Another quote for your pleasure:
I don’t have room for this elsewhere, so: my thanks to SP RN and Bones. I finished Metzger’s Dog over the weekend, and their recommendations were right on target.
Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
Miscellany.
Monday, September 29th, 2025Obit watch: September 18, 2025.
Thursday, September 18th, 2025Maj. John H. Luckadoo (USAAF – ret.) has passed away. He was 103.
Maj. Luckadoo was a pilot in the 100th Bombardment Group, also known as “the Bloody 100th”.
… even in a campaign that saw extensive losses of planes and crews, it stood out for its deadly turnover: During its 306 missions, the unit lost 757 men and 229 planes.
“Prior to being sent over, our commander called us together and he said, ‘Now I want you to look to your right and you look to your left and look ahead and look behind you, and only one of you is gonna come home,’” he recalled in January to News Channel 9 in Chattanooga, Tenn., his hometown.
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Mr. Luckadoo’s most harrowing mission came on Oct. 8, 1943, as U.S. forces launched a series of massive air raids over the German port city of Bremen. By then, the life expectancy of a B-17 pilot like Mr. Luckadoo was 11 missions — a virtual death sentence for the officers, who were required to fly 25 missions during their tour.
“Some later described the flak that day as being so thick we could have put down our wheels and taxied on it!” he said in an interview for the 100th Bombardment Group’s historical association.
At one point Mr. Luckadoo looked up to see a flight of German Fw-190 fighters headed straight for them. The lead plane, either by accident or because the pilot was shot, slammed straight into the bomber directly above Mr. Luckadoo’s. Both aircraft exploded, nearly taking down his B-17 with it.
By the time they dropped their payloads, Mr. Luckadoo’s formation had lost 12 of its 18 bombers. An engine had been shot out, and a hole had been punched into a window near his seat. Freezing air poured in. Even with heated sheepskin boots, Mr. Luckadoo’s foot froze to a control pedal.
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Maj. Luckadoo was the last surviving pilot from the 100th.
Greg Ellifritz has a nice obit up for John Holschen, professional trainer. I recommend you go read it, if for no other reason than the story about the “rocket attack”. I don’t want to quote it here, because I would like for you to go over to Active Response Training and read it yourself.
While you are there, I also recommend you read the related “The Gas Station Clerk”.
By way of the Rap Sheet, I’ve learned that Thomas Perry passed away on Monday.
Mr. Perry is one of those writers who I haven’t read a lot of, but would like to read more. I’m especially interested in his “Butcher’s Boy” trilogy. The only book of his I’ve read so far is Pursuit, which I thought was terrific: the world’s best criminalist goes up against the world’s best hit man.
Ethan Iverson wrote a pretty good essay on Mr. Perry’s work, which I commend to your attention.
Obit watch: September 5, 2025.
Friday, September 5th, 2025I think these obits are interesting for various reasons, but some of them I’m only going to cover briefly.
Edgar Feuchtwanger, Adolf Hitler’x neighbor in Munich during the 1930s. Across the street, not next door. His family was forced out of Germany in 1939.
There are limits to what I am willing to subject my readers to, which is why I am not embedding “Heil Honey I’m Home!” here.
Robert Jay Lifton, psychiatrist and author. (The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism).
Steve Hayden, advertising guy. He wrote the Apple “1984” commercial.
Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s second son (by Pauline Pfeiffer). He was 97.
I think everyone knows about my policy on obits for children of celebrities, but Patrick had an interesting life (as you might expect). He ran a safari compnay in Tanganyika, finished his dad’s True at First Light, and taught at the College of African Wildlife Management.
He was Hemingway’s last surviving child.
Obit watch: August 29, 2025.
Friday, August 29th, 2025I know I’m drawing heavily from the NYT, but that’s where the interesting obits are today.
Jim Murray. He was the general manager of the Philadelphia Eagles from 1974 until 1983, including during their Super Bowl run in 1981. But that’s not what I think is notable.
The first facility opened in Philadelphia in 1974, the year Mr. Murray became, at 36, the National Football League’s youngest general manager. The daughter of Fred Hill, a tight end with the Eagles, had been diagnosed with leukemia. The team raised money for her; Mr. Murray was delegated to prolong the giving by looking for a related charitable cause.
He found a local pediatric oncologist, Dr. Audrey Evans, who told him that the most pressing need was to provide accommodation for families who brought their sick children to a hospital and often had to sleep in the corridor or in their cars.
Mr. Murray understood immediately. “He saw the way they were struggling and said, ‘We have to figure something out,’” his godson, the Philadelphia sports broadcaster Rob Ellis, said in an interview. “Then the idea bloomed and progressed. It started with the motivation to help his player.”
Know your stuff. Be a man. Look after your people.
Mr. Murray reached out to a Philadelphia advertising executive who handled the region’s McDonald’s account. Local McDonald’s restaurants agreed to donate money from a promotional drink — the Shamrock Shake — as long as the house could be named after the company’s emblematic clown.
The first Ronald McDonald House opened on Oct. 15, 1974, at 4032 Spruce Street in Philadelphia. There was room for seven families. Mr. Murray took to calling it the “McMiracle.”
Joan Mellen, biographer. She wrote 25 books about all sorts of subjects (Japanese film, the JFK assassination) but I wanted to highlight her because…one of her biographies was about Bobby Knight.
In early 1987, the irascible and authoritarian college basketball coach Bobby Knight called Temple University looking for Joan Mellen…
Mr. Knight was fuming about “A Season on the Brink,” a recent best-selling biography by the sportswriter John Feinstein that portrayed him as vulgar, sexist and out of control. Professor Mellen had just reviewed the book for The St. Petersburg Times, faulting it for misunderstanding its subject.
“Knight is, above all, a teacher,” she wrote. “Aggressively he gives his all. In this he is no different from the dedicated English or math teacher. The basketball players, like all students, are recalcitrant. They fight against learning. Knight’s advantage over other teachers lies in his access and control.”
On the phone, Mr. Knight was charming.
“You’re a professor of literature?” Professor Mellen later recalled him asking her. “I just wanted to tell you I really liked what you wrote.”
Professor Mellen began compulsively watching his games. She arranged to write a profile of him for The New York Times, which she later expanded into a best seller of her own: “Bob Knight: His Own Man.”
Bob Knight: His Own Man was negatively reviewed by many people, some of whom saw it as a shot across the bow of Mr. Feinstein. One of those people was Rick Telander in the New York Times Book Review.
Professor Mellen’s response was vintage Professor Mellen.
She castigated The Times in a letter to the editor, saying that Mr. Telander should not have reviewed her book because he worked for Sports Illustrated, which had published several negative articles about Mr. Knight. He was among the writers who had criticized the coach.
“Such breaches of journalistic ethics on the part of some sportswriters are a central theme of my book,” Professor Mellen wrote. “My focus, however, was Mr. Knight as a teacher, a topic not touched upon once by Mr. Telander, who is obviously adhering to some other agenda.”
The Times published an Editors’ Note saying that Mr. Telander should not have been chosen to review the book.
A.K. Best, fly tying guy.
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Mr. Best also wrote books and magazine articles, spoke at seminars and made instructional videos with the professorial tone of a pipe-smoking teacher, which he had been. (Pipe smoke helped keep the mosquitoes away while he fished.) Fly Fisherman magazine said, in a tribute after his death, that he “shaped the soul of modern fly fishing.”
For hours at a time, Mr. Best sat in his basement workshop in Boulder, using a vise, pliers, tweezers, a toothbrush, sprigs of feathers and other tools of the trade. He made the wings and tails of insect replicas by hand, for personal use and at a commercial pace of roughly 40 lures an hour and 36,000 a year for companies like Orvis, Umpqua Feather Merchants and Urban Angler. He was said to have attached a shoulder rest to his phone so he could keep tying while taking a call.
As he worked, he listened to classical music and jazz, accompaniment that dated to his earlier career as a music teacher and high school band director. He considered the precision required for tying flies similar to the exactitude of creating music.
“There’s no such thing as an unimportant detail in music,” Mr. Best told The Gazette of Colorado Springs in 2024. “The composer put that dot on the paper with an ink pen for a specific reason. Just like when you look at a picture of an insect, every dot is important.”
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His great skill was creating flies of a size and color that appeared natural, rather than store-bought, using the knowledge that no adult aquatic insects have fuzzy bodies; that flies should appear shiny and waxy, not translucent; that hair from a white-tailed deer could be used if elk hair was not available.
“You don’t need a fly so big you’re going to scare the hell out of a fish,” he said in a 2015 interview for the Montana State University Angling Oral History Project. In the same interview, he said, “If it’s the right color and floats, it’ll catch fish.”
There’s a Montana State University Angling Oral History Project? Awesome! President Trump, I want some of my tax money going there, please.
We fished some when I was a child, by which I mean we dangled lines in the water from fishing poles. I’ve never been fly fishing, but I find myself becoming more interested in both the sport itself and the literature surrounding it as I get older. Callahan and Company has fly fishing and angling books as one of their specialties, so I see a lot of fly fishing literature advertised in their catalogs. Much of it sounds fascinating.
I am seeing reports (especially from McThag) that Randall “Duke” Cunningham, Navy ace, former Congressman, and convicted and pardoned felon, has passed away. But I don’t have anything I can link yet.
Burning in Hell watch: Tran Trong Duyet, chief warden of the Hanoi Hilton.
Obit watch: August 28, 2025.
Thursday, August 28th, 2025Pat Moore, long-time server at P.J. Clarke’s in New York City.
This is one of those not-so-famous person obits that the paper does well. She was named “Miss Fordham” in her first year at the school and signed to a modeling contract with the Ford Modeling Agency.
She also had an interesting personal life, especially after she started working at P.J. Clarke’s.
As a teenager, Ms. Moore had been the president of the local chapter of the Perry Como Fan Club, invited into the studio to watch Como rehearse. An appreciation for smooth Italian American crooners would be a refrain in her life. After her divorce, she dated both Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, though whether the two men overlapped is unclear to her friends.
“The way I heard it was, when Sinatra would come in, Tony Bennett wasn’t allowed to come in the restaurant,” Michael DeFonzo, the chef for the company that owns all five of the P.J. Clarke’s locations (three in Manhattan), said in an interview. “I would always press her about it, and she would say, ‘Stop it.’ She never gave up the truth.”
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That’s the other reason I wanted to post this obit. David J. Schow, noted horror writer, wrote a story called “Red Light” that won a World Fantasy Award in 1987. The premise of the story involves a successful model that comes to believe, every time someone takes a picture of her, they’re stripping away pieces of her.
It’s a kind of subtle, not really splatterpunk, horror story. I commend it to your attention, if you can find it. And I wonder if Ms. Moore ever felt the same way.
Note to consumers.
Friday, August 22nd, 2025Wet Dog Publications is having a sale.
You may remember Wet Dog as the publisher of FN Browning Pistols – Sidearms that Shaped World History, which I have written about previously.
The sale is:
- 10% discount on all new Wet Dog books.
- 10% discount on all used books (which are under “Collectables” on their web site).
- And they have a sale on “consignment accessories”.
The more you buy, the more you save:
-10% Discount on one accessory item (excludes books)
-15% Discount on two accessory items (excludes books)
– Spend $750 or more on accessories and get 20% Discount (excludes books)
– Spend $1500 or more on accessories and get 25% Discount (excludes books)
I know at least one person who might be interested in their book on the VIS Radom pistol. I personally ordered a copy of their book on the Browning Auto-5 for myself.
The sale runs through August 30th. I have no connection to Wet Dog except as a highly satisfied customer.
Use code SUMMER2025 at checkout for new books or email us directly for used books and accessories.
Used books and accessories are sold on a first come, first serve bases.
Obit watch: August 15, 2025.
Friday, August 15th, 2025Gerry Spence, legendary lawyer and author. He was 96.
Among the people he defended or represented: Karen Silkwood.
Randy Weaver.
Imelda Marcos.
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Mr. Spence often boasted that he had never lost a criminal case with a jury trial, as either a defense lawyer or a prosecutor, and that he had not lost a civil case since 1969. That was not actually true, but it was not far off. He was known to lose now and then, and several of his notable civil verdicts were overturned on appeal.
But in the tradition of Perry Mason, he seemed unbeatable — not only to courtroom foes but also to lawyers who attended his seminars, and to Americans who read his best-selling books and tuned in to his television programs and network commentaries, most notably on the O.J. Simpson murder case.
I remember seeing a “60 Minutes” profile of him some years back. I can’t find that now, but there’s a two-part interview with him on the ‘Tube.
Masaoki Sen. He was 102.
Mr. Sen was best known for serving as the 15th-generation grand master of the Urasenke, one of the three main schools of Japan’s tea ceremony. After inheriting the role from his father in 1964, he used it as a platform to promote peace, often while speaking of his own experiences during the war.
Traveling the world to engage in a sort of tea-ceremony diplomacy, Mr. Sen used the ancient art, whose roots lie in Zen Buddhism, to call for an end to all wars. He was known for the phrase “peacefulness through a bowl of tea.”
He was also a former kamikaze pilot.
After leaving Doshisha University in 1943 he was drafted to the Imperial Navy, where he trained to be a pilot. When his unit was asked to form a “special attack” squadron to carry out suicide missions, Mr. Sen was one of the volunteers.
“I thought I was ready to die,” Mr. Sen said in a 2021 interview with a Japanese newspaper. “But I was just a greenhorn of 20 or 21 years of age. I didn’t know what death meant.”
While many young men in his unit flew off to ram their aircraft into Allied ships, Mr. Sen was never sent. Historians say the Japanese military often spared the oldest sons, especially from historically significant households.
After the war, Mr. Sen asked a former commander why he was never sent. The older man answered: “Just think of it as fate.”
Unlike many war veterans, Mr. Sen spoke openly of his experiences and sorrow for comrades who never returned. He also made no effort to disguise his anger toward his nation’s leaders who sent them on one-way missions.
“We were told to die because others would fill our ranks,” he said in another interview. “But who wants to die?”
Drink!
Wednesday, August 6th, 2025Shot:
A merchant’s sheltered but cheerful daughter, fighting to control a fire spirit that lives inside her, and a grieving half-orc warrior, who, like many an orc of his kind, has green skin and tusks, fall madly in love while he escorts her to marry a prince in a far-off kingdom. During their journey, the human and the half-orc have a lot of raunchy sex.
It sounds like a fever dream, but it’s actually the plot of “Tusk Love,” a romance novel that landed on the New York Times best-seller list last month. How the book got there is as twisty as the novel’s central love affair — and the latest, and perhaps most unusual, example of how internet-driven fandom can intersect with publishing to create hit books.
Chaser:
Spicy bar snack: I, Libertine Kindle edition on Amazon. Wikipedia.
Obit watch: July 16, 2025.
Wednesday, July 16th, 2025NYT obit for Martin Cruz Smith.
Mr. Smith’s initial evocation of Russia was all the more remarkable in that he had spent exactly two weeks in the Soviet Union, as a tourist, in 1973 and did not speak Russian. But he made up for it by frequenting libraries in the United States and talking to Soviet émigrés, who filled in the gaps in his knowledge. “A number of the Russians who helped me would in fact come and live with me and my family,” Mr. Smith told the reference guide Contemporary Authors in 1986.
With the character of Renko, he was also making moral and historical claims, ambitions he sometimes admitted to in interviews.
“He’s the truth-teller, the honest man in a dishonest system,” Mr. Smith said in an interview with CBS in 2009. At the same time, he discounted American fears of the Soviet Union. “It was an illusion that it was a threat to Americans,” he said. “The system was far more dangerous to its own people.”
Fauja Singh, runner. His age is unknown.
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On Oct. 13 [2011 – DB], at a meet in Toronto, he set eight world records for the 95-plus age group in events ranging from 100 meters to 5,000 meters, or 3.1 miles. Doug Smith, the co-chair of Ontario Masters Athletics, called it the “most astonishing achievement” he had ever witnessed.
“He rested between the events by sitting down and having a few sips of tea,” Mr. Smith said in an interview for this obituary in 2017. “He was actually running — both feet off the ground. He was amazing.”
Three days after the track meet, Mr. Singh performed yet another rousing feat. He became the first reputed centenarian to complete a race of 26.2 miles by finishing the Toronto Waterfront Marathon in 8 hours 25 minutes 16 seconds. His actual running time was 8:11:05, but in the throng of runners, it took him 14 minutes to reach the start.
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Obit watch: July 14, 2025.
Monday, July 14th, 2025Martin Cruz Smith passed away over the weekend. The Rap Sheet has a short item, but I haven’t seen any other coverage.
I find the Arkady Renko books fascinating in the abstract, but I’ve never actually gotten around to reading any of them. (I did, however, see the film version of “Gorky Park”, but I don’t find it really memorable.) I guess he’s another one of those series authors where, now that there’s a defined end to the series, I can start reading…
Samuel Abt, writer for the NYT and The International Herald Tribune. Anong other work, he covered the Tour de France for the papers for close to 30 years.
I remember reading his coverage, back in the Lance Armstrong days when I followed the Tour.
In an Opinion article in The Times published shortly before Armstrong lost his titles, Mr. Abt expressed sympathy for the cyclist, whom he had known since the early 1990s and with whom he had had a sometimes friendly, sometimes strained relationship.
“The internet and mass media are in a frenzy of condemnation now,” he wrote. “I have not read or heard any sorrow or compassion about a man stripped of his honor.”
Obit watch: July 3, 2025.
Thursday, July 3rd, 2025Robert Holton, big damn hero. He was 81.
Taxol is a hugely important drug in cancer treatment. It was originally isolated from the yew tree, but there just aren’t enough yew trees to go around. In order to isolate the drug, the trees had to be stripped of their bark, which killed them.
Dr. Holton was the first person to figure out how to synthesize Taxol in a lab, without killing yew trees.
“I have always been drawn to difficult problems, and synthesizing Taxol was a big one,” Dr. Holton said in 2018 during remarks at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Inventors in Washington, D.C. He was elected an academy fellow that year. “Seeing the drug’s success in treating so many patients has been an incredibly gratifying experience.”
The National Cancer Institute estimates that more than one million patients have been treated with Taxol. It was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1992 for ovarian cancer and, in 1994, for advanced breast cancer. The chemo agent is also used for the treatment of lung cancer and Kaposi’s sarcoma, among other malignancies, Dr. Boyd said.
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Barry Longyear, SF writer. I don’t have a formal obit I can link, but Michael Swanwick put up a tribute/obit on his blog.
Obit watch: June 27, 2025.
Friday, June 27th, 2025Fred Espenak, astrophysicist. He was known as “Mr. Eclipse”.
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In the early 1990s, Mr. Espenak began writing NASA’s eclipse bulletins with the Canadian meteorologist Jay Anderson. He also started a website for the space agency devoted to eclipse data. His goal: simplify and democratize complicated data so nonscientists sky gazers could geek out on the data, too.
All the while, he kept chasing eclipses — traveling to Kenya, Indonesia, Mexico, Aruba, Turkey, Zambia, Antarctica, Spain, Libya and beyond.
Lalo Schifrin. He was 93, and dang, what a career.
(Edited to add 6/28: NYT obit, which just went up today.)
The workaholic Schifrin received Oscar nominations for his scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), The Fox (1968), Voyage of the Damned (1976), The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Sting II (1983) and for the song “People Alone” from The Competition (1980).
He scored Dirty Harry (1971) and the sequels Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983) and The Dead Pool (1988), all starring Clint Eastwood — the filmmaker presented him with his Oscar — and served as the composer on all three of the Rush Hour films.
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His résumé also included work on Coogan’s Bluff (1968) — that kicked off his long association with Eastwood and director Don Siegel — Kelly’s Heroes (1970), Charley Varrick (1973), The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Telefon (1977), The Nude Bomb (1980), Black Moon Rising (1986), Money Talks (1997), Something to Believe In (1998), Tango (1998), Bringing Down the House (2003) and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004).
An inspired Bruce Lee worked out to the show’s score in his gym in Hong Kong before signing Schifrin as the composer and orchestrator on Enter the Dragon (1973). As a bonus, Lee gave the musician his first martial arts lessons, for free.
Schifrin concocted a jazz waltz in 3/4 time for the theme to the Mike Connors series Mannix — also produced by Geller — and played the Moog synthesizer on the opening music for another 1960s’ CBS drama, Medical Center.
Schifrin also was responsible for the themes for T.H.E. Cat, Petrocelli, Starsky & Hutch, Bronk and Most Wanted. And his “Tar Sequence” music from Cool Hand Luke was adopted by ABC affiliates for their Eyewitness News broadcasts.
IMDB.
Rick Hurst, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Return of the Killer Shrews”, “Supertrain”, and “Murder, She Wrote”.
Carolyn McCarthy, former Congresswoman from Long Island and prominent gun control advocate.
I bet you thought I wasn’t going to post this, didn’t you? Yes, I’ve used it before (though not in this version) but for my money, I think this is the greatest TV theme of all time. (Though I admit it does have some stiff competition.)
News from the publishing world.
Friday, June 20th, 2025The NYPost informs us that Tiffany Henyard, the former mayor of Dolton, Illinois, whose antics have provided us with much entertainment over the past few years, has a new venture.
She’s writing a book, Standing on Business.
$99?! I would certainly be willing to buy her book, probably as a Christmas/birthday present for Lawrence (who, as I’ve noted before, is a connoisseur of books by disgraced politicians) but not for no $99! $9.99 is about my limit.
And, no, that’s not a typo. Here’s a link to the book’s page on the “Big Cartel” website. Here’s a link to her Facebook post, for those of you who swing that way. However, I can’t get the link in her Facebook post to come up.
Obit watch: June 9, 2025.
Monday, June 9th, 2025Lieutenant Commander Conrad Shinn (US Navy – ret.) died on May 15th. He was 102.
LTC Shinn was the first man to land a plane at the South Pole.
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On Oct. 31, 1956, Commander Shinn, Admiral Dufek and five other Navy men made the seven-hour flight from McMurdo Station on Antarctica to the pole aboard an R4D-5L Skytrain, a twin-engine military version of the commercial DC-3. Internal politics affected the assigned duties for the extraordinary mission.
A captain onboard, Douglas Cordiner, was so upset at not being named the co-pilot that he later stood on the deck of a ship in New Zealand and “threw his library of Antarctica into the water,” Commander Shinn said in his oral history interview.
The R4D, nicknamed Que Sera Sera — Whatever Will Be Will Be — after a popular song, had its landing gear outfitted with skis and was accompanied by a circling Air Force C-124 Globemaster cargo aircraft. Maurice Cutler, then an 18-year-old United Press correspondent from Australia who joined other reporters on the cargo plane, which had wheels but no skis, said in an interview that pallets of survival gear were to be airdropped if Commander Shinn’s plane could not lift off from the pole.
The landing, photographed from above by Mr. Cutler, was not exceptionally rough. Commander Shinn set his plane down at 8:34 p.m. during continuous sunlight across windblown ridges on a desolate ice sheet nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. The temperature was minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit.
Admiral Dufek planted an American flag, and Commander Shinn kept the engines running as the plane remained on the ground for 49 minutes. By then, the skis had become stuck to the ice.
In the thin air on the ice cap, the propeller-driven plane, weighing 28,000 pounds, did not budge with its engines at full power. “We just sat on the ice like an old mud hen,” Commander Shinn told the National Naval Aviation Museum.
To gain thrust, Commander Shinn made a jet-assisted takeoff, firing a series of small rockets housed in canisters attached to the fuselage. After all 15 rockets had been fired, the plane lifted off. “Barely,” he said in a radio interview a day or so after the flight.
Tom Henderson, who directed the 2019 documentary “Ice Eagles,” about aviation in Antarctica, said in a recent interview that Commander Shinn had told him he had lifted off at 58 miles an hour, two below the plane’s minimum designated takeoff speed.
Later, an engine oil pressure light came on, Mr. Henderson said, and Commander Shinn promptly unscrewed the bulb, telling his co-pilot that he’d rather not have Admiral Dufek “see that and get excited.”
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Frederick Forsyth. The obits right now are still in the preliminary stage, but I’m going to be on the road tomorrow and don’t know when I’ll have time to write.
I wrote a long time ago about my early experience with The Day of the Jackel. I also wrote a little, not quite so long ago, about The Shepherd.
I remember thinking The Odessa File was pretty good, but I was young at the time. I’m not sure it holds up. I do think The Dogs of War does.
Oddly, I think my second favorite Forsyth (of the ones I’ve read) is the short story collection No Comebacks. A story that turns on an obscure point of libel law? Another story about a man who figures out a way to take his fortune with him when he dies…and tick off his greedy family. A group of blackmailers meet their match in a meek insurance executive.
And then there’s “The Emperor”. This seems like a typical fishing story of the kind Hemingway would have written: man gets into the fight of his life with a big fish. But the man is a henpecked bank employee…and in the struggle with the fish, he finds something inside him. This story contains another of my favorite lines in fiction:
“To hell with the bank,” he said at length. “To hell with Ponder’s End. And madam, to hell with you.”
Bill Atkinson, one of the pioneers of the Macintosh.
It was Mr. Atkinson who programmed QuickDraw, a foundational software layer used for both the Lisa and Macintosh computers; composed of a library of small programs, it made it possible to display shapes, text and images on the screen efficiently.
The QuickDraw programs were embedded in the computers’ hardware, providing a distinctive graphical user interface that presented a simulated “desktop,” displaying icons of folders, files and application programs.
Mr. Atkinson is credited with inventing many of the key aspects of graphical computing, such as “pull down” menus and the “double-click” gesture, which allows users to open files, folders and applications by clicking a mouse button twice in succession.
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Mr. Atkinson’s programming feats were renowned in Silicon Valley.
“Looking at his code was like looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” recalled Steve Perlman, who as a young Apple hardware engineer took advantage of Mr. Atkinson’s software to design the first color Macintosh. “His code was remarkable. It is what made the Macintosh possible.”
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He was also the author of two of the most significant early programs written for the Macintosh. One, MacPaint, was a digital drawing program that came with the original Macintosh; it made it possible for a user to create and manipulate images on the screen, controlling everything down to the level of the individual display pixel.
Ordinary users without specialized skills could now create drawings, illustrations and designs directly on a computer screen. The program introduced the concept of a “tool palette,” a set of clickable icons to select simulated paint brushes pens, and pencils.
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Springtime!
Thursday, May 29th, 2025And I’d like to talk about Spring…fields. Or at least books about Springfields. Plus some sniping content after the jump…