Obit watch: Lawrence Phillips, former Nebraska running back, first round draft pick of the St. Louis Rams, and current prison inmate.
He was also suspected of having killed a cellmate. His death is believed to have been a suicide.
Well. Chip Kelly is the new coach of the San Francisco 49ers. This should make Gregg Easterbrook’s head explode.
I was actually going to embed my favorite Rickman moment here, but the NYT beat me to it.
I’d kind of like to see Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny
As always, after the jump, this week’s TMQ…
William Del Monte passed away on Monday at the age of 109.
Mr. Del Monte was the last known survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.
I sort of shoved the Bowie roundup to the back of the fridge yesterday, mostly because I felt the coverage had become over-saturated. But I still feel obligated to do something for the historical record.
NYT, which contains links to their extensive coverage. LAT coverage. I know I’m probably being provincial in not linking to a UK paper, but honestly I don’t know which of them is trustworthy these days; if I have any readers in the UKOGBNI who are willing to drop links in comments, please feel free to do so.
Interesting piece from TechDirt about Bowie as music technology visionary.
The A/V Club ran a quick obit, and followed up with a longer “For Our Consideration” piece that’s mostly okay except for the last sentence. Death isn’t “a guise”, and Sean O’Neal should be ashamed of himself for saying that.
I’ve never called myself a Bowie fan, and never spent money to see him live. But when I think about Bowie, I keep thinking about how much of his music I really enjoyed: “Heroes”, “Major Tom”, “Ashes to Ashes”, “Putting Out the Fire”…
It isn’t a great recording, but it is a great song.
Violates my rule about Christmas music, but I think I can make an exception in this case.
Florence King: NYT.
The cultural boils Miss King sought so vigorously to lance included:
Political correctness; feminism (“Feminists will not be satisfied,” she wrote, “until every abortion is performed by a gay black doctor under an endangered tree on a reservation for handicapped Indians”); environmentalism; the antismoking lobby; sentiment; intimacy; weakness; special pleading; lack of breeding (“No matter which sex I went to bed with, I never smoked on the street”); gay liberation; far rightism; far leftism; mild to moderate leftism; democracy (“I believe in a Republic of Merit in which water is allowed to find its own level, where voters, like drivers, are tested before being turned loose”); the Constitution; children (“In order to molest a child you must first be in the same room with a child, and I don’t know how perverts stand it”); the human race.
WP.
Angus Scrimm also passed away over the weekend. He knocked around quite a bit, doing guest shots on various TV series (including “Alias” and “Trapper John M.D.”) and movies. He was perhaps best known as “The Tall Man” from the “Phantasm” movies. Interestingly, he also wrote liner notes for Capitol Records:
More firings, that is.
Some friends of ours who shall remain anonymous to protect their privacy (thank you, anonymous friends!) invited folks over on Saturday to watch the Texans playoff game. I was tied up with other events and arrived with only five minutes left in the game, but based on what I heard from my anonymous friends and Lawrence (and what I observed personally in that five minutes), it was a debacle.
Question: have the Texans gone far enough?
Lionel Hollins out as coach of the Nets. The team also “reassigned” General Manager Billy King.
I’ve known about David Bowie for a grand total of five minutes at this point. I want to wait a few hours for the smoke to clear before I post an obit roundup.
Somehow “tax-fattened hyena” doesn’t seem fitting, and crustacean related jokes seem inappropriate.
So. Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow: guilty.
On 162 counts, “including murder in the service of racketeering, murder conspiracy and racketeering.”
(They said “murder” and “racketeering” twice. They must like “racketeering”. And “murder”.)
LAT. SFGate. SF Examiner. Of course the defense plans to appeal.
I’m still kind of hoping for an obituary from a more mainstream news source, but Florence King, writer and National Review columnist, has died. Tributes from Tam and Lawrence.
This was a little surprising:
Amen. Florence King was the cat's meow, which would have meant something to her. https://t.co/8MVKXMs1M9
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) January 7, 2016
I’m not going to say she was as influential on my writing as P.J.: I came to her relatively late in life. But she was a damn funny writer (even if I can’t quote some of my favorite lines here), and the world is a lesser place for her passing. Frankly, we could do a lot worse than a monarchy. Especially one run by Florence King.
Interesting career. He started out on “The Jack Paar Show” (or “The Steve Allen Show”, depending on which obit you read).
Of course, he was most famous as Schneider on “One Day at a Time”.
Ashraf Pahlavi, sister of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.
Really? I wonder where the NYT got access to this “internal secret history”.
It took us a non-trivial amount of digging to find this, but:
The case against Chow went to the jury on Tuesday.
We will keep an eye out for the verdict, or lack of one.
Lovie Smith out as coach of hapless the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. 8-24 in two seasons.
Happy 2016. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Tom Coughlin out as head coach of the New York Football Giants. ESPN. It seems that this is being spun as a resignation, though I suspect it was more “mutual agreement”.
The Tennessee Titans are “not renewing the contract” of general manager Ruston Webster. You may recall that they fired head coach Ken Whisenhunt in November.
The Chargers have fired offensive coordinator Frank Reich, but apparently plan to keep Mike McCoy as head coach.
Bad time for cinematographers.
Both the LAT and the A/V Club are reporting the passing of noted cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.
He won an Oscar for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”, and worked on a whole boatload of other stuff: “Deliverance”, “The Deer Hunter”, “The Long Goodbye”, “Sugarland Express”…