Archive for January, 2024

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Obit watch: January 8, 2024.

Monday, January 8th, 2024

Norby Walters, famous sports and entertainment agent. I wanted to note this for a few reasons:

Is it just me, or did he look an awful lot like Paul Shaffer?

Mr. Walters and Mr. [Lloyd] Bloom were convicted of mail fraud and racketeering in 1989. Mr. Walters was sentenced to five years in prison and Mr. Bloom to three, but neither served a day.
An appeals court reversed the racketeering convictions in 1990, ruling that the trial judge had not instructed the jury that the two men’s actions had been guided by their lawyers’ advice that the signings were legal.

Also:

In 1993, the mail fraud convictions were also overturned.
“Walters is by all accounts a nasty and untrustworthy fellow,” Judge Frank Easterbrook wrote in the 1993 ruling, “but the prosecutor did not prove that his efforts to circumvent the N.C.A.A.’s rules amounted to mail fraud.”

That’s Judge Frank Easterbrook, TMQ’s brother.

Mr. Bloom was shot to death at his home in Malibu, Calif., later that year.

…

From 1990 to 2017, he organized an annual Oscar viewing party, which he called Night of 100 Stars, in hotel ballrooms in Beverly Hills. It drew stars like Jon Voight, Shirley Jones, Charles Bronson, Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau. He was also the host of a regular poker party at his condos in Southern California, where the regulars included Milton Berle, Bryan Cranston, Richard Lewis, Jason Alexander, James Woods, Charles Durning, Mimi Rogers and Alex Trebek.
“It was $2 a hand,” Robert Wuhl, the actor and comedian, said by phone. “So the most anybody lost was $250 and the most anybody won was $300 to $400. It was all about the kibitzing. Buddy Hackett would come to kibitz.”

You know, I’d probably put out $250 to sit at that table.

Joe D sent over a link to The Register’s obit for legendary computer scientist Niklaus Wirth, and Borepatch also ran an obit. I’ve had this in my back pocket for a few days, as I was hoping that a more mainstream source than El Reg would run an item.

Fred Chappell, author and former poet laureate of North Carolina. (Dagon, More Shapes than One) (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Cindy Morgan, actress. Other credits include “Beverly Hills Buntz”, “Mancuso, FBI”, and “She’s The Sheriff”.

Posted in Geek, Law, Movies, Obits, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Blood! Blood in the streets!

Monday, January 8th, 2024

This is your Monday morning after the end of the NFL season firings thread.

From the “Damn! You didn’t even wait to get him in the house!” department: Arthur Smith was fired last night as head coach of the Falcons. 21-30 over three seasons, 7-10 this year. ESPN.

Ron Rivera out as coach of the Washington Commanders. 26-40-1 over four years, 4-13 this season. ESPN.

Scott Fitterer out as general manager of the Carolina Panthers, who already fired their head coach. 14-37 over three seasons, and Carolina finished 2-15 this year. ESPN.

Mote updates later if there are any.

Edited to add: the NYPost is reporting that special teams coordinator Thomas McGaughey and offensive line coach Bobby Johnson have been fired from the NY Football Giants. Additionally, Don “Wink” Martindale has “resigned” as defensive coordinator.

Edited to add 1/9: late on Monday, Jacksonville fired defensive coordinator Mike Caldwell and a whole bunch of other folks:

In addition to Caldwell, [head coach Doug] Pederson also fired defensive line coach Brentson Buckner, passing game coordinator/cornerbacks coach Deshea Townsend, inside linebackers coach Tony Gilbert, safeties coach Cody Grimm, senior defensive assistant Bob Sutton and defensive quality control coaches Tee Mitchell and Sean Cullina.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 6, 2024.

Saturday, January 6th, 2024

David Soul. THR.

Shoutout for his work in “Magnum Force”. Other credits include “Jerry Springer: The Opera” (the TV movie: he played Jerry Springer), “Murder, She Wrote”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Unsub” (an interesting failed series from the late 1980s), “Casablanca” (the short-lived TV series: he played “Rick Blane”), “In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders” (he played “Michael Lee Platt”, one of the killers), and a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Christian Oliver. Other credits include “Alarm für Cobra 11 – Die Autobahnpolizei”, “Ninja Apocalypse”, and “Christmas in Vienna”.

Joseph Lelyveld, former executive editor of the NYT.

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

Obit watch: January 5, 2024.

Friday, January 5th, 2024

Glynis Johns. IMDB.

Wow:

A year later [1963 – DB], she starred in her own short-lived CBS sitcom, Glynis, in which she played a mystery writer and amateur sleuth, and later, she was Lady Penelope Peasoup opposite Rudy Vallee as Lord Marmaduke Ffogg on the last season of ABC’s Batman.

Yes, she did do a guest spot on “Murder She Wrote“.

Wow^2: she was “Sister Anne” in “Nukie“.

Stephen Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns”, in “A Little Night Music”, with shorter phrasing to accommodate her. Although her voice, alternately described as smoky or silvery or wistful, was lovely, she was unable to sustain notes for long.

Be that as it may, I find her performance of that song incredibly haunting.

Maj. Mike Sadler has passed away at 103.

Mr. Sadler was one of the first recruits and the last surviving member of the S.A.S. from the year of its founding, 1941. Like a navigator at sea, he used stars, sun and instruments to cross expanses of the Libyan Desert, a wasteland almost the size of India, whose shifting, windblown dunes can be as changing and featureless as an ocean.
Compared with the commandos he guided on truck and jeep convoys — volunteer daredevils who crept onto Nazi airfields; attached time bombs to Messerschmitt fighters, Stuka dive bombers, fuel dumps and pilot quarters; then sped away as explosions roared behind — Mr. Sadler was no hero in the usual sense. Comrades said he might not have fired a single shot at the enemy in North Africa.
But he got his men to the targets — and out again. Without him, they said, the commandos could not have crossed hundreds of miles of desert, found enemy bases on the Mediterranean Coast, destroyed more than 325 aircraft, blown up ammunition and supply dumps, killed hundreds of German and Italian soldiers and pilots, or found their way back to hidden bases.

…

Mr. Sadler was intrigued by desert navigation. “What amazed me,” he told Mr. Rayment, “was that even with the vast, featureless expanses of the desert, a good navigator could pinpoint his exact location by using a theodolite, an air almanac and air navigational tables, and having a good knowledge of the stars.”
He spent weeks studying navigation techniques, including use of a theodolite — a telescopic device, with two perpendicular axes, used mainly by surveyors, for measuring angles in the horizontal and vertical planes. It was not unlike the sextant used by mariners to fix positions at sea.

…

In one of the epic stories of the North Africa campaign, Mr. Sadler and two sergeants escaped from the Germans and, with only a goatskin carrying brackish water, crossed 110 miles of desert on foot in five days. Hostile Bedouins stoned them, bloodying their heads, and stole their warm clothing, leaving them to shiver through freezing nights.
Starving except for a few dates, they were exposed to windblown sands that scraped them like sandpaper, a relentless sun that burned and blistered their faces, and swarms of flies that enveloped and tormented them. On the hot sands, their feet were masses of blisters after a few days. When they finally reached Free French lines, they looked like half-dead castaways in rags.
“We had long hair and beards and were looking very bedraggled,” Mr. Sadler recalled. “Our feet were in tatters — I don’t think we looked very much like soldiers.”

…

After his North Africa adventures as a desert navigator, Mr. Sadler returned to England and in 1944 parachuted into France after the Allied invasion of Normandy. He participated in sabotage operations against German occupation forces and won the Military Cross for bravery in action behind enemy lines.

Anthony Dias Blue, noted wine guy.

Mr. Blue was no populist. But he believed that good wine needn’t be expensive or difficult to appreciate; all that people needed, he said, was a guide, like him, to show them what was worth buying.

Posted in Heroism, History, Mixology, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

Entertainment trivia.

Thursday, January 4th, 2024

My beloved and indulgent family gave me a copy of Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! for Christmas. I think part of the motivation for this (other than it being on my wish list) is that everyone in my family wants to borrow it when I’m done. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Fun fact I’ve learned from the book, which I did not know previously. Remember “Gunderson”?

Whatever happened to that guy? Would you believe he went on to bigger things?

(more…)

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Movies, TV | 2 Comments »

Quick flaming hyenas update.

Thursday, January 4th, 2024

Mike the Musicologist sent me a text the other day mentioning that there’s a superseding indictment against Democratic Senator Robert “Buffalo Bob” Menendez.

This seems like reason enough to link the NYT: “What We Know About the Menendez Bribery Case”.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 4, 2024.

Thursday, January 4th, 2024

Donald Wildmon has passed away at 85. I believe he was mostly forgotten now, but I remember a time when he was a hugely controversial figure in American politics.

Rev. Wildmon was a Methodist preacher. As the story goes, one night at Christmas he and his family gathered around the warm glowing glow of the TV set…and Rev. Wildmon discovered that the TV was full of what he considered to be vulgarity.

He kept switching channels — from a program with an adultery scene, to another with profanity, to a third with a man attacking someone with a hammer — before telling his children to turn off the set and resolving to do something about what he considered immoral content.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, he ended up founding an organization called the National Federation for Decency, which later became the American Family Association. AFA was one of the leaders in the controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts:

Mr. Wildmon had sent a photograph in 1989 to every member of Congress of a work by the artist Andres Serrano of a small crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, which had appeared in an exhibition with partial N.E.A. funding. “I would never, ever have dreamed that I would live to see such demeaning disrespect and desecration of Christ in our country that is present today,” Mr. Wildmon wrote lawmakers.

…

Over more than three decades, groups that Mr. Wildmon led boycotted Target stores for substituting the word “holiday” for “Christmas,” ran full-page ads denouncing the 1990s police drama “NYPD Blue” for “steamy sex scenes” and picketed a Hollywood studio over Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which portrayed Jesus as having sexual desires.

The effectiveness of the AFA is questionable. They don’t seem to have any impact on “Last Temptation”, but they got 7-11 to pull “Playboy” and “Penthouse”, and were partially responsible for Proctor and Gamble pulling advertisements from “50 TV shows”.

I’m a First Amendement absolutist, and I didn’t care much for Mr. Wildmon or his organization at the time. But now that I’m older, and see stuff on TV airing during children’s waking hours, I wonder if the man may have had a point.

Of course, there’s alway the V-chip, which didn’t come into existence until 1996…

Posted in Obits, Politics, TV | 1 Comment »

TMQ Watch: January 2, 2024.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024

Welcome to the exciting future world of 2024! Which looks a lot like 2023. Except a university is missing a president. Hey, you know who would make a good president for Harvard?

After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Crazy horse people update.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024

Crazy horse woman took a plea.

Tatyana Remley, 43, pleaded guilty on Thursday to a count of solicitation to commit murder stemming from an attempt to hire a person to kill her husband, Mark Remley. She also pleaded guilty to having a loaded, concealed gun that wasn’t registered to her, according to the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office.

As part of the plea, she’s taken a stipulated sentence of three years and eight months, but it isn’t clear to me if she has a chance at parole or some other form of early release.

Posted in Bagatelle, Horses, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 2, 2024.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024

It was a busy weekend, so I’m playing obit catch-up here. Administratively, I plan to get TMQ Watch up at some point during the day.

Tom Wilkinson. THR. IMDB.

This has been pretty well covered, but I did want to make an observation. When I was at St. Ed’s, for my “Film and Literature” class, we had to watch “In the Bedroom” and read Andre Dubus’s “Killings”. I thought “Bedroom” was a pretty terrific movie: both Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek give career peak performances. If you have not seen it, I commend it to your attention.

(The Dubus story is good, too.)

Shecky Greene, comedian. THR. IMDB.

“I’m bipolar,” he told a Las Vegas television interviewer in 2010. “I’m more than bipolar. I’m South Polar, North Polar. I’m every kind of polar there is. I even lived with a polar bear for about a year.”

…

Although never known as the most decorous of comedians, Mr. Greene made news in the comedy world in 2014 when he stormed out of a Friars Club event in Manhattan and announced that he was resigning from the club after his fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried did material that Mr. Greene, who had been scheduled to speak, found offensive.
“He got dirtier and dirtier,” Mr. Greene told a radio interviewer, without providing details, “so I got up and I said, ‘That’s it.’”

Cale Yarborough, one of the NASCAR greats.

Posted in Admin, Cars, Movies, Obits, Sports | 2 Comments »

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