Bagatelle (#122).

November 7th, 2024

A few food related things Mike the Musicologist and I saw while running around:

The New Braunfels Rotary Club has gone up to $16! for the sausage and potato pancakes plate. Thanks, Joe Biden!

(Seriously, I think it was $12 the last time I went to Wurstfest.)

Because it just isn’t charcuterie unless it is on a stick. Also, that raclette sounds really good.

(We’ve driven past that cheese shop when we’ve been in New Braunfels, but I’ve never been in. May have to fix that.)

They’re not just pork rinds. They’re “small batch” pork rinds. I don’t think they are “artisanal”, however.

Sorry, not sorry.

November 7th, 2024

Part of me thinks I should apologize for not posting yesterday. The other part of me doesn’t.

I got about 3.5 hours of sleep Tuesday night, though I did nap some on Lawrence’s dog couch. So I was pretty worn out yesterday and still had to put in a full day at work. Plus, as I’ve said before, I am not a politics or geo-politics person. I have some things I could say about politics and gun politics, like what I’m hoping for out of the new boss (same as the old boss) but I’d just be stirring the metaphorical pot with a metaphorical stick.

There are plenty of other people who are smarter about politics than I am. I’d suggest Lawrence and Borepatch to start with. I’d also recommend the folks on Lawrence’s sidebar.

At least I can stop muting political ads, and continue muting Medicare supplement ads and lawyer ads.

In other news, I wanted to bookmark this article from American Handgunner, “Sixguns To The Rescue: The M1917 In World War One” about the M1917 revolvers. (Previously on WCD.)

From the obit front: Geoff Capes. I’d never heard of him, but he was hugely popular in the United Kingdom. He was a multiple time winner of the World’s Strongest Man competition, a six-time winner of the Highland Games, and won the “U.K. Truck-Pulling Championship” in 1986.

At 6-foot-6 and 365 pounds, Mr. Capes was a crushing Adonis whose daily diet consisted of seven pints of milk, two loaves of bread, a dozen eggs, two steaks, a jar of baked beans, two tins of sardines, a pound of butter and a leg of lamb.
His gargantuan caloric intake powered his extraordinary feats in strongman competitions: pulling 12-ton trucks uphill, flipping cars, tearing London phone books in half and tossing five-pound bricks as if they were Kleenex boxes. He could run 200 meters — nearly the length of two American football fields — in under 25 seconds.

His physical prowess made him a favorite of Queen Elizabeth II, who howled in laughter after her glove stuck to his sweaty, sticky hands when she congratulated him on winning the Braemar Games, another Scottish skills competition, in 1982. Prince Charles and Princess Diana stood nearby having a giggle.

He was also a world-class breeder of budgies.

He competed in budgerigar shows throughout Europe, winning a world championship in 1995. He was named president of the Budgerigar Society in 2008 and frequently judged competitions.
“There’s something about their color and beauty that fascinates me,” Mr. Capes told The Sunday People. “They bring out my gentler side.”

This is one that I’ve been a little behind on: Richard A. Cash, big damn hero.

One of the things that people don’t understand until they’ve read at least a little bit about medicine is: dehydration will kill you. And there are lots of diseases, such as cholera and dysentery, that trigger fatal dehydration.

Patients could go “from a grape to a raisin” within hours, Dr. Cash often said.

Dr. Cash and Dr. David Nalin were working in Pakistan in 1967, and together developed an experimental oral rehydration therapy. It worked exceptionally well in trials.

Their approach was put to the test in 1971, when Bangladesh’s war of independence drove tens of thousands of refugees into camps across the border in India. Cholera and other diseases soon spread rapidly.
An Indian pediatrician helping with the response, Dilip Mahalanabis, made oral rehydration a cornerstone of his strategy, with astounding success — proof for all the world that a simple solution could be brought to bear against one of the world’s greatest killers.

The World Health Organization estimates that oral hydration therapy has saved more than 50 million lives, a majority of them children. In 1978, the British medical journal The Lancet called their innovation “potentially the most important medical advance this century.”

Please to remember…

November 5th, 2024

Happy Guy Fawkes Day to all my peeps everywhere!

(Still busy as all get out running around with Mike the Musicologist. I did accomplish something yesterday, though: I managed to get one of the Lipsey’s/S&W Ultimate Carry guns. Mine is a 442 in .38 Special: Cabela’s, it turns out, had a few and I think I got the last non-display one. They had no .32 Magnums. I hope to be able to post at least a brief range report, maybe even with chronograph data, once my eye doctor clears me to shoot.)

Obit watch; November 4, 2024.

November 4th, 2024

Quincy Jones. NYT.

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.

Firings watch.

November 4th, 2024

I 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, 2024

Shot:

Chaser:

“The thing I hate most in life,” Ballmer once said, “is arenas where you have to wait in line for the bathroom. I’ve become a real obsessive about toilets. Toilets, toilets, toilets.”

Obit watch: October 30, 2024.

October 30th, 2024

Teri Garr. Tributes. NYT.

While making many of these films, she noticed troubling physical symptoms. She didn’t suspect their cause, but she remembered running in New York City in the late 1990s. “When I was jogging, I would get this horrible pain in my arm like a knife stabbing,” she told CNN in 2008. “And I thought, well, I’m in Central Park — well, maybe it is a knife stabbing.”

For years, she was a spokeswoman for MS research and support, continuing to make appearances in her wheelchair. “I really do count my blessings,” she wrote in a memoir, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood” (2005), written with Henriette Mantel. “At least I used to. Now I get so tired I have a woman come once a week and count them for me.”

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, 2024

No, 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, 2024

David 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.

Before embarking on her Star Trek voyage, the Indiana native wrote and produced episodes of such popular network crime fare as Quincy, M.E., Magnum, P.I., Jake and the Fatman and In the Heat of the Night. She was adept at writing about “character, of people and relationships and feelings,” she once noted.

Along the way, Taylor also wrote ABC Afterschool Specials, episodes of Little House on the Prairie, The Incredible Hulk, Blue Thunder and Father Dowling Mysteries and the 1987 CBS telefilm A Place to Call Home, starring Linda Lavin.

Fried Rice.

October 27th, 2024

Mike 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, 2024

Just 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Norts spews.

October 25th, 2024

I 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.

Police said Reynolds and two others had reported they were at Shotgun Willie’s, a strip club in Glendale, Colorado, and left at 2:45 a.m. Friday morning. Reynolds and one of the men left the club in an SUV and later told police they were followed by multiple vehicles and shots were fired.

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).

Reynolds and the other man got out of the SUV they were in when it would no longer drive on Interstate 25, the highway that bisects Denver north to south. The SUV was later found by police with multiple bullet holes in it.

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.)