I bow to nobody as far as my interest in the space program goes.
But I don’t have a darn thing to say about Apollo 11, or the 50th anniversary of same. This just feels like one of those big round number anniversaries where everybody is on top of it, everything that can be said has already been said, and there’s nothing left.
If you want something, go over to Lawrence’s.
This year’s S&WCA Symposium made me realize that I’m dealing with a contradiction.
On the one hand, I’m fond of big-bore revolvers. I’m especially drawn these days to blued 4″ guns, like the Wolf and Klar revolvers, mostly because I have several 6″ examples. But I wouldn’t turn my nose up at something like this, either. (The gunshop near me had a 4″ Mountain Gun in .45 Colt for a long while that I was seriously considering pulling the trigger on. But I think it finally got sold to someone who wasn’t me.)
I think a nice blued big bore 4″ gun, with a good looking holster, would make a fine barbecue gun. Put some good looking grips on it (perhaps real vintage ivory if I can find it), maybe get some tasteful engraving done when I can afford it…
On the other hand, I’m also developing a fetish for small-bore handguns. I’m not talking .22 rimfire here: first off, I already have more than a few of those, and secondly, no man needs to apologize for or defend his collection of .22 rimfire handguns. There are very few things better than a nice .22 pistol: I think if I was limited to one revolver, I’d keep my Kit Gun.
No, what I’m talking about is the weird centerfire smallbore stuff. The XP-100 in .221 Remington Fireball. The .224 Harvey Kay-Chuck. And yes, I want to pick up a Model 53 in .22 Jet, even though I realize how impractical the Jet cartridge is, and I’d have to start handloading if I wanted to shoot it. (Though there is someone who makes the rounds of the gunshows selling remanufactured .22 Jet ammo.)
(And I probably need to start handloading anyway. For reasons.)
Even though I’m a Smith guy, the idea of a Blackhawk in .256 Winchester Magnum appeals, too.
If I ever win the lottery, I have a plan to commission the S&W Performance Center to build some Kit Guns based on the Model 51 frame, but chambered in .17 HMR. I just need to figure out if you can put enough of a twist in a 4″ barrel to stabilize the .17 round. If that works out, my next project would be to commission some X-frame revolvers in .221 Fireball. I wouldn’t do a whole lot of them: maybe ask them to build about 10 of each, give some to the family, and donate the others to the S&WCA auction.
I’m sure you’re all hoping I don’t win the lottery now.
I saw a post about the Kickstarter for Papillon and said to myself, “Man! What a cool idea!”
I’m not really into MMORPGs, but the idea of one where you could play a prisoner in a penal colony in French Guyana, dodging guards, forming alliances with other prisoners, struggling to survive solitary confinement, and plotting escape? I could get behind that.
Then I clicked through to the link. Apparently it has something to do with butterflies.
I like my idea better.
…not in the conventional sense, anyway. But I’ve been reading more James Lileks the past few days because…reasons.
For the historical record, one of the most unambiguously incorrect statements ever made by a Supreme Court justice (sitting or former):
Edited to add: Reason 1. Reason 2.
Charles Levin. Apparently he was most famous for playing a mohel on an episode of “Seinfeld”, but he knocked around TV quite a bit before that. Never did a “Mannix”, but he did some other cop shows, was a regular on “Alice”, and was also in “This Is Spinal Tap”.
Pernell Whitaker, champion boxer.
He fought Julio Cesar Chavez to a draw, though “many observers” believed he’d won outright. He also fought Oscar De La Hoya, but lost the decision (even though he scored the only knockdown of the fight, and even though, again, most observers thought he outpunched De La Hoya).
ESPN.
Michael Seidenberg. This is one of those interesting obits for an otherwise obscure person: Mr. Seidenberg ran a “clandestine bookshop”.
No, not one that specialized in espionage and spy books:
…
Mr. Seidenberg often described himself as a good book collector but a lousy bookseller.
I totally missed Bastille Day. But Borepatch put up a nice post.
(And he’s right. I think that is one of the best scenes from “Casablanca”.)
In my defense, it was a hectic weekend. I was at an event most of the day on Saturday (from early in the morning to late in the afternoon), went from there to Half-Price Books, from there straight to the dining conspiracy, from there to Lawrence‘s for movies, and from there home around 2 AM.
Sunday afternoon, Mom and I went out for lunch: after that, I went to the gun show in Dripping Springs, came home, picked up Mom, and we went over to the big Half-Price on North Lamar.
The thing is, I noticed on the way over to Half-Price that I was really tired: I found myself starting to doze off in the car, which worried me. I got a bottle of water while we were there, which helped some, but when I came home, I went upstairs to lay down and slept from about 5 PM to 5 AM this morning.
Either I’m getting old, or something’s wrong.
Anyway, in case you haven’t guessed what with all the trips to Half-Price, this week was another coupon sale. Unfortunately, the pickings were really slim:
Especially when it came to gun books. The only really worthwhile thing I found was a copy of Helmer’s The Gun That Made the Twenties Roar for $12 (after 40% off coupon) plus tax.
Other than that: a blu-ray of “The Revenant”, which I missed in theaters and kind of wanted to see, for roughly $8 with a 20% off coupon, a copy of Boessenecker’s biography of Frank Hamer (which I’d been trying to find for a while, and got for $6), and Ben Macintyre’s book about Kim Philby. (I believe that was also about $6.)
Maybe next weekend I can catch up on sleep. And I have some gun porn I want to post, but I have to take the photos first.
In keeping with our baseball theme, some lazy stupid blogging.
Actually, I wanted to pull together a longer post, but I’m all out of energy this week, plus I’ve posted on this subject before, so:
Ladies and Germans, today is the 40th anniversary of Disco Demolition Night.
There’s a book (co-written by Steve Dahl).
And the Sox commemorated the occasion before last night’s game, with Steve Dahl throwing out the first pitch.
Enough time has passed for the Sox to come to terms with Disco Demolition’s place in the team’s annals. They showed highlights of that night on the video board, including video of fans storming the field and damaging it so much the Sox had to forfeit the second game of that day’s doubleheader against the Tigers.
“It’s absolutely cool that it’s just part of the history, and not a shameful part of the history,” Dahl said. ‘It’s just something that happened, and honestly, it was just about the music.”
I am not a musician or a musicologist. I have no talent for music, and I try to leave the musicology to Mike.
But there’s something about the obit for Vivian Perlis that I find touching and interesting. Back in the day, she was a research librarian at the Yale School of Music. She went to pick up some archival material from one of Charles Ives’s business partners.
Thinking that he might have some recollections to share, Ms. Perlis brought along a portable tape recorder. She was fascinated by the stories that Mr. Myrick, an elderly, hard-of-hearing former Southerner, told about the iconoclastic, curmudgeonly Ives.
This led her to conduct a series of more than 60 interviews over several years with people who had known and worked with Ives. A nephew in Danbury, Conn., Ives’s hometown, recounted playing baseball with “Uncle Charlie.” The composer Lehman Engel recalled hearing Ives talk about the “old days,” when the “sissies,” meaning timidly conservative performers, refused to play Ives’s flinty music.
This was the seed crystal from which grew the Yale University Oral History of American Music.
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Also among the dead: Jim Bouton. WP (and a tip of the hat to Borepatch for the heads-up.) He was a pitcher with several teams (Yankees, Seattle Pilots, and even the Astros). Apparently, he was not an outstanding pitcher (the paper of record uses the phrase “a pitcher of modest achievement but a celebrated iconoclast”).
He went on to greater fame as the author of Ball Four, one of the early “inside baseball” books.
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In Bouton’s telling, players routinely cheated on their wives on road trips, devised intricate plans to peek under women’s skirts or spy on them through hotel windows, spoke in casual vulgarities, drank to excess and swallowed amphetamines as if they were M&Ms.
Mickey Mantle played hung over and was cruel to children seeking his autograph, he wrote. Carl Yastrzemski was a loafer. Whitey Ford illicitly scuffed or muddied the baseball and his catcher, Elston Howard, helped him do it. Most coaches were knotheads who dispensed the obvious as wisdom when they weren’t contradicting themselves, and general managers were astonishingly penurious and dishonest in dealing with players over their contracts.
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“Ball Four” is “arguably the most influential baseball book ever written,” baseball historian Terry Cannon told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2005, “and one which changed the face of sportswriting and our conception of what it means to be a professional athlete.”
Sports Illustrated named it the third-best book written on sports, after A.J. Liebling’s “The Sweet Science,” about boxing, and Roger Kahn’s elegy to the Brooklyn Dodgers, “The Boys of Summer.”
I’ve never read Ball Four, though I’ve heard it described as sceamingly funny. But the obits make it sound like the book is as much about a man struggling to hold on to his dream of being a major league pitcher as much as it is a tell-all about the wild antics of players in the late 60s – early 70s.
As a side note, Mr. Bouton has a limited career as an actor: there was apparently a short-lived “Ball Four” TV series in 1976 that I don’t remember. He was also “Terry Lennox” in Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye“, a movie you do not want to get me started on.
Edited to add 7/12: Wow. Neil deMause over at “Field of Schemes” has a really nice tribute to Mr. Bouton up.
…As he once acknowledged, “I get angry easily.”
In what is probably the most famous example, in 1968 Mr. Torn was filming “Maidstone,” an underground film written and directed by Mailer. Mailer was also the star, playing a writer running for president. Mr. Torn played his half brother. In a decidedly unscripted moment, Mr. Torn struck Mailer with a hammer; Mailer responded by attacking Mr. Torn and biting his ear. The fight became the centerpiece of the film.
…
I’m probably being unfair by highlighting the more colorful aspects of his life. He was apparently a rather talented movie and theater actor, and a good Texas boy (born in Temple, went to both Texas A&M and UT). For some reason, I keep thinking he was on a lot of game shows when I was a kid: am I confusing him with someone else? (I know I’m not confusing Rip Torn and Charles Nelson Reilly.)
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“Miriam and I were part of a group of children who were alive for one reason only — to be used as human guinea pigs,” she wrote. “Three times a week we’d be placed naked in a room, for six to eight hours, to be measured and studied.
“They took blood from one arm and gave us injections in the other. After one such injection I became very ill and was taken to the hospital. If I had died, Mengele would have given Miriam a lethal injection in order to do a double autopsy. When I didn’t die, he carried on experimenting with us and as a result Miriam’s kidneys stopped growing. They remained the size of a child’s all her life.”
…
Ms. Kor, who worked in real estate for many years, traveled to Germany in 1993 to meet with a former doctor at Auschwitz, Hans Münch, who had been acquitted of war crimes. He accepted her invitation to go to Auschwitz with her and sign a document acknowledging the existence of the camp’s gas chambers. On the 50th anniversary of its liberation, they stood together before the charred ruins of its crematories.
Ms. Kor composed a letter to Dr. Münch expressing her belief in forgiving tormentors, as a thank you for his gesture.
“Dr. Münch signed his document about the operation of the gas chambers while I read my document of forgiveness and signed it,” she recalled. “As I did that, I felt a burden of pain was lifted from me.”
“Some survivors do not want to let go of the pain,” she wrote in her Forgiveness Project remembrance. “They call me a traitor and accuse me of talking in their name. I have never done this. I do it for myself. I do it not because they deserve it, but because I deserve it.”
Ross Perot. (Edited to add: Lawrence. Dallas Morning News.)
He was no quitter: an Eagle Scout, a Navy officer out of Annapolis, a top I.B.M. salesman, the founder of wildly successful data processing enterprises, a crusader for education and against drugs, a billionaire philanthropist. In 1969, he became a kind of folk hero with a quixotic attempt to fly medicine and food to American prisoners of war in North Vietnam. In 1979 he staged a commando raid that freed two of his employees, and thousands of criminals and political prisoners, from captivity in revolutionary Iran.
And in 1992 he became one of the most unlikely candidates ever to run for president. He had never held public office, and he seemed all wrong, like a cartoon character sprung to life: an elfin 5 feet 6 inches and 144 pounds, with a 1950s crew cut; a squeaky, nasal country-boy twang; and ears that stuck out like Alfred E. Neuman’s on a Mad magazine cover. Stiff-necked, cantankerous, impetuous, often sentimental, he was given to homespun epigrams: “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”
…
…
His folk-patriot reputation stemmed from two adventures. In 1969, after months of speaking on the plight of 1,400 American prisoners of war in North Vietnam, he chartered two jetliners, filled them with 30 tons of food, medicines and gifts and flew to Southeast Asia. Hanoi rejected the mission, but it was hardly a failure. The spotlight on prisoners’ hardships embarrassed Hanoi and led to better treatment for some.
In 1979, as an Islamic revolution swept Iran, Mr. Perot mounted a commando raid on a prison in Tehran to free two employees being held for ransom. A riot was orchestrated at the gates, and in the chaos of an ensuing breakout 11,800 inmates escaped, including both employees. The episode was chronicled in Ken Follett’s best-selling book “On Wings of Eagles” and in a 1986 mini-series on NBC.
You know, I need to read that book. (Also The Pillars of the Earth.)
Also among the dead: Jack Renner, co-founder of Telarc and a good Cleveland boy.
In 1978 the company made what Mr. Renner said was the first commercially released digital recording of symphonic music in the United States, featuring Frederick Fennell and the Cleveland Symphonic Winds.
“It created a lot of stir among audiophiles,” he said. “It had a bass drum that blew up speakers. Everybody accused us of hyping the bass drum. We didn’t.”
Back in the day, I had a fair number of Telarc CDs (including some of their P.D.Q. Bach).
There’s an interesting article in today’s NYT about Jenna Garland, the former press secretary for Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed.
Ms. Garland is currently under indictment. She’s charged with two misdemeanors. But, unlike the usual run of tax-fattened hyenas, the charges against Ms. Garland involve…
…violations of the Georgia open records law.
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There are two interesting things about this.
1. Criminal charges against public officials for open records act violations are “extremely uncommon”, as the paper of record describes it.
Open-records or “sunshine” laws in a number of other states include no criminal sanctions for noncompliance, although a number of them call for civil penalties or the payment of attorneys’ fees and court costs if a news organization or a member of the public successfully sues a government agency for documents.
In Colorado, lawmakers removed criminal penalties for violating the state’s open-records law two years ago because almost no one was ever charged.
And something that’s feeding into this: even though Kasim Reed left office last year, his administration is still under federal investigation.
It kind of sounds like the charges against Ms. Garland are more fallout from the ongoing investigation of Mr. Reed. I’d be tempted to suggest that they’re trying to flip her: but that seems unlikely with misdemeanor charges.
Scott R. Grubman, an Atlanta-based lawyer experienced in white-collar crime matters who is not involved in the Garland case, read Ms. Garland’s text messages the same way. He said he thought the government’s case against her was “flimsy” and an overreaction, given that civil penalties could be levied instead.
In Georgia, both state agencies and local governments “regularly engage in delay tactics” in response to open-records requests, Mr. Grubman said in an email. “By bringing a criminal prosecution against Ms. Garland without having ever criminally prosecuted any other violation in the past, the A.G.’s office appears to be unfairly targeting Ms. Garland and opening up a can of worms that will be difficult to close.”
I actually kind of agree with Mr. Grubman’s position, at least in part. This does seem like selective prosecution. But: I only agree with him in part because I think more public officials should face criminal charges for open records act violations. The heck with “civil penalties”, which are probably going to be paid by the taxpayers anyway: let’s hold these people personally responsible for violating the law. And if that means some of them wind up in jail…fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Dr. Mitchell Feigenbaum, theoretical physicist.
When Feigenbaum began his career in the early 1970s, the term “chaos theory” did not exist. Generations of scientists dating back to Isaac Newton had worked on problems related to the predictability of complex systems, such as the orbits of the planets in the solar system. By the middle of the 20th century, physicists and mathematicians—inspired by the pioneering work of the French physicist and mathematician Henri Poincaré—had succeeded in characterizing chaotic states, often enabled by computers, by framing such questions as geometric problems. But the boundary between regular and chaotic behavior remained fuzzy, particularly as it applied to real physical systems.
Feigenbaum stepped into this foggy arena, developing methods capable of computationally modelling the period-doubling transition to chaos, which proceeds in a series of geometrically focused steps that remain similar when scaled across orders of magnitude, an example of so-called fractal geometry. He first studied a simple iterated algebraic equation known as the logistic map, and was later able to demonstrate that these steps are “universal:” all physical systems that become chaotic via this period-doubling route to chaos exhibit the same behavior. Feigenbaum also found that this behavior is determined by two universal constants, now known as the Feigenbaum constants.
Gene Pingatore, Illinois high school basketball coach. He holds the state record for most wins, but is perhaps more famous as the coach in “Hoop Dreams”.
Mickey Kapp. No, I hadn’t heard of him before, either, but the story is interesting: he was the provider of mixtapes to the astronauts through the Gemini and Apollo programs.
And it all started with José Jiménez.
At Mr. Kapp’s urging, Mr. Dana booked an appearance at the Kings Inn in Cocoa Beach, Fla., near where the astronauts trained. He usually did the astronaut bit with a straight man acting as interviewer, but for Cocoa Beach he was working alone.
“A few minutes into the routine, a guy in the front row began yelling out the straight man’s lines,” Mr. Thompson wrote. It was Mr. Shepard, who joined Mr. Dana onstage but was laughing so hard that another Mercury astronaut, Wally Schirra, who was there, took over, followed by another, Deke Slayton.
Paul Benjamin, actor. He knocked around quite a bit from the 1970s through to 2016: never did a “Mannix”, but he was in various other 70s cop shows, “Escape From Alcatraz” and was one of the guys on the corner in “Do the Right Thing”.
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Bookmark:
“For 40 Years, Crashing Trains Was One of America’s Favorite Pastimes“.
I read a similar article some years ago in an Old Farmer’s Almanac, but haven’t been able to find it since, and people don’t believe me when I tell them about this.
Oh, they believe in the Great Crush Crash (which is given much love in this article), but people seem incredulous when you tell them staged locomotive crashes for crowds were a regular spectator event, and Crush wasn’t a one-off.
For the historical record: Arte Johnson, of “Laugh-In” fame.
You know, I’d never even heard of “Baggypants and the Nitwits” until now…