Obligatory Rhode Island content.

June 13th, 2023

This is actually not quite obligatory. It seems to be a big story in both Little Rhody and Philadelphia (though I think I-95 has knocked it off the front page in the later). And it has been a minute since I used the “Rhode Island” tag.

Two Rhode Island officials visited Philly. They were so rude their state launched two separate investigations.

They went to Philly to visit Bok. Bok is an old vocational school that’s been turned into a “workspace”.

The building, spanning a full city block, is filled with furniture makers, restaurants, tattoo artists, product showrooms, jewelers, videographers, architects, fashion designers, product designers, artists, charitable organizations, and a pre-school — among others — in the previously empty classrooms.

The people behind Bok had made a deal with Rhode Island to re-purpose an old state building. But that was under a previous administration, and now they were trying to convince the current administration in Rhode Island to go ahead with the deal, which was worth $55 million.

Hilarity. Ensued.

Lindsey Scannapieco is a managing partner at Scout, the company behind Bok. David Patten is (or was) the director of the state’s property management division. James Thorsen was the “director of administration”.

But the way the Rhode Island representatives allegedly behaved was so “bizarre, offensive, and unprofessional” that Scannapieco and colleague Everett Abitbol wrote an email to a hired lobbyist documenting all that happened. The email ended up with the governor of Rhode Island.

Here’s the email.

Some highlights from the press coverage:

“A text received at midnight (12:01AM) the night before their visit saying “Please have french coffee (with milk and sugar) and the best croissant in Philadelphia ready for me upon arrival. Director Thorsen likes Diet Coke. Have a cold six pack waiting on the table in your conference room. You have three hours to convince us to give you $55M.”

The group visited the headquarters for Diadora, the Italian sportswear and sneaker company, where an employee offered Patten a pair of sneakers. “Are these made in China?” Patten asked. “I hope not, because I really hate China.” He then turned to an Asian American female staffer in the room and said, “No offense, hun.”

According to the email, there was “…an irate phone call from the US CEO of Diadora, Bryan Poser, at 5:12pm asking us ‘who these people were and why we would have allowed them into his space (with many expletives in between)…He is also married to a Chinese woman and has two half-Chinese children.”

Irwin’s, one of the best restaurants in Philly, is only open for dinner. During the tour, Patten and Thorsen said they wanted to eat lunch there. When Scannapieco told them the restaurant was not open, they said, “Well you can call in a favor if you want $55M in funding.” Scannapieco said she organized a private lunch for them, which she had never done before.

Quote from an earlier article:

About the lunch at Irwin’s, where entrees start at $28 on the dinner menu — and no lunch menu is featured — [Patten] wrote: “Those reading this memo should know that Irwin’s looked like it was vandalized just before our arrival at 11:30 a.m. for lunch.”
“Imagine my surprise when I learned that Bon Appetit magazine rated it one of the top ten restaurants in the United States! The cuisine at Irwin’s did not disappoint. The word ‘understated’ comes to mind.” (The Journal has not yet been able to reach anyone at the restaurant for elaboration on why the dinner-only restaurant opened for lunch.)

“Patten at almost every visit insisted on taking something from the tenant home with him, whether that be vegan cheese, hand blown glass or a pair of sneakers…At each instance of taking something he turned to Thorsen and said something to the extent of “I don’t have to declare this right” in which Thorsen replied ‘its de minimis’.”

Speaking of vegan cheese, they also apparently made “condescending remarks” to the vegan cheese maker and a glass blower: “…there were questions about paying above a minimum wage and shock that these businesses made any money or could pay rent.”

There was also an argument about someone’s dog being overweight. And I’m leaving out the “Mazel tov” conversation. And the vanilla syrup. But I can’t leave this next one out.

In the morning as the tour began, Patten commented on Scannapieco’s appearance, asking her, “Lindsey, where is your husband? Why is he in Australia? Good thing you’re married or I would move to Philadelphia.” He also said, “If I knew your husband wasn’t going to be here, I would have come last night.”

“We will not permit Patten or Thorsen to return to Bok ever again,” the email said. “[We] are shocked at how this reflects on the state of Rhode Island and the lack of competence there.”

Patten is currently on “paid administrative leave” and seems to be attributing his behavior to a mental breakdown. It sounds like he was the main source of the issues. If it really was a mental breakdown (or a substance abuse problem, as some suggested) I hope he makes a full recovery and amends to the folks he hurt. If he’s just a jerk, I hope he has a long unhappy life asking people if they want to supersize that lobster roll.

Thorsen didn’t do anything about Patten, even though people were pulling him to one side and telling him “this s–t needs to stop. NOW.” However, he’s the former director of administration: he resigned before the trip and now works for the Treasury Department. I’m thinking he was probably like honey badger, just don’t care.

It makes me miss the class and sophistication of Buddy Cianci.

Posted in Rhode Island | 2 Comments »

It never fails.

June 13th, 2023

You post the obit watch on your lunch hour. You’re thinking, “Oh, it looks like a slow day. No big news is going to break after lunch.”

Big news breaks after lunch.

Cormac McCarthy obits tomorrow. The NYT‘s current one is a kind of lengthy preliminary one (probably pulled from the files) with the standard “A full obituary will appear shortly.” tag.

Posted in Books, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 13, 2023.

June 13th, 2023

Treat Williams. Tributes. NYT (archived). IMDB.

I hear “Prince of the City” is pretty good. Haven’t seen it yet, but just ordered the blu-ray.

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 12, 2023.

June 12th, 2023

Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian prime minister.

To Italians, Mr. Berlusconi was constant entertainment — both comic and tragic, with more than a touch of off-color material — until they booed him off the stage. But he kept coming back. To economists, he was the man who helped drive the Italian economy into the ground. To political scientists, he represented a bold new experiment in television’s impact on voters. And to tabloid reporters, he was a delicious fount of scandal, gaffes, ribald insults and sexual escapades.

Posted in Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 10, 2023.

June 10th, 2023

Mike Batayeh, actor and comedian. NYT (archived). Other credits include a show I do not acknowledge the existence of, “The Shield”, and “Life”.

Burning in Hell watch: Ted Kaczynski.

His terrorist strategy, and the ideas that he said undergirded it, enjoyed an afterlife few would have predicted in the 1990s.
The Norwegian news media reported that Anders Beivik, who killed dozens of people at government buildings and at a youth summer camp in 2011, lifted passages from Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto in a manifesto of his own. More curious was the way a variety of law-abiding Americans developed an interest in the same line of thought.
In 2017, the deputy editor of the conservative publication First Things, Elliot Milco, credited Mr. Kaczynski with “astute (even prophetic) insights.” In 2021, during an interview with the businessman and politician Andrew Yang, Tucker Carlson cited Mr. Kaczynski’s thinking in detail without any prompting.
Online, young people with a variety of partisan allegiances, or none at all, have developed an intricate vocabulary of half-ironic Unabomber support. They proclaim themselves “anti-civ” or #tedpilled; they refer to “Uncle Ted.” Videos on TikTok of Unabomber-related songs, voice-overs and dances have acquired millions of views, according to a 2021 article in The Baffler.

Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser, and Gilbert Murray were unavailable for comment.

The lobbyist, Gilbert Murray, was married with two children. He was so mutilated in the blast that his family was permitted to see him only from the knees down as a farewell.

Posted in Explosives, Law, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 9, 2023.

June 9th, 2023

James G. Watt, former Secretary of the Interior and notorious Beach Boys hater.

As planning for the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall began, Mr. Watt said that pop-music groups retained in recent years had attracted “the wrong element” — presumably young people drinking and taking drugs. The Mall’s most prominent band had been the Beach Boys, popular since the 1960s.
Mr. Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist who did not smoke or drink alcohol, proposed the Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton, whose signature song was “Danke Schoen,” and military bands, saying they would better represent the patriotic, family-oriented themes he preferred.

…

After leaving the government, Mr. Watt was a lobbyist for builders seeking contracts from the Department of Housing and Urban Development from 1984 to 1986. In 1995, he was charged with 25 counts of perjury and obstructing justice by a federal grand jury investigating fraud and influence-peddling during his lobbying at HUD. But the prosecution’s case deteriorated, the felony charges were dropped and he pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor and was sentenced to a $5,000 fine and 500 hours of community service.

Carroll Cooley, historical and legal footnote, has passed away at 87.

Mr. Cooley was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department. In that capacity, he was the person who took Ernesto Miranda’s original confession.

He wasn’t handcuffed because he was not yet under arrest, Detective Cooley said during a speaking engagement in 2016 quoted in an article in The Arizona Republic, and he wasn’t told that he needed a lawyer because there was no legal requirement to do so.

…

The Miranda case was by far the most significant of Detective Cooley’s law enforcement career. Mr. Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping by a Superior Court jury in June 1963; the conviction was upheld nearly two years later by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that his confession was admissible despite his not having had a lawyer present.
In late 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review four cases, including Mr. Miranda’s, in which indigent men had confessed after being interrogated. The next year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Fifth Amendment required the police to advise suspects that they had the right to remain silent once they were in custody and to have an attorney present during interrogations. The rights, almost from the day of the decision, became known as the Miranda warning.
Mr. Miranda’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, but he was retried on rape and kidnapping charges and found guilty again in 1967. (The confession was not used in that trial.) He was paroled in 1972 and stabbed to death four years later in a barroom fight. After his death, it was reported that he had been trading on his legal celebrity by selling Miranda warning cards for $1.50 each.

…

In 1976, he defended his actions in the Miranda case to The Republic, saying that Mr. Miranda’s confession had been written voluntarily and that Mr. Miranda knew his rights.
“He was not un-knowledgeable about his rights,” he said. “He was an ex-convict and served a year in prison” — for auto theft — “and had been through the routine before.”

Noreen Nash, actress. Other credits include the original “Dragnet” TV series, “77 Sunset Strip”, and ‘Yancy Derringer”.

On the advice of her son, she decided to quit show biz in 1962 and went back to study, enrolling at UCLA and graduating in 1971 with a Bachelor’s Degree in history. In 1980, she published her first novel, ‘By Love Fulfilled’, set in the 16th century and following the life of a physician at the court of Catherine de Medici. This was followed by ‘Agnès Sorel, Mistress of Beauty’ in 2013 and an autobiographical work of recollections, ‘Titans of the Muses: When Henry Miller Met Jean Renoir’ in 2015.

Posted in Books, Cops, History, Law, Movies, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 8, 2023.

June 8th, 2023

Pat Robertson.

George Winston, of Windham Hill fame.

…His 1994 record, “Forest,” won a Grammy Award for best new age album — a category that was relatively new at the time — and he was nominated four other times.
Those nominations were evidence of the range of his musical interests. Two — for “Plains” (1999) and “Montana: A Love Story” (2004) — were for best new age album, but he was also nominated for best recording for children for “The Velveteen Rabbit” (1984; Meryl Streep provided the narration) and for best pop instrumental album for “Night Divides the Day: The Music of the Doors” (2002).
Mr. Winston recorded two albums of the music of Vince Guaraldi, the jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated “Peanuts” television specials. In 2012, he released “George Winston: Harmonica Solos,” and in 1983 he created his own label, Dancing Cat Records, to record practitioners of Hawaiian slack-key guitar, a genre he particularly admired.

…

Mr. Winston knew his music wasn’t for everyone, and he was self-deprecating about that.
“One person’s punk rock is another person’s singing ‘Om’ or playing harp,” he told The Santa Cruz Sentinel of California in 1982. “It’s all valid — everybody’s got their own path. I wouldn’t want to sit around and listen to me all day.”

NYT obit for The Iron Sheik (archived).

NYT obit for Barry Newman (archived).

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, Religion, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 7, 2023.

June 7th, 2023

Hossein Khosrow Ali Vazir.

He was better known under his professional wrestling name, The Iron Sheik.

Edited to add: THR.

He was a great admirer of his country’s most famous Olympic wrestler, Gholamreza Takhti. When Takhti was found dead of an apparent suicide in his hotel room in early 1968, theories circulated that he had been murdered, spurring Vaziri to leave the country.
“If Iran is no good for Gholamreza Takhti, the greatest champion we had, Iran is never going to be good for me. So I decided to come to America,” he said.

…

But in 1976, he married Minnesota native Caryl Peterson. Their best man at the wedding was wrestling announcer “Mean” Gene Okerlund — or “Gene Mean,” as he would call him during interviews.

I wasn’t originally planning to link the obits for Andrew Bellucci, NYC pizza guy, because they seemed excessively local.

But the NYT obit (archived) is…interesting. Mr. Bellucci had a colorful history.

Although he had 18 pizzas on the menu, three kinds of dough and any number of toppings, two aspects of his trade preoccupied Mr. Bellucci above all. One was what Mr. Katakis called “a borderline lunacy” about dough. The other was clam pizza.
“Other people put clam pie on the menu but nobody’s that meticulous,” Mr. Katakis said. “He figured out that the clams were going on the pizza cold, so he figured he should sous vide them,” heating them in a hot-water circulator for 45 seconds before baking.
Mr. Bellucci was preparing clam pizzas as a surprise for some guests when he died.

I like seafood, and I’m fond of clams. Clam pizza is a little hard to get in Texas, though: Home Slice Pizza does it, and I’ve had it once, but I haven’t been able to make it back since. Plus nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded. And clam pizza is a hard sell for the rest of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.

Posted in Food, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 6, 2023.

June 6th, 2023

Astrud Gilberto, of “The Girl From Ipanema” fame.

Jim Hines. He set a world record by running the 100 meter dash in 9.95 seconds at the 1968 Olympics: that record stood for 15 years.

Roger Craig, noted split-fingered fastball pitcher.

Bobby Bolin, former pitcher for the Giants (also the Brewers and the Red Sox).

Bolin made his MLB debut in 1961 and was on the 1962 pennant-winning Giants, appearing in two games in the World Series against the Yankees, a series San Francisco would lose in seven games.
The sidearmer went a career-best 14-6 in 1965.
The following season he set career-highs with 10 complete games and four shutouts despite a pedestrian 11-10 record.

Mike the Musicologist sent over an obit for Kaija Saariaho, composer. He says some of her late works are appealing: I am unfamiliar with them myself.

George Riddle, actor. Other credits include “Arthur” and “The Trial of Standing Bear”.

Burning in Hell watch: Robert Hanssen, notorious spy.

Posted in Cops, FBI, Law, Movies, Music, Sports, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

Many small bloodsucking insects.

June 5th, 2023

I usually don’t like to cover politics here, even Texas politics, because it tends to drive me up a tree.

In this case, I haven’t seen anyone else pick up on this, and it’s an interesting story.

The Texas Legislature has eliminated annual safety inspections for cars, starting in 2025.

The Libertarian side of me thinks this is swell: as far as it was concerned, the annual inspection didn’t do much of anything except put money in the pockets of certified state inspection stations for “adjusting your headlights” and “replacing your wiper blades”.

“This will make the roads more dangerous. I’m sure you guys have thought about that. I could also talk about the small businesses that will be put out of business and many people will have to be fired and lose their job,” owner of San Antonio-based Official Inspection Station Charissa Barnes said. “If this bill passes, then it would destroy our inspection industry, right in the middle of us bringing on emissions testing.”

The less Libertarian side of me is skeptical for a few reasons. While I think most people are motivated not to drive with bad tires and brakes, and those kind of things can be picked up when you take your car in for an oil change anyway, there probably are some folks who got some warning out of the annual inspection process. Then again, the people who did drive with bad brakes and bad tires probably would be driving even if they didn’t have an inspection or registration, and these days the odds of getting caught seem to be slim.

If safety is really a concern, the insurance companies can start requiring a “voluntary” inspection: you get a discount if you get your car inspected yearly at an approved facility. Or even better, no inspection, no insurance. Worst case, you go through the assigned risk pool.

Secondly, this doesn’t eliminate the state inspection fee: the state is still going to make you pay $7.50 (or $16.75 if it is a new car) as part of the annual registration.

Also, if your car is registered in one of the areas that requires emissions testing (that includes Travis, Williamson, and Harris counties, among others: full list in the article) you still have to get your car emissions tested before you can register it. (There’s an exception for cars that are 25 or more years old: I managed to get out of emissions testing for a few years before my old Honda blew a head gasket.)

I thought most states still required at least a safety inspection, but I was wrong, according to Wikipedia: “Fifteen states have a periodic (annual or biennial) safety inspection program, while Maryland requires a safety inspection and Alabama requires a VIN inspection on sale or transfer of vehicles which were previously registered in another state.”

Interestingly, Louisiana requires a safety inspection, and “New Orleans requires a “brake tag”. In addition to the state requirements, if the vehicle is registered in New Orleans, the brakes must be tested annually with a short stop test.”

Must be fun to get your car inspected in the Big Easy.

Posted in Cars, Politics, Roads, Safety, Texas, Travis County, WillCo | 2 Comments »

Happy anniversary!

June 4th, 2023

Today is the 49th anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night.

If you happen to live in the Cleveland area, Collision Bend Brewery is offering ten cent beers from 2:00 PM to 2:48 PM Cleveland time, with a maximum of two per customer. So you’ve got about two hours to hie yourself over there.

While we look forward to reliving an epic TEN CENT BEER NIGHT, we have all seen how terribly things can go with one too many ten cent beers. Please note, this will not be a bench clearing brawl… there will be no bottle throwing, no chair tossing, and no fists flying. Let’s leave that to the replays on the television. Please drink responsibly and leave your fighting pants at home.

Sadly, I don’t have any fighting pants. Anyone know where I can get some? 5.11 makes good tough pants, maybe those will work. Or some of those fire hose pants from Duluth Trading Company?

I won’t be able to make it for this year’s celebration, anyway. But the thought of going up to Cleveland, visiting relatives, and being there for next year’s 50th anniversary is tempting…the month of June is going to be jam-packed with activities, however, and I’m not sure if that’s something I can afford yet.

Posted in Clothing, Pants, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 4, 2023.

June 4th, 2023

Barry Newman, actor.

Other credits include “City on Fire” (the 1979 TV movie), “Murder, She Wrote”, “Get Smart”, and “Quincy, M.E.” (which is worth calling out: he was actually the star in the weird final episode of the series, “The Cutting Edge”, which was an unsuccessful backdoor pilot).

Posted in Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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