Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Obit watch: October 2, 2023.

Monday, October 2nd, 2023

Lucy Morgan, Florida journalist. She wasn’t someone I had heard of before, but the obit (which I encourage you to read) makes her sound fascinating.

She specialized in uncovering political corruption. In 1973, she went to jail because she refused to reveal her source for grand jury proceedings.

In 1976, the Florida Supreme Court overturned previous rulings against Ms. Morgan and expanded press privileges in Florida, setting a precedent that local reporters still cite.

She shared a Pulitzer (with Jack Reed) for exposing the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office.

Ms. Morgan’s reporting showed, among other things, that one in eight officers in Pasco County had criminal arrest records, and that more than half had lied about their pasts to get certified. One officer had an outstanding grand theft arrest warrant for stealing a police dog in another Florida county. Another had been the wheel man in several armed robberies.

She also exposed the sheriff of Gulf County, who got sent to prison for extorting oral sex from female inmates.

After the sheriff was found guilty of seven counts of violating the civil rights of female prisoners, Ms. Morgan returned to her office and found a dozen roses with a note: “From the women you believed.”

…

When she was about 60, she shattered her right ankle in the Florida House press gallery. But she continued limping around the Capitol building, bringing a fog of Trésor Eau de Parfum with her wherever she went. She greeted the legislators, lobbyists and maintenance people she knew not by asking, “How are you?” but instead calling out, “You doin’ somethin’ bad?”

…

Her investigations exposed widespread misreporting of gifts to state politicians, indicating that many of them should be charged with criminal misdemeanors. They also exposed what Ms. Morgan herself nicknamed the “Taj Mahal” scandal, which involved slipping an appropriation of more than $30 million for a luxurious courthouse into unrelated transportation legislation at the last minute.

Russ Francis, former tight end for the Patriots and 49ers, was killed in a plane crash on Sunday. Also killed was Richard McSpadden, a vice-president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA).

It appears they were taking off from Lake Placid Airport and there was some sort of problem. Reports say they tried to make it back to the airport but couldn’t.

Mr. Francis, in additional to a successful NFL career (first round NFL draft pick, three time Pro Bowl player) was also an avid pilot. He’d recently bought an interest in Lake Placid Airways, a local charter and scenic flight service.

Mr. McSpadden, in addition to being an AOPA VP, was a former commander and flight leader for the Thunderbirds.

Tim Wakefield, former Boston Red Sox pitcher (and a past winner of the Roberto Clemente Award). Cancer got him at 57.

Chris Snow, of the Calgary Flames. He was diagnosed with ALS in 2019, and passed away after a “catastrophic brain injury”.

Posted in Media, NFL, Obits, Planes, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 20, 2023.

Wednesday, September 20th, 2023

I didn’t find out about this until late last night, so I’m a bit behind. Apologies.

Two pilots, Nick Macy and Chris Rushing, were killed in an accident at the Reno Air Races on Sunday.

According to the reports I’ve read, both pilots had been competing in what’s called the “Gold Race” in the T-6 Class. The race had completed, and the pilots were in the post-race recovery period when they collided in mid-air.

Preliminary analysis from the Air Safety Institute. Reno Gazette Journal coverage. As the linked articles note, the remainder of the races was cancelled after the crash: this was the last year for the Reno Air Races in their current form.

Buddy Teevens, football coach at Dartmouth. He was badly injured in a bicycle accident in March, and died of complications from his injuries.

JoAnne Epps, acting president of Temple University. She was attending a memorial service when she collapsed. Ms. Epps was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

James Hoge, noted journalist.

Few editors at major American newspapers have been as young as Mr. Hoge was when he rose to the top at The Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid aimed at a working-class readership. He became the city editor at age 29, editor in chief at 33 and publisher at 44.
He shook up the staff, strove for sprightlier writing and, like other newspaper editors in the 1970s, introduced new sections on business, food and fashion. “I am always agitating,” he said.
The payoff was six Pulitzer Prizes on his watch: two each for feature photography and criticism and one each for spot news reporting (concerning violence by young radicals in Chicago) and local news reporting (on new evidence in the 1966 murder, still unsolved, of Valerie Percy, a daughter of Charles H. Percy of Illinois, then making his first United States Senate race).

He was also behind the Mirage Tavern investigation, and went on to become publisher of the New York Daily News and the journal Foreign Affairs.

Aware that some council members fretted over his tabloid background, he had some fun with them, offering a mock magazine cover with the model Cindy Crawford and teasers like “sexiest ethnic rivalries.”

Roger Whittaker, British musician.

Burning in Hell watch: Billy Chemirmir. I’d never heard of him, but he was convicted twice of capital murder, and was suspected of 20 more murders. His MO seems to have been smothering old folks.

Most of Chemirmir’s alleged victims lived in apartments at independent living communities for older people. The women he’s accused of killing in private homes include the widow of a man he had cared for while working as an at-home caregiver.

You could also classify this as part of the “fool around and find out” watch:

Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot told WFAA that Chemirmir was killed after apparently making inappropriate comments sexual in nature towards his cellmate’s children. According to Creuzot, the cellmate allegedly beat Chemirmir, dragged him out of his cell and killed him while other inmates watched. No one intervened and Chemirmir may have been stabbed with a pen, Creuzot said.
“Even though they are on lockdown, apparently [the cellmate] somehow opened the door and dragged [Chemirmir] into the hallway and there were other prisoners who saw it and not one intervened and no one called for help,” Creuzot told WFAA. “He was basically there for 15 to 20 minutes before anybody with authority could figure out what happened. When they got there, they tried to revive him, but he died.”

Posted in Cycling, Law, Media, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2023.

Friday, August 18th, 2023

I haven’t done any obits for the past few days, for reasons I don’t want to go into here.

But a few people have sent me some, and it would be rude not to acknowledge them.

Sir Michael Parkinson, British talk show host. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Darren Kent, actor. IMDB. Other credits include “EastEnders”, “Les Misérables” (the TV series), and “C.O.O.L.I.O Time Travel Gangster”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)

Paul Brodeur, longtime New Yorker writer.

Mr. Brodeur also reported on the possible dangers of radiation from microwave ovens, computer terminals and electromagnetic power lines. But this reporting was not as widely accepted as his work on asbestos and CFCs.
In 1997, the National Academy of Sciences found little to no evidence of any risk from power-line radiation. Other studies have been far from conclusive. (Mr. Brodeur noted, however, that the World Health Organization classified microwave radiation from cellphones to be a possible carcinogen.)

James L. Buckley, former Senator from New York (and brother of William F. Buckley Jr.).

Posted in Media, Obits, Politics, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: July 25, 2023.

Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

Pamela Blair, actress. Other credits include John Huston’s film of “Annie”, “The Cosby Mysteries”, and “Law and Order”.

Reeves Callaway. He made cars go fast.

Mr. Callaway and his company were well known in the world of high-performance automobiles custom-made for deep-pocketed clients. He began by modifying cars out of his garage, then established his company in Old Lyme, Conn., with the goal of challenging European manufacturers like Porsche and Ferrari, which were then making the world’s fastest vehicles.

…

“They came to us,” he told the Truck Show Podcast in 2021, “and they said, ‘Look, could you, within one year’s time, develop an Alfa twin-turbo system for us that we could use to compete against the Maserati?’”
He did, making about three dozen modified vehicles, but then Alfa Romeo lost interest in the project. Yet somehow one of those modified Alfas found its way to General Motors’ Black Lake testing ground in Michigan, and soon GM was asking if Mr. Callaway could do the same thing to its Chevrolet Corvette.
“This was a huge opportunity, to become associated with Corvette,” he said. “So we saluted and said, ‘Yes, sir; immediately, sir; may I have another, sir?’”

…

In late 1988, he and his engineers tweaked the Corvette some more, taking aim at 250 miles per hour with a version of the car that they called the Sledgehammer.
“We basically decided that 250 m.p.h. was a reachable goal,” Mr. Callaway told the McClatchy News Service. “But if it was to have any meaning, the car had to be docile at low speeds as well. It had to retain all the things that make a car usable on the street, such as air-conditioning.”
To prove the point, his team drove the car from Connecticut to a seven-and-a-half-mile oval track in Ohio. (It got 16 miles per gallon, they said.) At the track, it hit 210 m.p.h. on its first run, 223 on its second. After more tweaking, it reached 254.76 on its third attempt, a record for a car made for normal driving. Mr. Callaway’s company, in its announcement of his death, said the record stood for more than 20 years.

The Santa Barbara News-Press.

Ampersand Publishing LLC, the entity that owns the paper, filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, or liquidation, on Friday, with estimated assets of up to $50,000 and liabilities between $1,000,001 and $10 million, according to court records. The bankruptcy was approved by the LLC on May 1, with Wendy McCaw, who has owned the paper since 2000, as the authorized agent.

…

The News-Press has published for more than 150 years, but it has undergone years of turbulence since McCaw bought it from The New York Times Co. In 2006, six editors and a columnist resigned in protest of interference from McCaw in the editorial process. The was followed by an exodus of dozens of additional staffers, as well as a vote by remaining newsroom employees to unionize with the Teamsters.

Ron Sexton, comedian and regular on ‘The Bob & Tom Show’.

Posted in Cars, Media, Obits, Radio, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 18, 2023.

Tuesday, July 18th, 2023

Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher and author.

Professor Frankfurt’s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will — people’s motivating wants and desires — at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life’s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.
Despite the ambition and inventiveness of this project — the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as “powerful and exciting philosophy” of great “depth and fecundity” — Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.
The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.
Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

That paper was republished as a book in 2005, On Bullshit (affiliate link), which became a best-seller. He also wrote On Truth (affiliate link) which seems to have been less successful.

Bold and daring in his ideas, Professor Frankfurt was somewhat aloof in style, with a dry wit and a strenuous aversion to pomposity. When asked what had inspired his interest in Descartes, the subject of his first book, “Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen” (1970), he admitted that he had liked that Descartes’s books were short.

For the record, and because Lawrence sent over an obit: Jane Birkin.

Over the weekend, my mother asked me: “How do you go from being a promising young journalist to being a swami?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but here’s the obit for Sally Kempton.

Robert Lieberman, director. Other credits include quite a few genre TV series, “Christmas in Tahoe”, “All I Want for Christmas”, and “Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy”.

Posted in Books, Media, Movies, Obits, Religion, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: July 10, 2023.

Monday, July 10th, 2023

The sports department of the New York Times.

The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists and editors, is a major shift for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes and team owners, and its Sports of the Times column in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism. The section covered the major moments and personalities of the last century of American sports, including Muhammad Ali, the birth of free agency, George Steinbrenner, the Williams sisters, Tiger Woods, steroids in baseball and the deadly effects of concussions in the National Football League.

The paper of record plans to shift sports coverage to The Athletic, which it purchased last year.

As a business, The Athletic has yet to turn a profit. It reported a loss of $7.8 million in the first quarter of this year. But the number of paying subscribers has grown to more than three million as of March 2023, from just over one million when it was acquired.

Evva Hanes, popularizer of Moravian cookies.

Mrs. Hanes, the youngest of seven, grew up watching her mother, Bertha Foltz, make and sell hundreds of the thin cookies to supplement what little money the family’s small dairy farm brought in. Other Moravian women sold cookies, too, adhering to a recipe with molasses and warm winter spices, like clove and ginger, that were popular around Christmas.
Mrs. Foltz began baking a crispy vanilla-scented version as a way to differentiate herself and extend the selling season. By age 8, Evva could bake them on her own. By 20, she had taken over her mother’s business and slowly begun to expand it, selling the original sugar crisps as well as the traditional ginger version but eventually other flavors, too, like lemon and black walnut.

I feel a little guilty about saying this, but now I kind of want to order a tin of Moravian cookies.

Roy Herron, Tennessee state legislator. He was injured in a jet ski accident on July 1st, and passed away on Sunday.

I’ve written previously about both the Dutch resistance and about the NYT‘s “Overlooked No More” obits. In that vein: Hannie Schaft.

In June 1944, Schaft and a fellow resistance fighter, Jan Bonekamp (with whom she was rumored to have had a romantic relationship), targeted a high-ranking police officer for assassination. As the officer was getting on his bicycle to go to work, Schaft shot him in the back, causing him to fall off the bike. Bonekamp finished the killing but was injured doing so. He died shortly after. Schaft managed to escape on her own bike, which was how she got around doing her resistance work.
Schaft was also involved in killing or wounding a baker who was known for betraying people, a hairdresser who worked for the Nazis’ intelligence agency, and another Nazi police officer.
Before confronting her targets, Schaft put on makeup — including lipstick and mascara — and styled her hair, Jackson said. In one of the few direct quotations that have been attributed to Schaft, she explained her reasoning to Truus Oversteegen: “I’ll die clean and beautiful.”

Posted in Food, History, Media, Nazis, Obits, Sports | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: June 14, 2023.

Wednesday, June 14th, 2023

Cormac McCarthy. NYT (archived). “Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner” (archived). THR. Publisher’s Weekly.

Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.
“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

I can’t find it now, but I saw the same story recounted in a tweet somewhere: in that version, the McCarthy’s were so poor, they couldn’t afford toothpaste. And that explains why she became the second ex-Mrs. McCarthy.

Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.

Noted:

A correction was made on June 13, 2023: An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to El Paso, where Mr. McCarthy moved in 1976. It is in Texas, not New Mexico.

Layers and layers of editors.

This tableau inspired one of the funniest pieces of wildcat food criticism I’ve ever read. The essay, by Helen Craig, was titled “A Meat Processing Professional Reviews Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’” It ran in 2014 on a website called The Toast.
Craig pointed out that such a “living larder” is wasteful. Every day they’re alive, she wrote, “these people will be depreciating in calorific value.” Craig suggested, as any good butcher would, that “the ribs will be good fresh, and a pickling and brining process for the thighs and haunches should result in a product that is similar to ham.”

“The Toast” essay (archived).

“Unless you have an old rancid stockpot that you can just sort of throw every horrible thing into — rotten turnips, dead cats, whatever — and let it simmer for about a month — you’re at a real disadvantage,” he says.

So it sometimes goes in McCarthy’s universe. He goes to great lengths to get details right, then throws his readers a curveball. After all, it’s fiction. Asked about the fettuccine via his publicist (because how could I not?), McCarthy responded, in pure Bobby Western fashion: “No goddamn clams! Put a note at the bottom of the page!”

Jacques Rozier, who the NYT describes as the “last of the French New Wave Directors”.

John Romita Sr., Marvel comics artist.

In 1966, Romita began a five-year run working Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee on The Amazing Spider-Man. He took over for artist Steve Ditko, who had created the famed webslinger with Lee in 1961 before leaving in a spat with the comic book legend.
Romita’s run on Spider-Man saw the introduction of a number of the property’s most memorable characters, including Spidey love interest Mary Jane Watson and crime boss Kingpin; it was during Romita’s time as artist that Spider-Man overtook Fantastic Four to become Marvel’s top-seller, with the masked man becoming the face of the company.

Patrick Gasienica, Olympic ski jumper. He was 24, and died in a motorcycle accident.

Park Soo Ryun. She was the star of a Disney+ show, “Snowdrop”. I note this because she was 29, and her death kind of scares me:

Ryun slipped down a flight of stairs Sunday at a property on Jeju Island, South Korea’s largest island, where she was scheduled to perform, according to the Mirror.
The actress was reportedly taken to the hospital for emergency treatment and was pronounced brain dead by medics after attempts to revive her failed.

…

Fellow “Snowdrop” star Kim Mi-soo also died unexpectedly at age 29 last year.

Posted in Books, Food, Media, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Headline of the day.

Friday, May 19th, 2023

Violent taco rampage caught on camera at D.C. Chipotle

In other news, “Violent Taco Rampage” is the name of my new Smiths cover band.

Posted in Bagatelle, Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 15, 2023.

Monday, May 15th, 2023

Doyle Brunson, legendary poker player and a good Texas boy.

The first person to win $1 million in tournament play, Mr. Brunson — nicknamed Texas Dolly — became a star to a new generation when poker became a fixture on television in the 1990s, his cowboy hat and no-nonsense drawl a gentlemanly foil to brash, talkative younger players.

…

Mr. Brunson, whose career in poker began in illegal games in the back rooms of Texas bars, won the World Series of Poker main event, the sport’s most coveted prize, in 1976 and 1977. His total tournament winnings exceeded $6 million.

…

Mr. Brunson was among the three dozen players invited in 1970 to the inaugural World Series of Poker, a name that belied its modest beginnings. The tournament was the brainchild of the casino owner Benny Binion and Jimmy Snyder, then a public relations agent better known as Jimmy the Greek.
The World Series expanded its roster of poker contests to include several variants of the game, but Texas hold ’em remained the most publicized and lucrative event. Mr. Snyder called Mr. Brunson “Texas Doy-lee,” which reporters mistook for Dolly, and the nickname Texas Dolly stuck, though it seemed incongruous for someone who stood 6 feet 3 inches tall and weighed well over 250 pounds.
After moving to Las Vegas in 1973 for steadier gambling opportunities, Mr. Brunson won the tournament’s main event in 1976 and 1977, widely viewed as the world championship, earning $560,000 in a winner-take-all format. His 10 World Series bracelets are tied for second behind Phil Hellmuth’s 16.

Bill Oesterle, co-founder of Angie’s List (now just “Angi”). He was 57, and died of complications from ALS.

Semi-obit: Vice Media. They’ve officially filed for bankruptcy, but it is a Chapter 11, they have a $20 million operating loan, and the plan for their lenders (“including Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management”) to buy the company is still on.

“Archer“.

The long-running animated comedy will conclude with its upcoming 14th season.

Posted in Media, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 13, 2023.

Saturday, May 13th, 2023

Hodding Carter III, journalist and aide to Jimmy Carter.

The son of the journalist Hodding Carter Jr., who won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials calling for racial moderation in the old segregated South, Hodding Carter III succeeded his father as editor and publisher of The Greenville Delta Democrat-Times, and as a voice of conscience in a state torn by violence and social change during the struggles of the civil rights era.
But after 5,000 editorials and years of journalistic trench warfare, Mr. Carter took his fight into politics.

…

In the 1976 presidential campaign, Mr. Carter helped engineer a narrow victory in Mississippi for Jimmy Carter, who was no relation, and was rewarded with an appointment as assistant secretary of state for public affairs. As chief spokesman for the State Department, he delivered nuanced statements on foreign policy with candor and wit, and developed a good if sometimes acerbic rapport with the diplomatic press corps.
He became the national face of the Carter administration during the Iranian hostage crisis, which broke on Nov. 4, 1979, when militants took over the United States Embassy in Tehran and seized 52 Americans. Their captivity lasted 444 days — virtually the remainder of President Carter’s single term in office, a tenure ended by a frustrated electorate that chose Ronald Reagan for president in 1980.

…

Colleagues in government and the news media gave Mr. Carter high marks for fielding tough questions on what was known, and not known, of the fate of the Americans. Aside from one episode in which he threw a rubber chicken at a persistent questioner, he coolly conveyed at press briefings the sensitivity of the diplomatic crisis.

I was alive and around during that time, but I do not recall the rubber chicken thing…

Posted in History, Media, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 13, 2023.

Thursday, April 13th, 2023

Anne Perry, noted mystery writer.

Ms. Perry’s books, including the Thomas Pitt and William Monk series of historical mysteries, have sold more than 26 million copies, according to her website. In 1998, when The Times of London named its 100 Masters of Crime of the past century, there she was on the list alongside Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett and Arthur Conan Doyle.
“Heroes,” set in the trenches of World War I, won the 2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best short story. In 2013 and 2020, she was a guest of honor at Bouchercon, the international convention of mystery writers and fans.

I hate talking about this, but there’s a huge elephant in the room that I can’t ignore. As a teenager, she was known as Juliet Hulme. Her family moved to New Zealand, where she met Pauline Parker. The two girls became very close friends and “invented an elaborate medieval-like fantasy world and worshiped celebrities, especially the opera singer Mario Lanza, as saints.”

Juliet’s parents decided to divorce and leave New Zealand. The two girls didn’t want to be split up:

In Victoria Park, in Christchurch, the girls — Pauline was 16, Juliet was 15 — struck Honorah Parker in the head repeatedly with half a brick wrapped in a stocking. The trial was a sensation, much of it focusing on Juliet and Pauline’s absorption with each other and their fantasies about becoming famous novelists.
Both young women were convicted of murder, and after five years behind bars (in separate prisons) they were given new identities and instructed never to meet again. If they violated that order, they were warned, they would return to prison and serve life sentences.

The was dramatized in Peter Jackson’s “Heavenly Creatures”, which I strongly recommend if you can see it. (I checked Amazon: home video copies of this seem very hard to come by.)

Once her murder conviction was revealed, Ms. Perry did not shy away from acknowledging her guilt. She excused herself only by saying that she had been afraid that if she did not go along with the murder plan, her distraught friend might kill herself.
Ms. Perry’s regret did not extend to self-condemnation, however.
“In a sense it’s not a matter — at the end — of judging,” she said in the documentary. “I did this much good and that much bad. Which is the greater?”
“It’s in the end, Who am I? Am I somebody that can be trusted? Am I someone that is compassionate, gentle, patient, strong?” She mentioned other traits: bravery, honesty, caring. “If you’re that kind of person — if you’ve done something bad in the past, you’ve obviously changed.”
She concluded, “It’s who you are when time’s up that matters.”

Someone sent me Virginia Norwood’s obit the other day, but I don’t remember who, and I can’t find it now. USGS.

Ms. Norwood pioneered the scanning technology used on the Landsat satellites.

Ms. Norwood, who was part of an advanced design group in the space and communications division at Hughes, canvassed scientists who specialized in agriculture, meteorology, pollution and geology. She concluded that a scanner that recorded multiple spectra of light and energy, like one that had been used for local agricultural observations, could be modified for the planetary project that the Geological Survey and NASA had in mind.

…

Ms. Norwood and Hughes were told that their multispectral scanner system, or M.S.S., could be included if it weighed no more than 100 pounds.
Ms. Norwood had to scale back her scanner to record just four bands of energy in the electromagnetic spectrum instead of seven, as she had planned. The scanner also had to be high precision. In her first design, each pixel represented 80 meters.
The device had a 9-by-13-inch mirror that banged back and forth noisily in the scanner 13 times a second. The scientists at the Geological Survey and NASA were skeptical.
A senior engineer from Hughes took the device out on a truck and drove around California to test it and convince the doubters that it would work. It did — spectacularly. Ms. Norwood hung one of the images, of Yosemite National Park’s Half Dome, on the wall of her house for the rest of her life.

Her tech was so good, it pretty much completely replaced the main Landsat system. (That system was actually shut down two weeks after the first Landsat launch because of problems.)

Over the next 50 years, new Landsat satellites replaced earlier ones. Ms. Norwood oversaw the development of Landsat 2, 3, 4 and 5. Currently, Landsat 8 and 9 are orbiting the earth, and NASA plans to launch Landsat 10 in 2030. Each generation satellite has added more imaging capabilities but always based on Ms. Norwood’s original concept.

Alicia Shepard, former NPR ombudsman (ombudsperson?).

In June 2009, she wrote on her blog that she had received a “slew of emails” that took issue with NPR News’s use of the phrases “enhanced interrogation tactics” and “harsh interrogation techniques” instead of “torture” to describe what terrorism suspects held by the George W. Bush administration during the Iraq war had been forced to endure.
“Some say that by not using the word ‘torture,’ NPR is serving as right-wing apologists for waterboarding and other methods of extracting information,” Ms. Shepard wrote. President Bush refused to call waterboarding torture, but in April 2009 President Barack Obama did.
Ms. Shepard suggested that rather than labeling enhanced measures as torture, reporters should simply describe the tactics — saying, for example, that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds” or forced detainees “into cramped confines crawling with insects.”

…

Soon after writing her blog post, Ms. Shepard told Bob Garfield, the co-host of the NPR program “On the Media”: “If I were asked personally whether or not pouring water down someone’s nose and throat for 20 seconds constitutes torture, I would say personally that I think it does. I totally understand, though, that a news organization needs to be as neutral as possible, and putting out the facts and letting the audience decide whether something is good or bad, right or wrong.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Media, Movies, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 7, 2023.

Friday, April 7th, 2023

Mimi Sheraton, former food critic for the NYT. “Remembering Mimi Sheraton’s Writing and Cooking“.

An adventurer with a passion for offbeat experiences, an eclectic taste for foods and the independence to defy pressures from restaurateurs and advertisers, Ms. Sheraton was the first female food critic for The Times. She pioneered reviewing-in-disguise, dining in wigs and tinted glasses, and using aliases for reservations, mostly in high-end places where people knew her from repeat visits and lavished their attentions on her.
“The longer I reviewed restaurants, the more I became convinced that the unknown customer has a completely different experience from either a valued patron or a recognized food critic,” she wrote in her memoir, “Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life” (2004). “For all practical purposes, they might as well be in different restaurants.”
Colleagues and other restaurant critics described her reviews as tough but fair and scrupulously researched. The Times required three visits to a restaurant before publishing a review; she dined six to eight times before passing judgment. For an article on deli sandwiches, she collected 104 corned beef and pastrami samples in one day to evaluate the meat and sandwich-building techniques.

…

Another of her reviews, based on blind tastings by several Times staff members, favored private-label liquors over popular brand names of Scotch, bourbon, rye, vodka and gin. The review ran weeks before Christmas, the busy liquor-selling season.
“I heard that two million dollars’ worth of advertising had been canceled,” Ms. Sheraton recalled in her memoir. She approached the executive editor. “I asked Abe Rosenthal if that was true. He said, ‘That’s none of your business. It was a great story.’”

…

In her Greenwich Village townhouse, she had 2,000 cookbooks and a spacious kitchen overlooking a backyard where she grew chives, tarragon, mint, sage, rosemary and basil. And she read other restaurant critics, with whom she often disagreed.
“Well, whether they’re right or not, which means they agree with me,” she told The Times wryly in 2004, “food writers in general devote too much space to chefs’ philosophies. They’re not Picasso, after all — this is supper. So I don’t want to hear about a chef’s intentions. Call me when it’s good.”

Bill Butler, noted cinematographer. Other credits include “Raid on Entebbe”, “Capricorn One”, and “Hot Shots!”.

Nora Forster, John Lydon’s wife.

The punk rock icon and Forster met in 1975 at Vivienne Westwood’s famed punk shop Sex and married in 1979, according to Rolling Stone.
The two remained married till Forster’s death and did not have children.

Paul Cattermole, of S Club 7.

Posted in Food, Media, Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 11, 2023.

Wednesday, January 11th, 2023

George Pell, Cardinal and former Vatican treasurer.

From 2014 to 2019, Cardinal Pell was the church’s financial czar and third-in-command, and he tried to push through reforms to make its finances more transparent. Those efforts were truncated in 2017, when he was forced to return to Australia to face trial on charges of sex abuse dating to the 1990s. The case transfixed Australia — cameras met Cardinal Pell at the airport when he arrived from Rome.
In December 2018, he was convicted by an Australian jury of five counts of child sexual abuse of two choir boys that were said to have occurred in 1996, during his time in Melbourne. Less than two years later, in April 2020, Australia’s highest court overturned the conviction, saying that there was “a significant possibility” that he was not guilty.
Throughout the proceedings, Cardinal Pell maintained his innocence. At a news conference in Rome in 2017, he said he had been a victim of “relentless character assassination.” He said, “The whole idea of sexual abuse is abhorrent to me.”
At the time of his death, Cardinal Pell faced a civil suit by the father of a now-deceased choir boy who alleged that the cleric had abused the boy when he was archbishop of Melbourne. In a statement, the claimant’s lawyer said the suit would continue, adding: “There is still a great deal of evidence for this claim to rely upon.”
Separately, a 2017 Australian government inquiry into the abuse of tens of thousands of children in churches, schools and other institutions over a period of decades found that Cardinal Pell had been aware of the sexual abuse of children by other Roman Catholic priests as early as 1974, but failed to take action.

Blake Hounshell, NYT reporter and editor.

His family said in a statement that he had died “after a long and courageous battle with depression.” The police in Washington were investigating the death as a suicide, a police official said.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also dial 988 to reach the Lifeline. If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in Media, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 9, 2023.

Monday, January 9th, 2023

Bernard Kalb, former foreign correspondent for CBS, NBC, and the NYT.

He reported for The Times from 1946 to 1962, for CBS during the next 18 years (during which he joined his brother, Marvin, on the diplomatic beat) and as NBC’s State Department correspondent from 1980 to 1985. Then, for nearly two years, he served in the Reagan administration’s State Department — a stint that ended contentiously.
As a CBS correspondent in 1972, Mr. Kalb accompanied President Richard M. Nixon on the trip to China that proved to be a major step in the normalization of relations between the two nations. He also made virtually every overseas trip with Henry A. Kissinger, Cyrus R. Vance, Edmund S. Muskie, Alexander M. Haig Jr. and George P. Shultz during their tenures as secretary of state.

…

After graduating from the City College of New York in 1942, Mr. Kalb spent two years in the Army, mostly working on a newspaper published out of a Quonset hut in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. His editor was Sgt. Dashiell Hammett, the author of the detective novels “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man.”

Russell Banks, novelist.

Joyce Meskis, former owner of The Tattered Cover.

In addition to creating a bookstore famed for its vast selection and bibliophile-friendly atmosphere, Ms. Meskis often took a stand in matters related to censorship and the First Amendment. Sometimes those positions were not easy ones to embrace.
In 1991, for instance, when she was president of the American Booksellers Association, she testified against the proposed Pornography Victims Compensation Act, a bill introduced by Senator Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, that would have allowed victims of sex crimes to sue distributors of pornography, including bookstores, if they could demonstrate that pornography influenced their attacker. Opponents of that bill (which died in committee) were sometimes labeled pro-pornography, but Ms. Meskis knew the real issue was that the law would make bookstores wary of selling anything controversial.
Similarly, the case she took to the Colorado Supreme Court some two decades ago pitted her against law enforcement officials, who were trying to build a case against a customer suspected of making methamphetamine. In 2000 the police found two books on drugmaking in a trailer home used as a meth lab; they also found an envelope with Ms. Meskis’s bookstore listed as the return address. Hoping to link the drugmaking to the recipient whose name was on the envelope, they sought Ms. Meskis’s sales records — and, though her stand read as pro-drug to some, she again saw the bigger picture.
“This is about access to private records of the book-buying public,” she told The New York Times in 2000. “If buyers thought that their records would be turned over to the government, it would have a chilling affect on what they buy and what they read.”
In 2002 the State Supreme Court ruled that both the First Amendment and the Colorado Constitution “protect an individual’s fundamental right to purchase books anonymously, free from governmental interference.”

Adam Rich. Other credits include “CHiPs”, “Silver Spoons”, and “Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star”.

Owen Roizman, cinematographer. “The French Connection”, “The Exorcist”, and “Network”? Wow.

Art McNally, NFL official credited as being “the father of instant replay”.

Earl Boen. Other credits (he has 291 as an actor: man worked) include video game spun offs from a minor 1960s SF TV series, “Battle Beyond the Stars”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, and “Richie Brockelman, Private Eye”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Law, Media, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: October 10, 2022.

Monday, October 10th, 2022

Anton Fier, noted drummer.

His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”
By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.

Peter Robinson, crime writer. (“…DCI Alan Banks, hero of a series of Yorkshire-set novels that spanned 35 years and sold more than 10 million copies.”)

Douglas Kirkland, celebrity photographer.

(Hattip on the previous two to Lawrence.)

Nikki Finke, founder of Deadline.com.

At L.A. Weekly, Finke headed its Deadline Hollywood Daily column from 2002-09. In 2006, she launched Deadline Hollywood Daily, an around-the-clock online version, and became a key source of news surrounding the 2007 WGA strike.
That year, The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter wrote that Finke’s blog had “become a critical forum for Hollywood news and gossip, known for analyzing (in sometimes insulting terms) the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of moguls,” with her reporting on the strike ultimately solidifying “her position as a Hollywood power broker.”

She went on to sell the site to Penske Media for $100 million in 2009.

Speaking to her legacy and that of Deadline‘s in a 10-year anniversary post for the publication, she wrote that the concept behind her original blog — using a URL purchased for “14 bucks and change” — was to get breaking news out faster than she could with her column.
“I didn’t set out to be a disruptor,” she wrote. “Or an internet journalist who created something out of nothing that put the Hollywood trades back on their heels, and today, under Penske Media ownership, is a website worth $100+ million. Or a woman with brass balls, attitude and ruthless hustle who told hard truths about the moguls and who accurately reported scoops first.”

Obit from Deadline.com.

Posted in Books, Media, Music, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »