Sean Connery. Man, I love that photo. Borepatch. Variety. THR.
I don’t know what I can say that hasn’t been better said by other people. Borepatch beat me on “The Wind and the Lion“. “The Untouchables”. “The Man Who Would Be King”.
And “Zardoz“.
Edited to add: “15 Sean Connery Movies to Stream” from the NYT. Which includes a couple of Bond films, a couple of movies I mentioned above, “The Hunt For Red October”, some other interesting stuff…
…and “The Rock” and “Zardoz”.
A while back, I found a book at Half-Price Books: Body 115: The Mystery of the Last Victim of the King’s Cross Fire (affiliate link, but please do not pay those prices).
Sometime around 7:30 PM on November 18, 1987, somebody threw away a lit match or a burning cigarette butt or something on the escalator at King’s Cross Station in the London Underground. Whatever was burning fell between the wooden treads and apparently landed on something flammable. Later investigation revealed that the underside of the escalator was full of discarded trash, fluff, old grease, and other things that would burn easily.
The resulting fire seemed small and easily controlled. The London Fire Brigade was dispatched at 7:36 PM. The police started evacuating the station at 7:39 PM.
At 7:45 PM, the fire blew up into a flashover. 31 people died.
There was one man who was burned beyond recognition and who the authorities couldn’t identify. He became known as “Body 115”.
In 2004, the unknown man was finally identified as Alexander Fallon.
Body 115 and the King’s Cross fire fascinate me for two reasons. One is the amount of time and effort spent identifying the unknown man. The book is like a good non-fiction detective story, but with no real crime: just the search to put a name to an unknown man and maybe give his people some sense of…closure. It was an extraordinary, multiple organization effort spread across years.
I think sometimes you find people who view things with a certain exceptionalism. “Well, sure, we British would take 16 years to put a name to a unknown fire victim. Do you think they’d do that in America? They’re too busy chasing dope dealers with assault weapons.” Well, yes, actually: look up Little Miss 1565. Or the Boy in the Box. Or “Orange Socks“, to name some US specific examples.
I’m not saying the British or the Americans are superior. I’m saying I think this kind of thing happens in every country, and we don’t hear about most of them unless they grab the public’s imagination. I’m sure there are police officers in Japan or Germany trying to tie names to unknown bodies. Look at the work of EAAF, for another example.
The only exceptionalism involved here is the exceptionalism of being human, of wanting to find answers, solve mysteries, and comfort others.
The other reason King’s Cross fascinates me is the dynamics of the fire. Why did it suddenly go from “the size of a large cardboard box” and easily controllable to a massive flashover?
The Atomic Energy Research Establishment (which had a supercomputer) set up computer simulations of the fire at the request of the investigators. They found something strange: the fire actually laid down along the escalator treads, instead of burning straight up like they expected. The people who set up the simulation actually thought that their code was buggy: maybe they had gravity going the wrong way, or some mistake like that.
So the investigative teams built scale models of King’s Cross, set them on fire…and the fire behaved exactly like the simulation did. The flames laid down along the escalator. The metal sides of the escalator contained the heat and flames, and with the fire laying down on the escalator, it rapidly heated the wooden treads. The treads, under heat, started decomposing and giving off combustible gasses. At the same time, radiant heat directed upwards was heating layers of old paint above the escalator shaft. All of these things combined, but especially the “laying down” behavior of the fire, contributed to the flashover.
That phenomenon became known as the “trench effect“.
Bonus #1: this is an episode of “Seconds From Disaster” that covers the fire itself. It doesn’t spend a lot of time on Body 115, but it does give you a clear idea of what happened and the investigative process.
Bonus #2:
Station Officer Townsley was posthumously awarded the George Medal.
I thought today I’d post some stuff that I think is just pure fun.
South Texas Pistolero posted a few weeks ago about the Roy Clark Greatest Hits album, and then this popped up: Roy Clark and Johnny Cash play “Folsom Prison Blues”.
Something else that popped up: this excerpt from “The Seven Little Foys”, in which Bob Hope (as Eddie Foy) and James Cagney (as George M. Cohan) do a dance-off.
These two are obviously having so much fun – not just dancing, but playing off each other’s lines. I like this almost as much as I do the Nicholas Brothers routine from “Stormy Weather”. (And both men were in their fifties when this was filmed: that’s some darn fine dancing for men of that age.)
(Historical callback: Eddie Foy was backstage in the Iroquois Theatre preparing to perform when it caught fire. He famously ran out on stage and attempted to calm the crowd and keep them from panicking, even while chunks of burning scenery were falling near him. Foy was widely considered to be one of the heroes of the disaster. And this is dramatized in “The Seven Little Foys”.)
Bonus: I may be stretching other people’s definitions of “fun” here, but you know what I find fun? Advertising fiascos.
Once upon a time (the early 1980s) there was a chain called “Rax Roast Beef”. It was mostly based in the Northeast, but:
But selling roast beef sandwiches wasn’t enough:
This sounds like a company that is very confused about what their core mission is. But to make a long story shorter…
I find this guy kind of annoying (at least in the first 30 seconds or so) but the video is short: “The Commercial that Killed a Fast Food Chain”.
The Mr. Delicious promotional video:
Question: is this the worst fast food promotional campaign ever? The first guy seems to think so, but: was it worse than Herb?
Or The Noid?
Or – and I’m pretty sure Lawrence would argue that this is the worst fast food commercial of all time – the “singing” rat creatures for Quizno’s? That pretty much killed their company, too.
Dan Baum, journalist and author.
He was somewhat famous for being fired by the New Yorker: more specifically, for tweeting about being fired by the New Yorker.
Over three days in May 2009, he tapped out his saga in more than 350 tweets, each less than 140 characters.
The media world, which always paid close-attention to Twitter, hailed the result as a breakthrough in storytelling: Not only was Mr. Baum pulling back the curtain on an august legacy publication; he was also unspooling his tale in real time, one tweet after another. (He learned as he went along not to do things like break up sentences between entries.)
Mr. Baum ended up producing one of the first examples of what is now called a Twitter thread, in which multiple tweets are linked together to provide more information than can be captured in one entry; today, entire novels are written in threads.
He went on to write several books. The NYT singles out Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans (affiliate link) as his “most acclaimed” book. Among his other books is Gun Guys: A Road Trip (affiliate link), a book that great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn recommends.
NYT obit for Billy Joe Shaver.
In the opening seconds of a televised college hockey game on Oct. 20, 1995, Roy, a forward, skated in to body-check an opposing defenseman, crashed into the boards and fell to the ice.
“It was as if my head had become disengaged from my body,” he recalled in a book, “Eleven Seconds: A Story of Tragedy, Courage & Triumph,” written with E.M. Swift. “I was turning the key in the ignition on a cold winter morning, and the battery was completely dead. Not a spark. Just click, and nothing. And right away it passed through my mind I was probably paralyzed.”
He had shattered his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. The injury left Roy a quadriplegic. Eventually he regained some movement in his right arm, which he used to work the joystick on his wheelchair.
College hockey is held in awe in Boston, its athletes worshiped and its fallen participants mourned. Shortly after Roy’s accident, more than 200 special church masses and prayer services were held in his honor, according to his father, Lee.
That reverence for the younger Roy grew as he gave motivational speeches and raised money to help those with spinal injuries and to fund research.
The Travis Roy Foundation, established in 1996 to support people with spinal cord injuries, has given nearly $5 million in research grants and helped more than 2,100 quadriplegics and paraplegics, according to its website.
Travel Thursday!
Today’s feature: “Flagships of the Air”, from American Airlines sometime in the 1940s. I picked this for one big reason: it features transcontinental flight on the DC-3, and I love me some DC-3s.
Bonus: We haven’t done a Pan Am video in a bit, and this even fits in with the America! theme. “Wings to Alaska”, from 1965.
Bonus bonus: Nothing to do with travel really, but I remember this song from one of the 8-track tapes we had kicking around in our old Suburban.
Cecilia Chiang has passed away at 100.
She was the woman who brought traditional Mandarin cooking to America.
The Mandarin, which opened in 1962 as a 65-seat restaurant on Polk Street in the Russian Hill section and later operated on Ghirardelli Square, near Fisherman’s Wharf, offered patrons unheard-of specialties at the time, like potstickers, Chongqing-style spicy dry-shredded beef, peppery Sichuan eggplant, moo shu pork, sizzling rice soup and glacéed bananas.
This was traditional Mandarin cooking, a catchall term for the dining style of the well-to-do in Beijing, where family chefs prepared local dishes as well as regional specialties from Sichuan, Shanghai and Canton.
In a profile of Ms. Chiang in 2007, The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that her restaurant “defined upscale Chinese dining, introducing customers to Sichuan dishes like kung pao chicken and twice-cooked pork, and to refined preparations like minced squab in lettuce cups; tea-smoked duck; and beggar’s chicken, a whole bird stuffed with dried mushrooms, water chestnuts and ham and baked in clay.”
The NYT obit mentions Paul Freedman’s Ten Restaurants That Changed America (affiliate link), in which The Mandarin is profiled. My copy was a Christmas gift last year from my beloved and indulgent sister, and it is a swell book that I enthusiastically recommend. (Here’s a pretty good interview with Mr. Freedman from the “Eat My Globe” podcast.)
Billy Joe Shaver, Texas musician.
He was a close friend and associate of Connie Nelson’s ex-husband, Willie Nelson, who recorded many of Shaver’s songs over the years. He performed here often, in settings ranging from the Austin City Limits Music Festival to honky-tonk haven the White Horse. He appeared four times on the TV show “Austin City Limits.”
In addition to releasing his debut album “Old Five and Dimers Like Me” in 1973, he wrote almost all the songs on Waylon Jennings’ landmark album “Honky Tonk Heroes,” released that same year.
A song Jennings and Shaver co-wrote, “You Asked Me To,” was recorded by Elvis Presley in 1975. That was just one of many Shaver songs eventually recorded by hundreds of artists. Among them: “Ride Me Down Easy” (Jerry Lee Lewis), “Georgia on a Fast Train” (Johnny Cash), “Black Rose” (Willie Nelson) and “Live Forever” (actor Robert Duvall, on the soundtrack to the film “Crazy Heart”). Nelson also included Shaver’s song “We Are the Cowboys” on his latest record “First Rose of Spring,” released in July.
Shaver released more than two dozen albums of his own across the ensuing decades, initially for major labels such as Columbia Records and later for indies like New West and Houston-based Compadre. The most recent, “Long in the Tooth,” came out in 2014 on the Lightning Rod label.
South Texas Pistolero has a nice tribute up to Mr. Shaver and Jerry Jeff Walker.
Cocoanut Grove was the worst nightclub fire and the second-worst single building fire in US history.
Those of you who didn’t obsessively read the “disasters” section of the almanac are probably asking: what was the worst?
It was advertised as being “absolutely fireproof”. I get the impression that “theatre” in those days was pretty much a synonym for “firetrap”.
The video I am about to present also suggests that some of the building inspectors may have been bribed. (I know: bribes in Chicago? Who’d thunk it?)
Anyway, you probably see what’s coming. But you may not know how bad it was.
The official death toll, according to Wikipedia, was “at least 602 deaths”.
Bonus #1 and #2: a two-part documentary from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) about the MGM Grand Hotel fire of November 21, 1980.
This is a historically interesting fire. The cause of the fire was determined to be an improperly installed refrigerated display case. The copper refrigerant lines ran through the same wall and were in contact with an aluminum electrical conduit. A combination of compressor vibration and galvanic corrosion wore through the conduit and wiring, eventually causing electrical arcing and a smouldering fire. The fire eventually got large enough to become visible: one of the hotel employees sounded an alarm, but then things got really bad.
A total of 85 people died. 61 of them were on upper levels of the hotel. They were away from the fire, but toxic gasses given off by the burning material were sucked into the air-conditioning system, stairwells, and seismic joints, killing them.
We’ve had war. We’ve had pestilence. We’ve had death. I don’t want to do famine.
How about something kind of fun, and relatively short? “The Railrodder” from the National Film Board of Canada. This popped up in my recs at random, and I think it’s kind of historically interesting: it was one of the last films Buster Keaton ever made, and his very last silent film appearance. (This is from 1965, and is in color.)
I spent some time trying to find Keaton’s Canadian safety video, but it didn’t turn up. So for bonus material: “Buster Keaton Rides Again” a longer video about the making of “The Railrodder”. Sort of. There’s more to it than that. It is also more than twice as long as the “The Railrodder”, but it has great footage of Keaton at work.
When I was a lad in school, we had to read excerpts from The Diary of Samuel Pepys. I didn’t like it much at the time. But now I’m an older person with more enjoyment of history, and I feel Pepys goes down much better when you read him as he intended to be read: in blog form.
And one thing I haven’t really addressed, even in a glancing oblique way, is the current crisis. No, the other one. No, the other other one.
Anyway, I know this is a little long, but there’s a shorter bonus video afterwards.
Bonus: from the same channel, but shorter, scientific, and even thematically appropriate for Halloween: “The Mystery of the Bog Mummies”.
…
The song was by far Mr. Walker’s best-known composition, the only original of his — he typically performed songs written by others — to become a major hit. But perhaps his most enduring contribution to popular culture was as an architect of the so-called cosmic cowboy music scene that coalesced around Armadillo World Headquarters, an iconoclastic nightclub in Austin.
The reception Mr. Walker received in Austin, he often said, signaled the first time he felt truly validated as an artist. “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy,” he told Rolling Stone in 1974, referring to the freewheeling ethos he cultivated with fellow regulars at Armadillo World Headquarters like Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.
“It was the first place where, when I got on the stage to play, they said, ‘Of course, why not?’ Other places, they said, ‘Aw, you’re just another Bob Dylan, trying to make it with your guitar.’”
…
In a career that spanned six decades, Mr. Walker never had a Top 40 pop hit. But in his 1970s heyday, he and the Lost Gonzo Band, his loose-limbed group of backing musicians, made a number of definitive Texas outlaw recordings.
Foremost was “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” a boozing, brawling anthem written by Ray Wylie Hubbard that appeared on Mr. Walker’s 1973 album, “Viva Terlingua.”
“The mid-’70s in Austin were the busiest, the craziest, the most vivid and intense and productive period of my life,” Mr. Walker wrote in his memoir.
“Greased by drugs and alcohol, I was also raising the pursuit of wildness and weirdness to a fine art,” he wrote. “I didn’t just burn the candle at both ends, I was also finding new ends to light.”
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Next week, the 6-1 Chiefs.
Science Sunday!
My plan for today’s videos feel through because there was less science and more history in them than I really felt comfortable with for Science Sunday. So I moved those to Monday.
Instead, from MIT:
“The Sound of Gravity”, about LIGO and the search for gravity waves.
Bonus #1: “Editing Ourselves”, about CRISPER.
Bonus #2: Not by way of MIT, but a short video clip from “Cosmos”: Carl Sagan explains the 4th dimension.
The Beverly Hills Supper Club fire was the third deadliest nightclub fire in the history of the United States.
What was the second deadliest?
I’m ashamed that I’ve never heard of this one: the Natchez Rhythm Club fire. 209 people died on April 23, 1940. It was the usual: the windows were boarded up to keep non-paying spectators from watching the performers, there were an estimated 746 people crowded into the building, and they’d decorated the place with Spanish moss strung on chicken wire…which was then sprayed with Flit.
This is a 30 minute documentary from 2012 called “The Rhythm Club Fire”.
Bonus #1 and #2: The only thing we learn from history is…that we learn nothing from history. Or, “Fire after fire, the lessons are the same…” The worst nightclub fire in US history took place on November 28, 1942. It was also the second-worst single-building fire in US history. I feel pretty confident that the vast majority of my readers have heard of this one: Cocoanut Grove.
…
Many patrons attempted to exit through the main entrance, the same way they had entered. The building’s main entrance was a single revolving door, which was rendered useless as the crowd stampeded in panic. Bodies piled up behind both sides of the revolving door, jamming it until it broke. The oxygen-hungry fire then leaped through the breach, incinerating whoever was left alive in the pile. Firemen had to douse the flames to approach the door. Later, after fire laws had tightened, it would become illegal to have only one revolving door as a main entrance without being flanked by outward opening doors with panic bar openers attached, or have the revolving doors set up so that the doors could fold against themselves in emergency situations.
Other avenues of escape were similarly useless; side doors had been bolted shut to prevent people from leaving without paying. A plate glass window, which could have been smashed for escape, was boarded up and unusable as an emergency exit. Other unlocked doors, like the ones in the Broadway Lounge, opened inwards, rendering them useless against the crush of people trying to escape. Fire officials would later testify that had the doors swung outwards, at least 300 lives could have been spared.
492 people died.
From the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA): “Cocoanut Grove Survivors Tell Their Stories”.
Also from the NFPA: “What we still don’t know about the Cocoanut Grove fire”.
If it bends, it’s funny. If it breaks, it’s not funny.
So I’m bending the rules today. Really bending them. I’m posting two long videos, neither of which I have watched all the way through yet, and one of which is a “free with ads” documentary. As always, you are more than welcome to skip over today’s entry, or just read the linked articles if you prefer.
I could sit here and post gun related posts for the next 365 days, if I wanted to. But I like to break things up: military aviation one day, private/commercial aircraft another day, the occasional gun post, some food, Travel Thursday, Science Sunday…I just wanted to post something outside of normal and not creepy or horrifying or both today. I might go back to the disaster theme tomorrow, and then we’ll have Science Sunday. (Also, I want to bookmark these for myself.)
Today’s feature: “Perfect Bid: The Contestant Who Knew Too Much”, a documentary about Ted Slauson.
“Ted who?” Ted Slauson is a man who spent a lot of time watching “The Price Is Right”, memorized the various price amounts (there was a fairly fixed rotation at the time) and, in 2008, was part of a “scandal” when he may (or may not) have helped a contestant place an exact bid on a showcase. Here’s a 2010 Esquire article if you’re one of those folks who prefers reading articles to watching documentaries.
Bonus: You can’t have a game show scandal without Michael Larson, who people may actually remember. (Well, you also can’t have a game show scandal without “Twenty-One”, but I’ve already covered Charles Van Doren and Herb Stempel.)
For those who don’t: Michael Larson was a guy with a VCR. He started taping episodes of the old “Press Your Luck” game show, and realized that the board wasn’t random: there were only five patterns, and Mr. Larson memorized them all. He knew where and when to stop to win big bucks and miss “whammies”. (If this doesn’t make any sense to you, you were not a child of the 1980’s, and don’t worry: the video demonstrates.)
Anyway, he flew to LA, managed to get on the show, and won $110,237. In inflation adjusted dollars, that’s still the largest amount ever won in one day on a game show. CBS had to break the episode into two thirty minute segments, because Larson’s run went on so long.
Wikipedia entry. “The Man Who Got No Whammies” from Priceonomics.
“Big Bucks: The ‘Press Your Luck’ Scandal”, originally from the Game Show Network.
Shot:
Blue Bell releases two holiday flavors: Christmas Cookies and Peppermint
Chaser:
The former president of Blue Bell Creameries has been charged with wire fraud for allegedly trying to cover up a 2015 listeria outbreak linked to the company’s ice cream that killed three people in Kansas and sickened several others, federal prosecutors announced Wednesday.
A federal grand jury in Austin returned a seven-count indictment Tuesday charging Paul Kruse with six counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to a Justice Department statement.
(I like my Blue Bell. But they sure burned through a lot of goodwill with the whole listeria thing.)