Roberto D’Aversa has been fired as manager of Lecce. Lecce is a team in the Italian Serie A soccer league.
This is not ordinarily something I would take notice of, but the reason for his firing is interesting:
Hellas Verona was the opposing team, and is in 13th place in Serie A. Lecce is in 15th place.
Vice Admiral Richard Truly (US Navy – ret.), astronaut and former NASA administrator. NASA.
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But he returned to NASA as its associate administrator in charge of the shuttle program in 1986, less than a month after the Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight due in part to launching in too cold temperatures, killing its seven-person crew, which included a teacher, Christa McAuliffe.
A month into his new job, Captain Truly said that the next shuttle would be launched only in daylight and in warm weather (the Challenger was launched at 36 degrees Fahrenheit), and that it would land in California instead of Cape Canaveral, Fla.
“I do not want you to think this conservative approach, this safe approach, which I think is the proper thing to do, is going to be a namby-pamby shuttle program,” he said. “The business of flying in space is a bold business.”
He added: “We cannot print enough money to make it totally risk-free. But we certainly are going to correct any mistakes we may have made in the past, and we are going to get it going again just as soon as we can under these guidelines.”
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He remembered walking to his office on his first day as associate administrator to find people crying in the corridor “because of the pounding they had been taking in the media,” he said in a 2012 interview with the Colorado School of Mines, where he was a trustee at the time.
“By that time,” he added, “rather than an airplane accident, it had been portrayed as NASA killed its crew. It was the start of the most tumultuous engineering, political, cultural, social endeavor that I ever found myself in.”
He was appointed administrator by George H.W. Bush, but (according to the NYT) left after three years because of a dispute with “Vice President Dan Quayle and his staff at the National Space Council, of which Mr. Quayle was the chairman.”
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Steve Lawrence, of Steve and Eydie fame. NYT (archived).
FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Akira Toriyama, manga guy and creator of “Dragon Ball”.
John Walker, AutoCAD and Autodesk guy.
The idiosyncratic Mr. Walker put his mark on a company that was anything but corporate in spirit. A 1992 article in The New York Times described Autodesk under Mr. Walker as “a cabal of counterculture senior programmers” who “took their dogs to work and tried to reach a consensus on strategy through endless memos sent by electronic mail.” (In those days, email was still a novelty in the business world.)
That same year, The Wall Street Journal scored a rare interview with Autodesk’s “founding genius.” The resulting article noted his quirks, including the fact that he did not allow the company to distribute his photograph in any form. He was prickly in manner during the interview, the reporter noted, and insisted that it be conducted in front of a video camera, debated each question and claimed a copyright on the conversation.
Apologies for the silence the past two days. I have been busy assisting the police with their inquiries.
Brigadier General John C. Bahnsen Jr. (US Army – ret.) has passed away at the age of 89.
Gen. Bahnsen was a genuine, certified, American badass.
General Bahnsen was among the most decorated combat veterans in U.S. history. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest honor for heroism, behind the Medal of Honor; five Silver Stars; four Legions of Merit; three Distinguished Flying Crosses; four Bronze Stars (three for valor); two Purple Hearts; and the Army Commendation Medal with a “V” device for valor.
He earned most of those awards during the second of two Vietnam tours, when he led a troop in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment that was commanded by Maj. Gen. George S. Patton, the son of Gen. George S. Patton Jr. of World War II fame.
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Unlike fellow commanders who led from a desk, General Bahnsen led troops from his own helicopter — a tactic that allowed him to coordinate air and ground forces simultaneously, which he did while firing his rifle and dropping grenades from his window.
“We thought he had a death wish sometimes,” Mr. Noe said.
He did, but not for himself.
“The enemy of my country is my enemy, and our mission was to kill them,” General Bahnsen said in a 2013 interview with the American Veterans Center. “You could capture them if you could. We captured a lot of them in my units, but we also killed them. And my feeling was, that’s our job.”
He was unrelenting. He often landed his helicopter to fight alongside his ground troops. One day, he was shot down three times. Each time, he ordered delivery of a replacement helicopter so that he could return to attacking.
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General Bahnsen was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions during a battle in early 1969.After his crew chief was severely wounded amid heavy gunfire at low altitudes, General Bahnsen evacuated him, refueled and rearmed.
“I was mad as hell!” he wrote in his autobiography. “I thought those bastards had just killed my crew chief.”
Not knowing whether the crew chief was alive or dead — he survived but was paralyzed — General Bahnsen returned to the battle site.
“Forcing them to a confined area, he marked their position and directed five airstrikes against them, while at the same time controlling four separate rifle platoons,” his award citation reads.
Enemy fire crippled his helicopter, so he returned to his base and got another.
Upon returning, the citation says, he “landed to guide in the lift ships carrying an additional infantry unit, and then led a rifle platoon through dense terrain to personally capture two enemy who were attempting to escape.”
He ordered the captives to be evacuated by helicopter while he remained on the ground, and led his squad on foot for more than a mile to a safe position.
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Chris Mortensen, ESPN guy.
David Bordwell, film scholar. He did a lot of work for the Criterion Collection.
Interesting list. I kind of feel like calling “Song of the South” one of your favorite films in this day and age is just setting yourself up for cancellation. But then again, he’s dead, so what does he care if he gets cancelled? (And to be frank, the Criterion Collection could probably do a great job of preserving and showing “Song” in a historical and scholarly context.)
Mark Dodson, voice actor. Other credits include a video game inspired by a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Darkwing Duck”, and “Legend of the Superstition Mountains”.
Mr. Abath was one of the two guards on duty at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum early in the morning on March 18, 1990. He was the one who let the two robbers, disguised as police officers, into the museum.
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All together they took some $500 million in art, the equivalent of $1.2 billion today, making it by far the biggest art heist in history.
Suspicion immediately turned to Mr. Abath. City and federal investigators zeroed in on important details, like the coincidence of the thieves arriving so soon after the second guard left to make the rounds. A video camera outside the museum showed Mr. Abath briefly opening a side door not long before the robbery occurred.
Mr. Abath maintained his innocence throughout the rest of his life, and he was never named as an official suspect. He said that he regularly opened the side door to make sure it was locked and that while museum protocol forbade him from letting anyone in after hours, there was no contingency should the visitors be uniformed police officers.
“You know, most of the guards were either older or they were college students,” he told NPR in 2015. “Nobody there was capable of dealing with actual criminals.”
Brian Mulroney, former Canadian PM.
Richard Lewis. Tributes. (The one from Jamie Lee Curtis is particularly nice.) NYT (archived).
Anne Whitfield, actress. Other credits include “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, “Dragnet 1967”, and “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”.
Even better, this is sort of a Texas story.
For decades, countless articles and videos using similar verbiage have boasted of their creators gaining unprecedented access to sumo. What follows is inevitably a mishmash of cliche, misinformation, outdated statistics and the all-too-common confusing of amateur sumo with professional.
The reality is that ōzumo, for all its pageantry and uniqueness, is actually one of the most open and accessible top-level professional sports in the world, particularly for amateur athletes from overseas.
Summary: guy up in Dallas runs a sumo club, club holds first tournament successfully, everyone celebrates and places long distance call. Lots of great stories start out this way.
It happened.
And one thing led to another.
Emboldened by that positive experience, and their growing friendship with Gagamaru, Morrison and Sauer decided to make a sumo-centric visit to Tokyo this month to coincide with the retirement ceremony of another Georgian rikishi — Tochinoshin.
With little more than a “why not” attitude and a handful of social media connections, the Texan managed to have a deeper and more all-encompassing sumo experience over the course of two weeks than most do in a lifetime.
Morrison also took advantage of former Texan rikishi Wakaichiro’s coincidental visit to the capital by tagging along to watch training at Ikazuchi stable. Morrison was delighted when the stablemaster — who had extensive experience in amateur and international sumo — agreed to let him join practice.
“I barely even have time to stretch and, before I know it, my first bout is against Ikazuchido, who I’ve rooted for on TV and I’m like ‘what the hell is happening.’ It was surreal.
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The whole story reminds me of “Genghis Blues“, except with sumo instead of Tuvan throat singing. Brings a smile to my face, it does.
Ole Anderson, one of the Four Horsemen.
That’s the Four Horsemen of professional wrestling.
Through the 1970s and early 1980s, he was a member of the tag team known as the Minnesota Wrecking Crew, which over the years included Gene, Lars and Arn Anderson, who called themselves brothers and were popular around the Midwest. They were part of regional circuits like Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling and Georgia Championship Wrestling that were united under the National Wrestling Alliance, which regularly crowned them tag-team champions.
In the 1980s, Mr. Anderson teamed up with Arn Anderson, Ric Flair and Tully Blanchard to become the Four Horsemen, who went on to dominate the N.W.A. and later World Championship Wrestling, which competed with the W.W.F.
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Brian Stableford, noted author, passed away a few days ago. I don’t have a direct obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick posted a nice tribute to him on his blog.
I know this should be a local story, and for some reason it has become an international one.
But I can’t tell a lie: I get a kick out of this.
Bonus points:
The Oompa Loompa from the knock off Wonka land experience looks like she’s running a literal meth lab and is seriously questioning the life choices up until this point. If you scripted this, I would say it was too on the nose pic.twitter.com/WwkGO8Hjck
— Disappointed Optimist (@disappoptimism) February 27, 2024
I was running pretty much flat out from mid-Friday afternoon until late Sunday night, so this is the first chance I’ve had to post anything. But: the NYT finally ran an obit for Chuck Mawhinney. (Previously.)
After graduating from high school in 1967, Chuck wanted to become a Navy pilot. But a Marine Corps recruiter won him over by promising that he could delay his enlistment by four months, until the end of deer season.
The Marines had not had dedicated snipers since World War II, but by 1967 the corps had changed its mind. Mr. Mawhinney was among the first to complete the new Scout Sniper School at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps installation in Southern California. He graduated at the top of his class.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Golden Richards, former Dallas Cowboy receiver.
José DeLeón, pitcher.
Jackie Loughery, actress (and Jack Webb’s third wife). Other credits include OG “Perry Mason”, “Surfside 6”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.
Charles Dierkop, actor.
Other credits include “Matt Houston”, “Bearcats!” and…two episodes of “Mannix” (“A Penny for the Peep Show”, season 3, episode 6. “Desert Run”, season 7, episode 6).
Eddie Driscoll, actor. IMDB.
Chris Gauthier, actor. Fair number of genre credits, including “Supernatural”, “Watchmen”, and the “Earthsea” mini series.
Kenneth Mitchell, actor. Other credits include “NCIS”, “CSI: Cyber”, and “Detroit 1-8-7”.
It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.
Yes, Miss Moneypenny counts as a Bond girl. Yes, “Never Say Never Again” counts as a Bond movie.
Other credits include “Magnum, P.I.” (original recipe), “The Great Train Robbery”, “God’s Outlaw”, and some “Doctor Who”. And “EastEnders”.