I really enjoyed “Catch Me If You Can”, both the book and the movie. So here’s something on the long side for you: Frank Abagnale talks at Google.
Shorter bonus: the two red flags to look for.
Archive for September, 2020
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 184
Wednesday, September 30th, 2020Obit watch: September 30, 2020.
Wednesday, September 30th, 2020Bad day for music.
Ms. Reddy’s first hit was a 1971 cover of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” a hit from the award-winning stage show “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The success of “I Am Woman,” with Ms. Reddy’s lyrics and Ray Burton’s music, came a year later.
Ms. Reddy was a frequent guest in the early ’70s on variety, music and talk shows like “The Mike Douglas Show,” “The Carol Burnett Show,” “The David Frost Show,” “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.” “The Helen Reddy Show” (1973) was an eight-episode summer replacement series on NBC.
She made her big-screen debut in the disaster movie “Airport 1975” (released in 1974) as a guitar-playing nun who comforts a sick little girl (Linda Blair) on an almost certainly doomed 747. Ms. Reddy always liked to point out that Gloria Swanson and Myrna Loy were also in the cast.
,,,
Mac Davis, good Lubbock boy.
Mr. Davis enjoyed early success as a songwriter in the late 1960s, supplying Presley with Top 10 pop hits like “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy” after spending much of the decade working in sales and publishing for independent record companies.
He also wrote “Something’s Burning,” a Top 20 pop single in 1970 for Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, and “I Believe in Music,” which was recorded by the Detroit pop group Gallery, reaching the Top 40 in 1972.
“I Believe in Music” was recorded by scores of artists and became Mr. Davis’s signature song; he closed his concerts with it for decades. “Watching Scotty Grow,” another of his best-known compositions, stalled just outside the pop Top 10 for Bobby Goldsboro in 1971.
…
Genial, photogenic and fit, Mr. Davis had his own television variety hour, “The Mac Davis Show,” from 1974 to 1976 on NBC and was a regular guest on “The Tonight Show” and other talk shows in those years. He made his acting debut in the 1979 movie “North Dallas Forty,” a comedy that starred Nick Nolte as an aging football star and Mr. Davis as a calculating quarterback.
More recently, after years of inactivity on the charts, Mr. Davis enjoyed a revival as a songwriter, collaborating with latter-day pop artists like Avicii, the Swedish D.J. with whom he wrote the 2014 global pop hit “Addicted to You.” (Avicii died at 28 in 2018.)
He also wrote “Young Girls” with the pop star Bruno Mars; a version released by Mr. Mars in 2012 was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Mr. Davis’s other projects over the last few years included collaborations with the country star Keith Urban and the singer Rivers Cuomo of the band Weezer.
Clippings.
Tuesday, September 29th, 2020Missed this one until I was tipped off by, shockingly, Mike the Musicologist:
Doc Rivers was fired as head coach of the Clippers yesterday.
The precipitating incident for this seems to have been the team blowing a 3-1 lead in the playoffs and losing to Denver. He was 356-208 in seven seasons, but the team has struggled in the playoffs.
Also noteworthy:
Edited to add: fixed the poor formatting introduced by trying to use the visual editor in the WordPress app on the iPhone.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 183
Tuesday, September 29th, 2020I feel like it has been a while since I’ve done anything with military aircraft, so here’s a nice one for you: “F-14 Tomcat The Total Fighter”, produced by Grumman sometime in the 1980s. It’s only about 10 minutes long, too.
Bonus #1, also short, also from Grumman: “F-14 Air Combat Maneuvering”, featuring F-14 pilots in training at Fighter Town USA (not to be confused with Flavor Town).
Bonus: as a tip of the hat to Ygolonac, please to enjoy the following:
I missed the other big news yesterday.
Tuesday, September 29th, 2020There was another set of indictments that came down which I totally missed. And these are a surprise, though they don’t get the “tax-fattened hyena” tag.
Eight former NFL players and a Houston athletic trainer were indicted in a scheme to attempt to defraud an NFL player trust by submitting false claims for medical benefits, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced Monday.
The players, which include former Texans receiver Corey Bradford and linebacker Shantee Orr, are accused of submitting false reimbursement claims for physical therapy by Houston trainer Louis Ray, who owns Rehab Express in the Galleria area.
Apparently, this was the old “create fake invoices” scheme. The players would turn the invoices over to the “Gene Upshaw NFL Player Plan, a health-reimbursement account set up for former players”, get payments, pocket the money, and kick some back to Rehab Express for creating the invoices in the first place.
If I run the numbers on this after taking out Ray’s share, it works out to an average of about $76,000 per player. Which isn’t exactly small change, but it’s not in the sevenn or eight figure range where I would consider doing a crime and escaping to a country without an extradition treaty. Also, the payouts seem to have varied quite a bit:
Ray, 59, was indicted on a first-degree felony of Securing the Execution of a Document by Deception, for allegedly taking checks valued at more than $300,000.
Bradford, who was an original member of the Houston Texans in 2002 and played four seasons for the team, was indicted on a second-degree felony for allegedly taking checks valued at more than $150,000 and less than $300,000.
Orr, who played linebacker for the Texans from 2003 to 2007, was indicted for a third-degree felony for allegedly taking checks valued at more than $30,000 and less than $150,000. Fabian Washington, James Adkisson, Rex Hadnot, Clint Ingram and Chad Slaughter were indicted for the same.
Derrick Pope, who graduated from Galveston Ball High School and played linebacker for the Dolphins for four seasons, was indicted for a state-jail felony for allegedly taking checks worth more than $2,500 and less than $30,000.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#66 in a series)
Monday, September 28th, 2020
Whoa.
(Previous background on the case in question from WCD.)
…
But here’s something interesting.
The contract between Williamson County and “Live PD” producers in place at the time of Ambler’s death allowed the show to destroy unaired footage within 30 days unless a court order or other state or federal law required it to be retained.
“Live PD” host Dan Abrams said in television interviews and in a post on his web site that sheriff’s officials initially asked producers to preserve the video. Two months after Ambler’s death, Chody told them the investigation was completed. At that point, Abrams said, producers destroyed the video.
If I understand the story correctly, though, both the WillCo and Travis County DAs offices were still investigating this as a death in custody.
Yadda yadda presumption of innocence yadda yadda “growing scrutiny” of the sheriff’s office.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 182
Monday, September 28th, 2020Today’s historical video is dedicated to Iowahawk and his fans. Iowahawk may already be aware of this one.
“Wonderful World Of Wheels”. According to the YouTube notes, this is a cut-down version of a longer documentary about car culture in the 1960s. Among other things: Fabian racing go-karts, “Big Daddy” Roth and George Barris, John Derek, and narration by Lloyd Bridges (whose lungs were apparently not bursting for air).
Bonus:
Okay, not really. I just threw that in for giggles.
“Rubber For Industry”, a Firestone propaganda film from the 1940s. After all, you can’t have wheels without rubber, can you? (Well, technically, you can, but they have limitations.)
Obit watch: September 28, 2020.
Monday, September 28th, 2020A quick round-up of obits I’ve been meaning to make note of over the past few days.
Michael Lonsdale, actor. He was “Hugo Drax” in “Moonraker”, but he did a whole bunch of other work. Some of it was in “avant-garde” films, but he also played “Lebel” in the original “Day of the Jackel”, “Jean-Pierre” in “Ronin”, and a long list of other work “with a Who’s Who of directors, including Mr. Spielberg, François Truffaut, Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Jacques Annaud, and James Ivory”.
Pierre Troisgros, famous French chef.
The Troisgros brothers eventually took charge of their parent’s restaurant and transformed it into a gastronomic destination, at the cutting edge of the culinary revolution known as la nouvelle cuisine. That style was influenced by the austere finesse of Japanese cooking and known, at its extreme, for tiny portions on huge white plates, a caricature in which the Troisgros brothers never indulged.
Their contribution was to showcase the innate flavors of seasonal ingredients, and to pare down some of the overblown creations buried in thick sauces that had come to represent French haute-cuisine.
It earned them Michelin stars and top ratings from other guides. And it put the restaurant high on the list for tourists starting in the 1970s, many of whom, like safari-goers ticking off the “big five,” went to France mainly to experience its top restaurants, collecting souvenir menus along the way.
…
The restaurant’s most famous dish was salmon with sorrel sauce (saumon à l’oseille). In the Troisgros kitchen the sauce was not thickened with starch but depended on well-reduced sauce ingredients and a touch of cream. Mr. Boulud pointed out that the dish was cooked in a nonstick pan, noting that Mr. Troisgros was among the first chefs to use one.
Alain Ducasse, the chef and restaurateur who is part of a generation that followed in the footsteps of Mr. Troisgros, Mr. Bocuse and others, said in a statement that the Troisgros brothers had developed the basis for nouvelle cuisine, but that their food was never austere or posed.
Robert Gore, inventor of Gore-Tex.
Mr. Gore’s billion-dollar invention was born out of failure and frustration. In 1969, as head of research and development for W.L. Gore & Associates, the manufacturing company founded by his parents, he was tasked with creating an inexpensive form of plumber’s tape for a client. The tape was made from polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, known commonly by the brand name Teflon.
Mr. Gore sought to make more efficient use of the material by stretching it, not unlike Silly Putty. But each time he heated and stretched a rod of PTFE in his lab, it broke in two.
“Everything I seemed to do worked worse than what we were already doing,” he told the Science History Institute in a short film. “So I decided to give one of these rods a huge stretch, fast — a jerk. I gave it a huge jerk and it stretched 1,000 percent. I was stunned.”
…
Mr. Gore became president and chief executive of W.L. Gore & Associates in 1976 and pursued new applications for his invention. He would stand in a rainstorm to check garments and footwear for waterproofness, and he filled his home with prototypes. He called the company’s 800 numbers to make sure the customer service was up to par.
“Bob was the guy who made things happen,” Bret Snyder, the chairman of W.L. Gore & Associates and Mr. Gore’s nephew, said in a phone interview. “He had a passion not just for the theoretical, but how the products worked in customers’ hands.”
Your loser update: week 3, 2020.
Monday, September 28th, 2020Cincinnati and Philadelphia tied, so both come off the list this week.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
New York Football Giants
Denver
Houston
New York Jets
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 181
Sunday, September 27th, 2020Science Sunday!
The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has a YouTube channel. (The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory was formerly known as the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, so I guess this is now the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center National Accelerator Laboratory, unless SLAC is now one of those acryonyms that doesn’t stand for anything.)
“Here Be Monsters: Tales of the Hot Universe”.
Bonus: Here’s a lost art: “The Slide Rule (The “C” and “D” Scales)”.
The Internet of Stupid Things.
Saturday, September 26th, 2020…
“hardly any encryption, authorization or authentication”. I bet you can guess what happens next. Yes! Hilarity ensues!
The write-up is much, much longer and more detailed: I’m just trying to hit the high points here.
Bonus:
(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitter.)
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 180
Saturday, September 26th, 2020This one had me at “Narrated by Burgess Meredith”. I think this is just called “Copper!” From Kennecott Copper, intended to promote their Bingham Mine.
Bonus: how could I pass this up? “They Make Zinc At Swansea”.
Somebody ought to write a book. (Part 2)
Friday, September 25th, 2020Book ideas, free for the taking! My only ask is: if you end up writing this book, please send me one autographed copy.
I have a half-baked idea for a book about people and their relationship with their tools: how they chose their tools, how they use their tools, how they bond with their tools, and how their tools are changed over time to meet their needs. (And possibly how people change over time because of their tools: not in an evolutionary biology sense, but in the sense of “when I started using this tool, I found myself doing these things”.)
My vision of this book is a sort of sequel to Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (affiliate link) but for tools: How Tools Learn if you will.
Some examples of the sort of things I’m thinking about:
- A Romance on Three Legs (affiliate link) obviously got me thinking in this direction, so you could spend some time talking about Gould and CD318. (There’s also some interesting stuff about Verne Edquist and the evolution of his piano tuning toolbox.) But what about other musicians: Horowitz and his piano, Louis Armstrong and his trumpets, Clapton’s guitars, Wendy Carlos’s Moog, Zappa’s Synclavier, and the list goes on.
- You could probably get a chapter out of prominent computer folks and their setups. Followers of TJIC know what he uses for his work, and I’m pretty sure information about Linus Torvalds and esr is easy to come by. But why do they set them up the way they do? What are their motivating factors beyond “make my work as easy as possible”? Maybe bring in some writers and their setups, like Roddenberry’s custom CP/M system or Jerry Pournelle’s computers?
- Photographers, their cameras, and their camera bags. I’ve written a little about this before.
- Old-time African big-game hunters and their guns?
- Writers and their typewriters, like Cormac McCarthy’s Lettera 32 Olivetti. (“Twain had his customized, though, by replacing the treadle with a handle.“)
- Woodworkers and machinists, and their tool chests. Something like The Anarchist’s Tool Chest, maybe.
- NASCAR/Formula 1 mechanics and high-end car tuners? Maybe this guy?
I don’t know what the conclusions would be: I figure those would evolve as the book takes form. I do think it’d be a interesting book to read, and a fun book to write.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 179
Friday, September 25th, 2020Some real history today. According to my calendars, Monday is Yom Kippur, and I think this is the last appropriate time to get this in before the holiday.
“Never Again To Be Denied”, a 1968 film (according to YouTube, made for the United Jewish Appeal) about the 1967 Six Day War.
Slightly longer bonus: I think this is an episode of something called “Line Of Fire”, also covering the Six Day War.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 178
Thursday, September 24th, 2020Travel Thursday!
I thought we’d go back to France this week. But this time, in English, and on one of our favorite defunct airlines, Pan Am.
“Voici La France”.
Bonus: since I’ve kind of been neglecting my responsibilities to the United States, “The First and the Small”. This is a 1960s episode of a TV series called “America!” and covers Delaware and Rhode Island. (I think that’s four states down, 46 to go.)