Obit watch: March 28, 2024.
March 28th, 2024Obit watch: March 27, 2024.
March 27th, 2024Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and winner of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
I’ve heard some people endorse Thinking, Fast and Slow. I’ve heard other people say it is overrated and much of the research cited has not been replicated.
Much of Professor Kahneman’s work is grounded in the notion — which he did not originate but organized and advanced — that the mind operates in two modes: fast and intuitive (mental activities that we’re more or less born with, called System One), or slow and analytical, a more complex mode involving experience and requiring effort (System Two).
Others have personified these mental modes as Econs (rational, analytical people) and Humans (emotional, impulsive and prone to exhibit unconscious mental biases and an unwise reliance on dubious rules of thumb). Professor Kahneman and Professor Tversky used the word “heuristics” to describe these rules of thumb. One is the “halo effect,” where in observing a positive attribute of another person one perceives other strengths that aren’t really there.
Ron Harper, actor. Other credits include “FBI: The Unheard Music Untold Stories”, “Dragnet” (the 1989-1991 version), “87th Precinct” (he played “Bert Kling”), and “Walker, Texas Ranger” (the Chuck Norris one).
Richard Serra, sculptor.
Mr. Serra enjoyed both great notoriety and great fame over the course of his long career, with notoriety coming first. In 1971, a rigger was crushed to death when one plate of a piece being installed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis accidentally came loose. Many people in the art world — artists, curators, critics, museum directors — urged Mr. Serra to stop making sculpture, even though an investigation revealed that the crane operator had not properly followed the rigging instructions.
Mr. Serra’s early public pieces sometimes met with opposition, most famously “Tilted Arc,” commissioned by the General Services Administration and completed in 1981. The work — a gently curving, slightly leaning wall of rusting steel 12 feet high and 120 feet long — was installed in a plaza in front of a federal office building in Lower Manhattan. Some people who worked there regarded it as an eyesore and a danger and petitioned to have it removed. A hearing was held to consider arguments pro and con, after which the G.S.A. decided in favor of removal.
Dismayed and infuriated, Mr. Serra sued the government to keep the work in place, vowing that he would leave the country if it were dismantled. He lost his suit, and “Tilted Arc” was taken down in March 1989. But he continued to be based in New York.
Peter G. Angelos, former owner of the Baltimore Orioles. (He and his family made a deal to sell the team earlier this year, but it hasn’t been approved by MLB yet.)
Short quick random gun crankery.
March 27th, 2024I got an invoice this morning from “Colt Archive Properties, LLC” for a historical letter on this gun. While this is only an invoice, and not the actual letter itself, the invoice says they have completed their research and “Once the invoice has been paid, your letter will be typed & mailed to you by USPS, and you should receive it within 2-3 weeks.”
I submitted the letter request on September 30th of 2023. So we’re looking at almost exactly six months from Colt letter request to completion of the research and notification. The FAQ says “90 to 100 days“.
Not that I’m complaining, just providing a data point for anyone out there who may want to request a letter.
Gun books. And train book.
March 25th, 2024I haven’t done one of these in a bit, and need to get back to it. And since it looks like the baseball season begins this week, I’m going to take the opportunity to throw a metaphorical change-up pitch with a train related book.
I would love to be able to document a book about guns on trains, but I don’t have a copy of Gerald Bull’s book. Yet.
After the jump…
Quick flaming hyena update.
March 22nd, 2024The airport director who was shot by BATFE has passed away.
Neither the ATF, state police nor federal prosecutors would provide details of what agents were looking for, citing an ongoing investigation.
Around 2:35 p.m., Little Rock firefighters carrying a power saw and a Halligan tool —a large pry bar— were seen walking toward the house. An ATF agent was overheard saying they were at the scene to help agents open a safe in Malinowski’s house, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.
Edited to add: the NYT published a story that includes information from a redacted version of the search warrant affidavit.
The authorities accused Mr. Malinowski of having purchased more than 100 guns in recent years and of illegally selling many of them, including at least three that were later found to be connected with a crime. Mr. Malinowski first bought the guns legally, checking a box on purchase forms stating that the guns were for himself, before selling them privately to individuals, the affidavit states.
He would go to gun shows, the affidavit said, including two in Arkansas and one in Tennessee, and sell guns to people “without asking for any identification or paperwork.”
Photographs included in the redacted affidavit show Mr. Malinowski at a gun show, standing behind a booth filled with firearms. The affidavit also states that Mr. Malinowski had sold guns to two undercover agents who were investigating him.
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This raises all sorts of interesting questions which a) I don’t have time to go into right now, and II) other people have covered at length: what constitutes being a dealer? How many guns do you have to sell in a year before you have to get an FFL? How long do you have to keep a gun before you can resell it? How many years is “recent years”? How many guns can you buy in a year before triggering (ha!) BATFE suspicions? Does BATFE track how many purchases someone makes in a year, or at least how many background checks they have done? Isn’t that illegal? And what if you don’t have background checks done? (In Texas, I don’t have to have a background check done because I have a valid license to carry.)
And what prompted the shooting? Was this a no-knock warrant, and Mr. Malinowski thought someone was trying to rob him? Did BATFE knock and announce, or did they just start breaking down doors?
I’m still thinking this is going to be swept under the rug.
Obit watch: March 21, 2024.
March 21st, 2024FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Richard C. Higgins, who passed at 102. The NYT also ran a timely obit.
Mr. Higgins was a radioman at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Mr. Higgins, who later in his life often spoke about his experience to schoolchildren and on social media, described in a 2020 Instagram video pushing planes away from each other as bombs fell around him.
“I was moving planes away from ones that were on fire, because when the tanks exploded, they threw burning gas on the others,” he said.
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According to both the NYT and the Columbian obits, it is believed that there are about 22 survivors still living.
M. Emmet Walsh, one of the great character actors. He’s been a personal favorite of mine since I first saw “Blood Simple”. NYT.
Other credits include…just about every damn thing. 233 acting credits in IMDB. Okay, he didn’t do a “Mannix”. But he did do a “Rockford”, “McMillan and Wife”, and “Ironside”. He was part of the ensemble cast of “UNSUB“. He was in the legendary fiasco (which revisionists now say wasn’t) “At Long Last Love“.
And he hates the cans! Stay away from the cans!
Mr. Walsh had confidence in his ability to deliver, and he knew how valuable that was to harried filmmakers. “You’re casting something, and you’ve got 12 problems; if they’ve got me, they only have 11 problems.”
He said that directors sought him out for his ability to elevate subpar material. “They’d say, ‘This is terrible crap — get Walsh. At least he makes it believable.’ And I got a lot of those jobs.”
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I always thought he classed up everything he was in. A Walsh sighting, much like a William Boyett sighting, thrilled me a bit.
In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Walsh said he was asked about Blade Runner more than any other movie he had ever made. “We shot down in [Los Angeles’] Union Station,” he recalled. “They set it all up in a little office over in a corner, and we had to be out by five in the morning because commuters were coming in for the train. I don’t know if I really understood what in the hell it was all about.”
After seeing the finished film for the first time, Walsh realized he wasn’t the only one with that opinion. “We all sat there and it ended. And nothing,” he said, laughing hysterically. “We didn’t know what to say or to think or do! We didn’t know what in the hell we had done! The only one who seemed to get it was Ridley.”
I never met him, but I think I would have liked to. And I have no idea what his politics were, which I still think is a compliment.
Vernor Vinge, SF writer, has passed away. Unfortunately, all the obits I have found so far are from sources I do not trust or link to. The closest thing I have found to something linkable is a nice tribute from Michael Swanwick.
I haven’t read A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky yet, though they are on my to-read list. I was pretty grandly impressed by “True Names“: I spent a lot of time scouring used paperback stores around UT in the old pre-Internet BBS days to find a copy of Binary Star #5, back in the day when that was the only way to get a copy (before Bluejay reprinted it). You can still get True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which also reprints the story, at a not unreasonable price.
Hacker News thread. The comments are worth reading, especially the one that links Vinge’s annotated A Fire Upon the Deep.
Obit watch: March 20, 2024.
March 20th, 2024Alexander Keewatin Dewdney, also known as “A. K. Dewdney”.
He took over what was known as the “Mathematical Games” column from Douglas Hofstadter (who followed Martin Gardner, and renamed it ” Metamagical Themas”) and, in turn, renamed it “Computer Recreations”. He’s also credited as being one of the inventors of the “Core War” game. Wikipedia.
It isn’t the Christmas season, but I’ll tell this story anyway: one year I was asked what I wanted for Christmas. I said I wanted one of Dewdney’s books.
Every year, my brother retells the story of how my family went all over town hunting for that book, until, at their very last stop (a Bookstop) a particularly clever clerk figured out that the book they were looking for was not The Touring Omnibus but, rather, The TURING Omnibus.
This is one of the reasons I like Amazon so much: while it does somewhat hurt indie bookstores, you don’t have to worry, you can just add it to your wish list. (And Bookstop was never an “indie” anyway.)
(Kids, ask your parents about Bookstop.)
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#115 in a series)
March 20th, 2024Well, this is certainly an odd one.
Our good friends at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives conducted a raid on a house in Little Rock, Arkansas yesterday.
Someone inside the house fired shots. BATFE agents shot back.
An ATF agent, whose identity was not released, was also shot in the exchange of gunfire but suffered a non-life-threatening wound, officials said. The agent, too, was taken to an area hospital for treatment.
The apparent shooter was also injured, and is apparently in the hospital.
The weird part? The injured apparent shooter (and, I think, the homeowner, but this is not explicitly stated) is…
…the executive director for the Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport.
I’ll pause for a moment here so you can insert your own “I have evidence that will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton” meme.
There’s something strange about BATFE raiding the home of an airport executive. But not completely implausible: they could have been looking for something like a Glock switch or other illegal machine guns. Or perhaps “fuel filters” from China.
I’ll be curious to see if there’s any follow-up on this, or if the story just gets quietly buried.
(Hattip: Miguel at Gun Free Zone.)
Obit watch: March 19, 2024.
March 19th, 2024Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford (USAF – ret.). NASA tribute. NASA biography page.
He was originally selected for Mercury, but was one inch too tall for the capsule.
He flew two Gemini missions, including Gemini VI (which was the first capsule to perform a space rendezvous). He flew Apollo 10, which scouted landing sites for Apollo 11. And he flew the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
David Seidler, screenwriter. I’ve been going back and forth on this one for notability reasons, but this pushed me into it:
That’s class. That’s the kind of class you don’t see much of these days.
And the exact opposite of class, the burning in Hell watch: Andrew Crispo, art dealer and criminal.
On the night of Feb. 22, 1985, he and an employee, Bernard LeGeros, met a 26-year-old model and student from Norway named Eigil Dag Vesti. They left the club and went north, to an estate in Rockland County, N.Y., owned by Mr. LeGeros’s parents.
What happened over the next few hours is unclear; all three men were on drugs. But in the early hours of Feb. 23, Mr. Legeros shot Mr. Vesti in the back of the head, twice, with a .22-caliber rifle. Mr. Vesti was naked, save for handcuffs around his wrists and a zippered leather hood over his head.
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Mr. LeGeros was arrested on March 27. The case became a tabloid sensation; the news media called it the Death Mask Murder.
Mr. Crispo denied involvement in the killing, and the police never charged him. He also never testified, despite Mr. LeGeros’s insistence that Mr. Crispo had ordered him to kill Mr. Vesti, and despite the discovery of the murder weapon at his gallery.
“I don’t shock, frankly, but one of the most surpassingly ugly things that ever happened in the art world was that Andrew Crispo got off with no charges for the murder of Eigil Dag Vesti,” the writer Gary Indiana told Interview magazine in 2020.
Two months after the Vesti murder, Mr. Crispo and Mr. LeGeros were indicted in a different case, charged with the 1984 kidnapping and torturing of a 26-year-old bartender named Mark Leslie. The case was not tried until 1988. Mr. LeGeros pleaded guilty, but Mr. Crispo was acquitted, having convinced the jury that the activity he participated in was consensual.
Crispo was convicted of tax evasion in 1986 and served three years of a five year sentence. The IRS seized his art and sold it off.
He spent some time trying to make a comeback: his house blew up, and he used settlement money from the gas company to buy more art and another house. He also planned to open a new gallery.
The gallery was set to open in mid-1999. But that May he was arrested yet again, this time for threatening to kidnap the 4-year-old daughter of a lawyer who had been involved in his bankruptcy case.
Mr. Crispo had grown irate after the lawyer’s firm, which controlled the money during his bankruptcy proceedings, delayed sending him a $2,000 check. He told the lawyer that he had photographs of her daughter at a playground, knew where she lived and would kidnap the child if the check did not arrive soon.
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Mr. Crispo was convicted, and in 2000 he was sentenced to seven years in prison. He got out in 2005.
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After getting out of prison a second time, in 2005, Mr. Crispo bought a co-op apartment and two ground-floor spaces in a residential tower in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, intending to open yet another gallery.
But his plans never worked out, and by 2017 he was facing bankruptcy again. He took out a series of loans from a realty company, using his co-op shares and some of his artwork as collateral. When he defaulted on the loans, the realty company took ownership of the shares.
Mr. Crispo refused to leave the apartment, and he erected a series of legal roadblocks to delay eviction. At the same time, he was growing erratic; he continued to use drugs and threw sex parties in his apartment, and on at least one occasion was seen naked and defecating in the hallway.
There’s a good account of the Eigil Dag Vesti killing in Murder Along the Way: A Prosecutor’s Personal Account of Fighting Violent Crime in the Suburbs by H. P. Jeffers and Kenneth Gribetz. Mr. Gribetz was the prosecutor in that case. (Link goes to the mass-market paperback edition, which has a slightly different title.)
Obit watch: March 18, 2024.
March 18th, 2024David Breashears passed away on March 14th. I haven’t seen much coverage of this, but I was able to find an obit from Outside.
I think most Everest fans are familiar with him. He did several climbing documentaries, including the IMAX “Everest”.
Breashears shot Everest during 1996 climbing season, and witnessed the deadly blizzard that killed eight climbers and was later chronicled by author Jon Krakauer in the Outside feature and best-selling book Into Thin Air. Breashears helped with the rescue and recovery of climbers after the incident, and his experience led to another Everest film, the 2008 Frontline documentary Storm Over Everest. The film included interviews with survivors, video from the 1996 expedition, and recreated scenes of the storm and rescue efforts.
Speaking to Frontline, Breashears said he felt it was necessary to retell the story via film and not just words to try and help viewers understand the tragedy. “For me, to see and hear direct testimony from a person who has overcome such adversity, has survived such a difficult and stressful event, is very powerful,” he said. “There is something so much more poignant about seeing a person’s face and looking into their eyes and hearing their voice than just reading about them on a written page.”
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According to Wikipedia, he also did the climbing shots for David Lee Roth’s “Just Like Paradise” video.
My latest batch of million dollar ideas.
March 18th, 20241. I figure this one will hold up until the estate of Frank Herbert sues me. But then again, with a sufficiently good lawyer, I’m sure we can argue a parody exemption on this one:
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Fremen.
So far, I’ve got three. I’m thinking of recruiting a collaborator to help me flesh out the book a little.
- Walk without rhythm, to avoid attracting the worm.
- Never turn your back to the opposition.
- Don’t get high on your own (spice) supply.
(Yes, I did see “Dune Part 2” yesterday. Why do you ask?)
2. This one may be more of a $100,000 idea than a million dollar one, as there may be geographic limitations:
Vicious Australian Animal as a Service. (VAAaaS).
For s small fee to cover animal wrangling, packaging, shipping, and our profit, we’ll send a vicious Australian animal to your “favorite” person in the world. Message optional. We’ll maintain anonymity, and you can pay in cryptocurrency.
Let’s face it. Wouldn’t you love to send that “special person” who’s been acting like a rude (word that rhymes with “glass bowl”) a box jellyfish? Or a Sydney funnel-web spider? It sends a pretty clear message, and seems to me to be much more effective than a box of fecal matter.
There may be some issues with shipping marine life, like the box jellyfish or blue-ringed octopus, but spiders should be relatively easy. It would just be a small matter of finding animal wranglers and appropriate packaging. And lawyers.
We’d probably operate on a sliding scale, based on the size of the animal. Spiders and snakes should be small and easy to ship, while koalas and drop bears would be more expensive, as they would require special handling and packaging.
(I do have some morals. For that reason, VAAaaS will not ship Tasmanian devils, as they are endangered.)
Gonzaga!
March 18th, 2024It has been a while since I’ve done this. And, as y’all know, I have almost zero interest in basketball. But I do love saying “Gonzaga!”.
There was a lot of talk about Gonzaga being on the bubble, and possibly not even making it in to the NCAA tournament. But it looks like they’ve pulled things together, have been on kind of a tear, and are in as a lower seed.
I actually think this is good. In past years, they’ve been a top seed, which put a lot of pressure on them. The combination of them being a lower seed (less pressure) and having some momentum going makes me think this could be their year to Go. All. The. Way.
We shall see.