I did not know there was a Yogi Berra stamp.
I guess these were issued in 2021, which would explain why I can’t find first day covers on the USPS web site. But my local post office still had sheets of them.
Also, postage is 66 cents now. Good thing the Yogi stamps are forever stamps. After all, as someone once said, “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”
Richard Barancik has passed away at 98.
Mr. Barancik was the last surviving member of this group.
Mr. Barancik (pronounced ba-RAN-sick) was one of four members of what was formally called the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section to receive the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015 in Washington for their “heroic role in the preservation, protection, restitution of monuments, works of art and artifacts of cultural importance.”
On the day of the ceremony, Mr. Barancik told The Los Angeles Times: “The Americans cared about the cultural traditions of Europe. We did everything we could to salvage what the Nazis had done. It’s the best we could do.”
At first, the murder of Mr. Reynolds’s daughter, Kimber, seemed like just one more statistic. An 18-year-old college student home in Fresno on summer break, she was attacked one night in June 1992 by two men on motorcycles who tried to grab her purse.
When she resisted, one of the men, Joseph Michael Davis, shot her in the head, in front of dozens of witnesses. She was rushed to a hospital and died 26 hours later.
One of the murderers was killed in a shootout with police.
His efforts stalled out at first. Then Polly Klass was murdered.
Almost overnight, public outrage over Polly’s murder turned into support for Mr. Reynolds’s campaign. Calls came in to his Fresno headquarters in such volume that they overloaded the city’s 1-800 system. Within weeks, he had the signatures he needed.
The bill also found a new life in the Legislature, as state and national politicians, facing election in the fall of 1994, raced to appear tough on crime. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, and her Republican opponent that year, Representative Michael Huffington, both endorsed the bill.
This time it sailed through both chambers of the Legislature, and Governor Wilson signed it into law in March. That fall, the accompanying ballot initiative passed with overwhelming support. In the years that followed, two dozen states, inspired by California, enacted their own three-strikes laws.
Tiny violin watch:
The law had, and continues to have, its detractors. Critics claimed it would overcrowd the prisons, drive up the cost of incarceration and clog the courts, as criminals facing life in prison would be less likely to reach a plea agreement.
It was also derided as unfair: Even a felony as minor as stealing a slice of pizza could result in a 25-year sentence, a situation that befell one man, Jerry Dewayne Williams. Though a judge later reduced Mr. Williams’s sentence, critics used his case as an example of the law’s unfairness.
More about Jerry DeWayne Williams.
Finally. The position of the sun, the condition of the back porch, and all the other things going on in my life lined up, and I can bring you the senses shattering part two of “Day of the .45”.
The same day I picked up my CMP 1911, I also took a second gun off layaway. It was also chambered in .45 ACP, and also has a military background. It had been sitting in layaway purgatory for a few months, and I didn’t take out before then because holidays.
But once the holidays passed, I was free to buy things, and had the last tranche of funds available to take it home. After the jump, more history. And some pictures…
Jim Scoutten, noted shooting sports commentator. Thanks to Pigpen51 for tipping me off on this one, but it took me some time to find something I could link.
Tony Bennett. THR. Well covered pretty much everywhere, so not a lot to say.
Carlin Glynn, actress. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Three Days of the Condor”, “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, and “Resurrection” (an interesting sounding movie I had not heard of until recently: parts of it were filmed in the area around Cattleman’s Steakhouse in Fabens).
Dick Biondi, noted Chicago DJ. I never listened to Chicago radio, but the name does ring a bell with me.
Kevin Mitnick, noted computer cracker/social engineer/security consultant. WP (archived). The NYT has one of their preliminary obits up, with a promise of a longer obit later. I’ll add that here when it is published.
Edited to add: NYT obit (archived) here.
…
James Reston Jr., historian, and author who was involved in the Frost/Nixon interviews.
Mr. Reston drafted a 96-page brief — an “interrogation strategy memo,” he called it — to gird Mr. Frost for nearly 29 hours of interviews that would be condensed into four 90-minute television programs.
“The resulting Frost-Nixon interviews — one in particular — indeed proved historic,” Mr. Reston wrote. “On May 4, 1977, 45 million Americans watched Frost elicit a sorrowful admission from Nixon about his part in the scandal: ‘I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden with me the rest of my life.’”
“In the broadcast,” Mr. Reston continued, “the interviewer’s victory seemed quick, and Nixon’s admission seemed to come seamlessly. In reality, it was painfully extracted from a slow, grinding process over two days.”
…
Ed Bressoud, baseball player. He played for both the New York Giants and the New York Mets. The only other person to do this was Willie Mays.
Nick Benedict, actor. Other credits include the original “Mission: Impossible”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, and the good “Hawaii 5-0”.
…so why not watch something vintage?
Someone on Hacker News posted this, and I thought I’d bookmark it here for the benefit of my readers:
The UCLA Library Film and Television Archive collection of the U.S. Steel Hour.
You can watch “select episodes” online. Why would you want to? Well, those select episodes include:
It isn’t like I don’t already have enough stuff to watch: I should be able to survive the end of the entertainment industry with ease. But this seems like the kind of thing some folks might enjoy.
Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher and author.
Professor Frankfurt’s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will — people’s motivating wants and desires — at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life’s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.
Despite the ambition and inventiveness of this project — the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as “powerful and exciting philosophy” of great “depth and fecundity” — Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.
The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.
Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”
That paper was republished as a book in 2005, On Bullshit (affiliate link), which became a best-seller. He also wrote On Truth (affiliate link) which seems to have been less successful.
For the record, and because Lawrence sent over an obit: Jane Birkin.
Over the weekend, my mother asked me: “How do you go from being a promising young journalist to being a swami?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but here’s the obit for Sally Kempton.
Robert Lieberman, director. Other credits include quite a few genre TV series, “Christmas in Tahoe”, “All I Want for Christmas”, and “Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy”.
Jim Foster out as baseball coach at Northwestern.
…
Northwestern had several coaches depart the program in February, and the team struggled to a 10-40 record. After the season, 16 players reportedly entered the transfer portal.
Radio station 670 The Score in Chicago reported that Foster discouraged players from seeking medical attention for injuries and that players hid their injuries from him. The station also reported that Northwestern coaches and other staff members attempted to meet with Gragg but were denied an opportunity.
This seems like fallout from a story I missed covering earlier this week: football coach Pat Fitzgerald got canned on Monday, for pretty much the same reason.
The firing of Fitzgerald, 48, comes after the school announced Friday that he’d be suspended without pay for two weeks this summer following the conclusion of a university-commissioned investigation into allegations made by a former Northwestern football player. The school said the investigation, which was initiated in January and conducted by an outside law firm, did not find “sufficient” evidence that the coaching staff knew about ongoing hazing — though there were “significant opportunities” to find out about it.
The school then reversed course Saturday night after The Daily Northwestern published a story detailing allegations from the former player, who described specific instances of hazing and sexual abuse. That led Schill to write an open letter to the university community in which he said that he “may have erred in weighing the appropriate sanction” for Fitzgerald and acknowledged focusing “too much on what the report concluded (Fitzgerald) didn’t know and not enough on what he should have known.”
Don’t have much to say, but didn’t want to let the holiday pass without notice.
If you live in Austin, the French Legation is having their celebration tomorrow.
Kenneth Eberhart. He was one of my uncles on my mother’s side of the family, and passed away over the weekend. I’ve been waiting until I had something I could link to.
…he was twice expelled from the party he had supported from age 18, when the Communists seized power in 1948.
His first expulsion, for what he called a trivial remark, was imposed in 1950 and inspired the central plot of “The Joke.” He was nevertheless allowed to continue his studies; he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 1952 and was then appointed to the faculty there as an instructor in world literature, counting among his students the film director Milos Forman.
Mr. Kundera was reinstated to the party in 1956 but kicked out again, in 1970, for advocating reform. This time it was forever, effectively erasing him as a person. He was driven from his job and, as he said, “No one had the right to offer me another.”
Jimmy Weldon, voice actor and ventriloquist. He also did some TV work.
Andrea Evans, soap star. IMDB.
Mikala Jones, surfer.
Jones had been staying at the Awera Resort with his family, when around 9:15 a.m., he likely impaled his left groin on his surfboard fin, suffering a 4-inch-long gash, according to the surfing website Surfline, citing official reports.
While the exact circumstances of Jones’ death remained unclear, those close to Jones wrote on social media that he died after slashing his femoral artery, leading to massive blood loss.
Remember: Stop The Bleed isn’t just for shootings.
Lawrence emailed obits for Manny Coto, producer, and Betta St. John, actress.
I don’t think this quite qualifies for the “Burning In Hell Watch”, but it does belong at the bottom: James W. Lewis, who was suspected, but never actually charged, in the Chicago Tylenol poisonings.
Mr. Lewis spent more than four decades under scrutiny in connection with the notorious unsolved poisonings, in which someone laced Extra-Strength Tylenol with deadly potassium cyanide, killing seven people in the Chicago area in September and October 1982.
Mr. Lewis was never charged in the murders, and he denied any involvement in them. But in October 1982, he sent a letter to Johnson & Johnson, the parent company of MacNeil Consumer Products, the manufacturer of Tylenol, saying he would “stop the killing” if he were paid $1 million. He was convicted of extortion in 1983 and spent 12 years in federal prison.