Shot: “Restaurant Review: The Peking Duck at Juqi Passes All the Tests“.
Chaser:
Bagatelle (#88)
June 1st, 2023Obit watch: May 31, 2023.
May 31st, 2023John Beasley, actor. Other credits include “The Sum of All Fears”, “The Pretender”, and “To Sir, with Love II”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Claudia Rosett, journalist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Highlights of her journalism career include exposing the Oil-for-Food corruption scandal at the United Nations; covering the Russian invasion of Chechnya; and monitoring Beijing’s abrogation of its one-country, two-systems promise on Hong Kong. Her short book, What to Do About the UN, argues that the international organization founded in 1945 as a vehicle to avert war and promote human freedom and dignity has instead become fraught with bigotry, fraud, abuse, and corruption.
One of her most memorable pieces of reporting took place on June 4, 1989, when she was present in Tiananmen Square as Chinese tanks rolled over unarmed, peaceful student protestors. In an article published in the Wall Street Journal the next day, she wrote, “With this slaughter, China’s communist government has uncloaked itself before the world.” Thirty-four years later, these words still ring true.
NYT obit for Brian Shul (archived).
Obit watch: May 30, 2023.
May 30th, 2023C. Donald Bateman, big damn hero, passed away on Sunday. He was 91.
Most people outside of a small specialized circle have probably never heard of him, but:
…Bateman is credited by industry experts as having saved more lives than anyone in aviation history.
Back in the day, there was a huge problem with airplanes flying into the ground. The industry refers to this as “controlled flight into terrain” (CFIT). Two high profile examples of this were Southern Airways Flight 932 (the Marshall University crash) and TWA Flight 514 (the Mount Weather crash).
Don Bateman developed the Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS) which warns pilots when they’re getting too close to the ground.
Those early systems used a radar altimeter to track how high the plane was above the ground. It helped a lot, but it wasn’t perfect: the GPWS had a “blind spot” looking forward, and could also be fooled if the plane was configured for landing.
So Don Bateman went on to develop the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) which ties into GPS and a terrain database. EGPWS gives even more warning.
There’s a great story about the early development of EGPWS: Mr. Bateman found out that, after the Soviet Union had fallen apart, there was a huge terrain database that the Soviets had built up available for sale on the black market. So he went to his superiors at Honeywell and convinced them to buy the database, and the early EGPWS were built on that.
Today, what the FAA calls “terrain awareness and warning systems” (TAWS) are required on “all U.S. registered turbine-powered airplanes with six or more passenger seats (exclusive of pilot and copilot seating)”.
Bateman assembled a small team to work exclusively on flight safety systems — over the years, typically fewer than 10 people.
Bob Champion, who came to manage the team for Bateman, said “he looked for innovators who could drive his ideas. He liked people who disagreed and argued so we’d have a good debate about how to solve a problem.”
He said Bateman called it a “team of mavericks.”
Bateman’s team devised critical safety additions, including:
- The Runway Awareness and Advisory System, which alerts pilots taxiing on the ground when they are approaching a runway. It also tells pilots coming in to land if they are not aligned with the runway.
- The glide slope alert system, which warns pilots if their approach is excessively low or high.
- The Runway Overrun Awareness and Alerting System, which tells pilots if they’re coming in too long or too hard and in danger of overshooting.
- The Roll Recovery System, which detects an excessive bank angle and tells the pilot whether to roll left or roll right to prevent the plane rolling over.
Texas, our Texas!
May 29th, 2023For this year’s Memorial Day post, I’m going to lead off with a photo. Which is, frankly, not all that great because of the limitations of the situation, but it does serve to illustrate a story.
This is a photo I took when my brother, my nephew, and I went to see the Battleship Texas in dry dock.
If you click to embiggen, you’ll see a green dot. Here’s a cropped version, which might make it easier to see:
The green dot is from a laser pointer belonging to one of the tour guides. It shows where the Texas was patched.
Patched, you say?
Obit watch: May 29, 2023.
May 29th, 2023I think “Route 66” was patient zero for a certain type of show: the mysterious drifter (or drifters: I can think of some shows with a pair, but I can’t think of any with more than two) come to a town, meddle in the affairs of other people solve someone’s problems, and then move on to the next town. (See: “The Fugitive”, “The Incredible Hulk”, “The Master”, etc. I think TV Tropes refers to this as “Walking the Earth“.)
Amazon Prime has four seasons of the show available. I feel like I want to watch it, and I have tried to watch it. But I just can’t get through the first episode.
Other credits include, yes, “The Master”, “SST: Death Flight”, “Movin’ On” (I don’t think that counts as a “Walking the Earth” show, in spite of the TV Tropes entry, but I believe “BJ and the Bear” would), and “McMillan and Wife”.
Obit watch: May 27, 2023.
May 27th, 2023People of a certain age may remember him from the “Daniel Boone” TV show, or as a singer with the Ames Brothers, or for theater work (including “Chief Bromden” in the 1963 Broadway “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”).
People of my age remember him from a single clip from the Johnny Carson show, which I haven’t seen anyone actually reproduce anywhere, so here it is:
Gary Kent, knock-around guy. He was a stunt man (and stunt coordinator), acted some, and even directed a bit. Acting credits include “The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant”, “The New Adam-12”, and “Sex Terrorists on Wheels”.
Marlene Clark. Other credits include “The Rookies”, “McCloud”, and “Mod Squad”.
Obit watch: May 25, 2023.
May 25th, 2023I’m not badmouthing the dead, but I do think there’s something worth pointing out here:
“After suffering a stroke in 2009 because of my poorly controlled hypertension I struggled to get back up on my feet,” she penned. “This is when I first learned that my kidneys didn’t work that well anymore. They had already lost thirty-five percent of their function.”
Turner eventually “developed a fatal dislike” of her prescription pills and even “convinced” herself that they made her feel “worse.”
So without consulting with her doctors, she “replaced” her “conventional medication” with “homeopathic” remedies.
“Indeed, I started feeling better after a while,” the 12-time Grammy winner noted. However, she was in for a rude awakening when she went for her “next routine check-up.”
“Rarely in my life had I been so wrong. I had not known that uncontrolled hypertension would worsen my renal disease and that I would kill my kidneys by giving up on controlling my blood pressure,” she confessed.
Homeopathic “remedies”.
“Are the “dangers of mass popular delusion” not “so menacing”?“
Nicholas Gray, founder of Gray’s Papaya.
For the record: NYT obit for Rolf Harris.
Yes, I know…
May 24th, 2023Tina Turner tomorrow, after the dust has had a chance to settle.
Obit watch: May 24, 2023.
May 24th, 2023Brian Shul, SR-71 pilot and author, passed away over the weekend.
I’ve had this obit on hold for a few days because I couldn’t find a good source to link to. FotB RoadRich forwarded the Flying obit, so much credit to him.
Bill Lee, musician.
He also wrote film scores for the first four feature films directed by Spike Lee, his son.
Newby was a member of John Lennon’s first band The Quarrymen, and news of his death was announced by The Cavern Club Liverpool — a music venue where The Beatles performed before finding global stardom.
“It’s with great sadness to hear about the passing of Chas Newby,” the venue wrote in a Facebook post. “Chas stepped in for The Beatles for a few dates when Stuart Sutcliffe stayed in Hamburg and latterly he played for The Quarrymen.”
Gerald Castillo, actor. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects”, the 1990 “Dragnet”, and the 1990-1991 “The New Adam-12”.
Kenneth Anger, the Hollywood Babylon guy. He also did some “experimental” films. (Edited to add: NYT obit archived.)
I’ve heard more than once that HB is notoriously inaccurate. I know, I know, but: Wikipedia.
And here’s a direct link to the “You Must Remember This” episodes (which I have not listened to yet, not being a regular listener of YMRT).
Obit watch: May 23, 2023.
May 23rd, 2023Lawrence emailed an obit for C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel for George Bush and long-time advisor to other presidents. NYT (archived).
Rick Wolff. Interesting guy. He was a radio host on WFAN. Before that, he was the “psychological coach” for the Cleveland Indians: one of the first sports psychologists hired by a major league team.
Even though sports psychology was rare in baseball, Mr. Wolff said on his show last year, Cleveland’s players “took the mental side of the game seriously” and within a few years were a “powerhouse in the American League.”
The idea caught on, he added, and “these days it’s the rare, rare sports team or professional or college organization that doesn’t have at least one sports psychologist on their staff.”
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Rick Hoyt, marathon runner with his father Dick Hoyt. I wrote about the Hoyts when Dick Hoyt passed away in 2021, so I’ll point you back to that obit and to the Rick Reilly essay.
The pair competed nearly every year in the Boston Marathon from 1980 through 2014. In 2013, Dick and Rick Hoyt were honored with a bronze statue near the race’s starting line.
They completed more than 1,100 races together, including marathons, triathlons and duathlons, a combination of biking and running.
Ray Stevenson, actor. IMDB.
“Kill the Irishman” is an interesting movie that I have a sentimental fondness for (because Cleveland) and he was good as Danny Greene. But the movie could have been a lot better than it actually was.
Rolf Harris, “Australian-born, UK-resident presenter, actor and convicted sex offender” (stealing Lawrence‘s blurb). IMDB.
Helmut Berger, actor noted for his work with Luchino Visconti. IMDB. (He was also in “Victory at Entebbe” and “The Godfather Part III”.)
Obit watch: May 20, 2023.
May 20th, 2023Playing for the Browns from 1957 to 1965 after earning all-American honors at Syracuse University in football and lacrosse, Brown helped take Cleveland to the 1964 National Football League championship.
In any game, he dragged defenders when he wasn’t running over them or flattening them with a stiff arm. He eluded them with his footwork when he wasn’t sweeping around ends and outrunning them. He never missed a game, piercing defensive lines in 118 consecutive regular-season games, though he played one year with a broken toe and another with a sprained wrist.
“All you can do is grab, hold, hang on and wait for help,” Sam Huff, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker for the Giants and the Washington team now known as the Commanders, once told Time magazine.
Brown was voted football’s greatest player of the 20th century by a six-member panel of experts assembled by The Associated Press in 1999. A panel of 85 experts selected by NFL Films in 2010 placed him No. 2 all time behind the wide receiver Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971, the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1984 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.
He retired in 1966…
…
Handsome with a magnificent physique — he was a chiseled 6 feet 2 inches and 230 pounds — Brown appeared in many movies and was sometimes cited as a Black Superman for his cinematic adventures.
“Although the range of emotion Brown displayed onscreen was no wider than a mail slot, he never embarrassed himself, never played to a demeaning stereotype of the comic patsy,” James Wolcott wrote in The New York Review of Books in his review of Dave Zirin’s 2018 biography, “Jim Brown: Last Man Standing.” He called Brown “a rugged chassis for a more self-assertive figure, the Black uberman.”
One of Brown’s best-remembered roles was in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he played one of 12 convicts assembled by the Army for a near-suicide mission to kill high-ranking German officers at a French chateau in advance of the D-Day invasion of Normandy. He next played a Marine captain in the Cold War thriller “Ice Station Zebra” (1968).
IMDB. He was also a prominent civil rights activist.
Martin Amis, British novelist.
…
Mr. Amis’s misanthropic wit made his voice at times reminiscent of that of his father, Kingsley Amis. Kingsley, who died in 1995, was one of the British working- and middle-class novelists of the 1950s known as the Angry Young Men and became famous with the success of his comic masterpiece “Lucky Jim” (1954).
Father and son were close, but they disagreed about much. Kingsley Amis drifted to the right with the rise of Margaret Thatcher; he once publicly referred to his son’s left-leaning political opinions as “howling nonsense.”
…
Mr. Amis’s talent was undeniable: He was the most dazzling stylist in postwar British fiction. So were his swagger and Byronic good looks. He had well-chronicled involvements with some of the most watched young women of his era. He wore, according to media reports, velvet jackets, Cuban-heel boots, bespoke shirts. He stared balefully into paparazzi lenses.
His raucous lunches with friends and fellow writers like Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Clive James, James Fenton and Mr. Hitchens were written up in the press and made other writers feel that they were on the outside looking in. He seemed to be having more fun than other people. His detractors considered him less a bad boy than a spoiled brat.
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Headline of the day.
May 19th, 2023In other news, “Violent Taco Rampage” is the name of my new Smiths cover band.
