Archive for September 5th, 2020

“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.

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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 »