Alan Rachins, actor. I watched enough “L.A. Law” that I remember him. THR.
Other credits include “Stargate SG-1”, “Showgirls”, and the “Fear on Trial” TV movie, which some of us had to watch in high school.
Obit watch; November 4, 2024.
November 4th, 2024Firings watch.
November 4th, 2024I had scheduled today and tomorrow off, and am running around with Mike the Musicologist. I had no idea how busy it was going to get, so I am blogging by phone.
Dennis Allen out in New Orleans. 18-25 in more or less three seasons, and the Saints have lost seven games in a row.
The Raiders fired Luke Getsy as offensive coordinator. Also offensive line coach James Cregg and QB coach Rich Scangarello. The team is 2-7, and all three were in their first season with the Raiders. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Bagatelle (#121).
November 1st, 2024Obit watch: October 30, 2024.
October 30th, 2024…
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?
Isn’t it ironic?
October 28th, 2024No, 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.
Obit watch: October 28, 2024.
October 28th, 2024David 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.
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Fried Rice.
October 27th, 2024Mike 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.
Random gun book crankery, plus Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters.
October 25th, 2024Just 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.
Norts spews.
October 25th, 2024I 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.
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).
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.)
Obit watch: October 25, 2024.
October 25th, 2024Philip 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.”
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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.
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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.
Obit watch: October 24, 2024.
October 24th, 2024Ron 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.
Obit watch: October 23, 2024.
October 23rd, 2024Fernando 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.