Archive for October, 2024

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Obit watch: October 30, 2024.

Wednesday, October 30th, 2024

Teri Garr. Tributes. NYT.

While making many of these films, she noticed troubling physical symptoms. She didn’t suspect their cause, but she remembered running in New York City in the late 1990s. “When I was jogging, I would get this horrible pain in my arm like a knife stabbing,” she told CNN in 2008. “And I thought, well, I’m in Central Park — well, maybe it is a knife stabbing.”

…

For years, she was a spokeswoman for MS research and support, continuing to make appearances in her wheelchair. “I really do count my blessings,” she wrote in a memoir, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood” (2005), written with Henriette Mantel. “At least I used to. Now I get so tired I have a woman come once a week and count them for me.”

Other credits include “One from the Heart”, “Honky Tonk Freeway”, “McCloud”, “Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood”, and an episode of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

John Gierach, author and fly fisherman. I recognized the name, probably because I’ve seen some of his books around. (Half-Price Books puts the fishing books right above the firearms books.)

Charles Brandt, former prosecutor and author.

But [“The Irishman”] was fiercely criticized by journalists and Mafia experts, who said Mr. Sheeran had exaggerated (at best) or fabricated (at worst) his role in Mr. Hoffa’s death.
“Frank Sheeran never killed a fly,” John Carlyle Berkery, an Irish mob figure in Philadelphia, was quoted as saying in a 2019 Slate article with the headline “The Lies of the Irishman.” “The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine.”
Selwyn Raab, who wrote about the Mafia for The Times for more than two decades, told Slate: “I know Sheeran didn’t kill Hoffa. I’m as confident about that as you can be. There are 14 people who claim to have killed Hoffa. There’s an inexhaustible supply of them.”

I read I Heard You Paint Houses and I think Frank Sheeran’s claim that he killed Hoffa is B.S. Sheeran even admitted to the author at one point that he’d lied about an easily checkable point: if he lied about that, why should we believe the rest of what he said?

Posted in Books, Fish, Law, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Isn’t it ironic?

Monday, October 28th, 2024

No, it isn’t. It’s just stupid.

So Lawrence has already observed that blogging on his side is going to be light this week for reasons.

This would be a good chance to get people flocking over here like a bunch of temporarily orphaned baby ducks…

…except, as previously noted, I’m having cataract surgery on my right eye tomorrow, and I’m not sure how well I’m going to be able to see, much less blog, afterwards.

Plus, you know, they say you shouldn’t drive or operate heavy machinery after surgery. I’m not sure if blogging counts as operating heavy machinery, but, as a great philosopher once said:

See you all as and when I can.

Posted in Admin | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: October 28, 2024.

Monday, October 28th, 2024

David Harris, actor. NYT (archived).

Other credits include “18 Wheels of Justice”, “Crime Story”, “Badge of the Assassin”, and “Cop Rock”.

Tom Jarriel, ABC reporter. He’s another one of those old-time guys I remember from watching the news when I was younger.

Phil Lesh, of the Grateful Dead.

Jeri Taylor. TV writer and producer.

Before embarking on her Star Trek voyage, the Indiana native wrote and produced episodes of such popular network crime fare as Quincy, M.E., Magnum, P.I., Jake and the Fatman and In the Heat of the Night. She was adept at writing about “character, of people and relationships and feelings,” she once noted.

…

Along the way, Taylor also wrote ABC Afterschool Specials, episodes of Little House on the Prairie, The Incredible Hulk, Blue Thunder and Father Dowling Mysteries and the 1987 CBS telefilm A Place to Call Home, starring Linda Lavin.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Fried Rice.

Sunday, October 27th, 2024

Mike Bloomgren out as head coach of Rice.

24-52 in seven seasons, 2-6 this season with four games left.

As you know, Bob, I prefer to link to local coverage when I can, but I couldn’t find any. Not in the HouChron, not on the Fox station, not on KHOU, nothing.

Christie Sides out as coach of the Indiana Fever, which is your WNBA team featuring Caitlin Clark.

33-47 in two years, 20-20 this year, and they got swept in the playoffs. ESPN.

Posted in Firings, Sports | No Comments »

Random gun book crankery, plus Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters.

Friday, October 25th, 2024

Just going to take a deep breath and jump here. These are pretty much new books, mostly from Amazon, so I’m going to spare you photos and just insert affiliate links. If you buy anything, I get a small kickback.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Leadership | No Comments »

Norts spews.

Friday, October 25th, 2024

I ran across a story on ESPN last night that, for me, raised more questions than it answered. I even ran it past Mike the Musicologist (who is very much not a sportsball person) because it just seemed so odd.

Josh Reynolds, wide receiver for the Denver Broncos, was shot last Friday.

Police documents indicate Reynolds and another man were located, after multiple 911 calls to report two people had been shot, near South Quebec Street and East Union Avenue in Denver. Reynolds had been shot twice — once in the left arm and once in the back of his head.
Team sources said Thursday that Reynolds was treated and released from a Denver-area hospital hours after the shooting.

So he was shot in the back of the head, treated, and released? That’s the kind of thing that should make you get down on your knees three times a day and thank God. It is also the kind of thing that makes you wonder what caliber he was shot with, and whether something slowed down the bullet on the way.

Police said Reynolds and two others had reported they were at Shotgun Willie’s, a strip club in Glendale, Colorado, and left at 2:45 a.m. Friday morning. Reynolds and one of the men left the club in an SUV and later told police they were followed by multiple vehicles and shots were fired.

Strippers. Always with the strippers. Also, nothing good happens after midnight. Also, Shotgun Willie’s is where Ja Morant got into trouble. Maybe teams should be telling their players “Shotgun Willie’s is off-limits.”

Also also: situational awareness. Maybe teams should be hiring the Left of Bang guys (more on this to come).

Reynolds and the other man got out of the SUV they were in when it would no longer drive on Interstate 25, the highway that bisects Denver north to south. The SUV was later found by police with multiple bullet holes in it.

Sounds like the car was shot up enough to where it wasn’t mechanically functional, which is another reason why I’m wondering if Mr. Reynolds was hit by a bullet or fragment that was slowed down by glass or auto body.

I don’t know that this worth the amount of thought I’ve been putting into it. It just seems like a curious thing.

By the way, the police have arrested two suspects. And while Mr. Reynolds was treated and released, he won’t be playing this week: he’s been on injured reserve for a finger injury. (Carolina plays in Denver Sunday afternoon.)

Posted in Guns, NFL, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: October 25, 2024.

Friday, October 25th, 2024

Philip Zimbardo. I think everyone who took Psychology 101 in college remembers the “Stanford Prison Experiment”.

In 1971, seeking a novel way to study how situations can transform behavior, Dr. Zimbardo set up a prison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building.
He turned rooms into cells. He made a tiny closet into “the hole” — solitary confinement. And he placed an advertisement in a local newspaper: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks.”

…

For his study, he asked local police officers to arrest the students who had been hired (for $15 a day) to be prisoners. He outfitted the students hired to be guards with crisp uniforms and made them wear sunglasses to appear more inscrutable, an idea he got from the 1967 prison movie “Cool Hand Luke.”
As prisoners arrived, they were stripped, searched and deloused, a process overseen by Dr. Zimbardo, who played the role of prison superintendent. Initially there were a few giggles among the participants, but as the guards began enforcing rules, the mock prison began to feel very real.
Though critics have accused Dr. Zimbardo of coaching the guards to act sadistic, he told the guards only to “create feelings of boredom, frustration, fear and a ‘sense of powerlessness,’” according to a defense of the study on his website. They were, he said, given no “formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.”
Within a day, the guards had become abusive and were engaging in psychological torture: making the prisoners defecate in buckets, waking them up repeatedly through the night, forcing them to simulate sodomy. Several prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns. But Dr. Zimbardo kept the study going.
On the sixth day, he told Christina Maslach, a graduate student whom he would marry that year, that he was impressed by how much interesting behavior the study had revealed in just under a week.
Interviewed for the documentary “Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment” (2004), Dr. Zimbardo said she replied, “I think what you are doing to those boys is horrible.”
“She was right,” he added. “I had to end the experiment, because that’s what it was — an experiment, not a prison. These were real boys who were suffering, and that fact had escaped me.”

At least, that’s the conventional account of the experiment. Recent scholarship points to this being a whole bunch of bullshit, and that Dr. Zimbardo was manipulating the participants behind the scenes to get a pre-determined result.

LeTexier’s analysis shows that Zimbardo had actually decided in advance what conclusions he wanted to demonstrate. For example, on only the second day of the experiment, he put out a press release stating that prisons dehumanize their inmates and therefore need to be reformed. Moreover, contrary to his repeated claims that participants in the experiment assigned to the role of guards were not told how to treat the prisoners and were free to make up their own rules, the archival data clearly show that the guards were told in advance what was expected of them, how they were to mistreat the prisoners, and were given a detailed list of rules to follow to ensure that prisoners were humiliated and dehumanized.
Furthermore, Zimbardo and his research team were highly assertive in ensuring that participants acted as “tough guards,” contrary to Zimbardo’s claims that they just fall naturally into their roles. For example, in the orientation session for guards on the first day of the experiment, Zimbardo’s assistant David Jaffe, who acted as a prison warden, even read out a list handwritten by Zimbardo entitled: “Processing in—Dehumanizing experience,” that included instructions like, “Ordered around. Arbitrariness. Guards never use names, only number. Never request, order.” This contradicts Zimbardo’s claims that dehumanizing behavior like calling the prisoners by their numbers rather than their names was something the guards came up with themselves. Additionally, after the experiment, some of the guards stated that either Zimbardo or Jaffe had directed them to act in specific ways at various times during the study.

General Michael Jackson (British Army – ret.) . I probably would have skipped over this on notability grounds, but this is an interesting story:

General Jackson was Britain’s senior leader in the Balkans in June 1999 when NATO forces moved into the province of Kosovo to enforce a withdrawal of Serbian troops. Russian soldiers, who backed Serbia, made a surprise grab of the airfield outside Pristina, the capital.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, an American and NATO’s supreme commander, ordered General Jackson to block the runways with tanks and troops to prevent more Russians from landing.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” General Jackson told him. “It’s not worth starting World War III.”
The insubordination was taken up by both men’s superiors — the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and General Jackson’s British commander.
They resolved the dispute in favor of General Jackson, according to testimony that General Shelton gave to Congress.
In the British press, General Jackson was nicknamed “Macho Jacko” for his rebuke of General Clark. His words to the American were quoted as being sharper than they were in U.S. accounts. “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you,” he reportedly told General Clark.

…

In the end, General Jackson’s view — that Russia did not threaten NATO through control of the airport — proved correct. The Russians were absorbed into the international peacekeeping force.
Rather than causing a career setback, General Jackson’s insubordination lifted him among his peers.
“The clash enhanced Jackson’s reputation as the most colorful character of modern soldiery,” The Telegraph wrote in a profile of him in 2007. The following year, Queen Elizabeth II named him a Knight Commander of the Bath.

Posted in History, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch: October 24, 2024.

Thursday, October 24th, 2024

Ron Ely, actor and good Texas boy. NYT.

Other credits include “Renegade”, “The Hat Squad”, the “Sea Hunt” revival in the 1980s, and “The Night of the Grizzly”.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Kentucky state senator Johnnie Turner, who passed away on Tuesday.

He had been hospitalized since September 15th, due to injuries sustained when he accidentally drove his riding lawn mower into an empty swimming pool.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: October 23, 2024.

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

Fernando Valenzuela. ESPN. NYT (archived).

As I’ve noted before, I am not a baseball fan, and I hate the Dodgers. But I remember Fernandomania. And I get the impression he was a class act.

Bruce Ames.

The so-called Ames Test, developed in the 1970s, is still used by drug manufacturers and pesticide companies to check the safety of their products. It involves exposing chemicals to a mutant strain of salmonella bacteria that Dr. Ames created; how the bacteria responds to a chemical makes it possible to determine whether that chemical caused DNA damage and therefore might lead to cancer in humans.

…

He stumbled on one of his most publicized discoveries accidentally, when he asked his undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, to bring in a chemical of their choosing to undergo testing. All of the chemicals tested negative, except for one: contained in a bottle of hair dye a student had borrowed from his girlfriend.
Dr. Ames sent a lab technician, Edith Yamasaki, to buy out every type of hair dye at a local drugstore, and after extensive testing concluded that the dyes — used by more than 20 million Americans at the time — were very likely linked to cancer and birth defects.

…

A year later, his work made headlines again when he discovered that a chemical called Tris, used to make children’s pajamas flame-retardant, caused genetic mutations. By some estimates, 45 million children were wearing Tris-treated pajamas. The chemical was later banned from garment manufacturing.

…

Later in his career, as Dr. Ames’s opinions about the dangers of man-made chemicals began to shift, his legacy in the environmental movement became more complicated.
He felt that some activists were overstating the risks of these chemicals and targeting chemical companies unfairly. He often said that he thought there was too much focus on substances that were technically mutagenic but that were no more likely to cause DNA damage than the “natural” chemicals found in fruits and vegetables.
“I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t real problems with some synthetic chemicals, but the environmentalists are wildly exaggerating the risks,” he told The Times in 1994. “If our resources are diverted from important things to unimportant things, this doesn’t serve the public.”

I’ve known about this one for a few days, but was waiting for something I was comfortable linking to: Ward Christensen, early computer BBS pioneer.

Then, on Jan. 16, 1978, a blizzard hit Chicago, covering the city in 40 inches of snow and stranding Mr. Christensen at his home in the suburbs. He phoned Mr. Suess, suggesting that they use the time to start building their messaging system. He wondered if they should get help from other club members, but Mr. Suess argued that involving more people would slow the project down.
“Forget the club. It would just be management by committee,” Mr. Suess said, as Mr. Christensen recalled their conversation to The New York Times in 2009. “It’s just me and you. I will do the hardware, and you will do the software.”

…

In 1977, he developed a protocol, called XMODEM, for sending computer files across phone lines; it was later used on C.B.B.S.

…

The next fall, Mr. Christensen described their creation in an article he wrote for Byte, a magazine for computer hobbyists. When they retired their system less than a decade later, its phone line had received more than a half-million calls.

By way of Greg Ellifritz: Ed Lovette, trainer and gun guy. I have a copy of The Snubby Revolver, and would recommend picking it up if you find it used.

I also wanted to link this because Mr. Ellifritz’s post contains an excellent list of other books you should have in your gun library. I will say I have many, but not all, of them: some of them I am still trying to find. (And someone should get the rights to reprint that old Paladin Press stuff, like the Lovette and Cirillo books.)

As a side note, I haven’t forgotten about gun books. I’ve just been busy, and my dealer of choice has taken some time off. I do want to try to get up a post this week, but it is probably going to be shorter than usual. The books I plan to post about are all new books, available from Amazon (with one exception). And one of those books is also going to be an entry in the “Leadership Secrets” series, too.

Keep watching the skies.

Posted in Books, Geek, Hoplobibilophilia, Obits, Sports | 6 Comments »

Obit watch: October 21, 2024.

Monday, October 21st, 2024

John Kinsel Sr. died on Saturday at the age of 107.

Mr. Kinsel was one of the Navajo Code Talkers.

An estimated 400 Navajo Code Talkers served during World War II, transmitting a code crafted from the Navajo language that U.S. forces used to confuse the Japanese and communicate troop movements, enemy positions and other critical battlefield information. Mr. Kinsel, who served from October 1942 to January 1946, was part of the second group of Marines trained as code talkers at Camp Elliott in California, after the original 29 who developed the code for wartime use.

…

The Associated Press reported that the only two surviving Navajo Code Talkers are Thomas H. Begay and Peter MacDonald, a former Navajo chairman.

Nicholas Daniloff passed away last Thursday. He was 88.

He was a foreign correspondent in Russia for UPI and, later, for U.S. News and World Report.

After taking a call at his Moscow apartment on Aug. 30, 1986, Mr. Daniloff met a trusted Russian friend and news contact, Misha, in a park for a farewell exchange. He gave Misha several Stephen King novels, and Misha gave him a sealed packet that supposedly contained news clippings from a Soviet republic and some photographs that he said might be useful.
After they parted, a van pulled up alongside Mr. Daniloff. Several men leapt out, handcuffed him, dragged him into the vehicle and took him to the infamous K.G.B. torture center, Lefortovo Prison. Misha’s packet turned out to contain photographs and maps of military installations, all marked “secret.” The fix was in — a heavy-handed throwback to Stalinist tactics.
In Room 215, a chamber that reeked of interrogations, Mr. Daniloff was met by a tall, imposing man in a dark gray suit. “He walked toward me, pinning me with his dark eyes,” Mr. Daniloff wrote in his book “Two Lives, One Russia” (1988). “This senior K.G.B. officer said solemnly in Russian, ‘You have been arrested on suspicion of espionage. I am the person who ordered your arrest.’”
For the bewildered Mr. Daniloff, that moment set off 14 days of grueling interrogations, confinement in a tiny underground cell and the anguish of being cut off from the world, facing what his captors called years in a Siberian labor camp or a death sentence. His claims of innocence hardly mattered; as he guessed, he had been arrested as a bargaining chip in a larger game.

Ultimately, Mr. Daniloff was traded for Gennadi F. Zakharov (a confessed Soviet spy, who had been arrested two weeks before Mr. Daniloff’s arrest) and human rights activist Yuri Orlov.

But the affair continued to roil Soviet-American relations. About 100 Soviet officials, including 80 suspected spies, were eventually expelled by the United States. Moscow expelled 10 American diplomats and withdrew 260 Russian employees from the American Embassy in Moscow.

(By the way, for those of you out there who are connoisseurs, this is a Robert D. McFadden obit.)

Michael Valentine, one of nature’s noblemen. He helped pioneer the radar detector.

Mr. Valentine, who didn’t believe that road safety was determined by finite speed limits, went into battle armed with the Escort, a radar detector that he built with Jim Jaeger, his college friend and business partner, for their company, Cincinnati Microwave.
They were met with early success. In 1979, a year after the Escort’s debut, Car and Driver magazine tested 12 radar detectors and ranked it the best — “by a landslide” — for its ability to pick up the signals of police radar equipment.

…

Car and Driver’s obituary of Mr. Valentine quoted Mr. Jaeger as recalled that they disassembled a Fuzzbuster and “were amazed at how primitive it was. There was almost nothing inside. Mike and I started noodling about how to build a superior, cost-no-object detector.”

Sammy Basso, an advocate for research into progeria, an ultrarare fatal disease that causes rapid aging in children, who was known for living with gusto and humor with the condition as he faced the certainty of premature death, died on Oct. 5 near his home in Tezze sul Brenta, in the Veneto region of northern Italy. He was 28.

I wanted to share this one because cool story, bro:

He once posed outside a U.F.O. museum in Roswell, N.M., in green “alien” eyeglasses, which accentuated his egg-shaped head, to make tourists think he was a real visitor from outer space.
“He made everyone around him feel comfortable with him and with progeria,” Dr. Gordon said. “All he had to do was say two words and you’d be smiling and laughing.”

Posted in Cars, Heroism, History, Media, Obits | 1 Comment »

Firings watch.

Saturday, October 19th, 2024

Latricia Trammell was fired on Friday as head coach of the Dallas Wings.

The team was 9-31 this season.

In case you were wondering- and it took me longer to figure this out than it should have – the Dallas Wings are a WNBA team.

The Wings franchise started in Detroit in 1998 and won three WNBA championships there before moving to Tulsa in 2010. After six seasons in Oklahoma, the team relocated to Dallas in 2016 and became the Wings.

On a related note:

This season the WNBA will lose $40 million, a bit better than the $50 million forecast and reported by several media outlets months ago but still a loss, sources said.
Starting in the 2026 season, the WNBA will get up to $2.2 billion over 11 years as part of the new basketball media contracts.

…

But the players are expected to opt out of the current collective bargaining contract by a Nov. 1 deadline and, if they do, that means salaries are likely to rise, which would eat into that potential $60 million 2026 profit by the league — the $100M in television revenue turning the projected $40M loss into a $60M gain.

Posted in Firings, Sports | No Comments »

Obit watch: October 17, 2024.

Thursday, October 17th, 2024

Mitzi Gaynor. NYT (archived). IMDB.

I found this kind of interesting, in light of another obit from not that long ago:

Her most notable television experience, however, may also have been her least triumphant. On Feb. 16, 1964, Ms. Gaynor had top billing on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” She sang “It’s Too Darn Hot” and a medley of blues songs, but she was completely overshadowed by another act on the bill that night: the Beatles, in their second American television appearance. At a cast dinner afterward, she recalled, Paul McCartney asked for her autograph.

Also interesting to me:

While the couple were still honeymooners, George Abbott, the revered Broadway producer and director, asked for a meeting and told Ms. Gaynor that he wanted her to play Lola, the seductive agent of the Devil, in the musical he was planning, “Damn Yankees.” Unfortunately, Mr. Bean had just committed his new wife to a four-picture deal in Hollywood. Gwen Verdon went on to play Lola, winning one of the show’s seven Tony Awards in 1956. Except for a small part in the 1946 musical “Gypsy Lady,” when she was still billed as Mitzi Gerber, Ms. Gaynor never made it to Broadway.

Ever wonder how the history of a particular musical would have been different if the producers had been able to cast their first choice, instead of “settling” for someone who came out of left field and blew everyone away? I do.

(Okay, to be fair, Gwen Verdon didn’t exactly come out of left field. She’d already won a Tony for “Can-Can”.)

NYT obit for Bob Yerkes. Noted here because:

1) This gives me a chance to thank jimmymcnulty for his comments on the previous obit. I agree: I think Mr. Yerkes would have been a great neighbor, and a swell guy to hang with.

(Also, thanks to FotB RoadRich and FotB cm smith for their comments on the late Mr. Armes in the same obit.)

B) I thought this was interesting, and it was sort of played down in the THR obit:

During his circus days, Mr. Yerkes became deeply religious — a turnabout from his childhood.
“I was reared in an unbelieving home,” he said in “Redeeming the Screens,” a 2016 book about religion in the entertainment industry. “As a young adult, I have to confess I read the Bible planning to denounce the truth of it, but I realized that it had to be inspired by God.”
He formed a Bible-reading group for circus performers. He later served on the board of the Christian Film & Television Commission, which bills itself as being “dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media.”

Posted in Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | 1 Comment »

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