Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

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Obit watch: February 27, 2026.

Friday, February 27th, 2026

Dan Simmons passed away last Saturday. My source for this is a tweet Lawrence forwarded me from David Morrell: Lawrence has also posted his own obit, which is much better than anything I could post.

He was a pretty swell writer. I haven’t read everything he wrote, but I’ve read quite a bit. I liked Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion quite a bit. He also did some pretty good suspense books: I’m very fond of Darwin’s Blade and the first two Joe Kurtz books (I haven’t read the third). He also wrote The Terror, which was turned into a TV series.

FotB RoadRich sent over two obits: Dan McGrath, writer for “The Simpsons”. (He co-wrote the “Time and Punishment” segment of “Treehouse of Horror V”, the one where Homer turns his toaster into a time machine.)

Also by way of RoadRich, Elizabeth Snead, former THR writer. I missed this, but she sounds fun:

During THR’s Costume Designers Roundtable in 2012, Lincoln’s Joanna Johnston told Snead and executive features editor Stephen Galloway that designing wardrobes for film was “somewhere between a war and a circus.”

…

Snead often brought her poodle Mina on assignment. She found the abandoned dog, dingy gray and with chipped nail polish, on a street near Dupont Circle in Washington. Once she bathed the pooch, she discovered Mina had snow-white fur.
She retired from journalism in the mid-2010s and returned to Florida, where she turned her attention to animal activities, such as showing her pack of Maltese dogs competitively and breeding Napoleon cats.

Bobby J. Brown, actor. He played “Officer Bobby Brown” on “The Wire”, a character based on a real police officer named “Bob Brown”. I think RoadRich rolled his eyes a little when he told me this.

Other credits include “Law & Order: SVU”, “We Own This City”, and “From Within”.

Posted in Books, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 11, 2026.

Wednesday, February 11th, 2026

I had not previously heard of Hudson Talbott, but I find his obituary touching.

He wrote children’s books.

Mr. Talbott’s collaboration on “Into the Woods,” published in 1988, was a happier experience. The musical, which opened on Broadway a year earlier, is for adults — although it is based in part on folk tales by the Brothers Grimm, and features characters like Cinderella that are familiar to children. Mr. Talbott adapted it for a younger audience.
James Lapine, the musical’s Tony Award-winning librettist, said in an email that the book “honors our show rather than reinvents it.”
Mr. Talbott used a lush visual style, which he described as “more or less 18th-century French,” for illustrations like the depiction of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother inside the wolf’s open mouth, and he rewrote the story with help from Mr. Sondheim’s notes.
“Both Steve and I loved what he did,” Mr. Lapine said. “And the book remains my favorite gift to anyone who has a child.”

…

As a child, he showed artistic talent, but he had difficulty reading; he discovered later in life that he had dyslexia. In his semi-autobiographical book “A Walk in the Words” (2021), he wrote that drawing allowed him to disappear into a safe world all his own.
“I was the slowest reader in my class,” he wrote. “When everybody was turning to the next page, I was still on the first sentence. Nobody knew. But the books knew! And they were coming for me!”

…

Nancy Paulsen, the president and publisher of an imprint at Penguin Young Readers, who edited over a dozen of Mr. Talbott’s books, said that he was more confident in his artwork than in his writing. In painting, he employed various styles and was inspired by work from the Renaissance and the Hudson River School.
“He was very sophisticated about what he showed kids, but it was very easy to understand,” Ms. Paulsen said in an interview. “In ‘A Walk in the Words,’ when you see the wall of words, a kid knows what he’s doing there.”
In one part of the book, the boy cowers before the wall of words; in another, he tears down a wall of shame.

…

In 2022, Mr. Talbott spoke by Zoom to dyslexic students at a school in Richmond, Va., telling them that, as a child, he had dealt with his own challenges by spending too much time alone — “and nobody was there to help me, and it wasn’t their fault because I was hiding it.”
“If I could go back in time,” he added, “I would try to say to me, as a little boy, ‘Don’t be ashamed. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. You are who you are, and you read the way you read.’”

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Going fishing.

Saturday, February 7th, 2026

I started the post months ago, but couldn’t do anything with it before now because of image uploading issues and Bluehost’s refusal to assist with those.

Bluehost upgraded my WordPress instance for this blog a few days ago, and image uploading seems to be working slightly better, so I think I can post this now and see what happens.

My intent when I started this was to dangle some stinky old bait in the water to see if a specific person took the bait.

Jump goes here.

(more…)

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Ruger, Winchester | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 30, 2026.

Friday, January 30th, 2026

I’m going to do a round-up from the past couple of days. I’m also going to draw heavily on the NYT since we’re reaching the end of the month, and I have a bunch of share links to burn off before February.

Sly Dunbar, of Sly and Robbie.

For nearly 50 years, Mr. Dunbar and his partner, the bassist Robbie Shakespeare, who died in 2021, single-handedly shaped the various music styles — ska, reggae, rocksteady, dancehall — coming out of Jamaica’s heady cultural ferment of the 1960s.

…

Mr. Dunbar was known for his precise, propellant and somehow also relaxed drumming. After mastering the one-drop rhythm, a reggae standard that leaves out the kick drum on the first beat of a 4/4 measure, he pioneered the rockers rhythm, which deploys the drum on the first and third beats, and the snare on the second and fourth, making it even more danceable and energetic.
The rockers rhythm challenged the reggae orthodoxy of the 1970s. It fostered new genres like dancehall and made it easier for adjacent styles, like R&B, funk and rock, to incorporate reggae influences.

John L. Allen Jr., prominent Catholic journalist and author. I haven’t read any of his books, but I should probably at least buy the Opus Dei one. (Lawrence likes to give me a hard time about my Opus Dei membership.)

Johnny Legend, a polymath of the perverse who became something of a cult hero as — among other outré personas — a punk-rock wrestling impresario, an accomplice to the comedian Andy Kaufman, a B-movie archivist and erotic film auteur, and, with his flowing beard, a recording curiosity known as the Rockabilly Rasputin, died on Jan. 2 in South Beach, Ore. He was 77.

He’s not someone I’d ever heard of, but the obit is mildly interesting, so I’m just going to quote the first paragraph and send you over to the paper of record if it grabs you.

Finally, Dr. Peter H. Duesberg. That name may ring a bell for some people.

He did important early work on cancer.

In the late 1960s, when scientists had little understanding of what caused cancer, Dr. Duesberg studied a virus called Rous sarcoma, which had been associated with malignant tumors in chickens. He published the results of his experiments in 1970, showing that the virus carried a gene, known as Src, that triggered cancer in the birds.
It turned out to be the first known cancer-causing gene, or oncogene.
Dr. Duesberg’s work, at the University of California, Berkeley, set the stage for other researchers who were able to show that normal cells in many animals, including humans, carry a version of this gene, known as a proto-oncogene. Modern cancer treatments are based in part on the understanding that those proto-oncogenes can turn into cancer-spawning oncogenes when damaged over time by carcinogens, radiation or random mutations.

…

But he didn’t pursue his research on oncogenes. Instead, in his work at Berkeley and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, where he held an appointment starting in 1997, he focused on the more established theory that cancer is caused by damage to the chromosomes, the structures that carry our genetic material.
And in a startling about-face, he inexplicably contradicted his own research, insisting that oncogenes didn’t, in fact, cause cancer; he even went so far as to heckle colleagues at scientific meetings if they supported that idea.

He became more famous as an H.I.V. denialist.

In the 1980s, Dr. Duesberg adopted another contrarian view, publicly rejecting the theory that the newly discovered disease known as AIDS was caused by human immunodeficiency virus, or H.I.V., a link that is widely accepted today. The theory he promoted was that AIDS was caused by poverty, malnutrition, the use of recreational drugs and azidothymidine, or AZT, an early antiviral drug used to treat the disease.

…

Throughout his life, Dr. Duesberg maintained his position that H.I.V. does not cause AIDS, a contention that raised questions about the perils of undermining public trust in established scientists during an epidemic.

…

By 1987, when Dr. Duesberg published his theory about AIDS in the journal Cancer Research, a consensus had formed around H.I.V. as the cause of the disease. Eventually, scientists figured out how H.I.V. caused AIDS — through the slow destruction of a white blood cell known as CD4, which is essential for the maintenance of the immune system. None of the factors Dr. Duesberg had proposed as the cause of AIDS led to this immune collapse.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 13, 2026.

Tuesday, January 13th, 2026

Scott Adams. THR.

I used to be a pretty avid follower of “Dilbert”. Back at one of my previous jobs, the running joke was that “Dilbert” was a documentary about my life. Then something happened. Mr. Adams’s…eccentricities, for want of a better word, got on my nerves. (Remember the “Dilberito“, and Mr. Adams’s idea that we didn’t need to actually, you know, eat food? We could just pills with all the nutrients we needed.)

He was still on my radar, because how could he not be? But he didn’t have the relevance for me that he once had. I’m sad he’s passed on, though.

(These days, the documentary about my life is called “The Wire”.)

Elle Simone Scott, of “America’s Test Kitchen”. I get a kick out of having “ATK” on in the background while I work.

Jirdes Winther Baxter. She was 101.

Ms. Baxter was the last known survivor of the 1925 Nome diphtheria epidemic.

A copy of medical records from 1925, possessed by Mr. Baxter, a retired lawyer, indicates that Jirdes (pronounced JER-diss) Winther, then 11 months old, was hospitalized in Nome on Jan. 30 with diphtheria and what she later called a high fever. Highly contagious, diphtheria is a dangerous bacterial disease that can clog airways, severely restricting breathing, and damage the heart and kidneys.
Jirdes’s Norwegian-born mother, Ragnhild, and one of her brothers, John, were admitted on Feb. 2. Her father, Johan, and another brother, Gudmund, did not contract the disease.
At the time, there was only one doctor, Curtis Welch, in Nome, a gold-rush town of 1,400 inhabitants. After two young children died of diphtheria by mid-January, officials there instituted a quarantine advised by Dr. Welch, who had realized that a pandemic seemed “almost inevitable.”
He sent alerts, by radio telegram, to other towns in Alaska and pleaded for emergency help from the U.S. Public Health Service. The nearest supply of antitoxin, made from the blood of horses, was at a hospital in Anchorage, 1,000 miles away.

They couldn’t fly antitoxin in by plane, the port was frozen over, and there was no train service directly to Nome.

A plan was devised to carry 300,000 units of antitoxin by train from Anchorage to the railhead of Nenana in interior Alaska, about 300 miles north. From there, sled dogs would ferry the serum 674 miles west to Nome, a relay that would involve 20 mushers and about 150 dogs. It would come to be known as the 1925 Serum Run and the Great Race of Mercy.
For days, millions were enthralled by radio and newspaper accounts of the rush to keep a threatened town alive. A front-page headline in The New York Times reported, “Serum Relief Near for Stricken Nome.”
Bill Shannon, the first musher on the relay, retrieved the serum — a 20-pound package containing glass vials housed in a metal cylinder — from the train in Nenana. He insulated the container with bearskin and took off on a 52-mile stretch as midnight approached on Jan. 27.
Mushers handed off the antitoxin and rested at roadhouses along the relay, enduring aching cold and wind and blizzards that sometimes made the trail disappear. On Feb. 2, the serum arrived in Nome after five days and seven hours, frozen but quickly thawed by Dr. Welch and administered to the sick.

Ms. Baxter had a few words to say on a subject of historical interest:

Ms. Winther Baxter believed — as many now do — that Balto, a husky that helped lead his team on the final 55-mile stretch into Nome, received heroic acknowledgment, including a statue in Central Park, at the expense of Togo, another husky who was the lead sled dog for a celebrated Norwegian-born driver named Leonhard Seppala.
Togo led his team for 261 miles — 170 to meet up with the relay and 91 on the longest, most hazardous stretch, involving a treacherous crossing of a frozen bay. Decades later, Togo received his own statue in New York, but in a less prominent location, Seward Park on the Lower East Side.
“No, no, you have it all wrong,” Ms. Winther Baxter corrected people when they mentioned the Balto statue, her granddaughter recalled her saying. “Togo was the real hero.”

Posted in Books, Food, History, Mammals, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 11, 2026.

Sunday, January 11th, 2026

Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead.

(the sound of eight confused men getting paid)

Stewart Cheifet. My older readers may remember him from back in the day as the host of “Computer Chronicles” on PBS.

Hessy Levinsons Taft. I confess she wasn’t that notable, but this is a fun story in historical retrospect.

When she was six months old, in 1934, her family hired a photographer to take a portrait of her. The photographer, feeling whimsical, submitted the photo as an entry for a contest “to find a baby representing the epitome of the Aryan race”.

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, chose the winner.

She won the contest. Which made things rather complicated, as she and her family were Jewish.

T.K. Carter, actor. Other credits include “The Corner” (For those of you who have read the book or watched the mini-series, he was Gary McCullough. For those of you who haven’t read the book, I commend it to your attention.), “A Rage In Harlem” (1991), “Runaway Train”, and “Quincy, M.E.”.

Erich von Däniken, crank.

Mr. von Däniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, “Chariots of the Gods,” in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” Mr. von Däniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.
With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. (“Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million — 98,000,000 miles — corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” he wrote.)
The birdman cult of Easter Island, Mr. von Däniken declared, developed as a way to honor the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.
Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted. Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.

It sounds ridiculous, but people bought into this [stuff]. Including me. In my defense, I was left unsupervised. Also, I was very young at the time. (See also.)

Over the next half century, he published over 40 more books, which were translated into some 30 languages, and though none of them offered much variation from his original themes or ideas — subsequent titles included “Gods From Outer Space,” “The Gods Were Astronauts” and “Arrival of the Gods” — they collectively sold more than 70 million copies.

…

Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
Critics pointed to Mr. von Däniken’s criminal history as proof of a penchant for deception. But Mr. von Däniken seemed unfazed, even comparing himself to Jesus. “People don’t ask if Christ was convicted of a crime,” he told Playboy in 1974. “What has that to do with the message Christ brought?”

Posted in Books, Geek, History, Movies, Music, Nazis, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Random gun (and other) crankery.

Saturday, January 10th, 2026

One of my Christmas presents to myself was to take a gun off layaway at my local dealer.

I’m not ready to show it off yet. I want Mike to see it first, and I’ve warned him that his eyes are going to roll so hard they may pop out of his head. Let me just say that this gun combines 1.5 of this blogger’s obsessions. More later on.

One of my other Christmas presents to myself was a replacement for Project e. While it was (and still is, to some extent) a fine machine, the CPU and memory are quite limited. You can’t even get an Ubuntu distro for it any longer, as far as I can tell. It still powers on, but I was getting a lot of fan noise out of it, too. I think it is time for it to go into retirement.

The new machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad P15S – I believe this is a gen 2, with an i7-10510U processor and a discrete NVIDA T500 GPU. It is a lot larger (I’d say about twice the size) than Proect e, but several times more powerful. This was a Discount Electronics purchase when they were looking to dump inventory a few weeks ago, and I upgraded the SSD and RAM when I ordered it. (I also got six months free financing.)

Other than replacing Project e, I wanted to get a personal computer for myself. I’ve been doing a lot (well, pretty much all) of my personal stuff on my work laptop, and that doesn’t seem like a good situation for obvious reasons. I want to start moving files and personal stuff off the work laptop and onto this one. Of course, that’s more difficult than you might think, because Cisco, as a security measure, has locked down all the corporate machines so you can no longer use any removable media. I think I can still copy stuff to the cloud.

Right now, the new device has Windows 11 Pro on it. I’m keeping it there for two reasons:

1) I also signed up, at the end of the year, for the Certified Ethical Hacker certification from Colorado State. They specify Mac or Windows for the coursework. I didn’t want to try running the courseware on my work Mac (and possibly running into infosec issues) so I figured I’d get a dedicated Windows laptop for the course, and once I finish the cert, install some flavor of LINUX on it.

2) I also need to do my taxes this year. I think there may be a LINUX tax software package, but I’ve never used it. I can get the H&R Block tax software, which I prefer, for Windows. The past few years, I’ve installed it on my work Mac, but I think I’m going to stop doing that this year.

Why not just get a new personal Mac instead? I’m waiting for the M5 Pro Max laptops. Once those come out, and as long as everything holds together, I plan to purchase a fully blown and stoked M5 Pro Max (or whatever Apple calls it) for personal use. Project L (the Lenovo) will then become a dedicated security research machine.

I’ve messed around a little with the Windows version of hashcat so far, and I think I’m getting pretty good performance with that. I also want to see how it performs ripping DVDs with Handbrake. I do expect performance improvements in both these areas when I move Project L to UNIX.

I also want to go back to messing around more with SDR. I have one of those TV tuner based SDR kits, but I haven’t done anything with it because I felt my existing machines were too slow. Now that I have something a bit more modern than 2009…

And speaking of SDR, I also want to pick back up experimenting with Bluetooth. Though, again, I think that’s going to have to wait for UNIX. It is also going to have to wait for me to figure out what the current state of Bluetooth probing devices is: the Ubertooth One is out of production and deprecated. Just based on a preliminary Google search it looks like the state of the art has shifted to higher-end SDR devices.

Going back to guns for a minute, I do have a “gun” coming from Amazon on Monday. I’ll blog that when I can, as it answers the question: what happens to a dream deferred?

And I have a huge backlog of gun books to blog, once I can get picture uploads to work again.

Busier than a one-armed man in a calf-milking contest, indeed. I’m just hoping to hold everything together.

Posted in Apple, Bluetooth, Books, Christmas, Geek, Guns, Project L, project_e, Radio, SDR | Comments Closed

I Ran (So Far Away)

Friday, January 9th, 2026

(Did you know that “A Flock of Seagulls” (the first album) was a concept album about alien abduction? At least, that’s what Genius says.)

I am not an expert in geopolitics. I am especially not an expert in Iranian politics. Lawrence can probably point you in the right direction on that front.

But, back when I was attending St. Ed’s and studying “Modern Revolutions” with Dr. Sanchez, she had us read Iran Awakening: One Woman’s Journey to Reclaim Her Life and Country by Shirin Ebadi.

(Actually, Dr. Sanchez just asked us to read the first half of the book. I read the whole thing, because I’m an overachiever. Also, I liked Dr. Sanchez – not in that way, she was already married – and wanted to impress her.)

Anyway, one thing vividly stood out to me from that book.

Dr. Ebadi was a judge form 1969 forward, during the reign of Shah Reza Pahlavi. She describes the elation she, and her friends, felt at the Revolution, and how happy they were to see the Shah deposed and the new regime come in.

A week later, the new bosses called her into the office.

They told her, “Women can’t be judges in Islam. You can either be a janitor or a librarian.”

Point being: be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.

Posted in Birds, Books, History, Music, School | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 27, 2025.

Saturday, December 27th, 2025

Robert Lindsey, author and NYT reporter.

He ghostwrote autobiographies of Ronald Reagan and Marlon Brando. He also wrote A Gathering of Saints (about the Mormon forgery murders). He may be most famous for The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage (which won the Edgar for best fact crime in 1980).

He credited his inspiration to become a journalist to the radio soap opera “Front Page Farrell,” starring Richard Widmark, which captured his imagination when he was home sick from school in the fourth grade. In the fifth grade, he started a student newspaper at his parochial school. In the sixth, he received a red-penciled “A” on one of his compositions. He was hooked, he said.

“Front Page Farrell” on the Internet Archive.

“With a notebook and a great deal of curiosity, I traveled the world, top to bottom, from the Arctic Circle to the South Pole,” he wrote in his memoir. “I hung out with murderers, spies, a president, mobsters, generals, movie stars and scientists who helped shape our future. I watched history unfold and wrote about it.”
He added, “What could be more fun than being a reporter?”

Annette Dionne, last of the Dionne quintuplets. I don’t want to seem like I’m giving her, or the very sad story of the quints, short shrift. But I wrote about this back in August when Cécile Dionne passed away, and the obit also does a good job of recapping the story.

Posted in Books, History, Law, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 12, 2025.

Friday, December 12th, 2025

Lawrence emailed me that the great SF writer John Varley had passed away, but he couldn’t find an obit anywhere until Michael Swanwick posted one.

I haven’t read many of his novels, but I’ve read a lot of his short fiction. “The Persistence of Vision“. “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” (which is a fun story that was adapted into a horrible PBS movie, which you can (but shouldn’t) watch in the MST3K version on the ‘Tube). “Air Raid”, which was adapted into Millennium, the novel, which was turned into “Millennium”, the movie (which I hear is awful, but have not seen).

“Press Enter■”. I remember standing in a Bookstop in Austin reading that story when it was published in Asimov’s…and coming very close to vomiting all over the magazine when I got to a key point in the story. (If you’ve read it, you can probably guess where.)

But I will mourn the man who, for a time, seemed to be the resurrection of science fiction, the New Heinlein, the kwisatz haderach of genre. Back then, he set the standard. His were the stories we all wanted to equal and perhaps surpass. He was the reason we read science fiction in the first place.

Posted in Books, Obits | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 10, 2025.

Wednesday, December 10th, 2025

Madeleine Wickham, also known as “Sophie Kinsella”, author. (Confessions of a Shopaholic). She was 55: a brain tumor got her.

John Noble Wilford, former science reporter for the NYT and Pulitzer Prize winner. He was most famous for covering Apollo 11, but he did a lot of other science reporting as well.

In 1976, he covered an expedition to Scotland to explore the longstanding mystery of the Loch Ness monster. With sonar probes and underwater television cameras, the expedition, partly funded by The Times, scanned the murky depths of the 23-mile-long lake for a month, but turned up no trace of the creature, said in legend and in many unverified accounts of sightings to be an undulating serpent.

Posted in Books, History, Media, Obits, Science | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 8, 2025.

Monday, December 8th, 2025

Mary Kuczkir has passed away at the age of 92. She was also (and better) known as “Fern Michaels”.

In her early years, Ms. Michaels wrote with a partner, Roberta Anderson, but took legal control of the pen name in 1989 and adopted it as her public persona in interviews. Her actual name was Mary Kuczkir.

…

As Ms. Michaels often described it, it took a steely resolve to embark on a writing career in her 40s. “When my youngest went off to kindergarten,” she recounted on her website, “my husband told me to get off my ass and get a job. Those were his exact words. I didn’t know how to do anything except be a wife and mother.”
“Rather than face the outside world with no skills,” she added, “I decided to write a book. As my husband said at the time, stupid is as stupid does. Guess what, I don’t have that husband any more.” The couple never divorced, but parted ways in the early 1970s.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 1, 2025.

Monday, December 1st, 2025

Daniel Woodrell, author.

He’s one of those guys who I’ve wanted to read, but haven’t yet. I’ve heard good things about Winter’s Bone. I’ve also heard the movie is great, but I haven’t seen it yet.

I also haven’t read Woe to Live On, but I have seen the Ang Lee Ride With the Devil and thought that was an interesting movie.

Mr. Woodrell took a somewhat fatalistic attitude. He told the magazine that the Ozarks were a place to mind your own business, go off the grid, avoid the law, hide. Even meth, he saw, had its use, giving families a profitable line of work in a place with few of them.

He was 72. Pancreatic cancer got him.

Fuzzy Zoeller, golfer.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Brief historical note.

Monday, November 10th, 2025

Brief because I’ve covered this several times before.

The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was 50 years ago today.

I have not read it yet, and I’m probably going to wait for the trade paperback, but: The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon looks like it could be an interesting book on the subject.

Posted in Boats, Books, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 1, 2025.

Wednesday, October 1st, 2025

Jane Goodall has passed away. She was 91.

It goes against my usual policy, but here’s a NYT obit from today that seems pretty comprehensive. I’ll try to post an updated version tomorrow if it is justified.

NYT obit for Thomas Perry. Fun fact I didn’t know: he and his wife worked as TV writers and producers. Credits include “Simon and Simon”, “Snoops”, and a spin-off of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

Viv Prince, drummer for the Pretty Things. I’d never heard of the Pretty Things (pigpen51?) but the paper of record describes them as a “ruder, cruder version of the Rolling Stones”. And the obit is entertaining, especially if you’re a fan of Spinal Tap.

An appreciation published in The Guardian after his death unearthed a 1965 interview with Mr. Prince from Record Mirror, the British music newspaper, in which he was grilled about his antics with the band during a scorched-earth tour of New Zealand that year.
In the interview, Mr. Prince denied lighting fires onstage but did admit to sabotaging a performance by the teen idol Eden Kane by laying carpet onstage while Mr. Kane was performing. “Everyone was digging it,” Mr. Prince said.
And he addressed news accounts that he had released live crayfish in an airport lounge. “The fish were dead when we bought them,” he said. “They always are. How on earth can dead fish run around?”

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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