Firings watch.
February 2nd, 2024Obit watch: February 1, 2024.
February 1st, 2024This is an obit that made me say “Wow.” when I read it.
Jack Jennings has died at the age of 104.
Mr. Jennings was a private in the British Army (1st Battalion Cambridgeshire Regiment) and was serving in Singapore when it fell to the Japanese in 1942. He was one of “an estimated 85,000” soldiers captured and taken prisoner.
He and the other POWs were put to work building the Burma Railway.
He survived the searing heat of the Indochinese jungle; a daily diet of rice, watery gruel and a teaspoon of sugar; and a battery of ailments: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria and renal colic. He developed a leg ulcer that required skin grafts, which were performed without anesthesia.
“At least 15 soldiers died each day of malaria and cholera,” Mr. Jennings told the British newspaper The Mirror in 2019. “I remember sitting in camp just counting the days I had left to live. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there alive.”
His memoir, Prisoner Without A Crime, is available from Amazon in the US.
This is also in the linked NYT obit, but if you don’t want to click over there to watch it, here’s the commercial Mr. Jennings did for the British National Lottery.
Two months after he came home, he married. He had at least two daughters. (“Complete information on survivors besides Mr. Jennings’ daughters was unavailable.”) The daughters believe he was the last survivor of the captured soldiers.
Well. Well well well. Well.
February 1st, 2024I’ve said before that I have a high bar for linking to ESPN. This clears that bar, especially since I think the story is kind of buried.
“How fears over CTE and football outpaced what researchers know”.
Nut graph:
Beginning of a CTE backlash? Or ESPN positioning themselves for a possible partial buyout from the NFL?
Obit watch: January 31, 2024.
January 31st, 2024Jean Carnahan, former Senator from Missouri. As some may recall, she succeeded to the seat after her husband, Mel, died in a plane crash while campaigning.
TMQ Watch: January 30, 2024.
January 30th, 2024So, it has come to this. Kansas City and San Francisco. Again.
We’re a little bit disappointed, but honestly, Detroit has nothing to be ashamed of this season. They played well, and we hope this continues next year.
In other news, it’s Baltimore, gentlemen. The football gods will not save you.
After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…
Obit watch: January 26, 2024.
January 26th, 2024Generally, I like to give credits beyond the ones in the headline. But Mr. Coward’s other credits as an actor are “Ghost Town: The Movie” and one episode of the “Hillbilly Blood” TV series. That’s it. (He also produced “Ghost Town” and it looks like he appeared as himself in an episode of “Moonshiners”.)
The NYT ran a very nice obit for David J. Skal. (Previously.)
Jon Franklin, journalist. I’d never heard of him before today, but he had an interesting career:
…
“Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” online.
David L. Mills, Internet guy. He developed the Network Time Protocol, and did a lot of other leading edge work as well.
Carl Andre, “minimalist sculptor”. I thought this was worth noting because I haven’t done anything with (regular) art recently, and because Mr. Andre was also famous for a lengthy interruption in his career.
He was aquitted of second-degree murder, but there were a lot of people in the art world who thought he’d gotten away with it and the prosecution botched the case.
Firings watch.
January 24th, 2024No big firings still, but a few coordinators lost their jobs. I’m playing catch-up here, so please forgive the ESPN links.
Vic Fangio has been let go as defensive coordinator of the Miami Dolphins, supposedly by “mutual decision”.
Joe Barry fired as defensive coordinator of the Green Bay Packers. That’s the Green Bay Packers who made it as far as the divisional round of the playoffs.
Obit watch: January 24, 2024.
January 24th, 2024Dr. Arno A. Penzias has passed away at the age of 90.
While this is another one of those obits for a relatively obscure figure, I feel there’s a good chance many of my readers have actually heard of Dr. Penzias.
…
In 1961, Dr. Penzias joined AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., with the intention of using a radio antenna, which was being developed for satellite communications, as a radio telescope to make cosmological measurements…
In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?…
The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation…
The discovery not only helped cement the cosmos’s grand narrative; it also opened a window through which to investigate the nature of reality — all as a result of that vexing hiss first heard 60 years ago by a couple of junior physicists looking for something else.
Charles Osgood. THR. I feel like I’m giving him the short end of the stick, but there’s really nothing I can add to what others have said about him.
Gary Graham, actor. Other credits include “Crossing Jordan” (the “Quincy” of the 2000s except it sucked), “Walker, Texas Ranger”, and the 2003 “Dragnet”.
Melanie (aka Melanie Safka), who sang at Woodstock. This is another one where there’s not much I can say: pigpen51 may be more familiar with her music than I am.
Happy birthday, John Moses Browning!
January 23rd, 2024Excuses, excuses.
I had fancy plans for a JMB birthday post. (And pants to match!)
I was going to post a triptych (not really, but you know what I mean) of three JMB designs, including one that I’m not sure most people associate with JMB. But the weather here the past few days has been awful: not just cold (by Austin standards) but also overcast and wet. That’s not good for taking firearm photos.
And I don’t really have a good space inside where I could set up a three-gun photo shoot. Not right now, anyway.
So some substitute links for your pleasure:
John M. Browning, American Gunmaker: An Illustrated Biography of the Man and His Guns. I can remember when this was easily available, at extremely reasonable prices, at Half-Price Books. I wonder what’s going on with those prices?
The Guns of John Moses Browning: The Remarkable Story of the Inventor Whose Firearms Changed the World. Haven’t decided if I’m going to read this or The Rifle next.
Bob Rayburn’s Colt Woodsman Home Page. Mike-SMO asked a while back for some more Colt links, so I think this is going on the firearms reference sidebar. (Also, I have another reason. Hint. Hint.) Bob Rayburn was a serious Woodsman collector (he sold off his collection a few years ago) and this seems to be one of the best Internet references on the Woodsman.
TMQ Watch: January 23, 2024.
January 23rd, 2024Last week, we quoted TMQ:
Final score: Detroit 31, Tampa Bay 23. What’s the pace now, Gregg?
(To be honest, we don’t have a lot of faith in Detroit beating San Francisco. But, as FotB pigpen51 notes, “On any given Sunday…“. Stranger things have happened. And we’d love to see Detroit in the Superb Owl.)
After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack)…
Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#AK of a series)
January 23rd, 2024Art Acevedo is not taking the job in Austin. Repeat: Art Acevedo is not taking the job in Austin.
Acevedo notified Interim City Manager Jesús Garza Tuesday morning, following a firestorm about his appointment as an assistant city manager over the Austin Police Department (APD). On Tuesday afternoon, he posted a statement on X, the platform previously known as Twitter.
“It is clear that this newly created position has become a distraction from the critical work ahead for our city, the Austin Police Department, and the Austin Police Association,” Acevedo said in part, adding that he has always loved and admired the members of APD and, “as a long time member of their extended family, I will continue to support them in any way I can. Their well being has and will always [be] a priority for me, which is one of the reasons I have made this decision.”
I was actually surprised by the reaction to this, but haven’t had a chance to cover it. Many city leaders said, in essence, they felt bushwhacked by the decision and resented not being consulted.
It was also particularly upsetting to victims of sexual assault. The city had a special apology ceremony this afternoon:
The DNA lab problems, and the case mishandling, all took place under Chief Acevedo’s watch.
If we find out anything about what he’s doing next, we’ll post another Art Watch here. To be honest, we’re a little surprised he never got a position in the Biden administration…
Firings watch.
January 23rd, 2024Adrian Griffin out as head coach of the Milwaukee Bucks. I’ve been having intermittent problems with archive.is again, so here’s the ESPN link as well.
This was his first year coaching (he was hired over the summer) and the team is currently 30-13.
Dave Heeke out as athletic director of the Arizona Wildcats.
(TMQ Watch is about 90% done, and will be going up later. It would be going up now, but I have two breaking news stories to do.)