I was tempted to make some play on Bob Feller’s name in the headline, but I figure everyone’s going to be doing that. So here’s your NYT obit link, sans pun.
As I was in the process of composing this post, I found out about the death of Blake Edwards. I expect fuller obits in tomorrow’s papers.
Speaking of the NYT, there’s quite a bit of interesting stuff in today’s paper. Here’s a quick set of links:
Today is the 50th anniversary of the “Park Slope” plane crash: a United Airlines DC-8 and a Lockheed Constellation collided and fell to the ground in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn, killing 134 people. The “City Room” blog has been doing retrospectives on this story for most of the week: the best place to start is probably here, with the “How It Happened” post, and then browse the list of related posts below. It would be nice if the NYT bloggers could tag all the posts on the subject for easy linking…
(Edited to add: for some reason, the tags were not showing up for me earlier in Firefox 3.6, but they are now: this link will show all the posts tagged “Park Slope Plane Crash”.)
There’s also a retrospective on the murder of Ken Rex McElroy in Skidmore, Missouri “nearly” 30 years ago. The hook here is that the county prosecutor, who was just starting the job at the time of the murder, is now leaving office, and there still haven’t been any prosecutions.
There’s also a pretty shallow article on the rise of home science labs. I say “shallow” because the article is basically “Oh, look at all this cool stuff computerization has made affordable” and doesn’t cover any of the issues around home labs and amateur science experimentation; the CPSIA and science kits for kids, laws in some states (like Texas) restricting the purchase of “chemical glassware”, BATFE and the war on high-power rocketry, or the CPSC’s attempt to shut down sales of chemicals for home experimentation, among other issues.
How bad is the California Institute of Technology basketball team?
In local news, I would have liked to be a fly on the wall for this conversation at the Hays County sheriff’s office: “So let me get this straight: you lost the interview with the victim.”
Jack Shafer on the nutmeg scare. I think many of the commenters are missing a key point: shouldn’t we be happy that kids these days are still reading the classics