Archive for the ‘Books’ Category

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 314

Monday, February 8th, 2021

I have a doctor’s appointment today. I would say I’m being a little lazy, since these videos are long, but I think there’s some stuff in them that might interest military history buffs. All of these come from the same source (BalticaBeer) and seem to be official productions of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. I feel like there’s kind of unifying theme here: what a small motivated group of individuals can do if given liberty to work outside of the box.

In rough order of length: “To the Sea, a Sidewinder…50 Years of Snakes on the Wing”, a documentary history of the AIM-9 Sidewinder.

Next up: “The Origins of ARM: Defence Suppression and the Shrike Antiradar Missile”.

Finally: “The Pursuit of Precision: Walleye The TV-Guided Glide Bomb”

I know this last one is the length of a feature film. I’ve actually watched all of it, and personally found it weirdly fascinating. Also, there is a lot of footage of things blowing up or being blown up, so it isn’t just talking heads. Walleye itself is kind of a fascinating story. Today, it’s not uncommon to talk about putting a bomb through one window of a building: but what I don’t think most people realize is that we were actually doing that 55 years ago.

(Ålso, if you’re a television technology geek, there’s a lot of talk about TV tech and how Walleye helped advance the technology.)

Posted in Books, History, Planes | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 293

Monday, January 18th, 2021

I observed the other day that I was reading Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (affiliate link). Great and good FotB Borepatch commented that he liked Duncan’s book.

So…from 2017 and Mike Duncan’s book tour, “The Storm Before the Storm” at Politics and Prose in DC. If you’re a “Revoutions” listener, you’ve heard the podcast version of this, but for those of you who are not (and for those of you who want to see what Mike Duncan looked like three years ago), here you go.

I get a particular kick out of his stories about his early writerly ambitions: wanting to write “Redwall” knockoffs, except the mice flew airplanes, and then later wanting to be the next Phil Dick.

Bonus: a more recent (July of 2020) interview with Mr. Duncan from “The Current” which is apparently something the Hatchette Book Group puts out.

Posted in Books, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 290

Friday, January 15th, 2021

Christmas has come and gone. Y’all know what this means, right?

Right. I have a new stack of books to read.

One of them was a recent book that was a present from Mike the Musicologist, and one that I was not aware of before he sent it to me: The Fighting Bunch: The Battle of Athens and How World War II Veterans Won the Only Successful Armed Rebellion Since the Revolution by Chris DeRose (affiliate link). (I have not read it yet, though it is very high up on my stack: I would have started it already, but I got stuck into Mike Duncan‘s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic right before it showed up.)

After WWII, a group of veterans returned to their homes in McMinn County, Tennessee. (Athens is the county seat.) The veterans found that McMinn County was run by a corrupt local machine, and assembled their own slate of reform candidates. However, the crooked local government decided that they were going to rig the elections in their favor. The machine, though, had not realized some facts of life:

McMinn County had around 3,000 returning military veterans, constituting almost 10 percent of the county’s population.

You can figure that many (if not all) of those men were familiar with firearms, had combat experience, and at least some of them knew something about explosives.

So when the election took place on August 1, 1946, and the machine tried to rig the vote counting (even going as far as to beat and arrest GI poll watchers), the veterans took up arms and rebelled, in what is now known as “The Battle of Athens“.

Here are two short versions of the story:

A somewhat longer video, which is based in part on Mr. DeRose’s book:

This is a long video (about an hour) of a talk by Matt Green (a former judge in Alabama: as best as I can tell, he’s in private practice now specializing in DUI and constitutional law) about the Battle of Athens.

There’s a made for TV movie that you can find on the ‘Tube, but which I’m not embedding here for policy reasons.

Posted in Books, History | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 8, 2021.

Friday, January 8th, 2021

I started working on this earlier this morning, but this is breaking just now: Tommy Lasorda. ESPN. No LAT, because you basically can’t read anything without a subscription and your ad-blocker disabled.

Neil Sheehan, author (A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam) and journalist.

“Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers”.

It was a story he had chosen not to tell — until 2015, when he sat for a four-hour interview, promised that this account would not be published while he was alive.

NYT obit for William Link.

Eric Jerome Dickey, novelist.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 281

Wednesday, January 6th, 2021

This could possibly fall equally well under “travel”, but I decided to go the “food” route today.

This should not have surprised me, but yet it did: there is a Charles Dickens Museum. And yes, they do have a YouTube channel.

It is a little late for this year (although the Christmas season actually ends tonight), but maybe for next year: “The Original Victorian Christmas Pudding Recipe”.

Are you hungry yet? How about some Victorian gingerbread?

We can wash it down with “Charles Dickens’s Favourite Brandy Punch Recipe”.

And finally, “Toasted Cheese with the Dickenses”. Complete with Victorian cheese toaster. This is a real thing that exists, and I kind of want one now.

Posted in Books, Christmas, Food, History, Mixology, Museums | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 274

Wednesday, December 30th, 2020

Another thing I’m trying to avoid using too much is the “Timeline – World History Documentaries” channel. But this popped up in the feed, and is relevant to my interests:

“How The Germanic Barbarians Annihilated Rome’s Legions”, a semi-short (49 minutes) documentary about the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest.

Episode 55 of “The History of Rome” podcast (which I can’t pull up right now, but you should be able to get it through the podcast app of your choice) covers the Teutoberg Forest. There’s also a book that I’ve read, and liked: The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest by Peter S. Wells (affiliate link).

Bonus: To give folks a little variety, here’s a documentary about “The Black Ghost”, a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T SE with a 426 Hemi that was a street racing legend in Detroit.

I’m not a huge gearhead, and definitely not a big Mopar guy, but I have to say: that is one nice car, with a great story behind it.

Posted in Books, Cars, Food, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 273

Tuesday, December 29th, 2020

105 years ago today, Robert Ruark was born.

I wrote a long appreciation of him on his 100th birthday, which I won’t repeat here. But I thought it might be neat to feature him in today’s block of videos.

Short: a 15 minute documentary about Ruark from the Robert Ruark Society.

Long: “Safari Hunting”, a 1954 documentary about an African safari, featuring Robert Ruark (and Harry Selby) and narrated by Ruark.

It’s kind of cool, for someone as Ruark obsessed as I am, to see and hear the man himself, instead of just reading him. It’s also kind of cool to see what a safari was like in the 1950s.

And speaking of that, one of my Christmas presents from my beloved and indulgent sister and her family was a swell book: White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris by Brian Herne (affiliate link). I’m about 3/4ths of the way through it, and I feel comfortable in recommending this book.

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Ruark | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 28, 2020.

Monday, December 28th, 2020

Phil Niekro, noted knuckleballer.

A right-hander, like his brother, Phil Niekro (pronounced NEEK-row) threw a total of 5,404 innings, placing him No. 4 on the major league career list, without ever incurring a sore arm, allowing him to endure in Major League Baseball far longer than most other players.
He tied Andy Messersmith in the National League for the most victories in 1974, when he was 20-13, and he tied Joe for the most wins in 1979, when he went 21-20 (also losing the most games in the league). Joe was 21-11 that season with the Houston Astros.
Phil, who retired after the 1987 season, was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997. But for all of his achievements, he never made it to a World Series, his Braves teams reaching only the National League Championship Series twice, losing both times. Phil pitched for four teams and Joe for seven. They were teammates with the Braves in 1973 and ’74 and briefly with the Yankees in 1985.

Barry Lopez, noted writer.

Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Wisconsin who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Christmas Day at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI.

Finally, Michael Alig is burning in Hell. He was one of the late 80’s NYC “club kids”. But he’s burning in Hell because he killed Andre Melendez.

Mr. Melendez, who was also known as Angel, was missing for months before his dismembered corpse washed up on Staten Island, which is when people began to believe Mr. Alig’s frequent claims that he had killed Mr. Melendez.
They had argued about money one night and, prosecutors and investigators said at the time, Mr. Alig, while under the influence of heroin, had murdered Mr. Melendez and dumped his remains in the Hudson River.
Mr. Alig pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in 1997, as did an accomplice, Robert Riggs. Mr. Alig served 17 years. He was released from prison in 2014 at the age of 48 and was met by friends and supporters.

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

Obit watch: December 24, 2020.

Thursday, December 24th, 2020

A couple of quick music related ones: Chad Stuart, of Chad and Jeremy.

Leslie West, of Mountain. (“Mississippi Queen”.)

Rebecca Luker, noted Broadway actress. She was only 59.

Ms. Luker’s Broadway career, fueled by her crystal-clear operatic soprano, brought her three Tony Award nominations. The first was for “Show Boat” (1994), in which she played Magnolia, the captain’s dewy-fresh teenage daughter, whose life is ruined by marriage to a riverboat gambler. The second was for “The Music Man” (2000), in which she was Marian, the prim River City librarian who enchants a traveling flimflam man who thinks — mistakenly — that he’s just passing through town.

…

When she earned her third Tony nomination, this one for best featured actress in a musical, it was for playing Winifred Banks, a married Englishwoman with two children and a gifted nanny, in “Mary Poppins” (2006).

Lawrence tipped me off to the death of James E. Gunn, one of the greats in SF.

Gunn launched his career writing short stories for pulp magazines in 1949 and went on to author dozens of books, starting with 1955’s Star Bridge. He saw his 1962 short story “The Immortals,” about a group who discovers the secret to immortality, made into an ABC movie of the week in 1969 and become a 1970-71 hourlong series.
In addition to fiction, Gunn was known as an editor of anthologies and an author of academic works. He earned a Hugo for 1983’s Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, an exploration of famed author Isaac Asimov’s contributions to the science fiction genre.

…

In 1969, he taught one of the first classes at a major university on science fiction, becoming a pioneer for treating the genre as a serious academic subject. He created a $1.5 million endowment for the James E. and Jane F. Gunn Professorship in Science Fiction, named for himself and his late wife, in 2014.

That’s one part of his career that I’m afraid will get short shrift. As important as he was as a writer and critic, his most important contribution to the genre may have been as a teacher.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 264

Sunday, December 20th, 2020

Science Sunday!

Today’s video is another long one, but it is Sunday. This popped up in my recommendations totally at random.

“The American Rocketeer”, a documentary about the life of Frank Malina (born in Texas, mech engineering grad from Texas A&M).

Why is he significant? He was one of the pioneering figures in American rocket development: protege of Theodore von Kármán, one of the members of the “Suicide Squad” (other members included Jack Parsons and Qian Xuesen), second director of JPL, and artist.

Bonus: This is a lot shorter, and might be interesting to people who want to know a little more about Jack Parsons: “Jack Parsons: ‘Sex Magic’, Drugs, and Rocket Science”.

I’ve read Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons (affiliate link), but I’m thinking I need to look up some of the other books on the early days of JPL, rocketry, and the personalities involved. Thread Of The Silkworm might be a good start…

Posted in Books, Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 13, 2020.

Sunday, December 13th, 2020

Oh, wow. I opened up a post so I could update some obits from the past couple of days, and the first thing I saw was: John le Carré. The current NYT obit is a preliminary one: they promise a longer one soon, and I may update with some personal thoughts when that posts.

In the meantime, Charley Pride.

A bridge-builder who broke into country music amid the racial unrest of the 1960s, Mr. Pride was one of the most successful singers ever to work in that largely white genre, placing 52 records in the country Top 10 from 1966 to 1987.
Singles like “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” — among his 29 recordings to reach No. 1 on the country chart — featuried a countrypolitan mix of traditional instrumentation and more uptown arrangements.
At RCA, the label for which he recorded for three decades, Mr. Pride was second only to Elvis Presley in record sales. In the process he emerged as an inspiration to generations of performers, from the Black country hitmaker Darius Rucker, formerly of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, to white inheritors like Alan Jackson, who included a version of “Kiss an Angel” on his 1999 album, “Under the Influence.”

…

Nevertheless, the dignity and grace with which Mr. Pride and his wife of 63 years, Rozene Pride, navigated their way through the white world of country music became a beacon to his fans and fellow performers.
“No person of color had ever done what he has done,” Mr. Rucker said in “Charley Pride: I’m Just Me,” a 2019 “American Masters” documentary on PBS.
Mr. Pride himself was more self-effacing in assessing his impact but nevertheless expressed some satisfaction in having a role in furthering integration. “We’re not colorblind yet,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but we’ve advanced a few paces along the path, and I like to think I’ve contributed something to that process.”.

NYT obit for Ben Bova.

Tommy Lister. Apparently, he was most famous as “Deebo” in “Friday” (which we watched last night: while he’s good in it, the movie itself is not good), but he had a long list of other credits.

Norman Abramson. You may never have heard of him, but he was one of the developers of ALOHAnet.

The wireless network in Hawaii, which began operating in 1971, was called ALOHAnet, embracing the Hawaiian salutation for greeting or parting. It was a smaller, wireless version of the better known ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, which allowed researchers at universities to share a network and send messages over landlines. The ARPAnet was led by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded the ALOHAnet.
“The early wireless work in Hawaii is vastly underappreciated,” said Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet.”

…

Some of the data-networking techniques developed by Professor Abramson and his Hawaii team proved valuable not only in wireless communications but also in wired networks. One heir to his work was Robert Metcalfe, who in 1973 was a young computer scientist working at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research laboratory that had become a fount of personal computer innovations.
Mr. Metcalfe was working on how to enable personal computers to share data over wired office networks. He had read a 1970 paper, written by Professor Abramson, describing ALOHAnet’s method for transmitting and resending data over a network.
“Norm kindly invited me to spend a month with him at the University of Hawaii to study ALOHAnet,” Mr. Metcalfe recalled in an email.
Mr. Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC adopted and tweaked the ALOHAnet technology in creating Ethernet office networking. Later, Mr. Metcalfe founded an Ethernet company, 3Com, which thrived as the personal computer industry grew.

I’ve been holding on to this one for a few days: William Aronwald. He was a prosecutor in the 1970s, working on organized crime cases around New York. He went into private practice later on. But that’s not the reason his obit is noteworthy.

On March 20, 1987, his father, George M. Aronwald, was shot and killed in a laundry in Queens. The senior Aronwald’s death was kind of a puzzle: he was 78, worked as a hearing officer for the Parking Violations Bureau, and shared an office listing with his son. Why would anyone want to kill him? Turns out…

…Mr. Cacace, acting on the orders of an imprisoned crime boss, Carmine Persico, had arranged to have William Aronwald killed, according to news accounts.
The reasons were vague — Mr. Persico was said to have thought Mr. Aronwald had “been disrespectful,” as one article put it. Mr. Aronwald later speculated that he had been targeted in retaliation for his testimony in one of the trials of the mobster John Gotti.
In any case, a prosecutor said later, the hit men, brothers named Vincent and Eddie Carini, were shown a piece of paper with only the name “Aronwald” on it. They killed the wrong Aronwald. And that wasn’t all, a 2003 article in The New York Times reported:
“After the botched assignment, Mr. Cacace had his hit men killed, prosecutors said. Then, they added, he had the hit men who had killed the hit men killed.”

“Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.”

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

Obit watch: December 1, 2020.

Tuesday, December 1st, 2020

I don’t have a good third party source to link, but Ben Bova, noted SF writer, has passed away.

Dr. Bova was the author of more than 200 works of science fact and fiction, including short stories, essays, newspaper articles, non-fiction works and novels. He was the six-time winner of the prestigious Hugo Award, the editor of Analog Magazine, and the editorial director of Omni Magazine. He was president of the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Edited to add: obit from Lawrence.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

Annals of law (#13 in a series)

Saturday, November 28th, 2020

I have heard stories like this before, but I thought this Twitter thread was worth noting:

I’ve also heard this referred to as “swoop and squat” fraud. It is actually a key plot point in Dan Simmons’s Darwin’s Blade (affiliate link).

Someone in the thread linked to an old Fortune article, which I am re-linking here for your convenience. No need to thank me: full service blog, here.

Posted in Books, History | Comments Closed

Now that we are in the Christmas season…

Thursday, November 26th, 2020

…I can post this.

There’s a new Lame Excuse Books catalog out. Books from Lame Excuse Books make fine presents for the SF and/or fantasy fan in your circle of family and friends.

I feel like I got an early Christmas present this year. Maybe. I haven’t decided if I’m going to go see this in a theater, or wait for the home video release.

David Fincher has a new movie coming out. Apparently it will be released to Netflix on December 4th, but there is a theatrical run already at the Alamo Drafthouses in Austin.

I think Fincher is an interesting director. But: he has scientifically designed this movie to get me to put money on the table for it.

Director David Fincher’s MANK is a journey into the black-and-white era of Hollywood through the eyes of alcoholic screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, played with droll, boozy, intense wit by Gary Oldman. The film follows the former journalist as he races to finish the screenplay for the landmark 1941 film CITIZEN KANE – leading to a battle with wunderkind director Orson Welles over the screenwriting credit.

Posted in Books, Christmas, Endorsements, Movies | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: November 24, 2020.

Tuesday, November 24th, 2020

An obit roundup, because I’m a little behind.

Jan Morris, British writer and historian. I haven’t read any of Morris’s work, yet. But John Crowley in his beautiful novella “Great Work of Time” cites Morris’s history of the British empire as a major source, and I’ve been hunting for reasonably priced copies. (Like I need three more volumes of history to read, in addition to Gibbon and the two volume history of the Canadian transcontinental railroad.)

Ken Spears, co-creator of “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!”. The other creator, Joe Ruby, passed away in September.

Daniel Cordier, one of the legendary figures of the French Resistance. He was 100.

David Dinkins, former mayor of New York City.

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

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