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Obit watch: October 29, 2020.

Thursday, October 29th, 2020

Cecilia Chiang has passed away at 100.

She was the woman who brought traditional Mandarin cooking to America.

The Mandarin, which opened in 1962 as a 65-seat restaurant on Polk Street in the Russian Hill section and later operated on Ghirardelli Square, near Fisherman’s Wharf, offered patrons unheard-of specialties at the time, like potstickers, Chongqing-style spicy dry-shredded beef, peppery Sichuan eggplant, moo shu pork, sizzling rice soup and glacéed bananas.
This was traditional Mandarin cooking, a catchall term for the dining style of the well-to-do in Beijing, where family chefs prepared local dishes as well as regional specialties from Sichuan, Shanghai and Canton.
In a profile of Ms. Chiang in 2007, The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that her restaurant “defined upscale Chinese dining, introducing customers to Sichuan dishes like kung pao chicken and twice-cooked pork, and to refined preparations like minced squab in lettuce cups; tea-smoked duck; and beggar’s chicken, a whole bird stuffed with dried mushrooms, water chestnuts and ham and baked in clay.”

The NYT obit mentions Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America (affiliate link), in which The Mandarin is profiled. My copy was a Christmas gift last year from my beloved and indulgent sister, and it is a swell book that I enthusiastically recommend. (Here’s a pretty good interview with Mr. Freedman from the “Eat My Globe” podcast.)

Billy Joe Shaver, Texas musician.

He was a close friend and associate of Connie Nelson’s ex-husband, Willie Nelson, who recorded many of Shaver’s songs over the years. He performed here often, in settings ranging from the Austin City Limits Music Festival to honky-tonk haven the White Horse. He appeared four times on the TV show “Austin City Limits.”
In addition to releasing his debut album “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” in 1973, he wrote almost all the songs on Waylon Jennings’ landmark album “Honky Tonk Heroes,” released that same year.
A song Jennings and Shaver co-wrote, “You Asked Me To,” was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1975. That was just one of many Shaver songs eventually recorded by hundreds of artists. Among them: “Ride Me Down Easy” (Jerry Lee Lewis), “Georgia on a Fast Train” (Johnny Cash), “Black Rose” (Willie Nelson) and “Live Forever” (actor Robert Duvall, on the soundtrack to the film “Crazy Heart”). Nelson also included Shaver’s song “We Are the Cowboys” on his latest record “First Rose of Spring,” released in July.
Shaver released more than two dozen albums of his own across the ensuing decades, initially for major labels such as Columbia Records and later for indies like New West and Houston-based Compadre. The most recent, “Long in the Tooth,” came out in 2014 on the Lightning Rod label.

South Texas Pistolero has a nice tribute up to Mr. Shaver and Jerry Jeff Walker.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 202

Sunday, October 18th, 2020

Science Sunday!

Today: a pretty high quality documentary from Rolex, “The Trieste’s Deepest Dive”, about the 1960 descent by Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh (US Navy) to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.

I actually have a copy of Seven Miles Down: I kept it next to my copy of Half Mile Down because of course I did.

As best as I can tell, Lt. Walsh is still alive.

In June, 2020, Walsh’s son Kelly dove to the bottom of Challenger Deep with [Victor] Vescovo, becoming the twelfth person to reach the deepest point in the ocean.

Bonus: As far as I’m concerned, archaeology is science. “Jamestown Rediscovery…a world uncovered”. Hosted by Roger Mudd.

Posted in Books, Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 10, 2020.

Saturday, October 10th, 2020

Whitey Ford, legendary Yankee.

Pitching for 11 pennant-winners and six World Series champions, Ford won 236 games, the most of any Yankee, and had a career winning percentage of .690, the best among pitchers with 200 or more victories in the 20th century.

…

At 5 feet 10 inches and 180 pounds, Ford seldom overpowered batters. But in his 16 seasons he mastered them with an assortment of pitches thrown with varying speeds and arm motions and delivered just where he wanted them. “If it takes 27 outs to win, who’s going to get them out more ways than Mr. Ford?” the longtime Yankee manager Casey Stengel once said.
Methodical on the mound, Ford was irrepressible off it. He joined with Mantle and Billy Martin for late nights on the town, inspiring Stengel to call them the Three Musketeers. Mantle, too, entered the Hall of Fame in 1974, and at the induction ceremony he was asked about the chemistry behind the friendship between him, the country boy from Oklahoma, and Ford, who grew up on the streets of Queens. “We both liked Scotch,” he said.
“In those early years it was three of us — me, Whitey and Billy Martin,” Mantle said, adding, “They were both brash, outspoken guys, and I could stay in the background.”

…

Ford missed the 1951 and 1952 seasons while in the Army, but returned with an 18-6 season in 1953. As he remembered it, Yankee catcher Elston Howard gave him the nickname Chairman of the Board around the mid-’50s.
Ford kept rolling along, winning 53 games from 1954 to 1956.
Then came an infamous night in Yankee lore. In May 1957, Ford and Mantle joined with a few teammates to celebrate Martin’s 29th birthday at the Copacabana nightclub. A patron wound up on the floor with a broken nose and accused Hank Bauer, the Yankees’ strapping right fielder, of decking him. Bauer denied it, and no charges were filed, but the Yankees fined all the players who were there for the embarrassing headline-making episode. It was never clear who clobbered the customer, and Berra famously explained, “Nobody did nuthin’ to nobody.” But Martin was soon banished to the lowly Kansas City Athletics.

I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere (though I’m sure the NYT will get around to it, just like they did for Gardner Dozois…oh, wait) but my mother forwarded an obit for Bette Greene. She was probably most famous for Summer of My German Soldier.

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: October 3, 2020.

Saturday, October 3rd, 2020

Terry Goodkind, noted fantasy writer.

…Mr. Goodkind’s series grew to include 17 books, several of them best sellers. Together, the “Sword of Truth” books have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide. In 2008, the books were adapted by the director and producer Sam Raimi into a television series, “Legend of the Seeker,” that aired for two seasons on ABC.

…

While Mr. Goodkind attracted numerous readers with his storytelling, he angered some others with his worldview and his criticisms of fantasy fiction. He was a follower of Ayn Rand, whose Objectivism prized the individual over the collective, and he spoke about her ideas publicly and inserted them into his novels. He also often distanced himself from the genre in which he had achieved fame.
He told an online audience on Reddit that he had “irrevocably changed the face of fantasy” and “injected thought into a tired, empty genre.”
In a phone interview, his literary agent, Russell Galen, said: “His fans were wrapped up in his work and Terry personally. And then there were people who literally despised him. Terry was unique in that field in delighting in controversy, delighting in stirring up verbal combat, delighting in stirring up criticism. He was very feisty.”

Bob Gibson, pitcher.

Gibson won both the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award and Cy Young Award, as its best pitcher, in 1968, when he won 22 games, struck out 268 batters, pitched 13 shutouts and posted an earned run average of 1.12. The following year, Major League Baseball lowered the pitchers’ mounds to give batters a break, but Gibson won 20 games and struck out 269.
He won at least 20 games five times and struck out 3,117 batters, relying on two kinds of fastballs, one breaking upward and other downward, and a slider that he threw at about three-quarters speed. He threw 56 career shutouts and captured a second Cy Young Award in 1970. He was an eight-time All-Star, won a Gold Glove award for fielding nine times and pitched a no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1971.
Pitching for three Cardinals pennant-winners, Gibson won seven World Series games in a row, losing in his first and last Series starts. His physique was not especially imposing — he was 6 feet 1 inch and 190 pounds or so — but he holds the records for most strikeouts in a World Series game, 17, and in a single World Series, 35, both against the Detroit Tigers in 1968.
He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, his first year of eligibility.

…

“Bob wasn’t just unfriendly when he pitched,” Joe Torre, a Cardinals teammate who later hired Gibson as a coach when he managed the Mets, the Atlanta Braves and the Cardinals, told the sportswriter Roger Kahn in an article for The New York Times shortly before Gibson’s induction into the Hall. “I’d say it was more like hateful.”

…

Profiling Gibson for The New Yorker in September 1980, Roger Angell told how after his 17-strikeout game against Detroit, a reporter asked if Gibson had always been as competitive as he seemed that day.
“He said yes,” Angell wrote, “and he added that he had played several hundred games of tick-tack-toe against one of his young daughters and that she had yet to win a game from him. He said this with a little smile, but it seemed to me that he meant it: he couldn’t let himself lose to anyone. Then someone asked him if he had been surprised by what he had just done on the field, and Gibson said, ‘I’m never surprised by anything I do.’”

Derek Mahon, Irish poet.

Posted in Books, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Somebody ought to write a book. (Part 2)

Friday, September 25th, 2020

Book ideas, free for the taking! My only ask is: if you end up writing this book, please send me one autographed copy.

I have a half-baked idea for a book about people and their relationship with their tools: how they chose their tools, how they use their tools, how they bond with their tools, and how their tools are changed over time to meet their needs. (And possibly how people change over time because of their tools: not in an evolutionary biology sense, but in the sense of “when I started using this tool, I found myself doing these things”.)

My vision of this book is a sort of sequel to Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (affiliate link) but for tools: How Tools Learn if you will.

Some examples of the sort of things I’m thinking about:

I don’t know what the conclusions would be: I figure those would evolve as the book takes form. I do think it’d be a interesting book to read, and a fun book to write.

Posted in Books | Comments Closed

Somebody ought to write a book. (Part 1)

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020

Book ideas, free for the taking! My only ask is: if you end up writing this book, please send me one autographed copy.

Somebody should do a really nice coffee table type book with lots of color photos about Steinway pianos. Especially the custom ones.

Now, I have no discernible musical talent (as confirmed by highly sensitive instruments placed in orbit by NASA) and my photography skills are questionable. But I was struck by this when I read it:

Steinway had made many beautiful instruments over the years—not just the classic ebonized concert grands, but also a number of art-case pianos. Among the best known are an elaborate white-and-gilt decorative piano mode for Cornelius Vanderbilt, with paintings of Apollo surrounded by cherubs, and a piano created for the White House, with legs formed of carved eagles. For the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, Steinway had built a tortoiseshell decoration surmounted by a candelabrum. For the oil magnate E.L. Doheny, the company designed a gilded piano in a Louis XV style with carved legs and elaborate moldings. Even Steinway’s standard-issue polished-ebony concert grands were stately and handsome, if also austere.

—Katie Hafner, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano (affiliate link)

Those were not the only folks to commission art-case Steinways. “The Steinway firm received orders for “fancy pianos” from America’s illustrious and wealthy citizens: F. W. Woolworth, E. L. Doheny, Sen. Thomas F. Walsh, Henry G. Marquand, George J. Gould, Stanford White, Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc. They also produced decorated instruments for the crowned heads of European countries and influential and wealthy people throughout the world.”

It seems like someone could put together a really nice photo book with these, plus some of the more famous non-art-case Steinway piano (Glen Gould’s, obviously, but also Vladimir Horowitz’s, and I’m sure there are more artists that I’m not aware of yet). Accompany that with documents from the Steinway archives (I wonder if they have photos as well)…I’m certain you can get a book out of this.

That book may already exist, to be honest, but I can’t tell. There’s a book called Steinway that was published in 2002, “with more than 200 photos, designs, sketches, and paintings”, but I don’t have it (and don’t want to spend $70 to get it from Amazon) so I’m not sure if it covers this territory.

(I did do some research. I found an auction listing from 2018 for what may be the Vanderbilt Steinway. The White House Steinway is currently in the White House Museum. I can’t find anything on the Waldorf’s Steinway, though they do still have Cole Porter’s Steinway. I found a reference to a reproduction of the Doheny piano, and a LAT story about an auction of the Doheny collection in 1987.)

(One way to know if a book is really good: it gives you ideas for a different book. One way to know if a book is really bad: it gives you ideas for a better book on the same subject.)

(Final side note: it’s kind of fun to see E.L Doheny pop up again. The Doheny family and their scandals are a large part of Richard Rayner’s A Bright and Guilty Place: Murder, Corruption, and L.A.’s Scandalous Coming of Age (affiliate link) which I read a couple of months ago at the recommendation of friend Dave, and heartily recommend. The family was also a large influence on Chandler’s work.)

Posted in Books, Music | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 21, 2020.

Monday, September 21st, 2020

There were some obits that got kind of buried in the shuffle of events over the weekend. Here’s a round-up:

Winston Groom, noted author. He is perhaps most famous for Forrest Gump, but he did a lot of other work:

“‘Forrest Gump’ is not the only reason to celebrate him as a great writer,” P.J. O’Rourke, the political satirist and journalist who knew Mr. Groom for decades, wrote in an email.
In Mr. O’Rourke’s view, Mr. Groom’s debut novel, “Better Times Than These” (1978), “was the best novel written about the Vietnam War.”
“And this is not even to mention Winston’s extraordinary historical and nonfiction works,” he added.
Those books include the Pulitzer Prize finalist (for general nonfiction), “Conversations With the Enemy” (1983), an account of a Vietnam-era prisoner of war written with Duncan Spencer; “Shrouds of Glory” (1995), about the Civil War; and “Patriotic Fire” (2006), about the Battle of New Orleans.
At his death, Mr. Groom was awaiting the publication of “The Patriots,” a combined biography of Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams; it is to be published in November by National Geographic.

I have not seen, and have no interest in seeing, “Forrest Gump”. However, I recall reading some years back that the book is much more vicious and satirical than the movie, and that Mr. Groom somewhat resented how the movie watered down his work. I might have to seek out some of his non-fiction, especially if P.J. O’Rourke endorses it.

Anne Stevenson, poet. She was also famous, perhaps more so, as the author of a biography of Sylvia Plath.

Ms. Plath committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30, and many of her admirers blamed her husband, Mr. Hughes, who was having an affair with a woman named Assia Wevill (who herself would commit suicide in 1969). But Ms. Stevenson’s book painted a different picture, portraying Ms. Plath as “a wall of unrelenting rage” prone to outrageous behavior, while depicting Mr. Hughes as generous and caring.
The book was written with the cooperation of Ms. Plath’s literary estate, which was controlled by Mr. Hughes and his sister, Olwyn Hughes. Ms. Stevenson wrote in the preface that she “received a great deal of help from Olwyn Hughes,” so much so that “Ms. Hughes’s contributions to the text have made it almost a work of dual authorship.”
That did not give “Bitter Fame” much credibility in some critics’ eyes. The poet Robert Pinsky, reviewing it in The New York Times, called out a bias in the presentation.
“Since Ms. Stevenson’s book is, as it had to be, largely about a marriage, the tilting of viewpoint toward one side is a difficult problem for the biographer,” he wrote. “Marriages are complex and mysterious stories, each with a minimum of two sides. Writing about a marriage demands tact, respect for the unknowable and more acknowledgment of a limited viewpoint than I think Ms. Stevenson provides.”
In the British newspaper The Independent, Ronald Hayman was even harsher, calling “Bitter Fame” a “vindictive book” that sought not only to blame Ms. Plath for the failed marriage but also “to undermine her poetic achievement by representing her verse as negative, sick, death-oriented, and comparing it unfavorably with his.”

Great and good FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Long Cat (aka Nobiko) the subject of Internet memes.

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

Obit watch: September 8, 2020.

Tuesday, September 8th, 2020

By way of Hacker News, I found this obituary for Verne Edquist on the Glenn Gould Foundation website.

Mr. Edquist was born with congenital cataracts and was nearly blind. He trained as a professional piano tuner.

Years later, Verne often took to quoting his tuning teacher, J. D. Ansell, whose favorite aphorism was “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” To give Verne experience, Ansell started taking his young protégé into town to tune pianos in private homes. Verne was allowed to keep the money – $2.50 per piano, and sometimes, when he got lucky, $3.00 – which he put toward some basic tools: a tuning wrench, a tuning fork, needle-nose pliers, gauges for measuring the diameter of piano wire, and rubber wedges for muting strings.

He moved around a lot, sometimes working for piano makers, sometimes working as a freelance tuner.

One afternoon about a year after Verne started at Eaton’s, Miss Mussen sent him across town to Glenn Gould’s apartment to tune Gould’s old Chickering. All Gould wanted, he told Verne, was for the tuner to do what had been done hundreds of times before: get the piano into playable condition, if only for the time being. But Verne refused, telling Gould that the tuning pins were so loose they needed to be replaced.
Verne’s stubborn insistence on doing things his way had endeared him to Gould, and the encounter galvanized what was to become a decades-long association between a pianist and his technician.
Verne tuned for many famous musicians over the years, including Duke Ellington, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin, Victor Borge, and Liberace. But it was the business he got from Gould that eventually enabled him to quit Eaton’s employ and sustain his family for two decades.
Each tolerated the other’s idiosyncracies, which were in ample evidence in both men. Gould’s quirks, of course, were legion and legendary. One of their earliest conversations was about Verne’s physical limitations. “I can’t see very well, but I get the job done,” Verne told Gould. And Gould replied that of this he had no doubt. Nothing further on the topic was ever said.

…

All his life, Verne heard music through his own particular synaesthesia – in colors. If you asked him how he knew that an F was an F, he would say, “oh that’s blue.” C was a slightly lime green. The key of D was a sandy hue, E was yellowy-pink, A was white, G orange and B dark green. For years he was ashamed of this rather oddball talent. When he finally told Glenn Gould about it, his boss reacted as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

…

When I interviewed Verne for my book, I was struck by what a kind and gentle man he was. It came as a surprise to hear him voice some reservations, even a little bitterness, about his most famous client. Although Gould had often gone out of his way to accommodate Verne’s schedule and never uttered an unkind word to him, nor did he, in the two decades they worked together, gone out of his way to praise Verne’s tuning. To have gone so many years without hearing so much as a “nice job” had clearly taken its toll.

I’m not a musician, or a piano tuner, but that Katie Hafner book (affiliate link) sounds fascinating to me for some reason.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 162

Tuesday, September 8th, 2020

I haven’t posted any vintage police training videos in a while, because I really haven’t been finding any. At least, none have been popping up in my YouTube feed.

However, I went looking for a specific FBI video that Bill Vanderpool mentioned in his book, Guns of the F.B.I. : A History of the Bureau’s Firearms and Training. (Longer write up about that book to come.) I couldn’t find it, but I did find this:

“Officer Down Code Three” from 1975. This is one of those Motorola videos, but the quality of the transfer seems to me to be a bit higher. It is also interesting for another reason: this video is adapted from Pierce R. Brooks’s book of the same name.

Officer Down Code Three is considered by some to be the first “officer survival” book. It precedes the somewhat more famous Street Survival by about five years.

Rather than going into more detail about the book and author, I will refer you to this excellent review from FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training.

Bonus: vintage LAPD recruiting film from the 1950s.

Posted in Books, Cops, FBI, History, Law | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 159

Saturday, September 5th, 2020

Wow. I did not expect Wednesday’s jail poetry post to get the activity it got. Thanks to Borepatch and Lawrence. Thanks also to Desley Deacon for mentioning their book, Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage (affiliate link) which is available in a very reasonably priced Kindle edition.

I haven’t posted any survival videos in a bit, so when I ran across these, I thought they’d be good fodder. They give a slightly different perspective. Also, while this runs about an hour in total, it’s broken up into handy 15 minute chunks.

“SAS Escape, Evasion, Survival” with Barry Davies.

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

Part 4.

Barry Davies passed away in 2016. Telegraph obit.

The non-fragmentation grenades were designed to stun anyone close to the detonation for between three and five seconds. Davies pulled the pins of two of them. He threw one over the starboard wing and another over the cockpit. This exploded two feet above the flight deck.
He then scaled a ladder on to the wing and followed two GSG9 soldiers through the hatchway into the aircraft. The terrorists exploded two grenades and there was a fire fight for close to five minutes, largely confined to the flight deck, with shouts to the passengers of “Get down! Get down!” while continuous gunfire rattled up and down the aircraft.
Morrison cradled one of the beauty queens in his arms as he helped her down from the wing. “I’m afraid you may have to give her back,” Davies shouted to him. One member of GSG9 had been hit and three passengers and a stewardess were slightly wounded. Two of the terrorists had been shot dead. A third died a few hours later in hospital. News of the rescue of the passengers was followed by the deaths in custody of three of the Red Army group. Davies was awarded the British Empire Medal. Morrison was appointed OBE.

Posted in Books, History, Safety | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 158

Friday, September 4th, 2020

Another dose of random for today.

How could I not post this?

“The Poisonous History of Tomatoes”.

(Obligatory.)

Bonus, slightly longer, video, which you would not see on television today. Or any time after about 1965, I’d guess.

A 1950s episode of “Bold Journey” featuring the editor of True magazine, Douglas Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy goes to Africa…to hunt rhino.

This is within a few years of Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter: that was published in 1953, so I think (but can’t confirm) that Ruark’s safari was 1951 or 1952. According to the YouTube notes, this aired in the third season of “Bold Journey” which ran from 1956-1959.

Bonus #2: as a hattip to ASM826, I thought I’d post this one: “YOJIMBO & A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS – How The Western Was Changed Forever”.

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

Obit watch: August 26, 2020.

Wednesday, August 26th, 2020

For the historical record: Gail “Passages” Sheehy.

Justin Townes Earle, singer, songwriter, and son of Steve Earle. He was only 38.

Norman Carlson. He ran the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 1970 to 1987.

Starting in the early 1980s, government policies like the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing had led to mass incarceration, swelling inmate populations in both state and federal systems. Aiming to ease the stress on penitentiary inmates and staff, Mr. Carlson favored building more prisons; during his tenure, he created 20 new facilities, nearly doubling the existing number.
And in Marion, Ill., he established a tough new system of solitary confinement that became the model on which future supermax penitentiaries were based. These included the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo., known as the ADX; it is the toughest prison in the federal system, housing those who have been labeled the “worst of the worst.”

…

Mr. Carlson was credited with professionalizing the Bureau of Prisons. He disciplined officers who beat inmates, setting a policy of zero tolerance for prisoner abuse. Guards were to call themselves corrections officers, and assistant wardens were to wear suits and ties. He often ate with prisoners and brought along his wife and children, to show that prison food was good enough for his own family.
And he was a stickler for cleanliness.
“Mr. Carlson viewed a dirty prison as a sign of poor management; consequently floors were highly polished and walls kept painted,” Mr. Earley wrote. He said that one warden was so eager to please the director that when the snow outside had turned muddy and brown, the warden had his staff sprinkle flour on it to make it look whiter before Mr. Carlson arrived.

…

“We have to divorce ourselves from the notion that we can change human behavior, that we have the power to change inmates,” Mr. Carlson told Mr. Earley. “We don’t. All we can do is provide opportunities for inmates who want to change.”

(Pete Earley’s The Hot House is a swell book about Leavenworth specifically, and to some extent about the Federal prison system in general. I enthusiastically recommend it if you’re interested in prisons or criminal justice issues.)

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

Obit watch: August 6, 2020.

Thursday, August 6th, 2020

Pete Hamill, famous NYC journalist.

Mr. Hamill became a celebrated reporter, columnist and the top editor of The New York Post and The Daily News; a foreign correspondent for The Post and The Saturday Evening Post; and a writer for New York Newsday, The Village Voice, Esquire and other publications. He wrote a score of books, mostly novels but also biographies, collections of short stories and essays, and screenplays, some adapted from his books.
He was a quintessential New Yorker — savvy about its ways, empathetic with its masses and enthralled with its diversity — and wrote about it in a literature of journalism. Along with Jimmy Breslin, he popularized a spare, blunt style in columns of on-the-scene reporting in the authentic voice of the working classes: blustery, sardonic, often angry.

…

He idolized Hemingway and covered wars in Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Northern Ireland. He lived in Dublin, Barcelona, Mexico City, Saigon, San Juan, Rome and Tokyo. But his roots were in New York, where he pounded out stories about murders, strikes, the World Series, championship fights, jazz or politics, and then got drunk after work with buddies at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village.

…

He was widely respected in newspaper circles, not only for his innovative writing and advocacy of underdogs, but for promoting higher tabloid news standards and for standing up to publishers in squabbles over pay and treatment of employees and his own autonomy as an editor.

Kathleen Duey, children’s book author. I was unfamiliar with her, but she sounds like an interesting person. The NYT obit describes her as not just an author, but a mentor to other authors as well.

“One student said for the longest time that she had one of Kathleen’s words of wisdom on her desktop: ‘Every artist of every kind takes a leap,’” Ms. Zarins said. “That’s what she did for my students. She showed them how to leap.”

…

Ms. Duey gained a reputation within the organization as someone who lent her time and talent to aspiring writers, said Bruce Coville, a fellow author of children’s literature. He got to know Ms. Duey in the 1980s, when she was the one starting out and in need of a confidence boost.
“She didn’t yet understand how incredibly talented she was,” he said.

She was 69, and according to the obit, had been suffering from dementia.

Posted in Books, Media, Obits | Comments Closed

More things I did not know.

Friday, July 31st, 2020

1. Craig Thomas, the author of Firefox (full name David Craig Owen Thomas) died in 2011.

2. “Thomas wrote part-time, with his wife as editor, in two fields: philosophical thoughts in books of essays; and techno-thrillers, a genre whose invention is often attributed to the better-known Tom Clancy, though many fans feel that Thomas was its true originator.” (He was a teacher, but left teaching in 1977 after Wolfsbane was published.)

3. His last work before his death was a two-volume commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche.

Posted in Books | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 118

Sunday, July 26th, 2020

Science Sunday!

Back in the day (approximately 1952-1964) gleeful eccentrics walked the Earth. And I mean that in the best possible way: I would have enjoyed having a few beers with these guys if I had been around back then.

Some of them were interested in earth science. So they formed a group called the American Miscellaneous Society (AMSOC, because I’m not going to keep writing that out).

It was formed by Gordon Lill, of the Office of Naval Research, as an organization designed to collect various Earth science research ideas that were submitted by scientists to the U.S. Navy and did not fit into any particular category. Membership in AMSOC was open to everyone and so there was no official membership list. Prospective members could join whenever two or more members were together.

AMSOC’s biggest and most famous venture was Project Mohole.

Now, when you were a kid, you probably wanted to dig a hole to China. Or at least thought about it. Project Mohole was kind of that on a larger scale. Specifically, AMSOC’s idea with Mohole was to drill a hole through the earth’s crust and into the mantle to bring back samples.

Not that kind of samples. They were especially interested in the Mohorovičić discontinuity, the boundary between crust and mantle. (Hence the project name.)

But there was a problem. No, they were not looking for audiophiles who needed high quality cassette tapes. The problem was that the earth’s crust is really thick on dry land, and you have to drill down a long way to reach the mantle.

But! If you drill at sea, the crust is a lot thinner there, and you don’t have to drill as deep a hole!

But! This was the late 1950s – early 1960s. Drilling technology, especially deep sea drilling technology, wasn’t as advanced back then.

But! This was the late 1950s – early 1960s. Sputnik! Space race! We can do anything!

And so, with funding from the National Science Foundation, Project Mohole began in 1961.

Phase 1 was kind of cool: they used a drillship called CUSS 1, and developed “dynamic positioning”. That allowed the ship to hold a position within a radius of 600 feet, which, in turn, allowed them to drill in deep water. Their deepest hole went down to 601 feet under the sea floor, in a depth of 11,700 feet.

This test drilling program was seen by all as a great success, attracting the attention of both the scientific community and the oil industry. The test was completed in a timely manner and under budget, costing $1.7M.

Unfortunately, stuff happened. AMSOC really wasn’t set up to manage big projects like this, so they turned the management over to the NSF. The various institutions involved didn’t completely see eye to eye on the project goals, and there was some infighting over where to drill the next hole, and whether to drill shallow holes first or go for the gusto and try to hit the Moho.

The NSF took bids on who the primary project contractor would be, and they ended up selecting Brown and Root. Now, I have a sentimental attachment to Brown and Root (my dad worked for them) but it seems like they were not the best choice to run the project. B&R apparently wasn’t highly skilled in sea drilling. Costs went up and up and up.

Then Congress got involved. Technically, Congress was already involved: one of the big supporters of Project Moho was Albert Thomas, a congressman from Houston. (Thomas was also key in getting NASA to locate the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. His involvement may explain why B&R was chosen as the primary contractor. The fact that B&R was also a big donor to Lyndon Johnson might have something to do with it as well.) Thomas died in February of 1966, and the project was cancelled later that year.

And somewhere, I have a copy of Willard Bascom’s A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.

Short bonus video: this claims to be footage of a nuclear weapon being used to put out a massive gas well fire in the Soviet Union.

I’ve had this in my queue for a while because I’m not sure if it is real or fake. If it is fake, it is well done, and certainly suckered me in. I guess this is one of those “I report, you decide” moments.

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