Norm Macdonald. THR. Variety. Lawrence. Ben Sixsmith.
(If there are any of my readers who are unfamiliar with Albert Fish, he was a real jerk, and I strongly encourage you to think twice before you DuckDuckGo him.)
Hacker News thread (pretty respectful, and lots of links).
https://t.co/xeBTkWrGV1 pic.twitter.com/1qaiGpPmzg
— shoe (@shoe0nhead) September 14, 2021
I thought about embedding some of his bits from YouTube, but Variety already pulled a bunch of those together (including OJ).
This one goes out to FotB Dave: Don Collier. He did a lot of work on Westerns: “The High Chaparral”, “Bonanza”, “Death Valley Days”, “Branded”, and so on. He also did some movie work, including “Seven Ways from Sundown” (with Audie Murphy) and “Tombstone” (credited as “High Roller”).
We’re back, baby!
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
Chicago
Green Bay
Dallas
Washington
New York Football Giants
Baltimore
Cleveland
New England
Buffalo
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Tennessee
Well, how about that?
We have our first college football firing, two games into the season.
Clay Helton out at the University of Southern California.
The precipitating incident seems to have been losing to Stanford on Saturday. Helton was 46-24 overall. But his record since 2018 was 19-15, and apparently the usual suspects (boosters) felt like they were consistently underperforming.
Interesting note: Ivan Jasper is going to coach quarterbacks for Navy. Why is this interesting? Jasper was fired as offensive coordinator on Saturday, but Navy’s head coach (Ken Niumatalolo) persuaded the athletic director (Chet Gladchuk) to re-instate him.
Also fired: assistant Billy Ray Stutzmann, who is being let go after his request for a religious exemption to getting the COVID vaccine was rejected.
Gilbert Seltzer has died at 106.
He was one of the last members of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. His death leaves only nine surviving members.
The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops was also known as the “Ghost Army”.
“We would move into the woods in the middle of the night, going through France, Belgium and Germany, and turn on the sound” — from blaring loudspeakers — “so it sounded like tanks were moving on the roads,” Mr. Seltzer told StoryCorps in 2019. “The natives would say to each other, ‘Did you see the tanks moving through town last night?’”
“They thought they were seeing them,” he added. “Imagination is unbelievable.”
…
Mr. Seltzer, an architect, was a platoon leader and later a lieutenant and adjutant of the 603rd Engineer Camouflage Battalion, whose ranks included men who would go on to work in advertising, art, architecture and illustration, among them the future fashion designer Bill Blass, the photographer Art Kane and the painter Ellsworth Kelly.
The battalion handled the Ghost Army’s visual fakery; the 3132nd Signal Service Company was in charge of sound deception; the Signal Company, Special, devised realistic-sounding radio messages to throw off the Germans. The 406th Combat Engineer Company provided security.
In March 1945, in one of their most elaborate feats of trickery — during the critical Rhine River campaign, designed to finally crush Germany — the 23rd set up 10 miles south of the spot where two American Ninth Army divisions were to cross the river. To simulate a buildup of those divisions at their decoy location, the Ghost Army used inflated tanks, cannons, planes and trucks; sent out misleading radio messages about the American troops’ movements; and used loudspeakers to simulate the sound of soldiers building pontoon boats.
The Germans fell for the ruse, firing on the 23rd’s divisions, while Ninth Army troops crossed the Rhine with nominal resistance.
Nino Castelnuovo, Italian actor who was perhaps most famous for a French film: he played opposite Catherine Deneuve in “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”.
Peter O’Toole may have been one of the unluckiest men in movies.
This came up last night, and I’m not sure why. For some reason, Lawrence and I got into a discussion of O’Toole. (Last night’s movie was “United 93”, which, while fitting, does not have Mr. O’Toole in it.)
I would have sworn he’d won an Oscar for “My Favorite Year”, but Lawrence correctly pointed out he didn’t. His only Oscar was a honorary one in 2002 (and, according to Wikipedia, his family had a king-size job persuading him to accept it, as he felt like he wasn’t done acting yet).
But why unlucky? He was nominated eight times, which is a record for nominations without a win. But worse yet, a lot of his nominations were for fantastic roles…that just happened to go up against someone else who had a career defining role that year.
See what I mean, Vern?
Side note for Dave: the TV series in which Cloris Leachman played a Pilgrim was “Thanks“. It lasted for six episodes in 1999.
(This is a guest post from FotB RoadRich, who is speaking in his capacity as a private citizen, and not as a representative of any Federal, state, or local governmental body, or as a representative of any corporation or non-profit organization. –DB)
Good afternoon,
Twenty years ago today (well, this evening) I went to a baseball game.
I was with friends who were also members of an athletic performance team I’m a member of. It so happens many of these friends were from families who had emigrated from Vietnam to a better place. I had been in their care since a few days prior, when after returning home from an outing with them, I discovered one of my previous cat family’s last members was near the end of his life. I called up one of my friends who rushed over and helped us both get to a vet where my little friend was confirmed to be gone, having passed away in my arms enroute. It became a very long night. A local friend offered a spot on his ranch for a burial and heading back into town I was told I was staying over at my friends’ shared apartment rather than head to an empty apartment.
The next day another of our friends visited and thought it would be good to get out of the apartment and do something, so after a quick dinner we went out to the Dell Diamond for a ball game. We were running late, so we were in line outside buying tickets when the National Anthem began to play.
Absolutely everything stopped. Tickets stopped being sold. Those in line paused and put their hands over their hearts, or removed their ball caps. I could actually see through the gates to the other side of the ball field and it looked full. But it was absolutely and completely silent. And I was moved.
The date was September TENTH, 2001. In twelve hours my small concerns would be submarined but in this moment I already felt how united we were.
He was apparently most famous for “Police Academy 2” and “Police Academy 3”, but he had a pretty lengthy career before those. He was prolific on TV, appearing on “Movin’ On” and a lot of ’70s cop shows…
…including “Mannix”. (“Deathrun”, season 2, episode 13. This is one of the ones with an old Army buddy of Mannix: however, Mr. Metrano was not the Army buddy.)
Since many asking: no Tuesday Morning Quarterback this season either. But I haven’t forgotten how to do it! Am keeping notes (“saving string,” to writers). If my new book out in a week https://t.co/uABXN0D3L7 is a hit that will put me in a TMQ mood for ’22. pic.twitter.com/rgBwow56yP
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) September 4, 2021
But that’s not going to stop TMQ:
Hell’s Sports Bar about to reopen! No curbside service, you enter all Hell’s-branded properties.
Sunday in Hell’s Sports Bar, Texas and Florida see Houston v. Jax (2020 combined record 5-27) not Steelers v. Bills (2020 combined 27-9). https://t.co/1ffz3pVh6l
— Gregg Easterbrook (@EasterbrookG) September 8, 2021
Yes. Because two teams that had bad records last year, and turnover in the off season, will automatically be playing a bad game to start off the new season.
In other news, the loser update returns Tuesday.
Two things that I have absolutely no use for but find oddly appealing. Both of these are kind of old, but I just discovered them in the past couple of days:
1. Lone Wolf shows them as “low stock”, but they do apparently still have 9×18 Makarov barrels for the Glock 42.
I actually learned about this by way of Lucky Gunner’s ammo tests, which I am familiar with, but was reviewing to find data about a specific caliber. I don’t know what advantage this would give me over .380 (ballistically, I think very little), and if I wanted something in 9×18, why wouldn’t I just go out and get a surplus gun? But the idea is just weird enough to turn my crank a little bit. And it is threaded for a suppressor…
2. Speaking of guns in .380 Auto…the Cimarron 1862 Pocket Navy. This is a newly manufactured gun, designed to emulate the look and feel of a 1862 Colt Pocket Navy, but set up as a cartridge-fired gun (instead of a black powder one), and chambered in .380 Auto.
Again, I have no use for this, and why would I carry one over my Glock 42? But it is another one of those things that’s so freaking weird, it turns the crank again. If I saw one turn up used at a good price, it would be tempting.
In other news, I am back from my vacation, as of Tuesday. The original plan was to attend the NRA Annual Meeting in Houston…but that was not to be. So instead, Mike the Musicologist and I spent a few days bumming around looking at gun shops, some in the area around Abilene.
I’ll probably write more about our adventures later, but since this is “random gun crankery”, I’ll mention Caroline Colt Company, which is a nice shop with a lot of quality guns, and a surprisingly good (for the times we are in) selection of ammo.
Thanks to great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl for introducing me to the work of the Snub Gun Study Group. As a confirmed snubby guy, I like this idea and wish to subscribe to their newsletter.
My snubbies. Let me show them to you.
Top: S&W 19-3 in .357 Magnum with Tyler T-grip.
Bottom: S&W Model 36 (no dash?) fitted with an Apex Tactical spring kit
(And yes, I consider the 2 1/2″ Model 19 to be a snub gun. As I recall, so did Ed Lovette in his book, The Snubby Revolver. No Amazon link because this was an old Paladin Press volume and prices are through the roof.)
In a rare combination of Smith and Wesson crankery and movie crankery, you can buy Indiana Jones’s S&W. On GunBroker. The “buy it now” price, though, is $5,000,000.00. Which is also the minimum bid. Just for comparison, the gun that killed Billy the Kid went for $6,030,312 not too long ago. (Hattip: The Firearm Blog.)
Lawrence sent over a note earlier this morning: David Chipman’s nomination to head BATFE is being withdrawn. I’d like to believe this is a good thing: maybe it is, but I’m worried the Biden administration is going to nominate someone who is even worse.
Michael Constantine, noted actor.
He gets a lot of press for “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” but he did a lot of other work before (and after) that. No “Mannix”, but “Kojack”, “Homicide: Life on the Street”, “Law and Order: Original Recipe”, “Hunter”, multiple appearances on “Quincy, M.E.”, “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl”, late period “Perry Mason”, and the list goes on. He was even in “The Hustler”, which we watched just a few weeks ago.
I don’t do NetFlix. I’ve never watched an episode of “Tiger King”, and I’m not sure if any of my readers have.
But just in case: Erik Cowie.
The Murdaugh story just gets stranger.
Alex Murdaugh, the prominent South Carolina lawyer whose wife and son were shot to death months ago in an unsolved murder mystery that has captivated the state and confounded the police, was pushed out of his powerful law firm over claims that he had misused funds the day before he called 911 from a rural road to say that he had been shot in the head, the firm disclosed on Monday.
Leaders of the Hampton, S.C., firm said they had discovered that Mr. Murdaugh had misappropriated money from the law office and that he had resigned on Friday. The next day, Mr. Murdaugh told the police he had been changing a tire at the side of a road in Hampton County — where members of his family have established a powerful legal dynasty over three generations — when someone in a truck pulled up and shot him in the head.
…
Mr. Murdaugh, 53, was a partner at the law firm P.M.P.E.D. — known by the initials of its partners — which was founded by Mr. Murdaugh’s great-grandfather more than a century ago and is well-known in South Carolina’s Lowcountry. In a statement to The New York Times, the firm said that it had hired a forensic accounting firm to investigate the suspected misappropriation of funds and that it had also notified the police and the South Carolina Bar.
The law firm said it had told Mr. Murdaugh of the accusations on Friday, and that he and the firm agreed that he should resign. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer said his client had expressed his “regret and sorrow.”
The law office did not say how much money was missing, but a member of the firm, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to disclose company information, said the amount was in the millions.
Damn.
— David Simon (@AoDespair) September 6, 2021
Michael K. Williams, “Omar” on “The Wire”, “Leonard” in “Hap and Leonard”, “Chalky White” on “Boardwalk Empire”, and lots of other stuff. THR.
Keith McCants. He was picked fourth overall by Tampa Bay in the 1990 draft, but turned into a bust. Tampa Bay let him go after three years, he bounced around a bit (playing with Houston and Arizona) before leaving football, and fell into addiction. He was 53, and apparently died of an overdose.
Jean-Paul Belmondo, legendary French New Wave star. (“Breathless”, among other credits.)
Tony Selby, British actor. (“Doctor Who”, “Eastenders”).