Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.

February 15th, 2023

If I had thought about it, I would have prepared a longer post. However, I’ve been distracted by other projects, and would have completely missed this if it wasn’t for McThag.

125 years ago today, on February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor.

Interesting note from Wikipedia (I know, I know):

Maine is described as an armored cruiser or second-class battleship, depending on the source. Commissioned in 1895, she was the first U.S. Navy ship to be named after the state of Maine. Maine and the similar battleship Texas were both represented as an advance in American warship design, reflecting the latest European naval developments. Both ships had two gun turrets staggered en échelon, and full sailing masts were omitted due to the increased reliability of steam engines. Due to a protracted 9-year construction period, Maine and Texas were obsolete by the time of completion. Far more advanced vessels were either in service or nearing completion that year.

(Edited to add: I should clarify, since this is a little confusing: the “Texas” above is the 1892 USS Texas, not the 1914 USS Texas.)

Side note: one of the tour guides at the Texas made an interesting comment, and I’d like to do more research on this. In brief, the Germans pioneered modern welding.

Because of arms limitation treaties after WWI, the weight of battleships was limited. If you rivet battleship plates together, you have to overlap the plates. But if you weld battleship plates, you can basically butt the plates together rather than overlapping. This allows you to use less plate. Less plate means bigger battleship within the weight limitations.

I’d really like to find some good sources on welding history. I think that’d be a technically interesting area to explore.

Anyway, remembering the Maine: somewhere I have what I believe is a first edition of Rickover’s How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed. (Affiliate link goes to a Naval Institute Press reprint edition.)

Edited to add 2: Thanks to valued commenter Chuck Pergiel for providing a link to his post on the Maine.

Drachinfel. This one is short:

The USS New Jersey. This is a little under 30 minutes.

Posted in History, Ships | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 14, 2023.

February 14th, 2023

Conrad Dobler, NFL guard.

Over a 10-year NFL career, Dobler embraced his role as protector, joining forces with the likes of future Hall of Famer Dan Dierdorf to form one of the best offensive lines in history on the “Cardiac Cardinals.” In 1975, they surrendered just eight sacks — then a league record — with Dobler embracing the task of keeping QB Jim Hart upright, no matter the means.

…

A fifth-round pick out of Wyoming in 1972 — undersized at 6-foot-3 and 254 pounds — Dobler made three straight Pro Bowls from 1975-77 with St. Louis before spending the final two seasons of his career with the Saints and Bills.

ESPN:

On July 25, 1977, Dobler made the cover of Sports Illustrated with the title “Pro Football’s Dirtiest Player.”
Stories about the feisty offensive lineman included him punching Joe Greene, spitting on Bill Bergey and kicking Merlin Olsen in the head.
“I’ll do anything I can get away with to protect my quarterback,” Dobler told the magazine.

Austin Majors, actor. I used to watch re-runs of “NYPD Blue” in syndication, and I remember him playing “Theo Sipowicz”.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: February 13, 2023.

February 13th, 2023

Hugh Hudson, director. IMDB.

Cody Longo, actor. Other credits include “CSI: Original Recipe”, “CSI: NY”, and “Piranha 3D”.

NYT obit for Solomon Perel (also known as “Shlomo”), whose death was previously noted in this space.

David Jolicoeur of De La Soul.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Administrative update.

February 9th, 2023

The list of Austin City Council members has been updated.

It will, I hope, stay that way for the next five minutes or so.

I’ve included staff information when and where it is available. Which led me to note: notorious gun-grabber Ed Scruggs is now the “Constituent Director & Policy Aide” for District 8 council member/mayor pro tem Paige Ellis.

I encourage folks to be polite and respectful in their communications with these folks. Next up: the Travis County Commissioners, then the Congressional reps. Maybe I can get those done this weekend? We’ll see.

(I’ve made some good progress on part 2 of “Day of the .45”, but I still need to take photos, do some proofreading, and triple-check my sources. I might get to the photos this weekend, but again, we’ll see.)

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

Posted in Admin, Austin, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 9, 2023.

February 9th, 2023

Burt Bacharach. THR.

Noted:

Mr. Bacharach met Ms. Warwick at a recording session for the Drifters that included “Mexican Divorce” and “Please Stay,” two songs he wrote with the lyricist Bob Hilliard. Hearing Ms. Warwick, a backup singer, Mr. Bacharach realized he had found the rare vocalist with the technical prowess to negotiate his rangy, fiercely difficult melodies, with their tricky time signatures and extended asymmetrical phrases.

Albert Okura. You may not have heard of him, but the obit is interesting. He built a chicken empire (Juan Pollo), opened an “unofficial” McDonald’s museum, and worked on historic preservation along the old Route 66.

In addition to the McDonald’s museum, which is packed with memorabilia, he founded and supported a veterans museum near his corporate headquarters; distributed chicken dinners free to social gatherings and civic groups; and subsidized local Veterans Day parades and Christmas toy drives.

…

The Roy of Amboy’s famous Googie-style “Roy’s” gas station sign, erected in 1959, was Roy Crowl, who opened the service station in 1938 and with his first wife, Velma, owned the town. It was home to about 200 people in the 1940s when Mr. Crowl teamed up with Herman Burris, known as Buster, who married Roy’s daughter Betty. Together they added a motel and cafe.
Mr. Burris sold the town in 1998. The two investors who had previously arranged to rent it out for photo shoots and movie locations bought it outright, but lost it in a foreclosure by Mr. Burris’s widow. She sold it and several hundred acres of adjacent desert to Mr. Okura, who promised to reopen Roy’s and restore the town.
“The more I looked into Amboy, the more I realized there’s no other place like this,” Mr. Okura told The New York Times in 2007.
The gas station reopened in 2008, and its balky sign was lit again in 2019.

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 8, 2023.

February 8th, 2023

Ted Bell, author. He wrote spy thrillers featuring the “Alex Hawke” character, and wrote a couple of YA time-travel historical novels featuring “Nick McIver”.

He wasn’t someone I’ve read, but I do recall seeing his books in the supermarket racks: as I’ve noted before, that’s always a good sign of success for a writer.

Charlie Thomas, Drifter. But not one of the original Drifters:

Mr. Thomas became a Drifter by chance. He was singing with the Crowns, an R&B group, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1958 when they came to the attention of George Treadwell, the manager of the original Drifters, who were also on the bill.
After one of the Drifters got drunk and cursed out the owner of the Apollo and the promoter of the show, the music historian Marv Goldberg wrote, Mr. Treadwell, who owned the name, fired all its members and replaced them with members of the Crowns, including Mr. Thomas and Ben Nelson, who would later be known as Ben E. King, and rechristened them the Drifters.

This is not to say that he wasn’t talented or successful:

Mr. King had written “There Goes My Baby” for Mr. Thomas to sing. But Mr. Thomas froze at the studio microphone, according to Billy Vera’s liner notes for “Rockin’ and Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (1996), and Mr. King took over. The song rose to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959.
The hits continued for several years, as the Drifters became one of the most successful groups of the era. They followed “There Goes My Baby” with songs like “This Magic Moment,” “Up on the Roof,” “Under the Boardwalk,” “On Broadway” and “Saturday Night at the Movies.” “Save the Last Dance for Me” was their only song to reach No. 1.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 6, 2023.

February 6th, 2023

Charles Kimbrough.

Ignoring “Murphy Brown” for the moment, he was also in the original Broadway casts of both “Company” and “Sunday in the Park With George”, among other theater credits.

Interesting side note: in 2002, he married Beth Howland, who was also in the original Broadway cast of “Company”.

Pervez Musharraf, former ruler of Pakistan.

Harry Whittington, most famous as the man Dick Cheney shot.

As a lawyer and investor, Mr. Whittington was a fierce proponent of property rights. He repeatedly questioned the city of Austin’s use of eminent domain to acquire private property — some of it his own — for public purposes.

…

In 1979, Gov. Bill Clements appointed Mr. Whittington to the Texas Corrections Board (now the Board of Criminal Justice), where he was the only Republican on a nine-member panel that had tended to rubber-stamp everything prison managers wanted.
“It was time for somebody to question,” Mr. Whittington said in an interview with The Austin American-Statesman. “There was no other way I knew how to do it.”
He uncovered secrets that stunned him: drug-running by prison officials, no-bid contracts, families paying off guards to protect their loved ones. At meetings, he asked hard questions.
His tenacity led to the creation of a separate unit for developmentally disabled prisoners and an end to wardens’ using prisoners to punish other inmates.

Lawrence emailed an obit for Shlomo Perel, Holocaust survivor with an interesting story.

So this man poses as an Aryan in order to appease the insane, fanatical Nazi Herrenrasse machine, becomes a Nazi translator, is conscripted into the Hitler Youth, and then joins the German military. That’s a fraught path to take.

Fred Terna, also a Holocaust survivor. He became famous for abstract art inspired by his experience.

Mr. Terna’s art became his Holocaust testimony. In acrylic works like “In the Likeness of Fire” and “An Echo of Cinders,” he painted in reds, yellows, oranges and blues to illustrate the flames that incinerated Jews in crematories. In some paintings, he used sand pebbles to represent ashes.
“I know how the fire of a crematorium chimney casts flickering light on a barrack wall,” he wrote in 1984 for the Berman Archive at Stanford University, which documents American Jewish communities. “How does one paint the near certainty of violent personal annihilation? How does one paint, and then make a viewer want to stop, to look at a canvas, to react to it?”

I know that some people would like for me to include photos. Pretty much all of the time, the obits I link to include photos. I’ve always generally assumed that, if you were that interested in the obit, you’d click through to the link, and including photos here would make these entries longer (and possibly infringe on intellectual property rights). I am trying to make more of an effort to link to archived articles, so people don’t have to navigate paywalls.

What do you guys think? Am I wrong about this?

Posted in Art, History, Nazis, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: February 4, 2023.

February 4th, 2023

Melinda Dillon.

Other credits include “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar”, “Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story”, and “Captain America” (the 1990 one).

George R. Robertson. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, the 1990 “War of the Worlds” TV movie, and “The Mad Trapper”.

Paco Rabanne, fashion designer.

John Adams. This one was a legendary Cleveland baseball fan, noted for banging a drum at games since 1973.

Mr. Adams’s drumming was heard at more than 3,700 home games, first at Cleveland Municipal Stadium and then, starting in 1994, at Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field). Stationed deep in the bleachers, he steadily urged the team on by rhythmically banging his drum with two mallets.
“Football has its bands and its cheerleaders, and all of them help get into the spirit of the game,” Mr. Adams told The Akron Beacon Journal in 1983, explaining his long-running stadium gig. “Baseball has nothing, so I thought of the war drum thing for the Indians.”
His status as a superfan was acknowledged when the team gave away bobblehead figures of him with a drum and movable arms at a home game in 2006. Six years later, Great Lakes Brewing introduced Rally Drum Red Ale in his honor.
And last year, on the 49th anniversary of Mr. Adams’s first performance at a game, he was inducted into the Guardians’ Distinguished Hall of Fame as a nonuniformed contributor. That group also includes Bill Veeck and Richard E. Jacobs, two of the team’s former owners.

…

“Suddenly, I saw people clapping to the beat,” he recalled. “When the game was over, people stopped me outside the stadium. They told me I had the opposing pitcher so rattled that guys from the other team were looking all over for me.” The Indians beat the Texas Rangers that day, 11-5.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Mount Washington ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids…

February 4th, 2023

…in fact, it’s cold as hell.

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington felt more like Mars than planet Earth on Friday as wind chills dipped below an unfathomable minus 110 degrees, a new record for the coldest wind chill ever recorded in the US.
Known for having some of the world’s worst weather, Mount Washington saw air temperatures plummet to minus 46 degrees with wind speeds averaging over 100 miles per hour with gusts over 125 miles per hour as the artic air mass wreaked havoc Friday, according to the Mount Washington observatory.

…

Meanwhile on Mars, temperatures on the surface this week reached a balmy high of 16 degrees with a low of minus 105, according to NASA. The space agency said temperatures of the red planet can fluctuate between minus 225 and 70 degrees.

This goes out to FotB RoadRich:

Nimbus the cat, who lives in the observatory with staffers, was reportedly cozied up and unbothered by the deadly storm, despite being a bit grumpy from taking his flea medication.
“He is actually sleeping through most of this event,” Tarasiewciz said.

Posted in Bagatelle, Mammals | 2 Comments »

Bagatelle (#78).

February 3rd, 2023

Shot:

New York to feel like a below-zero Arctic hell amid Northeast cold spell

…

New York will be hit with dangerously cold conditions this weekend, as an Arctic blast threatens most of the Northeast and puts residents in some areas at risk of getting frostbite in as little as three minutes.

Chaser:

Posted in Bagatelle | Comments Closed

Apologies.

February 3rd, 2023

I apologize for the radio silence the past couple of days.

The power at our house went out shortly before 7 AM (CT) on Wednesday and is still not restored at the time of this writing.

I was thinking it’d be back on sometime on Wednesday. Then I was thinking sometime on Thursday.

I’ve gone into the office this morning to get work done and things charged. I managed to keep the cell phones charged up by tapping the battery on my laptop, but I ran that down to 2% before I got into the office. I have a UPS protecting the network equipment at the house (cable modem/router/issued work from home gear) but it feels like the same event that took out the power also took out Spectrum internet in our area, so I couldn’t get an Internet connection anyway. And by now, the UPS is fully discharged (though it will run for about five hours with all that crap connected to it).

AUSTIN, Texas – Austin Energy says there is no timeline for system-wide power restorations, after saying on Wednesday it could be restored by Friday evening.

To be clear about this, the issue is not an ERCOT/power grid problem, like it was a while back. This is just simply ice accumulation on power lines bringing them down, and ice accumulation on trees causing limbs to fall and take out power lines.

Edited to add: power restored at our house at about 1 PM CT today. So that’s about 54 hours without electricity, by my reckoning.

Posted in Admin | 3 Comments »

What goes with fajitas?

January 31st, 2023

Chicken wings, of course!

Remember a few years back, we had a guy busted for stealing $1.2 million worth of fajita meat in Cameron County?

The food service director of an impoverished Illinois school district was charged with stealing $1.5 million of food — most of which was chicken wings.

…

The station reported that Liddell ordered more than 11,000 cases of chicken wings for the district with school funds, but took all the poultry for herself.
“The food was never brought to the school or provided to the students,” court records claimed.

…

The auditor “discovered individual invoices signed by Liddell for massive quantities of chicken wings, an item that was never served to students because they contain bones,” prosecutors said.
The food service provider employees all knew Liddell by name “due to the massive amount of chicken wings she would purchase,” prosecutors said, according to WGN.

Posted in Food, Law | Comments Closed

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