I think it is time to bring back chariot racing.
No politics, no political statements: just chariot racing. I’m sure we can get a TV deal, and not just on ESPN 8, “The Ocho”. Given a choice between televised chariot racing and televised cornhole, what do you think people are going to watch?
Apparently, the NFL started their regular season this weekend.
I just barely noticed.
It isn’t so much the politics, although McThag has a good post up on that. I’m just finding it really difficult to care.
Still, one of the motivations for starting this blog was the NFL loser update, and as a wise man once said…
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
San Francisco
Carolina
Tampa Bay
Atlanta
Dallas
Philadelphia
New York Football Giants
Minnesota
Detroit
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Denver
Indianapolis
Houston
New York Jets
Miami
In other semi-related football news, I have been reading as much of Gregg Easterbrook’s Twitter as I can stomach, and there has been no mention of “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” at all. Not just a lack of pointers to the current column, but also a lack of “if you liked it, write our sponsor” messages. I have to assume that he’s not doing it this year, though his silence on the subject is a little strange.
With precise control, he had swing-and-miss stuff. He struck out more than 200 batters in 10 different seasons, a National League record, and on April 22, 1970, facing the San Diego Padres, he struck out a record 10 batters in a row to end the game. His total of 3,640 strikeouts in his 20 big-league seasons is sixth on the career list.
He was also a cerebral sort, a thinker who studied opposing hitters and pored over the details of each pitch — its break, its speed, its location. As he aged and his arm strength diminished, it was his strategic thinking and experience that extended his career.
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He was the team’s first bona fide star, known to New York fans as Tom Terrific and, more tellingly, The Franchise. The team was established five years before he arrived, and had not finished higher than ninth in the 10-team National League. Even then, the Mets had quickly earned a reputation for chuckleheaded ineptitude.
The Mets were hardly more inspiring in Seaver’s first two seasons, finishing 10th in 1967 and ninth in 1968, but Seaver himself served as the signal that the team’s fortunes were turning.
Until his arrival, no Mets pitcher had ever won more than 13 games in a season; Seaver won 16 his first year and 16 more the next.
He was the league’s rookie of the year in 1967, and was an All-Star nine times in 10 full seasons with the Mets. He had five seasons with more than 20 wins for the team, led the league in strikeouts five times and in earned run average three times. He won three Cy Young Awards as the league’s best pitcher.
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In what The New York Times called “one of the blockbuster trades in baseball history,” he was immediately sent to the Reds for four players of far lesser stature: Pat Zachry, Doug Flynn, Steve Henderson and Dan Norman.
“Dick Young dragged my wife and family into it, and I couldn’t take that,” Seaver said after the trade. “I called the Mets and said, ‘That’s it, it’s all over.’ This alliance or whatever it is — this alliance between Young and the chairman of the board — is stacked against me.”
The deal, which became known among Met fans as the Midnight Massacre — two other Mets, Dave Kingman and Mike Phillips were traded the same night — has been considered by many as the lowest point — or as The New York Post has called it, “the darkest day” — in Mets history.
It certainly didn’t work out for the Mets. Seaver shined for the Reds and without him, attendance at Shea Stadium plummeted for the Mets, who finished in last place three seasons in a row and didn’t win as many as 70 games until 1984.
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For his career he was 311-205 with an earned run average of 2.86.
Sophia Farrar. She’s kind of an obscure figure, but this gives me a chance to give the NYT another swift kick in the teeth.
Ms. Farrar tried to help Kitty Genovese.
Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times reported in a front-page article that 37 apathetic neighbors who witnessed the murder failed to call the police, and another called only after she was dead.
It would take decades for a more complicated truth to unravel, including the fact that one neighbor actually raced from her apartment to rescue Ms. Genovese, knowing she was in distress but unaware whether her assailant was still on the scene.
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“For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens,” the Times article began (there were actually only two attacks). “Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again.”
That account — epitomized by one neighbor’s stated excuse that “I didn’t want to get involved” — galvanized outrage, became the accepted narrative for decades and even spawned a subject of study in psychology: how bystanders react to tragedy. Except that with the benefit of hindsight, the number of eyewitnesses turned out to have been exaggerated; none actually saw the attack completely; some who heard it thought it was a drunken brawl or a lovers’ quarrel; and several people said they did call the police.
(Previously. Previously.)
The first two panels of today’s “Dinosaur Comics”. Having extensively studied listened to the first 112 or so episodes of “The History Of Rome”, I am confident in stating that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire began when the Empire proscribed setting off fireworks whenever you felt like it.
All of this Babylon Bee op-ed. (Hattip: MtM.) Yes, I am aware that they are a satire site, but everything in that piece is correct: everything did start going downhill when men stopped wearing hats.
“The best thing about kids’ soccer being canceled this year”. Although I quibble slightly with this: the best thing about kids soccer being cancelled isn’t the renewed socialization, it is the fact that kids aren’t playing soccer.
The Canadian Football League has cancelled the 2020 season.
It seems to have come down to this: the CFL depends on ticket sales at the gate, rather than TV or streaming revenue. Without ticket sales, they wanted a government bailout in order to play this season: and, shockingly (to me) the Canadian government said “No”.
The Manitoba government stepped up with $2.5 million for player accommodations, meals and transportation in Winnipeg.
The league, though, said it still required a significant cash infusion from Ottawa.
The federal government responded with an offer of a short-term loan with interest and fees that the league said it could not pay.
I thought perhaps I could do something on the lighter, cheerier side for Saturday.
The late John Hillerman tells the funniest joke he’d ever heard. As an admirer of Churchill myself, I approve of this joke, even though I have heard it before. Really, Hillerman’s delivery makes up for it being oft cited.
I don’t want to post a bunch of these, but just one more that I couldn’t pass up. Because: Shatner.
(“There’s no rule that says a mule horse can’t play football baseball!” My DuckDuckGo-fu may be weak, but I looked through the 2019 MLB rulebook, and I actually do not see any requirement that players be human. I guess as long as your horse isn’t on baseball’s permanently ineligible list…)
(“Bojack Horseman, call the commissioner, please.”)
Anyway, I actually had not heard that one. And it gives me a nice transition into this video, which I thought I’d post since Eddie Gaedel was mentioned earlier in the week:
One thing that’s been popping up in my recommendations recently is “STEP promotion” videos. Now, we’ve already established that I never served, and there’s probably a few (okay, more than a few) people who think I place an awful lot of emphasis on military stuff, military history, and military leadership for someone who didn’t serve.
There may be some truth to that. But the STEP videos reinforce something that’s important to me where I am now, and where I hope to be in the future: immediate public praise and reward for exceptional performance.
And finally, someone commented earlier this week: “Veronica Lake always gets the thumbs-up seal of approval.” I usually don’t like linking fiction or movie clips here, unless I’m using them to illustrate a throwaway joke or a larger point.
I’m making an exception in this case to give you something even better than Veronica Lake: Veronica Lake, wet.
Jim Boylen out as Chicago Bulls coach. Tribune.
He was 39-84 over “parts of two seasons”, which I believe works out to a .317 winning percentage.
(Are they playing pro basketball now? I haven’t noticed.)
Sumner Redstone, media mogul.
Beginning with a modest chain of drive-in movie theaters, Mr. Redstone negotiated, sued and otherwise fought to amass holdings that over time included CBS, the Paramount film and television studios, the publisher Simon & Schuster, the video retail giant Blockbuster and a host of cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon. At their peak, the businesses were worth more than $80 billion.
Toward the end of his life, he controlled about 80 percent of the voting stock in Viacom and CBS, presiding over both through National Amusements. And almost to the end, his grip was tight and his enthusiasm undiminished.
I’d heard of the man, in the context of his recent legal struggles, but this was something I did not know:
It was in 1979 that Mr. Redstone almost died in a fire at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, started by a disgruntled former hotel employee late at night, when most guests, including Mr. Redstone, were asleep.
“I was enveloped in flames,” he wrote. “The fire shot up my legs. The pain was searing.” He staggered to the window and hung from a ledge on an upper floor until firefighters rescued him. He suffered third-degree burns over 45 percent of his body, and it took five operations over several months to restore him to health.
He was 97.
Kurt Luedtke. He was a journalist with the Detroit Free Press:
At The Free Press, Mr. Luedtke became the first writer of Action Line, a column that cut through red tape and helped solve readers’ problems. It ran on the front page for 14 years and was copied throughout the newspaper industry.
By 1967, he had been named assistant city editor. That summer, Detroit exploded in one of the most destructive periods of civil unrest in the nation’s history. Five days of violence, fueled by deep frustration with racism, unemployment and police brutality, left 43 people dead, most of them African-American. More than 1,300 buildings were burned, and the National Guard and Army were called in.
Mr. Luedtke joined his reporters on the streets, dodging bullets and bayonets. After the riots, he assembled notes from other reporters, who had conducted more than 300 interviews, and wrote a hard-hitting article that concluded that few of the 43 who died had been rioters and that their deaths had mostly been avoidable. The article was part of a Free Press package that won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting.
He also wrote about how, during the rioting, the police had stormed the Algiers Hotel and killed three young Black men who were staying there. That infamous episode became the subject of a book, “The Algiers Motel Incident” (1968), by John Hersey, author of “Hiroshima” (1946), and of a critically acclaimed movie, “Detroit” (2017), directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
He left the newspaper and went into screenwriting. His first produced screenplay was “Absence of Malice”, which you may remember for Wilford Brimley’s short but significant appearance. He was nominated for an Oscar for best original screenplay, but lost to “Chariots of Fire”. He did win an Oscar for best adapted screenplay for “Out Of Africa”.
At the movie’s Detroit premiere, he was interviewed by an old friend, Mort Crim, a local television anchor. In an online tribute on Monday, Mr. Crim recalled their conversation:
“He said, ‘Crim, you and I both went to journalism school; I ended up kissing Meryl Streep, and you end up interviewing me. Where did you go wrong?’”
Bill Yeoman, noted University of Houston football coach.
Yeoman was the man responsible for turning the University of Houston football program from relative obscurity into national prominence in two-and-a-half decades. He guided the Cougars to four Southwest Conference championships and 11 bowl games, posting a 6-4-1 mark in postseason competition.
Off the field, Yeoman played a key role early in the integration of college athletics with the signing of running back Warren McVea in 1964 as the Cougars’ first African-American Football student-athlete.
The Cougars had 17 winning seasons under Yeoman, including nine campaigns with at least eight victories. UH finished nationally ranked 11 times, concluding the 1976 season with its highest national ranking at No. 4 by both the Associated Press and United Press International.
Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.
–Gen. Robert H. Barrow, USMC
In that vein, “Of Ships and Butter”, a 1970s (in color!) US Navy film about the Navy’s role in protecting shipping.
Bonus video: “U.S. News Review”, one of those old newsreels. I put it here because Veronica Lake shows up at about the :24 mark. And as far as I am concerned (and I hope the vast majority of my readers will agree with me) I need no justification other than “Veronica Lake”.
For the record: William English (one of the people who helped build the first mouse) and Frances Allen, noted computer scientist and researcher. Both of these have been extensively covered in a lot of places, which is why I’m only noting them here.
Terry Cannon. My feelings about baseball are well known, but Mr. Cannon sounds like my type of person. He founded the Baseball Reliquary:
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The first induction, in 1999, exemplified the shrine’s type of inductee: Curt Flood, who helped pave the way for free agency by challenging baseball’s reserve clause, which tied a player to his team year after year unless an owner traded or released him; Bill Veeck, the maverick owner of several teams; and [Dock] Ellis, a thoughtful, idiosyncratic Black pitcher, mostly for the Pittsburgh Pirates, who spoke out on racial issues.
Ellis attended his induction ceremony and wept, saying that Major League Baseball had never honored him. He recalled receiving a letter from Jackie Robinson (a 2005 shrine inductee) urging him to continue to push for change in baseball.
“He was crying his eyes out,” Ms. Cannon, who is also the reliquary’s artistic director, said in an interview. “I had to reach over and pat his hand to bring him back.”
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Mr. Cannon was, indeed, a serious scholar, but the artifacts he collected invariably prompted a smile — as did his use, at his wife’s suggestion, of the word “reliquary,” which means a container for holy relics.
There is the jockstrap worn by the 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel, who appeared as a pinch-hitter for the St. Louis Browns in 1951 in a stunt conceived by Mr. Veeck. And there is the sacristy box that a priest used in 1948 to give the last rites to Babe Ruth, who died nearly a month later.
Then there are the curlers that Ellis wore on the field during batting practice at Three Rivers Stadium after Ebony magazine wrote about his hairstyle.
“I was interested in things that other museums weren’t interested in collecting,” Mr. Cannon told Pasadena Weekly in 2017. “Like, if they wanted bats and gloves, I wanted things to keep famous stories alive. It was more interesting to find a desiccated hot dog that Babe Ruth partially digested than a signed baseball or bat.”
Richard Lapointe. This is an incredibly sad story worth noting here.
In March of 1987, Bernice Martin was raped and murdered, and her apartment was set on fire. She was 88 years old, and the grandmother of Mr. Lapointe’s wife. Mr. Lapointe, who was born with a brain malformation that left him with limited mental capability, was interrogated by the police. Eventually, he signed three confessions to the crime, “though their legitimacy was open to debate“.
He was convicted in 1992 and sentenced to life. But almost immediately people raised questions about the conviction.
Among those who smelled a miscarriage of justice from the start was Tom Condon, a columnist for The Courant. Ten days after the conviction, he began his column this way:
“Richard Lapointe is short, chubby and owlishly homely. He wears a hearing aid and thick glasses. He is meek and deferential. He is not very bright.
“Watching him on the witness stand and examining the record, it is hard to believe that on one night in his 46 years, and one night only, he turned into a crazed psychopathic sex killer.
“It is so hard to believe, that maybe he didn’t.”
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Among other issues, Mr. Lapointe’s disability may have left him particularly inclined to please others, including pleasing the police by signing confessions. And his disability may also have left him so poorly coordinated that he was physically incapable of doing the crime.
It was not until 2015 that the Connecticut Supreme Court intervened, examining an argument that exonerating evidence had not reached the defense. Its ruling reversing the conviction did not mince words.
“The petitioner was forty-two years old when he allegedly committed one of the most brutal crimes in our state’s history — the rape, torture and murder of a defenseless eighty-eight year old woman, a person who, by all accounts, was like a grandmother to him,” the majority opinion read. “Although there is abundant evidence in the record concerning the petitioner’s simplemindedness, his peculiarities and his very rigid way of thinking, one searches the record in vain for evidence that he ever was physically violent, that he suffered from a mood disorder, psychosis, drug addiction or anything else that could explain why, after visiting the victim every Sunday for years, he suddenly went back to her apartment on the Sunday in question and brutally murdered her, without his wife noticing either that he had left their house or any change in his demeanor or appearance upon his return.”
He lived for five years after his release. According to people who knew him, he had dementia and had been hospitalized with COVID.
Sports firings have been kind of slow recently. With very little sports going on, who’s going to get fired and why?
Answer: Nikita Lowry Dawkins, assistant women’s basketball coach at Texas Tech. And head coach Marlene Stollings.
As for the why…
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Wednesday’s report by USA TODAY Sports, in collaboration with The Intercollegiate, was based on season-ending exit interviews with players from the past two seasons, other documents and interviews with 10 players, two former assistant coaches and two parents. Six of the players spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Among the claims from players:
Coaches directed players to maintain an heart rate of at least 90% of capacity during play or face conditioning assignments or risk losing playing time.
The three international players on rosters the past two seasons allegedly faced treatment such as being ridiculed, isolated and threatened by coaches. Brazil native Marcella LaMark said Stollings told LaMark her fitness lagged so far behind teammates’ that she was “dangerous” to them.
Emma Merriweather, a 6-5 center, said she was admonished by coaches for displaying symptoms of depression, for which she was eventually diagnosed. She was also allegedly told by assistant coach Lowry Dawkins to snap a rubber band on her wrist when she had a negative thought.
Five players alleged Petrella sexually harassed players, making suggestive comments to one player and using a therapy technique that involved applying pressure to some players’ chests and pubic bones and groins.
Three players said Stollings retaliated by holding tougher practices after they brought abuse claims to school officials, including Judi Henry, executive senior associate athletic director and senior women’s administrator.
The “Petrella” mentioned above is strength and conditioning coach Ralph Petrella. He resigned in March.
Over the past few days, the paper of record has run two obits that fall into the “obscure outside of a specific niche, but interesting” category.
Jay Riffe. He took up spearfishing when he was 10 years old (“to get food for the table”). He became the Pacific Coast spearfishing champion at 22.
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Louis Colavecchio. He used to make jewelry, but turned his skills to a more lucrative occupation: counterfeiting.
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All of Mr. Colavecchio’s work was meticulous. He could toil alone under microscopes for days, filled by a desire to trick the federal government and the casinos. He would not brook the possibility of an error; each die had to be perfect.
“Making counterfeit items must have appealed to me in some way that I didn’t understand,” Mr. Colavecchio wrote in his book.
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His tokens were masterly because he crushed the originals and got the exact breakdown of their composition, Mr. Longo said. Mr. Colavecchio purchased the material, bought a press and, using a laser-cutting die, made molds and copies.
“It’s like having access to the U.S. Mint on the weekend, printing your money and leaving,” Mr. Longo said.
In case you were wondering, his book is You Thought It Was More: Adventures of the World’s Greatest Counterfeiter, Louis the Coin (affiliate link). I may have to order a copy of that for myself.
Great and good FotB Borepatch sent over a nice obit from ArsTechnica for Grant Imahara, which I very much appreciated. There’s also a very good Hacker News thread.
Joel Schumacher, director. Variety. THR.
Batman & Robin, however, was a critical disaster, and Schumacher admitted years later that he had made a mistake by listening to studio marketing executives, who wanted to target the film to kids.
“I want to apologize to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Vice.
“A lot of it was my choice. No one is responsible for my mistakes but me. I think one curveball we got was at the eleventh hour; Val Kilmer quit due to a role he got in The Island of Dr. Moreau. There had been talks about it, but none of us were involved, not with Warner Bros. and certainly not with me. I talked to Val, and all he kept saying was, ‘But man, it’s Marlon Brando.’ It’s not like he was on a hook and chain here, so Val went. So it was [then Warners co-CEO] Bob Daly’s idea to acquire George Clooney. He was an obvious choice because he was a rising star on ER. I had a talk with him and he was like, ‘All right, if you do it, I’ll do it.’
Wait, wait: Kilmer skipped out on Batman because he wanted to do “The Island of Dr. Moreau“? I haven’t laughed this hard since the hogs ate my kid brother.
Jim Kiick, Miami Dolphins running back in the early 1970s.
Running behind a fearsome offensive line, Kiick, fullback Larry Csonka and halfback Mercury Morris propelled the Dolphins to three Super Bowls and back-to-back titles in the 1972 and 1973 seasons.
Kiick scored six touchdowns during those playoff runs, including one in Super Bowl VII, a 14-7 win over the Washington Redskins, that helped the team complete the N.F.L.’s only perfect season. Kiick scored another touchdown and Csonka added two more in Super Bowl VIII, a 24-7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I had not heard of him, either, but he wrote The Shadow of the Wind, which is “…the second-most-successful Spanish novel after Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece “Don Quixote,” according to Planeta.”
A visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s, inspired Mr. Ruiz Zafón to write “The Shadow of the Wind,” but he set the action in his birthplace, Barcelona. Written as a story within a story, the novel crisscrosses the tumultuous decades before, during and after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
It starts in 1945, when a boy named Daniel Sempere is taken by his father to a mysterious place known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where Daniel selects a book called “The Shadow of the Wind.” Fascinated by its obscure author, Julián Carax, Daniel enlists the help of friends to investigate the writer’s past, which also brings up the disturbing story of a character who has been burning all the copies of the book he can find.
That sounds like something that’s in my wheelhouse.
Kurt Thomas, gymnast.
He competed in the 1976 Olympics, but didn’t win any medals. He won a gold medal at the world championships in 1978: he was the first American to do so.
He was a favorite to medal in the 1980 Olympics, but we all know what happened there.
He also starred in the 1985 film, “Gymkata“, a fact the NYT curiously omits from their coverage.
Wes Unseld, NBA center.
There are only two players who have been named MVP and rookie of the year in the same season. The other one is Wilt Chamberlain.
Pat Dye, Auburn football coach.
Elsa Dorfman, photographer. She specialized in taking portraits with the giant 20×24 Polaroid camera, about which I have written previously.
By way of Hacker News (and I don’t think the WSJ link is going to work for many people): Irene Triplett. Ms. Triplett was 90 years old, and was the last person still receiving a Civil War pension.
According to the WallyJ, which I can read but can’t link here, her father (Moses Triplett) started out fighting for the Confederacy, then defected to the Union side in 1863. He married a woman named Elda Hall in 1924, had Irene Triplett in 1930 (he was 83, his wife was 34), and died in 1938 at 92.
Her pension was apparently $73.13 a month, though she received other benefits as a ward of the state. In addition, “…a pair of Civil War buffs visited and sent her money to spend on Dr. Pepper and chewing tobacco, a habit she picked up in the first grade.”