Archive for November, 2019

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Recent acquisitions (some bibliohoplophilia)

Saturday, November 16th, 2019

Half-Price Books had another one of their coupon sales last week (the 4th through 10th).

Unfortunately, this was a busy week for me between voting and Wurstfest and meetings and other things, so I didn’t get as much of a chance to shop as I would have liked. Also, the gun book pickings have been kind of slim recently. Even the big central Half-Price has gotten rid of a lot of their fancy leather-bound books.

The only gun book that I found was A Varmint Hunter’s Odyssey by Steve Hanson for $10+tax after coupon. This is another one of those books published by the (now sadly defunct) Precision Shooting Press, and as I’ve written before, I like to snap those up when I find them.

Other than that…I found a nice trade paperback copy of Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence by Bill James to replace my old hardback. I enjoy this book (though James sometimes makes me go “What?!”) and didn’t realize that the trade paperback had some additional material. (Including James’s list of his 100 top true crime books.) $4.24+tax after coupon.

And I also found a good copy of The Annotated Tales Of Edgar Allen Poe by Stephen Peithman for $6+tax after coupon. Oddly enough, I did not have a collection of Poe’s short works previously, and it is a well known fact that I’m a sucker for annotated books…

…so now I’ve got my eye out for a copy of The Annotated Poe by Kevin J. Hayes. Because you can never have enough Poe.

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | 2 Comments »

Today’s bulletin from the Department of WTF?!

Friday, November 15th, 2019

Lucky Miller was the police chief of Mannford, Oklahoma (which is somewhere near Tulsa).

I say “was” because Chief Miller was killed while attending a law enforcement conference in Florida.

The department’s detective is charged with killing him.

On Sunday around 9:50 p.m., the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office responded to complaints at the Hilton Pensacola Beach hotel, where deputies found Chief Miller unresponsive on the floor, and Mr. Nealey lying a short distance away, mumbling, according to a police report.
Sgt. Melony Peterson, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office, said in an interview that the cause of death had not been determined and that an autopsy was being performed. She said the two men had been drinking before the fatal encounter.

Apparently, this wasn’t a shooting:

A hotel worker went to check on the situation and knocked on the door several times, but “only heard a grunting noise.” The worker entered the room and found Mr. Nealey sitting on top of Chief Miller, who was lying on the floor, according to report. The worker yelled at Mr. Nealey to get up, and then pulled him off the chief.
By the time the police arrived, Chief Miller was dead. His face was beaten and his right eye was completely swollen, but there were no other apparent injuries, according to the police report.

In other news, which I didn’t get a chance to note yesterday: the former DA of Suffolk County, NY, is on trial. One of his deputies is also being tried. I’ve written about this before: guy stole a bag of “cigars, sex toys, and pornographic DVDs” out of the police chief’s car, police chief arrested him, handcuffed him to the floor of an interrogation room, and assaulted him, and the DA and his deputy are charged with helping to cover up the chief’s actions.

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 14, 2019.

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

Ronald Lafferty died earlier this week. He died of natural causes, as opposed to being executed by a firing squad.

I think it’s more likely than usual that this name will ring some bells with folks. Mr. Lafferty was a religious fanatic: he was excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for “increasingly extreme religious views” (yes, he did believe in polygamy) and founded a new sect, School of the Prophets. He and his brothers (who were also members of the sect) claimed that they received messages from God.

Mr. Lafferty said one of those messages told him that his ex-wife, who had left him and taken their six children to Florida, had been the bride of Satan in a previous life.
In another message, he said, he was told that four people caused his excommunication and divorce, including his brother Allen’s wife, Brenda, and their 15-month-old daughter, Erica, “who he believed would grow up to be just as despicable as her mother,” according to court documents.
God told him to kill all four of them, Mr. Lafferty said. So on July 24, 1984 — a state holiday that commemorates the arrival of Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley — Mr. Lafferty and a group of followers, including his brother Daniel, went to Brenda’s house in American Fork, Utah.

Mr. Lafferty and his brother Daniel killed Brenda and the baby. They abandoned their plan to kill the other two on the list. Ronald and Daniel were arrested in Nevada about a month later. Daniel is serving a life sentence.

Mr. Lafferty’s mental competence to stand trial quickly became an issue in the case and would be the focus of his subsequent appeal efforts.
He was convicted of both killings and sentenced to death in 1985. But in 1991, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit vacated Mr. Lafferty’s convictions and ordered a new trial after finding that the wrong legal standard had been used to determine his mental competence.
Prosecutors again charged Mr. Lafferty with the killings, but a competency hearing in November 1992 found him to be mentally unfit to stand trial owing to mental illness. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital until a new competency hearing was held in February 1994 and he was found competent to stand trial.
In April 1996, he was again convicted of the killings, and again sentenced to death.

The reason I say this will ring some bells is that the Lafferty murders were at the center of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, a book which I’ve read and liked. (And, no, it did not strike me as being “anti-religion”. Anti-“religious fanatics killing women and babies”, maybe, but not anti-religion.)

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Religion | Comments Closed

The most fun I’ve had recently with my clothes on…

Thursday, November 14th, 2019

…or, for that matter, off.

I’ll start with the musical interlude. I rather like this, though the banjo player should put on a damn shirt.

So, last night, I was down at the Austin Film Society. (It sounds more amusing if you say it with kind of a snooty accent.) What was I doing there? Getting some culture into my system…

(more…)

Posted in Endorsements, Movies, Music, Rhode Island | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 13, 2019.

Wednesday, November 13th, 2019

Zeke Bratkowski, Green Bay Packers quarterback. He didn’t quite get the level of fame he probably deserved as he spent most of his time backing up some guy named Starr.

By way of Lawrence: Charles Rogers, first round NFL draft choice (and second overall pick) in 2003.

The 6-foot-3, 220-pounder had just 36 catches for 440 yards with four touchdowns in 15 games before he left the league in 2005.

Also by way of Lawrence: Virginia Leith. Possibly an obscure figure, but some folks may remember her as “Jan” (or “Jan In the Pan”) from “The Head Brain That Wouldn’t Die”, which was (of course) a MST3K.

Interestingly, she also did guest shots on some of the better cop shows of the 1970s: “Baretta”, “Starsky and Hutch”, “Barnaby Jones”. “Police Woman”.

Frank Giles, former editor of The Sunday Times of London. He may be best remembered as the man who published the Hitler diaries, though he claimed he knew they were fake and Rupert Murdoch ordered them published anyway.

Posted in 1970s, History, Media, Movies, Nazis, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 11, 2019.

Monday, November 11th, 2019

pigpen51 left a very kind and much appreciated comment on the last obit watch. In that vein, someone who I feel like i should remember, but is probably just a little outside the fringes of my consciousness:

Maria Perego. She created Topo Gigio.

Ms. Perego, who worked alongside her husband, Federico Caldura, came up with the 10-inch-tall Topo Gigio in the late 1950s. Topo Gigio was a sort of cross between a puppet and a marionette; three puppeteers, hidden in a black background, moved various body parts with rods.
According to “Sundays With Sullivan: How ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ Brought Elvis, the Beatles, and Culture to America,” a 2008 book by Bernie Ilson, Mr. Sullivan saw a tape of the puppet from Italian television and booked Topo Gigio for a series of appearances on his popular Sunday-night CBS variety show. The first, the book said, was on April 14, 1963.
Ms. Perego and two other puppeteers were on hand to impart the movements, and a fourth provided Topo Gigio’s voice — but, Mr. Ilson wrote, Mr. Sullivan had not realized that someone would also have to serve as the puppet’s straight man. Mr. Sullivan, who was famously wooden on camera, stepped into that task for the initial appearance, figuring he would arrange for a professional comic to take over for later ones if the bit caught on.
“It was evident from the very first appearance, however, that the chemistry between Sullivan and Topo Gigio worked extremely well,” Mr. Ilson wrote. “The exchanges between Sullivan and the mouselike puppet revealed another side of the host, a warm and humanizing element.”
Mr. Sullivan remained in the role of sidekick for what the book says were some 50 appearances by Topo Gigio over the years. (Other sources give higher numbers.) The appearances often ended with the mouse saying, in a thick Italian accent, “Eddie, kiss me good night.”

A little late on this, but: Ernest J. Gaines. (The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Lesson Before Dying)

Laurel Griggs. Nobody should die at 13.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Your loser update: week 10, 2019.

Monday, November 11th, 2019

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Cincinnati

Not much more to say than that, really.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 8, 2019.

Friday, November 8th, 2019

Louis Eppolito is burning in Hell.

Some of you probably remember that name, either because you’re true crime buffs or else you’re regular readers of this blog.

For those who don’t recall the name, Eppolito was one of the “Mafia Cops“: two NYPD officers who made deals with the Mob to provide confidential information and even whack guys.

Nineteen eighty-five was also the year Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa began their relationship with Mr. Casso’s circle. A career criminal with ties to Mr. Casso hired them that year to kill a Long Island jeweler to keep him from testifying in an F.B.I. inquiry.
The detectives used a confidential police database to find the jeweler’s home address, the type of car he drove and his license plate number. They pulled him over and asked him to come to the precinct station house.
Instead, they took him to a building in Brooklyn, where Mr. Caracappa and another man killed him. Mr. Eppolito acted as a lookout.
It was the first of the eight killings they would participate in over the next several years on Mr. Casso’s orders. They received $4,000 a month and up to $65,000 for individual murders, prosecutors said.
The other victims included a Brooklyn man gunned down mistakenly because he had the same name as a rival of Mr. Casso’s; a Luchese gangster; two Gambino soldiers; and two F.B.I. informers.

Stephen Caracappa, Mr. Eppolito’s partner in crime, died in 2017: somehow I missed hearing about this.

The good book on this case is The Good Rat by the late great Jimmy Breslin. I’m not recommending or endorsing it, but Eppolito’s Mafia Cop is still widely available: you can even purchase a Kindle edition. (Yeah, that is an affiliate link: it’s not like Eppolito is going to benefit from sales now, and I’m pretty sure anything he earned while alive went towards compensating the families of his victims.)

Posted in Books, Cops, Law, NYPD, Obits | 1 Comment »

I’m done.

Wednesday, November 6th, 2019

The Catholic Church has more compassion for people who have committed suicide than science fiction fandom.

If you think that’s a strong statement, well…

James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon. Born Alice Bradley in 1915, she travelled the world with her parents as a young child. In 1940, after a brief unhappy marriage, she joined the women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and worked in intelligence. She married Huntington “Ting” Sheldon in 1945, and in 1952 they both joined the CIA. She later earned her doctorate and took up writing. She wrote short stories and novels, but it is the former that stand out as truly remarkable. With prose as subtle and precise as the most refined literary fiction, she penned imaginative tales like “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” and “The Girl Who was Plugged In,” which became classics of science fiction and also important works of feminist fiction. Later in her life, she suffered from heart troubles and depression. Her husband went blind. She recorded in her diary in 1979 that she and her husband had agreed to a suicide pact if their health worsened. In 1987, she shot her husband, called her lawyer and told him that they had agreed to suicide, and then shot herself.
The award is being renamed because of this suicide. Although the prize was founded to recognize fiction “exploring gender,” the current board of the award see their expanded mission to be to “make the world listen to voices that they would rather ignore.” The issue is that some of these voices have decided that Sheldon killed her husband because she was ableist (that is, bigoted toward the disabled). Sheldon’s biographer, Julie Phillips, has tweeted in response: “The question has come up whether Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr) and her husband Ting died by suicide or murder-suicide. I regret not saying clearly in the bio that those closest to the Sheldons all told me that they had a pact and that Ting’s health was failing.” Phillips has also changed her Twitter profile to include the sentence, “Biographer of Ursula K. Le Guin and of James Tiptree, Jr., who was not a murderer.”

From Catholic Answers:

Yes, for many centuries the Church taught that those who took their own lives could not be given a Christian funeral or buried in consecrated ground. Nonetheless, in so doing the Church wasn’t passing judgment on the salvation of the individual soul; rather, the deprivation of Christian funeral rites was a pastoral discipline intended to teach Catholics the gravity of suicide.
Although the Church no longer requires that Christian funeral rites be denied to people who commit suicide, the Church does still recognize the objective gravity of the act…
As it does for all grave acts, the Church also teaches that both full knowledge and deliberate consent must be present for the grave act of suicide to become a mortal sin:

Mortal sin requires full knowledge and complete consent. It presupposes knowledge of the sinful character of the act, of its opposition to God’s law. It also implies a consent sufficiently deliberate to be a personal choice (CCC 1859).

When a person commits suicide as a result of psychological impairment, such as that caused by clinical depression, the Church recognizes that he may not have been fully capable of the knowledge and consent necessary to commit mortal sin:

Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide (CCC 2282).

(For those unfamiliar, CCC is the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Those numbers are paragraph references: you can find the whole thing online here.)

Posted in Books, Geek, Religion | Comments Closed

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, folks!

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019

Tweet of the day:

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 5, 2019.

Tuesday, November 5th, 2019

The part of me that doesn’t really want to acknowledge reality TV stars is outweighed by the part of me that thinks Rudy Boesch deserves acknowledgement for honorable service to his country.

He joined the merchant marine in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy the next year, training in underwater demolition and serving on ships over the next 17 years.
In 1962 he was among the first SEALs, given charge of setting physical fitness and other standards for Team 2.
“Rudy Boesch had a special understanding of his men,” Mr. Watson wrote, “what they did, and why they did it. That is very rare. There was never a man more devoted to the Navy and the SEALs.”
Mr. Boesch served two tours in Vietnam, though he never talked much about what specifically he did in the service. Between the tours he worked and competed with the Navy bobsled team. He retired from the Navy in 1990 as a master chief petty officer.

Also worth noting: the Wikipedia entry on his military career. I don’t want to quote it here because it has a lot of citations, but suffice it to say that are a lot of Boesch stories.

Overall, in his history of SEAL operations in Vietnam, former SEAL T.L. Bosiljevac writes that Boesch symbolizes much of what the SEAL teams represent and that, “There are a lot of colorful personalities among the teams, but even considering the best of those, Rudy Boesch is a legend. Everybody knows Rudy, and you can bet that Rudy knows everyone in return … [including] some of the Navy’s top brass.”

Posted in History, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

William Gibson, call your office, please.

Monday, November 4th, 2019

The street finds its own uses for things.

The paper of record would like for you to know that “drones are increasingly being used by criminals across the country“.

Their first example is a guy who was using drones to drop IEDs on his ex-girlfriend’s property.

He has been indicted on charges related to making explosives and possessing firearms, but the only charge concerning his delivery method has been unlawful operation of an unregistered drone.

And they all moved away from him on the Group W bench.

Other examples are more in line with what you’d expect: drug smuggling and voyeurism. Buried in the article is a decent point: the question of who has jurisdiction over drones in flight and what can be done about them is kind of up in the air.

Where have we heard something like this before?

“It’s not like a car — it’s not necessary to register at sale,” Mr. Holland Michel said, adding, “A criminal will not register a drone.”

Posted in Explosives, Geek, Law | Comments Closed

Your loser update; week 9, 2019 (with bonus firings).

Sunday, November 3rd, 2019

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Cincinnati (bye week)

NBA teams that still have a chance to go 0-82:

None.

As I expected, the hapless Dolphins apparently acquired at least one hap on the open market during the week, and managed to beat the Jets in Miami. This may screw up their shot at the top draft pick: currently, we have

  • The Bengals at 0-8
  • Miami at 1-7
  • The Jets at 1-7
  • Washington at 1-8
  • and Atlanta at 1-7

As I said last week, I think Miami has a good chance of at least one more win against the Bengals at home, and maybe wins against the Jets and Giants on the road.

Stat:

“Since Marino’s exit, 21 quarterbacks have started for Miami.”

In firings news, Willie Taggart out as head coach of Florida State after about two seasons. To be exact, 21 games, in which he was 9-12.

According to ESPN:

FSU raised about $20 million in private donations to buy out what was left of Taggart’s contract, sources told ESPN’s Mark Schlabach. However, an FSU official denied that the money was raised for Taggart’s buyout.
Under the terms of Taggart’s six-year, $30 million contract, FSU’s athletic department will owe him 85% of his remaining compensation through Jan. 31, 2024, which is between $17 million and $18 million. The Seminoles also paid Oregon a $3 million buyout when it hired him away from the Ducks in December 2017, as well as the remaining $1.3 million buyout Oregon owed South Florida when it hired him in December 2016.

Also by way of the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network:

Bayern Munich have sacked Niko Kovac as manager after Saturday’s embarrassing 5-1 defeat at Eintracht Frankfurt, the club announced on Sunday.

If you feel like you’re having a stroke, you’re probably not: this is just German soccer news. (But do remember the FAST mnemonic for strokes: Face, Arms, Speech, Time.)

Posted in Firings, Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

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