Archive for October 12th, 2021

Obit watch: October 12, 2021.

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021

Bob Herron, stuntman. He was 97.

His career began in the 1950s working on “Winchester ’73” and “The Flame and the Arrow.” He would work steadily over the years on across TV and film. One of his earliest film credits was as an actor was “Four Guns to the Border,” directed by Richard Carlson. In TV, he worked on hundreds of shows including “Charlie’s Angels,” “The Rockford Files,” “The A-Team” and Kojak.” In film, he also worked on “Pale Rider,” “The Goonies,” “Rocky” and “Earthquake.” With over 342 credits to his name including “Airwolf,” “The Green Hornet” and “Stagecoach,” much of his work went uncredited.

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.

Over time, she worked on nearly every one of Disney’s animated features, from “Snow White” to “The Rescuers,” released in 1977.

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.

Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#AH of a series)

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021

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.

And even in the few days that separated the two commission hearings on the chief, Acevedo created more ill will. During a 75-minute fiery and private grievance-filled speech to staff, the chief said he had enough probable cause to arrest people obstructing police probes, without naming commissioners.

According to several sources, the chief called Miami a corrupt city during that meeting and said he could cure it if he were permitted to bring in the right people. He also complained that several senior level positions were being eliminated by commissioners to stop his plan. The usually boisterous staff was stone silent after the chief’s outburst.

Noted:

Back in March, when Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami revealed that the city would bring on Art Acevedo, the Houston police chief, to head its Police Department, Mr. Suarez told the local newspaper that the hire was “like getting the Tom Brady or the Michael Jordan of police chiefs.”

21stCenturyCassandra, you sure called that one.

Firings watch.

Tuesday, October 12th, 2021

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.