Frank Mansfield, call your office, please.
January 18th, 2023Firings watch.
January 17th, 2023Day of the .45, part 1. (Random gun crankery)
January 16th, 2023Before I get too far into this, I want to say: McThag is responsible for this. I don’t “blame” him, but he is responsible (as he noted in a previous post), and I owe him a very public “thank you” for this. So: thank you, Angus McThag. I also owe you a beer or three if we’re ever in the same place at the same time.
After the jump, an explanation of why McThag is responsible, as well as some background and pictures. I’m doing a jump because I expect this to be long, there will be pictures, and a lot of background for my readers who are not People of the Gun…
Obit watch: January 16, 2023.
January 16th, 2023A 1955 film, “La Donna Più Bella del Mondo” (“The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” — a term some in Hollywood came to use about Ms. Lollobrigida herself), released in the United States as “Beautiful but Dangerous,” brought Ms. Lollobrigida her first major acting award: the David di Donatello, Italy’s equivalent of the Oscar. She won the Donatello twice more, for “Venere Imperial” (1962), in a tie with Silvana Mangano, and for “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” in a tie with Monica Vitti.
Ms. Lollobrigida was always considered more a sex symbol than a serious actress — at least by the American press — but she was also nominated for a BAFTA award as best foreign actress in “Pane, Amore e Fantasia” (1953). She received Golden Globe nominations for “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell” in 1969 and for a recurring role on the prime-time television soap “Falcon Crest” in 1985.
Al Brown. Other credits include “12 Monkeys” (the Gilliam film, not the TV series), “Forensic Files”, “The F.B.I. Files”, and something called “Fartcopter”.
Charles White, 1979 Heisman Trophy winner with U.S.C.
White, who went on to play eight seasons in the N.F.L., was part of U.S.C.’s lineage of elite running backs, four of whom also won the Heisman: Marcus Allen, O.J. Simpson, Mike Garrett and Reggie Bush. White’s 6,245 rushing yards exceed the 4,810 gained by Allen, who ranks second on U.S.C.’s all-time list.
White was not especially big or fast; rather than elude defenders, he bulled his way through them. And he was a workhorse: In 1978, he rushed 374 times (65 more than anyone else in the N.C.A.A.’s top ranks) for 1,859 yards. The next year he ran for 2,050.
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White was chosen by the Cleveland Browns in the first round of the N.F.L. draft in 1980, but in four seasons, he never rushed for more than 342 yards. After he was released by the Browns, he was signed by the Rams, who were then coached by Robinson, for the 1985 season.
His first two seasons with the Rams were uneventful, but he was spectacular in 1987, carrying the ball 324 times for a league-leading 1,374 yards and 11 touchdowns. However, the season was tainted by a 24-day players’ strike, during which games were played largely by nonunion replacements for three weeks. White was one of a group of players who crossed the union’s picket lines.
He started the 1988 season serving his four-game suspension and never regained his starting job. He gained only 323 yards that year, and Greg Bell led the Rams with 1,212 rushing yards.
He also struggled with substance abuse and dementia (possibly caused by CTE). He was 64 and died of esophageal cancer.
Brief note on film.
January 16th, 2023The management of this theater suggests that, for the greater entertainment of your friends who have not yet seen the picture, you will not divulge to anyone the secret of the ending of Witness for the Prosecution.
Don’t worry. I’m not going to give away the ending.
The Saturday Movie Group did watch Witness, though. I had never seen the movie until now, and one thing I did not realize until we got settled in:
Witness for the Prosecution is hilarious.
This is unusual, for a documentary about the treatment of cardiac patients in the late 1950s British court procedural. Make no mistake: it is a drama, with high stakes, but it also sparkles with wit and sharp writing. RoadRich compared it to a good episode of “M*A*S*H” and I kind of agree.
In particular, the interplay between Sir Wilfrid Robarts Q.C. (Charles Laughton) and Miss Plimsoll (Elsa Lanchester) is a delight. The nurse and the barrister play off each other well. (Of course, the screenplay by Billy Wilder, Larry Marcus, and Harry Kurnitz helps with that. While Witness is based on a 1953 play written by Agatha Christie, the entire Robarts/Plimsoll relationship was added for the movie.)
(And a bit of triva I did not realize until I looked up Laughton: he was married to Elsa Lanchester, which may explain why they had such great on-screen chemistry. They met in 1927, when they were cast in the same play, married in 1929, and stayed together until Laughton’s death in 1962.)
Spoiler free clip of my favorite bit from the movie. While the full clip is 3:10, the part that had me in stitches is in the first 20 seconds.
I commend Witness for the Prosecution to your attention, especially if you wait for one of Kino Lorber’s periodic sales. I think I paid $9.99 for the blu-ray.
Murder, he wrote.
January 15th, 2023As best as I can determine, Elizabeth Short was murdered either on January 14 or 15, 1947: it isn’t clear which day.
So I can claim that this is timely: “Black Dahlia: On the Anniversary of Elizabeth Short’s Murder, a Guide for the Hasty Reporter“, by Larry Harnisch. This is a re-run of an article originally published in the LAT, but now paywalled.
And as an extra bonus for you, freshly posted, and featuring Mr. Harnisch himself:
Obit watch: January 14, 2023.
January 14th, 2023Robbie Knievel, daredevil and Evel’s son. He was 60: pancreatic cancer got him.
In one of his best known jumps, in 1989, Mr. Knievel, decked out in a star-spangled, white-leather suit, vaulted 150 feet over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. It was a kind of tribute to Evel Knievel, who had cleared the same fountains in 1967, only to land in a bone-breaking crash that horrified viewers.
“When I made the jump and said, ‘That was for you, Dad,’ he ran up and hugged me, with tears in his eyes,” the son recalled years later. “I had never seen him so emotional.”
Robbie Bachman, of Bachman-Turner Overdrive.
Hannes Keller, one of the pioneers of deep diving.
On December 3, 1962, he dived down 1,000 feet.
Mr. Keller and his expedition partner, Peter Small, a journalist and a veteran diver, knew that critical to the mission would be how well the gas they breathed mitigated the possibility of getting “the bends” — the potentially deadly decompression sickness caused when bubbles of nitrogen form in divers’ bodies during rapid ascents.
Mr. Keller enlisted the help of a cardiopulmonary specialist in Zurich and an IBM computer to conceive a secret formula of oxygen, nitrogen and helium, as well as a plan to dispense it at different mixtures at different depths.
The descent, on Dec. 3, 1962, went well — “Anybody can go down,” Mr. Keller told Life magazine in 1961 — but when Mr. Keller exited the Atlantis on the floor of the Pacific Ocean to plant Swiss and American flags, his breathing hoses became entangled with them. He dropped the flags and returned to the vessel. But he started to feel dizzy and soon fell unconscious. So did Mr. Small.
When the mission’s operations crew was pulling up the vessel, they saw the unconscious men on a television feed and sent two divers to investigate. One of them was able to shut the vessel’s hatch after cutting away a piece of Mr. Keller’s flipper, which had become stuck between the door and its frame, allowing pressure to build inside the bell. The other diver went missing. His body was never found.
Mr. Keller revived while still inside the bell. Mr. Small woke up, too, but he was weak, thirsty and sleepy, and eventually Mr. Keller had to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Mr. Small died of decompression sickness before he could be transported to a hospital.
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Despite the deaths on that dive, Mr. Keller and Dr. Albert Buhlmann, the cardiopulmonary specialist who had helped Mr. Keller design his gas mixture, signed a contract in 1964 with Shell International Petroleum to continue their research.
“Hannes Keller’s prominence in the world of deep diving was relatively brief but definitely bold,” Mr. Hellwarth said in an email. “His thousand-foot dive turned into a Houdini-like spectacle, unfortunately with disastrous consequences.”
Mr. Keller moved on. In the late 1960s, he and a business partner, Hans Hess, developed a deep-sea diving suit and an aerodynamic ski-racing suit. Over the next few decades he started a line of computers, developed software programs and created an online art and photo museum.
He was also “a classical pianist who occasionally appeared in concert”, but I’ll leave that story for the reader.
Obit watch: January 13, 2023.
January 13th, 2023Paul Johnson, noted conservative British historian.
A writer of immense range and output, capable of 6,000 words a day when in harness, Mr. Johnson modeled his career after earlier English men of letters, like Thomas Babington Macaulay and G.K. Chesterton. With an affable prose style and supreme confidence in his own opinions, he was happy to deliver forceful judgments on almost anything: the tangled politics of the Middle East, his personal quest for God or the cultural meaning of the Spice Girls.
The author or the editor of more than 50 books, Mr. Johnson alternated between large histories (of Christianity, Judaism, England, the United States, the middle years of the 20th century, art) and slim biographies of eminences from the ancient or more immediate past (Socrates, Jesus, Edward III, Elizabeth I, George Washington, Mozart, Napoleon, Darwin, Churchill, Eisenhower, Pope John XXIII.)
Writing more for a popular audience than for the approval of specialists, he filtered his wide reading through an ethical lens. As a historian, he looked back to the Victorians, for whom readable prose was as crucial as archival research, and, like those old-fashioned moralists, he was fond of hierarchies. Whether the subject was Renaissance sculptors or American humorists, no era, nation, religion, politician, event, building or piece of art or music was safe from his need to compare and rank.
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Lawrence emailed an obit for William Consovoy, prominent lawyer.
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Mr. Consovoy often led the charge in attacking existing laws in court or defending new ones. In 2020 alone, he argued against an extension of the deadline for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin, the re-enfranchisement of felons in Florida and a California plan to send absentee ballots to all registered voters.
He was equally involved in efforts to strike down affirmative action by colleges and universities. He played a supporting role in Fisher v. the University of Texas, a case that originated in 2008 and came before the Supreme Court twice. In both instances, the university successfully defended its plan to automatically admit in-state students who had graduated in the top 10 percent of their class.
Mr. Consovoy then worked closely with Mr. Blum on cases against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, arguing that their affirmative action programs — and, by extension, college and university affirmative action programs generally — were unconstitutional.
Those cases, brought on behalf of Students for Fair Admissions, an organization that Mr. Blum founded, reached the Supreme Court last fall. By then, Mr. Consovoy was too ill to argue them himself, so two of his partners did instead. The court is widely expected to decide in favor of Students for Fair Admissions before the end of the term, most likely in June.
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Lisa Marie Presley. THR. Pitchfork.
Constantine II, Olympic gold medalist (sailing, 1960) and the last king of Greece.
A lot of this took place shortly before or shortly after I was born, but it’s an interesting story I was previously not aware of.
…public support faded after he tried to influence Greek politics, machinations that led to the collapse of the newly-elected centrist government of Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou.
Constantine appointed a series of defectors from Mr. Papandreou’s party as prime minister without holding elections, a widely unpopular chain of events that became known as “the Apostasy.”
The increasing instability culminated in a coup led by a group of army colonels in 1967, considered one of the darkest moments in Greece’s modern history. It set off seven years of a brutal dictatorship for which many Greeks still blame the former king.
Constantine initially accepted the junta before attempting a counter-coup in December of the same year. When it failed, he was forced to flee to Rome, where he spent the first years of his exile.
After the dictatorship ended in 1974, Greece’s new government called a referendum on the monarchy, and 69 percent of Greeks voted to abolish it. The vote effectively deposed Constantine and ended a monarchy that had ruled Greece since 1863, except for the period from 1924 to 1935, when it was first abolished and then restored.
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His relationship with the Greek authorities after his dethroning remained prickly. In 1994, the Socialist government passed a law stripping him of his nationality and expropriating the former royal family’s property. Constantine took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, which in 2002 ordered Greece to pay him and his family nearly $15 million in compensation, a fraction of what he had sought. He accused the government of acting “unjustly and vindictively.”
“They treat me sometimes as if I’m their enemy,” he said in 2002. “I am not the enemy. I consider it the greatest insult in the world for a Greek to be told that he is not a Greek.”
The former king could have regained a Greek passport by adopting a surname, which the government demanded that he do to acknowledge that he was no longer king. But he insisted on being called only Constantine, and continued to cast himself as king and his children as princes and princesses.
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In 1964, he married Princess Anne-Marie of Denmark, who became queen.
She survives him, as do their five children: Alexia, Pavlos, Nikolaos, Theodora and Philippos; nine grandchildren; and two sisters, Sofia, the former queen of Spain, and former Princess Irene.
Obit watch: January 12, 2023.
January 12th, 2023I find it difficult to write about music: I just don’t know enough. Perhaps one of my commenters will have something more to say about Mr. Beck.
Dorothy Tristan. Other credits include “Fear on Trial”, “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”, and “Rollercoaster”.
Carole Cook. Other credits include “The Gauntlet”, “Quincy M.E.”, and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis”.
Ben Masters. Other credits include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “Petrocelli”, and “Noble House”.
Barrie Youngfellow. Other credits include “Carter Country”, “The Eddie Capra Mysteries”, and “WKRP in Cincinnati”.
Hubert G. Wells, noted animal trainer.
Quick firings watch.
January 11th, 2023There haven’t been any additional head coach firings in the past couple of days, but there have been a few lower level firings:
Mike LaFleur out as offensive coordinator for the Jets.
Scott Turner out as offensive coordinator for the Washington Generals Redskins Commanders.
The Tennessee Titans fired offensive coordinator Todd Downing on Monday. Also out: ffensive line coach Keith Carter, secondary coach Anthony Midget and offensive skill assistant Erik Frazier.
Obit watch: January 11, 2023.
January 11th, 2023George Pell, Cardinal and former Vatican treasurer.
From 2014 to 2019, Cardinal Pell was the church’s financial czar and third-in-command, and he tried to push through reforms to make its finances more transparent. Those efforts were truncated in 2017, when he was forced to return to Australia to face trial on charges of sex abuse dating to the 1990s. The case transfixed Australia — cameras met Cardinal Pell at the airport when he arrived from Rome.
In December 2018, he was convicted by an Australian jury of five counts of child sexual abuse of two choir boys that were said to have occurred in 1996, during his time in Melbourne. Less than two years later, in April 2020, Australia’s highest court overturned the conviction, saying that there was “a significant possibility” that he was not guilty.
Throughout the proceedings, Cardinal Pell maintained his innocence. At a news conference in Rome in 2017, he said he had been a victim of “relentless character assassination.” He said, “The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me.”
At the time of his death, Cardinal Pell faced a civil suit by the father of a now-deceased choir boy who alleged that the cleric had abused the boy when he was archbishop of Melbourne. In a statement, the claimant’s lawyer said the suit would continue, adding: “There is still a great deal of evidence for this claim to rely upon.”
Separately, a 2017 Australian government inquiry into the abuse of tens of thousands of children in churches, schools and other institutions over a period of decades found that Cardinal Pell had been aware of the sexual abuse of children by other Roman Catholic priests as early as 1974, but failed to take action.
Blake Hounshell, NYT reporter and editor.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline. If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Obit watch: January 10, 2023.
January 10th, 2023Quinn Redeker, actor.
He did a fair number of cop and PI shows, among other credits, including “The Rockford Files”, “Harry O”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Falling Star“, season 1, episode 15. He was “Jim Dancy”.)
Mike Hill, film editor. He won an Oscar for “Apollo 13”.
Diamond Lynnette Hardaway, of “Diamond and Silk”.
Timothy Vanderweert. He ran the “Leicaphilia” blog, which has been on the sidebar for a while now.
Adolfo Kaminsky. I swear I have written something about him before, but I can’t find it now.
He was a forger. Specifically, he forged documents to get people out of the hands of the Nazis.
The forged documents allowed Jewish children, their parents and others to escape deportation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps, and in many cases to flee Nazi-occupied territory for safe havens.
At one point, Mr. Kaminsky was asked to produce 900 birth and baptismal certificates and ration cards for 300 Jewish children in institutional homes who were about to be rounded up. The aim was to deceive the Germans until the children could be smuggled out to rural families or convents, or to Switzerland and Spain. He was given three days to finish the assignment.
He toiled for two straight days, forcing himself to stay awake by telling himself: “In one hour I can make 30 blank documents. If I sleep for an hour 30 people will die.”
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Using the pseudonym Julien Keller, Mr. Kaminsky was a key operative in a Paris underground laboratory whose members — all working for no pay and risking a quick death if discovered — adopted aliases like Water Lily, Penguin and Otter, and often contrived documents from scratch.
Mr. Kaminsky learned to fashion various typefaces, a skill he had picked up in elementary school while editing a school newspaper, and was able to imitate those used by the authorities. He pressed paper so that it, too, resembled the kind used on official documents, and photoengraved his own rubber stamps, letterheads and watermarks.
Word of the cell spread to other resistance groups, and soon it was producing 500 documents a week, receiving orders from partisans in several European countries. Mr. Kaminsky estimated that the underground network he was part of helped save 10,000 people, most of them children.