…they read as fast as lightning…
Needs some work.
After the jump, some more old gun books, and one new one.
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Everybody was gun book blogging…
Thursday, April 25th, 2024Obit watch: April 20, 2024.
Saturday, April 20th, 2024In haste: Death finally caught the Midnight Rider.
Daniel C. Dennett, author.
An outspoken atheist, he at times seemed to denigrate religion. “There’s simply no polite way to tell people they’ve dedicated their lives to an illusion,” he said in a 2013 interview with The New York Times.
According to Mr. Dennett, the human mind is no more than a brain operating as a series of algorithmic functions, akin to a computer. To believe otherwise is “profoundly naïve and anti-scientific,” he told The Times.
For Mr. Dennett, random chance played a greater role in decision-making than did motives, passions, reasoning, character or values. Free will is a fantasy, but a necessary one to gain people’s acceptance of rules that govern society, he said.
Mr. Dennett irked some scientists by asserting that natural selection alone determined evolution. He was especially disdainful of the eminent paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, whose ideas on other factors of evolution were summarily dismissed by Mr. Dennett as “goulding.”
Obit watch: April 4, 2024.
Thursday, April 4th, 2024Apologies for being silent yesterday. I have not been feeling well pretty much all week. While I’ve been to our local Quack In the Box and gotten prescriptions, and while they seem to be helping with some things, they’re not helping as much as I would like with others. Then again, I haven’t taken the full course of antibiotics yet.
Joe Flaherty, SCTV guy. While the obit is silent on his cause of death, I do not believe he blowed up real good.
John Barth, writer. I’ve seen Giles Goat-Boy cited as a cyberpunk precursor, but have never actually read it.
Christopher Durang, playwright. I’d actually heard of him, but I’ve never seen a performance of “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You”. I think I’d kind of like to, if only to push myself outside of my comfort zone.
Obit watch: March 29, 2024.
Friday, March 29th, 2024Harvey Elwood Gann (US Army – ret.). He was 103.
Mr. Gann was a flight engineer and top turret gunner with the 449th Bomb Group, 718th Squadron, on B24s. His plane was shot down during a bombing raid and he had to bail out. He was the only member of his crew to survive, but was imprisoned in a German POW camp. He escaped and was recaptured three times: his fourth escape attempt was successful.
He served as a Austin police officer for 38 years, mostly in vice and narcotics according to the online obit. He also wrote a book about his wartime experiences, Escape I Must (affiliate link).
(Hattip on this one to a source who I will leave anonymous for now. While Mr. Gann has an online obituary, my source was informed of this through other non-public channels, and I’m not sure they want to be named right now.)
200 acting credits in IMDB, with 12 more upcoming. They include five episodes of “Hap and Leonard”, “The Rockford Files”, “The Bold Ones: The New Doctors”, and “Longstreet”.
NYT obit for Vernor Vinge (archived).
Jennifer Leak, actress. Other credits include the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “The Delphi Bureau”, and “Nero Wolfe” (the 1981 series with William Conrad in the title role).
Gun books. And train book.
Monday, March 25th, 2024I haven’t done one of these in a bit, and need to get back to it. And since it looks like the baseball season begins this week, I’m going to take the opportunity to throw a metaphorical change-up pitch with a train related book.
I would love to be able to document a book about guns on trains, but I don’t have a copy of Gerald Bull’s book. Yet.
After the jump…
Obit watch: March 21, 2024.
Thursday, March 21st, 2024FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Richard C. Higgins, who passed at 102. The NYT also ran a timely obit.
Mr. Higgins was a radioman at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
Mr. Higgins, who later in his life often spoke about his experience to schoolchildren and on social media, described in a 2020 Instagram video pushing planes away from each other as bombs fell around him.
“I was moving planes away from ones that were on fire, because when the tanks exploded, they threw burning gas on the others,” he said.
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According to both the NYT and the Columbian obits, it is believed that there are about 22 survivors still living.
M. Emmet Walsh, one of the great character actors. He’s been a personal favorite of mine since I first saw “Blood Simple”. NYT.
Other credits include…just about every damn thing. 233 acting credits in IMDB. Okay, he didn’t do a “Mannix”. But he did do a “Rockford”, “McMillan and Wife”, and “Ironside”. He was part of the ensemble cast of “UNSUB“. He was in the legendary fiasco (which revisionists now say wasn’t) “At Long Last Love“.
And he hates the cans! Stay away from the cans!
Mr. Walsh had confidence in his ability to deliver, and he knew how valuable that was to harried filmmakers. “You’re casting something, and you’ve got 12 problems; if they’ve got me, they only have 11 problems.”
He said that directors sought him out for his ability to elevate subpar material. “They’d say, ‘This is terrible crap — get Walsh. At least he makes it believable.’ And I got a lot of those jobs.”
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I always thought he classed up everything he was in. A Walsh sighting, much like a William Boyett sighting, thrilled me a bit.
In a 2017 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Walsh said he was asked about Blade Runner more than any other movie he had ever made. “We shot down in [Los Angeles’] Union Station,” he recalled. “They set it all up in a little office over in a corner, and we had to be out by five in the morning because commuters were coming in for the train. I don’t know if I really understood what in the hell it was all about.”
After seeing the finished film for the first time, Walsh realized he wasn’t the only one with that opinion. “We all sat there and it ended. And nothing,” he said, laughing hysterically. “We didn’t know what to say or to think or do! We didn’t know what in the hell we had done! The only one who seemed to get it was Ridley.”
I never met him, but I think I would have liked to. And I have no idea what his politics were, which I still think is a compliment.
Vernor Vinge, SF writer, has passed away. Unfortunately, all the obits I have found so far are from sources I do not trust or link to. The closest thing I have found to something linkable is a nice tribute from Michael Swanwick.
I haven’t read A Fire Upon the Deep or A Deepness in the Sky yet, though they are on my to-read list. I was pretty grandly impressed by “True Names“: I spent a lot of time scouring used paperback stores around UT in the old pre-Internet BBS days to find a copy of Binary Star #5, back in the day when that was the only way to get a copy (before Bluejay reprinted it). You can still get True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which also reprints the story, at a not unreasonable price.
Hacker News thread. The comments are worth reading, especially the one that links Vinge’s annotated A Fire Upon the Deep.
Obit watch: March 20, 2024.
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024Alexander Keewatin Dewdney, also known as “A. K. Dewdney”.
He took over what was known as the “Mathematical Games” column from Douglas Hofstadter (who followed Martin Gardner, and renamed it ” Metamagical Themas”) and, in turn, renamed it “Computer Recreations”. He’s also credited as being one of the inventors of the “Core War” game. Wikipedia.
It isn’t the Christmas season, but I’ll tell this story anyway: one year I was asked what I wanted for Christmas. I said I wanted one of Dewdney’s books.
Every year, my brother retells the story of how my family went all over town hunting for that book, until, at their very last stop (a Bookstop) a particularly clever clerk figured out that the book they were looking for was not The Touring Omnibus but, rather, The TURING Omnibus.
This is one of the reasons I like Amazon so much: while it does somewhat hurt indie bookstores, you don’t have to worry, you can just add it to your wish list. (And Bookstop was never an “indie” anyway.)
(Kids, ask your parents about Bookstop.)
Obit watch: March 19, 2024.
Tuesday, March 19th, 2024Lt. Gen. Thomas P. Stafford (USAF – ret.). NASA tribute. NASA biography page.
He was originally selected for Mercury, but was one inch too tall for the capsule.
He flew two Gemini missions, including Gemini VI (which was the first capsule to perform a space rendezvous). He flew Apollo 10, which scouted landing sites for Apollo 11. And he flew the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
David Seidler, screenwriter. I’ve been going back and forth on this one for notability reasons, but this pushed me into it:
That’s class. That’s the kind of class you don’t see much of these days.
And the exact opposite of class, the burning in Hell watch: Andrew Crispo, art dealer and criminal.
On the night of Feb. 22, 1985, he and an employee, Bernard LeGeros, met a 26-year-old model and student from Norway named Eigil Dag Vesti. They left the club and went north, to an estate in Rockland County, N.Y., owned by Mr. LeGeros’s parents.
What happened over the next few hours is unclear; all three men were on drugs. But in the early hours of Feb. 23, Mr. Legeros shot Mr. Vesti in the back of the head, twice, with a .22-caliber rifle. Mr. Vesti was naked, save for handcuffs around his wrists and a zippered leather hood over his head.
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Mr. LeGeros was arrested on March 27. The case became a tabloid sensation; the news media called it the Death Mask Murder.
Mr. Crispo denied involvement in the killing, and the police never charged him. He also never testified, despite Mr. LeGeros’s insistence that Mr. Crispo had ordered him to kill Mr. Vesti, and despite the discovery of the murder weapon at his gallery.
“I don’t shock, frankly, but one of the most surpassingly ugly things that ever happened in the art world was that Andrew Crispo got off with no charges for the murder of Eigil Dag Vesti,” the writer Gary Indiana told Interview magazine in 2020.
Two months after the Vesti murder, Mr. Crispo and Mr. LeGeros were indicted in a different case, charged with the 1984 kidnapping and torturing of a 26-year-old bartender named Mark Leslie. The case was not tried until 1988. Mr. LeGeros pleaded guilty, but Mr. Crispo was acquitted, having convinced the jury that the activity he participated in was consensual.
Crispo was convicted of tax evasion in 1986 and served three years of a five year sentence. The IRS seized his art and sold it off.
He spent some time trying to make a comeback: his house blew up, and he used settlement money from the gas company to buy more art and another house. He also planned to open a new gallery.
The gallery was set to open in mid-1999. But that May he was arrested yet again, this time for threatening to kidnap the 4-year-old daughter of a lawyer who had been involved in his bankruptcy case.
Mr. Crispo had grown irate after the lawyer’s firm, which controlled the money during his bankruptcy proceedings, delayed sending him a $2,000 check. He told the lawyer that he had photographs of her daughter at a playground, knew where she lived and would kidnap the child if the check did not arrive soon.
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Mr. Crispo was convicted, and in 2000 he was sentenced to seven years in prison. He got out in 2005.
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After getting out of prison a second time, in 2005, Mr. Crispo bought a co-op apartment and two ground-floor spaces in a residential tower in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, intending to open yet another gallery.
But his plans never worked out, and by 2017 he was facing bankruptcy again. He took out a series of loans from a realty company, using his co-op shares and some of his artwork as collateral. When he defaulted on the loans, the realty company took ownership of the shares.
Mr. Crispo refused to leave the apartment, and he erected a series of legal roadblocks to delay eviction. At the same time, he was growing erratic; he continued to use drugs and threw sex parties in his apartment, and on at least one occasion was seen naked and defecating in the hallway.
There’s a good account of the Eigil Dag Vesti killing in Murder Along the Way: A Prosecutor’s Personal Account of Fighting Violent Crime in the Suburbs by H. P. Jeffers and Kenneth Gribetz. Mr. Gribetz was the prosecutor in that case. (Link goes to the mass-market paperback edition, which has a slightly different title.)
My latest batch of million dollar ideas.
Monday, March 18th, 20241. I figure this one will hold up until the estate of Frank Herbert sues me. But then again, with a sufficiently good lawyer, I’m sure we can argue a parody exemption on this one:
Seven Habits of Highly Effective Fremen.
So far, I’ve got three. I’m thinking of recruiting a collaborator to help me flesh out the book a little.
- Walk without rhythm, to avoid attracting the worm.
- Never turn your back to the opposition.
- Don’t get high on your own (spice) supply.
(Yes, I did see “Dune Part 2” yesterday. Why do you ask?)
2. This one may be more of a $100,000 idea than a million dollar one, as there may be geographic limitations:
Vicious Australian Animal as a Service. (VAAaaS).
For s small fee to cover animal wrangling, packaging, shipping, and our profit, we’ll send a vicious Australian animal to your “favorite” person in the world. Message optional. We’ll maintain anonymity, and you can pay in cryptocurrency.
Let’s face it. Wouldn’t you love to send that “special person” who’s been acting like a rude (word that rhymes with “glass bowl”) a box jellyfish? Or a Sydney funnel-web spider? It sends a pretty clear message, and seems to me to be much more effective than a box of fecal matter.
There may be some issues with shipping marine life, like the box jellyfish or blue-ringed octopus, but spiders should be relatively easy. It would just be a small matter of finding animal wranglers and appropriate packaging. And lawyers.
We’d probably operate on a sliding scale, based on the size of the animal. Spiders and snakes should be small and easy to ship, while koalas and drop bears would be more expensive, as they would require special handling and packaging.
(I do have some morals. For that reason, VAAaaS will not ship Tasmanian devils, as they are endangered.)
Obit watch: February 28, 2024.
Wednesday, February 28th, 2024Ole Anderson, one of the Four Horsemen.
That’s the Four Horsemen of professional wrestling.
Through the 1970s and early 1980s, he was a member of the tag team known as the Minnesota Wrecking Crew, which over the years included Gene, Lars and Arn Anderson, who called themselves brothers and were popular around the Midwest. They were part of regional circuits like Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling and Georgia Championship Wrestling that were united under the National Wrestling Alliance, which regularly crowned them tag-team champions.
In the 1980s, Mr. Anderson teamed up with Arn Anderson, Ric Flair and Tully Blanchard to become the Four Horsemen, who went on to dominate the N.W.A. and later World Championship Wrestling, which competed with the W.W.F.
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Brian Stableford, noted author, passed away a few days ago. I don’t have a direct obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick posted a nice tribute to him on his blog.
Obit watch: February 22, 2024.
Thursday, February 22nd, 2024The paper of record finally got around to publishing an obit for Niklaus Wirth.
Ewen MacIntosh, British actor. IMDB.
Lefty Driesell, noted college basketball coach.
Robert Reid, one of the great Houston Rockets.
Lawrence sent over two obits:
Paul D’Amato, actor. IMDB.
Steve Miller, SF author.
Today is Presidents’ Day. How about some gun book crankery?
Monday, February 19th, 2024I recall reading somewhere (I think in Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It) that Lincoln was a big gun guy. If any inventor showed up at the White House with a new or improved weapon design, they were pretty much guaranteed an audience with Abe.
How much of that was desperation to win the war, and how much of it was a fascination with guns and the mechanics of machines, I have no idea.
Short shameful confession: it has been a while since I field stripped a 1911 pattern pistol.
I wanted to break down and lube one of my Commander length guns (using the lubrication suggestions from Bill Wilson’s Gun Guy, and also his lube). I had forgotten what a complete and utter (word that rhymes with “witch”) it is to get the slide stop pin through both the frame and the barrel link. Every time, the link got pushed backwards and into a position where I couldn’t get the stop into place.
I finally got it, but it took me probably 45 minutes. Maybe I need more practice. Good thing I have three more 1911s that need the same treatment. And plenty of Wilson lube left…
After the jump, a few gun books for the discerning eyes of my readers.