Archive for August, 2023

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Quick and dirty updates.

Wednesday, August 30th, 2023

The Elvis gun went for $199,750. I don’t know if that’s inclusive of the bidder’s premium. (Previously.)

I wrote a while back about the criminal charges against Thomas Moyer, Apple’s security head and the somewhat related (I think) case against former Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith.

I missed, however, that the case against Moyer was dismissed in 2021.

But: a California appellate court reinstated the charges last week.

Friday’s opinion, written by Justice Daniel Bromberg, joined by Justices Adrienne Grover and Cynthia Lie, claimed that the evidence presented to the grand jury was “sufficient to raise a reasonable suspicion of such bribery.”

Appellate decision here. Interesting quote:

During the relevant time frame, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office rarely issued CCW licenses. Indeed, the office’s practice was to not even process an application for a CCW license absent a special instruction to do so. Only Sheriff Laurie Smith and a small number of others in the Sheriff’s Office had the authority to give such instructions. One of those individuals was Rick Sung, who appears to have run Sheriff Smith’s 2018 re-election campaign and after the election became the undersheriff, second in command to the sheriff. Undersheriff Sung also had authority to place license applications on hold even after licenses were signed by the sheriff.

Posted in Apple, California Über Alles, Elvis, Guns, Law, Music, Politics, Smith and Wesson | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 29, 2023.

Tuesday, August 29th, 2023

Nicholas Hitchon.

He was one of the children profiled in the original “7 Up” movie and the followup films through “63 Up” in 2019. He worked at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Professor Hitchon pursued research on nuclear fusion, then switched to computational plasma physics. Once in a while, Mr. Apted would ask him about his work.
“When I try to explain,” Professor Hitchon told Physics Today in 2000, “his eyes glaze over.”
He published more than 100 journal articles and three books, the university’s posting said. He retired in 2022.

As best as I can tell, he was only the second member of the group to pass. (Lynn Johnson died in 2013.)

NYT obit for Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 28, 2023.

Monday, August 28th, 2023

Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher. He was 49. Pancreatic cancer got him.

Mr. Wurzelbacher was better known as “Joe the Plumber”.

Wurzelbacher, the owner of a plumbing business at the time, rose to national acclaim when he confronted Obama at a 2008 campaign event in Toledo, Ohio, accusing the Democratic presidential candidate’s tax plan of conflicting with the American dream.
Obama countered that the plan would help small businesses grow more quickly.

Posted in Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 27, 2023.

Sunday, August 27th, 2023

Bob Barker. THR. Tributes. Variety.

Claude Ruiz-Picasso, son of Pablo and administrator of his estate (through July of this year).

Alexandra Paul, Olympic figure skater from Canada. She was 31.

David LaFlamme, of It’s a Beautiful Day. As usual, I feel guilty not saying more about this, but the band was…not exactly before my time, but I was terribly young then.

Arleen Sorkin, actress. Other credits include “Perry Mason: The Case of the Killer Kiss” (which was the last Perry Mason movie with Raymond Burr), “Frasier”, and “The New Mike Hammer”.

Posted in Art, Music, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

In keeping with the established policy of this blog…

Saturday, August 26th, 2023

…Bob Barker tomorrow, so things have time to settle and obits have time to be corrected.

Posted in Admin, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Clippings.

Friday, August 25th, 2023

Two things that popped up in my reading that I thought were worth sharing.

1. CrimeReads has a fairly good piece by Keith Roysdon (generally one of their less pretentious writers): “To Film and Thrive in L.A.: Three Lesser-Praised Friedkin Films Are Classics“.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen “To Live and Die in L.A.” and I’d kind of like to see it again. My feelings about “Sorcerer” are well known. I’ve never seen “Cruising” but I do want to as part of my “watch all of Friedkin’s films” project.

2. “Facts of Life: For Outdoorsmen and Ordinary Gentlemen” by Richard (The Scout Rifle Study) Mann.

I think there’s some pretty sound advice here. You should interpret that as “it agrees with my prejudices”. For example:

17: The greatest outdoor book ever written was The Old Man and the Boy. It was published in 1957 and written by Robert Ruark. If it does not make you feel something you’re broken.

And:

10: Never confuse a politician with a patriot, they’re not the same thing. Patriots will risk their life for their country and folks they don’t know. Politicians risk the lives of those they don’t know and then tax them for the privilege.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Ruark | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 25, 2023.

Friday, August 25th, 2023

NYT obit for John Warnock.

Bray Wyatt, pro wrestler. He was 36.

During his time in WWE, he was a three-time world champion, including one WWE Championship and two Universal Championships.

Karol Bobko, astronaut. He was the first pilot of the Challenger. He flew two more shuttle missions (on Atlantis and Discovery).

“Bo was a commander who could lead without ever getting angry with people or raising his voice,” Dr. Hoffman, now a professor of aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said by phone. “He didn’t have to prove he was the boss to get our respect.”

Hersha Parady, actress. Other credits include “The Waltons”, “Bearcats!”…

…and “Mannix”. (“Cry Silence”, season 6, episode 2, credited as “Receptionist”.)

Posted in 1970s, Geek, Mannix, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 24, 2023.

Thursday, August 24th, 2023

Sliman Bensmaia. He wasn’t somebody I’d heard of before his obit was published, but he sounds like a person whose passing leaves a hole in the world.

Dr. Bensmaia was a neuroscientist. His specialty was the sense of touch, and how it worked.

Dr. Bensmaia was a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University in the 2000s when the Defense Department, faced with a mounting number of wounded veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, committed $100 million to prosthetics research.
Scientists were making enormous strides in the field of brain-controlled prosthetics, but giving users of such devices a sense of touch was still largely uncharted territory. Patients could not actually feel what they were doing: whether a material was rough or smooth, if it was moving or stable, even where their limb was in space.
Dr. Bensmaia (pronounced bens-MAY-ah) saw his task as taking the next step: understanding how the brain receives and processes information through touch, which in turn could allow prosthetics to perform more akin to an organic limb.

…

He and his team would connect electrodes to areas of the monkeys’ brains, poke spots on their hands and then analyze where the brains received that sensory information, as well as how the animals reacted. They then used electrodes to simulate those pokes, in an attempt to mimic the experience.
“When you imagine moving your arm, that part of the brain is still active, but nothing happens due to the lost connection,” he told the magazine Wireless Design and Development in 2014. “The idea behind the project was to stick electrodes in the brain and stimulate it directly to produce some percepts of touch to better control the modular limb.”
Most scientists focus their labs on either pure or applied research. Dr. Bensmaia’s group — some two dozen undergraduates, grad students, postdocs and technicians — managed to do both. He employed neuroscientists, but also teams of engineers and computer programmers.
“He ran his lab like a small company,” David Freedman, a neurobiologist at Chicago, said in a phone interview.
Such coordination was necessary for the complicated work Dr. Bensmaia engaged in. The sense of touch involves a wide array of finely measured inputs — pressure, heat, movement, hardness — all of which are communicated to the brain through some 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections.

…

In 2016, his team and a group from the University of Pittsburgh outfitted a 28-year-old man, Nathan Copeland, who had been paralyzed from the neck down, with a prosthetic arm that allowed him to feel through its finger tips.

Dr. Bensmaia was 49.

Terry Funk, noted professional wrestler.

He also did some acting, including “Road House”: IMDB.

Nancy Frangione, actress. Other credits include “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”, “In the Line of Duty: A Cop for the Killing”, and “Matlock”.

This isn’t quite an obit, but Stephen Wolfram wrote a really long (35,000+ words) remembrance of his friend Edward Fredkin. (Previously.)

Posted in Geek, Movies, Neuroscience, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

YouTube videos you might enjoy.

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023

I have several favorite bookstores.

One of those is Chartwell Booksellers in New York, which I have never visited but have done business with by mail. Chartwell is a bookshop specializing in Winston Churchill books and related items.

They turned 40 on April 11th of this year, and have been celebrating by doing a series of readings. The first one was John Lithgow reading from William Manchester’s The Last Lion.

I thought some folks might get a kick out of the most recent reading: Bryan Cranston reads from Churchill: A Biography by Roy Jenkins.

They are less than halfway through the series (the Cranston video is #19 out of a planned 40), so it might be worth subscribing to their YouTube channel so you can see what comes next.

Here’s something else I thought was interesting. I was tipped off to it by the second edition of Holstory, R.E.D. Nichols and John Witty’s book about the history of holsters in the 20th Century. I’ve written about that book previously (in both editions) so I won’t repeat myself here.

This is legendary holster designer Chic Gaylord’s appearance on “What’s My Line?” on May 1, 1960.

I’ve set the video to start with Mr. Gaylord’s appearance, but it won’t hurt you to watch the whole thing. The guest before him was Gloria Bale, a very cute trapeze artist. (If she was 17 at the time, she’d be 80 today, so there’s a chance she’s still alive. Miss Bale, if you’re out there somewhere, I hope you had a wonderful life.) And the mystery guest is Laurence Harvey.

This is a nice flashback to a time when guns were less demonized then they are today (well, NYC possibly excepted). I really like Dorothy Kilgallen’s “Ooooo, I’d like one of those.” My only complaint is that they don’t show Mr. Gaylord with any of his products, but I’m sure there were practical and legal reasons why they couldn’t do that.

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Holsters | 6 Comments »

Hoplobibilophilia, part 37.

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023

“Will this parade of Samworth books ever end?” cries my loyal reader.

Actually, yes. I think this is the final Samworth I have to catalog…so far. I’m still short of a complete set.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | 2 Comments »

Quick hyena update.

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023

Missed this previously, but Mike the Musicologist pinged it over to me.

Patrick Wojahn, the former mayor of College Park, Maryland, took a guilty plea.

Wojahn pleaded guilty to 60 counts of distribution of child pornography, 40 counts of possession of child pornography, and 40 counts of possession of child pornography with the intention to distribute…

Sentencing is scheduled for November 20th, per the article.

(Previously.)

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 22, 2023.

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2023

NYT obit for Inga Swenson, for the record. (Previously.)

John Devitt, Australian swimmer who won two gold medals in the 1960 Olympics…and there’s a story behind that.

...beyond Australia he may be best remembered for his part in the finish of the 100-meter freestyle final in Rome, one of the more freakish moments in sports history. It led to an overhaul of the way the placings and times for swimming races were decided, with electronic timers and photos replacing judgment calls.
Devitt, at 23 and a lean 6-foot-1 in 1960, was captain of the Australian men’s swimming team for the second consecutive Olympics and the race favorite. One opponent was Lance Larson of Monterey Park, Calif., a 20-year-old sophomore at the University of Southern California.
In the eight-man final, Devitt was clearly ahead until the last 20 meters, when Larson, in an adjoining lane, caught up to him. They touched the finish wall almost together, with Larson seemingly slightly ahead. Each congratulated the other, and they then both waited for the official results. The wait was excruciating — almost 10 minutes.
In that era, the rules called for three judges to choose first place, three other judges to choose second, and three others to choose third. Each lane had three timekeepers, but their timing, by hand, was almost incidental in determining who finished where. There was no starting beep or automatic touch pads or accepted electronic timing or replays, as there are in major swimming competitions today.
When the judges were polled after the race, the results were unusual. Two of the three first-place judges had picked Devitt as the winner, and one had picked Larson. Two of the second-place judges had picked Devitt for second, and one had picked Larson. The three timekeepers for Devitt’s lane had all timed him in 55.2 seconds. The three in Larson’s lane had timed the American in 55.0, 55.1 and 55.1.
And a newly introduced automatic timing machine — which was started electronically but stopped manually, and which was to be consulted only when judges were tied, as they were in Rome — had Larson in 55.10 seconds and Devitt in 55.16.
It seemed obvious that Larson had won — until the chief judge, Hans Runstromer of Germany, interceded and voted for Devitt.
American officials protested the decision to the jury of appeals, saying the rules did not give the chief judge a vote. Runstromer disagreed. Besides, he said, he had been standing on the finish line and had seen the whole thing. A Sports Illustrated photograph, however, showed that he was 25 yards away at the time and had viewed the finish at an angle.
The appeal failed. The Americans appealed three times more in the next four years and lost every time. As Larson said, “It was a bad deal.”

…

In 2009, a paper in the journal Physical Culture and Sport: Studies and Research concluded that “Runstromer’s decision undoubtedly sanctioned untruth.”
In other words, the study said, Larson had won.
Since the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, all international swim races have been timed electronically.

John Warnock, co-creator of Postscript and co-founder of Adobe.

Maxie Baughan, linebacker.

He came in second in the league’s United Press International rookie of the year balloting and was named to his first of five Pro Bowl selections with the Eagles.
After a trade to the Los Angeles Rams in 1966, Baughan picked up where he had left off. The Rams’ coach George Allen named him the team’s defensive captain and signal caller. Behind the quarterback Roman Gabriel, the Rams reached the divisional round of the playoffs twice over the next five years, with Baughan cleaning up on defense behind the team’s heralded defensive line, known as the Fearsome Foursome, starring Deacon Jones, Lamar Lundy, Rosey Greer and Merlin Olsen.
He would notch four more Pro Bowl appearances during his Rams tenure, adding to an N.F.L. résumé that also included five years as a second-team All-Pro and one as a first-teamer.

Reggie Chaney, former forward for the University of Houston basketball team. He was 23.

Chaney, a forward, played two seasons for the Arkansas Razorbacks before transferring to UH, where he played three more seasons and was part of the Cougars’ 2021 Final Four run. He played in 104 games for Houston, his last of which was during their most recent NCAA Tournament run.

Posted in 1970s, Geek, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

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