Want to get this in now, since I don’t know what tomorrow is going to be like: Betty White. THR.
Tiffini Hale. She was a member of the “Mickey Mouse Club” cast from 1989 to 1995, and was only 46.
Archive for December, 2021
Obit watch: December 31, 2021 (supplemental)
Friday, December 31st, 2021What we know that isn’t necessarily so…
Friday, December 31st, 2021Tweet:
Reversals in Psychology: A list of famous psychological findings that are now in doubt. Includes the Stanford prison experiment, implicit bias, Pygmalion effect, stereotype threat, power posing, multiple intelligences, brain training, learning styles, etc. https://t.co/WOES9XsMfs pic.twitter.com/VXGGhkxpCo
— Steve Stewart-Williams (@SteveStuWill) December 27, 2021
A lot of this probably isn’t news to people who are as geeky as I am. Some high points:
Evidence for a small marshmallow effect, that ability to delay gratification as a 4 year old predicts educational outcomes at 15 or beyond (Mischel).
After controlling for the socioeconomic status of the child’s family, the Marshmallow effect is r=0.05 or d=0.1 one-tenth of a standard deviation for an additional minute delay, with nonsignificant p-values. And since it’s usually easier to get SES data…
“Expertise attained after 10,000 hours practice” (Gladwell). Disowned by the supposed proponents.
(Previously.)
Obit watch: December 31, 2021.
Friday, December 31st, 2021I’ve written before about the NYT‘s ability to do touching obits for people who aren’t famous (outside of, perhaps, a limited cultural circle) but still led interesting lives.
Ben McFall, “the longest-tenured bookseller in the history of the Strand”.
Mr. McFall enjoyed duties and perks not given to any other Strand employee. For much of his tenure, he was the only person in charge of an entire section. Not only that, the fief he governed — the fiction shelves — provides the Strand with the core of its business in used books.
He determined the price of each used hardcover novel and book of stories and then affixed a Strand sticker to the dust jacket. On occasion, he’d assess a book newly purchased by the store and find inside his own handwriting with a price from the 1980s.
Pricing was one of many fields in which Mr. McFall’s experience enabled him to make quick, intuitive pronouncements. Without checking a computer, he would say he knew how many years it had been since he had last seen an obscure old novel, the number of days it had remained in stock, and its current value online.
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Back then, the Strand hardly sold new books. Now, in addition to the latest best-sellers, it gives space to socks, tote bags and mugs. Bibliophilic employees have complained about that evolution while also accusing management of mistreating workers, particularly during the pandemic, which led to mass layoffs and a warning from Ms. Wyden that “our business is unsustainable.”
Mr. McFall gave his blessing to commercialization — “I’m perfectly willing to sell low-end dresses here if it means keeping the Strand in business,” he told The Times — and throughout his tenure he commanded respect both from management and across factions of the rank and file.
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Obit watch: December 29, 2021.
Wednesday, December 29th, 2021Comment I made to Lawrence last night: “Sure,” the NYT reporter said, “I’ll cover the obituary desk between Christmas and New Year’s. Nothing ever happens between Christmas and New Year’s.”
I’m being kind of short with these first two because everyone is on them like a fat man on an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.
John Madden. ESPN. LAT.
“Rabelaisian emissary”. Gotta give that guy credit.
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I wouldn’t say I was ever a big Madden fan. I had nothing against him, it was more a matter of me not being a big football fan in general. But that seems like a good general leadership principle: be yourself, and treat your people like intelligent human beings.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, Madden was offered the “Ernie Pantusso” role on “Cheers”, but turned it down.
Harry M. Reid. Las Vegas Review Journal.
Jeff Dickerson, ESPN reporter covering the Chicago Bears. He was only 44.
I wanted to note this, even though he wasn’t as famous as the other guys. The ESPN obit makes Mr. Dickerson sound like a really good guy who was taken too soon:
Even after being placed in hospice last week, he told colleagues he was there merely to humor his doctors. No one around him heard a word of self-pity, and he disarmed those who expressed concern by asking them about their own lives.
“JD always wants to know how you’re doing,” Waddle said. “I’d ask him how he’s doing and his first response is, ‘How are you doing? How are [Waddle’s daughters]?’ The dignity with which he has carried himself through some of the most difficult times any human being would be asked to go through, what his wife went through and the dignity and strength and grace that he showed at her side throughout all of this … I don’t know anybody I’ve met in my 54 years in life who has handled adversity over the last decade with more grace and strength and dignity than Jeff Dickerson. I know a lot of people go through [stuff]. I do. I’m sympathetic to all of it. But what Jeff Dickerson has had to go through the last decade is cruel.
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“He always carried a care for the subject that he was going to write about,” said Gould, who co-hosted an ESPN 1000 radio show with Dickerson during a portion of his Bears career. “As a player you can appreciate that the wisdom he put on paper was as neutral and correct as it ever was going to be. It was always going to be your words. It was always going to be what the story was. It was never going to be someone filling in the blanks …
“Players definitely noticed. He always wrote a true story. He always wrote what was happening at the moment. He didn’t try to back the bus up over somebody. He tried to get it exactly how the story was. … I think you saw a lot of guys give him a lot of credit because they knew he would write it right.”
Obit watch: December 28, 2021.
Tuesday, December 28th, 2021Relentless advocate for children, and author, Andrew Vachss has died. This is by way of Lawrence from Joe Landsdale, and I don’t have any more information than what’s there at the moment. I’ll follow up as more information is posted.
When guns are outlawed…
Monday, December 27th, 2021Obit watch: December 27, 2021.
Monday, December 27th, 2021Man, you take some time off for Christmas, and Death decides to be even busier than usual.
As an expert on insects, Dr. Wilson studied the evolution of behavior, exploring how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony. He then championed this kind of research as a way of making sense of all behavior — including our own.
As part of his campaign, Dr. Wilson wrote a string of books that influenced his fellow scientists while also gaining a broad public audience. “On Human Nature” won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1979; “The Ants,” which Dr. Wilson wrote with his longtime colleague Bert Hölldobler, won him his second Pulitzer in 1991.
Dr. Wilson also became a pioneer in the study of biological diversity, developing a mathematical approach to questions about why different places have different numbers of species. Later in his career, Dr. Wilson became one of the world’s leading voices for the protection of endangered wildlife.
Jean-Marc Vallée. THR. Credits include “Dallas Buyers Club” and the “Big Little Lies” series. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Desmond Tutu, for the historical record.
Sarah Weddington, attorney in the Roe v Wade case. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Wanda Young, of the Marvelettes.
I’ve read (and thoroughly enjoyed) Rogue Warrior and, believe it or not, Leadership Secrets of the Rogue Warrior and The Real Team: Rogue Warrior (affiliate links). Oddly enough, though, I never met Mr. Marcinko. I say “oddly” because he was actually one of the guests of honor at a convention Lawrence and I went to years back, but I never sought him out. Both of us were busy hanging out with one of the other guests.
Bruce Todd, former Austin mayor.
Todd served two terms as mayor, first elected in June 1991 and retired in June 1997. In his time as mayor, he and the council considered issues such as airport relocation, wilderness preservation and transferring the city-run hospital to Seton. He also helped recruit major employers to the city, like Samsung, AMD and Applied Materials.
He also helped pass the city’s no-smoking law, banning cigars and cigarettes in all restaurants and bars.
Todd also led the effort to get the U.S. Airforce to transfer then-Bergstrom Air Force Base to the city when the base was being decommissioned. He succeeded and also worked to pass a $600 million bond election to transform the base into Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
This is a little old, and has been touched on by other folks, but I did not find a good obit until now: Edward D. Shames.
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Entering combat as a sergeant with Easy Company, he was among its many paratroopers who found themselves scattered and lost upon hitting the ground behind Utah Beach before dawn on D-Day.
“I landed in a bunch of cows in a barn,” he recalled in a July 2021 interview with the American Veterans Center. “I had no idea where I was.”
He rounded up his men and found a farmhouse. The farmer didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak French, but he took out his maps and, through the farmer’s gestures, found that he was in the town of Carentan, some five miles from a bridge where he was supposed to have touched down. When he got there with his men, he received a battlefield commission as a second lieutenant for his resourcefulness.
Mr. Shames was the last surviving officer of Easy Company.
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Saturday, December 25th, 2021I’m not sure that Annie Lennox gets enough credit for her musical talent. I think many people still associate her with the Eurythmics, but she’s gone on to do really interesting solo work. And there’s something about her voice that I find…well, I’m not sure “compelling” is the word for it, but maybe that will do.
I set this to start at the four minute mark because, but this is the whole album for your listening pleasure.
Tradition:
More tradition. This one makes me smile.
Not traditional, but I like it:
Further adventures in hoplobibilophilia, plus random gun crankery.
Friday, December 24th, 2021One of the problems joys of being a hoplobibliophile (as opposed to being a normal person, or even a normal book collector): you buy a book on a particular gun for some reason. It might be well put together and illustrated, or it might just be cheap. Whatever. Next thing you know…you’re wanting the gun to go with the book.
’twas the night before Christmas…
Friday, December 24th, 2021Chartwell Booksellers sent this over, and I thought I’d share it with everyone:
Winston Churchill’s Christmas Eve message, December 24, 1941.
Have yourself a merry little Christmas.
(Ugly Christmas Beanie from Magpul (affiliate link). I don’t know that you’ll be able to get one on or before the 25th: but as all people of goodwill know, the Christmas season runs through January 6th, the Feast of Epiphany, and thus your ugly Christmas beanie (or sweater, if you live someplace that cold) is appropriate wear at least through then.)
Obit watch: December 24, 2021.
Friday, December 24th, 2021Joan Didion. LAT. THR.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live…We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
By way of Lawrence: a selection of her writing from National Review.
Bad ideas ‘R’ us.
Thursday, December 23rd, 2021Setup for this: Someone Who Isn’t Me (SWIM) may have received one or more of the Brownells Gunsmith Kinks books for Christmas. SWIM may have texted me a message about “books about kinky gunsmiths”.
Which got me thinking…we have romance novels in just about every other area, including cop romances and SWAT romances (that’s “Special Werewolf Alpha Team“).
Why not…gunsmith romances?
John Brown is one of the best gunsmiths in the country. He can make a 1911 shoot cloverleafs at 50 yards. But he knows nothing about women.
Carrie Green is a Beverly Hills liberal who knows nothing about guns. But increasing crime has her worried. So she decides to buy a gun.
When Carrie walks into John’s shop, bullets won’t be the only thing in the air…
Nicole Cross is looking for someone to complete her father’s last firearms design. But when she meets hunky gunsmith Alex Middlemarch, her gas piston won’t be the only thing moving.
Police armorer Michelle Block lost her cop husband in a line of duty accident. She’s been immersed in her work for the past five years. But can she find love, and a father for her daughter, with macho SWAT cop Patrick Westlake?
A cinematographer is killed on the set of a Western, and movie armorer Lauren Hughes is blamed for her death. Can former SEAL and special investigator Donald Thomas prove she was framed…and find the real killer before he takes Lauren out of the picture?
Okay, that last one may cut a little too close to current events…
Notes on money. And other things.
Thursday, December 23rd, 2021I suspect that, politically, there’s a lot of stuff we’d disagree about. But Patrick McKenzie of Stripe has been writing a lot of smart stuff: both on his Twitter (for example, this thread on buying new glasses, or this one about tax filing) and his newsletter.
The quote above is from a recent issue of his newsletter about “The secondary market in gift cards“. There’s a lot of stuff in here that I didn’t know, or hadn’t thought about:
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Totally unrelated, but I don’t have another good place to stick this:
— The deadly river Neva (@pipandbaby) December 23, 2021
I am amused by this because: a while back (it may have been Christmas 2019) a group of Saturday Dining Conspirators got into a discussion of the Hallmark Christmas Movie Cinematic Universe (HCMCU). If any of us had drawing talent (and could get past the copyright issues) we’d start doing HCMCU graphic novels.
Speaking of bad ideas…
Obit watch: December 23, 2021.
Thursday, December 23rd, 2021He was “Enrico Rossi” in 113 episodes of “The Untouchables”. Other credits include two episodes of “Get Smart”, the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Mission: Impossible”, “The Rockford Files”, four episodes of “Quincy M.E.”, the Andy Sidaris film “Picasso Trigger”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Deadfall”, season 1, episodes 17 and 18. We have not seen this yet, as we are saving season 1 until after we’ve watched seasons 2 through 8. But this is kind of a legendary episode: Joe Mannix gets into a bloody fight with his boss at Intertect.)
Robbie Roper. He was a high school quarterback in Georgia and one of the top recruits in this year’s class.
He was only 18 years old, and passed away after a routine surgery.
Bowl watch.
Wednesday, December 22nd, 2021Doesn’t count as a firing, but still kind of interesting. Lawrence tipped me off to this earlier today, but it was just a rumor at the time: now it seems to be confirmed.
Texas A&M is out of the Gator Bowl.
Is it the Wuhan Flu? Sort of.
But they’ve also got “as many as ten upperclassmen” who are eligible for the draft and have said they don’t want to play. They’ve got two more players in the transfer portal, and “as many as 12 players” who are out because of injuries.
ESPN:
Texas A&M athletic director Ross Bjork told ESPN that the program was down to 38 scholarship position players, of which 20 were offensive and defensive linemen.
In addition to the outbreak and the injuries, Texas A&M also had tight end Jalen Wydermyer and running back Isaiah Spiller declare for the NFL draft. Quarterback Zach Calzada, who started 10 games this season, entered the transfer portal.
“So if you take running backs, receivers, quarterbacks and defensive backs, we had 13 of those guys and only 13 scholarship players on defense,” Bjork told ESPN. “We had over 40 guys out between COVID, season-ending injuries, transfers and opt-outs.
The Gator Bowl people, the NCAA, Wake Forest (the other team) and the ACC are all supposedly working to find another team to play. At this date, though, it seems to me like a long shot: the game is scheduled for December 31st. I imagine many teams have already released their players to go home (Texas A&M was supposed to release theirs Tuesday, and have them come back after Christmas) and I doubt a lot of teams that aren’t already scheduled for bowls are going to want to scramble and take risks just to compete in a lower tier bowl game.
On a completely related note:
The national championship game could be pushed to January 14th (it is scheduled for January 10th) but:
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Not that I am hoping for anyone to come down with the Chinese Rabies, but man, a national championship by forfeit would be a sight to see.