The NYPost has provided a vivid reminder not only that we must die, but that tomorrow is not promised to anyone.
On their homepage right now:
“Actress in Thailand dies after falling from speedboat on restaurant trip with friends“. Nida Patcharaweeraphong was 37.
“Minnesota college student killed after house she was dog-sitting at explodes“. Kailey Mach was 20.
“2 killed when BMW plunges off parkway, onto Amtrak tracks in NYC: cops“.
John Landy, runner, sportsman, and historical footnote.
Mr. Landy was the second man to run the mile in less than four minutes.
On August 7, 1954 (48 days after Landy’s record) he and Roger Bannister went head to head in Vancouver, BC.
As expected, Landy led from the start, building a 15-yard lead. But Bannister — by then Dr. Bannister — closed in on the last lap, and Landy could sense him coming. Rounding the final turn, he peeked over his left shoulder to see where Bannister was. But Bannister was on his right, and as Landy’s head was turned, Bannister stormed by him, and won, in 3:58.8. Landy came in second, in 3:59.6.
It was the first time two men had bettered four minutes in the same race. Today, a statue outside the stadium commemorates the moment.
Mr. Landy cut his foot the night before the race, and ran on four stitches.
Above all, Landy was a sportsman, as exemplified in a startling moment in the 1956 Australian track and field championships in Melbourne, just before the Olympics there.
Landy had entered the race hoping to break the world record for the mile. But with the race underway, a 19-year-old competitor, Ron Clarke, was bumped only strides ahead of him and fell to the track. Landy leapt over him and, as he did, accidentally spiked him on his right shoulder. Landy stopped, ran back to Clarke, brushed cinders from Clarke’s knees and said, “Sorry.”
“Keep going,” Clarke said. “I’m all right.”
Clarke got up, and he and Landy started after the others, who by then were 60 yards ahead. Landy caught them and won in 4:04.2.
Gordon Moyes, an Australian minister who was there, later called it “the most incredibly stupid, beautiful, foolish, gentlemanly act I have ever seen.”
Lawrence sent over an obit for Veronica Carlson, noted actress in Hammer horror films.
Twenty five years ago today, at about 9:17 AM Pacific Time, Larry Eugene Phillips Jr. and Decebal Ștefan Emilian “Emil” Mătăsăreanu attempted to hold up a Bank of America branch, located at 6600 Laurel Canyon Boulevard in North Hollywood.
Phillips and Mătăsăreanu were not, to borrow a memorable term from John Hearne, “crackheads with Ravens“. They had previously robbed two other BoA branches and two armored cars. They’d spent a lot of time scoping out the bank and were armed illegally with fully automatic weapons: “two Norinco Type 56 S rifles, a fully automatic Norinco Type 56 S-1, and a fully automatic Bushmaster XM15 Dissipator”. As I understand it, all of these were semi-automatic rifles that had been purchased and then modified to fire full-auto.
They also wore body armor and took drugs before the robbery. These guys were motivated and prepared. They’d taken $1.5 million in the two previous bank robberies, and expected to take about $750,000 in this one.
Sometimes you just get unlucky. The bank had changed procedures and schedules, and there wasn’t as much money there as they expected. Phillips got ticked off and shot up the vault, destroying even more of the money that was there. Then he tried to loot the bank’s automatic teller machine…but, due to a procedural change, the bank manager wasn’t able to open it. (“In the end, the two left with $303,305 and three dye packs which later exploded, ruining the money they stole.”)
They also thought they had eight minutes to pull off the robbery, given their observations of LAPD radio transmissions. However, a patrol unit was actually driving by the bank, saw Phillips and Mătăsăreanu go in, and put out a “211 in progress” radio call. By the time Phillips and Mătăsăreanu finished and went to exit the bank, they were facing multiple LAPD patrol cars and unmarked detective units.
LAPD at the time was armed with 9mm pistols and .38 Special revolvers. (Wikipedia says they were Beretta 92F and 92FS pistols and S&W Model 15 revolvers. However, the LAPD detective in the podcast linked below says he and his partner were carrying S&W 9mm pistols.) There were also some shotguns in the patrol cars, but LAPD wasn’t issuing patrol rifles at the time. So when Phillips and Mătăsăreanu started shooting, and LAPD started shooting back, the police rounds weren’t making it through the crook’s body armor. Phillips and Mătăsăreanu were doing a good job of laying down covering fire, and the ranges involved were fairly long, making it hard for the police to go for head shots.
I find the whole thing – the geometry and much of the sequence of events – hard to visualize, in terms of who was where and what the ranges were. Quoting Wikipedia, which has some diagrams:
Police officers went to a “nearby gun store” (A gun store? In LA?) and obtained some AR-pattern rifles (and, I assume, ammo) which they used to shoot back. LAPD SWAT, who were issued AR-15s, arrived on scene 18 minutes after the shooting started.
Mătăsăreanu took at least three hits, and what sounds like a fourth grazing wound, while he was still in the parking lot. He was able to get into a getaway car, get it started, and pulled out of the lot with Phillips walking alongside, firing a HK-91. At some point, Phillips took a round in the shoulder and his HK-91 was disabled by incoming fire. He grabbed one of the Norincos and apparently went one way on foot, while Mătăsăreanu went another direction in the car.
Phillips went down Archwood Street, hid behind a truck, and fired on the police with the Norinco until it jammed. He then pulled out a Beretta 92FS and continued to fire until taking a round in the right hand, which caused him to drop the gun. He picked it up and shot himself in the head with it: at the same time, one of the police officers shot him and severed his spine. (“Either bullet may have been fatal.”)
Mătăsăreanu’s car was shot to heck and wasn’t driveable. He tried to hijack a Jeep (per Wikipedia: it looks like a pickup, but it may have been one of those Jeeps with a bed), and transferred weapons from the getaway car to the Jeep: however, the driver had deactivated the Jeep before fleeing on foot, and Mătăsăreanu couldn’t get it started. The police showed up:
“two and a half minutes of almost uninterrupted gunfire“.
EMTs and ambulances didn’t want to come in until the scene was clear. There were reports of a possible third gunman, and it was obviously a pretty chaotic situation. It took about 70 minutes for medical aid to come in for Mătăsăreanu, and by that time he’d bled to death.
There was a lawsuit from Mătăsăreanu’s family, but the jury hung when it went to trial, and the case was later dismissed.
According to Wikipedia (I know, I know) the department started issuing patrol rifles: first surplus M16s (obtained from DoD) to patrol sergeants, and later as standard issue for all patrol vehicles. They also added Kevlar to the car doors. And, in what seems to me to be an odd development, LAPD also authorized the .45 ACP pistol for general carry. Previously, they’d only been authorized for SWAT. I say “odd” because if 9mm wasn’t getting through the body armor, .45 probably wouldn’t have either, so I don’t understand what difference they thought it would make.
Guns magazine podcast interview with a LAPD detective who was involved in the firefight.
Wikipedia entry. This links to a version of a very detailed memo from (then) Chief Bernard Parks, which is where I think much of the Wiki entry comes from.
National Geographic “Situation Critical” episode:
The LA Police Museum’s North Hollywood Shootout exhibit.
Contemporary news footage from the LA News Archive.
As far as I have been able to tell, there is no good (or even halfway decent) book on the robbery. This seems like a huge gap: some skilled true crime writer is leaving money on the table. If I’m wrong, and someone has done a book, please let me know in comments.
The Saturday Night Movie Group watched “Foreign Correspondent” last night.
Summary: it is a damn good movie, though the radio broadcast ending probably went down more smoothly in 1940. Today, it seemed to me to be a bit over the top and somewhat laughable instead of patriotic (which I believe was the original intent). The original ending of the film involved “two of the characters discuss[ing] the events of the film on a transatlantic seaplane trip” but Hitch was expecting war, and called in Ben “The Front Page” Hecht to write that ending.
I never really thought of Hitchcock as being strong on special effects, but the practical effects work (especially the plane crash scene) is outstanding. And much of that is due to William Cameron Menzies, who previously did the burning of Atlanta for “Gone With the Wind”, another movie we watched just a few weeks ago.
The fun thing about “Foreign Correspondent” is that everywhere you look, there’s a rabbit hole to go down.
For example, the movie dialogue was written by James “Lost Horizon” Hilton and Robert Benchley. Benchley seems to be mostly forgotten now, but he was a major humorist and writer, member of the Algonquin Round Table, and even did a little acting. He plays “Stebbins” in the movie.
Laraine Day, who plays the love interest, was only 19 when the movie was shot. She went on to appear in “The High and the Mighty”, and in seven of the nine Lew Ayres “Dr. Kildare” films as his long suffering girlfriend/fiance. She missed the first one, “Young Dr. Kildare”, but appeared in all of them through the eighth, “Dr. Kildare’s Wedding Day”. The studio had other plans for her, so her character was…
She went on to marry, believe it or not, Leo Durocher (husband number two for her).
She was also a member of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a committed Republican, supporting Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.
My favorite rabbit hole, however, is George Sanders, who plays a major supporting role as “ffolliott”. He looks like a villain, but surprisingly turns out to be a decent guy (though I could never shake the feeling he wanted to steal Laraine Day away from Joel McCrea, and I would not have blamed him). I feel like I should have known a lot of this trivia already, but if I did look it up, I forgot it.
Saunders had an interesting career, including voicing Shere Khan in “The Jungle Book”, playing “Mr. Freeze” in a two-part “Batman” (1966) episode, and – the reason I should have known all this – he was “Addison DeWitt” in “All About Eve” (and won an Oscar for that role).
He was married four times. His second wife was Zsa Zsa Gabor: they were married for five years. Lawrence commented that’s about average for Zsa Zsa’s husbands, though she had some really short marriages later on, and Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt kind of skews the numbers.
His fourth wife was Magda Gabor, Zsa Zsa and Eva’s older sister. They were married for a month (December 5, 1970 – January 6, 1971).
Saunders was in poor health, suffered from dementia, lost a lot of money in failed investments, and had an on-again off-again relationship with a girlfriend the last four years of his life. He was deeply depressed.
So on April 23, 1972, he checked into a hotel, called a friend, swallowed five bottles of Nembutal, and died two days later. Quoting Lawrence again, when you swallow five bottles of Nembutal, you’re obviously pretty serious about checking out: this wasn’t any half-hearted “hope someone finds me” effort. Then again, given his described health problems, I can’t say I blame him. He was 65.
The Criterion blu-ray (affiliate link) is nice, and includes a documentary on the visual effects that’s just about the right length.
Joe Wanenmacher, founder and owner of the Tulsa Arms Show, one of (if not the) largest gun shows in the world.
Mike the Musicologist and I have been lucky enough to attend a few of the Tulsa shows. The obit says that Mr. Wanenmacher had mostly handed off operational responsibilities to his other family members, but he still built the show into what it is today. Our hat is off to him.
(Hattip on this to our great and good friend David Carroll.)
Sandy Nelson, drummer and subject of one of the most interesting obits I’ve read in the NYT recently.
He had a big hit in 1959 with “Teen Beat”, which was based on a drum riff he heard in a strip club:
“While they were looking at these pretty girls in G-strings, guess what I was doing?” he told The Las Vegas Weekly in 2015. “I was looking at the drummer in the orchestra pit.”
“He was doing kind of a ‘Caravan’ beat,” he added, referring to a jazz standard. “‘Bum ta da da dum’ — small toms, big toms. That’s what gave me the idea for ‘Teen Beat.’”
He had a second big hit with “Let There Be Drums” in 1961. In 1963, he had a motorcycle accident and lost part of his right leg: he retrained himself to play the bass with his left leg.
He did a bunch of instrumental albums in the 1960s and 1970s, many of which featured covers:
But he also continued to do experimental work:
His friend and fellow musician Jack Evan Johnson said that Mr. Nelson was especially proud of “The Veebles,” a whimsical five-track concept album released on cassette in 2016 that had an extraterrestrial sound and theme.
“It’s about a race of people from another planet,” he told The Las Vegas Sun in 1996, when the long-gestating project was just beginning to take shape. “They’re gonna take over the Earth and make us do nothing but dance, sing and tell dumb jokes.”
(I checked: there was a CD version of this, but it is out of print. Amazon and Apple Music do not show a digital version, though some of Mr. Nelson’s other work is available from both.)
Mr. Nelson acknowledged that he had not handled his early success well.
“I spent most of the money on women and whiskey, and the rest I just wasted,” he told The Review-Journal.
…
Yes. He dug a cave in his backyard.
The project took him 12 years.
“I got a ‘cave tour’ once,” Mr. Johnson said by email, “and it was quite something, precarious even — dug down at a very steep angle into the hard desert soil, with no kind of support structure whatsoever and just enough room to scoot down into it for a ways until the room opened up at the bottom.”
“He had an electric keyboard down there,” he added.
Kenny Burrough, wide receiver for the Houston Oilers during the 1970s.
Other than the original “Hot Lips”, credits include a guest spot on an early episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Back to School”, “T.H.E. Cat”, “Coronet Blue”, the legendary “Delgo“, and a whole bunch of other stuff…
…including “Mannix”. (“The Solid Gold Web“, season 2, episode 23. She plays a former love interest of Mannix.)
Last year, Mike the Musicologist and I were talking about stuff. MtM suggested it might be interesting to take the money from our stimulus checks and invest it…in gun related stocks.
Thus was born what I refer to as “the gun hedge fund”, even though it technically isn’t a hedge fund. It is more just a collection of gun related stocks that I think have good growth potential. I have one (or in some cases, two) shares in each of the following companies:
I haven’t really been “trading”, per se. I’ve bought these stocks to hold, and any dividends I’ve reinvested in more stocks. This is just for fun, and experimental purposes. It’s also a way to use money that I’d otherwise probably have spent on whisky and women, or just wasted.
This has been going on for exactly a year today. What have the results been so far? Well, I funded the account with $408.10. As of the close of the markets today, my positions (and accumulated cash) are worth…
…$417.82. So I’ve made $9.72 on gun stocks over the past year, or roughly 2.3% on my initial investment. That includes the dividends I’ve received and reinvested over the past 12 months ($21.38), so, on the whole, I’ve probably lost money.
Better than what I would have made if I put the money in a savings account. I’m not too stressed, since I’m mostly doing this for fun.
Who did the best? As far as I can tell, Olin (bought at $32.78, closed today at $48.82) and Vista Outdoor (bought at $33.38, closed today at $34.39).
I can’t find a way in the Schwab app to graph the entire history of this account over the past 12 months, but looking at the history of all of my accounts, I was actually doing pretty well right up until February 21st. Then my accounts fell off a cliff. I blame the Ukraine and the vertical integration of the broiler industry for that.
Two side notes:
1) For all the complaints I have about work, this job has let me personally own stock for the first time in my life. I already had a Schwab account because I’ve been buying company stock on the employee purchase plan, so it was easy to open a second account for the gun hedge fund independent of that. The hardest part was moving the money from my bank to Schawb. (I think I also had to send them an ID.)
2) My employee stock purchase plan had $205 cash in it that I couldn’t do anything with: I couldn’t buy more company stock, and if there’s a way to reinvest dividends, I haven’t found it yet. So yesterday I opened a second personal account, because I wanted to keep the gun hedge fund as a thing by itself, and bought…one share of Apple.
Apple closed today at $162.74. I bought this morning at $152.42, so I’m already up $10.32 on that one share of AAPL, or more than the gun hedge fund made in the past 12 months.
Yes, it is a tongue twister.
It is also the fish sauce I ordered and which arrived yesterday. (Previously.) Please note that this is not cheap. Please also note that I paid for this out of my own pocket: it was not a trade or barter deal for advertising.
My regular lunch during the work week is dried noodle soup, generally jacked up with some additional low-sodium chicken broth and another condiment. Sometimes I use one of the Tabasco flavors (either the regular or the scorpion pepper), but I’ve also used Angostura Bitters. Both of those work pretty well, but I thought I’d give the Red Boat a try.
When I opened the bottle, the smell was really strong. It didn’t bother me, but it might be borderline offensive for people who aren’t big fans of fishy things. I added about a half-teaspoon to my noodles before I cooked them.
After cooking, you could tell there was something there, but it was very slight. I suspect a lot of the fish sauce volatilized off during the cooking: something like this happens with Angostura as well, but the bitters leave enough behind to give it a much more pronounced flavor.
Next time, I may try adding the sauce after cooking, and, depending on those results, may go up to a full teaspoon. Also, since I have the fish sauce, I do want to try making Parthian Chicken now. (However, I need to get lovage and asafoetida. Both are readily available from Amazon, and might even be at my local Whole Paycheck or Central Markup.)
Followup NYT obits for Bob Beckel, Gary Brooker, and The Amazing Johnathan.
William Kuenzel has passed away from cancer at the age of 60. I’m noting his obit because this is a bizarre and troubling case, that got Robert M. Morgenthau (NYC’s liberal DA) and Edwin C. Meese III on the same side.
Mr. Kuenzel was arrested in November of 1987 and charged with killing a convenience store clerk. His roommate, Harvey Venn, initially told police Mr. Kuenzel was probably asleep at home, but later changed his story and claimed Mr. Kuenzel pulled the trigger. Mr. Venn got a reduced sentence for testifying against Mr. Kuenzel. Mr. Kuenzel refused to plead out.
It gets worse.
Mr. Kuenzel met with more than 20 years of resistance to his hope for a new trial because of a late filing of an appeal in 1993 — a procedural issue that he could never overcome in state and federal courts even after Alabama’s state assistant attorney general in 2010 turned over evidence that had been withheld at the original trial. It included handwritten notes from Mr. Venn’s police interview in which he said that Mr. Kuenzel had been in bed at the time of the shooting.
The cache of new evidence also included a transcript of the grand jury testimony of a witness who had been equivocal about seeing Mr. Kuenzel and Mr. Venn in the store as she drove by in a car, but who testified with more certainty at the trial. Her testimony provided critical corroboration of Mr. Venn’s assertion that Mr. Kuenzel had been an accomplice.
The Supreme Court refused to review his case in 2013, and again in 2016.
Had he not died, he would have eventually been scheduled for execution.
Mark Lanegan, singer. (Queens of the Stone Age, Screaming Trees)
The Amazing Johnathan (John Edward Szeles).
…
Gary Brooker, of Procol Harum.
Arthur Feuerstein. He’s probably one of those people you’ve never heard of, but the obit fascinates me (for reasons that will become apparent shortly).
Mr. Feuerstein was a chess player. A really good chess player. How good?
Over his career, Mr. Feuerstein had a record of one win, one loss and three draws with Mr. Fischer.
More:
At the 1956 United States Junior Championship, he took third, behind Mr. Fischer. He then edged Mr. Fischer for the United States Junior Blitz Championship, in which each player had five minutes for the entire game.
The third Rosenwald tournament, played in October 1956 at the Manhattan Chess Club, is usually remembered because of Mr. Fischer’s remarkable win against Donald Byrne, Robert’s younger brother. But Mr. Fischer finished in a tie for eighth, while Mr. Feuerstein was third — just behind Arthur Bisguier, another New York prodigy, who had won the United States Championship two years earlier.
Then, in the 1957-58 championship, Mr. Feuerstein tied for sixth with Arnold Denker, a former champion, and Edmar Mednis, a future grandmaster. Mr. Fischer, who was then only 14, won the championship, beating Mr. Feuerstein in the process for the first and only time…
The NYT obit describes the 1950s as being “a golden age for the game in the United States, particularly in New York City”. It would probably have a limited audience, but I’d read a book about this time in the chess world.
Anyway, Mr. Feuerstein didn’t want to turn pro. He thought professional chess was “too unstable and too poorly paid”, so he went into the corporate world. But he continued to play as an amateur.
Then, one day in 1973, Mr. Feuerstein, his wife, and their dog were driving to their vacation home. They got hit by a semi.
The dog was killed. Mrs. Feuerstein broke her back and spent six weeks in a cast.
Mr. Feuerstein suffered a horrible head injury. The doctors on his case gave his wife an extremely negative prognosis.
Then one day Mr. Feuerstein woke up, pulled the breathing tube out and began trying to talk. A nurse called Alice, who rushed to the hospital. She found him playing chess with the neurosurgeon, who had also been called.
Years later, in a profile that appeared in 2012 in Chess Life, the magazine of the United States Chess Federation, the game’s governing body, Alice Feuerstein said her husband, after waking, did not even know what a toothbrush was. But, Mr. Feuerstein recalled, “I remembered everything about chess, even my openings.” He also recalled that he had won that game with the doctor.
This isn’t a miracle story. According to the obit, Mr. Feuerstein was never able to work full-time again.
But he did return to competition at something approaching his pre-accident ability, sometimes beating grandmasters, and he remained a master-level player into his late 70s.
He played his last tournament in October 2015, when he was nearly 80, and scored 50 percent, with one win, one loss and a draw.
Cancer got him at 86.
A mega sized roundup today, mostly due to FotB RoadRich.
Frank Pesce. Among his credits (other than the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies and “Top Gun”) are guest spots on “Jake and the Fatman”, “Miami Vice”, “Airwolf”, “Blue Thunder” (the series), and “The Master”.
Lindsey Pearlman. She appeared on “Vicious”, “Chicago Justice”, and “General Hospital”, among other credits. She was 43.
Zoe Sozo Bethel, Miss Alabama 2021.
Bob Beckel. He used to host “The Five” on the Fox News Channel.
Beckel was campaign manager during Democratic Party nominee Walter Mondale’s ill-fated run for the presidency in 1984.
He also served in the State Department during the Carter administration.
Peter Earnest. He used to work for the CIA…and went on to become the first executive director of the International Spy Museum. I’ve never been there, but my beloved and indulgent sister and her family have. One of these days, I have to make it back to DC.
Just in case you were wondering. Also: