Dennis Thompson, drummer for the MC5. He was also the last surviving member.
Pete McCloskey (R – California). He may be more famous for having run against Nixon for the presidential nomination in 1972.
I’ve been holding this one for a few days for reasons, but KVUE has a nice tribute to Robert “Bob” Reale. Mr. Reale was the founder and owner of Reale’s Italian Cafe, which is a swell Italian restaurant and a favorite of both myself and Lawrence.
Wow. Busy.
Susan Buckner, actress. We may have to add “Deadly Blessing” to the movie list. Other credits include “B.J. and the Bear”, “Switch”, and “Police Academy 6: City Under Siege”.
Judy Devlin Hashman, badminton champion.
Before badminton established a world championship or joined the Olympics, the All England Open Badminton Championships was the sport’s pinnacle. Hashman won the women’s singles title in that event for the first time in 1954 at age 18. Then she added her record-setting nine more, the last in 1967.
She also won seven women’s doubles titles, six of them with her sister Susan Devlin, later known as Susan Peard.
Ian Gelder, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Father Brown”, and “Rumpole of the Bailey”.
The paper of record finally ran an obit for Dick Rutan.
Milton Diamond, who the NYT describes as a “sexologist and advocate for intersex babies”.
I probably would have skipped this one for notability, but the obit starts off with an account of the 1973 International Symposium on Gender Identity, at which Dr. Diamond got into a confrontation with Dr. John Money. Dr. Money was an advocate of “genital correction” surgery, while Dr. Diamond advocated leaving them alone.
Dr. Money rushed over to Dr. Diamond, getting in his face, furiously insisting he was right.
Dr. Diamond only replied, “The data is not there.”
At one point, eyewitnesses reported that Dr. Money slugged Dr. Diamond, though Dr. Diamond later said he didn’t remember it.
Turns out Dr. Diamond may have been right, and Dr. Money was (at best) a crank and possibly worse.
Some people might question whether these are actual “flames”, but I think they’re close enough for government work.
1. Here comes the judge?
No. There goes the judge.
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Investigations began into Ademiluyi on Sept. 27, 2022, after allegations arose that she bypassed the judicial nomination process and vetting, ultimately beating a previously seated judge.
Court documents noted concerns from the Commission of Judicial Disabilities with a campaign ad from Ademiluyi that detailed her personal experience as a sexual assault survivor, claiming that the ad could “reasonably be perceived as inconsistent with the independence and impartiality of judicial office.”
While in office, two of Ademiluyi’s employees told the commission that the judge would routinely “demand, demean, and belittle” them, leading to both seeking medical attention for stress and anxiety
In 2023, Ademilyi was suspended without pay and barred from a courthouse.
…
She has alleged in complaints and court documents that her outsider status drew hostility from her judicial colleagues, creating a working environment that prompted her to file what she said was a whistleblower complaint against her supervisors in 2022.
In a statement, she asserted that her removal from the bench is retaliation for that complaint. After reporting her supervisors to the Maryland Commission on Judicial Disabilities, they responded with a complaint of their own, alleging misconduct by Ademiluyi in hundreds of pages of documents that the commission and Maryland Supreme Court deemed valid.
Her fellow judges alleged that she behaved inappropriately at the courthouse, including insubordination, unprofessionalism, tardiness and lack of participation in critical judicial training sessions.
…
Soon after Ademiluyi became a judge, tensions with her colleagues began to develop, according to court and commission documents.
But Ademiluyi took the first action before the commission, filing a complaint against Sheila Tillerson Adams, then serving as the county’s longtime chief administrative judge, and Daneeka Varner Cotton, who would soon take over for Tillerson Adams.
Ademiluyi alleged that Tillerson Adams forged her signature on a ruling and that the two had been monitoring her emails in an attempt to sabotage her, according to commission and court documents. In a letter to the commission, Cotton replied that it would be “extremely difficult to respond to the blatant falsehoods” alleged in Ademiluyi’s complaint.
…
Tillerson Adams told investigators that dealing with Ademiluyi had been a “nightmare.” The commission ultimately dismissed Ademiluyi’s complaint, ruling that there was not sufficient evidence to support her allegations.
Then came a second commission complaint from Tillerson Adams against Ademiluyi, alleging misconduct. The commission would ultimately find that, among other conclusions, she refused to talk to certain judges, instructed her law clerks to not speak to other judges and sent emails saying, “I don’t look forward to meeting you or communicating with you at anytime.” They also found that her election campaign content could have led to perceptions of her not being impartial in sexual violence cases.
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The Maryland Supreme Court’s decision Monday went far beyond the punishment the commission had unanimously recommended in February, which included a censure and six-month unpaid suspension, with two months served immediately and four months suspended depending on her compliance with certain conditions.
Those conditions included that the Supreme Court institute a one-year probation with a monitor; an assigned mentor judge who would provide monthly reports; “a complete emotional, behavioral and prosocial assessment” followed by Ademiluyi’s cooperation and compliance with any recommended treatments; and attendance at Maryland judiciary, educational and ethics trainings.
As I understand it, she beat Jared McCarthy in the 2020 general election for the position. Mike the Musicologist, who tipped me off to this story, also sent over a tweet:
"McCarthy had led by about 7,000 votes on election night, but with a large number of mail-in and provisional ballots remaining to be counted, he finally lost by 5,200 votes."
History will come to know this as THE BIDEN MANEUVER.
— Byl Holte (@SirBylHolte) May 8, 2024
2. Troy Finner, the chief of police for the Houston Police Department, retired yesterday.
This sounds more like a “retirefiring” than an actual retirement, even though he’s been on the job for 31 years. The HPD has been under a lot of fire recently over closing 264,000 cases. The cases were “suspended” with a code indicating “lack of personnel”…
Former Chief Finner had said repeatedly he knew nothing about this, but an email surfaced recently in which he was told that a road rage incident had been closed with that code:
And, as a special bonus for reading all the way to the end:
Slain beauty queen Landy Párraga may have tipped off killers by posting photo of octopus ceviche
I really do need to do that OPSEC post, don’t I?
They didn’t even have to look at the EXIF data.
Also, she was making the sign of the two-backed beast with a convicted drug lord, who was married to someone else.
“If my wife comes across anything about her, I’m screwed,” Norero had said of Párraga to Ángulo.
He reportedly added: “My friend, her name cannot come out anywhere. Otherwise, my world will come crashing down.”
The drug lord got whacked in prison. Authorities suspect that his widow is behind the assassination of Ms. Párraga.
Both Lawrence and Joe D. sent over additional obits for Dick Rutan: AP. AVWeb (which was not there when I looked yesterday). Air Force Times. My thanks to both gentlemen.
C.J. Sansom, mystery author. I’d never heard of him, but now I want to read his books. He specialized in historical mysteries, and had an ongoing series with “Matthew Shardlake”, a “hunchbacked lawyer-turned-detective” in Tudor England.
His first book, “Dissolution,” is set in a remote monastery in 1537, as Henry VIII is dispossessing Catholic monks of their lands and riches after the king’s rupture with Rome. Shardlake is sent there by his patron, Cromwell, Henry’s chief minister, to investigate a murder. He finds corruption, sexual depravity and more suspicious deaths.
Published in 2003, “Dissolution” was a popular success, and Mr. Sansom was signed to a multibook deal. He went on to publish six more Shardlake mysteries over 15 years. More than three million copies are in print.
His second installment, “Dark Fire” (2005), set during a sweltering London summer, includes child murder and culminates in Cromwell’s real-life execution in 1540. A reviewer, Stella Duffy, writing in The Guardian, praised Mr. Sansom for offering a dizzying window on the times: “Tudor housing to rival Rachman, Dickensian prisons, a sewage-glutted Thames, beggars in gutters, conspiracies at court and a political system predicated on birth not merit, intrigue not intelligence.”
You know, I feel like between Mr. Sansom and Hilary Mantel, at some point, I’m going to have to go to the Cromwell…
There was an election in Austin this past weekend.
Because of changes in state law, areas of Austin that were previously annexed by the city could vote to de-annex from the city.
Some of those results are interesting.
For example, Proposition B, “Disannex Mooreland Addition” received 0 votes against…and 0 votes for.
Proposition C, “Disannex Blue Goose Road”, got 3 votes for…and none against.
Proposition E, “Disannex Wildhorse/Webb” also ended up in a 0-0 tie.
And Proposition F, “Disannex River Place Outparcels”, won, 1-0. See, one vote can matter.
In case you were wondering, Proposition A, “Disannex Lost Creek”, won, 1,447 – 138. Proposition D, “Disannex Lennar at Malone”, won lost 110 – 2.
Edited to add 5/7: Actually, I mis-read the results. Proposition D, “Disannex Lennar at Malone”, was defeated.
I don’t know that there’s any major trends to be drawn from this. I want to say that the results prove general unhappiness with the city, and a desire to be well separated from it. But I feel like that can only be said for the areas covered by propositions A and D, since those seem to be the only ones with a significant number of voters.
Edited to add 5/7: Thanks to T. Migratorious for his comments.
Also, KVUE has a post election follow-up article.
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“My grandfather fought the annexation of this little area the whole time here until he died in 2015,” Kizer said. “He was the kind of guy that would call the county … call the city and tell them, ‘You need to come do things.’”Kizer said they never got any benefits from the city in the seven years they were annexed and that their roads and water infrastructure deteriorated.
“I did call and contact the city for services, and they’re like, ‘No, we’re not up to date in your area to provide those services,'” Kizer said. “Huge potholes everywhere … They didn’t actually come and fix our road until they started doing new construction in the rest of the area. It was only to benefit the newcomers to the area, not anybody that’s already been here and paying taxes.”
…
Disannexing means the residents will no longer receive certain city services, like fire or police protection, street maintenance, public health sanitation and more.
“There weren’t a lot of things to look forward to or that they were giving us,” Kizer said. “So, the major benefit is that I get to go back to being county taxed.”
Bernard Hill. NYT. IMDB.
Frank Stella, artist.
Mr. Stella was a dominant figure in postwar American art, a restless, relentless innovator whose explorations of color and form made him an outsize presence, endlessly discussed and constantly on exhibit.
Few American artists of the 20th century arrived with quite his éclat. He was in his early 20s when his large-scale black paintings — precisely delineated black stripes separated by thin lines of blank canvas — took the art world by storm. Austere, self-referential, opaque, they cast a chilling spell.
Jeannie Epper, stuntwoman. 161 stunt credits in IMDB (and another 39 actress credits). Seems like she was working pretty steadily from 1964 all the way to 2021, including “Play Misty For Me”, “Soylent Green”, “Blazing Saddles”, “The Blues Brothers”, and “Road House” (the good one).
Lawrence sent over an obit for Edgar Lansbury. I had seen this elsewhere and didn’t think he was noteworthy enough, but Lawrence pointed out that he produced “Squirm“.
Lawrence also sent over an obit for Dick Rutan, legendary pilot. He’s the guy who, with Jeana Yeager, flew non-stop around the world in nine days, three minutes, and 44 seconds in “Voyager”. Unfortunately, the obit Lawrence sent me came from a blog by way of a blog, and I’d rather have something more substantial to link to: none of the flying news publications I know of have this story yet. I’ll link to a better obit when I find one.
Darvin Ham out as head coach of the Lakers.
Why can’t LeBron James make change for a dollar?
Because he doesn’t have a 4th quarter.
This was rumored all morning, but it was just rumors until now.
His wife Imelda has also been indicted.
…
The two each face the following charges:
- Two counts of conspiracy to commit bribery of a federal official and to have a public official act as an agent of a foreign principal
- Two counts of bribery of a federal official
- Two counts of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud
- Two counts of violating the ban on public officials acting as agents of a foreign principal
- One count of conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering
- Five counts of money laundering
Of course, Rep. Cuellar and his wife are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Hey! Guess what!
The battleship New Jersey is in dry dock.
Being completely fair, this is a good story, especially if you’re interested in history, ships, the Navy, or some combination of those three.
But it isn’t without annoyances.
The Texas also cost a lot more, but it had gone without maintenance for much longer, too.
(Also being scrupulously fair, the Texas is now out of dry dock and in a new permanent location. On the other hand, the Texas was in dry dock for 18 months, not the two months estimated for the New Jersey, and anyone who wanted to had plenty of opportunities to go see it.)
$1,000? Really? Nothing against Mr. Szimanski: I do watch the New Jersey YouTube channel sometimes. But $775 seems like a steep YouTube premium. (As I recall, the dry dock tour of the Texas was $150.)
It is kind of nice to see the New Jersey is selling merch (though they already had an online store). But can you get Battleship New Jersey 1911 grips? As far as I can tell, no.
(Okay, that’s a trick question: you can’t get Battleship Texas 1911 grips either. Except for the deck pattern ones, which I personally don’t like. The other two patterns seem to come into stock and sell out very fast. One of these days I might be lucky enough to snag a pair.)
What’s the takeway from this, other than dry dock tours of old battleships are fun?
The NYT ran two obits recently for people who were a little outside the mainstream of celebrity.
Larry Young passed away in March at the age of 56. Dr. Young was a neuroscientist, who got his PhD from UT Austin.
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With their beady eyes, thick tails and sharp claws, prairie voles are not exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: They are monogamous, and the males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.
“Prairie voles, if you take away their partner, they show behavior similar to depression,” Professor Young told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost as if there’s withdrawal from their partner.”
That made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.
In a study published in 1999, Professor Young and his colleagues exploited the gene in prairie voles associated with the signaling of vasopressin, a hormone that modulates social behavior. They boosted vasopressin signaling in mice, which are highly promiscuous.
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Professor Young followed up with other prairie vole studies that focused on oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates contractions during childbirth and is involved in the bonding between mothers and newborns.
“Because we knew that oxytocin was involved in mother-infant bonding, we explored whether oxytocin might be involved in this partner bonding,” he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019.
It was.
…
Frank Wakefield, mandolin guy.
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While still a teenager, Mr. Wakefield mastered the heavily syncopated “chop” chord of the bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe, whom he met in 1961 and who immediately recognized Mr. Wakefield’s prowess as a mandolinist.
“You can play like me as good — or near as good — as I can,” Mr. Wakefield, in a 2022 interview with the Hudson Valley Bluegrass Association, recalled Mr. Monroe saying at their initial meeting. “Now you’ve got to go out and find your own style.”
Heeding Mr. Monroe’s advice, Mr. Wakefield did exactly that. He devised his own sound by alternating up and down strokes on his instrument with equal force to produce a clear, ringing tone and sustained rhythm, which he likened to a sledgehammer striking a steel rail in a 1998 interview with the bluegrass website Candlewater.com.
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David Grisman, a student of Mr. Wakefield’s and a mandolin virtuoso in his own right, said in an often quoted passage from Frets magazine that Mr. Wakefield had “split the bluegrass mandolin atom” by taking the instrument beyond where Mr. Monroe had.
“Bluegrass,” the album that Mr. Wakefield made with Mr. Allen for Folkways Records in 1964 (and that a 19-year-old Mr. Grisman produced), proved ample confirmation of that claim: It featured versions of two of Mr. Wakefield’s most enduring originals, “New Camptown Races” and “Catnip,” both of which, with their developments in melody, tunings and chord changes, pushed the limits of what then constituted bluegrass.
Mr. Wakefield’s innovations didn’t stop there, though. By the mid-1960s he had begun composing sonatas for the mandolin and arranging classical pieces for traditional bluegrass ensembles. He performed with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1967 and made a guest appearance with the Boston Pops orchestra the next year.