I don’t like linking to ESPN.
Duke sucks.
This is one heck of a piece of writing.
(And I’m sorry, Coach K, but I’ll still be pulling for Gonzaga this year.)
Archive for March, 2022
Noted.
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022Obit watch: March 2, 2022.
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022THR obit for Veronica Carlson.
Ralph Ahn, actor. He seems to be mostly known as “Tran” on “New Girl”, but other credits include “ER”, “Walker: Texas Ranger”, and “Hunter”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Nick Zedd, “founder of the Cinema of Transgression movement and an uncompromising auteur whose crude, no-budget oeuvre influenced filmmakers from Christoph Schlingensief to Quentin Tarantino”.
He shot his first distributed film, They Eat Scum, in 1979 on Super 8 film with funds loaned by his parents and by the movie’s star, Donna Death. The short followed a roving gang of nonactor punks turned zombies, whose peregrinations were set to the earsplitting yowls of local New York bands and, inexplicably, the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Zedd released They Eat Scum under his own Penetration Films imprint, describing it on the cassette label “a disgusting outlay of cheapness, decadence, nihilism, and everyday cannibalism” and an “achievement of noncommittal, unblinking savagery, a true expression of the punk ethos.”
Future films lived up to this promise, among them 1983’s Geek Maggot Bingo, which starred Richard Hell and was panned in TV Guide as “a nothing little zit of a 16mm movie.” Writing in the East Village Eye, Cookie Mueller, who starred in a number of John Waters movies, declared, “I have never in my lifetime of experience with low-budget films seen one this low . . . It lies somewhere below the subculture, even beneath the New York subway system.” Waters himself would later say of Zedd, “Nick Zedd makes violent, perverted art films from Hell—he’s my kind of director!”
Danny Ongais, one of the great figures in auto racing.
…
Video of the crash. I can’t embed it, because it is “age restricted” and “only available on YouTube”.
Dottie Frazier has passed away at 99. This is another one of those folks you’ve probably never heard of, but the obit is relevant to my interests.
Ms. Frazier was a diver. She learned to skin dive when she was young:
She seemingly had as many diving stories as she had dives.
There was the time she faced down a shark in the waters off Mexico. The time a large seal wanted the fish she was bringing back to her boat and slammed into her, breaking four ribs. The time she broke her leg snow skiing and made herself a special wet suit with an ankle-to-chest zipper so she could be rolled into it and thus keep diving with the busted limb.
She wasn’t initially impressed with the early scuba gear, but it grew on her.
…in 1955 she tried to enroll in a Los Angeles County underwater instructors certification course, sending in the required fee. She was sent a letter saying the course was for men only, but when she told that news to a friend and respected fellow diver, Jim Christiansen, he asked, “Did they return your check?”
“When I told him no, they had not, he said, ‘Just be ready; I’m picking you up,’” she told the podcast “The League of Extraordinary Divers” in 2016.
She went on to become one of the first, if not the first, women certified as a diving instructor in the United States.
In addition to her work as a scuba instructor, Ms. Frazier, a member of the Women Divers Hall of Fame, operated the Penguin Dive Shop in Long Beach for 15 years beginning in the 1950s and designed and sold wet suits and dry suits. She learned hard-hat diving as well — the kind used in underwater commercial work — but didn’t pursue the career possibilities because, at about five feet tall and not much more than 100 pounds, she found the equipment too cumbersome and restraining.
Ms. Frazier was energetic and adventurous even in her 90s. At 93 she went ziplining. In 2019, she finally sold the last of her motorcycles. In the “Neutral Buoyancy” interview, she noted that longevity seemed to go along with diving.
“A lot of the original divers have made it to a great age,” she said. “Being underwater does things to your spirit.”
Norts spews.
Tuesday, March 1st, 2022If you’re not interested in basketball…well, neither am I. Another story will be coming along eventually.
Sports Illustrated ran a story today that I found interesting about the New York Liberty of the WNBA, and their $500,000 fine (which was bargained down from $1 million).
What did the Liberty do? You would not believe the gravity of this offense. They…
…chartered flights for their players. There was also an unauthorized team trip to Napa.
Yeah. They were seriously considering pulling the plug on the entire team.
I kid a little about this. The thing about charter flights is: they are banned under the terms of the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement. Same with the trip to Napa. And the league is serious about this. My regular readers may remember the Las Vegas Aces ended up forfeiting a game because of travel issues. (In that case, the Aces did obtain special permission from the league to use a charter flight, but wasn’t able to arrange one.)
Part of the idea is to equalize the playing field between owners with deep pockets and those who treat their WNBA teams as marginal enterprises:
And that’s one of the points of the article: there’s a dispute between those two groups.
And while many players continued to loudly call for improving travel conditions—charter flights being the most visible part of that effort—the league found the players had an unexpected source of support for that expense from the new owners who view WNBA teams less as businesses to be managed to the last dollar or places to park losses and more as growth opportunities in a developing economy.
New owners—the Tsais in New York, Marc Lore in Minnesota, Larry Gottesdiener in Atlanta, Mark Davis in Las Vegas—found themselves dumbstruck by how little the WNBA could invest in growth. A sale of 20% of the league’s equity at that moment—especially at a valuation of $200 million—felt like a huge loss, even though new investors outside the league’s owners would not control any votes on the WNBA’s Executive Committee.
Obit watch: March 1, 2022.
Tuesday, March 1st, 2022David Boggs, co-inventor (with Bob Metcalfe) of Ethernet.
Ned Eisenberg, actor. THR. He was a regular on “Law and Order: SVU”. Other credits include “Million Dollar Baby”, “Flags of Our Fathers”, and guest shots on “The Equalizer” (original recipe) and “Miami Vice”.