You post the obit watch on your lunch hour. You’re thinking, “Oh, it looks like a slow day. No big news is going to break after lunch.”
Big news breaks after lunch.
Cormac McCarthy obits tomorrow. The NYT‘s current one is a kind of lengthy preliminary one (probably pulled from the files) with the standard “A full obituary will appear shortly.” tag.
Treat Williams. Tributes. NYT (archived). IMDB.
I hear “Prince of the City” is pretty good. Haven’t seen it yet, but just ordered the blu-ray.
Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian prime minister.
This is incredible. Berlusconi possibly the single most Italian man to have ever lived. https://t.co/jZwOSb76zf
— Niall Gooch 👍🇻🇦🏴🚅🏏✒ (@niall_gooch) June 12, 2023
Mike Batayeh, actor and comedian. NYT (archived). Other credits include a show I do not acknowledge the existence of, “The Shield”, and “Life”.
Burning in Hell watch: Ted Kaczynski.
His terrorist strategy, and the ideas that he said undergirded it, enjoyed an afterlife few would have predicted in the 1990s.
The Norwegian news media reported that Anders Beivik, who killed dozens of people at government buildings and at a youth summer camp in 2011, lifted passages from Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto in a manifesto of his own. More curious was the way a variety of law-abiding Americans developed an interest in the same line of thought.
In 2017, the deputy editor of the conservative publication First Things, Elliot Milco, credited Mr. Kaczynski with “astute (even prophetic) insights.” In 2021, during an interview with the businessman and politician Andrew Yang, Tucker Carlson cited Mr. Kaczynski’s thinking in detail without any prompting.
Online, young people with a variety of partisan allegiances, or none at all, have developed an intricate vocabulary of half-ironic Unabomber support. They proclaim themselves “anti-civ” or #tedpilled; they refer to “Uncle Ted.” Videos on TikTok of Unabomber-related songs, voice-overs and dances have acquired millions of views, according to a 2021 article in The Baffler.
Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser, and Gilbert Murray were unavailable for comment.
James G. Watt, former Secretary of the Interior and notorious Beach Boys hater.
As planning for the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall began, Mr. Watt said that pop-music groups retained in recent years had attracted “the wrong element” — presumably young people drinking and taking drugs. The Mall’s most prominent band had been the Beach Boys, popular since the 1960s.
Mr. Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist who did not smoke or drink alcohol, proposed the Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton, whose signature song was “Danke Schoen,” and military bands, saying they would better represent the patriotic, family-oriented themes he preferred.
…
Carroll Cooley, historical and legal footnote, has passed away at 87.
Mr. Cooley was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department. In that capacity, he was the person who took Ernesto Miranda’s original confession.
…
The Miranda case was by far the most significant of Detective Cooley’s law enforcement career. Mr. Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping by a Superior Court jury in June 1963; the conviction was upheld nearly two years later by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that his confession was admissible despite his not having had a lawyer present.
In late 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review four cases, including Mr. Miranda’s, in which indigent men had confessed after being interrogated. The next year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Fifth Amendment required the police to advise suspects that they had the right to remain silent once they were in custody and to have an attorney present during interrogations. The rights, almost from the day of the decision, became known as the Miranda warning.
Mr. Miranda’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, but he was retried on rape and kidnapping charges and found guilty again in 1967. (The confession was not used in that trial.) He was paroled in 1972 and stabbed to death four years later in a barroom fight. After his death, it was reported that he had been trading on his legal celebrity by selling Miranda warning cards for $1.50 each.
…
In 1976, he defended his actions in the Miranda case to The Republic, saying that Mr. Miranda’s confession had been written voluntarily and that Mr. Miranda knew his rights.
“He was not un-knowledgeable about his rights,” he said. “He was an ex-convict and served a year in prison” — for auto theft — “and had been through the routine before.”
Noreen Nash, actress. Other credits include the original “Dragnet” TV series, “77 Sunset Strip”, and ‘Yancy Derringer”.
George Winston, of Windham Hill fame.
…His 1994 record, “Forest,” won a Grammy Award for best new age album — a category that was relatively new at the time — and he was nominated four other times.
Those nominations were evidence of the range of his musical interests. Two — for “Plains” (1999) and “Montana: A Love Story” (2004) — were for best new age album, but he was also nominated for best recording for children for “The Velveteen Rabbit” (1984; Meryl Streep provided the narration) and for best pop instrumental album for “Night Divides the Day: The Music of the Doors” (2002).
Mr. Winston recorded two albums of the music of Vince Guaraldi, the jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated “Peanuts” television specials. In 2012, he released “George Winston: Harmonica Solos,” and in 1983 he created his own label, Dancing Cat Records, to record practitioners of Hawaiian slack-key guitar, a genre he particularly admired.
…
Mr. Winston knew his music wasn’t for everyone, and he was self-deprecating about that.
“One person’s punk rock is another person’s singing ‘Om’ or playing harp,” he told The Santa Cruz Sentinel of California in 1982. “It’s all valid — everybody’s got their own path. I wouldn’t want to sit around and listen to me all day.”
NYT obit for The Iron Sheik (archived).
NYT obit for Barry Newman (archived).
He was better known under his professional wrestling name, The Iron Sheik.
Edited to add: THR.
He was a great admirer of his country’s most famous Olympic wrestler, Gholamreza Takhti. When Takhti was found dead of an apparent suicide in his hotel room in early 1968, theories circulated that he had been murdered, spurring Vaziri to leave the country.
“If Iran is no good for Gholamreza Takhti, the greatest champion we had, Iran is never going to be good for me. So I decided to come to America,” he said.
…
I wasn’t originally planning to link the obits for Andrew Bellucci, NYC pizza guy, because they seemed excessively local.
But the NYT obit (archived) is…interesting. Mr. Bellucci had a colorful history.
Although he had 18 pizzas on the menu, three kinds of dough and any number of toppings, two aspects of his trade preoccupied Mr. Bellucci above all. One was what Mr. Katakis called “a borderline lunacy” about dough. The other was clam pizza.
“Other people put clam pie on the menu but nobody’s that meticulous,” Mr. Katakis said. “He figured out that the clams were going on the pizza cold, so he figured he should sous vide them,” heating them in a hot-water circulator for 45 seconds before baking.
Mr. Bellucci was preparing clam pizzas as a surprise for some guests when he died.
I like seafood, and I’m fond of clams. Clam pizza is a little hard to get in Texas, though: Home Slice Pizza does it, and I’ve had it once, but I haven’t been able to make it back since. Plus nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded. And clam pizza is a hard sell for the rest of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.
Astrud Gilberto, of “The Girl From Ipanema” fame.
Jim Hines. He set a world record by running the 100 meter dash in 9.95 seconds at the 1968 Olympics: that record stood for 15 years.
Roger Craig, noted split-fingered fastball pitcher.
Bobby Bolin, former pitcher for the Giants (also the Brewers and the Red Sox).
Bolin made his MLB debut in 1961 and was on the 1962 pennant-winning Giants, appearing in two games in the World Series against the Yankees, a series San Francisco would lose in seven games.
The sidearmer went a career-best 14-6 in 1965.
The following season he set career-highs with 10 complete games and four shutouts despite a pedestrian 11-10 record.
Mike the Musicologist sent over an obit for Kaija Saariaho, composer. He says some of her late works are appealing: I am unfamiliar with them myself.
George Riddle, actor. Other credits include “Arthur” and “The Trial of Standing Bear”.
Burning in Hell watch: Robert Hanssen, notorious spy.
I usually don’t like to cover politics here, even Texas politics, because it tends to drive me up a tree.
In this case, I haven’t seen anyone else pick up on this, and it’s an interesting story.
The Texas Legislature has eliminated annual safety inspections for cars, starting in 2025.
The Libertarian side of me thinks this is swell: as far as it was concerned, the annual inspection didn’t do much of anything except put money in the pockets of certified state inspection stations for “adjusting your headlights” and “replacing your wiper blades”.
The less Libertarian side of me is skeptical for a few reasons. While I think most people are motivated not to drive with bad tires and brakes, and those kind of things can be picked up when you take your car in for an oil change anyway, there probably are some folks who got some warning out of the annual inspection process. Then again, the people who did drive with bad brakes and bad tires probably would be driving even if they didn’t have an inspection or registration, and these days the odds of getting caught seem to be slim.
If safety is really a concern, the insurance companies can start requiring a “voluntary” inspection: you get a discount if you get your car inspected yearly at an approved facility. Or even better, no inspection, no insurance. Worst case, you go through the assigned risk pool.
Secondly, this doesn’t eliminate the state inspection fee: the state is still going to make you pay $7.50 (or $16.75 if it is a new car) as part of the annual registration.
Also, if your car is registered in one of the areas that requires emissions testing (that includes Travis, Williamson, and Harris counties, among others: full list in the article) you still have to get your car emissions tested before you can register it. (There’s an exception for cars that are 25 or more years old: I managed to get out of emissions testing for a few years before my old Honda blew a head gasket.)
I thought most states still required at least a safety inspection, but I was wrong, according to Wikipedia: “Fifteen states have a periodic (annual or biennial) safety inspection program, while Maryland requires a safety inspection and Alabama requires a VIN inspection on sale or transfer of vehicles which were previously registered in another state.”
Interestingly, Louisiana requires a safety inspection, and “New Orleans requires a “brake tag”. In addition to the state requirements, if the vehicle is registered in New Orleans, the brakes must be tested annually with a short stop test.”
Must be fun to get your car inspected in the Big Easy.
Today is the 49th anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night.
If you happen to live in the Cleveland area, Collision Bend Brewery is offering ten cent beers from 2:00 PM to 2:48 PM Cleveland time, with a maximum of two per customer. So you’ve got about two hours to hie yourself over there.
Sadly, I don’t have any fighting pants. Anyone know where I can get some? 5.11 makes good tough pants, maybe those will work. Or some of those fire hose pants from Duluth Trading Company?
I won’t be able to make it for this year’s celebration, anyway. But the thought of going up to Cleveland, visiting relatives, and being there for next year’s 50th anniversary is tempting…the month of June is going to be jam-packed with activities, however, and I’m not sure if that’s something I can afford yet.
Barry Newman, actor.
Other credits include “City on Fire” (the 1979 TV movie), “Murder, She Wrote”, “Get Smart”, and “Quincy, M.E.” (which is worth calling out: he was actually the star in the weird final episode of the series, “The Cutting Edge”, which was an unsuccessful backdoor pilot).
Michael Norell, actor.
His acting credits in IMDB are limited, though his credits as a writer are more substantial. He did one episode of “Police Story”…
…and 110 episodes of “Emergency”. He was “Captain Stanley”. JEMS.
Cynthia Weil, songwriter. (“You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’”)
Redd Holt, drummer.
Mr. Holt scored his biggest hit as the drummer with the pianist Ramsey Lewis’s trio, whose original lineup also included Eldee Young on bass.
In 1965 — nearly 10 years after the band’s first record — they came out with “The ‘In’ Crowd,” a live album whose title track was a cover of a recently popular song by the R&B singer Dobie Gray.
The Lewis Trio version superseded Mr. Gray’s, reaching the top of the Billboard R&B chart and No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. Their “‘In’ Crowd” won the 1965 Grammy Award for best instrumental jazz performance by a small group or soloist.