I thought today, for a change of pace, I’d make everyone hungry.
Chicken Chasseur, or “Hunter’s Chicken”.
Bonus #1: Bigos, or “Polish Hunter’s Stew”.
Bonus #2: This is longer, but it pushes another of my hot buttons (other than food), arctic exploration. “The Food Of Prince Philip’s Arctic Expedition” from the Real Royalty channel. (The arctic expedition part is early on, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.)
Yes, yes, “Two and a Half Men”, but she did a lot of other work too.
Ms. Ferrell had achieved acclaim decades earlier in New York theater, appearing as the prostitute April in Lanford Wilson’s “The Hot L Baltimore” (1973), a role he wrote for her. The play won multiple awards, including an Obie for best Off Broadway play, and ran for three years.
Ms. Ferrell collected her own Off Broadway prizes, including the Drama Desk Award for best actress in a play and an Obie, for her performance as a disillusioned waterfront-bar owner in “The Sea Horse” (1973).
She received her first Emmy nomination in 1992 for a recurring role as Susan Bloom, a ruthless entertainment lawyer with more money than manners, on “L.A. Law.”
She later said the three favorite characters she had played were Berta, April and Susan Bloom. What they had in common, she said in a 2018 interview with The Huntington Quarterly, a West Virginia magazine, was “a zest for living life to the fullest in the best way available to them.”
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She notably played the judge who refused to annul Ross and Rachel’s Las Vegas marriage on “Friends” (1999). But she often went dramatic too, playing a homesteader’s wife in the 1979 movie “Heartland” and appearing on series including “Knots Landing,” “Lou Grant” and “Touched by an Angel.” In a 1986 television version (and Los Angeles stage version) of William Inge’s heart-wrenching drama “Picnic,” she played the kind widow who hires a dangerous drifter.
Ms. Ferrell also had small roles in big movies, including “Network” (1976), as a television executive appalled by Faye Dunaway’s series ideas, and “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), as a neighborhood lady in pink hair rollers. She starred as a pizzeria owner in “Mystic Pizza” (1988), with a cast that included a young Julia Roberts. The two reunited in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), with Ms. Ferrell as Albert Finney’s secretary.
She never did a “Mannix”, but she did appear on “The Rockford Files” and “Quincy, M.E”, and had a recurring role as “The Fox” on both “B.J. and the Bear” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, along with a bunch of other guest shots.
Back in the day (1960-1961) there was a series that ran on ABC, “The Valiant Years”.
Here’s episode 7, “Struggle At Sea”, about the sinking of the Hood and the Bismarck.
Bonus #1: Here’s a time lapse video from “The Operations Room” detailing the hunt for the Bismarck.
Bonus #2: I couldn’t pass this up.
Joe Morgan, baseball player and television commentator.
At 5-foot-7 and 160 pounds, Morgan, who was sometimes called Little Joe, was among the smallest great players in the history of the game. He was also among the greatest second basemen, and some, like Bill James, the groundbreaking interpreter of statistics, say he was the greatest of all.
He won five consecutive Gold Gloves, led National League second basemen in fielding percentage three times and finished second six others. In an era when sliding base runners routinely tried to take out the second baseman to prevent double plays, Morgan was known as especially tough in the pivot.
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In 1975, that team, whose stars included future Hall of Famers at catcher (Johnny Bench), first base (Tony Perez) and second base (Morgan), and the all-time hits leader (Pete Rose) at third, won 108 games and defeated the Boston Red Sox in one of the most memorable World Series in history.
Morgan, the league’s M.V.P., batted .327 for the season, hit 17 homers, drove in 94 runs, stole 67 bases and won a Gold Glove. He didn’t have a great postseason, but in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the Series, he drove in the winning run with a single to center. The next year, again the league M.V.P., his production was arguably even better: a .320 batting average, 27 homers, 111 runs batted in, 60 stolen bases in just 69 attempts, a league-leading slugging percentage (.576) and another Gold Glove.
The Reds weren’t quite as dominant during the season — they won six fewer games — but they powered through the postseason, sweeping the Philadelphia Phillies in three games for the National League pennant and the Yankees in four games in the World Series.
“Joe Morgan was a genuinely great player,” Bill James wrote in his analytic volume, “The Bill James Historical Abstract.” His 1976 season, James wrote, which included leading the league in sacrifice flies (12) and fewest double plays hit into (two), “is the equal of anything ever done by Lou Gehrig or Jimmie Foxx or Joe DiMaggio or Stan Musial.”
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He began working as a broadcaster in the mid-1980s, first locally in Cincinnati and San Francisco, later for ABC, CBS and NBC. But his public profile did not prevent his being mistaken for a drug courier and knocked to the ground by policemen at Los Angeles International Airport in 1988. Morgan, who claimed he was targeted because he was Black, sued the city. The case was settled in 1993 for $796,000.
Morgan’s most prominent television role was on ESPN’s “Sunday Night Baseball,” where he appeared from 1990 to 2010. Teamed as color commentator with Miller, an upbeat play-by-play man who was the lead broadcaster for the Giants and a Hall of Fame inductee in 2010, Morgan was a popular figure within the game and with many fans, but over time he grew crusty and disputatious on the air — “the Grumpy Old Analyst,” Richard Sandomir called him in The New York Times.
A self-described “baseball traditionalist,” Morgan was especially known, and sometimes ridiculed, for the disdain he frequently expressed for the statistics-based approach to the game described in Michael Lewis’s best-selling 2003 book, “Moneyball” — a philosophy of roster-building and game management that has now been accepted as wisdom by analysts of every stripe and adapted in various modifications by virtually every team in the major leagues.
I had a late night last night, and I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon, so I’m being a little lazy today.
“Magic Highway, USA”, an episode of “Wonderful World of Disney” from 1958.
Bonus: the reason I had a late night last night was that Andrew and I went to see Greg Gutfeld at the HEB Center in Cedar Park. Spoiler: it was a lot of fun, like a giant tailgate party. But the staff (the HEB Center staff, not Mr. Gutfeld’s staff) were curiously obsessed with “the box”. You had to park squarely in the box. You had to back into the box (even though that put your car facing away from the stage, so you couldn’t sit in the front seats and watch). You could take off your mask if you were in the box, but if you left the box you had to mask up. You couldn’t jump boxes (move up to a closer box if your friends were there). You couldn’t get too close to the box surrounding the stage or they’d chase you back.
But I did get a free book and an autographed coffee pod out of it.
Why do I bring this up? No particular reason…
1. I was looking over some old blog posts, and ran across this quote from a 2014 “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column on ESPN:
TMQ Vows: By 2020, I Will Reduce Factual Errors 17 Percent Compared to 2005 Columns
Credit where credit is due: TMQ has certainly met – as a matter of fact, exceeded – that goal. Hats off to Easterbrook.
2. I wanted to highlight this blog post (by way of Hacker News): I think it’s a nice bit of writing, but it also is a good illustration of the kind of thing I was talking about in this post.
It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.
Margaret Nolan. She was “Dink” in “Goldfinger” (she was also the model in the title sequence), appeared (uncredited) in “A Hard Day’s Night”, and appeared in various other UK movies and TV shows (including “Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?” and some of the “Carry On” series). She has a small role in Edgar Wright’s upcoming “Last Night in Soho”, and the THR obit reprints some of his tweets.
Tom Kennedy, most famous as a game show host. He doesn’t have many non-game show credits, but he did appear on both “Cannon” and “Hardcastle and McCormick”.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
New York Football Giants
New York Jets
Science Sunday!
This sits at a weird intersection. “The Land Beneath The Sea” is a US Navy film from 1967, but the subject it covers is the Navy’s oceanographic research programs. That puts it squarely, to me, in the “science” category. But then, I’ve been interested in oceanography ever since my parents gave me one of those “How and Why Wonder Books” on the subject a long time ago (when I was in the single-digit age range).
Bonus: here’s something that may be a little more explicitly science. “Man in Space” from 1955. This is a vintage Disney video: Uncle Walt himself shows up at about the 1:00 mark.
#TheFutureWeCouldHaveHad
Whitey Ford, legendary Yankee.
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At 5 feet 10 inches and 180 pounds, Ford seldom overpowered batters. But in his 16 seasons he mastered them with an assortment of pitches thrown with varying speeds and arm motions and delivered just where he wanted them. “If it takes 27 outs to win, who’s going to get them out more ways than Mr. Ford?” the longtime Yankee manager Casey Stengel once said.
Methodical on the mound, Ford was irrepressible off it. He joined with Mantle and Billy Martin for late nights on the town, inspiring Stengel to call them the Three Musketeers. Mantle, too, entered the Hall of Fame in 1974, and at the induction ceremony he was asked about the chemistry behind the friendship between him, the country boy from Oklahoma, and Ford, who grew up on the streets of Queens. “We both liked Scotch,” he said.
“In those early years it was three of us — me, Whitey and Billy Martin,” Mantle said, adding, “They were both brash, outspoken guys, and I could stay in the background.”
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Ford missed the 1951 and 1952 seasons while in the Army, but returned with an 18-6 season in 1953. As he remembered it, Yankee catcher Elston Howard gave him the nickname Chairman of the Board around the mid-’50s.
Ford kept rolling along, winning 53 games from 1954 to 1956.
Then came an infamous night in Yankee lore. In May 1957, Ford and Mantle joined with a few teammates to celebrate Martin’s 29th birthday at the Copacabana nightclub. A patron wound up on the floor with a broken nose and accused Hank Bauer, the Yankees’ strapping right fielder, of decking him. Bauer denied it, and no charges were filed, but the Yankees fined all the players who were there for the embarrassing headline-making episode. It was never clear who clobbered the customer, and Berra famously explained, “Nobody did nuthin’ to nobody.” But Martin was soon banished to the lowly Kansas City Athletics.
I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere (though I’m sure the NYT will get around to it, just like they did for Gardner Dozois…oh, wait) but my mother forwarded an obit for Bette Greene. She was probably most famous for Summer of My German Soldier.
I thought today I’d dabble a little in true crime. Also, I wanted to do some more CanCon.
This is a fairly short documentary from The Globe and Mail: “Manhunt, Manitoba” about two vicious Canadian murderers…and the tracker who ran them to ground.
Bonus: this one from the land down under. “Manhunt”, from 60 Minutes Australia. This was posted fairly recently, but dates back to 2011, and covers the hunt for Malcolm Naden. Naden was a child molester and murderer, who evaded capture by the authorities for seven years.
Naden was finally captured in 2012. He pled guilty on 18 counts (including two murders) in 2013.
I’m trying to think of US fugitives who were on the run for that long or even close to it. Eric Rudolph evaded capture for five years. Whitey Bulger evaded capture for 16 years, but I’d argue his circumstances were different than Rudolph’s or Naden’s.
Travel Thursday. Science Sunday. Is it time to make Self Indulgent Friday a thing?
Savage Arms has a YouTube channel, “SavageAccuracy”, with various playlists. One of those playlists is “Gunsite Academy with Cory Trapp“, in which Mr. Trapp gives tips on long range shooting.
For example: “Three Elements of Making a Long Range Shot”.
Another: “Ranging Without a Rangefinder”.
And a third: “Calculating Wind Value”.
Bonus: I’ve mentioned Ryan Cleckner before. Here’s a video with Mr. Cleckner and John Lovell about “Essential Gear for Long Range Shooting”.
Travel Thursday!
Today: the Philippines! “New Horizons: The Philippines” from our favorite airline, Pan Am, sometime in the 1960s.
Bonus video: another point of view, from the 1950s and Northwest Orient, yet another defunct airline. (Northwest Orient merged with Republic in 1986 and dropped the “Orient”. Northwest filed for bankruptcy in 2005, and merged into Delta in 2008.)
Johnny Nash, musician (“I Can See Clearly Now”).
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When Mr. Nash traveled to Jamaica to promote “Let’s Move,” he became enamored of the emerging reggae sound. He recorded at Federal Studios in Kingston, bought a house in the city and one night in 1967, at a Rastafarian ceremony, met a young Bob Marley and heard him sing.
Mr. Nash and Mr. Sims were so impressed that they signed Marley and his group, the Wailers, to their label (now called JAD), with the idea that he would write material for Mr. Nash to sing.
In his book “Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley” (2007), Christopher John Farley described a complicated relationship between the two singers. Mr. Nash promoted Marley to international audiences, bringing the Wailers to London in 1972 as his opening act and recording Marley’s songs. But to Marley’s ears, an American singer doing a commercial take on reggae was inauthentic.
“He’s a nice guy, but he doesn’t know what reggae is,” Mr. Farley quoted Marley as saying. “Johnny Nash is not Rasta; and if you’re not a Rasta, you don’t know nothin’ about reggae.”
Peregrine Worsthorne, who the paper of record describes as “an arch-Conservative newspaper editor, contrarian columnist and defender of empire and aristocracy”. I highlight this obituary for two reasons:
1) I don’t believe in making fun of people’s names: that’s the lowest form of insult humor. However, I have to say: you don’t run across people with names like “Peregrine Worsthorne” much these days.
2) This extremely annoying passage from the NYT obit:
In 1973, in what Mr. Worsthorne had described as a rehearsed and knowingly provocative episode, he appeared on British television and was asked to comment on the likely public reaction to news of a sex scandal involving a Conservative government minister, Lord Lambton, the Earl of Durham (who would, by coincidence, become his father-in-law).
Mr. Worsthorne forecast public indifference, using a four-letter word that later crept into use on cable television and in some general interest publications, but which in 1973 was wholly forbidden. His remark was long credited as only the second use of the word on British television after the theater critic Kenneth Tynan uttered it in 1965 in what became a cause célèbre in a national debate about public morality.
Mr. Worsthorne’s language caused a stir with both the BBC and the owners of the Telegraph newspaper group, very likely costing him any chance of becoming editor of The Daily Telegraph, the flagship of Conservatism at the time.
“I still don’t know why I made such a fool of myself,” he wrote in the liberal newspaper The Guardian in 2004. “Foolhardiness, I suppose. It seemed the mot juste, and I could not resist the temptation to make a splash. As a result, I shall be remembered, if at all, as the second person to say” — and here he said it again — “on British TV. What a deservedly horrible fate.”
Later he suggested that the episode may not have been spontaneous, since it followed private conversations at El Vino, a notorious wine bar and eatery on Fleet Street, then the hub of many British newspapers. Contrarianism, he once remarked, was synonymous with “the pure pleasure and enjoyment of annoying people.”
(According to The Guardian, that word was “fuck”.)
I’m bending some rules today:
But: James “Connections” Burke, on “Is The Internet Redefining Knowledge?” Buttons. Pushed.
This was posted in May, but from context clues in the introduction, I think it dates back to 2001 or 2002. I set it to start about two minutes in, skipping the introductions, but you’re welcome to rewind if you wish.
Bonus: This is an episode of “New Mexico In Focus”, I think from 2014 (at least, that’s when it was posted). This one’s only about 21 minutes.