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Obit watch: November 19, 2024.

Tuesday, November 19th, 2024

Lawrence, the Guardian, and the New York Times have all noted that two drummers for the Bee Gees have died in the past few days.

Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.
Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.
Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.

…

Mr. Petersen played on a string of hit ballads from 1967 to 1970, including “Massachusetts,” “To Love Somebody,” “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You,” “I Started a Joke” and “Words.” He was also a child actor, known for his role in the 1956 film “Smiley,” which was the origin of his nickname, among a few other movies in the late ’50s.

…

Mr. Bryon, born in Cardiff, Wales, was a part of the Bee Gees for many of its greatest hits in the 1970s, including “Stayin’ Alive,” “How Deep is Your Love,” “You Should Be Dancing,” “More Than a Woman” and the rest of the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack. He started playing drums when he was 14.

Arthur Frommer, travel book guy.

Mr. Frommer built an empire of guidebooks, package tours, hotels and other services on the bedrock of his first book, published in 1957, which sold millions of copies in annually updated editions until 2007. (It was “Europe From $95 a Day” by then.)

…

“This is a book,” he wrote, “for American tourists who a) own no oil wells in Texas, b) are unrelated to the Aga Khan, c) have never struck it rich in Las Vegas and who still want to enjoy a wonderful European vacation.”

Thomas E. Kurtz, one of the great men of history. He co-created the BASIC computer language.

At 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, in the basement of College Hall on the Dartmouth campus, the time-sharing system and BASIC were put to a test. A professor and a student programmer typed a simple command, “RUN,” into neighboring Teletype terminals and watched as both received the same answer simultaneously. It worked.

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

Obit watch: October 30, 2024.

Wednesday, October 30th, 2024

Teri Garr. Tributes. NYT.

While making many of these films, she noticed troubling physical symptoms. She didn’t suspect their cause, but she remembered running in New York City in the late 1990s. “When I was jogging, I would get this horrible pain in my arm like a knife stabbing,” she told CNN in 2008. “And I thought, well, I’m in Central Park — well, maybe it is a knife stabbing.”

…

For years, she was a spokeswoman for MS research and support, continuing to make appearances in her wheelchair. “I really do count my blessings,” she wrote in a memoir, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood” (2005), written with Henriette Mantel. “At least I used to. Now I get so tired I have a woman come once a week and count them for me.”

Other credits include “One from the Heart”, “Honky Tonk Freeway”, “McCloud”, “Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood”, and an episode of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.

John Gierach, author and fly fisherman. I recognized the name, probably because I’ve seen some of his books around. (Half-Price Books puts the fishing books right above the firearms books.)

Charles Brandt, former prosecutor and author.

But [“The Irishman”] was fiercely criticized by journalists and Mafia experts, who said Mr. Sheeran had exaggerated (at best) or fabricated (at worst) his role in Mr. Hoffa’s death.
“Frank Sheeran never killed a fly,” John Carlyle Berkery, an Irish mob figure in Philadelphia, was quoted as saying in a 2019 Slate article with the headline “The Lies of the Irishman.” “The only things he ever killed were countless jugs of red wine.”
Selwyn Raab, who wrote about the Mafia for The Times for more than two decades, told Slate: “I know Sheeran didn’t kill Hoffa. I’m as confident about that as you can be. There are 14 people who claim to have killed Hoffa. There’s an inexhaustible supply of them.”

I read I Heard You Paint Houses and I think Frank Sheeran’s claim that he killed Hoffa is B.S. Sheeran even admitted to the author at one point that he’d lied about an easily checkable point: if he lied about that, why should we believe the rest of what he said?

Posted in Books, Fish, Law, Movies, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

Random gun book crankery, plus Leadership Secrets of Non-Fictional Characters.

Friday, October 25th, 2024

Just going to take a deep breath and jump here. These are pretty much new books, mostly from Amazon, so I’m going to spare you photos and just insert affiliate links. If you buy anything, I get a small kickback.

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Posted in Books, Guns, History, Hoplobibilophilia, Leadership | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 23, 2024.

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

Fernando Valenzuela. ESPN. NYT (archived).

As I’ve noted before, I am not a baseball fan, and I hate the Dodgers. But I remember Fernandomania. And I get the impression he was a class act.

Bruce Ames.

The so-called Ames Test, developed in the 1970s, is still used by drug manufacturers and pesticide companies to check the safety of their products. It involves exposing chemicals to a mutant strain of salmonella bacteria that Dr. Ames created; how the bacteria responds to a chemical makes it possible to determine whether that chemical caused DNA damage and therefore might lead to cancer in humans.

…

He stumbled on one of his most publicized discoveries accidentally, when he asked his undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, to bring in a chemical of their choosing to undergo testing. All of the chemicals tested negative, except for one: contained in a bottle of hair dye a student had borrowed from his girlfriend.
Dr. Ames sent a lab technician, Edith Yamasaki, to buy out every type of hair dye at a local drugstore, and after extensive testing concluded that the dyes — used by more than 20 million Americans at the time — were very likely linked to cancer and birth defects.

…

A year later, his work made headlines again when he discovered that a chemical called Tris, used to make children’s pajamas flame-retardant, caused genetic mutations. By some estimates, 45 million children were wearing Tris-treated pajamas. The chemical was later banned from garment manufacturing.

…

Later in his career, as Dr. Ames’s opinions about the dangers of man-made chemicals began to shift, his legacy in the environmental movement became more complicated.
He felt that some activists were overstating the risks of these chemicals and targeting chemical companies unfairly. He often said that he thought there was too much focus on substances that were technically mutagenic but that were no more likely to cause DNA damage than the “natural” chemicals found in fruits and vegetables.
“I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t real problems with some synthetic chemicals, but the environmentalists are wildly exaggerating the risks,” he told The Times in 1994. “If our resources are diverted from important things to unimportant things, this doesn’t serve the public.”

I’ve known about this one for a few days, but was waiting for something I was comfortable linking to: Ward Christensen, early computer BBS pioneer.

Then, on Jan. 16, 1978, a blizzard hit Chicago, covering the city in 40 inches of snow and stranding Mr. Christensen at his home in the suburbs. He phoned Mr. Suess, suggesting that they use the time to start building their messaging system. He wondered if they should get help from other club members, but Mr. Suess argued that involving more people would slow the project down.
“Forget the club. It would just be management by committee,” Mr. Suess said, as Mr. Christensen recalled their conversation to The New York Times in 2009. “It’s just me and you. I will do the hardware, and you will do the software.”

…

In 1977, he developed a protocol, called XMODEM, for sending computer files across phone lines; it was later used on C.B.B.S.

…

The next fall, Mr. Christensen described their creation in an article he wrote for Byte, a magazine for computer hobbyists. When they retired their system less than a decade later, its phone line had received more than a half-million calls.

By way of Greg Ellifritz: Ed Lovette, trainer and gun guy. I have a copy of The Snubby Revolver, and would recommend picking it up if you find it used.

I also wanted to link this because Mr. Ellifritz’s post contains an excellent list of other books you should have in your gun library. I will say I have many, but not all, of them: some of them I am still trying to find. (And someone should get the rights to reprint that old Paladin Press stuff, like the Lovette and Cirillo books.)

As a side note, I haven’t forgotten about gun books. I’ve just been busy, and my dealer of choice has taken some time off. I do want to try to get up a post this week, but it is probably going to be shorter than usual. The books I plan to post about are all new books, available from Amazon (with one exception). And one of those books is also going to be an entry in the “Leadership Secrets” series, too.

Keep watching the skies.

Posted in Books, Geek, Hoplobibilophilia, Obits, Sports | 6 Comments »

Obit watch: October 11, 2024.

Friday, October 11th, 2024

Ethel Kennedy.

Thomas Rockwell, author. His most famous book is perhaps How to Eat Fried Worms.

He was also Norman’s son.

Posing for a painting that depicted him rummaging through his grandfather’s overcoat pocket was one of his favorite childhood memories, he told Cobblestone, a children’s magazine, in 1989. That image appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post in 1936.
“I had to stand on tiptoe while reaching into the overcoat, which was hung on an easel,” Mr. Rockwell said, describing how his father had composed the painting. “My father gave me a present for posing, and I remember feeling so proud and pleased that I’d helped him with his work. I know I’ve never enjoyed any gift as much as that one.”

This one goes out to great and good FotB pigpen51: Greg Landry, quarterback.

He wore the Lions’ Honolulu blue and silver for 11 seasons, tallying 12,451 yards and 80 touchdown passes.
In 1971, his first year as a starter, Landry passed for 2,237 yards and 16 touchdowns, earning a first-team All-Pro nod and his only trip to the Pro Bowl. He was the last Lions quarterback to earn that distinction until Matthew Stafford was named an alternate for the 2014 Pro Bowl.

…

Unusual for an era marked by pocket passers, Landry did damage with his legs as well as his right arm: He rushed for 2,655 yards over his career, which concluded with stints with the Baltimore Colts and the Chicago Bears. In both 1971 and 1972, he ran for more than 500 yards.

…

But with Landry, who was physically imposing at 6-foot-4, the Lions designed running plays for him, as would later be the case with current dual-threat quarterbacks like Lamar Jackson of the Baltimore Ravens and Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills. The Lions even took a page from college football playbooks and drew up option plays, in which the quarterback has the option to carry the ball himself after the snap or pitch it to a running back, a rarity in the N.F.L.
Landry showed off his burst early in his career, during the Lions’ rout of the Green Bay Packers in the opening game of the 1970 season. Closing out the game in relief of the starter Bill Munson, Landry called a quarterback sneak on third down with two yards to go at the Lions’ 13-yard line. Instead of gutting out a few yards for a first down, he burst through the Packers’ defense and galloped for 76 yards — the longest run for a Lion since 1951.

Great and good FotB RoadRich sent over an obit for Nobuyo Oyama, Japanese voice actress.

For about 25 years, Ms. Oyama was the voice of Doraemon, a character that first appeared in a manga created in 1969. Doraemon is a robot from the future, sent by its owner to the present day to help his great-great-grandfather solve his childhood problems and change his family’s fortunes.
The plump, earless, catlike robot typically helped the boy, Nobita Nobi, using gadgets from the future that he kept in his magical pocket. His deepening friendship with Nobita and his family was part of what made “Doraemon” one of the longest-running shows in Japan and beyond.

Posted in Art, Books, History, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2024.

Monday, September 23rd, 2024

Mercury Morris, one of the great NFL players. ESPN. NYT (archived).

Morris made no secret of the fact that he was filled with pride about the 1972 Dolphins being the first — and still only — undefeated and untied team in NFL history, pulling off a truly perfect season.
He also tried to make this clear: No, the Dolphins were not rooting against the teams that came close to matching their feat of perfection or had champagne on ice waiting for the moment that the last unbeaten team in a season gets defeated.
“And for the record, we DO NOT TOAST every time an unbeaten team loses,” Morris posted on social media in 2015, when the Cam Newton-led Carolina Panthers started 14-0 before losing the next-to-last game of their regular season. “There’s no champagne in my glass, only Canada Dry Ginger ale! Ha!”

Kathryn Crosby, der Bingle’s wife who had a pretty successful career of her own. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Anatomy of a Murder”, “The Phenix City Story”, and “The Night the World Exploded”.

Tongsun Park, who was at the center of the 1970s “Koreagate” scandal.

In 1978, he was indicted on charges of conspiracy, bribery and making contributions as a foreign agent, and he fled the country. He returned with a promise of criminal immunity to testify in Congress and before a grand jury.
He said that he had passed money to 31 members of Congress — up to $273,000 in one case — and while he denied acting on behalf of the South Korean government, a former Korean intelligence officer told Congress under oath that Mr. Park was working for Korean intelligence as part of an influence-buying operation code-named Ice Mountain.
But the accusations, splashily covered in the post-Watergate period, largely fizzled out. Only three of the 31 current and former congressmen Mr. Park named were indicted, and only one, Richard T. Hanna, a California Democrat, was convicted. He served a little over a year in jail.
The House, which considered disciplinary action against 11 sitting members, ended up reprimanding just three, in what critics called an example of Congress’s inability to discipline its own members.

He later got caught doing illegal lobbying for Saddam Hussein, and served five years for that.

Shortly after I posted Friday’s obit watch, the NYT posted their Nelson DeMille obit.

KMart. Sort of. The last “full-sized” store in the United States, in Bridgehampton, New York, is closing in October. There is one store left in Miami, but it is described as being the size of a CVS, not a full-sized store. There are also other stores in places like Guam and the Virgin Islands.

Posted in Books, Law, NFL, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 20, 2024.

Friday, September 20th, 2024

Dr. John A. Clements, another big damn hero, passed away on September 3rd at 101.

Newborn babies sometimes have a problem called respiratory distress syndrome, or RDS. They can’t breathe, and they die. Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, the second son of JFK and Jacqueline, famously died from RDS. In the 1960s, RDS killed about 10,000 babies every year.

Dr. Clements first did the early work that determined the lungs used a surfactant to allow breathing. Then, two other researchers that he served as an advisor for determined that RDS was caused by an absence of surfactant in the baby’s lungs.

Then Dr. Clements developed an artificial surfactant.

His research led to the first synthetic lung surfactant, which the University of California licensed to the drugmaker Burroughs Wellcome and Company. Its drug Exosurf was the first replacement surfactant for clinical use approved by the Food and Drug Administration, in 1990.
Eventually, further study found that animal-derived surfactants worked better, and they are most often used today. Infant deaths from R.D.S. in the United States have declined to fewer than 500 a year.

JD Souther, musician and actor.

Mr. Souther was almost the fifth Eagle: He joined the quartet for an afternoon tryout at the Troubadour, but he decided that the band was already perfect, and that he’d rather write for them.
A string of songs followed, many of them hits and most of them written with Mr. Henley and Mr. Frey, including “The Best of My Love,” “Victim of Love,” “Heartache Tonight” and “New Kid in Town.”

…

In recent years he was better known, at least to younger fans, for his screen presence. In 2012 he joined the cast of “Nashville,” playing a veteran music producer, Watty White — a character that drew heavily on his own experiences in the industry. He appeared during the first season, and his character was popular enough that the showrunners brought him back for the fifth season.

Nobody else has bothered to report this yet, as far as I’ve seen, but: Nelson DeMille, thriller author.

His first novel was “By the Rivers of Babylon,” published in 1978.

I actually remember when that came out, and being interested in reading it. However, I had somewhat limited means at the time, and that was one of the books I never bought. Now that I’m older, I may have to pick it up, because what’s not to like about a book with two Concordes in it?

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | 1 Comment »

Bob and Jack and Julian and John.

Friday, September 6th, 2024

It was a busy weekend. There’s a new gun show near Leander that a bunch of us ended up going to, and I found quite a bit of stuff. Including .220 Swift and – believe it or not – .22 Remington Jet ammo.

Then I ate something that disagreed with me on Tuesday and haven’t been feeling great. Things are looking up, but all of this is to say that I’ve been behind the curve, so I’m only now getting to more gun book blogging.

I think I’m going to try to knock off the last five books that are down here on the kitchen table so I can move those upstairs. And bring some more down later, but don’t tell anybody I said that. This is going to be a long one, so I’m putting a jump here.

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, Law, O'Connor, Ruark | Comments Closed

“…he thought he was good.” (Random gun crankery.)

Thursday, August 29th, 2024

I have an impression that the Colt Woodsman looms large in American popular culture.

Chandler, in one of his stories (“Trouble Is My Business“), had two gunmen come through the door, one armed with “a Colt Woodsman with a long barrel and the front sight filed off. That meant he thought he was good.”

(Sorry. Just wanted to break the wall of text up a bit.)

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Posted in Books, Colt, Guns, Ruark | 3 Comments »

Duke, Duke, Duke…

Friday, August 23rd, 2024

…not of Earl, Earl, Earl. I have two books by the late Mike “Duke” Venturino I want to get cataloged. And while I’m at it, I want to also hit another Samworth and another O’Connor. So why don’t we get started?

I think, before I insert the jump, that I do want to note: I know there are some people (including one reader here) who don’t care for Duke’s writing. I’m 100% okay with that. While I enjoyed reading him, I understand tastes differ. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that crap. Plus I don’t have a personal investment in people sharing my tastes. I remember having this discussion with one of my nephews once upon a time: I don’t want you to like the same things I do just because I like them, but I would like for you to be able to articulate why you do or don’t like things. (Again, that was one of my nephews. That’s not an issue with anyone here.)

Anyway, if you didn’t care for Mr. Venturino’s writings, you’re welcome to skip over the last two entries. Deal?

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia, O'Connor | 1 Comment »

Virtue. Rewarded.

Tuesday, August 20th, 2024

Yes, another rare event in the history of the republic.

After many years (seriously: I’ve known him since Jesus was getting his hair cut at boot camp) of honing his craft…

…friend, fellow blogger, writer, and noted book dealer Lawrence Person has won a major literary award.

Specifically, the Grand Prize in the 2024 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

More from Lawrence here. Hearty congratulations to him on this achievement.

Sadly, I do not believe the award comes with any money attached. It used to come with a leather-bound set of Bulwer-Lytton’s books, but I have been unable to determine if that is still the case.

I did briefly consider buying him a leg lamp to commemorate the occasion, but an authentic leg lamp from the Christmas Story House is $300! Freaking! Dollars!

Can you get a ham hock bronzed?

Posted in Books, Endorsements | 1 Comment »

Quick random book post.

Tuesday, August 6th, 2024

I was busy all this past weekend, and will be busy all of this coming weekend. I’m hoping to get a gun book post up sometime between Wednesday and Friday, but I’m not sure if that’s going to work out. I did want to get this post up today, though, for obvious reasons.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum Exhibition Guide. No author and no publishing information given. I think this is about 68 pages.

There are two sections to this, which are actually printed reversed (as you might gather from the index: apologies for the lousy picture, but I couldn’t get this to sit flat easily). One covers “The Reality of the Atomic Bombing” and “Damage From Radiation” along with introductory material (“Hiroshima Before the Bombing”, “The Atomic Bombing”, “A Lost Way of Life”). The other covers “The Dangers of Nuclear Weapons” and “Hiroshima History”.

This was a gift from my beloved and indulgent sister, who was able to tour Japan recently and brought this back for me.

Posted in Books, History | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: July 30, 2024.

Tuesday, July 30th, 2024

15 years ago today, I posted my first obit, for the late legendary Reverend Ike.

Just sayin’. “15 years looking at obituaries and which coaches got fired.” I cannot tell a lie: that still makes me laugh my spleen out of my body. (As you know, Bob, the spleen is the most amusing body part, though not the most humerus.)

Francine Pascal, author. She did some screenwriting for soaps, but is best known as the creator of the “Sweet Valley High” book series and the spinoffs of that.

Ms. Pascal wrote the first 12 books in the series, then worked with a team of writers to keep a steady, rapid publication pace, often a book a month. She would draft a detailed outline, then hand it to a writer to flesh out while relying on what Ms. Pascal called her “bible” — a compendium of descriptions of the personalities, settings and dense web of relationships that defined life in Sweet Valley.

Edna O’Brien, author.

Roland Dumas, French foreign minister under François Mitterrand. This is the most French obit I’ve read recently.

A longtime confidant of François Mitterrand, the Socialist former president, Mr. Dumas was one of the most high-profile officials in France for two decades. His career stretched from the French Resistance to the summit of power, taking in epoch-making treaties, secretive negotiations with world leaders, numerous extramarital affairs, expensive art — works by Picasso, Braque and Chagall hung in his sumptuous apartment on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris — and a notorious pair of $2,700 made-to-measure Berluti shoes that featured in a 2001 corruption trial.
Mr. Dumas avoided jail, but his conviction, which was eventually overturned, ended his career. He had already been forced to resign from the presidency of the Constitutional Council, France’s highest appeals body. Christine Deviers-Joncour, a former lingerie model who had given him the shoes while they were having an affair, was not so lucky: She published a memoir called “The Whore of the Republic” (“La Putain de la République,” 1998) and spent five months in prison.

…

Mr. Mitterrand said of him, “I have two lawyers: Badinter for the law,” referring to Robert Badinter, the upright jurist who abolished the death penalty in France, “and Dumas for everything that’s twisted.”

…

But like Mr. Mitterrand, Mr. Dumas was skeptical of many aspects of European integration. He failed to foresee the rapid collapse of Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, believed in the fixed European relationships and borders established after World War II and, for much of his life, harbored hostility for Germany and Germans.
He traced this sentiment to what he often said was the pivotal event of his life: the firing-squad shooting of his father, a member of the Resistance, by the Germans on March 26, 1944, when Mr. Dumas was 21 and himself in the French underground.

…

He served as foreign minister until 1993. Two years later, Mr. Mitterrand appointed him to the Constitutional Council, the summit of a French political career.
In the meantime he had become involved with Ms. Deviers-Joncour, whom the state oil company, Elf-Aquitaine, hoping to curry favor with Mr. Dumas, had hired as a “lobbyist,” showering her with favors to the tune of nearly $9 million, including a luxurious Left Bank apartment. She used the money to give Mr. Dumas valuable ancient artifacts, expensive meals and the custom Berluti shoes, among other things.
Mr. Dumas later suggested that he was unclear about the source of all this spending. That argument was eventually adopted by an appeals court, which threw out his six-month prison sentence in 2003, to the outrage of critics across the political spectrum, who saw France’s protective old-boy network in action.

Finally, William L. Calley Jr.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, Second Lieutenant Calley, a 24-year-old platoon leader who had been in Vietnam just three months, led about 100 men of Charlie Company into My Lai 4, an inland hamlet about halfway up the east coast of South Vietnam. The Americans moved in under ambiguous orders, suggesting to some that anyone found in the hamlet, even women and children, might be Vietcong enemies.
While they met no resistance, the Americans swept in shooting. Over the next few hours, horrors unfolded. Witnesses said victims were rousted from huts, herded into an irrigation ditch or the village center and shot.
Villagers who refused to come out were killed in their huts by hand grenades or bursts of gunfire. Others were shot as they emerged from hiding places. Infants and children were bayoneted and shot, and an unknown number of females were raped and shot. A military photographer took pictures.
Although Lieutenant Calley’s immediate superiors knew generally what had happened, the atrocity was covered up in military reports, which called it a successful search-and-destroy mission. It took nearly a year and a half — and persistent efforts by a few soldiers and an independent investigative journalist, Seymour M. Hersh, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for his disclosures — for investigations to grind forward and the story to reach a stunned world.

…

On Sept. 6, 1969, he was charged with the mass murder of civilians at My Lai. He was one of 25 people charged in the case, including two generals accused of misconduct. But charges against the generals were dropped, as were those against 10 other officers and seven enlisted men accused of murder or suppression of evidence. Six men were court-martialed, but all except Lieutenant Calley were acquitted, among them Capt. Ernest Medina, the company commander.
Lieutenant Calley’s trial, in Fort Benning, Ga., opened in November 1970. He was accused of personally killing 102 civilians. Many soldiers refused to testify. But eight witnesses, in often shockingly graphic testimony, said the lieutenant had herded sobbing, cowering villagers into a ditch and the hamlet center and shot them in bunches, and had ordered his troops to kill as well.
The number of victims at My Lai was never fixed precisely; the Army did not count the bodies. The official American estimate was 347, but a Vietnamese memorial at the site lists 504 names, with ages ranging from 1 to 82.
Lieutenant Calley, in three days of testimony, expressed no remorse and insisted that he had only followed orders by Captain Medina to kill all the villagers, quoting him as saying that everyone in the village was “the enemy.” The captain denied saying that, insisting that he had meant his order to apply only to enemy soldiers.
In March 1971, Lieutenant Calley was convicted of the premeditated murder of “not less than” 22 Vietnamese and sentenced to life in prison. Americans, long divided over Vietnam, were overwhelmingly outraged, calling him a scapegoat for a long chain of command that had gone unpunished. Many blamed the war itself, or said the lieutenant was only doing his duty.

…

Days after the sentencing, President Richard M. Nixon spared the lieutenant from prison, allowing him to remain in his bachelor apartment at Fort Benning pending appeals. In an ensuing roller-coaster of legal maneuvers, the fort’s commanding general reduced the life term to 20 years, and Secretary of the Army Howard Callaway cut it to 10 years, saying that Mr. Calley would be paroled after only one-third of that term.
In 1974, a federal judge in Georgia, J. Robert Elliott, overturned the conviction, saying Mr. Calley had been denied a fair trial because of prejudicial publicity. The Army appealed, and Mr. Calley was confined to barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for three months. He was then released on bail and never returned to custody.
In 1975, a federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed Judge Elliott and reinstated the conviction. And in 1976, the United States Supreme Court refused to review the case, letting the conviction stand and closing a bitter chapter of national history. By then, Mr. Calley had qualified for parole. His life term had been whittled down to slightly more than three years of house arrest and barracks confinement, which had ended in 1974.

WP (archived).

Posted in Admin, Books, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Why don’t we have a party?

Monday, July 29th, 2024

Since I’ve been blogging for 15 years, why not?

And what better kind of party to throw than…a gun book party! Because a gun book party don’t stop until we’re out of gun books, and I don’t see that happening. But I did run out of time to get this post up on Sunday, so I’m moving the party to Monday night instead.

Also, I’d like to get some more gun books off the kitchen table and reduce the stack before Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) gets sprung from durance vile and returns home. After the jump…

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Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | 4 Comments »

Things I didn’t know about until today.

Wednesday, July 24th, 2024

But which I find interesting:

1. The Romance Writers of America filed for bankruptcy at the end of May.

2. The RWA convention is in Austin this year. Maybe. According to the article, it was supposed to take place at the end of July, but is now scheduled for October. Except, when I went to the registration page, it doesn’t seem to be allowing registrations.

Edited to add 7/26: conference registration is now open. Dates are October 11th – 13th, and the cost is $349 ($399 if you’re not a member of RWA).

How did they manage to go bankrupt? The way you’d expect: they angered a bunch of their members, who are now ex-members.

Today, the group’s membership hovers at around 2,000, and it owes approximately $3 million in hotel contracts for the group’s past annual conferences.

I kind of want to keep this post short-ish, so I’m not going into details about how RWA made so many people angry: the linked article discusses the Courtney Milan affair (which I remember reading about as it was unfolding: as much as I hate linking to Wikipedia, that entry fills in some missing details) and the 2021 VIVIAN controversy (I know, two Wiki links in a row, but the primary source link is broken and the other links are to sites I don’t link to, or are not good sources). You can click through if you want more details on those issues: I just find the collapse of RWA interesting, and a little sad. I feel like writers need strong organizations to protect them from predatory publishers and publishing practices, so I’ll be unhappy to see RWA go.

“It would have been easier if I could have just said, ‘Well, deeply racist organization gone forever,’” she said. “But that’s not the story as I saw it. For me, and for a lot of people in Romancelandia, this was a group where they had made lifelong friendships, where there were very promising signs of progress in terms of redressing past mistakes.”

And if RWA goes away, that’s going to reduce my chances to network and sell my gunsmith romance series.

(Also, another year, another Hugo controversy. But I already knew about that, and I don’t have any sites I’m willing to link to. Very short version: someone was trying to buy votes, and did it so clumsily a seven-year-old could have figured it out.)

3. On a happier note, at least for me – because I hate the Olympics – the IOC is threatening to revoke Salt Lake City’s hosting status for the Winter 2034 games.

The IOC seems to be upset that…wait for it…the United States government, specifically Congress and the Department of Justice, are looking into how the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) handled the case of the Chinese swimmers.

But many American athletes say they don’t trust WADA’s procedures and want probes to continue.
“What the athletes think, they want transparency,” said Katie Ledecky, the star U.S. swimmer, who spoke at a separate press conference on Wednesday. “They want further answers to the questions that still remain.”
In a statement, Travis Tygart head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) blasted the IOC for linking the China scandal to Salt Lake City’s bid.
“It is shocking to see the IOC itself stooping to threats in an apparent effort to silence those seeking answers,” Tygart said. “It seems more apparent than ever that WADA violated the rules and needs accountability and reform.”

…

“Russia and China have been too big to fail in [WADA’s] eyes and they get a different set of rules than the rest of the world does unfortunately,” Tygart said.

I’m excited about this. I hope the IOC pulls the Salt Lake City bid, I hope they have to frantically scramble to find a new host city, I hope they completely fail because nobody wants to host the Olympics because they are a giant money pit with no financial returns, and I hope some folks from the IOC and WADA wind up in prison.

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