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Obit watch: May 9, 2021.

Sunday, May 9th, 2021

Tawny Kitaen, 80s figure.

With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the music video for Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”

She once described working with Paula Abdul, who was a choreographer at the time, on the set of one video.
As Ms. Kitaen recalled, Ms. Abdul asked her what she could do, and Ms. Kitaen showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” And then, Ms. Kitaen said, she left.
“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”

…

She married David Coverdale, the frontman of Whitesnake, in 1989. The couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a pitcher with the Anaheim Angels (now the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim). They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.

Tawny Finley, in a declaration to the Orange County Superior Court, claimed Finley used steroids among other drugs. She also claimed he bragged about being able to circumvent MLB’s testing policy. When told of his wife’s accusations, which also included heavy marijuana use and alcohol abuse, Finley replied: “I can’t believe she left out the cross-dressing.”

Ed Ward, music critic. He wrote for “Crawdaddy” and “Rolling Stone”:

Mr. Ward’s review of the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” (1969) in Rolling Stone demonstrated his tough side: He called “Sun King” the album’s “biggest bomb” and its second side “a disaster.”
“They’ve been shucking us a lot lately and it’s a shame because they don’t have to,” he wrote. “Surely they have enough talent and intelligence to do better than this. Or do they?”

…

Mr. Ward was fired from Rolling Stone after a few months (he didn’t get along with Jann Wenner, the publisher), then became the West Coast correspondent for the rock magazine Creem, a post he held for most of the 1970s. He left in 1979 to write about the thriving music scene in Austin as a music critic at The American-Statesman.
“Ed brought a reputation to Austin as an unflinching critic — Rolling Stone had a lot of clout — and he was not diplomatic in his writing,” said his friend and fellow writer Joe Nick Patoski, who described Mr. Ward as cantankerous and difficult. “Early on, there was a reaction to some of the things he wrote and it started a ‘Dump Ed Ward’ movement that had bumper stickers and T shirts.”

…

Over the next decade, Mr. Ward was a music and food critic (sometimes, while he was still at The American-Statesman, under the pseudonym Petaluma Pete) for the alternative weekly The Austin Chronicle; one of three authors of “Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock & Roll” (1986), in which he focused on the 1950s; and, in 1987, one of several founders of the South by Southwest music, film and technology festival in Austin.

…

He returned to Austin in 2013 and set to work on “The History of Rock & Roll, Volume 1: 1920-1963,” which was published in 2016. A second volume, taking the music’s history up to 1977, was published in 2019. But his publisher declined to publish a third one because the second book’s sales had not been as good the first one’s.

Ernest Angley, televangelist. Or, as I liked to call him, “the man who took over Rex Humbard’s soup kitchen“.

These last two by way of Lawrence: George Jung, cocaine smuggler.

Japanese composer Shunsuke Kikuchi. Among his credits: “Dragon Ball”, “Dragon Ball Z”, and several “Gamera” films.

Posted in Books, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 402

Friday, May 7th, 2021

Two videos on unrelated topics today. One short-ish, one admittedly long.

Short-ish: This is an episode of the old “True Adventure” TV show called…”Serpent Cult”, about snake handling religion in Kentucky. I possibly could have put this in last week’s travel entry, but it didn’t feel right there.

I actually kind of like the host’s introduction. When was the last time you heard someone on TV say:

  • I was brought up religious.
  • I believe in people’s right to worship as they please.
  • I have a point of view on this, but I’m not going to force it on anybody else.

Long (about 70 minutes): “Raid on the Northfield Bank: The James-Younger Gang Meets Its Match”.

I wanted to link this for two reasons:

1. There’s a pretty good movie that the Saturday Night Movie Group watched not too long ago: “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid”, which you can find on YouTube with a carefully crafted search or on Amazon (affiliate link). I don’t believe it is exactly historically accurate, but…

2. Massad Ayoob in “American Handgunner” actually devoted an “Ayoob Files” column to the “Great Northfield, Minnesota Bank Robbery”, concentrating on the role of armed citizens.

(I have also read, and can recommend, the book Ayoob cites: Shot All to Hell by Mark Lee Gardner. (Affiliate link.))

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Religion, Reptiles, Snakes | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 399

Tuesday, May 4th, 2021

And now for something completely different.

“The Lumberman”, a 1971 film from the good folks at Encyclopedia Brittanica. It was part of a series called “Our Changing Way of Life”.

Bonus #1: When was the last time you thought about rice? For me, it was last night. But I am somewhat food obsessed.

Phil Robertson says “America Doesn’t Know How to Cook Rice Anymore”.

In addition to Romans 12:13, I am also reminded of Luke 24:42, where the risen Jesus appears to the apostles and asks, “Hey, you guys got any food up in here?” ‘Cause you never know when Jesus might show up, and who wants to be placing an order from Domino’s while Jesus is hanging around?

(If it comes to that, though, I have to warn you: the Bible is very clear that just introducing the delivery guy to Jesus is no substitute for a tip. You still need to tip your delivery driver, and I’d suggest 25% under normal circumstances. Do you really want Jesus to think you’re a cheapskate?)

(Also, if it comes to that: Jesus likes the meat lover’s pizza, or whatever your local equivalent is. Acts 10:15: “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.”)

Walter White Alton Brown discusses his “fast and foolproof” method for rice cooking.

Bonus #2: Okay, the quality on this isn’t great, but it is short. And this is the “Month of Mayberry” according to MeTV. Don Knotts advertising the Dodge Tradesman van.

Posted in 1970s, Food, History, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 28, 2021.

Wednesday, April 28th, 2021

Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut.

NASA memorial page.

When the lunar module Eagle, descending from Columbia, touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969, Colonel Collins lost contact with his crewmates and with NASA, his line of communication blocked as he passed over the moon’s far side. It was a blackout that would occur during a portion of each orbit he would make.
“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life,” he wrote in recreating his thoughts for his 1974 memoir, “Carrying the Fire.”
“If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side,” he added. “I like the feeling. Outside my window I can see stars — and that is all. Where I know the moon to be, there is simply a black void.”

Ole Anthony, one of those interesting characters you may never have heard of.

Mr. Anthony was trained in electronics, and in 1958 he was sent to an island in the South Pacific, where he was supposed to watch a small nuclear test many miles away. But the explosion was much larger than expected, and the radiation left him with scores of knobby tumors throughout his body.
He left the military in 1959 and took a job with Teledyne, a defense contractor. In a 2004 profile in The New Yorker, he told the journalist Burkhard Bilger that he had continued his work for the Air Force, sneaking behind the iron and bamboo curtains to install long-range sensors to detect Chinese and Soviet nuclear tests, though a later investigation by The Dallas Observer, a weekly newspaper, called that claim into question.

He went on to become active in Republican politics and became rich. Then in 1972, he found Jesus, but with a twist: he built his own religious community and specialized in taking down scam evangelists.

He specialized in what he called garbology — rooting through dumpsters for evidence of legal or spiritual fraud by televangelists like Robert Tilton, Benny Hinn and W.V. Grant, just three of the more than 300 he went after during his nearly 35-year campaign.
He compiled the results in long reports that he fed to reporters, and he made frequent appearances on shows like “Primetime Live” and “Inside Edition.” His work was largely responsible for the implosion of Mr. Tilton’s $80 million-a-year empire and Mr. Grant’s 1996 imprisonment for tax evasion. In 2007, he worked with the U.S. Senate Finance Committee in its own investigation into televangelists.

…

At first, Mr. Anthony tried to gather his flock among the Republicans and Rotarians of wealthy Dallas. But his abrasive style — he talked about his sex life in Bible study and was permanently barred from Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” TV show — turned off the well-to-do.
Mr. Anthony didn’t seem to mind. With no religious training, he was teaching himself theology, and he became obsessed with the austere mysticism and doctrinal fluidity of first-century Christianity. He incorporated Jewish practices into Trinity’s evolving creed: The group celebrated Passover and insisted on having a minyan (at least 10 people) for Bible study.
As word about Trinity got around, it began to attract disciples from the margins of Dallas society: addicts and ex-hippies, disaffected students and people who otherwise found themselves at a dead end — as well as the occasional curious blow in.

I cannot tell a lie: “permanently banned from the ‘700 Club'” is what hooked me. (And “often obscenity-laced, sometimes violent Bible study sessions”. And “a Trinity member who, like Mr. Anthony, had taken a vow of poverty before acquiring a private investigator’s license”.)

Among those “margins of Dallas society” he attracted: Joe Bob Briggs.

Noted: DEFCON is holding an online memorial for Dan Kaminsky on 2021/05/02 at 12 PM PDT. Link to the Discord is at the top of the DEFCON page.

Posted in Geek, History, Religion | Comments Closed

Happy Easter!

Sunday, April 4th, 2021

404 – body not found.

Posted in Bagatelle, Geek, Religion | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 22nd, 2020.

Thursday, October 22nd, 2020

It is going to be one of those two obit watches days, for reasons.

Marge Champion, of Marge and Gower Champion fame. She was 101.

Ms. Champion was a child of Hollywood, the daughter of a dance coach who taught her ballet, tap and the twirls, kicks and glorious sweeps of the ballroom. She performed at the Hollywood Bowl as a girl and as a teenager was a model for three Walt Disney animated features, her graceful moves transposed to the heroine of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), to the Blue Fairy that gave life to the puppet in “Pinocchio” (1940) and to the hippo ballerinas tripping lightly in tutus for “Dance of the Hours” in “Fantasia” (1940).
But her career came to little until 1947, when she and Gower Champion, a childhood friend, became partners both professionally and personally. In the next few years, they were pivotal in a transition from the escapist musicals of the Depression to an exuberant new age of postwar television, successors to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and the first dance team to achieve national popularity through television.
The Champions did not possess the sheer magic of Astaire and Rogers or rival their stardom in Hollywood. But as television began to permeate American homes in 1949, they joined the weekly “Admiral Broadway Revue,” with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, on the Dumont and NBC networks, and delivered something new: narrative dances that sparkled with pantomime, satire, parody and touches of nostalgia.

…

As their audiences grew into the millions, Hollywood beckoned. The Champions played themselves in “Mr. Music” (1950), a light comedy with Bing Crosby about a sidetracked songwriter. In “Show Boat” (1951), with Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, the Champions were members of the onboard troupe of entertainers and sang as well as danced. In “Lovely to Look At” (1952), a remake of “Roberta” also with Keel and Grayson, the Champions sang and danced a memorable number, “I Won’t Dance.” In their first roles with top billing, they played married dancers loosely based on themselves in “Everything I Have Is Yours” (1952).
The Champions radiated the vitality of young America, looking even in middle age like a couple of fresh-scrubbed teenagers. They were extraordinarily handsome — she a petite brunette with the blushing cheeks and sincere brown eyes of the girl next door; he a tall, slender letterman with a crew cut and a dreamboat face. They were in constant motion, swirling, dipping, leaping. John Crosby of The New York Herald Tribune called them “light as bubbles, wildly imaginative in choreography and infinitely meticulous in execution.”

Father John Vakulskas. No, you probably never heard of him. He was an ordained Catholic priest and spent 45 years in the Sioux City Diocese.

But his major ministry was to carnival workers.

Father Vakulskas was all of 25 and an assistant pastor in Le Mars, Iowa, when he received a call from a carnival owner’s wife. Her husband was seriously ill, and her frantic first impulse was to call a priest for help — because in the days before 911, as Father Vakulskas learned, few hospitals would send help for a carnival worker.
Father Vakulskas prevailed upon a doctor in town to visit the man, as Mr. Hanschen, of the Showmen’s League, noted in a speech in 2016, when Father Vakulskas was inducted into the organization’s Hall of Fame. The diagnosis was exhaustion, ptomaine poisoning and double pneumonia. (It had been a cold and rainy summer, and the man had been working around the clock.) The doctor ordered bed rest, the man recovered, and the couple proposed that Father Vakulskas begin a ministry for carnival people.
On his retirement in 2014 from the Sioux City Diocese, Father Vakulskas moved to Florida and served six parishes there.

…

Often clad in robes emblazoned with circus insignia, he baptized babies in fonts sometimes improvised from buckets or tubs, officiated at marriages and heard confessions from Catholics who were, in carnival parlance, copping a plea.
You didn’t have to be Catholic, though, to be welcomed by the man everyone learned to call Father John, a big, burly priest who embraced those of all faiths and of no faith at all. His work began mostly after midnight, when the crowds had left the midway, the lights had been dimmed and the growl of generators ruffled the silence.
“I’m just a common priest,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “It might sound schmaltzy, but I love families and the good times. But I’m there for the sorrows, too. To be accepted on the carnival fairground is a good indication that God is representative.”

…

Pope John Paul II — one of three popes to honor his work — appointed Father Vakulskas International Coordinator of Carnival Ministries in 1993.

And by the way:

He wrote his own obituary, and in it he noted that he was a licensed, instrument-rated airline pilot and an amateur radio operator, and that his passions included sailing, snow skiing, water skiing and cheering for the Chicago Cubs.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Religion, Theatre | 3 Comments »

Quote of the day.

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2020

Apropos of nothing in particular:

Jeremiah said: “I hear the whisperings of many, “Terror on every side! Denounce! Let us denounce him!” All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine. “Perhaps he will be trapped; then we can prevail and take our vengeance on him.” But the Lord is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph. In their failure they will be put to utter shame, to lasting unforgettable confusion. O Lord of hosts, you who test the just, who probe mind and heart, let me witness the vengeance you take on them, for to you I have entrusted my cause. Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked!

–Jeremiah 20:10-13

Posted in Religion | Comments Closed

Random gun crankery, some filler.

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020

Here’s an interesting essay I’ve been meaning to bookmark for a while, and finally got around to.

“Chesterton: Patron Saint of Handgunners” by Patrick Toner, from “Crisis” magazine.

The jumping off point is a Chesterton quote, talking about his preparations for his honeymoon:

It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself, and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller.

Mr. Toner uses this to discuss the idea that defense of one’s self or those one loves is an obligation. More to the point, it is an obligation one has to assume on their own, rather than delegating to other people.

If a thing is worth doing, Chesterton tells us, it’s worth doing badly. (What’s Wrong With the World, 175) Defending one’s wife is worth doing, and hence worth doing badly. But more, it must be done principally by oneself. “These things, we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.” (Orthodoxy, 250) Chesterton’s examples are things like writing one’s own love letters or blowing one’s own nose, but the incident of the revolver shows that he would include the husband’s duty to protect his wife. It’s simply not a job that should be subcontracted out. Of course, we band together in communities that provide mutual support and defense, and the forces of law and order can do their best to provide the safest conditions possible, in general. Our laws and policies and so forth can and should serve to keep the pirates at bay to a great extent. (Whether they, in fact, accomplish this, or whether our policies create criminals like moisture creates mold is an extraneous question.) None of this runs contrary to my point. We ask for doctors, researchers and public health officials to try to create as high a general level of health as possible—but that doesn’t mean we ask them to wipe our noses for us.

He goes on to propose that Chesterton be named the patron saint of handgunners, though he doesn’t shy away from the two major problems with this idea:

  • Chesterton wasn’t a saint at the time. He was under consideration, but the latest information I’ve found indicates that the effort has been abandoned.
  • There already is a patron saint of handgunners. Sort of. It’s complicated.

Slightly more seriously, this month’s essay by Tiger McKee in “American Handgunner”, “3 Questions To Stay Alive“, is worthy of your consideration. I think this is especially relevant if you are a new gun owner, but I’d argue that even experienced ones could benefit from asking these three questions. I’ve asked some of those questions myself in the past. I particularly like his “kitchen fire/building fire” analogy.

What are you willing to risk your life for? Only you can answer this question. But, I recommend asking it in advance. Remember, fighting is problem-solving at high speed. The more questions you can answer in advance the more efficiently you arrive at a solution.

I think we’ve all heard the Creepy Joe quote about how police officers should be trained to just shoot people in the leg. Everyone who is a person of the gun (and a lot of people who are not) should realize this is obviously bolshie bushwa. (If you don’t understand why: try hitting a small target like a leg under extreme cognitive and physical stress. This is why police officers are trained to shoot “center of mass” aka “the biggest part of the body”.)

I’ve had this video in the back of my head for a while now, and I thought I’d post it as another reason why “shoot ’em in the leg” isn’t such a good idea. This is from Iran: the suspect in this video allegedly robbed a bank.

As best as I can tell, the police officer shoots the suspect in the leg at about the 30 second mark. Two points:

1. The suspect is still conscious and capable of putting up a fight for another 45 seconds or so after he was shot. How much damage do you think someone can do with a knife in 45 seconds?

2. The suspect bled out and died. Shooting someone in the leg does not mean “not lethal”. If you hit an artery, the person you shot can bleed to death before the ambulance gets there.

Posted in Bookmarks, Guns, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 5, 2020.

Friday, June 5th, 2020

Bruce Jay Friedman, noted writer.

Like his contemporaries Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin and Thomas Pynchon, he wrote what came to be called black humor, largely because of an anthology by that name that he edited in 1965. His first two novels, “Stern” (1962) and the best-selling “A Mother’s Kisses” (1964) — tales of New York Jews exploring an America outside the five boroughs — and his first play, the 1967 Off Broadway hit “Scuba Duba,” a sendup of race relations that is set in motion when a Jewish man fears his wife is having an affair with a black spear fisherman, made him widely celebrated. The New York Times Magazine in 1968 declared Mr. Friedman “The Hottest Writer of the Year.”

He also wrote the screenplays for “Splash” and “Stir Crazy”, and the works that were turned into “The Lonely Guy” and “The Heartbreak Kid”.

For the historical record: Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father.

Hutton Gibson belonged to a splinter group of Catholics who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, known as Vatican II. These traditionalists seek to preserve centuries-old orthodoxy, especially the Tridentine Mass, the Latin Mass established in the 16th century. They operate their own chapels, schools and clerical orders apart from the Vatican and in opposition to it.
But even among these outsiders, Mr. Gibson, who had early in life attended a seminary before dropping out, was extreme in his views. He denied the legitimacy of John Paul II as pope, once calling him a “Koran Kisser,” and said Vatican II had been “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.” He called Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a traditionalist leader until his death in 1991, a “compromiser.” Mr. Gibson earned the nickname “Pope Gibson” for his outspoken, dogmatic opinions on faith.
After he was expelled from a conservative group in Australia, where he had moved with his family from New York State in 1968, Mr. Gibson formed his own, Alliance for Catholic Tradition. Beginning in 1977, he disseminated his ultra-Orthodox views in a newsletter, “The War Is Now!,” and through self-published books, including “Is the Pope Catholic?” (1978) and “The Enemy is Here!” (1994). The Wisconsin Historical Society library and archives holds Mr. Gibson’s published works among its extensive collection of religious publications.

…

In 2003, as Mel Gibson was directing “The Passion of the Christ,” his film about the crucifixion, Hutton Gibson gave an interview to The New York Times laced with comments about conspiracy theories. The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, had been remote-controlled, he claimed (without saying by whom). The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was wildly inflated, he went on.
“Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,” Mr. Gibson said. “It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?”
In a radio interview a week before the February 2004 release of “The Passion,” Mr. Gibson went further, saying of the Holocaust, “It’s all — maybe not all fiction — but most of it is.” The comments added to an already simmering controversy that the film was anti-Semitic; the chairmen of two major studios told The Times that they wouldn’t work with Mel Gibson in the future.

Posted in Books, Movies, Nazis, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Father Vincent Robert Capodanno.

Monday, May 25th, 2020

Father Capodanno was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1958. He did missionary work in Taiwan and Hong Kong. But he felt a stronger calling.

So he enlisted, went through Officer Candidate School and was commissioned as a Lieutenant in 1965. He served with the United States Navy Chaplain Corps, and was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division. Later he was transferred to the 1st Medical Battalion, 1st Marine Division to finish out his first tour. He took six months of leave, and then re-enlisted and was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines. Shortly after that, he was reassigned to the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division.

Father Capodanno was more than a priest ministering within the horrific arena of war. He became a constant companion to the Marines: living, eating, and sleeping in the same conditions of the men. He established libraries, gathered and distributed gifts and organized outreach programs for the local villagers. He spent hours reassuring the weary and disillusioned, consoling the grieving, hearing confessions, instructing converts, and distributing St. Christopher medals. Such work “energized” him, and he requested an extension to remain with the Marines.

The troops called him “The Grunt Padre”.

Lt. RJ Marnell remembers, “Fr. Capodanno was … told several times it was not his job to go on patrols, fire sweeps, etc. Yet you had to watch him like a hawk as it was not uncommon to see a group of Marines running to get on a helicopter to go into battle, and all of a sudden this figure comes out of nowhere, no rifle, just his priest gear, and jumping in the helicopter before anybody could catch him. He wanted to be with his Marines and didn’t feel his job was simply to say Mass on Sundays.”

…

He became a true father to young boys on the front lines. He was “out there” with his men where he lived, ate, and slept as they did. To the young recruits thrust into the terrifying reality of battle, he was always available in his tent where anyone could drop in for comfort and guidance.
He shared his salary, rations and cigarettes with anyone in need. He could always be counted upon for a cold soda or a book from his reading library. When Christmas came around and soldiers felt forgotten, Father Vincent saw to it that no Marine was without gifts which he obtained through a relentless campaign from friends and organizations all over the world.
More importantly, he heard confessions for hours on end, instructed converts, and administered the sacraments. His granting of General Absolution before battle unburdened the consciences of the Marines and instilled in them the courage to fight. His mere presence in a unit was enough to lift the morale of all on patrol.
When men died, he was at their side so they would not die alone. He gave them Last Rites encouraging them to repent and persevere. In addition, he wrote countless letters of personal condolence to parents of wounded and dead Marines and offered solid grounding and hope to fellow Marines who lost friends.
When the pseudo-peace movement began to oppose the war, Fr. Vincent raised the spirits of demoralized soldiers in the field. He encouraged his men to oppose that same brutal communist system, which still oppresses Vietnam today.

When his second tour of duty was up, he begged his superiors for an extension. That extension was denied: he was supposed to go home in November of 1967.

On September 4, 1967, at 4:30 am, during Operation Swift in the Thang Binh District of the Que Son Valley, elements of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines encountered a large North Vietnamese Army (NVA) unit of approximately 2,500 men near the village of Dong Son. The outnumbered and disorganized Company D of the 1st Battalion was in need of reinforcements. By 9:14 am, 26 Marines were confirmed dead, and two rifle companies from the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines were committed to the battle. At 9:25 am, the commander of 1st Battalion requested further reinforcements.

…

In response to reports that the 2d Platoon of M Company was in danger of being overrun by a massed enemy assaulting force, Lt. Capodanno left the relative safety of the company command post and ran through an open area raked with fire, directly to the beleaguered platoon. Disregarding the intense enemy small-arms, automatic-weapons, and mortar fire, he moved about the battlefield administering last rites to the dying and giving medical aid to the wounded. When an exploding mortar round inflicted painful multiple wounds to his arms and legs, and severed a portion of his right hand, he steadfastly refused all medical aid. Instead, he directed the corpsmen to help their wounded comrades and, with calm vigor, continued to move about the battlefield as he provided encouragement by voice and example to the valiant marines. Upon encountering a wounded corpsman in the direct line of fire of an enemy machine gunner positioned approximately 15 yards away, Lt. Capodanno rushed a daring attempt to aid and assist the mortally wounded corpsman. At that instant, only inches from his goal, he was struck down by a burst of machine gun fire.

Father Capodanno was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions.

The Catholic Church is considering the case to canonize Father Capodanno as a saint. As I understand it, he has been named “Servant of God”, which is the first step in the process, but I can’t tell if there’s been any progress on this since 2013.

Posted in Heroism, History, Leadership, Religion | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: January 23, 2020.

Thursday, January 23rd, 2020

Wow. It got busy up in here all of the sudden.

Jim Lehrer. I feel like I should have more to say about this, but I was only an occasional “NewsHour” watcher. And I think the papers for the next day or so are going to be filled with eulogies that are probably better than I could write.

John Karlen, working actor. He was Willie Loomis on “Dark Shadows” and Lacey’s husband on “Cagney and Lacey”, among his 117 credits…

…which do include “Mannix”. (“Quartet for Blunt Instrument”, season 8, episode 19. He was “Hood #1”.)

Jack Kehoe, who never did “Mannix”, but was the “Erie Kid” in “The Sting”, the book keeper in “The Untouchables” (the DePalma one) and had roles in “Serpico”, “Melvin and Howard”, and a bunch of other films.

Jack Van Impe, televangelist.

Mr. Van Impe promoted a view of the end of the world known in evangelical circles as dispensational premillennialism, which teaches that Christians will be raptured, or taken up to heaven, before a period of tribulation, a final battle called Armageddon and the return and rule of Jesus on earth.
His sermons had titles like “The Coming War with Russia, According to the Bible. Where? When? Why?” (In that sermon he warned of a coming world dictator and a Russian invasion of Israel.) In his final broadcast, on Jan. 10, he discussed relations between the United States and Iran and predicted “the bloodiest war in the world,” saying it would result mostly in the deaths of “Muslim terrorists.”

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Media, Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 14, 2019.

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

Ronald Lafferty died earlier this week. He died of natural causes, as opposed to being executed by a firing squad.

I think it’s more likely than usual that this name will ring some bells with folks. Mr. Lafferty was a religious fanatic: he was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for “increasingly extreme religious views” (yes, he did believe in polygamy) and founded a new sect, School of the Prophets. He and his brothers (who were also members of the sect) claimed that they received messages from God.

Mr. Lafferty said one of those messages told him that his ex-wife, who had left him and taken their six children to Florida, had been the bride of Satan in a previous life.
In another message, he said, he was told that four people caused his excommunication and divorce, including his brother Allen’s wife, Brenda, and their 15-month-old daughter, Erica, “who he believed would grow up to be just as despicable as her mother,” according to court documents.
God told him to kill all four of them, Mr. Lafferty said. So on July 24, 1984 — a state holiday that commemorates the arrival of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley — Mr. Lafferty and a group of followers, including his brother Daniel, went to Brenda’s house in American Fork, Utah.

Mr. Lafferty and his brother Daniel killed Brenda and the baby. They abandoned their plan to kill the other two on the list. Ronald and Daniel were arrested in Nevada about a month later. Daniel is serving a life sentence.

Mr. Lafferty’s mental competence to stand trial quickly became an issue in the case and would be the focus of his subsequent appeal efforts.
He was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in 1985. But in 1991, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit vacated Mr. Lafferty’s convictions and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong legal standard had been used to determine his mental competence.
Prosecutors again charged Mr. Lafferty with the killings, but a competency hearing in November 1992 found him to be mentally unfit to stand trial owing to mental illness. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital until a new competency hearing was held in February 1994 and he was found competent to stand trial.
In April 1996, he was again convicted of the killings, and again sentenced to death.

The reason I say this will ring some bells is that the Lafferty murders were at the center of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, a book which I’ve read and liked. (And, no, it did not strike me as being “anti-religion”. Anti-“religious fanatics killing women and babies”, maybe, but not anti-religion.)

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I’m done.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019

The Catholic Church has more compassion for people who have committed suicide than science fiction fandom.

If you think that’s a strong statement, well…

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon. Born Alice Bradley in 1915, she travelled the world with her parents as a young child. In 1940, after a brief unhappy marriage, she joined the women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and worked in intelligence. She married Huntington “Ting” Sheldon in 1945, and in 1952 they both joined the CIA. She later earned her doctorate and took up writing. She wrote short stories and novels, but it is the former that stand out as truly remarkable. With prose as subtle and precise as the most refined literary fiction, she penned imaginative tales like “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and “The Girl Who was Plugged In,” which became classics of science fiction and also important works of feminist fiction. Later in her life, she suffered from heart troubles and depression. Her husband went blind. She recorded in her diary in 1979 that she and her husband had agreed to a suicide pact if their health worsened. In 1987, she shot her husband, called her lawyer and told him that they had agreed to suicide, and then shot herself.
The award is being renamed because of this suicide. Although the prize was founded to recognize fiction “exploring gender,” the current board of the award see their expanded mission to be to “make the world listen to voices that they would rather ignore.” The issue is that some of these voices have decided that Sheldon killed her husband because she was ableist (that is, bigoted toward the disabled). Sheldon’s biographer, Julie Phillips, has tweeted in response: “The question has come up whether Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr) and her husband Ting died by suicide or murder-suicide. I regret not saying clearly in the bio that those closest to the Sheldons all told me that they had a pact and that Ting’s health was failing.” Phillips has also changed her Twitter profile to include the sentence, “Biographer of Ursula K. Le Guin and of James Tiptree, Jr., who was not a murderer.”

From Catholic Answers:

Yes, for many centuries the Church taught that those who took their own lives could not be given a Christian funeral or buried in consecrated ground. Nonetheless, in so doing the Church wasn’t passing judgment on the salvation of the individual soul; rather, the deprivation of Christian funeral rites was a pastoral discipline intended to teach Catholics the gravity of suicide.
Although the Church no longer requires that Christian funeral rites be denied to people who commit suicide, the Church does still recognize the objective gravity of the act…
As it does for all grave acts, the Church also teaches that both full knowledge and deliberate consent must be present for the grave act of suicide to become a mortal sin:

Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice (CCC 1859).

When a person commits suicide as a result of psychological impairment, such as that caused by clinical depression, the Church recognizes that he may not have been fully capable of the knowledge and consent necessary to commit mortal sin:

Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide (CCC 2282).

(For those unfamiliar, CCC is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Those numbers are paragraph references: you can find the whole thing online here.)

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Here’s an odd clipping for you…

Monday, August 5th, 2019

Odd because:

1) I don’t like talking about religion.
II) I don’t like linking to ESPN.
c) I don’t like basketball.

With those stipulations: Shelly Pennefather was one of the great women’s basketball players.

She scored 2,408 points, breaking Villanova’s all-time record for women and men. She did it without the benefit of the 3-point shot, and the record still stands today.

After college, she played in Japan for a while. But she felt a calling, so in 1991…

…she became a cloistered nun.

The Poor Clares are one of the strictest religious orders in the world. They sleep on straw mattresses, in full habit, and wake up every night at 12:30 a.m. to pray, never resting more than four hours at a time. They are barefoot 23 hours of the day, except for the one hour in which they walk around the courtyard in sandals.
They are cut off from society. Sister Rose Marie will never leave the monastery, unless there’s a medical emergency. She’ll never call or email or text anyone, either. The rules seem so arbitrarily harsh. She gets two family visits per year, but converses through a see-through screen. She can write letters to her friends, but only if they write to her first. And once every 25 years, she can hug her family.

Don’t really have much more I want to say about this, other than I recommend you read the linked story.

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Obit watch: May 22, 2019.

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2019

Stanton T. Friedman, UFOlogist.

Thomas Silverstein is dead.

Mr. Silverstein was serving three consecutive life terms for the killing of two fellow prisoners and a guard while behind bars. He had been incarcerated continuously since 1975, originally on an armed robbery conviction. He was said to have joined the Aryan Brotherhood, the white nationalist prison gang, while serving time at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.
He was in solitary confinement for 36 years, more than half his life. The American Civil Liberties Union has cited his case in its campaign against long-term solitary confinement.

More:

In 1981, Mr. Silverstein and another inmate, Clayton Fountain, were convicted of murdering Robert Chappelle, a member of the D.C. Blacks prison gang. During the trial, the gang’s national leader, Raymond (Cadillac) Smith, was transferred to Marion, apparently intent on killing Mr. Silverstein in revenge. (Prison officials, Mr. Silverstein said later, were aware of the threats but “didn’t take any action to make me safe.”)
Mr. Silverstein and Mr. Fountain got to Mr. Smith first, stabbing him 67 times with makeshift weapons, then dragging his body along prison catwalks as an object lesson. Mr. Silverstein received two more life sentences, for the murders of Mr. Chappelle and Mr. Smith. He insisted that he was innocent of the Chappelle murder and that he had killed Mr. Smith in self-defense.
By 1983 Mr. Silverstein had taken up art, teaching himself and becoming accomplished at it. One day, on his way back from showering, another prisoner handed him another makeshift knife and a homemade key. Using it, he managed to unlock his handcuffs and then fatally stabbed Merle E. Clutts, an unarmed correction officer, about 40 times.

His running buddy Mr. Fountain killed another guard that same day. These incidents are (at least in part) what prompted the construction of the SuperMax prison in Colorado.

Mildly interesting fact that I ran across last night: Clayton Fountain, who was also confined in solitary, took theology courses, converted to Catholicism, and was accepted as a lay brother by a Trappist order after his death.

Posted in Geek, Law, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

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