…and then when I got out, they arrested me for swindling the sons of my dead housekeeper out of the settlement they got when she fell and died on my front steps.
Okay, that was not one of the more successful Amy Winehouse songs. The scansion could probably use a little work.
I love the fall season. Fall is a great time for philosophy.
For example, Mike Shildt out as manager of the St. Louis Cardinals.
Shildt was 252-199 in a little over three seasons, and the Cardinals have made the postseason each of the past three years. They won 17 straight games this year, made it to the wild card game, and lost to the Dodgers.
In other news, the Yankees fired Phil Nevin and Marcus Thames. Thames has been the hitting coach for four seasons, and Nevin has been the third base coach since 2018. Also out: P.J. Piliterre, assistant hitting coach.
Giggle. Snort. Both Mike the Musicologist and Lawrence sent this to me.
Also charged: Marilyn Louise Flynn, “who at the time was dean of USC’s School of Social Work”.
In a 20-count indictment, he and Flynn face charges of conspiracy, bribery and mail and wire fraud.
But what exactly did they do?
Allegedly, the senior Ridley-Thomas funneled about $100,000 to USC.
The Times reported that USC alerted federal prosecutors to the unusual arrangement after an internal investigation. It also described the intense budget pressure Flynn was under at the time of the alleged scheme with Mark Ridley-Thomas in large part because of her embrace of online degree programs.
Under her tenure as dean, USC’s social work program became the largest in the world, growing from an enrollment of 900 in 2010 to 3,500 in 2016.
That growth, however, was achieved largely through a partnership with a digital learning startup that received more than half of the tuition that students paid for a master’s degree through the school’s online program. The profit-sharing required Flynn to aggressively raise money and seek government contracts to increase revenue.
To fill the online ranks, the school began admitting less qualified students, who sometimes struggled to do the work and who ultimately drove down the rankings of the once-prestigious program. In 2019, USC was forced to lay off social work professors and staff members.
More fun: Ridley-Thomas is the third council member to be indicted in the past two years.
The council has been mired in corruption scandals. Former L.A. Councilman Jose Huizar is awaiting trial on racketeering, bribery, money laundering and other charges. Prosecutors allege he headed up a criminal enterprise involving multiple real estate developers looking to build projects in his downtown district when he was on the council. Huizar and a former deputy mayor who was indicted with him have pleaded not guilty and are seeking to have many of the charges dismissed.
In a related case, former Councilman Mitchell Englander is serving a 14-month prison sentence after pleading guilty to lying to federal authorities about cash and other gifts that he received in casinos in Las Vegas and near Palm Springs.
And even more fun: USC has other issues.
And the cherry on top:
Anne Saxelby. No, you probably never heard of her if you didn’t live in New York.
She was one of the people responsible for the growth of American cheese and American cheese making.
In 2006, when Ms. Saxelby opened Saxelby Cheesemongers, the American cheese industry was largely just that: industrial and mass market. Her shop was a daring enterprise that carried only American-made cheeses from small producers.
The space was hardly more than a nook with a refrigerator in the original Essex Market on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Almost immediately, Ms. Saxelby attracted attention among cheese lovers, and especially among chefs in the growing farm-to-table movement.
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“Her passion for celebrating American farmstead cheese influenced a generation of cheese makers, chefs, cheese enthusiasts and friends and changed the way we engage with American foods,” Michael Anthony, the executive chef of Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan and a regular customer, said in an interview.
Steven Jenkins, a former cheesemonger at Fairway Market, said in a statement: “Anne Saxelby was the U.S. ambassador for American cheese makers and their handmade cheeses. Her yearslong, tireless effort to promote them and make them mainstream will forever have its effect, and will long be remembered.”
…
She was 40.
Two by way of Lawrence: Brian Goldner, CEO of Hasbro. He was only 58: cancer got him.
Timuel Black, Chicago activist, historian, and war hero. He was 102.
While enduring racism in the military during his two years of service, he’d participate in two of the war’s decisive battles — the Normandy invasion and the Battle of the Bulge — as well as the liberation of Paris, earning four Battle Stars and the French Croix de Guerre.
“We went all the way from Normandy up onto the front line of the extermination camps,” he said in that interview on his 100th birthday. “At Buchenwald concentration camp, I saw human beings systematically being cremated.”
…
He returned to civilian life with militant views, working as a social worker, high school teacher and as an organizer — with a prominent role in just about every labor, civil rights and political justice movement of the next six decades.
He worked with activists Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois in the 1940s and 1950s, and alongside King in the 1960s. He helped establish the Congress of Racial Equality and the United Packinghouse Workers of America.
…
Mr. Black spent most of his life working to fulfill King’s dream. For nearly 30 years, he was a social worker and teacher at Farragut, DuSable and Hyde Park high schools, fighting segregation and discrimination within the school system and helping establish the Teachers Committee for Quality Education. He went to City Colleges of Chicago in 1969, initially as a dean at Wright College. He was vice president at Olive Harvey from 1971 to 1973, and head of communications systemwide from 1973 to 1979. Then he taught cultural anthropology at Loop College until his retirement in 1989.
In 1994, Sun-Times columnist Vernon Jarrett wrote of Mr. Black: “Tim was of a generation that viewed education not only as a vehicle for personal elevation but also as instrument for a people’s liberation … Whenever there was a good crusade against Jim Crow housing, segregated public beaches, job discrimination or the shortchanging of Black students in public schools, there was Tim Black.
I have my own set of issues with the New York City Police Department, and I don’t even live in NYC.
But I think this story is worth calling out.
In January of 1993, Katrina Brownlee was shot 10 times by her abusive boyfriend.
…
She survived, but lost the child she was carrying.
…
In 2001 she entered the police academy. What followed was a 20-year career of promotions to busy, dangerous areas of policing, from the streets of Brooklyn to undercover work in narcotics and prostitution stings. She ended up on the elite executive protection detail, as a bodyguard to the mayor of New York.
The entire time, through all those postings, Ms. Brownlee did her best to keep her shooting a secret. She feared what her fellow officers or her bosses would make of her traumatic injuries and her motivations for joining their ranks.
…
After more than five years of being undercover, she was transferred to a quieter post in a community affairs office in police headquarters, and, now a police officer in plain sight, she saw an opportunity.
In 2012, she founded a program with the office called A Rose Is Still a Rose, which was eventually renamed and designated a nonprofit, Young Ladies of Our Future. The organization “aims to inspire, educate, mentor, and empower at-risk young ladies,” according to its website. At offices in Brownsville and East New York in Brooklyn, young women would gather for weekly workshops — “from etiquette to bullying to gun violence to nutrition,” she said.
What started this: McLean Stevenson was on one of the “Match Game” reruns last night.
I got to wondering: what was the motivating concept behind “Hello, Larry”? I knew he was a single dad raising two daughters, but was he a widower, or divorced?
(I also knew that this is more thought than my entire readership combined has put into “Hello, Larry” since I started this blog. Onward!)
Answer: he was divorced, and his ex-wife (played by Shelly Fabares, who is still alive, and a “Mannix” alumnae) shows up in season 2.
But that’s not the dumb trivia. Here’s the dumb trivia: “Hello, Larry” was not a “Diff’rent Strokes.” spinoff.
Even though there were “Diff’rent Strokes”/”Hello, Larry” crossover episodes, “Hello, Larry” was not conceived of as a spinoff. The crossover episodes were intended to increase “Larry”‘s ratings, so the showrunners decided that Larry Alder and Mr. Drummond were…
…wait for it…
…Yes! “old Army buddies”! (“with Drummond’s company becoming the new owners of Larry’s radio station”).
I wonder if they got the idea from Shelly Fabares.
The NYT has a good summary of the Murdaugh case(s), for those like me who have had trouble keeping up.
Bob Herron, stuntman. He was 97.
Other work included “L.A. Confidential”, “Diamonds Are Forever”, “Bearcats!”…and “Mannix”! (“Deadfall: Part 2”, season 1, episode 18. “Eight to Five, It’s a Miracle”, season 1, episode 21.)
Ruthie Tompson, Disney animator. She was 111.
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Ms. Tompson joined Disney as an inker and painter. She later trained her eye on the thousands of drawings that make up an animated feature, checking them for continuity of color and line. Still later, as a member of the studio’s scene planning department, she devised exacting ways for its film cameras to bring those flat, static drawings to vivid animated life.
“She made the fantasies come real,” John Canemaker, an Oscar-winning animator and a historian of animation, said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “The whole setup then was predigital, so everything was paper, camera, film and paint.”
Among the totemic films into which Ms. Tompson helped breathe life are “Pinocchio” (1940), “Fantasia” (1940) and “Dumbo” (1941), along with countless animated shorts, including the anti-Nazi cartoon “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” which won a 1943 Academy Award.
In 2000, Ms. Tompson was named a Disney Legend, an honor bestowed by the Walt Disney Company for outstanding contributions. (Previous recipients include Fred MacMurray, Julie Andrews and Angela Lansbury; later recipients include Elton John and Tim Conway.)
…
In 1948, she was promoted to the dual role of animation checker and scene planner. As an animation checker, she scrutinized the artists’ work to see, among other things, that characters literally kept their heads: In the animators’ haste, different parts of a character’s body, often done as separate drawings, might fail to align.
The scene planner was tasked with working out the intricate counterpoint between the finished setups and the cameras that photographed them: which camera angles should be used, how fast characters should move relative to their backgrounds, and the like.
“She really had to know all the mechanics of making the image work on the screen as the director, the layout person and the animator preferred: how to make Peter Pan walk, or fly, in the specified time,” Mr. Canemaker explained. “What she did ended up on the screen — whether you see her hand or not — because of the way she supported the directors’ vision.”
In 1952, Ms. Tompson became one of the first women admitted to the International Photographers Union, an arm of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees representing camera operators. She retired in 1975 as the supervisor of Disney’s scene planning department.
Iohan Gueorguiev. I had not heard of him previously, but he had a popular YouTube channel.
Mr. Gueorguiev made his name overcoming challenges hurled at his body and spirit. He was a star in the world of “bikepacking,” long-distance bike travel conducted off main roads. Calling himself the Bike Wanderer, he stood out for his Beatnik-like romanticism about the open road, in contrast to the competitiveness of many bike jocks and gear heads.
Though Mr. Gueorguiev’s exact movements could be hard to pin down, it seems clear he spent from April 2014 to March 2020 biking from the Canadian Arctic Circle to its South American antipode, the icy mountains and valleys of Patagonia. It was not a straight path. Mr. Gueorguiev occasionally flew back to Canada to earn money planting trees, he said. While biking, he would get sidetracked by serendipitous encounters and eccentric trails.
…
He shot his videos with a simple GoPro camera charged by a portable solar panel. He would sometimes position the camera at a distance, making it appear as if he traveled with a cinematographer. He earned about $3,000 a month through the funding website Patreon and received bikepacking sponsorships, enabling him to exchange the basic touring bike he started with for one with fat tires designed for riding off-road.
However much Mr. Gueorguiev tried to cast the obstacles he encountered as part of a grand adventure, his videos showed genuine hardships. Headwinds on desert plains required him to take long breaks sheltered behind rocks and make a campsite in a stray shipping container, which itself shook from powerful gusts. He would go as long as 30 days without seeing a fellow cyclist and, when biking was not feasible, could wait two days on the road to get picked up as a hitchhiker.
…
With the onset of the pandemic, Mr. Gueorguiev found himself stuck in Canada, unable to cross borders because of travel restrictions. His videos grew shorter, and he ceased appearing onscreen as an enthusiastic narrator of his own experiences. Abiding by social distancing guidance, he avoided his habitual short stays at the homes of new friends he had met on the road. In his online journal, he described biking in the cold for days on end and spending nights without indoor heating.
“I had big expectations for the Farewell Canyon,” he wrote about a scenic area in British Columbia a few days before he died, “but it was very empty, gloomy and void of all traffic.”
…
Mr. Gueorguiev (generally pronounced gyor-ghee-ev) died on Aug. 19 in Cranbrook, British Columbia, where he had been using the home of friends as a base for travel during the pandemic. He was 33.
The cause was suicide, said Matthew Bardeen, a friend who was helping to oversee Mr. Gueorguiev’s affairs. His death was announced on biking websites late last month.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources. The Canada Suicide Prevention Service. La prévention du suicide et le soutien.
He’s gone, gone.
Well, technically, not quite yet:
Miami City Manager Art Noriega moved to fire embattled Police Chief Art Acevedo Monday night, ending weeks of speculation following two circus-like public hearings where city commissioners slammed the chief for everything from a tone-deaf statement about “Cuban Mafia” running the department to a tight jumpsuit he wore years ago during a fundraiser in another city.
Technically, the manager suspended Acevedo pending termination — forcing an almost-sure-to-lose hearing before a five-member commission with three vocal critics who appear likely to support his ouster after his tumultuous six months in charge.
…
In just six months, Acevedo angered city leaders with a string of decisions and comments. Noriega, Acevedo’s boss and who was ultimately responsible for his hire, was left with little choice but to force the chief out.
Since early April Acevedo has taken control of internal affairs, publicly disparaged the legal community for early prisoner releases and short sentences and fired the highest ranking police couple in the department for not properly reporting an accident in which two tires were blown out of a city-issued vehicle. He also demoted four majors, including the second-highest ranking Black female officer in the department.
Acevedo also “accidentally” posed for a picture with one of the local leaders of the white national movement Proud Boys.
Some of the complaints seem quite petty, like the one about the tight white jumpsuit. But others…
His relationship with the city’s five commissioners — who direct Noriega — only worsened. Three weeks ago he penned a memo to Noriega and Mayor Francis Suarez accusing Commissioners Joe Carollo, Diaz de la Portilla and Manolo Reyes of interfering with police investigations. The chief also said he had informed federal investigators and compared the trio’s actions to Communist Cuba.
Like Acevedo, two of the city’s three Cuban-American commissioners fled Cuba as children and the families of all three have suffered since Castro’s takeover 60 years ago. Infuriated, commissioners called for a pair of public hearings in which they excoriated the chief without rebuttal.
…
…
Noted:
Jon Gruden out as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders.
This is technically a resignation, but it is a “resign before he got fired” one. And in this case, it wasn’t his won-loss record that got him.
The move comes after additional offensive emails Gruden had sent containing homophobic and misogynistic language were detailed in a New York Times report.
Monday’s revelations are in addition to the racial trope he used to describe NFL Players Association chief DeMaurice Smith, which was revealed Friday.
In case you missed it:
The email was written in 2011 in an exchange between Gruden, who is white and was an analyst for ESPN at the time, and Bruce Allen, who was then the president of the Washington Football Team.
“Dumboriss Smith has lips the size of michellin tires,” Gruden wrote about Smith in the exchange.
Gruden claimed at the time that referring to “big lips” was his way of calling someone a liar.
In the new emails, which were also discovered in the same hostile workplace investigation into the Washington Football Team, Gruden called NFL commissioner Roger Goodel a “f—–” and a “clueless anti-football p—-.”
The emails were sent to friend Bruce Allen, the former president of WFT, and others.
Gruden also lamented the league’s hiring of female officials and slammed the league for what he asserts was pressure on the Rams to draft Michael Sam in 2014. Sam had come out as gay before the draft.
In one of the emails, which were sent over a seven-year period ending in 2018, Gruden voiced his opposition to his perception of the league’s influence on Rams coach Jeff Fisher to select “q—–.”
Once again, history shows: don’t put it in email if you don’t want it on the front page.
Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of the Republic of Iran, right up until the point Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini threw him into the street.
In one of the 20th century’s most spectacular political collapses, the shah fled Iran on Jan. 16, 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini, who had directed the revolution from exile, returned home two weeks later. In the broad-based government that the ayatollah installed, Mr. Bani-Sadr served as deputy minister of finance, then minister of finance, and finally as minister of foreign affairs. With the ayatollah’s blessing, Mr. Bani-Sadr easily won the presidential election of Jan. 25, 1980. The ayatollah, however, had secured approval of a constitution giving him power to dismiss presidents at will. Over the next 18 months, he directed Mr. Bani-Sadr’s rise and fall.
In his first weeks in power, Mr. Bani-Sadr worked to bring order to the shambles that had been left by the collapse of the shah’s government. However, he was quickly was distracted by the hostage crisis.
“The takeover of the U.S. embassy was wholly in line with Khomeini’s strategy of focusing hostility abroad,” he later wrote. “It was at this moment that the idea of a religious state became viable. He also realized that he could now silence people at will, by threatening them with the accusation of being pro-American.”
In the venomous political climate of post-revolution Tehran, enemies rose against Mr. Bani-Sadr. Several of his associates were convicted on trumped-up charges and executed. After war with Iraq broke out, militants criticized him for relying more on the regular army, which they associated with the shah’s monarchy, than on revolutionary guards and other political forces. In the summer and fall of 1980, he survived two helicopter crashes.
The combination of the hostage crisis and the war created a hyper-radical atmosphere in which a tweedy, mustachioed intellectual like Mr. Bani-Sadr could hardly hope to survive. On June 10, 1981, Ayatollah Khomeini removed him from his post as commander in chief. On June 21, parliament ruled him “politically incompetent” and voted to impeach him as president. Ayatollah Khomeini signed the bill the next day.
Several years ago, when I was immersed in the Iranian Revolution, I read Mr. Bani-Sadr’s book. It is like many of the books that came out of revolutionary Iran: “We hated the Shah. We thought Khomeini would be a change for the better. Boy, we got played for suckers.”
Abdul Qadeer (A.Q) Khan, “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Patrick Horgan. He had a long run as “Dr. John Morrison” on “The Doctors”, and did a few movies: “Zelig” and “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion”. Other TV credits include an episode of a minor 1960s SF television series.
Interesting to me: he was “Major Strasser” in “Casablanca”.
“Casablanca”, the 1983 TV series starring David Soul as Rick Blaine, that is. Anybody remember that? I have a vague memory of seeing commercials for it, but I can’t blame you if you don’t remember it: it was cancelled after three episodes, and NBC burned off the remaining two during the summer.
Granville Adams, of “Oz” and “Homicide: Life on the Street”.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Detroit
Jacksonville
Jacksonville has now lost 20 games in a row.
The question in my mind at the moment is: when does Urban Meyer get fired?
Next Sunday, Jacksonville plays Miami in London. Miami is 1-4, so this might be Jacksonville’s best shot at a win. After Sunday’s game, Jacksonville has a bye week: it makes sense to fire Urban at the start of the bye week, to give whoever steps in two weeks to adjust.
Detroit plays the Bengals, who are 3-2.