Archive for the ‘Cars’ Category

Obit watch: January 2, 2024.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2024

It was a busy weekend, so I’m playing obit catch-up here. Administratively, I plan to get TMQ Watch up at some point during the day.

Tom Wilkinson. THR. IMDB.

This has been pretty well covered, but I did want to make an observation. When I was at St. Ed’s, for my “Film and Literature” class, we had to watch “In the Bedroom” and read Andre Dubus’s “Killings”. I thought “Bedroom” was a pretty terrific movie: both Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek give career peak performances. If you have not seen it, I commend it to your attention.

(The Dubus story is good, too.)

Shecky Greene, comedian. THR. IMDB.

“I’m bipolar,” he told a Las Vegas television interviewer in 2010. “I’m more than bipolar. I’m South Polar, North Polar. I’m every kind of polar there is. I even lived with a polar bear for about a year.”

Although never known as the most decorous of comedians, Mr. Greene made news in the comedy world in 2014 when he stormed out of a Friars Club event in Manhattan and announced that he was resigning from the club after his fellow comedian Gilbert Gottfried did material that Mr. Greene, who had been scheduled to speak, found offensive.
“He got dirtier and dirtier,” Mr. Greene told a radio interviewer, without providing details, “so I got up and I said, ‘That’s it.’”

Cale Yarborough, one of the NASCAR greats.

Obit watch: July 25, 2023.

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

Pamela Blair, actress. Other credits include John Huston’s film of “Annie”, “The Cosby Mysteries”, and “Law and Order”.

Reeves Callaway. He made cars go fast.

Mr. Callaway and his company were well known in the world of high-performance automobiles custom-made for deep-pocketed clients. He began by modifying cars out of his garage, then established his company in Old Lyme, Conn., with the goal of challenging European manufacturers like Porsche and Ferrari, which were then making the world’s fastest vehicles.

“They came to us,” he told the Truck Show Podcast in 2021, “and they said, ‘Look, could you, within one year’s time, develop an Alfa twin-turbo system for us that we could use to compete against the Maserati?’
He did, making about three dozen modified vehicles, but then Alfa Romeo lost interest in the project. Yet somehow one of those modified Alfas found its way to General Motors’ Black Lake testing ground in Michigan, and soon GM was asking if Mr. Callaway could do the same thing to its Chevrolet Corvette.
“This was a huge opportunity, to become associated with Corvette,” he said. “So we saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir; immediately, sir; may I have another, sir?’”

In late 1988, he and his engineers tweaked the Corvette some more, taking aim at 250 miles per hour with a version of the car that they called the Sledgehammer.
“We basically decided that 250 m.p.h. was a reachable goal,” Mr. Callaway told the McClatchy News Service. “But if it was to have any meaning, the car had to be docile at low speeds as well. It had to retain all the things that make a car usable on the street, such as air-conditioning.”
To prove the point, his team drove the car from Connecticut to a seven-and-a-half-mile oval track in Ohio. (It got 16 miles per gallon, they said.) At the track, it hit 210 m.p.h. on its first run, 223 on its second. After more tweaking, it reached 254.76 on its third attempt, a record for a car made for normal driving. Mr. Callaway’s company, in its announcement of his death, said the record stood for more than 20 years.

The Santa Barbara News-Press.

Ampersand Publishing LLC, the entity that owns the paper, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, or liquidation, on Friday, with estimated assets of up to $50,000 and liabilities between $1,000,001 and $10 million, according to court records. The bankruptcy was approved by the LLC on May 1, with Wendy McCaw, who has owned the paper since 2000, as the authorized agent.

The News-Press has published for more than 150 years, but it has undergone years of turbulence since McCaw bought it from The New York Times Co. In 2006, six editors and a columnist resigned in protest of interference from McCaw in the editorial process. The was followed by an exodus of dozens of additional staffers, as well as a vote by remaining newsroom employees to unionize with the Teamsters.

Ron Sexton, comedian and regular on ‘The Bob & Tom Show’.

Many small bloodsucking insects.

Monday, 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.

Obit watch: April 10, 2023.

Monday, April 10th, 2023

NYT obit for Craig Breedlove.

Michael Lerner, actor. 186 credits in IMDB (counting the three upcoming), including “Mayor Ebert” in “Godzilla”, “Today’s F.B.I.”, four “Rockford Files”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Banacek”.

Francesca Cappucci. She worked for KABC-TV in LA.

Out of the blue, Quentin Tarantino named the glamorous Italian movie star wife of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton after her in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Jacques Haitkin, cinematographer. Other credits include “Fist of the North Star”, “Team Knight Rider”, and “The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything”.

Hobie Landrith.

The Mets and the Houston Colt .45s (now the Astros), founded as 1962 National League expansion teams, began stocking their rosters in an October 1961 draft. They alternated in selecting players whom the eight N.L. teams viewed as too young, too old or too ordinary to keep.
Houston chose Eddie Bressoud, a shortstop with the San Francisco Giants, as the first pick of the draft. The Mets chose Landrith, also a Giant, as their first selection.
When reporters asked Mets Manager Casey Stengel why Landrith, 31 years old, was anointed as the first Met, he replied: “You gotta have a catcher or you’d have a lot of passed balls.”

(Side note: as best as I can tell, Eddie Bressoud is still alive at 90. He was traded to the Red Sox before he played a game with Houston, and then went from the Red Sox to the Mets.)

Landrith had a career batting average of .233 with 34 home runs and 203 runs driven in.
“I was in the major leagues more because I was a good defensive catcher, and the fact that I was good at handling pitchers,” he once told the baseball history website This Great Game. “I always thought I was a fairly decent hitter, but I realized that I wasn’t in the big leagues for my bat.”

Obit watch: January 3, 2023.

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2023

Very quick roundups from the past few days:

Fred White, drummer for Earth, Wind and Fire.

Anita Pointer, of the Pointer Sisters.

Jeremiah Green, drummer for Modest Mouse.

Uche Nwaneri, former offensive lineman for the Jacksonville Jaguars. He was 38.

RoadRich sent over an obit for Ken Block, rally driver and YouTuber. He was 55, and died in a snowmobile accident.

Chris Ledesma, music editor for “The Simpsons”. He worked on every episode through May of 2022.

Obit watch: August 10, 2022.

Wednesday, August 10th, 2022

Taiki Yanagida, Japanese jockey. He was trampled during a race a week ago, and had been hospitalized since.

Ryan Fellows. He was on a show called “Street Outlaws”, which airs on Discovery, and seems to involve drag races on closed public roads.

Citing “a source connected with the show,” TMZ says Fellows crashed during the eighth out of nine races scheduled for the night and that Fellows was driving a “gold Nissan 240Z.” It’s unclear whether this is actually the orange “Scooby Doo” Nissan documented extensively on social media and described as a 280Z by Fellows on YouTube or a different Z altogether. The Street Outlaws star reportedly lost control near the finish line causing the car to roll and catch fire. Onlookers apparently attempted to get him out but could not do so in time.

Gene LeBell, noted stuntman. 252 credits in IMDB.

During taping, it was reported that Lee was beating up on the stuntmen, prompting stunt coordinator Bennie Dobbins to bring in LeBell to help set the actor straight by “putting him in a headlock or something.”
In his 2005 autobiography The Godfather of Grappling, LeBell remembered grabbing Lee, who then “started making all those noises that he became famous for … but he didn’t try to counter me, so I think he was more surprised than anything else.”
He then hoisted Lee over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry and ran around the set as Lee shouted, “Put me down or I’ll kill you.”

If that rings a bell, yeah, Quentin Tarantino says that Mr. LeBell influenced the Cliff Booth character in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”. Apparently in more ways than just the Bruce Lee bit.

Booth also had an accusation of murder hovering over his head, which might have been a veiled reference to LeBell being charged in the murder of private investigator Robert Duke Hall in 1976. LeBell was acquitted of that charge, and his conviction as an accessory to the crime was later overturned.

Here’s a PDF of a vintage NYT article about the Hall murder, if you want to start down that rabbit hole.

Okay. This made me laugh.

Friday, April 1st, 2022

A few things to know before stealing my 914“.

Especially this line:

Surprise is your best weapon against this transmission.

(Sometimes I think about a 914 as one of those fun cars to knock around in. Even though I have no mechanical talent, the 914 seems like a simple enough car to learn on. Then I come to my senses. A man will think a lot of stupid things when he can’t sleep at night. Also, there aren’t any on Craigslist locally right now.)

Obit watch: March 2, 2022.

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

THR obit for Veronica Carlson.

Ralph Ahn, actor. He seems to be mostly known as “Tran” on “New Girl”, but other credits include “ER”, “Walker: Texas Ranger”, and “Hunter”.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Nick Zedd, “founder of the Cinema of Transgression movement and an uncompromising auteur whose crude, no-budget oeuvre influenced filmmakers from Christoph Schlingensief to Quentin Tarantino”.

He shot his first distributed film, They Eat Scum, in 1979 on Super 8 film with funds loaned by his parents and by the movie’s star, Donna Death. The short followed a roving gang of nonactor punks turned zombies, whose peregrinations were set to the earsplitting yowls of local New York bands and, inexplicably, the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” Zedd released They Eat Scum under his own Penetration Films imprint, describing it on the cassette label “a disgusting outlay of cheapness, decadence, nihilism, and everyday cannibalism” and an “achievement of noncommittal, unblinking savagery, a true expression of the punk ethos.”
Future films lived up to this promise, among them 1983’s Geek Maggot Bingo, which starred Richard Hell and was panned in TV Guide as “a nothing little zit of a 16mm movie.” Writing in the East Village Eye, Cookie Mueller, who starred in a number of John Waters movies, declared, “I have never in my lifetime of experience with low-budget films seen one this low . . . It lies somewhere below the subculture, even beneath the New York subway system.” Waters himself would later say of Zedd, “Nick Zedd makes violent, perverted art films from Hell—he’s my kind of director!”

Danny Ongais, one of the great figures in auto racing.

Ongais was born in Kahului and remains the only native Hawaiian who has ever competed in the Indy 500. He made 11 starts from 1977 and 1996, earning four top 10 finishes and a fourth-place result in 1979.

During the 1981 Indy 500, Ongais survived one of the most dramatic crashes in the race’s history when his car disintegrated after hitting the wall, leaving his legs and arms exposed as it burst into flames and skidded to a stop. He suffered several season-ending injuries, but returned to drive in the race the following year.

Video of the crash. I can’t embed it, because it is “age restricted” and “only available on YouTube”.

Dottie Frazier has passed away at 99. This is another one of those folks you’ve probably never heard of, but the obit is relevant to my interests.

Ms. Frazier was a diver. She learned to skin dive when she was young:

She seemingly had as many diving stories as she had dives.
There was the time she faced down a shark in the waters off Mexico. The time a large seal wanted the fish she was bringing back to her boat and slammed into her, breaking four ribs. The time she broke her leg snow skiing and made herself a special wet suit with an ankle-to-chest zipper so she could be rolled into it and thus keep diving with the busted limb.

She wasn’t initially impressed with the early scuba gear, but it grew on her.

…in 1955 she tried to enroll in a Los Angeles County underwater instructors certification course, sending in the required fee. She was sent a letter saying the course was for men only, but when she told that news to a friend and respected fellow diver, Jim Christiansen, he asked, “Did they return your check?”
“When I told him no, they had not, he said, ‘Just be ready; I’m picking you up,’” she told the podcast “The League of Extraordinary Divers” in 2016.

She went on to become one of the first, if not the first, women certified as a diving instructor in the United States.

In addition to her work as a scuba instructor, Ms. Frazier, a member of the Women Divers Hall of Fame, operated the Penguin Dive Shop in Long Beach for 15 years beginning in the 1950s and designed and sold wet suits and dry suits. She learned hard-hat diving as well — the kind used in underwater commercial work — but didn’t pursue the career possibilities because, at about five feet tall and not much more than 100 pounds, she found the equipment too cumbersome and restraining.
Ms. Frazier was energetic and adventurous even in her 90s. At 93 she went ziplining. In 2019, she finally sold the last of her motorcycles. In the “Neutral Buoyancy” interview, she noted that longevity seemed to go along with diving.
“A lot of the original divers have made it to a great age,” she said. “Being underwater does things to your spirit.”

Obit watch: November 22, 2021.

Monday, November 22nd, 2021

Bob Bondurant, legendary racer and founder of The Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.

Mr. Bondurant began attracting attention in the racing world in 1959, when he won 18 of the 20 races he entered behind the wheel of a Corvette.
“I am an original California hot rodder turned white hot when I started winning everything in my Corvettes,” he was quoted as saying by the National Corvette Museum, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2016.
He continued to win races regularly in Corvettes in the 1960s, but he also began to race successfully in other sports cars and open-wheeled Formula 1 machines, including for the elite Ferrari team from 1965 to 1966.
“He was top of the line,” said Peter Brock, who designed the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe that Mr. Bondurant raced with Dan Gurney to first place in the GT, or Grand Touring, class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in 1964.

Even before opening the school, Mr. Bondurant had some well-known students. He had coached James Garner and Yves Montand in driving Formula 1 cars for John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film, “Grand Prix.” Mr. Bondurant, who was a stunt man and technical adviser to the film, wore 16-millimeter cameras on the sides of his helmet to record racing action on the track while moving at 150 miles per hour.
Soon after Mr. Bondurant opened the school, Mr. Newman and Robert Wagner signed up as students. They had been cast as racecar drivers in the film “Winning” (1969), in which Mr. Newman’s character dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500.
“Paul has a knack of knowing how to learn,” Mr. Bondurant told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1988. “He’s like most actors — they know how to listen. He would move at his own pace, and wouldn’t go too quick. He took it step by step, and it came naturally to him.”

One of my lifetime ambitions has been to attend the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, though apparently it went bankrupt in 2018 and is now known as the Radford Racing School.

Robert Bly, the Iron John guy. Anyone else remember when Iron John was a thing? I do, though I never actually read it: I just remember a time when people talked about books, instead of what the Kardasians were doing yesterday.

Carolyn Watjen, aka “Caroline Todd“. You wouldn’t know her under that name: she and her son, David Watjen, write (wrote?) mystery novels under the pseudonym “Charles Todd”. I haven’t read any of them yet, but the Ian Rutledge novels sound interesting.

Jay Last. He was an early semi-conductor pioneer: specifically, he was one of the “traitorous eight” who left William Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. His death leaves Gordon Moore (yes, that Moore) as the last surviving member of the group.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Mick Rock, photographer of musicians.

Peter Aykroyd, Dan’s brother and “Saturday Night Live” cast member.

Art LaFleur, actor. Other than “The Sandlot”, his credits include episodes of “The John Larroquette Show”, two different remakes of television series that should never have been remade and which failed miserably (not due to Mr. LaFleur, they were just bad ideas), “Matlock”, “Field of Dreams”, and “Wizards and Warriors”.

Gratuitous Mannix, some filler.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

By way of The Rap Sheet, through my mother: the cars of Joe Mannix.

Also from the same source: “Curbside TV – The Cars Of Mannix“.

Quick followup.

Wednesday, July 21st, 2021

The Drive has an article on that spectacular jumping car I posted the other day.

Their coverage adds quite a bit, including a diagram of what appears to have happened and a link to (low quality) security cam video from another angle.

And, yes, the comments are full of Dukes of Hazard references…

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 417

Saturday, May 22nd, 2021

There’s someone on the ‘Tube who has a channel, “Demolition Dave Drilling and Blasting”. I think he’s ‘stralian, mate.

In this video, Dave reviews a Chinese generator.

How do you say “Harbor Freight” in Australian?

Mike the Musicologist sent me this: it is a little more recent than I’d like, and I think I’ve seen it linked on Hacker News, but I still think it’s worth highlighting here.

“What Really Happened at the Oroville Dam Spillway?” from Practical Engineering.

Finally, here’s something that’s just about 25 minutes long, and that I think some folks will enjoy: “The Unfortunate History of the AMC Pacer”.

“There’s a fine line between uniqueness and strange.”

Dick Teague on Wikipedia.