry. She was 83.

For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”
As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.

David DePatie, co-creator (with Friz Freleng) of “The Pink Panther”.

George Butler, documentary filmmaker. Among his credits: “Pumping Iron”, aka “the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star”.

NYT obit for Val Bisoglio.

In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.
“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”

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

Firings watch.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

Joel Quenneville out as coach of the Florida Panthers (in the NHL) in another “resignation” that seems closer to a firing.

This is also related to the Chicago Blackhawks sexual abuse scandal: he was the Blackhawks head coach at the time.

The investigation, which was made public Tuesday, revealed that Quenneville was aware of the situation and took part in at least one meeting regarding the allegations during the 2010 postseason. Quenneville had previously said he only learned of the allegations in the summer of 2021 “through the media.”
In an interview with TSN on Wednesday, Beach said there was no way Quenneville was unaware of the allegations.”I’ve witnessed meetings, right after I reported it to [Blackhawks mental skills coach] James Gary, that were held in Joel Quenneville’s office. There’s absolutely no way that he can deny knowing it,” Beach said.
According to recollections from former Blackhawks general manager Stan Bowman in the investigation report, Quenneville, after learning of the Aldrich allegations, “shook his head and said that it was hard for the team to get to where they were [the playoffs] and they could not deal with this issue now.”

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Gratuitous Mannix, some filler.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

By way of The Rap Sheet, through my mother: the cars of Joe Mannix.

Also from the same source: “Curbside TV – The Cars Of Mannix“.

Posted in 1970s, Cars, Mannix, TV | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

Thursday, October 28th, 2021

Perhaps the idea of what a suitable military handgun should be may change, and who knows, perhaps we may have a new .40-caliber cartridge to get the ‘sectional density’ considered necessary for stopping power and a powder charge that will permit the average man to learn quickly to do good shooting at practical pistol range. Such a cartridge with a recoil and muzzle blast not much greater than that of the .38 Special and less than that of the .38 Colt automatic cartridge would make the handgun far more effective, for after all a bullet that misses the intended mark is without value regardless of the energy it may have. The idea that a handgun is essentially a short-range arm is not at all new, even in military circles, but we seem to have attempted to increase the range beyond the practical limit with such cartridges as the .45 Automatic, with the result that the gun is decidedly difficult for the average man to shoot well.

—Pistol and Revolver Shooting, Walter F. Roper (1945).

(Well, we never got a “new .40-caliber cartridge” in a military arm – we went straight from .45 ACP to 9mm – but we did get the .40 S&W as a popular police caliber. I wonder what Roper would have thought of the cartridge: biographical information is hard to find, but I’m pretty sure he had passed on when the .40 S&W was introduced in 1990.)

(As a side note: I’m not as enthusiastic about this gun as other folks seem to be, but that’s because I already have a Hi-Power. If I was in the market, I’d think about it. Or if Springfield comes out with a .40 S&W or even a .357 SIG version of the SA-35, that might quicken my pulse a bit.)

Posted in Guns, History | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 27, 2021.

Wednesday, October 27th, 2021

Mort Sahl.

Gregarious and contentious — he was once described as “a very likable guy who makes ex-friends easily” — Mr. Sahl had a long, up-and-down career. He faded out of popularity in the mid-1960s, when he devoted his time to ridiculing the Warren Commission report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; then, over the following decades, he occasionally faded back in. But before that he was a star and a cult hero of the intelligentsia.
He had regular club dates in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, with audiences full of celebrities. He recorded what the Library of Congress has cited as “the earliest example of modern stand-up comedy on record,” the album “At Sunset.” (Though recorded in 1955, it was not released until 1958, shortly after the release of his official first album, “The Future Lies Ahead.”) By 1960, he had starred in a Broadway revue, written jokes for Kennedy’s presidential campaign, hosted the Academy Awards, appeared on the cover of Time and been cast in two movies (he would later make a handful of others).
An inveterate contrarian and a wide-ranging skeptic, Mr. Sahl was a self-appointed warrior against hypocrisy who cast a jaundiced eye on social trends, gender relations and conventional wisdom of all sorts. Conformity infuriated him: In one early routine he declared that Brooks Brothers stores didn’t have mirrors; customers just stood in front of one another to see how they looked. Sanctimony infuriated him: “Liberals are people who do the right things for the wrong reasons so they can feel good for 10 minutes.”

…

His own political leanings were difficult to track. The left wanted to claim him, especially early in his career, but they couldn’t quite do so. Among other things, he could be crudely sexist and, though he supported civil rights, he was acerbic in confrontation with knee-jerk liberal dogma on the subject. Over the course of his life he kept company with politicians of varying stripes, from Stevenson, Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy to Alexander Haig and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. He said he had voted for Ross Perot; he praised Ron Paul and defended Sarah Palin; he cast a skeptical eye on Barack Obama’s presidency and was as scathing about Hillary Clinton as he was about Donald Trump.

…

Mr. Sahl worked on radio and on local television in Los Angeles, but he didn’t help his cause with what some felt was an obsession with the Kennedy assassination. His performances began to include reading scornfully from the Warren Commission report. And he worked as an unpaid investigator for Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who claimed to have uncovered secret evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the assassin, and who accused a New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, of conspiring to murder the president. No convincing evidence, secret or otherwise, was produced at Mr. Shaw’s trial, and the jury acquitted him in less than an hour.
“I spent years talking with people, Garrison notably, about the Kennedy assassination,” Mr. Sahl wrote in “Heartland,” a score-settling, dyspeptic memoir published in 1976, “and I was said to have hurt my career by being in bad company. I don’t think Gene McCarthy is bad company. I don’t think that Jack Kennedy is bad company. I don’t think that Garrison is bad company.
“I learned something, though. The people that I went to Hollywood parties with are not my comrades. The men I was in the trenches with in New Orleans are my comrades.” He concluded, “I think Jack Kennedy cries from the grave for justice.”

Richard Evans, actor. He was “Paul Hanley” in the first season of “Peyton Place”. Other credits include a lot of 1970s cop/PI shows, “Lancer”, “Bonanza”, one episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series…

…and “Mannix”! (“Bird of Prey”, season 8 episodes 20 and 21. He played “Victor Valdek”.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Supplemental obit watch.

Tuesday, October 26th, 2021

The NY Post is reporting the death of Carl Madsen.

Mr. Madsen was a long-time NFL official: he worked on-field from 1997 to 2008, then worked as a replay official from 2009.

He worked the game between the Titans and the Chiefs on Sunday. According to the report, he was driving home to Mississippi when he had some kind of medical problem. The police responded, pulled him out of the car and did first aid, and transported him to a hospital where he passed away.

He was 71. Our condolences to his family.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Firings watch.

Tuesday, October 26th, 2021

Stan Bowman, “president of hockey operations” for the Chicago Blackhawks, has “resigned”, in what sounds like one of those “resign or get fired” deals.

This appears to be a result of a third party investigation commissioned by the Blackhawks. A former player, who is being identified as “John Doe”, sued the team and states that he was sexually assaulted in 2010 by “video coach” Brad Aldrich. This was during the Blackhawk’s Stanley Cup run. Aldrich apparently admitted to a sexual encounter with “John Doe”, but claims it was consensual: “John Doe” denies that it was consensual.

The current investigation concluded that Aldrich made a sexual advance to a 22-year-old Blackhawks intern after the organization was made aware of the initial allegations.

…

After leaving the Blackhawks, Aldrich was convicted in 2013 in Michigan of fourth-degree criminal sexual conduct involving a high school student. He was sentenced in 2014 to nine months in prison and five years of probation, which ended in 2019. He is on Michigan’s registry of sex offenders.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 26, 2021.

Tuesday, October 26th, 2021

Francis Wayne Alexander. Mr. Alexander is believed to have died sometime between 1976 and 1977, but his death was not announced until Monday.

Mr. Alexander moved to Chicago from New York with his wife in 1975, officials said. The couple divorced months later, and Mr. Alexander remained in Chicago.
He lived on Winona Street on the North Side of Chicago, in a neighborhood where Mr. Gacy was known to have targeted other victims, including William Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.

…

The Sheriff’s Department was aided by a nonprofit organization, the DNA Doe Project, whose all-volunteer staff tries to match unidentified remains with genetic profiles that had been uploaded to an open-source genealogy database.
Using DNA from one of Victim No. 5’s molars, the DNA Doe Project found connections to Mr. Alexander’s family. Detective Moran followed up with research, interviews and further DNA testing before confirming that he had found the identity of the victim.

The confirmed identification of Mr. Alexander leaves five remaining unidentified victims of John Wayne Gacy. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office is actively working to identify those as well.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

Wells. Wells Wells Wells. Wells.

Monday, October 25th, 2021

Matt Wells out as head coach at Texas Tech.

Since Wells took over going into the 2019 season, the Red Raiders are 13-17 and 7-16 in Big 12 games. Many Tech fans were opposed to Wells’ hire from the beginning, and discontent grew as the Red Raiders went 4-8 in 2019 and 4-6 in 2020.

A source close to WCD suggests that this is related to the ongoing Curse of Mike Leach, and that Tech won’t be successful until they cough up the bucks they (allegedly) owe Leach.

Wells is in the third year of a six-year contract. To fire him without cause, Tech is obligated to pay Wells 70 percent of the amount remaining in his contract, around $7 million.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 7, 2021.

Sunday, October 24th, 2021

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Detroit

Just as a matter of personal curiosity, does anyone know if there was any kind of tribute to Chuck Hughes at today’s game?

Next week: Philadelphia (2-5) in Detroit.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

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