Jim Hagedorn, House member from Minnesota.
Gail Halvorsen, the original “Candy Bomber” from the Berlin Airlift. Instead of writing a fuller obit here, I’m going to point you to the much better one Borepatch wrote.
For the historical record: NYT obit for Ian McDonald.
A long time ago, I wrote about reading Car and Driver when I was in high school.
“Ferrari Reinvents Manifest Destiny” was one of those pieces of writing that hit me right between the eyes at exactly the right time.
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P.J. O’Rourke wrote an awful lot of other great stuff, but this is what I’ll remember him for.
NYT. John Podhoretz. National Review. (Edited to add: Reason.)
I’m going to miss him.
Kathryn Kates, actress. She was most famous as the bakery counterwoman on two episodes of “Seinfeld”, and also appeared several times on “Law and Order: SVU”, “Orange Is the New Black”, and other TV shows.
I’ve been reading Admiral Cloudberg on Medium for the past couple of days. What got me started was his writeup of the Überlingen disaster: what really hooked me was the one before that, on Ameristar Charters flight 9363.
I think a lot, if not all, of these accidents have been covered on “Mayday”, but I have trouble getting “Mayday”. Complete episodes are spotty on YouTube: I think Prime Video has some episodes, but not all.
And I can read a Medium article a lot faster than I can watch an episode of “Mayday”. It helps too that Admiral Cloudberg’s a pretty good writer, so these summaries are also more interesting than reading the Wikipedia entry.
If you read a bunch of these back to back, you can see certain recurring themes. Sometimes, it’s poor crew resource management (or, in rare cases, really good CRM). Sometimes it’s fly-by-night operations cutting corners. Sometimes it’s known problems (like wind shear, or controlled flight into terrain) that take years and technological advances to mitigate. And sometimes it’s just plain bad luck.
I remember hearing about the Lokomotiv disaster, as it was pretty big news worldwide when it happened. I didn’t keep up with the investigation or the aftermath, so this was kind of a surprising thing to find in an article about a air crash:
Damn allergies, you know?
Shot:
It seemed to me that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.
—Wonko the Sane, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Chaser:
Do not eat soap.
— US Consumer Product Safety Commission (@USCPSC) February 14, 2022
IMDB. Everybody plays up “Ghostbusters”, but he also did “Stripes”, produced “Animal House”…and let’s not forget “Cannibal Girls”. (Never seen it, but it sounds like it could be fun.)
Ian McDonald, co-founder of King Crimson and Foreigner.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
Lars Eighner. I’m not sure how many people outside of Austin recognize that name. For those long time Austinites, this should be a blast from the past.
Mr. Eighner lost his job and spent three years homeless on the streets of Austin with his dog. He wrote periodically for the “Austin Chronicle”, and eventually published Travels With Lizbeth about that experience. He published two other books after that, but those were less successful.
I’m going to put this last obit behind a jump. I’m noting it because it’s a sad sundae with chopped sad and a sad cherry on top.
Shot:
Chaser:
NYT obit for Douglas Trumbull.
NYT obit for Bob Wall. Includes the Bruce Lee vs. “O’Hara” fight from “Enter the Dragon”.
Luc Montagnier, one of the discoverers of the human immunodeficiency virus.
It’s complicated.
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From this sample Dr. Montagnier’s team spotted the culprit, a retrovirus that had never been seen before. They named it L.A.V., for lymphadenopathy associated virus.
The Pasteur scientists, including Dr. Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who later shared the Nobel with Dr. Montagnier, reported their landmark finding in the May 20, 1983, issue of the journal Science, concluding that further studies were necessary to prove L.A.V. caused AIDS.
The following year, the laboratory run by the American researcher Dr. Robert Gallo at the National Institutes of Health, published four articles in one issue of Science confirming the link between a retrovirus and AIDS. Dr. Gallo called his virus H.T.L.V.-III. There was some initial confusion as to whether the Montagnier team and the Gallo team had found the same virus or two different ones.
When the two samples were found to have come from the same patient, scientists questioned whether Dr. Gallo had accidentally or deliberately got the virus from the Pasteur Institute.
And what had once been camaraderie between those two leading scientists exploded into a global public feud, spilling out of scientific circles into the mainstream press. Arguments over the true discoverer and patent rights stunned a public that, for the most part, had been shielded from the fierce rivalries, petty jealousies and colossal egos in the research community that can disrupt scientific progress.
There was a lawsuit: an out-of-court settlement was mediated by Jonas Salk.
Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Gallo shared many prestigious awards, among them the 1986 Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, which honored Dr. Montagnier for discovering the virus and Dr. Gallo for linking it to AIDS. And in 2002 they appeared to have resolved their rivalry when they announced that they would work together to develop an AIDS vaccine. Then came the announcement of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology.
Dr. Gallo had long been credited with linking H.I.V. to AIDS, but the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine singled out its discoverers, not him, in awarding half the prize jointly to Dr. Montagnier and Dr. Barré-Sinoussi. (The other half was awarded to Dr. Harald zur Hausen of Germany “for his discovery of human papilloma viruses causing cervical cancer.”)
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Last May, he added fuel to the spread of false information about Covid-19 vaccines by claiming, in a French video, that vaccine programs were an “unacceptable mistake” because, he said, vaccines could cause viral variants.
And in January, in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal written with the Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, he criticized President Biden’s vaccine mandates. The authors said it was “irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for the government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen.”
Douglas Trumbull, noted SFX guy.
Some of his credits:
He also did effects and was an executive producer on “The Starlost“, and did effects for the first movie based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
I can’t find it online now (I tried both DuckDuckGo and Bing) but I have a vivid memory of an advertisement in the late 70s/early 80s, possibly in “Scientific American”, featuring Douglas Trumbull endorsing HP calculators. When the time came, that was a big motivator for me to go the RPN route.
Trigger warning for dog people, but: nature red in tooth and claw.
.380 is not a sufficient caliber for moose.
Also:
I’m sorry, but if your guns are going off because of the sled jostling, you’re doing it wrong, and should go find a qualified gunsmith.