John Lasell, actor. Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “Perry Mason”, “The New Perry Mason”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Broken Mirror“, season 6, episode 4.)
Obit watch: October 15, 2024.
October 15th, 2024Obit watch: October 11, 2024.
October 11th, 2024Thomas Rockwell, author. His most famous book is perhaps How to Eat Fried Worms.
He was also Norman’s son.
Posing for a painting that depicted him rummaging through his grandfather’s overcoat pocket was one of his favorite childhood memories, he told Cobblestone, a children’s magazine, in 1989. That image appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1936.
“I had to stand on tiptoe while reaching into the overcoat, which was hung on an easel,” Mr. Rockwell said, describing how his father had composed the painting. “My father gave me a present for posing, and I remember feeling so proud and pleased that I’d helped him with his work. I know I’ve never enjoyed any gift as much as that one.”
This one goes out to great and good FotB pigpen51: Greg Landry, quarterback.
He wore the Lions’ Honolulu blue and silver for 11 seasons, tallying 12,451 yards and 80 touchdown passes.
In 1971, his first year as a starter, Landry passed for 2,237 yards and 16 touchdowns, earning a first-team All-Pro nod and his only trip to the Pro Bowl. He was the last Lions quarterback to earn that distinction until Matthew Stafford was named an alternate for the 2014 Pro Bowl.
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But with Landry, who was physically imposing at 6-foot-4, the Lions designed running plays for him, as would later be the case with current dual-threat quarterbacks like Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens and Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills. The Lions even took a page from college football playbooks and drew up option plays, in which the quarterback has the option to carry the ball himself after the snap or pitch it to a running back, a rarity in the N.F.L.
Landry showed off his burst early in his career, during the Lions’ rout of the Green Bay Packers in the opening game of the 1970 season. Closing out the game in relief of the starter Bill Munson, Landry called a quarterback sneak on third down with two yards to go at the Lions’ 13-yard line. Instead of gutting out a few yards for a first down, he burst through the Packers’ defense and galloped for 76 yards — the longest run for a Lion since 1951.
Great and good FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Nobuyo Oyama, Japanese voice actress.
For about 25 years, Ms. Oyama was the voice of Doraemon, a character that first appeared in a manga created in 1969. Doraemon is a robot from the future, sent by its owner to the present day to help his great-great-grandfather solve his childhood problems and change his family’s fortunes.
The plump, earless, catlike robot typically helped the boy, Nobita Nobi, using gadgets from the future that he kept in his magical pocket. His deepening friendship with Nobita and his family was part of what made “Doraemon” one of the longest-running shows in Japan and beyond.
Que Saleh Saleh…
October 8th, 2024Robert Saleh out as head coach of the Jets. ESPN.
He was 20-36 over roughly three and a half seasons with the Jets. Noted:
In other news, Josh Wolff was fired on Sunday as head coach of Austin FC, the soccer team. 45-30-60 over four seasons. Austin FC made the playoffs once in that period (2022).
Your NFL loser update: week 5, 2024.
October 7th, 2024It was a full rich weekend. I was out all day Saturday and all day Sunday (at separate events) and did not get home until 10 PM last night. So blogging has been kind of constrained, and will be probably until tomorrow. (I have to drop my rental car off this morning, and I have an eye doctor’s appointment this afternoon that’s going to leave my eyes messed up.)
Anyway, NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
None.
I was right about the Jacksonville -Indianapolis game, but that gives me no satisfaction.
And, in other news, I’m thinking the only reason this wasn’t a forfeit is that it was a playoff game, and that would have been a bad look for MLB.
I am also waiting on the results of the Alabama appeal. As I understand it, SEC bylaws specifically forbid any team from scoring more points in a game than Alabama, so I’m thinking the conference is going to overturn Vanderbilt’s win and award the victory to ‘Bama.
Obit watch: October 3, 2024.
October 3rd, 2024Jay J. Armes passed away on September 19th. He was 92.
I had been thinking about him recently, wondering if he was still around and enjoying a comfortable retirement, or if he was still working.
I’m not sure how many people remember him, but he was a pretty famous private investigator in El Paso.
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In May 1946, Julian and an older friend were horsing around one afternoon with a teenager who had a pair of railroad blasting caps. Julian was holding them when they blew up, shooting him into the air, mangling his hands and nearly killing him.
A few months later he was fitted with prosthetic hooks.
He tried acting for a bit, but went into PI work.
Mr. Armes (pronounced arms) catapulted to investigatory stardom in 1972 after Marlon Brando hired him to find his 13-year-old son, Christian, who had been abducted in Mexico. Working with Mexican federal agents, Mr. Armes said he found the boy in a cave with a gang of hippies.
He told other daring tales of triumph: flying on a glider into Cuba to recover $2 million for a client; helping another client escape from a Mexican prison by sending him a helicopter, which he said inspired the 1975 Charles Bronson movie “Breakout.”
He was a self-promoter. Perhaps a bit too much of one.
The Cartwright article is linked from the obit, but Texas Monthly is kind of skirty about reading without a subscription. Here’s an archived version. Brutally summarizing (you should really read the whole thing), Mr. Cartwright found a lot of inconsistencies between what Mr. Armes claimed and what could be documented.
Mr. Armes’s son said in an interview last week that Mr. Cartwright’s article was a “hatchet job” and that it was retaliation for his father’s unsuccessful campaign for sheriff of El Paso County against a friend of the writer. Mr. Cartwright died in 2017.
In 2016, the public radio program “Snap Judgment” revisited the Texas Monthly article and the puzzle of Mr. Armes.
The private eye couldn’t tolerate even hearing Mr. Cartwright’s name.
“He’s got a wilted hand, and I guess he had an inferiority complex,” Mr. Armes told “Snap Judgment.” “He saw Jay Armes had accomplished all this. So, he had to write a cutthroat story. Don’t tell me about anything about this corrupt Gary Cartwright. Don’t even mention his name to me.”
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“Hookman”, season 6, episode 1. He was a violent criminal who was out for revenge against the four cops that caused him to lose his hands…one of whom was Steve McGarret. I admit, I haven’t seen every episode of the good “Hawaii Five-O”, but I have seen this one, and I would agree it is one of the best of those I’ve seen. Mike Quigley seems to agree with me.
(It was remade for the bad “5-0” (season 3, episode 15), but without Mr. Armes.)
He had some notable successes and seemed to earn enough money to support his lifestyle. In 1991, he was credited by authorities with tracking down the body of Lynda Singshinsuk, a Northwestern University student who had gone missing. Mr. Armes also persuaded the suspect, Donald Weber, to confess to killing her.
“Without Mr. Armes’s assistance, there is a significant possibility that Mr. Weber would not be brought to justice,” a prosecutor told The Chicago Tribune.
I found two action figures on eBay. One is $61.19 and it doesn’t look complete. The other one is $149.99. I can’t tell how complete it is, but it does have the “briefcase” with the various “hands”.
In other news, Masamitsu Yoshioka has passed away. He was 106.
He was “the last known survivor among some 770 crew members who manned the Japanese airborne armada that attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941”.
He explained last year in an interview with Jason Morgan, an associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, for the English-language website Japan Forward, “I’m ashamed that I’m the only one who survived and lived such a long life.”
Asked in that interview if ever thought of visiting Pearl Harbor, he at first replied, “I wouldn’t know what to say.” He then added: “If I could go, I would like to, I would like to visit the graves of the men who died. I would like to pay them my deepest respect.”
This made me snort:
“…the liberation of Asia from white colonialism”.
Bob Yerkes, stuntman. IMDB.
His backyard was equipped with rigs for high falls, mats to practice flips and a springboard powered by compressed air that launched people end-over-end. He is said to have invented the airbag for stunt use.
“There will never be another backyard like Bob’s where you could train for free or even live for free if you needed a place to stay,” Williams wrote.
Obit watch: October 2, 2024.
October 2nd, 2024John Amos. NYT (archived). Other credits include “The Rockford Files: Shoot-Out at the Golden Pagoda”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, and “Hunter”.
Frank Fritz, of “American Pickers”.
Burning in Hell watch: Song Binbin, commie.
A daughter of a prominent general in the People’s Liberation Army, Ms. Song was enrolled at Beijing Normal University Girls High School when she and classmates responded to Mao’s call for young people to turn against intellectuals, educators and others who supposedly held bourgeois values.
On Aug. 5, 1966, students attacked Bian Zhongyun, a 50-year-old mother of four who headed the school. She was kicked and beaten with sticks spiked with nails. After passing out, she was thrown onto a garbage cart and left to die.
Her death has been widely described as the first killing of a teacher during the Cultural Revolution, a violent spasm establishing Mao’s cult of personality, with masses waving his Little Red Book of his writings.
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Two weeks after Ms. Bian’s death, more than one million young Red Guards thronged Tiananmen Square, where Ms. Song had been selected to pin a red armband around Mao’s left sleeve as they stood atop the towering Gate of Heavenly Peace. A photograph of the moment appeared across the country. Praised by Mao, Ms. Song, at 19, became a kind of celebrity in China.
But the whirlwind of the Cultural Revolution soon turned on Ms. Song’s family. Her father, Song Renqiong, was purged from the Communist Party in 1968, and Ms. Song and her mother were put under house arrest. The Cultural Revolution ended only when Mao died in 1976.
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On Jan. 12, 2014, Ms. Song visited her old school and expressed remorse, bowing before a statue of Ms. Bian and delivering a 1,500-word speech. “I am responsible for the unfortunate death of Principal Bian,” she said, according to The Beijing News. (Ms. Bian’s title was officially deputy principal, but she was referred to as the principal because she was serving in that role at the time in an acting capacity.)
In 2004, Wang Youqin, a schoolmate of Ms. Song’s who later became a historian at the University of Chicago, published “Victims of the Cultural Revolution,” a book that included a description of the death of Ms. Bian and of Ms. Song’s role in the turmoil at the girls’ high school.
After Ms. Bian’s death, Ms. Wang wrote, “Every school in China became a torture chamber, prison or even execution ground, and many teachers were persecuted to death.”
Ms. Song denied that she had participated directly in the beating; she said, in fact, that she had tried to stop others who did. But she acknowledged that she and a fellow student were Red Guard leaders and that they were among the first to post so-called big-character posters — publicly displayed signs handwritten in a large format — denouncing teachers.
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Some commenters stressed that Ms. Song should bear a greater burden because of her prominence among the Red Guards. “It’s meaningless to say you witnessed a murder and then say you don’t know who the killers were,” said Cui Weiping, a retired professor of literature who writes about China’s past, as quoted by The New York Times in 2014.
One person who was unsatisfied was Ms. Bian’s widower, Wang Jingyao. He had taken photos of his wife’s battered body after her death as well as of the posters that her tormentors had hung in their apartment after breaking in. One sign threatened to “hack you to pieces,” another to “hold up your pigs’ ears.”
“She is a bad person, because of what she did,” Mr. Wang told The Times in 2014, when he was 93. “She and the others were supported by Mao Zedong. Mao was the source of all evil. He did so much that was bad.”
Obit watch: October 1, 2024.
October 1st, 2024Pete Rose. NYT (share link). ESPN. MLB.
As everyone knows, I am not a baseball fan. And if I was a baseball fan, I would be pulling for the Astros, Rangers, or Indians Guardians.
But I’ve always felt a little sorry for Pete Rose. He did pretty much the worst thing you can do in baseball, and what happened to him is a result of his own actions. But I think he probably got crapped on more than he deserved, and I kind of wish people had shown him a bit more compassion. The ban from baseball was an appropriate response, but maybe he didn’t deserve to be a pariah and the butt of jokes.
Your NFL loser update: week 4, 2024.
October 1st, 2024NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
Jacksonville
Four weeks in, one team remaining. And I don’t like Jacksonville’s chances of going 0-17. This week they play Indianapolis (2-2) at home: ESPN has Jacksonville as a slight favorite.
Pete Rose obits tomorrow.
September 30th, 2024You know the deal: I want to give everyone an opportunity to get their obits (and, more importantly, corrections) up.
Dumber than a bag of hair watch.
September 30th, 2024“Dumber than a bag of hair” is how I have previously described the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. They have a long history of corruption and incompetence, some of which I have documented here.
Today’s example is a criminal indictment brought to us by the FBI by way of Brian Krebs.
The whole thing is slightly confusing, and I’d recommend reading the Krebs article, but in brief: the FBI has been investigating a crooked cryptocurrency guy who founded a platform called “Zort”.
But that’s not the part that jumped out at me. What jumped out at me is: crypto bro apparently had LASD deputies “on his payroll”.
The FBI later obtained a copy of a search warrant executed by LASD deputies in January 2022 for GPS location information on a phone belonging to E.Z., which shows an LASD deputy unlawfully added E.Z.’s mobile number to a list of those associated with an unrelated firearms investigation.
“Damn my guy actually filed the warrant,” Iza allegedly texted someone after the location warrant was entered. “That’s some serious shit to do for someone….risking a 24 years career. I pay him 280k a month for complete resources. They’re active-duty.”
And relevant to Lawrence’s interests: “E.Z.” is apparently a man named Enzo Zelocchi. Mr. Zelocchi is one of the two listed directors, and the star of, “Angels Apocalypse”, “once rated the absolute worst sci-fi flick on IMDB”.
I’m not seeing any reports that LASD officers have been charged. Yet. Kind of makes me wonder if some of them rolled, perhaps in hopes of doing time in a white-collar resort prison.
Obit watch: September 30, 2024.
September 30th, 2024He was a good Texas boy who did some acting in addition to his music career. There’s plenty of press coverage around this, but a few credits that aren’t covered in the articles: “Lone Star”, “Millennium”, “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”, “Heaven’s Gate”, and let us not forget…
(I know both Lawrence and I have said this before, but “Passion & Poetry: Sam’s Trucker Movie”, which is on the blu-ray edition of “Convoy”, has a lot of Kristofferson in it. And I think it is almost more interesting than the movie itself.)
Dikembe Mutombo, Hall of Fame NBA player. ESPN.
I kind of disliked that commercial because I felt it made him look like a jerk (yes, I know it was playing off his signature move). But:
Mutombo often joked about how much in fines his showmanship had cost him under the league’s no-taunting rule. But four years into retirement he received ample payback, starring in an acclaimed Geico commercial created for the 2013 Super Bowl. In that 30-second spot, in full uniform, he wagged his famous finger at people in various everyday activities.
He told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the commercial had reestablished recognition “for me and for my foundation. I thank God for it.”
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Mutombo’s mother, Biamba Marie, died at home in 1998 after having a stroke; he had been unable to get hospital care for her due to a government-enforced curfew. That year, he invited business and political insiders to a dinner in Washington to announce a fund-raising campaign for a hospital in Kinshasa to provide treatment for the poor. Over the next several years, he struggled to raise money, even from people within the N.B.A., two notable exceptions being Ewing and Mourning.
“I thought it would be easy, that I would call up all the rich people I knew from being a basketball player and the whole thing would take nine months,” he told The New York Times weeks before the 300-bed hospital, named for his mother, opened in September 2006, on land donated by the government. He said that he had to pay squatters to vacate the property and that he had donated roughly $15 million to the project.
“This is going to be the proudest day of my life,” he said during the ceremonial opening.
John Ashton, actor. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Police Squad!” (In color), and “Columbo”.
Your MLB loser update.
September 29th, 2024The NFL loser update won’t post until Tuesday. (0-3 Tennessee plays the early Monday night game.)
But the MLB season mostly wrapped up today.
How did the White Sox do?
Shockingly well down the stretch. They swept the LA Angels Tuesday-Thursday of last week, and won two out of three against the Detroit Tigers (who ESPN had as heavy favorites for all three games). Where was this team earlier in the season?
But they did manage to drop one to Detroit, and you know what that means…
…their final record was 41-121, breaking the mark set by the 1962 Mets, and making them arguably the worst team in the modern (1901 and later) era of baseball.
“arguably”? Well, 121 losses in a season is a record. But 41-121 works out to a winning percentage of .253. That comes in fifth on Wikipedia’s list of worst MLB teams if you sort by percentage. Ahead of the Sox are:
- The 1916 Philadelphia Athletics, .235 (36-117)
- The 1935 Boston Braves, .248 (38-115)
- The 1962 Mets, .250 (40-120)
- The 1904 Washington Senators, .252 (38-113)
So what’s the best way to determine the worst? Sheer number of losses, which puts the 2024 Sox at the top of the heap? Or does it make more sense to use winning percentage, which evens out the fluctuations cased by the variable number of games per season over the past 123 years, and by some games being cancelled and not made up? (If you notice, none of those numbers adds up to 154 or 162. I haven’t looked at the other records, but as I understand it, one of the 1962 Mets games was a tie, so it should be 40-120-1, and one was rained out and not made up.)
I don’t know. But I think in any case, the achievement of the 2024 White Sox is worth celebrating, even if they didn’t remove all doubt about who is really the worst. There’s always next year.