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Obit watch: May 22, 2026.

Friday, May 22nd, 2026

The archiving service I use has been having problems for the past few days, and I’m running low on NYT share links.

Kyle Busch. ESPN. Oddly, I don’t see any coverage of this in the NYT: it looks like they’ve shuffled off the coverage to their sports vertical, “The Athletic”, which they make you pay extra to read.

41 seems awfully young these days.

Edited to add: Shortly after this went up, the NYT posted an actual obit in the obituary section. I apologize that this is paywalled, but, as I said earlier, archive.is is having problems and I only have three share links left until June 1. (No, they don’t roll over from month to month. I wish.)

Kirk Foyle. He was a local man: Tuesday night, he was eating on the patio at Green Mesquite (one of our local barbecue restaurants), when a tree fell on him. He died from his injuries the next day.

Tomorrow is promised to nobody, whether you’re a NASCAR driver or a barbecue eater. Be prepared.

Sam Sianis. He owned and ran the Billy Goat Tavern in Chicago, also known as the “Cheezborger cheezborger cheezborger cheeps cheeps Pepsi!” place from SNL. (Though my understanding is that sketch was also heavily influenced by the Belushi family, who were in the restaurant business as well.)

The Billy Goat Tavern is also famous for triggering Cubs fans.

Mr. Sianis’s uncle Billy bought the bar — which was originally across from Chicago Stadium (now United Center) and called the Lincoln Tavern — in 1934. After a goat wandered in the door, he renamed the bar the Billy Goat and adopted the animal as a pet.
The goat, called Murphy, became something of a celebrity himself. In 1945, the elder Mr. Sianis brought him to Game 4 of the World Series, between the Cubs and the Detroit Tigers, at Wrigley Field.
It began to rain. Murphy began to stink. The Cubs’ owner, Philip K. Wrigley, kicked them out.
As he was leaving, Billy Sianis put a curse on the team, vowing that it would never win a championship. When the Cubs lost the Series that year, he sent a note to Mr. Wrigley: “Now who stinks!”

…

In 1984, when the Cubs were contesting the National League championship, the team relented and allowed Mr. Sianis bring a goat onto the field.
But the Cubs did not win a World Series until 2016.
Watching the tiebreaking seventh game that year from the tavern, Mr. Sianis banished the curse by ringing the bell that had been worn by Murphy in 1945. The current goat stood beside him, looking as nervous as the rest of the crowd. Then it urinated on the floor. Mr. Sianis led it away.
“Don’t touch the goat,” one fan said, according to The Financial Times. “It’s bad luck.”

“Then it urinated on the floor.” I cannot tell a lie: one of the reasons I enjoy NYT obits so much is the telling details.

Posted in 1970s, Food, Goats, Mammals, Obits, Sports, TV, Urine | No Comments »

Obit watch: May 20, 2026.

Wednesday, May 20th, 2026

Barney Frank. WP (archived).

The Heart Attack Grill in Las Vegas.

The restaurant blamed major casinos and “corporate greed” for pricing average Americans out of the “quintessential American experience of affordable indulgence” in Las Vegas, it said.
“Our core value, ‘Eat big and laugh loud,’ no longer fits a city peddling $40 ‘artisanal avocado toast,’” the restaurant said.
“The honest, heavy-duty calories that built our reputation are now considered gauche by a city that has excluded the middle class and lost its swagger in the process.”

Lawrence sent over a report from Fox Las Vegas:

Posted in Food, Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

NRA annual meeting: more collected thoughts.

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026

I added both an “NRA” category (for general NRA things) and a subsidiary “NRAAM” tag for annual meeting coverage. This should make things easier next time I want to print off my NRAAM coverage for a press pass (though they never ask to see that). But that won’t be for a while: the next two annual meetings are in Atlanta and Orlando.

FotB Andrew sent over a link to the HouChron‘s coverage of the meeting (archived).

Oddly, I never made it back to the press room after I picked up my credentials. The last time I went with credentials, the snack and drink offerings in the room were mingey, and I intended to see if they were better this year.

The quality of the tchotchkes seemed off this year. Mostly pens, pins, stickers, and morale patches. And paper. So much paper. Oddly, also, a lot of lip balm. Hogue was giving away those really nice gun mats again, in two different sizes, which I would say was the best giveaway of the show. Buy stuff from Hogue. Second best: lens pens from Holosun. Buy stuff from Holosun. Also, I really like the foam earplugs Aguila hands out: they are cheap and disposable, but they’re also compact enough to slip in a go bag, just in case I get a chance to shoot and didn’t bring my full range bag.

I did buy the Hi-Lux scout scope (previously). I got it at a slight discount as a show special. Rings are on order. (Ruger‘s customer service was incredibly nice and helpful when I called them to ask what rings I needed.)

Note: for most vendors, it is this blog’s policy that we will pay full retail for products, or a “special show price” that’s generally available to everyone at the show. I won’t accept free merchandise from most vendors. Though if SIG wants to send me that .22 Creedmor for review, or Glock wants to send me a gun, or CZ wants me to review those Spitfire inspired CZ 75s, I won’t turn them down.

One of the things that I don’t think gets enough appreciation at NRAAM is the collector’s organizations, which are grouped together (towards the back of the show) in what we like to call the “collector’s ghetto”. These groups put together excellent displays that take a lot of time and effort: if you ever go to an annual meeting, you should make a point of visiting this section. We had a great time hanging out with my friends in the Association, who were also gracious about offering us water and seats when we needed them. I also belong to the Winchester Arms Collectors Association, and they had a nice (but smaller) display. Both of the Ruger collectors associations were there as well, but I didn’t see the Remington collectors.

Wilson Combat wasn’t there, which disappointed me. I’d been holding out until the meeting to buy a copy of Mr. Wilson’s new book. Now I guess I have to mail order it.

One thing that I thought was incredibly neat was the leather gun racks from South Texas Slings. Here’s how it works: you have two leather straps. At the top of each one is a clip that goes on to the support post for your car’s headrest. At the bottom is a metal clip, kind of like a belt clip but a little larger, that clips on to your seat back pocket. (The clip position is adjustable.) You put one strap on each seat (front or rear).

The straps have two adjustable leather loops. Once you’ve got them attached to the seats, you can just slide your long gun in and adjust the loops to fit. Viola! It’s like a pickup truck gun rack, except made out of leather and for your family sedan, and doesn’t obstruct your rear window!

I find this a very clever idea: I missed out on the show special, but I just ordered a set of these for the Honda. (I don’t plan to keep guns in the car, but I do want a better solution for taking long guns to the range.)

One of our party also greatly admired the work of Modern Rugged Leather, and I concur: they make some nice looking gear.

We were walking around and went past the 4D Reamer Rentals booth. Now, I do not need a chamber reamer at all: I would leave this to a professional gunsmith. But a flyer on the table headlined “Ackely Headspace” caught my eye. Turns out, one of the principals of 4D Reamer Rental is the guy who wrote the book on P.O. Ackley (which I’ve read and recommend). So we had a good conversation.

I do think we saw the Bear’s Leg at the Henry booth, but I wasn’t paying much attention. As someone who is into the .45-70, this really does not fill a need for me. But I can absolutely see a backpacker in bear country carrying this, and I would gladly try one if someone offered.

We had very good meals at Killen’s Barbecue in Pearland, and Goode Company Seafood. We had a spectacularly good meal at the Rainbow Lodge. (I’d been to both Goode Seafood and Rainbow Lodge before.) Our other meal was really just snacks and appetizers at the GOA mixer (previously mentioned in this space), because none of us was really hungry. Breakfast was at the hotel (the Wyndham Downtown) and was good but a little pricey.

The nice thing about the hotel was that it was literally across the street from a church. Since the exhibit hall closed at 5 on Sunday (and we left a little before that, having seen everything) I was able to hit the 5:30 PM Mass (or, as a friend of mine calls it, “the desperado’s mass”, because that’s your last chance for the day).

It really is a beautiful church.

I think this pretty much covers everything I wanted to hit from NRAAM. If I think of anything else, I’ll post an update. And I owe everyone a gun book post (actually, more than one), coming soon.

Posted in Admin, Beef, Books, Food, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, NRA, NRAAM, Photography, Religion, Ruger, Smith and Wesson, Winchester | No Comments »

Obit watch: February 4, 2026.

Wednesday, February 4th, 2026

Chuck Negron, of Three Dog Night.

Mr. Negron’s bandmates’ initially rejected “Joy to the World,” but he argued that the group needed a “silly song” to keep success rolling. His instincts proved correct, as the track shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1971. That same year, his jaunty vocals on Paul Williams’s “An Old Fashioned Love Song” helped propel that song to No. 4.

…

The band splintered in 1976, and Mr. Negron sank further into the abyss, in large part because of heroin addiction. His millions in savings vanished and, before long, he was living in a Skid Row drug den in Los Angeles. The police often raided crack dealer neighbors but “never bothered us,” he recalled in a 1998 interview with The Las Vegas Sun. “That’s how pathetic we were.”
He hit a particular low one day when he was zonked out on a curb and noticed people gawking. “It’s really embarrassing,” he remembered telling a companion next to him, “these people want an autograph.”
“Chuck, you just peed in the street,” the friend responded. “They don’t know who you are.”

…

After 35 trips to rehab attempts in 13 years, Mr. Negron said he finally got clean in 1991, leading to an attempt to rekindle things with his bandmates. “They kind of went, ‘Get screwed,’” he told The Sun, “so I went, ‘OK, some things are too late — move on.’”

Virginia Oliver. I’m not exactly sure she qualifies as “notable”, outside of a small circle. But the obit is fun, she led a good life, and it lets me use a tag I don’t get to use as often as I’d like.

On the frigid and crustacean-filled waters of Penobscot Bay, Mrs. Oliver was known as the Lobster Lady. She was a folk hero to Mainers — an enduring, if fading, emblem of the state’s hardy, matter-of-fact work ethic.
“She represented that no-nonsense Mainer who just got up every day and did what they had to do,” Barbara A. Walsh, the author of a children’s book about Mrs. Oliver, said in an interview. “It’s grit and determination.”
During lobster season — from June to December — Mrs. Oliver would wake up at 2:45 a.m., put on overalls and drive her four-wheel-drive pickup truck to the dock. After loading her boat, the Virginia, with bait and gas, she would head to sea before sunrise, hauling lobster pots until lunchtime.

…

Mrs. Oliver fished for more than 60 years with her husband, Maxwell Oliver Sr., known as Bill. After he died in 2006, Max Jr. took his spot. “I’m the boss,” she would occasionally remind both of them.
As a general rule, her authority was not to be questioned on land or at sea.
“She was a hard worker, a lovely lady, but you definitely didn’t mess around with her,” Dave Cousens, a lobsterman who knew Mrs. Oliver for several decades, said in an interview. “She had a mouth like a sailor. A lot of things she said you couldn’t print in a newspaper.”

…

A few years back, she needed stitches after a particularly obstreperous lobster sliced her finger.
“What are you out there lobstering for?” the doctor asked.
“Because I want to,” she replied.

She was 103 when a fall forced her to give up lobstering. She was 105 when she passed away.

Mickey Lolich, of the Detroit Tigers.

Pitching in the major leagues for 16 seasons, mostly with the Tigers, Lolich won 217 games and struck out 2,832 batters, posting more than 200 strikeouts in a single season seven times.

…

The Tigers finished 12 games ahead of the Baltimore Orioles as they won the 1968 American League pennant, led by the right-hander Denny McLain, who won 31 games and lost only 6 that season in becoming the first pitcher to reach the 30-game milestone in 34 years, a feat that hasn’t been matched since. Lolich, meanwhile, compiled a laudable 17-9 record.
McClain was bested by the future Hall of Famer Bob Gibson in the World Series opener, at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Despite battling a groin infection that had developed overnight, Lolich pitched the Tigers to an 8-1 victory in Game 2 and hit the only home run of his career, a drive down the left-field line off the Cardinal starter, Nelson Briles.
The Tigers lost the next two games at home and were facing elimination when Lolich took the mound again, once more against Briles, but this time at Tiger Stadium. Lolich yielded three runs in the first inning, but the Tigers managed to rally for a 5-3 victory.
They won again in Game 6, in St. Louis, behind solid pitching by McLain and a 10-run third inning.
The durable Lolich was called on again for Game 7, when he faced Gibson.
With the game scoreless in the seventh inning, the Tiger outfielder Jim Northrup connected on a liner over the head of Curt Flood, the Cardinals’ center fielder, for a two-run, two-out triple. Detroit went on to a 4-1 victory, giving the Tigers their first World Series championship since they defeated the Chicago Cubs in seven games in 1945.

…

With that final out — a foul pop-up by Tim McCarver of the Cardinals that spurred Tiger catcher Bill Freehan to leap into Lolich’s arms — Lolich became the only left-handed pitcher in American League history to win three complete games in a World Series.

ESPN. Baseball Reference.

Posted in Lobsters, Music, Obits, Sports | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 13, 2026.

Tuesday, January 13th, 2026

Scott Adams. THR.

I used to be a pretty avid follower of “Dilbert”. Back at one of my previous jobs, the running joke was that “Dilbert” was a documentary about my life. Then something happened. Mr. Adams’s…eccentricities, for want of a better word, got on my nerves. (Remember the “Dilberito“, and Mr. Adams’s idea that we didn’t need to actually, you know, eat food? We could just pills with all the nutrients we needed.)

He was still on my radar, because how could he not be? But he didn’t have the relevance for me that he once had. I’m sad he’s passed on, though.

(These days, the documentary about my life is called “The Wire”.)

Elle Simone Scott, of “America’s Test Kitchen”. I get a kick out of having “ATK” on in the background while I work.

Jirdes Winther Baxter. She was 101.

Ms. Baxter was the last known survivor of the 1925 Nome diphtheria epidemic.

A copy of medical records from 1925, possessed by Mr. Baxter, a retired lawyer, indicates that Jirdes (pronounced JER-diss) Winther, then 11 months old, was hospitalized in Nome on Jan. 30 with diphtheria and what she later called a high fever. Highly contagious, diphtheria is a dangerous bacterial disease that can clog airways, severely restricting breathing, and damage the heart and kidneys.
Jirdes’s Norwegian-born mother, Ragnhild, and one of her brothers, John, were admitted on Feb. 2. Her father, Johan, and another brother, Gudmund, did not contract the disease.
At the time, there was only one doctor, Curtis Welch, in Nome, a gold-rush town of 1,400 inhabitants. After two young children died of diphtheria by mid-January, officials there instituted a quarantine advised by Dr. Welch, who had realized that a pandemic seemed “almost inevitable.”
He sent alerts, by radio telegram, to other towns in Alaska and pleaded for emergency help from the U.S. Public Health Service. The nearest supply of antitoxin, made from the blood of horses, was at a hospital in Anchorage, 1,000 miles away.

They couldn’t fly antitoxin in by plane, the port was frozen over, and there was no train service directly to Nome.

A plan was devised to carry 300,000 units of antitoxin by train from Anchorage to the railhead of Nenana in interior Alaska, about 300 miles north. From there, sled dogs would ferry the serum 674 miles west to Nome, a relay that would involve 20 mushers and about 150 dogs. It would come to be known as the 1925 Serum Run and the Great Race of Mercy.
For days, millions were enthralled by radio and newspaper accounts of the rush to keep a threatened town alive. A front-page headline in The New York Times reported, “Serum Relief Near for Stricken Nome.”
Bill Shannon, the first musher on the relay, retrieved the serum — a 20-pound package containing glass vials housed in a metal cylinder — from the train in Nenana. He insulated the container with bearskin and took off on a 52-mile stretch as midnight approached on Jan. 27.
Mushers handed off the antitoxin and rested at roadhouses along the relay, enduring aching cold and wind and blizzards that sometimes made the trail disappear. On Feb. 2, the serum arrived in Nome after five days and seven hours, frozen but quickly thawed by Dr. Welch and administered to the sick.

Ms. Baxter had a few words to say on a subject of historical interest:

Ms. Winther Baxter believed — as many now do — that Balto, a husky that helped lead his team on the final 55-mile stretch into Nome, received heroic acknowledgment, including a statue in Central Park, at the expense of Togo, another husky who was the lead sled dog for a celebrated Norwegian-born driver named Leonhard Seppala.
Togo led his team for 261 miles — 170 to meet up with the relay and 91 on the longest, most hazardous stretch, involving a treacherous crossing of a frozen bay. Decades later, Togo received his own statue in New York, but in a less prominent location, Seward Park on the Lower East Side.
“No, no, you have it all wrong,” Ms. Winther Baxter corrected people when they mentioned the Balto statue, her granddaughter recalled her saying. “Togo was the real hero.”

Posted in Books, Food, History, Mammals, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 22, 2025.

Monday, September 22nd, 2025

Playing catch-up from the last few days:

Marilyn Hagerty. If you’ve been around the Internet for a while, that name may ring a bell with you.

Ms. Hagerty wrote a restaurant review column (“The Eatbeat”) for the Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald. In 2012, she wrote a review of the new (and first) Olive Garden in Grand Forks. It went viral on the Internet.

When the article first began to ricochet across social media, the initial consensus was that the writer was a kindly Midwestern grandmother who had lost the script. This seemed to be the view of an out-of-town reader who sent her a one-word email: “Pathetic.”
In fact, Ms. Hagerty was following a script of her own. It was her long-running custom to provide factual rundowns of the dining options in Grand Forks, a college town near the Minnesota border that has fewer than 60,000 people and few restaurants intent on culinary innovation.
She covered truck stops, diners and fast-food joints, some of them more than once. Although she wrote about places serving Vietnamese and Somali cuisine in Grand Forks, Eatbeat readers craving a new thrill generally had to look for it in Fargo, about 80 miles to the south.
“If you were going to review the fine dining here, you’d be done in three weeks,” Ms. Hagerty once said of her community.

What she said. It bothered me at the time, and it still bothers me. Why not seriously engage with and critique with what Olive Garden has to offer? (Back when we were still doing regular reviews, the Saturday Dining Conspiracy also reviewed our local Olive Garden, and our logic was the same: why should they be above criticism?)

Reaction to the review shifted as it became clear that Ms. Hagerty didn’t give a flying breadstick what the cynics thought. Within days, she was in New York, being welcomed by the national media. She gave interviews to “CBS Sunday Morning,” NBC’s “Today” morning program and Anderson Cooper’s syndicated talk show.

…

“My son is full of prunes,” she said.

She was 99.

Jim Edgar, Republican governor of Illinois during the 1990s.

Marian Burros, noted food writer. She worked at various times for the Washington Post, Washington Star, and the NYT.

She might offer a recipe for, say, Martha Washington’s Great Cake, usually in the weekly De Gustibus column, which she took over in 1983, while reporting on a sodium labeling bill being debated in Congress or regulatory battles over the wording of federal dietary guidelines.
From her home base in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, she became a close observer of the White House kitchen, reporting on a succession of presidential chefs, inaugural meals and the dining styles of new administrations. She took a particular interest in the White House vegetable garden planted by Michelle Obama.
On the pleasure side of the equation, her plum torte was one of the most popular recipes in the history of The Times, reprinted every September from 1983 to 1989.

“The Story Behind Our Most Requested Recipe Ever” (archived). Recipe (archived).

Martha Washington’s Great Cake (archived).

Ms. Burros alerted readers of The Post to the potential dangers of food dyes derived from coal tar, notably Red Dye No. 2, which the Food and Drug Administration banned in 1976. And, in a widely reprinted article, she revealed that Fresh Horizons Bread, marketed as a low-calorie alternative to regular bread, contained large amounts of powdered cellulose.

Posted in Food, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2025.

Monday, August 18th, 2025

Terence Stamp. THR. Tributes.

Other credits include “Big Eyes”, “The Limey”, “Bowfinger”, and “The Hit”.

Dan Tana, who ran one of those famous LA hangouts for the stars (until he sold it in 2009). NYT (archived).

Dobrivoje Tanasijević was born on May 26, 1935, in Cibutkovica, a small town outside Belgrade, where he grew up. His father, Radojko, was a restaurateur. His mother, Lenka (Miloseviv) Tanasijevic, resourcefully kept the family afloat during World War II, when Radojko was arrested. He was considered an ally of the old ruling classes by the Yugoslav Communists, and he wound up becoming an accountant at one of the restaurants he had owned.
In the early 1950s, Dan, still a teenager, was on the farm team of Red Star Belgrade, a professional soccer club. The team traveled to Belgium, where he got into a fight with the chaperone. He and a couple of friends promptly defected.

…

Regulars during the 1970s described a particularly rowdy era: the musician Nils Lofgren serenading strangers with an accordion while high on acid; a fight between an agent and a producer over a third man’s wife that left enduring blood stains on the restaurant’s carpeted floor.
“Our best clients are the regulars who come at least once or twice a week,” Mr. Susser told The New York Times in 2005. “Even a studio chief might not get a booth at the last minute if they haven’t been in for a while.”

…

The restaurant’s hipness depended somehow on its orthodoxy. The interior and the menu remained locked in midcentury America’s imagination of an Italian restaurant — including after a fire in 1980, when customers pleaded with Mr. Tana to exactly replicate the old saloon, and after Mr. Tana sold it to a friend in 2009.

…

The average experience of a night at Tana’s went something like this:
You walked under a green awning into a space so dark your eyes took a second to adjust. The décor was repeatedly described as “bordello red”: red Naugahyde booths, red-and-white checked tablecloths, red Christmas-tree lights on the ceiling and, everywhere, mounds of marinara sauce.
Your table, lit by candlelight, would generally occupy a dark, recessed corner. Your waiter would not be the Los Angeles archetype — a beautiful but incompetent aspiring young actor — but instead, dressed in black bow tie, a professional, courteous gentleman from the former Yugoslavia.
Mr. Tana himself, though frequently attending to his international soccer interests in London or Belgrade, where he had homes, might also stop by your table to greet you. He had an athlete’s build — six feet tall, broad shouldered — but also the sophistication of a confident speaker of Russian, German, French, Italian, English and Serbo-Croatian.
“His manners are old world: He is one of the few men who can carry off kissing a woman’s hand,” Los Angeles magazine reported in 1997. “He does it swiftly, smoothly and without hesitation, the same way he lights your cigarette.”

Ronnie Rondell, stuntman. He has a pretty massive body of credits, but would be known to many people as “the guy on fire on the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here'”. He also did stunt work on “The Night Stalker”, “To Live and Die in L.A.”, and one of the movies based on a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

On May 23, 1969, Mr. Rondell married Mary Smith in Palm Springs, Calif. The couple had two sons, R.A. Rondell and Reid Rondell. Both children became involved in the stunt industry.
In 1985, Reid Rondell, 22, was killed when his helicopter crashed during the filming of the CBS television series “Airwolf.” A producer, Donald Bellisario, informed Mr. Rondell of the death, according to a news report at the time. “He was obviously broken up by it, but he told me, ‘You know, it goes with the territory,’” Mr. Bellisario said.

Tristan Rogers, actor. Other credits include “Cover Up“, “Mancuso, FBI”, “Delgo“, and “Fast Track”.

Jules Witcover, political columnist and reporter.

From the days of manual typewriters to the age of laptop computers, Mr. Witcover interpreted America’s political scene as an analyst and eyewitness to history. He swapped tales with presidents; covered presidential campaigns, beginning in 1960; recorded the rise and fall of Richard M. Nixon; and was steps away when a gunman killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968.
Mr. Witcover’s column, “Politics Today,” written five days a week for years with Jack Germond, appeared in The Washington Star from 1977 to 1981, when The Star folded. It then ran in The Baltimore Sun and up to 140 other papers from 1981 to 2005, when it was terminated in a cutback, and was later syndicated three times a week by Tribune Media Services. Mr. Germond died in 2013, but Mr. Witcover continued writing it until he retired in 2022.

…

He was featured in “The Boys on the Bus,” Timothy Crouse’s 1973 book about pack campaign journalism, the old road show of poker games, pounding typewriters and all-night boozing. He fit right in, but he was one of the heavyweights.
“Witcover was deadly serious about his craft,” Mr. Crouse wrote. “He had given a great deal of thought to his own role as a political journalist, and was extraordinarily sensitive to the role that the whole press corps played, to its problems and failings.”

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Very short random gun crankery.

Monday, July 28th, 2025

One of the things Mike the Musicologist and I did over the weekend was to make a stop in Canyon Lake and go to the local grocery store.

Not because we were hungry, but because we wanted to try out the ammunition vending machine.

They had rifle, handgun, and shotgun ammunition. We didn’t look at the shotgun ammo. The rifle ammo was: .300 Blackout, .223, and Aguila .22 LR ammo. The handgun ammo was 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP.

We tried to buy one box of .45 and two boxes of .22 LR. The prices weren’t great, but we were treating this as an experiment.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of problem when I tried to use Apple Pay for the transaction: I think it couldn’t recognize my face due to the position I was in, and the passcode failed as well. And when Apple Pay failed, it left the machine totally locked up. We couldn’t get it to respond to any of the buttons on the screen, or even reset. Poor error handling on the part of the implementation team, I believe.

Sadly, we had to chalk this up as a failed experiment. But I did get some taco-flavored Doritos while I was there. I haven’t seen those around in a while.

Posted in Food, Guns | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: May 19, 2025.

Monday, May 19th, 2025

Jeff Blank, massively influential Austin chef.

Opened in 1984 on a then-two-lane stretch of RM 620 near Lakeway, Hudson’s on the Bend was one of the first restaurants in Central Texas to explore and celebrate regional Texas cuisine. The pastoral restaurant, built in a 1948 limestone ranch house perched on a hill dotted by cedar trees and juniper bushes, helped change the way people thought of fine dining in Texas.

…

Hudson’s on the Bend may have been the boldest of the new regional cuisine practitioners, serving an exotic menu that over time featured venison, antelope, wild boar, partridge, pheasant, guinea fowl, quail and alligator, along with seafood and more traditional proteins.

We ate a couple of birthday dinners there, and it was a swell joint: expensive, but worth the money.

Blank, who bought out Rausch in 1992, operated the restaurant from 1984 until 2016, when he sold it to a group that would be the first of several to make failed attempts at filling the shoes of the singular personality.

We never tried any of the attempts to reboot Hudson’s, though. Right now, that space is being converted into a Wahoo’s Fish Tacos.

Lawrence pointed out to me the obit for Ed Smylie, the man who put duct tape to the highest and best use ever: saving the crew of Apollo 13.

“If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape,” Mr. Smylie said in the documentary. “That’s where we were. We had duct tape, and we had to tape it in a way that we could hook the environmental control system hose to the command module canister.”

…

The adapter worked. The astronauts were able to breathe safely in the lunar module for two days as they awaited the appropriate trajectory to fly the hobbled command module home.

The Museum of Ice Cream in the Domain in Austin. I guess they just couldn’t come to terms on a new lease, and will be closing when the current one expires. We talked about having some corporate events there, but never actually did. And it seems kind of expensive: $30 will buy me more Amy’s Ice Cream than I can, or should, eat.

Biderman’s Deli off of Far West. This was their last standing location. I went there a few times with Mom: I think she liked their Reuben, and I know I liked their bagels and lox.

Posted in Food, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#133)

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2025

My Personal Top Ten List of Wikipedia Lists

10. “List of stoffs”. How can you not like a list with a name like that? Also, as you know, Bob, I’m both a bit of a plane geek and a military history geek. And as you also know, Bob, the famous ME-163 ran on T-Stoff and Z-Stoff (in the A variant) or C-Stoff (in the B and C variants.) (At least, I think that’s the case. The Wikipedia article is a little confusing.)

(I’ve been thinking about doing a Kickstarter for another million-dollar idea: a small rocket engine that attaches to a snowboard and runs on T-Stoff and Z-Stoff, maybe about the size of an old Apollo RCS motor. Why take the lift when you can rocket up the slope and board back down? And why just board back down when you can rocketboard back down? Think of the extreme fun!)

(No, I haven’t done the math on this. Yet.)

9. “List of lists of lists”. “This is a list of articles that are lists of list articles on the English Wikipedia. In other words, each of the articles linked here is an index to multiple lists on a topic. Some of the linked articles are themselves lists of lists of lists.” So do we need a “Lists of lists of lists of lists” entry?

8. “List of animals awarded human credentials”. This one would be higher on the list if it wasn’t just cats and dogs (well, except for one chicken and one goldfish). Really, is there nobody out there who has obtained a diploma for their sloth or slow loris? (And if the answer is “No, there isn’t” I sense a great need. Senator Shoshana, I’ve never met you and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so call me, maybe, about diplomas for sloths?) Honorable mention: “Non-human electoral candidates”.

7. “List of helicopter prison escapes“. I guess this is mostly personal nostalgia. When I was (mumble mumble) years old, “Breakout” was released. I thought a movie about a prison break by helicopter was incredibly cool. I never actually it in theaters because my parents wouldn’t let me watch PG-rated movies. I still haven’t seen it, and in retrospect it was probably a mediocre Bronson action film, But: Robert Duvall! John Huston! Randy Quaid! And it’s available on blu-ray from Kino Lorber.

Setting aside my personal nostalgia, this is still a good list. I’ve written before about the crazy Garrett Brock Trapnell story, but that’s not the only good one. “I told him it was our Minister of Defence leaving.” “The 3-passenger helicopter was so overloaded with 5 occupants that it barely cleared the fence, while flying away in a hail of gunfire that injured one guard.” “One of the skids caught on the razor wire, causing the helicopter to catapult over the fence and crash into the prison grounds.” Is it just me, or do there seem to be a disproportionate number of helicopter escapes in France and Canada?

The record for most helicopter escapes goes to convicted murderer Pascal Payet, who has used helicopters to escape from prisons in 2001, 2003, and most recently 2007.

6. “List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response“. Everyone knows about “The Rite of Spring” (or thinks they know: I would really love to find a good reliable history of what actually happened the night of the premiere). But there are other great moments in this entry. Some of them even involve artists I like. “One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing ‘Stop, stop, I confess.'” “Artist Man Ray reportedly punched a man in the nose, Marcel Duchamp began hurling obscenities at a fellow audience member, and Erik Satie was heard shouting, ‘What precision! What precision!'”. “…Futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti fighting members of the audience in the stalls.” (Futurism! There’s a rabbit hole for you.)

5. “List of sausages“. As you know, Bob, I am somewhat food obsessed. There are a bunch of Wikipedia food lists I could probably pick, but I happen to be fond of sausages. I wonder how hard it would be to organize a sausage tour of Germany? (I’d include Volkswagen currywurst in that tour, but I’m not if VW would let a tourist group eat in their canteen.) Also, I’m wondering if there’s any way to get Noumboulo in the US…

4. “List of Latin phrases”. Because sometimes in business it is useful to be able to toss out a reference like “alea iacta est” or “fiat justitia ruat caelum” and see who picks up on it. Honorable mention: “Glossary of French expressions in English“. I don’t have as many opportunities to use any of these, except “pour encourager les autres“.

3. “List of winless seasons”. Yes, this does include the NFL, and yes, the 2008 Lions and the 2017 Cleveland Browns are on the list. But there’s more to it than just the NFL. Have you ever wondered if a cricket team has lost all of their matches in a season? What about rugby? Or “association football”? (“In the 2010–11 Ukrainian Second League (3rd tier on the Ukrainian pyramid), FC Veres Rivne lost all 14 out of 22 scheduled games before being expelled from the league due to failure of payment of league dues; in addition, they also did not score a single goal at home.” Now that’s a mark to strive for.)

2. “List of canceled Las Vegas casinos”. I’ve linked to this before, but it is still a favorite of mine. Honorable mention: “List of Atlantic City casinos that never opened”.

And at number one on the hit parade…

1. “List of television series canceled after one episode”. Not only is this a subject near and dear to my heart (epic failure) but I love the way this list is organized: “Canceled before the first episode finished airing”, “Canceled after two episodes, seen back-to-back on premiere night”, “Special cases”, and etc.

Posted in Bagatelle, Food, Geek, History, Music, Planes, Travel, TV | 2 Comments »

Consumer warning.

Thursday, April 3rd, 2025

When I am out and about, I like to pick up unusual and different snacks for the Saturday Movie Group to try.

I bought some of these a while back and intended to write about them, but it got past me. Then we stopped at the Buc-ee’s in Hillsboro yesterday, where I saw them for sale again and was reminded that I intended to do a post.

“flock Chicken Skin Crisps”, in various flavors, including Terry Black’s Barbecue. Low-carb, high protein.

Folks, these are vile. Do not purchase these if you have any regard for your taste buds.

We opened the pack of Terry Black Barbecue flavor. It is about the size of your typical snack pack of chips. There were three of us there. None of us had more than one. The rest went into the trash. I don’t recall us ever before having a snack that was so bad none of us could finish it, but these were just that horrible.

Terry Black and Buc-ee’s should be ashamed of themselves for selling something this bad to unsuspecting travelers. Avoid at all costs. I wouldn’t even feed them to an elephant. Buy some beaver nuggets instead.

Posted in Food, Safety | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 22, 2025.

Saturday, March 22nd, 2025

George Foreman. ESPN.

Foreman’s career spanned generations: He fought Chuck Wepner in the 1960s, Dwight Muhammad Qawi in the ’80s and Evander Holyfield in the ’90s.
With his fellow heavyweights Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, Foreman embodied a golden era in the 1970s, when boxing was still a cultural force in America. The three great champions thrilled fans with one classic bout after another. Foreman was the last living member of the trio.

…

Success came quickly in the amateur ranks; only a year and a half later he was Olympic heavyweight champion, defeating Ionas Chepulis of the Soviet Union by a second-round knockout in Mexico City in 1968.
After the fight, Foreman, who was Black, waved a small American flag in the ring, days after the track athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised clenched fists during the national anthem to protest the country’s treatment of Black people.
“I was just glad to be an American,” Foreman said afterward. “Some people have tried to make something of it, calling me an Uncle Tom, but I’m not. I just believe people should live together in peace.”

…

Foreman’s affability helped him transcend boxing and cross over into the media world. In 1993-94, in the midst of his comeback, he starred in “George,” a short-lived sitcom on ABC in which he played a retired boxer helping troubled youth, and he made guest appearances on several other shows over the years. He appeared in a Venus-flytrap costume on the reality competition show “The Masked Singer” in 2022. (His performance of “Get Ready” by the Temptations was not enough to stave off elimination.)

Kitty Dukakis.

Posted in Food, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 24, 2025.

Monday, February 24th, 2025

Joy Reid’s show on MSNBC.

MSNBC’s president suggested Sunday that blindsided staffers of liberal host Joy Reid’s canceled show can apply for other jobs within the progressive network as she confirmed the group of employees would be canned, according to a report.

Just gonna slide in here before Lawrence does…

Lynne Marie Stewart. Other credits include the animated 1995 “The Tick”, “The Running Man”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Son of the Beach”.

Roberta Flack.

“I’ve been told I sound like Nina Simone, Nancy Wilson, Odetta, Barbra Streisand, Dionne Warwick, even Mahalia Jackson,” Ms. Flack told The New York Times in 1970. “If everybody said I sounded like one person, I’d worry. But when they say I sound like them all, I know I’ve got my own style.”

Tom Fitzmorris, who was the food guy in New Orleans for many years.

Mr. Fitzmorris had a corny sense of humor, which often involved jokes about the phrase “soup du jour.” (A customer asks what the soup du jour is; the waitress says, “I don’t know. They change it on me every day.”) He also liked to play elaborate April Fool’s pranks. He once made up a new restaurant that he said was opening near Commander’s Palace and described the fictitious competitor with such detailed admiration that Ella Brennan, then an owner of Commander’s Palace, dispatched her daughter, Ti Martin, to investigate.
Ti Martin, now one of the restaurant’s proprietors, remembered him as a particularly harsh critic, not out of meanness but because he wanted things done in a way he perceived as proper. When she ran out of iced tea at a restaurant she had just opened, he went on about it on his show for what she said seemed like an hour.
“But he was right,” she said. “Who runs out of iced tea?”

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

Gun books, not so much gun books, and other tales of recent library additions.

Friday, February 21st, 2025

If I make a small push here, I can get the last of the gun books out of the living room. That will leave me with one on the kitchen table (which is there waiting for me to do the combination gun crankery/gun book post) and a few new additions upstairs. (Plus the backlog. We don’t talk about the backlog.)

Some of these books I can cover relatively quickly, so maybe it is worth making that push. All of them are interesting to me, but for varying reasons.

Shall we get on with it?

(more…)

Posted in Books, Food, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Quick preview of coming attractions (also relevant to Lawrence’s interests).

Friday, January 31st, 2025

I do intend to resume gun book blogging (and random gun crankery) soon.

Right now, I’m trying to finish the updates to the list of Texas congressional representatives. I’m about 1/3rd of the way through, and hope to have that done by the end of the weekend.

In the meantime, I thought I’d put up a quick post that’s sort of gun book related. Lawrence gets a fair number of possums in his yard. Or maybe just one possum, over and over again, that his dog keeps cornering. I don’t know for sure. I haven’t checked the serial numbers on his possums.

Anyway, I thought I’d throw this up as a preview from a forthcoming book: a recipe for “possum sausages”. I do think my use of this limited excerpt from How Wild Things Are by Analiese Gregory counts as “fair use”.

(Click to embiggen.)

One thing I do want to point out, though: Lawrence’s possums are the “Virginia opossum” (order Didelphimorphia). The possums the author is describing here are the “common brushtail possum” (order Diprotodontia), which are considered invasive in Tasmania. I suspect with enough pork back fat stuffed in, either one tastes good. Especially if you follow the recommended process of caging your possum for two weeks and feeding it fruit and veggies to reduce the “gamey” taste.

I do not know if the differences between Didelphimorphia and Diprotodontia make a difference to the cooking time or the taste of the possum sausage. I have not tried this recipe yet. (We don’t have a sausage/meat grinder. We do have a Kitchenaid stand mixer, but I would never buy the sausage stuffer attachment for it, as reliable sources say that is a POS.)

Posted in Books, Food, Hoplobibilophilia, Mammals | 1 Comment »

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