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.
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.
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.
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).
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.)
Philip Zimbardo. I think everyone who took Psychology 101 in college remembers the “Stanford Prison Experiment”.
In 1971, seeking a novel way to study how situations can transform behavior, Dr. Zimbardo set up a prison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology building.
He turned rooms into cells. He made a tiny closet into “the hole” — solitary confinement. And he placed an advertisement in a local newspaper: “Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks.”
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For his study, he asked local police officers to arrest the students who had been hired (for $15 a day) to be prisoners. He outfitted the students hired to be guards with crisp uniforms and made them wear sunglasses to appear more inscrutable, an idea he got from the 1967 prison movie “Cool Hand Luke.”
As prisoners arrived, they were stripped, searched and deloused, a process overseen by Dr. Zimbardo, who played the role of prison superintendent. Initially there were a few giggles among the participants, but as the guards began enforcing rules, the mock prison began to feel very real.
Though critics have accused Dr. Zimbardo of coaching the guards to act sadistic, he told the guards only to “create feelings of boredom, frustration, fear and a ‘sense of powerlessness,’” according to a defense of the study on his website. They were, he said, given no “formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard.”
Within a day, the guards had become abusive and were engaging in psychological torture: making the prisoners defecate in buckets, waking them up repeatedly through the night, forcing them to simulate sodomy. Several prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns. But Dr. Zimbardo kept the study going.
On the sixth day, he told Christina Maslach, a graduate student whom he would marry that year, that he was impressed by how much interesting behavior the study had revealed in just under a week.
Interviewed for the documentary “Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment” (2004), Dr. Zimbardo said she replied, “I think what you are doing to those boys is horrible.”
“She was right,” he added. “I had to end the experiment, because that’s what it was — an experiment, not a prison. These were real boys who were suffering, and that fact had escaped me.”
At least, that’s the conventional account of the experiment. Recent scholarship points to this being a whole bunch of bullshit, and that Dr. Zimbardo was manipulating the participants behind the scenes to get a pre-determined result.
LeTexier’s analysis shows that Zimbardo had actually decided in advance what conclusions he wanted to demonstrate. For example, on only the second day of the experiment, he put out a press release stating that prisons dehumanize their inmates and therefore need to be reformed. Moreover, contrary to his repeated claims that participants in the experiment assigned to the role of guards were not told how to treat the prisoners and were free to make up their own rules, the archival data clearly show that the guards were told in advance what was expected of them, how they were to mistreat the prisoners, and were given a detailed list of rules to follow to ensure that prisoners were humiliated and dehumanized.
Furthermore, Zimbardo and his research team were highly assertive in ensuring that participants acted as “tough guards,” contrary to Zimbardo’s claims that they just fall naturally into their roles. For example, in the orientation session for guards on the first day of the experiment, Zimbardo’s assistant David Jaffe, who acted as a prison warden, even read out a list handwritten by Zimbardo entitled: “Processing in—Dehumanizing experience,” that included instructions like, “Ordered around. Arbitrariness. Guards never use names, only number. Never request, order.” This contradicts Zimbardo’s claims that dehumanizing behavior like calling the prisoners by their numbers rather than their names was something the guards came up with themselves. Additionally, after the experiment, some of the guards stated that either Zimbardo or Jaffe had directed them to act in specific ways at various times during the study.
General Michael Jackson (British Army – ret.) . I probably would have skipped over this on notability grounds, but this is an interesting story:
General Jackson was Britain’s senior leader in the Balkans in June 1999 when NATO forces moved into the province of Kosovo to enforce a withdrawal of Serbian troops. Russian soldiers, who backed Serbia, made a surprise grab of the airfield outside Pristina, the capital.
Gen. Wesley K. Clark, an American and NATO’s supreme commander, ordered General Jackson to block the runways with tanks and troops to prevent more Russians from landing.
“No, I’m not going to do that,” General Jackson told him. “It’s not worth starting World War III.”
The insubordination was taken up by both men’s superiors — the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and General Jackson’s British commander.
They resolved the dispute in favor of General Jackson, according to testimony that General Shelton gave to Congress.
In the British press, General Jackson was nicknamed “Macho Jacko” for his rebuke of General Clark. His words to the American were quoted as being sharper than they were in U.S. accounts. “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you,” he reportedly told General Clark.
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In the end, General Jackson’s view — that Russia did not threaten NATO through control of the airport — proved correct. The Russians were absorbed into the international peacekeeping force.
Rather than causing a career setback, General Jackson’s insubordination lifted him among his peers.
“The clash enhanced Jackson’s reputation as the most colorful character of modern soldiery,” The Telegraph wrote in a profile of him in 2007. The following year, Queen Elizabeth II named him a Knight Commander of the Bath.
Ron Ely, actor and good Texas boy. NYT.
Other credits include “Renegade”, “The Hat Squad”, the “Sea Hunt” revival in the 1980s, and “The Night of the Grizzly”.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Kentucky state senator Johnnie Turner, who passed away on Tuesday.
He had been hospitalized since September 15th, due to injuries sustained when he accidentally drove his riding lawn mower into an empty swimming pool.
Fernando Valenzuela. ESPN. NYT (archived).
As I’ve noted before, I am not a baseball fan, and I hate the Dodgers. But I remember Fernandomania. And I get the impression he was a class act.
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He stumbled on one of his most publicized discoveries accidentally, when he asked his undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, to bring in a chemical of their choosing to undergo testing. All of the chemicals tested negative, except for one: contained in a bottle of hair dye a student had borrowed from his girlfriend.
Dr. Ames sent a lab technician, Edith Yamasaki, to buy out every type of hair dye at a local drugstore, and after extensive testing concluded that the dyes — used by more than 20 million Americans at the time — were very likely linked to cancer and birth defects.
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Later in his career, as Dr. Ames’s opinions about the dangers of man-made chemicals began to shift, his legacy in the environmental movement became more complicated.
He felt that some activists were overstating the risks of these chemicals and targeting chemical companies unfairly. He often said that he thought there was too much focus on substances that were technically mutagenic but that were no more likely to cause DNA damage than the “natural” chemicals found in fruits and vegetables.
“I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t real problems with some synthetic chemicals, but the environmentalists are wildly exaggerating the risks,” he told The Times in 1994. “If our resources are diverted from important things to unimportant things, this doesn’t serve the public.”
I’ve known about this one for a few days, but was waiting for something I was comfortable linking to: Ward Christensen, early computer BBS pioneer.
Then, on Jan. 16, 1978, a blizzard hit Chicago, covering the city in 40 inches of snow and stranding Mr. Christensen at his home in the suburbs. He phoned Mr. Suess, suggesting that they use the time to start building their messaging system. He wondered if they should get help from other club members, but Mr. Suess argued that involving more people would slow the project down.
“Forget the club. It would just be management by committee,” Mr. Suess said, as Mr. Christensen recalled their conversation to The New York Times in 2009. “It’s just me and you. I will do the hardware, and you will do the software.”
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By way of Greg Ellifritz: Ed Lovette, trainer and gun guy. I have a copy of The Snubby Revolver, and would recommend picking it up if you find it used.
I also wanted to link this because Mr. Ellifritz’s post contains an excellent list of other books you should have in your gun library. I will say I have many, but not all, of them: some of them I am still trying to find. (And someone should get the rights to reprint that old Paladin Press stuff, like the Lovette and Cirillo books.)
As a side note, I haven’t forgotten about gun books. I’ve just been busy, and my dealer of choice has taken some time off. I do want to try to get up a post this week, but it is probably going to be shorter than usual. The books I plan to post about are all new books, available from Amazon (with one exception). And one of those books is also going to be an entry in the “Leadership Secrets” series, too.
Keep watching the skies.
John Kinsel Sr. died on Saturday at the age of 107.
Mr. Kinsel was one of the Navajo Code Talkers.
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Nicholas Daniloff passed away last Thursday. He was 88.
He was a foreign correspondent in Russia for UPI and, later, for U.S. News and World Report.
After taking a call at his Moscow apartment on Aug. 30, 1986, Mr. Daniloff met a trusted Russian friend and news contact, Misha, in a park for a farewell exchange. He gave Misha several Stephen King novels, and Misha gave him a sealed packet that supposedly contained news clippings from a Soviet republic and some photographs that he said might be useful.
After they parted, a van pulled up alongside Mr. Daniloff. Several men leapt out, handcuffed him, dragged him into the vehicle and took him to the infamous K.G.B. torture center, Lefortovo Prison. Misha’s packet turned out to contain photographs and maps of military installations, all marked “secret.” The fix was in — a heavy-handed throwback to Stalinist tactics.
In Room 215, a chamber that reeked of interrogations, Mr. Daniloff was met by a tall, imposing man in a dark gray suit. “He walked toward me, pinning me with his dark eyes,” Mr. Daniloff wrote in his book “Two Lives, One Russia” (1988). “This senior K.G.B. officer said solemnly in Russian, ‘You have been arrested on suspicion of espionage. I am the person who ordered your arrest.’”
For the bewildered Mr. Daniloff, that moment set off 14 days of grueling interrogations, confinement in a tiny underground cell and the anguish of being cut off from the world, facing what his captors called years in a Siberian labor camp or a death sentence. His claims of innocence hardly mattered; as he guessed, he had been arrested as a bargaining chip in a larger game.
Ultimately, Mr. Daniloff was traded for Gennadi F. Zakharov (a confessed Soviet spy, who had been arrested two weeks before Mr. Daniloff’s arrest) and human rights activist Yuri Orlov.
(By the way, for those of you out there who are connoisseurs, this is a Robert D. McFadden obit.)
Michael Valentine, one of nature’s noblemen. He helped pioneer the radar detector.
Mr. Valentine, who didn’t believe that road safety was determined by finite speed limits, went into battle armed with the Escort, a radar detector that he built with Jim Jaeger, his college friend and business partner, for their company, Cincinnati Microwave.
They were met with early success. In 1979, a year after the Escort’s debut, Car and Driver magazine tested 12 radar detectors and ranked it the best — “by a landslide” — for its ability to pick up the signals of police radar equipment.
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I wanted to share this one because cool story, bro:
He once posed outside a U.F.O. museum in Roswell, N.M., in green “alien” eyeglasses, which accentuated his egg-shaped head, to make tourists think he was a real visitor from outer space.
“He made everyone around him feel comfortable with him and with progeria,” Dr. Gordon said. “All he had to do was say two words and you’d be smiling and laughing.”
Latricia Trammell was fired on Friday as head coach of the Dallas Wings.
The team was 9-31 this season.
In case you were wondering- and it took me longer to figure this out than it should have – the Dallas Wings are a WNBA team.
On a related note:
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Mitzi Gaynor. NYT (archived). IMDB.
I found this kind of interesting, in light of another obit from not that long ago:
Also interesting to me:
Ever wonder how the history of a particular musical would have been different if the producers had been able to cast their first choice, instead of “settling” for someone who came out of left field and blew everyone away? I do.
(Okay, to be fair, Gwen Verdon didn’t exactly come out of left field. She’d already won a Tony for “Can-Can”.)
NYT obit for Bob Yerkes. Noted here because:
1) This gives me a chance to thank jimmymcnulty for his comments on the previous obit. I agree: I think Mr. Yerkes would have been a great neighbor, and a swell guy to hang with.
(Also, thanks to FotB RoadRich and FotB cm smith for their comments on the late Mr. Armes in the same obit.)
B) I thought this was interesting, and it was sort of played down in the THR obit:
During his circus days, Mr. Yerkes became deeply religious — a turnabout from his childhood.
“I was reared in an unbelieving home,” he said in “Redeeming the Screens,” a 2016 book about religion in the entertainment industry. “As a young adult, I have to confess I read the Bible planning to denounce the truth of it, but I realized that it had to be inspired by God.”
He formed a Bible-reading group for circus performers. He later served on the board of the Christian Film & Television Commission, which bills itself as being “dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media.”
Megan Marshack passed away earlier this month at the age of 70.
That’s a name that might ring a bell with the old people in my audience. You younger folks never heard of her.
Ms. Marshack was “with” former vice-president Nelson Rockefeller when he died on January 26, 1979.
I use “with” above because the circumstances of Mr. Rockefeller’s death were and are unclear.
The initial account of Mr. Rockefeller’s death was supplied by Hugh Morrow, his longtime spokesman, after midnight on Jan. 27. He told The New York Times that Mr. Rockefeller had died instantly, at 10:15 p.m., while he was in his office, alone with a bodyguard, “having a wonderful time” working on an art book he was writing.
The next day, The Times began deconstructing the official story. The paper reported that someone called 911 to report Mr. Rockefeller’s death an hour after he was reported to have died; that Mr. Rockefeller was not at his office but rather at a brownstone he used as a clubhouse; and that at the time he was with Ms. Marshack, who was identified as a research assistant.
A drip-drip of revelations ensued. First The Times reported that it was Ms. Marshack who called 911; then the paper said that the caller had actually been a friend of hers, who lived in the same apartment building as Ms. Marshack, down the block from Mr. Rockefeller’s brownstone. It also turned out that Mr. Rockefeller had given Ms. Marshack the money for her apartment, a loan amounting to $45,000 (about $200,000 in today’s money), which he forgave in his will, along with other loans to top aides.
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The circumstances of Mr. Rockefeller’s death remain mysterious. One account said that he was found dead wearing a suit and tie and surrounded by working papers; another said that he was nude, amid containers of Chinese food. Several credible sources indicated that he did not actually die at his brownstone but rather at Ms. Marshack’s apartment. The cause of death is generally understood to have been a heart attack.
Aside from minimal statements confirming that she had indeed been with Mr. Rockefeller when he died — released to The Times by Mr. Morrow immediately after Mr. Rockefeller’s death — Ms. Marshack never publicly commented on any of the accounts.
“My understanding is that, after he passed away, she signed a nondisclosure agreement with the family at their request, and that’s why she never spoke of it,” Ms. Marshack’s brother said in an interview. “I think she had a desire to tell the story all along but held on to her obligation.”
Ms. Marshack left behind an obituary that she wrote herself.
And another historical footnote: Richard V. Secord, of Iran-Contra fame.
Paul Lowe, photojournalist.
He was stabbed by his 19-year-old son, who was apparently suffering a mental health crisis.
John Lasell, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Perry Mason”, “The New Perry Mason”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Broken Mirror“, season 6, episode 4.)
Thomas Rockwell, author. His most famous book is perhaps How to Eat Fried Worms.
He was also Norman’s son.
Posing for a painting that depicted him rummaging through his grandfather’s overcoat pocket was one of his favorite childhood memories, he told Cobblestone, a children’s magazine, in 1989. That image appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1936.
“I had to stand on tiptoe while reaching into the overcoat, which was hung on an easel,” Mr. Rockwell said, describing how his father had composed the painting. “My father gave me a present for posing, and I remember feeling so proud and pleased that I’d helped him with his work. I know I’ve never enjoyed any gift as much as that one.”
This one goes out to great and good FotB pigpen51: Greg Landry, quarterback.
He wore the Lions’ Honolulu blue and silver for 11 seasons, tallying 12,451 yards and 80 touchdown passes.
In 1971, his first year as a starter, Landry passed for 2,237 yards and 16 touchdowns, earning a first-team All-Pro nod and his only trip to the Pro Bowl. He was the last Lions quarterback to earn that distinction until Matthew Stafford was named an alternate for the 2014 Pro Bowl.
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But with Landry, who was physically imposing at 6-foot-4, the Lions designed running plays for him, as would later be the case with current dual-threat quarterbacks like Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens and Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills. The Lions even took a page from college football playbooks and drew up option plays, in which the quarterback has the option to carry the ball himself after the snap or pitch it to a running back, a rarity in the N.F.L.
Landry showed off his burst early in his career, during the Lions’ rout of the Green Bay Packers in the opening game of the 1970 season. Closing out the game in relief of the starter Bill Munson, Landry called a quarterback sneak on third down with two yards to go at the Lions’ 13-yard line. Instead of gutting out a few yards for a first down, he burst through the Packers’ defense and galloped for 76 yards — the longest run for a Lion since 1951.
Great and good FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Nobuyo Oyama, Japanese voice actress.
For about 25 years, Ms. Oyama was the voice of Doraemon, a character that first appeared in a manga created in 1969. Doraemon is a robot from the future, sent by its owner to the present day to help his great-great-grandfather solve his childhood problems and change his family’s fortunes.
The plump, earless, catlike robot typically helped the boy, Nobita Nobi, using gadgets from the future that he kept in his magical pocket. His deepening friendship with Nobita and his family was part of what made “Doraemon” one of the longest-running shows in Japan and beyond.