Archive for the ‘Mammals’ Category

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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: 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

Back on the gun book train…

Thursday, February 13th, 2025

…with one oddity that’s not really a gun book.

This was bought in one lot from Callahan and Company, so there was $8 shipping on top of these prices.

The jump goes here…

(more…)

Posted in Books, Hoplobibilophilia, Mammals | 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 »

Bagatelle (#125).

Tuesday, December 17th, 2024

Shot:

Quincy, M.E., season 5, episode 1: “No Way to Treat a Flower”.

A teenage girl dies from a disease that mainly affects the elderly. A few hours later, her boyfriend dies of the same symptoms. Quincy later traces it to a the marijuana they smoked, which was treated with a poisonous fertilizer. Quincy then decides to go after the magazine that advertised it in order to try to keep more kids from dying from the tainted weed. He also must find out where the kids got the weed from.

Chaser:

Two men from New York died from pneumonia they contracted from bat feces — after they used the excrement as fertilizer to grow marijuana, a new study found.
The unidentified men from Rochester, ages 64 and 59, smoked pot that had been tainted with a fungus found in the bat droppings, known as guano, that caused fatal lung infections, according to a study published in Open Forum Infectious Disease earlier this month.

Posted in 1970s, Bagatelle, Mammals, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 13, 2024.

Friday, September 13th, 2024

Donald Sheppard passed away on September 7th. He was 104. BBC.

Mr. Sheppard served in the Royal Engineers during World War II.

Mr. Sheppard was one of more than 150,000 soldiers who crossed the English Channel on June 6, 1944. He landed at Juno Beach, in Normandy, under a hail of gunfire. More than 4,000 Allied troops died that day.
“When he landed on the beach, he said he was just walking over dead bodies,” his son said. “Dead boys, dead men. And they gave their life for our freedom. I think to him, personally, he never wants that to be forgotten.”

…

In 1945, Mr. Sheppard helped British forces liberate Bergen-Belsen, one of the largest concentration camps in Germany; more than 50,000 people, including Anne Frank, died there. When the British arrived, corpses lay in piles; about 60,000 people, emaciated and ill, were still alive.
Mr. Sheppard struggled to talk about the experience; a granddaughter, Daisy O’Brien, said she did not learn about it until she was a teenager. Mr. Sheppard would become emotional remembering that day, his son said.“He couldn’t believe that one human could do that to another human,” Jonathan Sheppard said, and would often lament the “senselessness” of war.

…

After his retirement, Mr. Sheppard devoted himself to keeping alive the memory of the soldiers who fought and died beside him. He raised money for veterans, made repeated trips to Normandy and, until recently, spoke to schoolchildren about the war.

Chad McQueen. I think I’ve noted before that I don’t do obits for celebrity children just because they are celebrity children, but he did have a career beyond being Steve McQueen’s son. Other credits include “V”, “New York Cop”, and “Firepower”.

Bob Weatherwax, Hollywood dog trainer. He was most famous for succeeding his father, Rudd, in training dogs to play “Lassie”.

On a trip to Philadelphia to promote the 1994 movie “Lassie,” a successful attempt to revive the franchise, he and the film’s star stayed at the luxurious Rittenhouse Hotel, where the celebrity collie dined on boiled chicken that was prepared by a chef, delivered by room service and washed down with distilled water.
Lassie usually traveled with Mel, a Jack Russell terrier. The two dogs watched “Lassie” reruns on Nickelodeon in between promotional appearances.
“The hotels say they wish they had more guests like Lassie,” Mr. Weatherwax told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “They don’t have to deal with cigarette holes in the carpet or spilled drinks.”

Alberto Fujimori.

Joe Schmidt, one of the Detroit Lions greats.

Schmidt was named to 10 Pro Bowls, selected as a first-team All-Pro eight times and chosen for the N.F.L.’s all-decade team for the 1950s.
The Lions were an N.F.L. powerhouse in those years. They defeated the Cleveland Browns for the 1952 league championship; beat them again in the 1953 title matchup, when Schmidt was a rookie; and bested them once more in 1957, routing them 59-14. They also went to the championship game against the Browns in 1954, but that time they lost.
Schmidt was 6 feet 1 inches and 220 pounds, not especially big even by the standards of his era. But he anchored the defense on Lions teams that included his fellow future Hall of Famers Yale Lary, Jack Christiansen and Dick Lane (known as Night Train) in the secondary, along with an offense featuring Bobby Layne at quarterback, Doak Walker at halfback and Lou Creekmur and Dick Stanfel on the line.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in 1973.

…

Schmidt’s teammates voted him their most valuable player four times. He was also the Lions’ longtime captain. When he retired after the 1965 season, he had intercepted 24 passes and recovered 14 fumbles.

Posted in Heroism, Mammals, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Breaking the law, breaking the law…

Wednesday, July 10th, 2024

I think this is a rare example of a headline that does not comply with Betteridge’s law of headlines.

Should You Hug a Sloth?

Obviously, the answer to that question is, “Yes, and you should ignore the joyless fun suckers who want to suck all the fun out of life.”

The number of those U.S.D.A.-licensed exhibitors almost doubled from 2019 to 2021, with over 1,000 sloths inspected annually in the last two years.

It must be fun to tell people at parties, “I’m a sloth inspector.”

Posted in Bagatelle, Mammals | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 24, 2024.

Friday, May 24th, 2024

Kabosu, the Shiba Inu who became a symbol of Dogecoin.

Hatitp to RoadRich, whose eulogy I will borrow: “Much sad. Very respect. No bite.”

Bob McCreadie. This is kind of a weird one, but actually not that weird by NYT standards. He was a prominent dirt track racer. Dirt track racing is apparently a big deal in parts of the East Coast, but not so much in NYC. The slightly surprising thing to me is that the paper of record treats him and his career with respect:

McCreadie was dirt racing’s perfect Everyman: Scrawny, bespectacled, with a bushy beard, he chain-smoked, cursed vigorously and hauled his racecars with his own pickup truck instead of the fancy trailers that many of his contemporaries used.
In northern New York, where he lived, the news media covered him with roughly the same exuberance with which New York City newspapers covered Babe Ruth in his heyday. The Post-Standard of Syracuse mentioned him more than 1,200 times in his career.
“He looked like a country bumpkin,” Ron Hedger, a longtime writer for Speed Sport Insider, said in a phone interview. “The fans identified with him, and they really loved him. There was always a mob of people waiting in line for an autograph.”

…

He started racing in 1971 and won his first race four years later. He then began dominating the circuit. In 1986, he won the Miller American 200 at the New York State Fairgrounds — the Super Bowl of dirt racing. His best year was 1994, when he won 47 of 93 races.

…

In his best year, McCreadie won somewhere between $300,000 and $400,000 in race prizes. But his aggressive racing style had an occupational hazard: dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of crashes.
“You’re looking at someone who’s run thousands of races,” he told The Post-Standard in 2006. “If you tried to do percentage-wise out of the total — maybe 5 percent.”

This just in: Caleb Carr, author. You’ve probably at least heard of The Alienist:

Mr. Carr had first pitched the book as nonfiction; it wasn’t, but it read that way because of the exhaustive research he did into the period. He rendered the dank horrors of Manhattan’s tenement life, its sadistic gangs and the seedy brothels that were peddling children, as well as the city’s lush hubs of power, like Delmonico’s restaurant. And he peopled his novel with historical figures like Theodore Roosevelt, who was New York’s reforming police commissioner before his years in the White House. Even Jacob Riis had a cameo.

He was also a prominent military historian. And he was horribly abused as a young boy by his father, the Beat author Lucien Carr.

“There’s no question that I have a lifelong fascination with violence,” Caleb Carr told Stephen Dubner of New York magazine in 1994, just before “The Alienist” was published, explaining not just the engine for the book but why he was drawn to military history. “Part of it was a desire to find violence that was, in the first place, directed toward some purposeful end, and second, governed by a definable ethical code. And I think it’s fairly obvious why I would want to do that.”

Morgan Spurlock, of “Super Size Me” fame. NYT (archived) which I prefer:

But the film also came in for subsequent criticism. Some people pointed out that Mr. Spurlock refused to release the daily logs tracking his food intake. Health researchers were unable to replicate his results in controlled studies.
And in 2017, he admitted that he had not been sober for more than a week at a time in 30 years — meaning that, in addition to his “McDonald’s only” diet, he was drinking, a fact that he concealed from his doctors and the audience, and that most likely skewed his results.
The admission came in a statement in which he also revealed multiple incidents of sexual misconduct, including an encounter in college that he described as rape, as well as repeated infidelity and the sexual harassment of an assistant at his production company, Warrior Poets.

Posted in Books, Cars, Geek, Mammals, Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Bagatelle (#110)

Friday, April 26th, 2024

Shot:

Noem also detailed how she killed a “nasty and mean” male goat because it had not been castrated.
She described the animal as smelling “disgusting, musky, rancid” and claimed it “loved to chase” Noem’s children and knock them down.
The goat was also “dragged to a gravel pit,” but jumped when she pulled the trigger, and subsequently survived the wound. Noem went back to her truck to retrieve another shell, then “hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down,” she wrote.

Chaser:

A hoarder “squatter” with a large aggressive goat refused to leave a house in San Antonio for months — as the belligerent billy goat attacked the homeowner and police, sources said.
The four-legged baaaad boy stormed and butted house flipper Daniel Cabrera, who bought a five-bedroom abode for $175,000 from a woman who refused to move out in June, he told realtor.com.

Spicy bar snack:

Ammo cuffs from Andy’s Leather. So you don’t have to go back to the truck to load another round. Or you could use a rifle with a magazine.

Posted in Bagatelle, Goats, Guns, Mammals | Comments Closed

I’m just a poor, dumb white boy from Hampden…

Thursday, October 5th, 2023

“There is a real danger with bringing fecal matter into the U.S.,” said LaFonda D. Sutton-Burke, CBP Director, Field Operations-Chicago Field Office, in a statement.

Posted in Bagatelle, Mammals | Comments Closed

This is intended to enrage you. (#10 in a series)

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2023

I’m going to put a jump here, for those of you who want to avoid being enraged. Something else will be coming along eventually.

(more…)

Posted in Mammals, Rage | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: March 28, 2023.

Tuesday, March 28th, 2023

Things have been quiet on the obit front the past few days. Now watch as someone prominent dies later on today. (I don’t want this to happen, but it seems that whenever I’m thinking things have been quiet, something happens.)

In the meantime, Lawrence sent me a couple of obits a few days ago:

Michael Reaves, writer. He worked on “Batman: The Animated Series”, wrote some “Star Wars” novels, and had a lot of other credits.

Eric Brown, SF author and critic for The Guardian.

Great and good FotB Borepatch lost his beloved dog, Wolfgang. Those of you who are familiar with Borepatch and Wolfgang might want to send condolences his way.

Posted in Books, Mammals, Obits | 1 Comment »

Yet another thing I did not know.

Thursday, March 23rd, 2023

According to the bear’s owners, the Cocaine Bear has the authority to officiate legally binding weddings in the mall where it is kept due to Kentucky’s marriage laws. This claim is only partly true; the bear does not have the authority to solemnize weddings, but the state of Kentucky cannot invalidate marriages performed by unqualified persons if the parties believe that the person marrying them has the authority to do so. As such, it is a belief in the Cocaine Bear’s authority that allows it to officiate legally binding weddings in Kentucky.

So as long as you believe, the marriage is valid. But when you stop believing, the marriage is invalid. And Pablo Escobear’s authority to officiate weddings is a giant consensual hallucination…and doesn’t the fact that Wikipedia states the bear does not have that authority invalidate the claim that the parties believe the bear has that authority?

Posted in Bagatelle, Law, Mammals | 2 Comments »

Mount Washington ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids…

Saturday, February 4th, 2023

…in fact, it’s cold as hell.

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington felt more like Mars than planet Earth on Friday as wind chills dipped below an unfathomable minus 110 degrees, a new record for the coldest wind chill ever recorded in the US.
Known for having some of the world’s worst weather, Mount Washington saw air temperatures plummet to minus 46 degrees with wind speeds averaging over 100 miles per hour with gusts over 125 miles per hour as the artic air mass wreaked havoc Friday, according to the Mount Washington observatory.

…

Meanwhile on Mars, temperatures on the surface this week reached a balmy high of 16 degrees with a low of minus 105, according to NASA. The space agency said temperatures of the red planet can fluctuate between minus 225 and 70 degrees.

This goes out to FotB RoadRich:

Nimbus the cat, who lives in the observatory with staffers, was reportedly cozied up and unbothered by the deadly storm, despite being a bit grumpy from taking his flea medication.
“He is actually sleeping through most of this event,” Tarasiewciz said.

Posted in Bagatelle, Mammals | 2 Comments »

Camel bites Kan be pretti nasti.

Friday, July 15th, 2022

A worker at a central Minnesota zoo was flown to St. Cloud Hospital on Wednesday after a camel got the man’s head in its mouth and bit down.
A second man who helped free the first also was bitten.

…

Deputies were told an employee was escorting a camel through an alleyway to prepare it for transport when the animal got the employee’s head in its mouth and bit down. The camel then dragged him about 15 feet.
A second employee, a 32-year-old Texas man, placed a plastic board into the camel’s mouth to release its bite from the first man, who was able to run to safety. The camel then charged at the second man and bit his head. He was able to get away on his own and declined medical treatment at the scene.

Posted in Camels, Mammals | 1 Comment »

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