Archive for April 16th, 2020

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 17

Thursday, April 16th, 2020

All of these are just a little outside my target run length, but that’s okay. I hope everyone can deal with that.

First up: this might be just a little too much, even for my readers who are people of the gun. But I wanted to put it up because it is a nice slice of history from around the time I was born.

“Target Vs.”, a 1965 film from the Williams Gun Sight company about the 1965 National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio.

I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to compete at Camp Perry, but I’d like to visit there one of these days while the matches are going on. Just to take in the scene.

Bonus video #1: “No Points For Second Place”. This is apparently a Grumman produced tribute to the F-14. With some handy tips on dogfighting thrown in.

Bonus video #2: “Police Pursuit Driving Part 2”. I guess this is a sequel (at least thematically) to “Police Pursuit“, but it lacks Jack Webb. I think it also lacks Smith and Wessons, though there is one ridiculous bit in here (you’ll know it when you see it).

I cannot tell a lie: “Some guys stay rookies forever.” gets a rise out of me.

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Obit watch: April 16, 2020.

Thursday, April 16th, 2020

I received a report from a usually reliable source that Brian Dennehy has passed, but I don’t have any independent or linkable confirmation of that at the moment.

Edited to add: THR has an obit up now. Variety does as well.

NYT obit for John Horton Conway.

“Conway’s LIFE changed mine,” the musician Brian Eno said in an email. “I think Conway himself thought it rather trivial, but for a nonmathematician like me, it was a shock to the intuition, a shattering revelation — to watch glorious complexity emerging from staid simplicity.”

…

At Princeton he was almost invariably recruited to give the first-year course intended to persuade students to become math majors. And he offered extracurricular content, like a campus tour titled “How to Stare at a Brick Wall.”

…

Math, Dr. Conway believed, should be fun. “He often thought that the math we were teaching was too serious,” said Mira Bernstein, a mathematician and a former executive director of Canada/USA Mathcamp, an international summer program for high-school students. “And he didn’t mean that we should be teaching them silly math — to him, fun was deep. But he wanted to make sure that the playfulness was always, always there.”

Willie Davis, one of the Green Bay Packers greats.

Davis’s Packer teams captured N.F.L. championships following the 1961, ’62 and ’65 seasons and won the first two Super Bowls, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967 and the Oakland Raiders in 1968.
Davis was an all-N.F.L. player five times and chosen for the Pro Bowl five times as well. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1981 and named to its all-N.F.L. team for the 1960s.
His Packers defeated the Giants in the 1961 and 1962 championship games, and he impressed New York’s star quarterback, Y.A. Tittle. “Davis is a great pass rusher,” Tittle was quoted as saying. “He’s strong and aggressive. He’s always towering over you, coming, coming, all the time.”

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