Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

’twas the night before Christmas…

Friday, December 24th, 2021

Chartwell Booksellers sent this over, and I thought I’d share it with everyone:

Winston Churchill’s Christmas Eve message, December 24, 1941.

Slightly longer version (Chartwell dropped the opening paragraph) from the International Churchill Society.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

(Ugly Christmas Beanie from Magpul (affiliate link). I don’t know that you’ll be able to get one on or before the 25th: but as all people of goodwill know, the Christmas season runs through January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany, and thus your ugly Christmas beanie (or sweater, if you live someplace that cold) is appropriate wear at least through then.)

Posted in Books, Christmas, Clothing, Hats, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 24, 2021.

Friday, December 24th, 2021

Joan Didion. LAT. THR.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

By way of Lawrence: a selection of her writing from National Review.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Bad ideas ‘R’ us.

Thursday, December 23rd, 2021

Setup for this: Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) may have received one or more of the Brownells Gunsmith Kinks books for Christmas. SWIM may have texted me a message about “books about kinky gunsmiths”.

Which got me thinking…we have romance novels in just about every other area, including cop romances and SWAT romances (that’s “Special Werewolf Alpha Team“).

Why not…gunsmith romances?

John Brown is one of the best gunsmiths in the country. He can make a 1911 shoot cloverleafs at 50 yards. But he knows nothing about women.
Carrie Green is a Beverly Hills liberal who knows nothing about guns. But increasing crime has her worried. So she decides to buy a gun.
When Carrie walks into John’s shop, bullets won’t be the only thing in the air…

Nicole Cross is looking for someone to complete her father’s last firearms design. But when she meets hunky gunsmith Alex Middlemarch, her gas piston won’t be the only thing moving.

Police armorer Michelle Block lost her cop husband in a line of duty accident. She’s been immersed in her work for the past five years. But can she find love, and a father for her daughter, with macho SWAT cop Patrick Westlake?

A cinematographer is killed on the set of a Western, and movie armorer Lauren Hughes is blamed for her death. Can former SEAL and special investigator Donald Thomas prove she was framed…and find the real killer before he takes Lauren out of the picture?

Okay, that last one may cut a little too close to current events…

Posted in Books, Christmas, Guns | 1 Comment »

Responsible use of category tags.

Wednesday, December 15th, 2021

I hate to link to Crimereads two days in a row, but this is another one of those articles I feel like I have to link. Especially since it lets me tick off multiple categories from my list:

“Fireworks at Graceland: How Elvis Spent His Last Christmas Before Boot Camp“.

I’m not going to add it to my wish list yet, but Christmas with Elvis (affiliate link) sounds like it could be a fun book.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Christmas, Elvis, Explosives, History, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 12, 2021.

Sunday, December 12th, 2021

Anne Rice.

Everybody’s been on this like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation, but I wanted to note it for two reasons:

1. The hysterical record.

2. When I looked early this morning (probably around 7:30 AM) the NYT had what I thought was a very brief and superficial obit up, with no mention that a longer one would be coming. When I checked later in the afternoon, that one has been slightly expanded and the usual “a fuller obituary will be published soon” note was there. The current obit seems to be the end product (modulo any corrections that come in).

Noted:

By her late teens, she had become disillusioned with the Catholic faith.
“I have a great deal of anger against a church that would teach kids a 7-year-old could burn in hell for French kissing, right alongside a Nazi sadist,” she told The Times in 1988. In the late 1990s, though, she would return to a belief in God after decades of atheism; over the next several years she wrote two novels inspired by the life of Jesus, as well as a memoir, “Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Journey” (2008).

Posted in Books, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

Christmas trivia.

Friday, December 3rd, 2021

Not too long ago, I found a used DVD of “The Detective” at Half-Price Books.

“The Detective” is a movie I’m kind of interested in, and I only paid $5 for the DVD. It is based on a novel by Roderick Thorp, and stars Frank Sinatra as a NYPD detective named Joe Leland.

Most of what I’ve read about the movie says that it was well regarded: it was praised for being a more mature approach to movies about police work, as well as dealing with non-mainstream subjects. (And check out that supporting cast.)

I think I’m going to end up watching it by myself, as I suspect it will be a tough sell to the Saturday Night Movie Group. (We’ve already watched one Sinatra detective film, “Tony Rome”, which was…not great.)

What does this have to do with Christmas?

In 1979, 13 years later, Roderick Thorp published a sequel to The Detective called Nothing Lasts Forever, also featuring Joe Leland (affiliate links). By this time, Detective Leland has retired from the NYPD, and decides to go visit his daughter in Los Angeles for Christmas.

While he is waiting for his daughter’s Christmas party to end, a group of German Autumn–era terrorists take over the skyscraper. The gang is led by the brutal Anton “Little Tony the Red” Gruber. Joe had known about Gruber through a counter-terrorism conference he had attended years prior. Barefoot, Leland slips away and manages to remain undetected in the gigantic office complex. Aided outside only by Los Angeles Police sergeant Al Powell and armed with only his police-issue pistol, Leland fights off the terrorists one by one in an attempt to save the 74 hostages, and his daughter and grandchildren.

Yeah, you guessed it. As I understand it, there were initially discussions about having Frank Sinatra play Joe Leland again (he was 64 when the book came out) but he turned the role down, and they eventually wound up with Bruce Willis. Also, the book sounds like it is a lot darker, just based on the Wikipedia summary.

Two of Thorp’s other novels were adapted for film, but none of those is set in the Die Hard Cinematic Universe (DHCU). (“Rainbow Drive” sounds like it could be interesting, but it is hard to find.) Thorp died in 1999.

And now you know…the rest of the story.

Because it’s just not Christmas until we see Hans Gruber fall from the Nakatomi Tower.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books, Christmas, Movies | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 26, 2021.

Friday, November 26th, 2021

Noah Gordon.

He was an American writer. His first book, The Rabbi, was on the NYT bestseller list for 26 weeks in the 1960s. His other books didn’t do as well, in the United States…

…but he was a huge bestseller overseas.

Mr. Gordon’s “The Physician” (1986) — the first book in a dynastic trilogy that began in 11th-century Persia, continued during the American Civil War with “Shaman” (1992) and ended with a modern woman doctor dealing with the morality of abortion in “Matters of Choice” (1996) — had an initial print run of only 10,000 copies in the United States.
But it eventually sold some 10 million copies, including more than six million in Germany, where, in the 1990s, six of Mr. Gordon’s novels were on best-seller lists simultaneously.
In 2013, “The Physician” was adapted into a German film, in English, starring Tom Payne, Stellan Skarsgard and Ben Kingsley. An award-winning musical based on the book is about to tour Spain.

…

“While Gordon has been published in 38 countries, Spain and Germany, where he is most popular, are two countries that grapple with a history of anti-Semitism,” Andrew Silverstein wrote in The Forward this year. “While not all of Gordon’s eight books have Jewish themes, most do, and his Jewishness is well known, which may play a role in his popularity in these two countries.”
Mr. Gordon won Spain’s Silver Basque Prize twice for best-selling book, in 1992 and 1995. His novels were also popular in Italy and Brazil.

I read the Kindle sample of The Death Committee before I went to bed last night, and…it was interesting enough that I’m tempted to purchase the book.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Memo from the legal beat.

Wednesday, November 24th, 2021

I feel like I have to write about this story, since I don’t think it has received much attention, and it sits at the odd intersection of crime and publishing. I’m trying to step lightly here, because what happened to both of the people involved is horrible, and I hope they are able to find some measure of peace.

Anthony J. Broadwater was exonerated on Monday. He was convicted of rape and spent 16 years in prison, but his conviction was thrown out:

…a state judge, his defense lawyers and the Onondaga County district attorney agreed that the case against him had been woefully flawed.

What makes this story slightly more significant than many of these cases is: the victim was Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones and Lucky, a non-fiction book about the attack.

Ms. Sebold used a fictitious name for Mr. Broadwater in her memoir, identifying him as Gregory Madison.

Ms. Sebold identified Mr. Broadwater as her attacker, but it seems like there were problems, even at the time:

After evidence was collected from a rape kit, she described her assailant’s features to the police, but the resulting composite sketch didn’t resemble him, she wrote.
Mr. Broadwater was arrested five months later, after Ms. Sebold passed him on the street and contacted the police, saying she may have seen her attacker.
But she identified a different man as her attacker in a police lineup. In her memoir, she writes that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him looked alike and that moments after she made her choice, she felt she had picked the wrong man. She later identified Mr. Broadwater in court.

…

In their motion to vacate the conviction, the defense lawyers J. David Hammond and Melissa K. Swartz wrote that the case had relied solely on Ms. Sebold’s identification of Mr. Broadwater in the courtroom and a now-discredited method of microscopic hair analysis.
They also argued that prosecutorial misconduct was a factor during the police lineup — that the prosecutor had falsely told Ms. Sebold that Mr. Broadwater and the man next to him were friends who had purposely appeared in the lineup together to trick her — and that it had improperly influenced Ms. Sebold’s later testimony.

Kind of interestingly, this whole thing was triggered by a planned film version of the book:

Timothy Mucciante was working as executive producer of the adaptation of “Lucky,” but began to question the story that the movie was based on earlier this year, after he noticed discrepancies between the memoir and the script.
“I started having some doubts, not about the story that Alice told about her assault, which was tragic, but the second part of her book about the trial, which didn’t hang together,” Mr. Mucciante said in an interview.
Mr. Mucciante said that he ended up leaving the production in June because of his skepticism about the case and how it was being portrayed.

He hired a PI, they gathered evidence, they approached a lawyer (and, coincidentally, Mr. Broadwater hired the same lawyer), one thing led to another which led to the motion to vacate the conviction, and Mr. Broadwater is no longer a sex offender.

Ms. Sebold had no comment on the decision, a spokesman for Scribner, which published “Lucky,” said. The spokesman said that the publisher had no plans to update the text.

Posted in Books, Law | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: November 22, 2021.

Monday, November 22nd, 2021

Bob Bondurant, legendary racer and founder of The Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.

Mr. Bondurant began attracting attention in the racing world in 1959, when he won 18 of the 20 races he entered behind the wheel of a Corvette.
“I am an original California hot rodder turned white hot when I started winning everything in my Corvettes,” he was quoted as saying by the National Corvette Museum, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2016.
He continued to win races regularly in Corvettes in the 1960s, but he also began to race successfully in other sports cars and open-wheeled Formula 1 machines, including for the elite Ferrari team from 1965 to 1966.
“He was top of the line,” said Peter Brock, who designed the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe that Mr. Bondurant raced with Dan Gurney to first place in the GT, or Grand Touring, class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in 1964.

…

Even before opening the school, Mr. Bondurant had some well-known students. He had coached James Garner and Yves Montand in driving Formula 1 cars for John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film, “Grand Prix.” Mr. Bondurant, who was a stunt man and technical adviser to the film, wore 16-millimeter cameras on the sides of his helmet to record racing action on the track while moving at 150 miles per hour.
Soon after Mr. Bondurant opened the school, Mr. Newman and Robert Wagner signed up as students. They had been cast as racecar drivers in the film “Winning” (1969), in which Mr. Newman’s character dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500.
“Paul has a knack of knowing how to learn,” Mr. Bondurant told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1988. “He’s like most actors — they know how to listen. He would move at his own pace, and wouldn’t go too quick. He took it step by step, and it came naturally to him.”

One of my lifetime ambitions has been to attend the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, though apparently it went bankrupt in 2018 and is now known as the Radford Racing School.

Robert Bly, the Iron John guy. Anyone else remember when Iron John was a thing? I do, though I never actually read it: I just remember a time when people talked about books, instead of what the Kardasians were doing yesterday.

Carolyn Watjen, aka “Caroline Todd“. You wouldn’t know her under that name: she and her son, David Watjen, write (wrote?) mystery novels under the pseudonym “Charles Todd”. I haven’t read any of them yet, but the Ian Rutledge novels sound interesting.

Jay Last. He was an early semi-conductor pioneer: specifically, he was one of the “traitorous eight” who left William Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. His death leaves Gordon Moore (yes, that Moore) as the last surviving member of the group.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Mick Rock, photographer of musicians.

Peter Aykroyd, Dan’s brother and “Saturday Night Live” cast member.

Art LaFleur, actor. Other than “The Sandlot”, his credits include episodes of “The John Larroquette Show”, two different remakes of television series that should never have been remade and which failed miserably (not due to Mr. LaFleur, they were just bad ideas), “Matlock”, “Field of Dreams”, and “Wizards and Warriors”.

Posted in Books, Cars, Geek, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 19, 2021.

Friday, November 19th, 2021

Wilbur Smith, author. He was another one of those guys whose books I often see in racks at the grocery store, which is a pretty good sign.

“I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women,” Mr. Smith said.

…

When he was 8, his father gave him a .22-caliber Remington rifle. “I shot my first animal shortly afterward and my father ritually smeared the animal’s blood on my face,” he wrote in his memoir, “On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures” (2018). “The blood was the mark of emerging manhood. I refused to bathe for days afterward.”

…

Mr. Smith had his detractors, who saw some of his writing as glorifying colonialism and furthering racial and gender stereotypes. And he was not always a favorite of critics.
He maintained, as he told the Australian publication The Age, that he paid little attention. “The snootiness of critics is so silly,” he said. “They’re judging Great Danes against Pekingese. I’m not writing that literature — I’ve never set out to write it. I’m writing stories.”

Lawrence sent over Ann Althouse’s obit for Justus Rosenberg yesterday. I can’t really do the man the justice she did, so I’ll just point you over there.

Posted in Books, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Stephen Hunter, call your office, please.

Thursday, November 18th, 2021

Spotted at a grocery store in Tulsa:

“…the man who holds the complete works of Aristotle in one hand, and a delicious sandwich in the other”. Well, who doesn’t love a delicious sandwich? But I think the Swagger I’m familiar with is more likely to have a .38 Super in the other hand.

(Swagger explained, for those who are unfamiliar with the works of Stephen Hunter. Those people should fix that soon: I’m personally fond of Pale Horse Coming, for reasons.)

Also spotted: Old Spice Krakengard. Which actually makes sense to me: if I can get a body wash that protects me from kraken, I am there, man.

Posted in Bagatelle, Books | Comments Closed

Fish heads, fish heads, rolly polly fish heads…

Friday, October 29th, 2021

I have food on my mind.

McThag put up a post over at his place about bagna cauda. This is something I’d like to try as well. And actually, I think I first heard about it from reading about “Babylon 5”.

(I have never seen a complete episode of “B5”. I feel like SF on TV has been dumbed down and mostly hasn’t been good since the first incarnation of “Twilight Zone” went off the air (though the second incarnation was a bright spot in some ways). I’ve never been a fan of that minor SF TV series from the 1960s or any of the followup products (though I would like to watch the adaptation of a Larry Niven story they did on the animated series). However, the more I read about “B5” and the more clips I watch on the ‘Tube, the stronger my impression gets that it was an actual thoughtful intelligent SF series with many of the right people involved, and it might be something that’s worth my time. Perhaps next time I see a box set at Half-Price.)

But I digress. I’m also kind of craving Swedish meatballs. A supper of bagna cauda and Swedish meatballs doesn’t sound too bad. Perhaps not really healthy, but not too bad…

Anyway, I don’t know where I’m going to get bagna cauda or Swedish meatballs. I could make them myself, but I’m kind of hesitant about stinking up the kitchen with the former. As for the latter, I guess I could schlep out to Ikea and get some frozen ones, but that doesn’t seem like an optimal experience. And I don’t know any place in Austin that serves either one. If you do, please feel free to leave a comment.

(Also, while I can cook, the kitchen is really someone else’s territory, and I’m hesitant about treading in there. Especially if I’m cooking things they might find disgusting, like bagna cauda or anything with onions.)

(Something else I have a craving for, not related to anchovies: Vincent Price’s cocktail franks.)

(There! Vincent Price! There’s your Halloween content! Are you not entertained?!)

Something else I’ve been interested in for quite a while that is (semi-) related to anchovies, and prompted by “The Delicious Legacy” and food anthropology in general: the lost Roman condiment garum.

See also: “Culinary Detectives Try to Recover the Formula for a Deliciously Fishy Roman Condiment” by the same guy, Taras Grescoe. (I’ve read his book, The Devil’s Picnic (affiliate link), and based on that, I’d be willing to give Lost Supper a chance when it comes out.)

I’m also intrigued by The Story of Garum, but damn! $158! $37 for the Kindle edition! At those prices, it had better come with a case of garum! Or at least a six-pack.

(I’ve heard that this is the closest you can get today to garum. Amazon has the 40°N, but not the 50°N. I might have to order a bottle directly. And the Vincent Price cookbook.)

(This food anthropology thing rapidly gets expensive. And I haven’t even bought any imported anchovies yet.)

Anyway, McThag’s probably peeved at me by now for wandering all over the place. And I’m hungry. Time to rummage up something to eat. Then maybe order some fish sauce.

Never shop when you’re hungry.

Posted in Books, Fish, Food, Kindleing, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: October 29, 2021.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

Richard Hammer, author. He wrote two books on the My Lai massacre:

Mr. Hammer’s account of the My Lai slaughter in 1968, “One Morning in the War: The Tragedy of Son My” (1970), was frequently reviewed alongside one by Seymour M. Hersh, who had broken the story — “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath.” (The village of Son My included the hamlet of My Lai.)
“Richard Hammer — knowing perhaps that Hersh had the jump on him — tried to put the incident in perspective and thereby ended up writing the better book,” the book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times.“He took the time,” he added, “to explain the gradual depersonalization of the Vietnamese in American soldiers’ eyes — to make us understand how even women and children begin to seem hated and dangerous.”
Mr. Hammer followed up that book with another centered on the massacre, “The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,” which John Leonard of The Times numbered among “a handful of public-affairs books published in 1971 that people will be reading a generation from now.” William Styron, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial.”

…

Mr. Hammer also wrote and narrated the film “Interviews With My-Lai Veterans” (1970), which won an Oscar for best documentary (short subject).

Additionally, he was a two-time winner of the Edgar award for “best fact crime” for books unrelated to My-Lai: The CBS Murders: A True Account of Greed and Violence in New York’s Diamond District and The Vatican Connection: The True Story of a Billion-Dollar Conspiracy Between the Catholic Church and the Mafia (affiliate links).

Viktor Bryukhanov, the guy who took the rap for Chernobyl.

After serving five years in prison, Mr. Bryukhanov returned to government service in Ukraine to head the technical department in its Economic Development and Trade Ministry.

It really was a different country, wasn’t it?

Sonny Osborne, of the Osborne Brothers.

Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.
The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.

This is in the NYT article, and I’ve posted this before, but fark that: I’m in the mood right now for some insurrectionist music.

Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, of the von Trapp family.

Mrs. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.
Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Mrs. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.

Martha Henry. She was 83.

For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”
As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.

David DePatie, co-creator (with Friz Freleng) of “The Pink Panther”.

George Butler, documentary filmmaker. Among his credits: “Pumping Iron”, aka “the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star”.

NYT obit for Val Bisoglio.

In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.
“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”

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

Obit watch: October 15, 2021.

Friday, October 15th, 2021

Gary Paulsen, author.

I was a little old for Hatchet (affiliate link) when it came out, and haven’t gotten around to reading it. But whenever I see discussions of young adult books people liked, or liked when they were that age, Hatchet always comes up. It seems to have had a strong influence on many young people.

And he was the kind of guy who could write that book.

When Gary was 4, his mother, Eunice (Moen) Paulsen, moved with him to Chicago, where she got a job in an ammunition factory. An alcoholic, she would dress Gary in a child-size soldier’s outfit and take him to bars, where she made him sing on tables as a way to get men to pay attention to her.
She could also be fiercely protective. Once he sneaked outside their apartment when she was sleeping. A man dragged him into an alley and began to molest him. Suddenly his mother appeared, beating and kicking the assailant into unconsciousness.
Eventually, her own mother forced her to send Gary to live with an aunt and uncle in northern Minnesota, where he learned to hunt, fish and live outdoors for long stretches.

…

In “Gone to the Woods,” a memoir published this year, Mr. Paulsen recalled how at one point the passengers watched in horror as a plane crash-landed nearby. As the plane’s passengers struggled in the water, a pack of sharks descended on them, pulling men and women and children below the water.
His family later returned to Minnesota, where his parents drank and fought constantly. To get away from them, Gary would take to the woods, exploring, hunting and trapping, or wander around their small town, Thief River Falls, near the Canadian border. He worked odd jobs, like setting pins at a bowling alley and delivering newspapers, and used the money to buy his own school supplies, as well as a .22-caliber rifle.
One day he ducked into a library to get warm. A librarian asked if he had a library card. When he said no, she gave him one, along with a Scripto notebook and a No. 2 pencil, with instructions to read everything he could and write down everything he thought.

…

When he was 14 he ran away and joined a carnival. He returned home just long enough to forge his father’s signature and join the Army.
The Army trained him in engineering, and he later tracked satellites for a government contractor at a facility in California. He also spent time in Los Angeles, writing dialogue for television shows like “Mission: Impossible.”
All along, he had been reading and writing, and one day in 1965 he decided to try his hand at a novel. He moved back to Minnesota, where he rented a cabin and went to work.
For several years he wrote westerns for adults under a pseudonym. He made just enough money to sustain a simple rural life, living off what he could grow and hunt.

…

He also fell in love with dog-sledding. He took part in the Iditarod, the grueling 1,000-mile race across Alaska, three times before giving up the sport in 1990, citing heart problems.
“When you run a thousand miles with a dog team, you enter a state of primitive exaltation,” he said in an interview with the American Writers Museum in January. “You go back 30,000 years, you and the dogs, and you’re never the same again.”

…

A proud Luddite and misanthrope, he considered the internet “just stupid, faster,” and said organized sports had become a perverse form of religion.

For the historical record: Sir David Amess, Conservative MP. Everybody’s covered this by now, and I don’t have anything to add.

Well, okay, perhaps one thing: I don’t mean to make fun of our friends in the UKOGBNI, nor do I mean to seem provincial. But “constituency surgery” is such an interesting term…

Posted in Books, Obits, Politics | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 5, 2021.

Tuesday, October 5th, 2021

Alan Kalter, David Letterman’s announcer on CBS.

The red-haired Kalter took over for the retired Bill Wendell as the Late Show announcer in September 1995 — about two years after Letterman moved from NBC to CBS — and remained through the host’s final program on May 20, 2015. On his first day on the job, Letterman tossed him into a pool.
With musical accompaniment from Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra, Kalter announced the guests and cheekily introduced the host at the top of each show, then voiced the comic one-liner over the Worldwide Pants title card on the end credits.
In between, Kalter often acted in funny sketches that included hosting “Alan Kalter’s Celebrity Interview” after Letterman was finished with the guest and speaking from his announcer’s podium as the studio lights dimmed, trying to come on to lonely, divorced women as “Big Red” — much to the dismay of a “shocked” Letterman.

…

“When I came home and said I was offered the job as the announcer on the Late Show, I told my wife I wasn’t sure if I really wanted it because it would really rock the boat on those commercials I was doing around the country,” he recalled in 2019. “I wouldn’t be able to go away for three or four days at a time whenever I wanted to, to do that work. And my kids, who were in high school at the time, sort of immediately in chorus said, ‘Dad this is the first cool thing you’ve ever done in your life. Take it!’”

Pearl Tytell has passed away at 104. She was a leading examiner of questioned documents.

Mrs. Tytell worked with her husband, Martin, at their typewriter repair and rental business on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, which branched out into the scientific examination of documents in the early 1950s. A rare woman in a male-dominated field, Mrs. Tytell ran that end of the business and trained her son, Peter, a widely known examiner of documents until his death last year.
Mrs. Tytell was an expert witness for the federal government in 1982 in the tax-evasion case against the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the head of the Unification Church. By analyzing changes in his handwriting — particularly how his printed “S” had turned cursive — she testified that he signed checks in 1974, not in 1973 as his lawyers had said.
At another point, Mrs. Tytell used paper-mill records and her knowledge of watermarks to prove that a piece of paper had not been produced until after the date written on it.
“She was an exceptional witness,” Martin Flumenbaum, a prosecutor in the case, said in a phone interview. “She dominated the courtroom. I remember the jury being enthralled by her testimony.”

…

In one of her best-known cases, she was hired in 1972 by International Telephone and Telegraph to analyze a politically explosive memorandum written a year earlier by one of the company’s lobbyists, Dita Beard (who denied writing the memorandum). Its existence was revealed by the investigative journalist Jack Anderson.
It suggested a connection between the settlement of a government antitrust lawsuit against I.T.T. and a pledge by the company to pay $400,000 in costs for the 1972 Republican National Convention.
A report issued by I.T.T. said that Mrs. Tytell and a chemist, Walter McCrone, had used “microscopic, ultraviolet fluorescence and highly sophisticated micro chemical analyses” of the memorandum and other samples that had been typed on Mrs. Beard’s typewriter between June 25, 1971 (the date on the document) and February 1972. They determined that the memo had most likely been written in January 1972, nearly six months after the antitrust settlement, meaning a connection to the payment was not likely.
Their report — submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which investigated the financial pledge made in the memo — contradicted the F.B.I.’s analysis of the document, which suggested it had been written on June 25.

Todd Akin, former House member from Missouri. He gave up that seat to run for the Senate, and lost after making some controversial remarks about rape.

Angelo Codevilla, conservative author and theorist. (The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It)

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »