Archive for the ‘Clippings’ Category

More obit watch.

Tuesday, December 30th, 2014

The LAT is reporting the death of Luise Rainer at the age of 104.

I’d never heard of Ms. Rainer until I read her obit, but she’s one of those interesting Hollywood stories. She started out acting on the stage in Germany, was signed by MGM and came to Hollywood in 1935, won two consecutive Academy Awards (Best Actress, 1936, “The Great Ziegfeld”, and Best Actress, 1937, “The Good Earth”)…

…and then pretty much disappeared from Hollywood.

Rainer, however, didn’t like the trappings of being a movie star. She refused to wear make-up or glamorous clothes and demanded a say in what roles she would play, which didn’t go over well with dominating Mayer. She disparaged Hollywood people, finding them more interested in clothes than in important issues of the day. Her friends included composers George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg, writer Thomas Mann and architect Richard Neutra — not exactly a Hollywood crowd. She struggled to find roles that were worthy of her talent.

She was unhappily married to Clifford Odets for a time.

Edited to add: Very nice McFadden obit from the NYT.

Obit watch: December 30, 2014.

Tuesday, December 30th, 2014

Timothy J. Dowd.

Mr. Dowd was the NYPD detective who led the task force that caught David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz.

This brought a smile to my face:

Ms. Begg [Mr. Dowd’s daughter – DB] said in an interview on Monday that her father had disdained television dramas about the police because they were unrealistic about police work — all except one, she said: “Columbo.” That series, especially popular in the 1970s, starred Peter Falk as an untidy, seemingly distracted detective in Los Angeles who solved cases by poking around in a practiced but random fashion and stumbling in the direction of a solution.
“That’s how it’s done,” she said her father explained to her.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (part 3)

Monday, December 29th, 2014

Dave Barry’s Year in Review: 2014.

Bloody Monday.

Monday, December 29th, 2014

This is your official NFL firings thread, which will be updated through the day as more people get the axe.

Jim Harbaugh was well reported yesterday (I was out and about). Technically, they’re making noises like it wasn’t a firing, but I still count it as one.

Rex Ryan and John Idzik (the general manager) are confirmed out at the Jets. No great shock.

Mike Smith is out at Atlanta: the press conference is at 11 AM Eastern, but ESPN has the press release.

Marc Trestman and Phil Emery (the general manager) are both out in Chicago, according to “sources”.

TMQ Watch: December 23, 2014.

Wednesday, December 24th, 2014

Before we jump into this week’s post-bye TMQ, a tweet from Easterbrook:

Dear Greggles:

The “whole nation” saw Jacksonville – Tennessee because it was a Thursday night game and the only game on. It may be true that California didn’t get to see Dallas – Indianapolis, but that was a curb stomping; the San Diego – San Francisco and Oakland – Buffalo games were close thrillers.

After the jump, this week’s TMQ. Warning: spoilers ahead for “Ascension”.

(more…)

Obit watch: December 24, 2014.

Wednesday, December 24th, 2014

Lawrence forwarded this really nice appreciation of Margot Adler, who passed away in July. Awful lot of dust in the room today.

(No, really. I’ve been sneezing my ass off the past couple of days.)

A/V Club obit for Joseph Sargent, who I mentioned yesterday. Also: NYT.

I missed this over the weekend: former Houston mayor Bob Lanier.

Finally, one I missed until late yesterday: Billie Whitelaw. You may know her as the nanny in the original “The Omen”, but she was very famous in England. She may have been best known as Samuel Beckett’s muse and collaborator:

She accepted his artistic vision without always understanding its explicitly rendered ambiguities. They read his plays together, discussing not their meaning but the most minuscule elements of the text — the pauses and sighs and guttural sounds as well as the words, the inflections demanded by the language, and his need, as she said in interviews, to remove the acting from the performance. “Flat, no emotion, no color,” he would often caution her, she said.

Obit watch: December 23, 2014.

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2014

Yesterday was a bad day for the Joes.

Joe Cocker: LAT. NYT. A/V Club.

This is the only story I’ve found so far, but prolific television and movie director Joseph Sargent also died yesterday. Among his credits: the original “Taking of Pelham 123” and “The Marcus-Nelson Murders” (the pilot for “Kojak”).

Merry Christmas to me!

Monday, December 22nd, 2014

I’m actually starting to get into the spirit of the season, believe it or not.

Part of the reason is that I got an early sort-of-but-not-really “Christmas present” over the weekend, which will be blogged in due time.

And then there’s this, which I think is really cool:

…mathematicians have made the first substantial progress in 76 years on the reverse question: How far apart can consecutive primes be? The average spacing between primes approaches infinity as you travel up the number line, but in any finite list of numbers, the biggest prime gap could be much larger than the average. No one has been able to establish how large these gaps can be.

Besides the fact that I have an amateur interest in prime numbers, this is also a famous Paul Erdős problem.

Even cooler: one of the guys who solved this problem, Terence Tao, has a direct connection to Erdős:

In 1985, Tao, then a 10-year-old prodigy, met Erdős at a math event. “He treated me as an equal,” recalled Tao, who in 2006 won a Fields Medal, widely seen as the highest honor in mathematics. “He talked very serious mathematics to me.” This is the first Erdős prize problem Tao has been able to solve, he said. “So that’s kind of cool.”

(Someone on my Christmas list is getting this as part of their present; I’ll let you know how that goes over.)

Random notes: December 22, 2014.

Monday, December 22nd, 2014

The Krampus Comeback!

“For the next 12 months I will live as if there is no God,” he typed. “I will not pray, read the Bible for inspiration, refer to God as the cause of things or hope that God might intervene and change my own or someone else’s circumstances. (I trust that if there really is a God that God will not be too flummoxed by my foolish experiment and allow others to suffer as a result).”

I don’t (and won’t) talk about my religion here. But I will say: I have a lot of respect for Ryan Bell, and would love to sit down and talk with him at some point.

Save the Lada!

The company’s market share diminished steadily after the Soviet Union collapsed, dropping to 17 percent from 70 percent.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (part 2)

Monday, December 22nd, 2014

The “First Annual Very Nicest Awards” from Very Nice Website (aka John Moltz, one of the four authentic geniuses the Internet has produced).

Won’t you consider murdering and eating a duck this holiday season?

The Incomparable takes on “The Star Wars Holiday Special”.

What does it take…

Friday, December 19th, 2014

…to lose your job as a cop?

If you’re the police chief in Phoenix, the answer is “insubordination”. Specifically, calling a press conference and demanding a new contract after the city manager said “Don’t DO that!” seems to be a sure way to get yourself terminated.

If you’re with the Austin Police Department, the answer is “running your mouth to a reporter”. Technically, Andrew Pietrowski “retired”, but it seems like his retirement was just ahead of “being canned by Art Acevedo”.

“Now, stop and think about this. I don’t care who you are. You think about the women’s movement today, [women say] ‘Oh, we want to go [into] combat,’ and then, ‘We want equal pay, and we want this.’ You want to go fight in combat and sit in a foxhole? You go right ahead, but a man can’t hit you in public here? Bulls–t! You act like a whore, you get treated like one!”

The way I read this, it wasn’t like Pietrowski was asked for his opinion; he just walked up to a reporter who was there for another reason and started spouting off.

Obit watch: December 19, 2014.

Friday, December 19th, 2014

Mandy Rice-Davies has passed away at 70.

Ms. Rice-Davies, you may recall, was one of the central figures in what became known as the Profumo Affair. In brief, she was a roommate and friend of Christine Keeler, who had brief affairs with both Secretary of State for War John Profumo and Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet intelligence agent. This was quite the scandal back in 1963.

The Taste of Schadenfreude.

Wednesday, December 17th, 2014

From the Austin Chronicle‘s runoff endorsements for District 8:

In October, when we endorsed Scruggs, we noted his bulldog efforts to create a Demo­cratic outpost in Circle C, his attention to thorny issues like global warming and gun control, and his affable leadership style.

Ed Scruggs was also one of the people who lobbied the Travis County Commissioners not to renew the contract for gun shows at the Expo Center.

How did that work out for you, Ed?

ed

Oooooooh. Not so well.

By way of Overlawyered, here’s an Orange County Register article on the Costa Mesa PI case, which I wrote about a few days ago.

I was not aware that the law firm had shut down; that’s a good first start, but nothing in the article indicates that any of the lawyers involved have been forced to surrender their licenses.

Even after the phony DUI report, as the union attempted to distance itself form its former law firm – Lackie, Dammeier, McGill & Ethir – and the P.I.’s records show that money continued to flow from the union to the law firm to investigators.
The affidavit shows that even after the union said it fired its law firm, after word of the DUI setup got out, the union continued to pay its elevated retainer rate of $4,500 per quarter to the firm as late as January 2013. Lanzillo and Impola were paid by the law firm through January, as well.

Another thing I’m curious about: why does the Costa Mesa Police Department continue to exist? At this point, given that the department is clearly out of control to the point where they’re threatening politicians, wouldn’t it be better to disband them, fire everyone, and let the county sheriff’s department patrol Costa Mesa until they can build a new department from the ground up?

(Of course, this being California, many of the crooked cops from Costa Mesa will probably end up with jobs in the sheriff’s department or other cities in the area.)

In case you were wondering…

Tuesday, December 16th, 2014

The runoff election was today. The polls closed at 7 PM.

According to the Statesman, Mike Martinez called Not Mike Martinez at 7:15 to concede.

Also, in case you were wondering, Steve Adler was the only candidate who responded to my emailed question about Art Acevedo’s future. That’s why you haven’t seen any updates: because Martinez, Sheri Gallo, and Mandy Dealey couldn’t be arsed to answer.

Obit watch: December 16, 2014.

Tuesday, December 16th, 2014

Fred “Fuzzy” Thurston, former Green Bay Packer.

Lombardi, the Hall of Fame coach, led the Packers for nine seasons, and Thurston was there for every one of them. The pre-eminent team of the 1960s, the Packers won championships in 1961, 1962, 1965, 1966 and 1967, including the first two Super Bowls, and though much of the team’s success was built on a ferocious defense, some of the game’s great players — including quarterback Bart Starr, halfback Paul Hornung and fullback Jim Taylor, all Hall of Famers — made Green Bay a powerful offensive force as well.

Thurston was a key element in Green Bay’s implementation of the sweep:

In the sweep, sometimes called the Lombardi sweep for the coach’s fine-tuning of a play that originated in an earlier football era, the two guards are required to pull. That is, instead of pushing forward against the defensive players lined up in front of them, they race in tandem along the line of scrimmage toward one sideline or the other before surging upfield, one ideally blocking a linebacker and the other a defensive back, providing an avenue for the runner behind them.
With Hornung and Taylor carrying the ball behind Thurston and Kramer, the Packer sweep was close to unstoppable, even though opponents often knew it was coming. Generally speaking, guards are among the most anonymous players on the field, but the Green Bay sweep was iconic enough that Thurston and Kramer became well known to football fans.