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 »

Brief notes on film: “The Concorde… Airport ’79”

July 28th, 2024

The Saturday Movie Group watched this last night.

It is not a good movie.

It is, however, an enjoyably good bad movie.

I think I will put a jump here to avoid any inadvertent spoilers, though frankly this movie arrived already spoiled…

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bagatelle, Movies, Planes | Comments Closed

Well. That’s interesting. At least to me.

July 28th, 2024

I have been blogging for 15 years as of today.

Posted in Admin | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: July 25, 2024.

July 25th, 2024

Gene Peterson, longtime radio announcer for the Houston Rockets.

Houston Rockets Twitter. Apparently I can’t embed tweets any longer, unless maybe I’m logged in to Twitter? (That would be difficult, as I don’t have a Twitter account.)

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Obits, Radio, Sports | 1 Comment »

Quick loser update.

July 25th, 2024

The White Sox are on a tear.

They’ve lost 10 games in a row, and are at 27-77 right now, for a .260 winning percentage.

If my math holds up and trends continue, it looks like they will lose 120 games this season, which is in the “historical” range.

Posted in Loser, Sports | Comments Closed

Things I didn’t know about until today.

July 24th, 2024

But which I find interesting:

1. The Romance Writers of America filed for bankruptcy at the end of May.

2. The RWA convention is in Austin this year. Maybe. According to the article, it was supposed to take place at the end of July, but is now scheduled for October. Except, when I went to the registration page, it doesn’t seem to be allowing registrations.

Edited to add 7/26: conference registration is now open. Dates are October 11th – 13th, and the cost is $349 ($399 if you’re not a member of RWA).

How did they manage to go bankrupt? The way you’d expect: they angered a bunch of their members, who are now ex-members.

Today, the group’s membership hovers at around 2,000, and it owes approximately $3 million in hotel contracts for the group’s past annual conferences.

I kind of want to keep this post short-ish, so I’m not going into details about how RWA made so many people angry: the linked article discusses the Courtney Milan affair (which I remember reading about as it was unfolding: as much as I hate linking to Wikipedia, that entry fills in some missing details) and the 2021 VIVIAN controversy (I know, two Wiki links in a row, but the primary source link is broken and the other links are to sites I don’t link to, or are not good sources). You can click through if you want more details on those issues: I just find the collapse of RWA interesting, and a little sad. I feel like writers need strong organizations to protect them from predatory publishers and publishing practices, so I’ll be unhappy to see RWA go.

“It would have been easier if I could have just said, ‘Well, deeply racist organization gone forever,’” she said. “But that’s not the story as I saw it. For me, and for a lot of people in Romancelandia, this was a group where they had made lifelong friendships, where there were very promising signs of progress in terms of redressing past mistakes.”

And if RWA goes away, that’s going to reduce my chances to network and sell my gunsmith romance series.

(Also, another year, another Hugo controversy. But I already knew about that, and I don’t have any sites I’m willing to link to. Very short version: someone was trying to buy votes, and did it so clumsily a seven-year-old could have figured it out.)

3. On a happier note, at least for me – because I hate the Olympics – the IOC is threatening to revoke Salt Lake City’s hosting status for the Winter 2034 games.

The IOC seems to be upset that…wait for it…the United States government, specifically Congress and the Department of Justice, are looking into how the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) handled the case of the Chinese swimmers.

But many American athletes say they don’t trust WADA’s procedures and want probes to continue.
“What the athletes think, they want transparency,” said Katie Ledecky, the star U.S. swimmer, who spoke at a separate press conference on Wednesday. “They want further answers to the questions that still remain.”
In a statement, Travis Tygart head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) blasted the IOC for linking the China scandal to Salt Lake City’s bid.
“It is shocking to see the IOC itself stooping to threats in an apparent effort to silence those seeking answers,” Tygart said. “It seems more apparent than ever that WADA violated the rules and needs accountability and reform.”

…

“Russia and China have been too big to fail in [WADA’s] eyes and they get a different set of rules than the rest of the world does unfortunately,” Tygart said.

I’m excited about this. I hope the IOC pulls the Salt Lake City bid, I hope they have to frantically scramble to find a new host city, I hope they completely fail because nobody wants to host the Olympics because they are a giant money pit with no financial returns, and I hope some folks from the IOC and WADA wind up in prison.

Posted in Books, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 24, 2024.

July 24th, 2024

John Mayall, massively influential British bluesman. NYT (archived).

Though he played piano, organ, guitar and harmonica and sang lead vocals in his own bands with a high, reedy tenor, Mr. Mayall earned his reputation as “the godfather of British blues” not for his own playing or singing but for recruiting and polishing the talents of one gifted young lead guitarist after another.
In his most fertile period, between 1965 and 1969, those budding stars included Eric Clapton, who left to form the band Cream and eventually became a hugely successful solo artist; Peter Green, who left to found Fleetwood Mac; and Mick Taylor, who was snatched from the Mayall band by the Rolling Stones.
A more complete list of the alumni of Mr. Mayall’s band of that era, known as the Bluesbreakers, reads like a Who’s Who of British pop royalty. The drummer Mick Fleetwood and the bassist John McVie were also founding members of Fleetwood Mac. The bassist Jack Bruce joined Mr. Clapton in Cream. The bassist Andy Fraser was an original member of Free. Aynsley Dunbar would go on to play drums for Frank Zappa, Journey and Jefferson Starship.

As you know, Bob, music – especially music of this period – is outside of my area of competence, so I am going to defer to valued commenter pigpen51 for additional comment on Mr. Mayall and his legacy.

Also outside of my area of competence (Hello, pigpen51! Really, I should give you posting privileges here.): Duke Fakir, of the Four Tops.

His family said in a statement that the cause was heart failure.

“Heart failure,” MacAdoo said in an almost sorrowful tone.
“Heart seizure,” Haere said automatically.
“What’s the difference?”
‘Everyone dies of heart failure.”

–Ross Thomas, Missionary Stew

Lewis H. Lapham, of “Harper’s Magazine” and “Lapham’s Quarterly”.

This might just be me, and I may very well be speaking ill of the dead. But when I see someone described as a “scholarly patrician”, I mentally translate that to: someone who thinks they are better and smarter than you are, therefore they know better than you how to run your life, and believe the government should enforce their point of view on you.

Finally, one I’ve been holding for a couple of days and want to get in: Robert L. Allen, “writer, activist and academic”. I knew of Mr. Allen because he wrote the book on “The Port Chicago Mutiny“, which was proceeded by the Port Chicago explosion.

There were a large number of black soldiers stationed at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine, loading and unloading ammunition. Safety procedures may not have been what they should have been. On July 17, 1944, the E.A. Bryan exploded during the loading process. It was a massive explosion which destroyed everything within 1,000 feet, including another ship. 320 people died, many of them black sailors.

White officers were given leave to recover, but Black sailors were soon ordered to continue their dangerous work loading munitions at a nearby port. They did not know why the ships had exploded — a cause has never been determined — and 258 refused to keep working, leading an admiral to threaten to execute them by firing squad, Mr. Allen said.

…

Of the 258 men, 208 returned to work, but they were still court-martialed for disobeying orders. The 50 others, in a summary court-martial, were convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny and sentenced to eight to 15 years of confinement.

Interestingly, Mr. Allen’s death apparently prompted the Navy to exonerate all the sailors last week.

“The secretary of the Navy called to offer condolences,” Ms. Carter said in an interview, referring to Carlos Del Toro. “And he said, ‘I’m going to do more than that — I’m going to exonerate these sailors.’”

I haven’t read Mr. Allen’s book, though I kind of want to. I know about the book and the incident from a long piece John Marr wrote in the late and very much missed “Murder Can Be Fun” zine (issue #11).

Posted in Books, History, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Brief programming note.

July 22nd, 2024

For the benefit of those who might want to watch it, it looks like the Bob Newhart tribute special will be airing at 8 PM Eastern, 7 PM Central, tonight. This is per the online CBS schedule.

Posted in Bagatelle, TV | Comments Closed

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