Archive for July, 2022

« Older Entries

Obit watch: July 31, 2022.

Sunday, July 31st, 2022

Burt Metcalfe. In addition to his producing credits on “M*A*S*H”, he did some acting. Credits include “The Twilight Zone” (“The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street”), “Perry Mason”, “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, “The Outer Limits”, and the “12 O’Clock High” series. Producing credits also include “AfterMASH”.

Stuart Woods, another one of those big-shot thriller authors.

Mr. Woods, who was also a swashbuckling licensed private jet plane pilot and trans-Atlantic sailor with homes in New York, Maine and Florida, tacked into his career as a novelist somewhat haphazardly.

…

He later moved to Ireland, where he began to write his first novel. But he was soon diverted when he became enamored with sailing and began racing. In 1976, in a race from Plymouth, England, to Newport, R.I., that took him 45 days, he finished about in the middle of the field.
He then wrote a nonfiction account of the race, “Blue Water, Green Skipper,” and, after returning to Georgia, sold the American rights to W.W. Norton & Company. It also agreed to publish “Chiefs,” the thriller that Mr. Woods had begun eight years earlier.

He was another one of those guys whose books I saw all the time on the rack at the grocery store, but I’ve never actually read any of them. Chiefs sounds like it might be a good place to start…

Mary Alice, actress. She won a Tony for “Fences”, an Emmy for ““I’ll Fly Away”, and appeared in “The Matrix Revolutions” among other credits.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 1 Comment »

Triskaidekaphobia.

Friday, July 29th, 2022

I forgot to post this yesterday, even though I had a reminder on my calendar. I’ve been busy working on a couple of small projects, including some forthcoming random gun crankery and a project for the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association.

But I didn’t want to go too much longer without noting, for the record, that yesterday was the 13th anniversary of the blog.

13 years. Where did they go?

As usual, thanks to my army of supporters, especially Lawrence, Borepatch, Jimmy McNulty, pigpen51, RoadRich, Mike the Musicologist, and Joe D. Thanks also to KR Training (official firearms trainer to WCD), Sportsman’s Finest (official arms dealer to WCD) and to anyone else I have forgotten to thank.

Supposedly, the traditional 13th anniversary gift is lace, and the modern one is “fur and textiles”. I’ll pass on that, please, thank you. I really don’t want gifts: your readership is enough for me. Also, sending guns through the mail is not exactly legal (unless you send them to my FFL), and sending ammo is expensive.

Musical interlude time. I can’t remember if I’ve posted this recently, but Warren Zevon never wears out his welcome.

Here’s to another 13 years.

Posted in Admin | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 27, 2022.

Thursday, July 28th, 2022

Tony Dow is really most sincerely dead. NYT again. My thanks to the many people (including Borepatch) who tipped me off to this.

Faye Marlowe. She had a short career: “Hangover Square” seems to be her best known film.

Jered Barclay. He did a fair number of Westerns, “Hawaiian Eye”, “Surfside 6”, “Coronet Blue”, and other credits. He was also in vaudeville and theater, and did a lot of voiceovers.

Bernard Cribbins. Credits other than “Doctor Who” include “Frenzy”, the 1967 “Casino Royale”, “Space: 1999”, and “Coronation Street”. (Edited to add: NYT.)

Lourdes Grobet, photographer. One of her specialties was photographing luchadores, and some of those photos are reproduced in the obit (including one of her dancing with El Santo).

U Phyo Zeya Thaw, Burmese rapper. He was 41.

His execution, and those of three other political prisoners, were announced in the junta-controlled news media on Monday. His mother, Daw Khin Win May, confirmed his death.
The four men were convicted of terrorism charges in trials widely denounced as a sham. The four executions, including that of the veteran democracy activist U Kyaw Min Yu, popularly known as Ko Jimmy, were the first to be carried out in decades in Myanmar.

Posted in Obits, Photography, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 27, 2022.

Wednesday, July 27th, 2022

James Lovelock, Gaia theory guy. He was 103.

But his global renown rested on three main contributions that he developed during a particularly abundant decade of scientific exploration and curiosity stretching from the late 1950s through the last half of the ’60s.
One was his invention of the Electron Capture Detector, an inexpensive, portable, exquisitely sensitive device used to help measure the spread of toxic man-made compounds in the environment. The device provided the scientific foundations of Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” a catalyst of the environmental movement.
The detector also helped provide the basis for regulations in the United States and in other nations that banned harmful chemicals like DDT and PCBs and that sharply reduced the use of hundreds of other compounds as well as the public’s exposure to them.

I’m setting aside, for the moment, the arguments over the legacy of “Silent Spring”. Folks are welcome to discuss that in the comments if they’d like.

Later, his finding that chlorofluorocarbons — the compounds that powered aerosol cans and were used to cool refrigerators and air-conditioners — were present in measurable concentrations in the atmosphere led to the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer. (Chlorofluorocarbons are now banned in most countries under a 1987 international agreement.)
But Dr. Lovelock may be most widely known for his Gaia theory — that Earth functioned, as he put it, as a “living organism” that is able to “regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state.”

Personally, I think Gaia is a bunch of hooey. But the man did science, and deserves props, even if I don’t necessarily agree with everything he said. Also, he was married to the same woman for 47 years, until she passed.

He first met his second wife, Sandy, at the age of 69.

The Choco Taco. I’ve always liked those, but it’s been a while since I’ve had one. Cause of death is given as COVID related supply chain issues. But I’ve seen assertions elsewhere that it was cancelled due to “cultural appropriation”. I’m not sure how serious that claim is…

Posted in Food, Obits, Science | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 26, 2022.

Tuesday, July 26th, 2022

Great and good FOTB RoadRich sent over a couple of obits for Tom Poberezny, former head of the Experimental Aircraft Association. He took over for his dad, Paul Poberezny, in the 1990s and ran EAA until 2010.

One of the most talented aviators of his day, Tom was world aerobatics champion as part of team USA in 1972 and was United States Unlimited aerobatics champion the next year. He went on to become part of the three-plane Red Devils aerobatic airshow act, later known as The Eagles, along with Gene Soucy and the late Charlie Hilliard.

Yoko Shimada. Credits other than “Shogun” include “Kamen Rider”, “Chicago Story”, and “We Are Youth”.

Paul Sorvino. THR.

He was another one of those people whose personal politics I have no idea about: he acted (and sang a little) and did it well. I was always happy to see him in something.

172 acting credits in IMDB.

I’ve said before that my ideal “Law and Order” lineup is Briscoe/Logan/Stone/Kincaid. But one of our local broadcast channels was re-running the early “L&O” episodes late at night a while back, and I recorded some of the ones with Sorvino as “Phil Cerreta”. He gets a lot of attention for playing mob guys, but he was really good in that role too.

There’s one episode in particular (“Heaven”, season 2, episode 10, based on the Happy Land Social Club fire) that stands out for me. Ceretta and Logan are looking at 53 bodies lined up outside the fire:

Det. Mike Logan: I’ve never seen this many. You?
Sgt. Phil Cerreta: Not in civilian life.

This is writing (the episode is one of my favorites) but it is also acting. I can’t find a clip online, but if you watch it, Sorvino’s delivery puts a lot across in four words: this is a man who saw some stuff during the war, and still carries those memories.

Tony Dow. THR.

Other credits include “Quincy, M.E.”, “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star”, “Diagnosis Murder”, and “The Kentucky Fried Movie”.

Lawrence pointed out to me “Who Killed Maxwell Thorn?”, the final episode of “The Love Boat”, which features Wally, Beaver, June…and Peter Graves, Barbi Benton (hi, pigpen51!), Florence Henderson, Robert Reed, and Ted McGinley, among other stunt casting. I was never a big “Love Boat” fan, though I did watch it (three broadcast networks, people) but (as I told Lawrence) this whole episode is one giant wink at the audience. And (as Lawrence also pointed out) it ties in to the Tommy Westphall Catastrophe.

Edited to add: Well, crud, this is embarrassing, but I did have three sources, and they apparently made the same mistake. Tony Dow is NOT DEAD. Repeat: Tony Dow is NOT DEAD. But he is apparently in hospice care.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Planes, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 25, 2022.

Monday, July 25th, 2022

Man, it got busy up in here all of the sudden.

Bob Rafelson. THR. Other credits include the “Poodle Springs” TV movie (with James Caan as Marlowe, based on Robert Parker’s continuation of an unfinished Chandler novel), “The Postman Always Rings Twice”, and “The King of Marvin Gardens”.

The Saturday Movie Group watched “Five Easy Pieces” not too long ago. I think I echo the general consensus when I say that it was very much like “The Last Picture Show”: a good movie that none of us want to see again.

David Warner, British actor. In case you were wondering, he’s the photographer who loses his head in “Omen”. Other credits include “TRON”, “Time Bandits”, the “Hogfather” TV movie, and lots of genre stuff, including some appearances on spinoffs of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Diana Kennedy. She was well known (at least to me and I think to other people who follow food) as the woman who introduced true Mexican cooking to the US.

At a time when most Americans’ concept of Mexican food was limited to tacos and enchiladas, Ms. Kennedy unfurled an ornate culinary tapestry, exploring the distinctly regional nature of Mexican cooking, defined, like the cuisines of Italy and China, by local geography, climate and ingredients.
“The regional dishes of Sonora, or Jalisco, have practically nothing in common with those of Yucatán and Campeche; neither have those of Nuevo León with those of Chiapas and Michoacán,” she wrote in the book’s first chapter. In Oaxaca, she explained, “certain chilies are grown and used that are found nowhere else in Mexico.”
The Mexican food known to most Americans, she wrote, was a travesty: “a crisp taco filled with ground meat heavily flavored with an all-purpose chili powder; a soggy tamal covered with a sauce that turns up on everything — too sweet and too overpoweringly onioned — a few fried beans and something else that looks and tastes like all the rest.” This state of affairs she hoped to correct.

…

In “The Tortilla Book” (1975) and “My Mexico” (1998), Ms. Kennedy continued the journey begun in “The Cuisines of Mexico,” elaborating on her findings as she roamed the country in her pickup truck, quizzing local cooks, taking notes and developing, as a side project, an atlas of indigenous herbs and plants.
Along the way, she clued readers in on the secrets of making wasp’s nest salsa, roasting a whole ox or cleaning black iguana for a special Oaxacán tamale.
“There is always someone who wants to know how to clean an iguana, so why not?” she told an interviewer for the journal Writing on the Edge in 2011. All three books were gathered in one volume in 2000 under the title “The Essential Cuisines of Mexico.”

…

Ms. Kennedy spared no effort to track down information. She served an apprenticeship in a bakery before writing her tortilla book. She traveled dusty back roads by bus or in her truck, sleeping in the back, en route to remote villages in search of obscure recipes, questioning saleswomen at local markets or wangling invitations to home kitchens.
“I’m out to report what is disappearing,” she told The Times in 2019. “I drive over mountains, I sit with families, and I record.”
She took a dim view of chefs and writers who did not do the same, and her criticism could be withering. “They’ve not done the travel and the research that I’ve done,” she told Saveur. “None of them, not one. I have traveled this country, wandering — it’s why I’m not rich! — and taking time, and nobody else has done that. Nobody else has seen a certain chile at a certain stage in a market in Chilapa, and then gone back in six months and seen other chiles.”

…

In 2010, she gave The Chicago Tribune a terse assessment of her work. “I am tenacious,” she said. “And I love to eat.”

Johnny Egan, coach of the Houston Rockets from 1972-1976. He was 129-152 overall during his tenure.

The Hartford, Connecticut native played for six NBA teams: Detroit Pistons (1961–63), New York Knicks (1963–65), Baltimore Bullets (1965–68), Los Angeles Lakers (1968–70) and San Diego/Houston Rockets (1970–72). The guard played with the Cleveland Cavaliers for the 1970-71 season.

Melanie Rauscher, who was on “Naked and Afraid”. She was 35, and the circumstances seem particularly sad.

Corey Kasun, a rep for the Prescott Police Department, confirmed to TMZ that the reality star was dog sitting in the city while the homeowners were out of town. Upon their return, they discovered Rauscher dead in their guest room, near several cans of dust cleaner containing compressed air.
It remains unclear if Rauscher consumed the cans’ contents.

Posted in 1970s, Food, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 22, 2022.

Friday, July 22nd, 2022

Great and good friend of the blog Joe D. let us know about the death of Al Evans.

Al was one of the old time Austin BBS people, and a personal friend of mine from back then. The Facebook post is a nice tribute to someone who was a good person, and whose passing leaves a hole in the world.

Taurean Blacque. Beyond “Hill Street Blues”, it seems like he had a pretty active theater career, and other credits including “The Bob Newhart Show”, “Taxi”, and “DeepStar Six”.

In 1982, Blacque received a supporting actor Emmy nomination for his work as the toothpick-dependent Washington on Hill Street but lost out to co-star Michael Conrad. Amazingly, the other three nominees — Charles Haid, Michael Warren and Bruce Weitz — also came from the 1981-87 series, created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll.

Nostalgia is a moron, but man, wasn’t that a heck of a show?

Shonka Dukureh passed on at 44. She was a musician, and also plays “Big Mama Thornton” in the current “Elvis” film.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Alan Grant, comic writer (“Batman”, “Judge Dredd”).

Werner Reich. He survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen (and the “35-mile death march in snow and ice” between the two). He also learned a card trick from another prisoner, Herbert Levin (aka “Nivelli the magician”) while he was in Auschwitz.

Mr. Reich, who became an engineer after his immigration to the United States, never lost his love of magic, performing close-up tricks with cards and coins for small groups of other magicians, at temples and at his sons’ birthday parties.

…

Mr. Levin’s card trick stayed with Mr. Reich the rest of his life.
“We loved anything that could take us away from Auschwitz for even a moment, that could take our minds off our memories and the horror around us,” he said in the 2017 interview.In England, he immersed himself in magic. He bought a deck of cards, then some magic tricks and books, and still more tricks and books.
“There’s a very, very thin line between a hobby and insanity,” he joked during his TEDx Talk.
Mr. Reich never saw Mr. Levin after Auschwitz and did not know that he had also emigrated to the United States, resumed his magic career and lived in Rego Park, Queens.
Mr. Levin died in 1977, but Mr. Reich did not learn of the death until nearly 30 years later, when he read an article in The Linking Ring, the monthly magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, to which Mr. Reich belonged.

Posted in Magic, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Because this is hookersnblow.com, too.

Thursday, July 21st, 2022

Not news: Air Force scientist persuades one of his contractors to hire a woman he knows.

Also not news: contractor has some concerns about his new hire, like her inability to “use basic word processing and document creation software” and “formulate coherent inter-office emails”.

News: she was actually a hooker.

News: not only was she involved professionally with the scientist, but she was also plying her trade with other scientists at Wright-Patterson AFB.

News: when the contractor told the scientist this was unethical, the scientist “stated he would come to Building 5 with one of his many guns to ‘end it all’”.

News:

When AFOSI investigators raided [the scientist’s] office, they seized electronic devices along with a box of condoms, women’s underwear and an empty bottle of Viagra.
A forensic review of his phone found texts between [the scientist] and 27 sex workers in different cities, many of whom were “foreign nationals from countries considered US National Security concerns,” the warrant said.

News: the scientist passed away in September of last year from “unspecified causes”.

The warrant, unsealed on Monday in the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, seeks access to [the scientist’s] and the woman’s email accounts for evidence of false, fictitious, or fraudulent claims, embezzlement/misuse of government property, extortion of officers or employees of the United States, ethnic intimidation, and aggravated menacing, the Daily Beast reported.
She is reportedly being investigated on charges of prostitution near military and naval establishments, and false, fictitious, or fraudulent claims.

That’s quite a catalog of crimes, some of which I’m unfamiliar with. “ethnic intimidation”? “aggravated menacing”? Is there non-aggravated menacing?

Posted in Law, Stupid | 1 Comment »

Murdaugh watch.

Thursday, July 21st, 2022

Russell Laffitte has been charged with wire fraud, bank fraud, and the ever popular “conspiracy”.

Mr. Laffitte used to be the CEO of Palmetto State Bank: he got canned back in January.

The whole thing centers around two sisters who got a settlement back in 2005. Mr. Laffitte was their conservator, Alex Murdaugh was their lawyer, and…

Laffitte allegedly schemed with the disgraced lawyer to pillage the girls’ accounts and steal $355,000 for himself and $990,000 for Murdaugh, court documents said.
He also misused bank funds to give Murdaugh an unauthorized $750,000 loan for “beach house renovations and expenses” and sent $680,000 of the bank’s money to pay back a debt Murdaugh had illegally transferred to him, according to the grand jury.
In addition, Laffitte earned nearly $400,000 for supposedly safeguarding the Plyler sister’s money, according to the document. He had allegedly been in cahoots with Murdaugh to steal from the girls since 2011 and faces 30 years in prison if convicted.

(Sorry about using the NYPost for this, but I actually could not find coverage of this story in the South Carolina newspapers.)

Posted in Law, Murdaugh | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 21, 2022.

Thursday, July 21st, 2022

Rebecca Balding, actress.

Other credits include “Supertrain”, “The Rockford Files” (“Dwarf in a Helium Hat“), “Lou Grant”, and “MacGruder and Loud”.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Tweet of the day.

Wednesday, July 20th, 2022

Yeah. I hadn’t thought about it, but it absolutely makes sense that if you need a bunch of movie armor, there are places you can go for that. It sort of surprises me that the places are in India, and it apparently involves “Blacksmiths followed by cargo containers” rather than local rental houses, but that’s the global economy, I guess.

Bonus:

Posted in Bagatelle | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 20, 2022.

Wednesday, July 20th, 2022

Dr. Robert F. Curl Jr., professor of chemistry at Rice University and a good Texas boy.

Dr. Curl shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996 (with Dr. Richard E. Smalley and Dr. Harold W. Kroto) for the discovery of buckyballs.

“If Mother Nature is trying to tell you something, you have to listen,” Dr. Curl recalled in a 2016 Rice University interview celebrating the 20th anniversary of his Nobel.
While Dr. Kroto and Dr. Smalley pursued further buckyball research, Dr. Curl soon moved on to other areas of interest. In the 2016 interview, he recalled going to Dr. Smalley’s office and finding his colleague filling up binders with papers about buckyballs.
“I don’t want to be in any field for a full-time job keeping up with the literature,” Dr. Curl said. “That’s why I abandoned that area.”

…

After Dr. Curl won the Nobel, Malcolm Gillis, then the president of Rice, asked him what he wanted, perhaps worried that bigger-name institutions would be looking to hire him away from the university.
Dr. Curl asked for a bicycle rack near his office.

Posted in Obits, Science | Comments Closed

« Older Entries