Archive for September, 2020

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Obit watch: September 8, 2020.

Tuesday, September 8th, 2020

By way of Hacker News, I found this obituary for Verne Edquist on the Glenn Gould Foundation website.

Mr. Edquist was born with congenital cataracts and was nearly blind. He trained as a professional piano tuner.

Years later, Verne often took to quoting his tuning teacher, J. D. Ansell, whose favorite aphorism was “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” To give Verne experience, Ansell started taking his young protégé into town to tune pianos in private homes. Verne was allowed to keep the money – $2.50 per piano, and sometimes, when he got lucky, $3.00 – which he put toward some basic tools: a tuning wrench, a tuning fork, needle-nose pliers, gauges for measuring the diameter of piano wire, and rubber wedges for muting strings.

He moved around a lot, sometimes working for piano makers, sometimes working as a freelance tuner.

One afternoon about a year after Verne started at Eaton’s, Miss Mussen sent him across town to Glenn Gould’s apartment to tune Gould’s old Chickering. All Gould wanted, he told Verne, was for the tuner to do what had been done hundreds of times before: get the piano into playable condition, if only for the time being. But Verne refused, telling Gould that the tuning pins were so loose they needed to be replaced.
Verne’s stubborn insistence on doing things his way had endeared him to Gould, and the encounter galvanized what was to become a decades-long association between a pianist and his technician.
Verne tuned for many famous musicians over the years, including Duke Ellington, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin, Victor Borge, and Liberace. But it was the business he got from Gould that eventually enabled him to quit Eaton’s employ and sustain his family for two decades.
Each tolerated the other’s idiosyncracies, which were in ample evidence in both men. Gould’s quirks, of course, were legion and legendary. One of their earliest conversations was about Verne’s physical limitations. “I can’t see very well, but I get the job done,” Verne told Gould. And Gould replied that of this he had no doubt. Nothing further on the topic was ever said.

…

All his life, Verne heard music through his own particular synaesthesia – in colors. If you asked him how he knew that an F was an F, he would say, “oh that’s blue.” C was a slightly lime green. The key of D was a sandy hue, E was yellowy-pink, A was white, G orange and B dark green. For years he was ashamed of this rather oddball talent. When he finally told Glenn Gould about it, his boss reacted as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

…

When I interviewed Verne for my book, I was struck by what a kind and gentle man he was. It came as a surprise to hear him voice some reservations, even a little bitterness, about his most famous client. Although Gould had often gone out of his way to accommodate Verne’s schedule and never uttered an unkind word to him, nor did he, in the two decades they worked together, gone out of his way to praise Verne’s tuning. To have gone so many years without hearing so much as a “nice job” had clearly taken its toll.

I’m not a musician, or a piano tuner, but that Katie Hafner book (affiliate link) sounds fascinating to me for some reason.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 162

Tuesday, September 8th, 2020

I haven’t posted any vintage police training videos in a while, because I really haven’t been finding any. At least, none have been popping up in my YouTube feed.

However, I went looking for a specific FBI video that Bill Vanderpool mentioned in his book, Guns of the F.B.I. : A History of the Bureau’s Firearms and Training. (Longer write up about that book to come.) I couldn’t find it, but I did find this:

“Officer Down Code Three” from 1975. This is one of those Motorola videos, but the quality of the transfer seems to me to be a bit higher. It is also interesting for another reason: this video is adapted from Pierce R. Brooks’s book of the same name.

Officer Down Code Three is considered by some to be the first “officer survival” book. It precedes the somewhat more famous Street Survival by about five years.

Rather than going into more detail about the book and author, I will refer you to this excellent review from FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training.

Bonus: vintage LAPD recruiting film from the 1950s.

Posted in Books, Cops, FBI, History, Law | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 161

Monday, September 7th, 2020

A pair of military history videos for Labor Day.

For RoadRich and the rest of my “12 O’Clock High” crew, “Flak”.

And as a bonus, “Our Crucial Deterrent”, a 1972 US Navy promo film about the importance of Polaris and Poseidon.

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Obit watch: September 6, 2020.

Sunday, September 6th, 2020

Dennis C. Eberhart. He was one of my uncles from my mother’s side of the family.

Gerald Shur, one of the founders of WITSEC. Here’s the NYT obit, but I would encourage folks to go read the very nice blog post by Pete Earley first.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 160

Sunday, September 6th, 2020

Science Sunday!

An assortment today. Sort of like a box of chocolates. (I’ll let you decide which one is the “Spring Surprise“.)

A short one: vintage video of the flight of the Gossamer Albatross.

(“Albatross!“)

Somewhat longer: by way of the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives, a lecture from the “Convair Lecture Series” by George Gamow on “Stellar Evolution”.

This is an interesting oral history from Marvin Stern, who worked at Convair at one time, which touches briefly on the Convair Lecture Series.

For instance, when Edward gave one —. By the way, he wouldn’t give one, I was told. But when I asked him, he did. During his lecture, he made a little mistake. A student asked him a question –- “Oh yes” — and he erased it and he fixed it. Afterwards Edward said, was it all right, do I want him to do it over? I said, “No. Making a little mistake — what have you—having a question — interrupt is almost a pedagogic technique. If I wanted to hire a Hollywood actor, I’d hire a Hollywood actor.”

Longest: “Nuclear Reactor Construction and Operation” from MIT “MIT 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation, Fall 2016”.

This is lecture number 16 in the course, but I feel like it is fairly stand-alone. Y’all know how I am about nukes and nuke stuff.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 159

Saturday, September 5th, 2020

Wow. I did not expect Wednesday’s jail poetry post to get the activity it got. Thanks to Borepatch and Lawrence. Thanks also to Desley Deacon for mentioning their book, Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage (affiliate link) which is available in a very reasonably priced Kindle edition.

I haven’t posted any survival videos in a bit, so when I ran across these, I thought they’d be good fodder. They give a slightly different perspective. Also, while this runs about an hour in total, it’s broken up into handy 15 minute chunks.

“SAS Escape, Evasion, Survival” with Barry Davies.

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

Part 4.

Barry Davies passed away in 2016. Telegraph obit.

The non-fragmentation grenades were designed to stun anyone close to the detonation for between three and five seconds. Davies pulled the pins of two of them. He threw one over the starboard wing and another over the cockpit. This exploded two feet above the flight deck.
He then scaled a ladder on to the wing and followed two GSG9 soldiers through the hatchway into the aircraft. The terrorists exploded two grenades and there was a fire fight for close to five minutes, largely confined to the flight deck, with shouts to the passengers of “Get down! Get down!” while continuous gunfire rattled up and down the aircraft.
Morrison cradled one of the beauty queens in his arms as he helped her down from the wing. “I’m afraid you may have to give her back,” Davies shouted to him. One member of GSG9 had been hit and three passengers and a stewardess were slightly wounded. Two of the terrorists had been shot dead. A third died a few hours later in hospital. News of the rescue of the passengers was followed by the deaths in custody of three of the Red Army group. Davies was awarded the British Empire Medal. Morrison was appointed OBE.

Posted in Books, History, Safety | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 5, 2020.

Saturday, September 5th, 2020

Julia Reed, writer about food and the South. She wasn’t someone I was really familiar with, but reading her obit makes her sound like a barrel of fun.

Deeply imprinted by the Mississippi Delta traditions she grew up with, Ms. Reed was as well known for her entertaining as her journalism. In one of her many food columns for The New York Times Magazine, she described a New Year’s Eve party that had gone off the rails. There was a fistfight, more than one bathroom dalliance, the unmasking of an arms dealer, a fainting, a fire and more — all of which she missed but heard about secondhand by phone when she awoke with a hangover the next day.

…

Ms. Reed earned her first byline at 19, when she was a sophomore at Georgetown University in Washington and a part-time library assistant and phone answerer, as she put it, at Newsweek, a job she had held since she was a student at Madeira, an all-girls boarding school in Virginia.
When the school’s headmistress, Jean Harris, murdered her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnower, the celebrity doctor and creator of the Scarsdale Diet, Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief sent Ms. Reed to get the Madeira angle. As Ms. Reed wrote, he woke her up with an order to head back to her old school. When she wondered why, he barked, “You idiot, your headmistress just shot the diet doctor!”
Ms. Reed liked to say she was sorry the doctor had to give his life in service to her career as a journalist.

…

Mr. Talley also recounted the story of Ms. Reed’s aborted marriage to a charming Australian foreign correspondent. She canceled the wedding, a full-on Southern affair with nearly 1,000 guests, but the couple went on their honeymoon anyway — it was paid for, after all — ending up at the Ritz in Paris, where they met Mr. Talley, and holding court in the bar until the early hours of the morning, with characters as various as Madonna’s bodyguards, Kate Moss, Johnny Depp and Arlene Dahl.

Cathy Smith is burning in Hell.

Ms. Smith is the woman who gave John Belushi the fatal speedball.

Posted in 1970s, Food, Law, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 158

Friday, September 4th, 2020

Another dose of random for today.

How could I not post this?

“The Poisonous History of Tomatoes”.

(Obligatory.)

Bonus, slightly longer, video, which you would not see on television today. Or any time after about 1965, I’d guess.

A 1950s episode of “Bold Journey” featuring the editor of True magazine, Douglas Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy goes to Africa…to hunt rhino.

This is within a few years of Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter: that was published in 1953, so I think (but can’t confirm) that Ruark’s safari was 1951 or 1952. According to the YouTube notes, this aired in the third season of “Bold Journey” which ran from 1956-1959.

Bonus #2: as a hattip to ASM826, I thought I’d post this one: “YOJIMBO & A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS – How The Western Was Changed Forever”.

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, History, Movies, Ruark | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 4, 2020.

Friday, September 4th, 2020

Tom Seaver.

With precise control, he had swing-and-miss stuff. He struck out more than 200 batters in 10 different seasons, a National League record, and on April 22, 1970, facing the San Diego Padres, he struck out a record 10 batters in a row to end the game. His total of 3,640 strikeouts in his 20 big-league seasons is sixth on the career list.
He was also a cerebral sort, a thinker who studied opposing hitters and pored over the details of each pitch — its break, its speed, its location. As he aged and his arm strength diminished, it was his strategic thinking and experience that extended his career.

…

He was the team’s first bona fide star, known to New York fans as Tom Terrific and, more tellingly, The Franchise. The team was established five years before he arrived, and had not finished higher than ninth in the 10-team National League. Even then, the Mets had quickly earned a reputation for chuckleheaded ineptitude.
The Mets were hardly more inspiring in Seaver’s first two seasons, finishing 10th in 1967 and ninth in 1968, but Seaver himself served as the signal that the team’s fortunes were turning.
Until his arrival, no Mets pitcher had ever won more than 13 games in a season; Seaver won 16 his first year and 16 more the next.
He was the league’s rookie of the year in 1967, and was an All-Star nine times in 10 full seasons with the Mets. He had five seasons with more than 20 wins for the team, led the league in strikeouts five times and in earned run average three times. He won three Cy Young Awards as the league’s best pitcher.

…

In what The New York Times called “one of the blockbuster trades in baseball history,” he was immediately sent to the Reds for four players of far lesser stature: Pat Zachry, Doug Flynn, Steve Henderson and Dan Norman.
“Dick Young dragged my wife and family into it, and I couldn’t take that,” Seaver said after the trade. “I called the Mets and said, ‘That’s it, it’s all over.’ This alliance or whatever it is — this alliance between Young and the chairman of the board — is stacked against me.”
The deal, which became known among Met fans as the Midnight Massacre — two other Mets, Dave Kingman and Mike Phillips were traded the same night — has been considered by many as the lowest point — or as The New York Post has called it, “the darkest day” — in Mets history.
It certainly didn’t work out for the Mets. Seaver shined for the Reds and without him, attendance at Shea Stadium plummeted for the Mets, who finished in last place three seasons in a row and didn’t win as many as 70 games until 1984.

…

For his career he was 311-205 with an earned run average of 2.86.

Sophia Farrar. She’s kind of an obscure figure, but this gives me a chance to give the NYT another swift kick in the teeth.

Ms. Farrar tried to help Kitty Genovese.

Two weeks after the murder, The New York Times reported in a front-page article that 37 apathetic neighbors who witnessed the murder failed to call the police, and another called only after she was dead.
It would take decades for a more complicated truth to unravel, including the fact that one neighbor actually raced from her apartment to rescue Ms. Genovese, knowing she was in distress but unaware whether her assailant was still on the scene.

…

“For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens,” the Times article began (there were actually only two attacks). “Twice the sound of their voices and the sudden glow of their bedroom lights interrupted him and frightened him off. Each time he returned, sought her out and stabbed her again.”
That account — epitomized by one neighbor’s stated excuse that “I didn’t want to get involved” — galvanized outrage, became the accepted narrative for decades and even spawned a subject of study in psychology: how bystanders react to tragedy. Except that with the benefit of hindsight, the number of eyewitnesses turned out to have been exaggerated; none actually saw the attack completely; some who heard it thought it was a drunken brawl or a lovers’ quarrel; and several people said they did call the police.

(Previously. Previously.)

Posted in Law, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 157

Thursday, September 3rd, 2020

Travel Thursday!

I can’t find that I’ve done this one yet: as much as I try to keep track, after 157 of these, it is starting to get hard.

Today: “Wings to Germany” on Pan Am! Berlin in the 1960s!

They had me at “over which we pour bananas and flaming brandy”.

(Wow! I managed to find this on the Wayback Machine, and it is now moved over to the new SDC site.)

Bonus: in the interest of equal time, TWA’s “Flight To Germany” from the 1950s.

Bonus #2: Just to give you that feeling of being there, a Lufthansa safety video for the 747.

Bonus #3: First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

(Apropos of nothing in particular, this Reddit thread gave me a few much needed laughs night before last.)

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 156

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020

Some people may be surprised by this, but: I like poetry.

I know, maybe I should turn in my man card. But I’m weird about the poetry I like. I find much of T. S. Eliot incomprehensible, but his imagery! Rod Dreher wrote a while back about the Australian poet Les Murray, and I want to read more of his work. Someone gave me a coffee mug with a quote from James Merrill’s “The Black Swan” on it and now I want to read more Merrill.

And Penny Arcade introduced me to “i sing of Olaf glad and big” which I find comforting from time to time.

“there is some shit I will not eat”

I believe there are two poets you don’t have to turn in your man card to like.

One is Kipling.

Charles Dance reads “The Road to Mandalay” during a 70th anniversary of VJ Day commemoration in London.

“The Power of the Dog”.

The other poet you don’t have to turn in your man card for? Robinson Jeffers. I think even TJIC would concede this point: you have to like a poet who apprenticed himself out so that he could learn stonemasonry, then used that skill to keep adding on to Tor House for the rest of his life.

He later built a large four-story stone tower on the site called Hawk Tower. While he had not visited Ireland at this point in his life, it is possible that Hawk Tower is based on Francis Joseph Bigger’s ‘Castle Séan’ at Ardglass, County Down, which had also in turn influenced William Butler Yeats’ choice of a poets tower, Thoor Ballylee. Construction on Tor House continued into the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was completed by his eldest son. The completed residence was used as a family home until his descendants decided to turn it over to the Tor House Foundation, formed by Ansel Adams, for historic preservation. The romantic Gothic tower was named after a hawk that appeared while Jeffers was working on the structure, and which disappeared the day it was completed. The tower was a gift for his wife Una, who had a fascination for Irish literature and stone towers. In Una’s special room on the second floor were kept many of her favorite items, photographs of Jeffers taken by the artist Weston, plants and dried flowers from Shelley’s grave, and a rosewood melodeon which she loved to play. The tower also included a secret interior staircase – a source of great fun for his young sons.

Judith Anderson reads Robinson Jeffers, part 2.

I’m leading off with this one because it contains two of my favorite Jeffers poems: “Hurt Hawks” and “The House Dog’s Grave”.

Part 1:

A shortish documentary from 1967:

Sadly, I can’t find any readings of my other two favorite Jeffers poems: “Be Angry at the Sun” and “The Stars Go over the Lonely Ocean“.

“…Long live freedom and damn the ideologies”

Posted in Art, History | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: September 2, 2020.

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020

Kaing Guek Eav, also known as “Duch”, is burning in Hell.

Duch was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 for atrocities he had committed as a commandant of the Tuol Sleng prison. At least 14,000 people died after being held there, most of them sent to a killing field after being tortured and forced to confess to often imaginary crimes. Only a handful survived.
Duch (pronounced doik) and Tuol Sleng prison became a symbol of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge as it devoured itself in paranoia and purges. Under the regime, from 1975 to 1979, at least 1.7 million people died from execution, torture, starvation, untreated disease or overwork.
A joint Cambodian-United Nations tribunal found Duch guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes as well as homicide and torture. The tribunal first sentenced him to 35 years, giving him credit for years already served in pretrial detention. A higher court within the tribunal later increased the sentence to life imprisonment without a right to appeal.

…

The force of his personality dominated the courtroom, and his self-confidence sometimes hardened into condescension as he corrected a lawyer or witness about details of the case against him.
At one point, a judge reminded him that laughter was not an appropriate response to a question.
A panel of court-appointed psychiatrists said that Duch was “meticulous, conscientious, control-oriented, attentive to detail and seeks recognition from his superiors,” and that he exhibited “a strong presence of obsessive traits.”
One question hovered above the trial: the source of the “evil” — as he himself described it — that could have compelled him to scribble on a list of 17 children, “Kill them all.”

…

When a Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh in January 1979, Duch oversaw the execution of the remaining prisoners. But he did not destroy the records of interrogations, meticulously kept accounts that could run to as many as 200 pages. They amounted, in the end, to his life’s work.

…

During his trial, however, Duch seemed to doubt the validity of his work, telling the courtroom that while running the prison he did not believe most confessions that his torturers had extracted and that he then annotated and sent to his superiors.
“I never believed that the confessions I received told the truth,” he said. “At most, they were about 40 percent true.”
And he said he believed that only 20 percent of the people whose names had been extracted through torture were genuine opponents of the regime. Those people were in turn pursued, arrested and tortured until they, too, produced the names of imagined accomplices.
“The work expanded,” Duch said. “People were arrested illegally, right or wrong. I considered it evil eating evil.”

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 155

Tuesday, September 1st, 2020

A couple of food videos on the shorter side today.

First off: an explanation of grog, and the importance of rum.

Bonus: how to make garum. First off, you leave a barrel of fish with some salt added out in the sun for two months…okay, not in this case, but that was basically the traditional Roman method.

Bonus #2: James May on the subject of Spam versus ham.

Posted in Food, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 1, 2020.

Tuesday, September 1st, 2020

McThag had this story the other day, but I was waiting:

Joe Ruby, co-creator of “Scooby-Doo”.

Mr. Ruby and Mr. [Ken] Spears had been working mostly as editors at Hanna-Barbera, the leading TV animation studio, when they were charged with creating a show that was a mash-up of “I Love a Mystery,” a popular radio show heard from 1939 to 1944 about three adventure-seeking pals; the 1948 horror-comedy movie “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”; and “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” the 1959-63 sitcom about a hapless teenager.
The directive, which came from Fred Silverman, then the head of daytime programming at CBS, also asked that a pop song be embedded in each episode, as was done on “The Archie Show.” The idea was for the new series to be soothing and nonviolent, an answer to the moral panic about violence in the media in the wake of Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, said Kevin Sandler, an associate professor of film and media studies at Arizona State University.
The pop song part didn’t work out. But Mr. Ruby and Mr. Spears hit all the other marks by writing an adorable half-hour comedy-mystery with a lovable and hapless Great Dane — a character modeled, they often said, on the character Bob Hope played alongside Bing Crosby in the “Road” movies. After 15 or so drafts, they realized that the dog, Scooby-Doo, was the star. (The artist was Iwao Takamoto, another Hanna-Barbera veteran, who died in 2007.)

…

Hanna-Barbera was a relatively small studio at the time that was short of writers, and the pair started submitting gags and scripts on spec. They became network darlings and were the particular favorites of Mr. Silverman, said Mark Evanier, a television writer who later worked for Mr. Spears and Mr. Ruby. When Mr. Silverman moved to ABC, he took Mr. Spears and Mr. Ruby with him, and in 1977 he helped them set up their own studio.
Over the next 20 or so years, Ruby-Spears Productions created a slew of animated programs, among them “Thundarr the Barbarian,” starring a musclebound hero and set in a postapocalyptic future, and “Fangface,” featuring a lovable werewolf and a gang of teenagers — like “Scooby-Doo,” but with complications. The company also produced a reboot of “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and many other shows.

The obit does not discuss Scrappy-Doo at all, but the Wikipedia entry on same is enlightening.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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