Those Sox.

August 8th, 2024

This is not going to become the “all White Sox, all the time” blog.

But this is sportsfirings.com, so I do have to report that the White Sox fired manager Pedro Grifol. Chicago Tribune. ESPN.

The White Sox also fired bench coach Charlie Montoyo, third base coach Eddie Rodriguez and assistant hitting coach Mike Tosar.

Mr. Grifol was 89-190 over less than two seasons. The Sox were 61-101 last year. Currently, they are 28-89, for a .239 winning percentage. That projects out to 123 losses this season if trends continue. Looking at things another way, in order to lose only 119 games (and be better than the 1962 Mets) they will have to go 15-30 over the rest of the season, for a .333 winning percentage in the remaining games.

“Worst MLB record ever? White Sox on pace for most losses” from ESPN.

Probability of a franchise-record 107 or more losses: 99.9%.
Probability of a modern era record of 121 or more losses: 41.9%

Posted in Firings, Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

That time of the year.

August 7th, 2024

Time for “on a stick”, that is.

On Wednesday, the State Fair of Texas shared the judges’ top 10 picks for the 20th annual Big Tex Choice Awards.

I feel like nine out of the ten are items I could actually go for. Only the “Texas Sugar Rush Pickles” (“The sliced pickles taste like cotton candy and are covered in Froot Loops, Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch. The concotion, served in a cup, includes vanilla ice cream, cotton candy, cotton candy sugar crystals, strawberry syrup and powdered sugar for a colorful mix of flavors.“) really bother me.

Money quote:

“It’s on a stick! What’s more fair food than that?”

Posted in Food, On a stick | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 7, 2024.

August 7th, 2024

Charles Cyphers, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music The Untold Stories”, “Renegade”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Jake and the Fatman”.

Duane Thomas, one of the great Dallas Cowboys. ESPN.

Thomas spent the 1971 season without speaking with reporters and apparently his teammates.
It didn’t stop Thomas from performing on the field. He became the first player to score a touchdown in Texas Stadium in 1971. When that season ended, Thomas rushed 175 times for 793 yards and a NFL-leading 11 touchdowns.

Patti Yasutake, actress. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy, M.E.” of the ’90s except it sucked), “Murder One” (curiously, Charles Cyphers was also in “Murder One”), “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot”, and “T.J. Hooker”.

Joss Naylor, English sportsman. He specialized in “fell running”: basically, running up and down mountains for days at a time.

His feats running the fells — the term in northern England for hills and mountains — defied common sense and earned him multiple nicknames, including “Iron Man” and “King of the Fells.”
In 1971, Mr. Naylor became the sixth person to conquer the Bob Graham Round — a 24-hour challenge to finish a 66-mile trek over 42 peaks in Cumbria’s Lake District. He overachieved, topping 61 peaks in 23 hours 37 minutes.
The next year, he crossed 63 peaks in the challenge, followed by 72 in 1975 — both times in under 24 hours.
Still running at age 50 in 1986, he completed the Wainwright Round, a series of 214 summits, in just over seven days, setting a record that stood until 2014. (He would have finished faster had he not stopped to save a lamb stuck in mud.)

…

In competitions that sometimes lasted a week, he survived on scone-like cakes and black currant juice with a dash of salt and cod liver oil that he swilled straight from the bottle — “like whiskey,” he once said.

…

In 1971, after the Bob Graham Round, he took on the National Three Peaks Challenge, which involved racing up the highest peaks in England, Scotland and Wales in 24 hours, including driving time between the mountains. He finished in just under 12 hours. Nobody has beaten that time.

Bucca di Bankrupt. (Headline hatip to Mike the Musicologist.)

Posted in Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

The dead cat bounces.

August 7th, 2024

White Sox 5, !Oakland A’s 1. The streak is busted.

However, there are 46 games left in the season. There’s enough room to start a new record-breaking streak.

Currently, the Sox are 28-88, for a .241 winning percentage. Right now, that projects out to about 123 losses.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Quick random book post.

August 6th, 2024

I was busy all this past weekend, and will be busy all of this coming weekend. I’m hoping to get a gun book post up sometime between Wednesday and Friday, but I’m not sure if that’s going to work out. I did want to get this post up today, though, for obvious reasons.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Exhibition Guide. No author and no publishing information given. I think this is about 68 pages.

There are two sections to this, which are actually printed reversed (as you might gather from the index: apologies for the lousy picture, but I couldn’t get this to sit flat easily). One covers “The Reality of the Atomic Bombing” and “Damage From Radiation” along with introductory material (“Hiroshima Before the Bombing”, “The Atomic Bombing”, “A Lost Way of Life”). The other covers “The Dangers of Nuclear Weapons” and “Hiroshima History”.

This was a gift from my beloved and indulgent sister, who was able to tour Japan recently and brought this back for me.

Posted in Books, History | 3 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#124 in a series)

August 6th, 2024

I think this may be marginal, since the person in question is not an elected official. But they were still a high-ranking official in a position of trust locally.

The chief financial officer for the Austin Independent School District was arrested yesterday.

Technically, he’s the former CFO: according to the article, he submitted his resignation July 23rd, it was scheduled to be effective August 16th, and he was placed on leave immediately after his arrest.

He’s charged with insurance fraud, though the reports say the case against him has nothing to do with AISD.

In a statement, Ramos told KXAN, “We have a judicial process. I ask that everyone let the process run its course before rushing to judgment.”

…

According to the district’s website, Ramos oversaw Austin ISD finances, including the budget, purchasing, state and federal grants, and the Historically Utilized Business program. His district biography stated he worked in school finance for 27 years, including as chief of finance and operations in Pflugerville ISD and deputy superintendent of finance and operations in Hutto ISD.

Posted in Austin, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Loser update: August 6, 2024.

August 6th, 2024

The Chicago White Sox lost to the Soon To Be Oakland No Longer But Nobody Knows Where They Will End Up A’s last night, 5-1.

This is the 21st consecutive loss for the White Sox. That ties the American League record for most consecutive losses (with the 1988 Baltimore Orioles). The National League record in the “modern” (post-1900) era is 23, held by the 1961 Philadelphia Phillies.

The overall record is 26 straight losses, surprisingly held not by the Cleveland Spiders, but by the 1889 Louisville Colonels.

The White Sox are currently 27-88, for a .235 winning percentage. By my math (and ESPN’s agrees with me) that’s a projected 124 losses, “which would be the most losses since the 1899 Cleveland Spiders of the National League went 20-134.” For comparison purposes, the 1962 New York Mets, who hold the modern era record in Wikipedia, went 40-120. So I’ve got high hopes for the White Sox.

They play the A’s again tonight. The A’s are the favorite, but ESPN has it about 60-40. So maybe the Sox might get the dead cat bounce and pull one out? Even if they do, there’s probably still enough margin in there to keep them in contention for the worst MLB team of the modern era.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 2, 2024.

August 2nd, 2024

Major General Joe Engle (USAF – ret.), astronaut. He passed away on July 10th, but the obituary didn’t run until yesterday (and if it was reported elsewhere previously, I missed it). He was 91.

Mr. Engle was the last surviving X-15 pilot.

He flew 16 X-15 missions.

He earned his astronaut wings on June 29, 1965, when he took the X-15 to an altitude of 280,600 feet, or 53 miles, at 3,431 m.p.h.

He was selected for Apollo, and scheduled to fly on Apollo 17. But he was replaced on that mission by Harrison Schmitt, and moved to Apollo 18. Apollo 18, of course, was cancelled.

In 1981, Mr. Engle, by then an Air Force colonel, went back to space as the commander of the second flight of the shuttle Columbia with the pilot Richard Truly. They demonstrated that the Columbia could be reused, but they had to return three days early because of a fuel cell failure. (Mr. Truly died in February.)
Four years later, Mr. Engle was the commander of the shuttle Discovery, which deployed three communications satellites and fixed an existing one.
He retired from the Air Force in 1986 and was promoted to major general, having flown more than 180 types of aircraft and logged more than 14,000 flight hours.

Quote of the day:

“If you lie down and let someone put a water-soaked bale of hay on your head and try to lift it,” he said, “that’s the feeling you have when gravity is pulling.”

NASA tribute page.

Quote of the day 2:

“I never met an airplane I didn’t like. Some of them are less relaxing and less enjoyable and less fun to fly, and some of them are a lot more work to fly than others, but they’ve all got their own characteristics, they’ve all got their own personality, and I really, really enjoy any new airplane, any airplane.”

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | 2 Comments »

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#123 in a series)

August 2nd, 2024

Misty Roberts, the mayor of DeRidder, Louisiana, resigned her position on July 27th.

She was arrested yesterday.

Surprisngly, the charges against her are not the usual Louisiana politician charges: bribery or some other form of corruption.

Ms. Roberts is accused of raping a minor.

Louisiana State Police Special Victims Unit says it conducted interviews with two juveniles, one of which was the victim, both of whom told detectives that Roberts had sexual intercourse with the victim while Roberts was mayor.

…

Adam Johnson, Roberts’ attorney, released the following statement:

“It is my honor to represent Misty Roberts. My client learned late last night of a warrant, despite not being contacted to be interviewed prior to investigators obtaining the warrant. My client maintains her innocence and, as it stands, she is in fact innocent. She has not been charged with a crime and/or convicted of any crime. And we trust the public will respect her constitutional presumption of innocence which is fundamental to our system of justice. Misty and her family are very grateful for the support they have received from their friends and neighbors and we look forward to putting this unfortunate situation behind them.”

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 1, 2024.

August 1st, 2024

Greenspoint Mall in Houston.

At one point, it was the largest mall in Houston until the Galleria mall surpassed it with multiple expansions in the late 1980s and early 2000s.

That was the mall for my family for a long time. We saw “Star Wars” at the theater there, and I spent a lot of time as a teen in that mall. But Willowbrook Mall opened up closer to our house, and that became the mall of choice (unless there was some compelling reason to go to Greenspoint).

After we all moved away, the mall and the area around it went into decline. Crime got so bad, the mall was nicknamed “Gunspoint Mall” by locals.

Part of the area’s expansive campus will be transformed into a new apartment complex called Summit at Renaissance Park, developed by the Zieben Group. It will replace a vacant Sears Auto Center.

I’m sorry. Did someone say “Sears Auto Center”?

(I thought about putting a language warning on this, but: it’s Ron White. If you need a language warning on Ron White, well, welcome to our universe, I hope you enjoy your stay here.)

(And both Lawrence and I would be firmly in the “fark Sears Auto Center” camp, if Sears Auto Center still existed.)

I haven’t watched all of this yet, but here’s a “Dead Malls” YouTube video on Greenspoint:

This one’s for Mike the Musicologist: Richard Crawford.

“He was a pioneer who shaped the scope of American music research,” Mark Clague, a musicologist and professor at Michigan who studied with Mr. Crawford, said in an interview. “It wasn’t about celebrating an unchanging canon, but about opening up the magic of musical experience.”
While studying at Michigan in the early 1960s, Mr. Crawford began examining a trove of papers that had been acquired by the school’s library concerning the 18th-century musician Andrew Law, who taught singing and compiled hymnals in Connecticut. The study of American music was a marginal subfield at the time; most scholars considered music history to be about the European classics. (The “American” part of the American Musicological Society, founded in 1934, referred to the nationality of its members, not their subject of inquiry.)
Whereas Mr. Crawford’s adviser, H. Wiley Hitchcock — also a major force in American music studies — had traveled to Europe for his doctoral research on Baroque opera, Mr. Crawford preferred not to uproot his young family.
So despite the potential career risk, he wrote his dissertation — and then a 1968 book — on Law, becoming one of the first scholars to dedicate his life’s work to music of the United States.

…

“Americanists set out, by turning our full attention to music in our own backyard, to prove the musicological worth of American studies,” he wrote in the journal American Music in 2005. The value was not in discovering an American Bach or expanding the classical canon, but instead shifting focus, as he once described it, “from Music with a capital M to music-making.” For Mr. Crawford, musical history was about process, not just product; performance, not just composition.
“They pointed not to beauty, not to excellence, not to the music that had survived, but to all the music whose existence in America could be documented,” he wrote of his generation of Americanists. “Only by reconstructing that totality could the life — the beating heart, we might say — of a forgotten or moribund tradition be glimpsed and a true image of historical ‘shape’ imagined.”
Thus, his magnum opus, the 2001 book “America’s Musical Life: A History,” presented not a parade of major composers and their masterworks but instead a rich musical tapestry, beginning with Native American songs and colonial psalms and continuing through African-American spirituals, Civil War anthems, Tin Pan Alley and Philip Glass. With clear, matter-of-fact prose, Mr. Crawford placed economic and artistic developments in popular, folk and classical music side by side.

Posted in History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 30, 2024.

July 30th, 2024

15 years ago today, I posted my first obit, for the late legendary Reverend Ike.

Just sayin’. “15 years looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired.” I cannot tell a lie: that still makes me laugh my spleen out of my body. (As you know, Bob, the spleen is the most amusing body part, though not the most humerus.)

Francine Pascal, author. She did some screenwriting for soaps, but is best known as the creator of the “Sweet Valley High” book series and the spinoffs of that.

Ms. Pascal wrote the first 12 books in the series, then worked with a team of writers to keep a steady, rapid publication pace, often a book a month. She would draft a detailed outline, then hand it to a writer to flesh out while relying on what Ms. Pascal called her “bible” — a compendium of descriptions of the personalities, settings and dense web of relationships that defined life in Sweet Valley.

Edna O’Brien, author.

Roland Dumas, French foreign minister under François Mitterrand. This is the most French obit I’ve read recently.

A longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, Mr. Dumas was one of the most high-profile officials in France for two decades. His career stretched from the French Resistance to the summit of power, taking in epoch-making treaties, secretive negotiations with world leaders, numerous extramarital affairs, expensive art — works by Picasso, Braque and Chagall hung in his sumptuous apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris — and a notorious pair of $2,700 made-to-measure Berluti shoes that featured in a 2001 corruption trial.
Mr. Dumas avoided jail, but his conviction, which was eventually overturned, ended his career. He had already been forced to resign from the presidency of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest appeals body. Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model who had given him the shoes while they were having an affair, was not so lucky: She published a memoir called “The Whore of the Republic” (“La Putain de la République,” 1998) and spent five months in prison.

…

Mr. Mitterrand said of him, “I have two lawyers: Badinter for the law,” referring to Robert Badinter, the upright jurist who abolished the death penalty in France, “and Dumas for everything that’s twisted.”

…

But like Mr. Mitterrand, Mr. Dumas was skeptical of many aspects of European integration. He failed to foresee the rapid collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, believed in the fixed European relationships and borders established after World War II and, for much of his life, harbored hostility for Germany and Germans.
He traced this sentiment to what he often said was the pivotal event of his life: the firing-squad shooting of his father, a member of the Resistance, by the Germans on March 26, 1944, when Mr. Dumas was 21 and himself in the French underground.

…

He served as foreign minister until 1993. Two years later, Mr. Mitterrand appointed him to the Constitutional Council, the summit of a French political career.
In the meantime he had become involved with Ms. Deviers-Joncour, whom the state oil company, Elf-Aquitaine, hoping to curry favor with Mr. Dumas, had hired as a “lobbyist,” showering her with favors to the tune of nearly $9 million, including a luxurious Left Bank apartment. She used the money to give Mr. Dumas valuable ancient artifacts, expensive meals and the custom Berluti shoes, among other things.
Mr. Dumas later suggested that he was unclear about the source of all this spending. That argument was eventually adopted by an appeals court, which threw out his six-month prison sentence in 2003, to the outrage of critics across the political spectrum, who saw France’s protective old-boy network in action.

Finally, William L. Calley Jr.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant Calley, a 24-year-old platoon leader who had been in Vietnam just three months, led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai 4, an inland hamlet about halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam. The Americans moved in under ambiguous orders, suggesting to some that anyone found in the hamlet, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies.
While they met no resistance, the Americans swept in shooting. Over the next few hours, horrors unfolded. Witnesses said victims were rousted from huts, herded into an irrigation ditch or the village center and shot.
Villagers who refused to come out were killed in their huts by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire. Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places. Infants and children were bayoneted and shot, and an unknown number of females were raped and shot. A military photographer took pictures.
Although Lieutenant Calley’s immediate superiors knew generally what had happened, the atrocity was covered up in military reports, which called it a successful search-and-destroy mission. It took nearly a year and a half — and persistent efforts by a few soldiers and an independent investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his disclosures — for investigations to grind forward and the story to reach a stunned world.

…

On Sept. 6, 1969, he was charged with the mass murder of civilians at My Lai. He was one of 25 people charged in the case, including two generals accused of misconduct. But charges against the generals were dropped, as were those against 10 other officers and seven enlisted men accused of murder or suppression of evidence. Six men were court-martialed, but all except Lieutenant Calley were acquitted, among them Capt. Ernest Medina, the company commander.
Lieutenant Calley’s trial, in Fort Benning, Ga., opened in November 1970. He was accused of personally killing 102 civilians. Many soldiers refused to testify. But eight witnesses, in often shockingly graphic testimony, said the lieutenant had herded sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch and the hamlet center and shot them in bunches, and had ordered his troops to kill as well.
The number of victims at My Lai was never fixed precisely; the Army did not count the bodies. The official American estimate was 347, but a Vietnamese memorial at the site lists 504 names, with ages ranging from 1 to 82.
Lieutenant Calley, in three days of testimony, expressed no remorse and insisted that he had only followed orders by Captain Medina to kill all the villagers, quoting him as saying that everyone in the village was “the enemy.” The captain denied saying that, insisting that he had meant his order to apply only to enemy soldiers.
In March 1971, Lieutenant Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of “not less than” 22 Vietnamese and sentenced to life in prison. Americans, long divided over Vietnam, were overwhelmingly outraged, calling him a scapegoat for a long chain of command that had gone unpunished. Many blamed the war itself, or said the lieutenant was only doing his duty.

…

Days after the sentencing, President Richard M. Nixon spared the lieutenant from prison, allowing him to remain in his bachelor apartment at Fort Benning pending appeals. In an ensuing roller-coaster of legal maneuvers, the fort’s commanding general reduced the life term to 20 years, and Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway cut it to 10 years, saying that Mr. Calley would be paroled after only one-third of that term.
In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia, J. Robert Elliott, overturned the conviction, saying Mr. Calley had been denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity. The Army appealed, and Mr. Calley was confined to barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for three months. He was then released on bail and never returned to custody.
In 1975, a federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed Judge Elliott and reinstated the conviction. And in 1976, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case, letting the conviction stand and closing a bitter chapter of national history. By then, Mr. Calley had qualified for parole. His life term had been whittled down to slightly more than three years of house arrest and barracks confinement, which had ended in 1974.

WP (archived).

Posted in Admin, Books, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Why don’t we have a party?

July 29th, 2024

Since I’ve been blogging for 15 years, why not?

And what better kind of party to throw than…a gun book party! Because a gun book party don’t stop until we’re out of gun books, and I don’t see that happening. But I did run out of time to get this post up on Sunday, so I’m moving the party to Monday night instead.

Also, I’d like to get some more gun books off the kitchen table and reduce the stack before Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) gets sprung from durance vile and returns home. After the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | 4 Comments »

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