Those of us who are, shall we say, of a certain age, fondly remember “Baa Baa Black Sheep“.
By way of McThag (and thank you sir): a history of the Corsairs used in filming the show.
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
70s television (and aircraft) geekery.
Tuesday, October 22nd, 2019Obit watch: October 20, 2019.
Sunday, October 20th, 2019Nick Tosches, fiction writer and biographer.
One of his most attention-getting biographies followed in 1992. It was “Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams,” about Dean Martin.
“Recordings, movies, radio, television: He would cast his presence over them all, a mob-culture Renaissance man,” he wrote of Martin. “And he would come to know, as few ever would, how dirty the business of dreams could be.”
For Mr. Tosches, Martin was a celebrity who beat the unrelenting fame machine, the one that often ground stars up and consigned them to early deaths. (Martin himself died in 1995 at 78.)
“I would describe Dean as a noble character in an ignoble racket in an ignoble age,” Mr. Tosches told The New York Times in 1992.
“Life is a racket,” he added. “Writing is a racket. Sincerity is a racket. Everything’s a racket.”
If everything is a racket, is anything worthwhile? Like trying to help out the poor?
…
In an era when foreign aid is largely based on charity, Dr. Polak (pronounced POLE-ack) instead advocated training people to earn livings by selling their neighbors basic necessities like clean water, charcoal, a ride in a donkey cart or enough electricity to charge a cellphone.
Although the nonprofit companies he created did accept donations, their purpose was to help poor people make money. His target market was the 700 million people around the world surviving on less than $2 a day, and he traveled all over the world seeking them out.
…
His most successful project was in foot-powered treadle pumps to pull water out of the ground. Beginning in 1982, he sold millions for about $25 each in Bangladesh and India, he said. The company he created for the project, iDE for International Development Enterprises, now operates in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The cost included the mechanism, which could be built in a local welding shop, and drilling the well. Dr. Polak’s organization trained thousands of welders and drillers. The customers — small farmers — supplied the foot power and long bamboo handles for the pumps, the device resembling a crude elliptical trainer.
To sell them, Dr. Polak ran a publicity campaign: a singing, dancing Bollywood-style movie about a couple that could not marry because her father could not afford a dowry. But once he bought a pump and could grow vegetables in the dry season, when they fetch more money, love triumphed.
…
By contrast, he said, the World Bank was subsidizing expensive diesel pumps that drew enough water to cover 40 acres. They were handed out by government agents, who could be bribed, he said, and the richest landowner would thus become “a waterlord,” who could drain the aquifer supplying everyone else’s wells and then charge them for water.
“It was very destructive to social justice,” Dr. Polak said.
Another franchise company he started in India was Spring Health, which uses battery power to convert salt into chlorine. The bleach is used to disinfect local water, which is then sold door-to-door in refillable containers.
Franchisees get caps and shirts with distinctive blue raindrops, and street theater troupes help uneducated people make the connection between dirty water and diarrhea, which sickens millions of children every day and, when chronic, can leave them mentally and physically stunted.
Bill Macy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Maude’s husband. But he knocked around a bunch of other stuff too.
Samuel Hynes, literature professor, author, and WWII torpedo bomber pilot. I’ve heard that Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator is a terrific book: anyone out there care to comment?
Not an Oracle guy, but for the historical record: Mark Hurd.
Sara Danius. She was the first woman to head the Swedish Academy. The Academy gives out the literature prize, and she was behind Bob Dylan winning in 2016. She was forced out in 2018.
I note this obit here less because of interest in the literature Nobel, and more because I find that it contains a remarkably high level of editorializing for a NYT obit.
She herself was never accused of wrongdoing. But she was the public face of a global institution whose reputation had been severely damaged.
Behind the scenes, her enemies within the academy sought to protect the accused man. They resisted her attempts to bring in law enforcement and forced her out.
When she left, Ms. Danius acknowledged that her colleagues had lost confidence in her leadership. She also defiantly suggested that arrogant and anachronistic forces within the academy had invoked the institution’s traditions to deny accountability.
“Not all traditions are worth preserving,” she said.
Her abrupt departure infuriated many women — and many men as well — across Sweden, a country that prides itself on gender equality. She was widely viewed as a scapegoat.
…
The man at the center of the sex scandal, Jean-Claude Arnault, was found guilty last year of raping a woman in 2011 and sentenced to two years in jail. In his appeal of the verdict, the appeals court found him guilty of raping the same woman twice and extended his sentence.
In addition, his wife, Katarina Frostenson, a poet who resigned from the academy, was accused of leaking the names of prize recipients to Mr. Arnault on at least seven occasions so that their friends could profit from bets. The two have denied all charges and said they were the objects of a witch hunt.
Obit watch: October 12, 2019.
Saturday, October 12th, 2019By way of Lawrence, Robert Forster.
Yeah, he was great in “Jackie Brown”, which I still think is Tarantino’s most restrained and disciplined movie. But he did a lot of other movie and TV work to varying degrees of success. As I’ve said before, I wasn’t a “Twin Peaks” guy, so I missed him there. But he was in “Avalanche”, “Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence”, and “The Black Hole”, he did guest shots on many series (“Magnum, P.I.”, “Jake and the Fatman”, “Police Story”), and he was in a few unsuccessful series (“Banyon”, “Nakia”, “Karen Sisco”).
Aleksei Leonov, Russian cosmonaut and the first man to walk in space.
What Mr. Leonov did not reveal until many years later was that he and his fellow cosmonaut, Pavel I. Belyayev, who was also an Air Force pilot, were fortunate to have survived.
Mr. Leonov’s specially designed suit had unexpectedly inflated during his walk, and its bulk was preventing him from getting back inside the Voskhod.
“I knew I could not afford to panic, but time was running out,” he recalled in the book “Two Sides of the Moon” (2004), written with the astronaut David Scott, about their experiences in space.
Mr. Leonov slowly deflated the suit by releasing oxygen from it, a procedure that threatened to leave him without life support. But with the reduced bulk, he finally made it inside.
“I was drenched with sweat, my heart racing,” he remembered.
But that, he added, “was just the start of dire emergencies which almost cost us our lives.”
The oxygen pressure in the spacecraft rose to a dangerous level, introducing the prospect that a spark in the electrical system could set off a disastrous explosion or fire.
It returned to a tolerable level, but the cosmonauts never figured out the reason for the surge.
When it came time for the return to Earth, the spacecraft’s automatic rocket-firing system did not work, forcing the cosmonauts to conduct imprecise manual maneuvers during the descent that left them in deep snow and freezing temperatures in a remote Russian forest, far from their intended landing point.
It took several hours for a search party to find them and drop supplies from a helicopter, and they spent two nights in the forest, the first one inside their spacecraft and the second one in a small log cabin built by a ground rescue crew, until rescuers arrived on skis. They then took a 12-mile ski trek to a clearing, where a helicopter evacuated them.
He also survived an attempt to kill Leonid Brezhnev, but you’ll have to read the obit for that story.
Anna Quayle. The name didn’t ring any bells with me, but she was in a bunch of stuff: “A Hard Day’s Night”, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, “Casino Royale” (the first one, with David Niven), “Stop the World – I Want to Get Off”, and the list goes on.
…died on Aug. 16, although her death was not announced by her family until early October. She was 86.
Her family did not say where she died or specify the cause. She had received a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia in 2012.
Obit watch: October 10, 2019.
Thursday, October 10th, 2019My morning went down the drain (for reasons I’m not authorized to talk about) so I’m only getting to this now:
Francis Currey, American badass.
Here is his citation from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society’s website:
He was 94. His death leaves two surviving recipients of the Medal of Honor from WWII.
Obit watch: September 26, 2019.
Thursday, September 26th, 2019NYT obit for Sid Haig, which is dated the 23rd but didn’t show up on their obit page until yesterday.
One I’ve been meaning to note all week: Mark von Hagen. You probably haven’t heard of him, but: he was the guy the NYT hired to determine if the paper should return Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer.
Professor von Hagen’s resulting eight-page report was highly critical of the coverage but made no recommendation about the prize. Only in interviews after the report was released did he suggest that the award be revoked because of what he described as Mr. Duranty’s “uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime.” In his view, he said, Mr. Duranty had fallen “under Stalin’s spell.”
“He really was kind of a disgrace in the history of The New York Times,” Professor von Hagen was quoted as saying.
In the end, however, the Pulitzer board decided that it did not have enough grounds to annul the award, which was bestowed in 1932.
Obit watch: September 25, 2019.
Wednesday, September 25th, 2019Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Reason. Rolling Stone.
I have to be honest: I am not a DeadHead. Never have been. I’m not really the person to look to for an obit or an appreciation. But i do think he did some good work. How about a musical interlude?
(I actually really like the Indigo Girls cover of this, but I can’t find a good version on YouTube.)
(Obligatory.)
Dr. Robert McClelland. He was one of the surgeons who treated John F. Kennedy at Parkland.
Inside, as doctors began lifesaving measures, it was clear that Kennedy’s condition was grave. His face was swollen, his skin bluish-black and his eyes protuberant, suggesting great pressure on his brain, Dr. McClelland told the Warren Commission in 1964 during its investigation of the assassination.
The lead surgeon, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry II, asked Dr. McClelland to assist in an emergency tracheotomy, and Dr. McClelland inserted a retractor into the incision that Dr. Perry had made in Kennedy’s neck to help accommodate a breathing tube.
Dr. McClelland’s position at the head of the gurney on which Kennedy lay gave him a close look at the severe wound at the back of the president’s head that had been caused by a second bullet.
The “posterior portion of the skull had been extremely blasted,” he told the commission. About a third of the president’s brain tissue was gone, he said.
Ironically, Dr. McClelland also treated Lee Harvey Oswald after he was shot.
A. Alverez, “British poet, critic and essayist” who had an unusual relationship with Sylvia Plath before she died. He also wrote about suicide and about the World Series of Poker: I’m pretty sure I’ve read The Biggest Game in Town, but I don’t know where my copy is right now.
I have one more obit to post, but that will go up later: I’m running out of time before work starts, and I want to do it right. Look for that one around mid-morning or posslbly lunch. Hint: this person was a big damn hero.
Obit watch: September 12, 2019.
Thursday, September 12th, 2019T. Boone Pickens. Oklahoma State football hardest hit.
Diet Eman has passed away at 99.
Ms. Eman, at 20, was living with her parents and bicycling to work at the Twentsche Bank in The Hague when, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands. Her sister’s fiancé was killed on the first of five days of fighting. (A brother died later in a Japanese prison camp.)
Some of her neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Ms. Eman — herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage and, for the most part, even lying to others — could find no justification for such evil.
She and her boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group (coincidentally called HEIN, an acronym translated as “Help each other in need”). They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal.
…
A plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Ms. Eman’s at the bank, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food and gas ration cards, forging identity papers and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews.
She said of the German occupiers, “It was beyond their comprehension that we would risk so much for the Jews.”
Ms. Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even toilet flushing risked raising the suspicions of neighbors, who knew only that a woman had been living there alone.
Ms. Eman was captured at one point and briefly imprisoned in a concentration camp: she managed to convince the Germans she was an innocent housemaid who knew nothing. Her fiance was also captured and was killed at Dachau.
It has been a bad week for photographers.
Robert Frank, noted for “The Americans”.
“The Americans” challenged the presiding midcentury formula for photojournalism, defined by sharp, well-lighted, classically composed pictures, whether of the battlefront, the homespun American heartland or movie stars at leisure. Mr. Frank’s photographs — of lone individuals, teenage couples, groups at funerals and odd spoors of cultural life — were cinematic, immediate, off-kilter and grainy, like early television transmissions of the period. They would secure his place in photography’s pantheon. The cultural critic Janet Malcolm called him the “Manet of the new photography.”
But recognition was by no means immediate. The pictures were initially considered warped, smudgy, bitter. Popular Photography magazine complained about their “meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons, and general sloppiness.” Mr. Frank, the magazine said, was “a joyless man who hates the country of his adoption.”
Neil Montanus. He worked in several different areas of photography, including underwater and microscopic. But he was perhaps most famous as one of Kodak’s leading “Colorama” photographers: he took 55 out of the 565 photos, which were displayed in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal between 1950 and 1990.
I kind of wish “On Taking Pictures” was still doing new shows, as I figure Jeffery Saddoris and Bill Wadman would have a lot to say about these two.
Finally: Daniel Johnston, singer/songwriter and Austin icon. Don’t have much to say: for me, he fell into the same category as Roky Erickson.
Obit watch: September 6, 2019.
Friday, September 6th, 2019Sharing the same riff with other folks, but: Robert Mugabe is burning in Hell.
Unemployment exceeded 80 percent. At one point, inflation ran at an almost incomprehensible 230 million percent: When a bank note with a face value of 10 trillion dollars was introduced in early 2009, it was worth only about $8 on the black market. Zimbabwe’s money became so worthless that it was effectively replaced by outside currencies, including the South African rand, the United States dollar and China’s yuan.
Mr. Mugabe morphed into a caricature of dictatorship: vain and capricious, encircled by the flashy spending of his second wife and other family members, who lived in luxury at home and went on shopping sprees and long annual vacations in the Far East. (That wife, the former Grace Marufu, had been his secretary and mistress, and Mr. Mugabe, despite a strict Roman Catholic upbringing, fathered two children with her while still married to his first wife, Sally Hayfron.)
…
Starting around 2000, Mr. Mugabe’s lieutenants sent squads of young men to invade hundreds of white-owned farms and chase away their owners. The campaign took a huge toll.
Over two years, nearly all of the country’s white-owned land had been redistributed to about 300,000 black families, among them 50,000 aspiring black commercial farmers and many of Mr. Mugabe’s loyalists. By late 2002, only about 600 of the country’s 4,500 white farmers had kept parts of their land.
The violent agricultural revolution had come with a heavy price: The economy was collapsing as farmland fell into disuse and peasant farmers struggled to grow crops without fertilizer, irrigation, farm equipment, money or seeds. Food shortages, at first ascribed to drought, only worsened as farmers were forced to stop farming. When food aid arrived, people who had opposed Mr. Mugabe said government officials had denied them handouts to punish them.
More hoplobibilophilia.
Monday, September 2nd, 2019Half-Price Books is having a 20% off sale over the long holiday weekend.
I haven’t found a lot of good stuff at the past few sales, but that didn’t stop me from going. And I think I see a break in the drought. I found some non-firearms related stuff:
- Season 1 of “Elementary”. I’ve already watched all of this with Lawrence, but Mom was griping that when the TV schedule changes after Labor Day, she’s not going to have anything to watch, so I figured this was worth taking a flyer on for her. Especially for $8 after discount (plus tax): while our TVs are set up with Amazon Prime, we’d have to pay $20 to watch this season.
- Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann. This won a fact crime Edgar, I enjoyed Grann’s The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, and I’ve seen a lot of people (including ones I didn’t think were fact crime buffs) reading this. Finally found a decent paperback copy cheap ($6.78 after discount + tax).
- Rogue Heroes: The History of the SAS, Britain’s Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged the Nazis and Changed the Nature of War by Ben Macintyre. I also liked A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, so I figured this was worth a shot. Though it looks like it should be more accurately called “The History of the SAS Through the End of WWII”. ($6.38 after discount + tax.)
- The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words edited by Barry Day. This was just for fun, and is also kind of weird: it isn’t really a biography of Chandler, but rather an attempt to summarize Chandler’s life, and his thoughts on various subjects (including booze, broads, and writing) using his own words: not just excerpts from the books and short stories, but also from letters he wrote to friends and others. I’m about 100 pages into it right now, and I think it’s kind of fun. ($5.59 after discount + tax.)
I wouldn’t be posting, though, if I hadn’t gotten lucky and found some gun books. Which I will put after the jump…
Obit watch: August 30, 2019.
Friday, August 30th, 2019He was the man standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald when Jack Ruby shot Oswald.
Ningali Lawford-Wolf, Australian Aboriginal actress. She was perhaps most famous as the mother in “Rabbit Proof Fence“.
Official NYT obit for Jessi Combs.
Ms. Combs was killed on Tuesday while attempting to set a land speed record.
Obit watch: August 14, 2019.
Wednesday, August 14th, 2019The name may ring a small bell for some of you. Others of you may be more familiar with his father…
…Dr. Carl A. Weiss, aka “The man who shot Huey Long”.
Maybe.
The junior Dr. Weiss spent much of his life trying to prove that his father did not shoot Long. Some historians agree:
The counternarrative asserts that the doctor had only punched Long, that the bodyguards had overreacted and that Long was actually killed in the fusillade of their bullets. The guards were said to have then covered up their reckless response by pinning the death on Weiss.
“In his heart he knew the allegations weren’t true,” Carl III said of his father in a telephone interview. “The one-man, one-gun, one-bullet is not what occurred.”
Professor Richard D. White Jr., dean of the E. J. Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University and the author of a more recent biography, “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long” (2006), shares those doubts.
“As a historian I cannot say either way, but deep in my heart I do not believe Carl shot Huey, but instead a stray bodyguard bullet hit him,” Professor White, who had met with Dr. Weiss Jr., said in an email this week.
…
Dr. Weiss ultimately cooperated with James E. Starrs, a forensic scientist at George Washington University, who tracked down Carl Sr.’s revolver (it was not unusual for Baton Rouge doctors making late-night house calls to be armed) and a single spent bullet.
They were found in a safe deposit box belonging to the daughter of Louisiana’s former top police official. Dr. Weiss joined the State Police in successfully suing to review the records and test fire the gun.
The police concluded that the bullet — if it was, indeed, the one that had killed Long — had not come from Weiss’s revolver.
Long’s clothes were also examined, and here the tearing of the material and the residue left on it indicated that Long had been shot at point-blank range. That undercut at least one theory — that Long was killed by a ricocheting bullet fired by a bodyguard.
I want to note here, for the record, that the supposed Weiss gun was not a revolver, but an FN Model 1910 pistol. As a matter of fact, it was this one.
I don’t know what to think about Long and Weiss. I’m inclined more in the direction of T. Harry Williams (who was writing close enough to the event that he could interview some first-hand witnesses, and believed that Weiss shot Long) than I am towards some of the later historians. On the other hand, the whole thing is just such a mess of botched investigations and chain of custody questions (how did the Weiss gun and the bullet end up in that guy’s safety deposit box?) that I doubt we’ll ever know anything for sure.
Obit watch: August 13, 2019.
Tuesday, August 13th, 2019Dorothy Olsen. She was 103 when she passed away on July 23rd.
You’ve probably never heard of her, but she was one of the WWII Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). The WASPs ferried military aircraft from manufacturing plants to points where they could then be flown overseas.
Transporting and testing the latest models, towing targets and transferring captured enemy planes, the WASPs collectively flew an estimated 60 million miles from 1942 to 1944. Thirty-eight died in accidents during training or on duty.
From her base in Long Beach, Calif., Mrs. Olsen flew 61 missions for the Sixth Ferry Group in nearly two dozen models, including P-38s, P-51s and B-17s. She flew them to West Coast airfields to be deployed in the Pacific, or to Newark to be deployed in Europe.
The WASPs were initially considered to be civil service employees and not military.
According to the paper of record, Ms. Olsen’s death leaves 38 surviving WASPs.
Henri Belolo, co-founder (with Jacques Morali) of the Village People.
I love the caption on that first photo.
Obit watch: August 9, 2019.
Friday, August 9th, 2019Rosie Ruiz, historical footnote. She apparently died in early July, but her death was not widely reported until recently.
For the younger set: Ms. Ruiz “won” the 1980 Boston Marathon, with a “finishing time” of 2:31:56.
Eventually, it came out that Ms. Ruiz hadn’t actually finished the NYC Marathon:
New York City Marathon officials invalidated Ruiz’s time after reviewing videotape showing that Ruiz had not crossed the finish line in the time she had mistakenly been assigned by a volunteer, who thought Ruiz was an injured runner.
Days later, Ruiz’s victory in Boston was also nullified. Race organizers there based their decision on about 10,000 photographs taken along the last mile of the race as well as on information supplied by the news media and observers along the route. In addition, at least one witness recalled seeing Ruiz enter the course at Kenmore Square, about a mile from the finish line.
Jacqueline Gareau was declared the women’s winner. According to Wikipedia (I know, I know) her time was 2:34:28, which was a record women’s time for the Boston Marathon.
Obit watch: August 5, 2019.
Monday, August 5th, 2019D. A. Pennebaker, noted mostly as a documentary filmmaker. (“Don’t Look Back”, “Primary”, “The War Room”.)
Nuon Chea is burning in Hell.
“Who?”
Known as Brother No. 2 — he was second in command to the movement’s founder, Pol Pot, who died in 1998 — Mr. Nuon Chea was convicted of, among other crimes, directing the forced evacuation of perhaps two million people from the capital, Phnom Penh, and overseeing the torture and killing of more than 14,000 people in a notorious prison, Tuol Sleng.
Often described as the movement’s chief ideologist, he was accused of laying out a “master plan” for the transformation of society that included the abolition of money and religion, the extermination of the educated class and the killing and expulsion of ethnic Vietnamese.
In the words of the court’s formal detention order, he planned or directed crimes including murder, torture, imprisonment, persecution, extermination, deportation, forcible transfer and enslavement.
Mr. Chea and Khieu Samphan were the only leading members of the Khmer Rouge who were convicted of any crimes. A third man, Kaing Guek Eav, who ran a prison (and reported to Mr. Chea), was also convicted: two other Khmer Rouge leaders died during the trial.
Mr. Nuon Chea denied involvement in the widespread killings. But in video recordings played to the court, he was heard acknowledging the purges, saying, “If we had shown mercy to these people, our nation would have been lost.”
He added: “We didn’t kill many. We only killed the bad people, not the good.”
Oh the weather outside is frightful…
Wednesday, July 31st, 2019…actually, it’s not all that bad in Austin. The estimated high today is a mere 99 degrees Fahrenheit (558.67 degrees Rankine).
But I know many of my readers are suffering from the heat, so here’s something that I hope will cool you down for a few minutes:
“The Stranding of the MV Shokalskiy”.
Beyond my interest in polar exploration, there’s a lot of stuff in here that prompted chuckles:
…
Reached by the BBC, the poor marketing person for the adventure company put it succinctly: “The hull has a hole the size of a fist and the outlook is not so positive for the ship at the moment.”
The outlook became less positive a few minutes later, when the ship sank.
…
…
…
There had already been choral music, and there threatened to be more.