I wanted to break this out from the others for reasons.
Jeffrey Richardson, an officer with the Poteet Police Department, was killed yesterday.
Poteet is a small city near San Antonio. According to reports, Officer Richardson was working an off-duty job in a construction zone near the Domain in Austin when he was struck and killed by a possibly impaired driver.
This one goes out to Lawrence:
Betty Rowland was 106 when she passed on April 3rd. Her death was not widely reported until recently.
John Visentin, the CEO of Xerox. He was 59, and passed due to “complications from an ongoing illness” according to a company statement.
Sonny Barger, founder of the Hells Angels. Cancer got him at 83.
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Barger was sentenced to 10 years to life behind bars in 1973 after he was convicted of possession of narcotics and a weapon by a convicted felon.
He was paroled in November 1977 after serving four-and-a-half years of his sentence, the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported.
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Barger was convicted of conspiracy in October 1988 and was sentenced to four years in jail.
He was released from FCI Phoenix in November 1992 after serving three-and-a-half years behind bars.
Edited to add: NYT obit, which was not up when I originally posted.
Every once in a while, I’ll mention a Smith and Wesson and say it is a J-frame or a K-frame or some other letter-frame.
Generally, I try to provide some context, for the benefit of the non-Smith and Wesson fans who make up part of my audience. However, I am not always successful at that.
I’ll add this to the “reference” section on the sidebar, too. Come to think of it…
No, no, don’t thank me: I run a full service blog here.
This is not an endorsement, and I am not getting anything from anybody for this.
In addition to those fancy Japanese toilets, something else I’ve wanted in my house when I win the lottery is a GeoChron. Maybe more than one GeoChron: I don’t know that I need one in every room, but at least the office and bedroom…
Yes, they are rather expensive. But how can you put a value on having your office look like a scene from The Hunt For Red October?
There used to be (for all I know, still is) a PC program that worked as both a stand-alone executable and also as a screen saver, that emulated the GeoChron but with a considerable omount of flexibility. That included additional map packages and zoom ability. As far as I know, though, that hasn’t been ported to other platforms, and I’m not sure if it is even still maintained or works with new versions of Windows.
I hadn’t looked at the GeoChron website in a while, but I did today. Turns out: the GeoChron people have gone digital. It’s a box (“Is like: a very heavy candy bar“) that plugs into the HDMI port of your 4K TV or monitor and provides…a GeoChron. Complete with Internet connectivity so you can download more stuff. They even offer a Ham Radio Bundle.
Still a touch expensive, but: I can get a 4K (Amazon Fire) TV for $200. $30 for a wall mount. $100 for someone to install the wall mount. Suddenly, that $4,500 GeoChron is about $800. This isn’t quite couch cushion money, but it also isn’t lottery winner money.
Very interesting. Very interesting indeed.
This one is short and lazy because I missed the story, while Lawrence is on it like flies on a severed cow’s head in a Damien Hirst installation.
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On June 30, 2020, Dolcefino entered Jordan’s courtroom to question the judge about his lack of action on a series of complaints of public corruption. Dolcefino was wearing a hidden camera to document the interaction.
According to the video evidence, Jordan at first greeted Dolcefino, but then told the reporter he would not answer his questions and threatened to hold him in contempt if he persisted. Moments later, Jordan had Dolcefino shackled and taken to jail.
The following day, television cameras recorded guards ushering Dolcefino back into the courtroom in handcuffs and a jail-issued orange jumpsuit. Jordan then sentenced him to three days in jail and 180 days of probation. After Dolcefino appealed, Jordan added an alcohol monitor and random drug tests to his probation conditions.
Although Jordan maintained he had been holding virtual hearings when Dolcefino entered, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals later overturned Dolcefino’s conviction, writing, “after a review of evidence and arguments, the contempt of court allegation is not supported by the habeas corpus record.”
Hershel “Woody” Williams, big damn hero and Medal of Honor recipient. He was 98.
His Medal of Honor citation:
According to the paper of record, he was “the last survivor among the 472 servicemen who were awarded the Medal of Honor for extraordinary bravery in World War II and the oldest living recipient of the medal”.
Margaret Keane, the painter of big-eyed children.
In 1970, on a trip to San Francisco, Ms. Keane told a reporter that her former husband had painted none of the big-eyed waifs, and offered to prove it with a demonstration of their respective painting abilities in Union Square. The media splash drew crowds. Ms. Keane arrived with paints and easel. But Mr. Keane did not show up, and he continued to play the part of the successful artist.
In 1986, Ms. Keane raised another dramatic “paint-off” challenge — this time in a Honolulu court, where she had brought a defamation suit against Mr. Keane for falsely claiming that he had painted her work. Her lawyers argued that a painting demonstration was the only way to settle the case. A judge agreed.
In less than an hour, Ms. Keane executed a big-eyed urchin. Mr. Keane, who represented himself in the case, said he had a sore shoulder and could not lift his arm to paint.
The director of Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback special (Steve Binder) also directed…”The Star Wars Holiday Special”.
Michael Swanwick has a post up on his website about one of his recent short stories.
This jumped out at me:
It’s a character fault. I don’t respond well to even the most benevolent authority.
Why? Well, earlier in the day, I’d been reading something that came across Hacker News that I had not seen before:
“S.S. Van Dine’s Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories“.
A lot of these make sense. A lot of these I either want to break, or find someone who’s already broken them. Perhaps, like Swanwick, I have a problem with authority.
For example:
There must be no love interest in the story.
That’s a little obsolete, ain’t it?
The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It’s false pretenses.
I had a famous counter-example I wished to cite here, but on inspection, it turns out that the murderer (who was also the narrator) was not the detective. I can’t think of an actual good counter to this, and I suspect Van Dine may be right about this one.
The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects.
Defensible. I can imagine a detective novel featuring someone who doesn’t start out as a detective, but sort of falls into it (say, for personal reasons: the case is close to his heart). The Fabulous Clipjoint might be a good example of that, but Ed and Am still detect.
There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.
So you can’t have a detective novel in which the central crime is, say, an embezzlement scheme, or financial fraud? Now I want to write that book.
There must be but one detective–that is, but one protagonist of deduction–one deus ex machine.
No “wunza” novels? No team detective novels? Now I want to write those books. (“He’s the Pope. She’s a chimp. They’re detectives.”) And again, The Fabulous Clipjoint and Brown’s subsequent Ed and Am books probably break that rule. (I equivocate a bit here because I haven’t read Clipjoint because I don’t have a copy of it yet. I guess I should get off my behonkus and buy the American Mystery Classics edition (affiliate link)).
Servants–such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like–must not be chosen by the author as the culprit.
So we’re throwing out the whole “the butler did it”? I see Van Dine’s point, but I think it depends on how well the servant character is developed. For example, the long suffering family butler, who is well developed as a character, plays an integral role in the novel…and killed his master for knocking up the butler’s daughter.
There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed.
Murder on the Orient Express was published in 1934. Van Dine wrote this list in 1928.
Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story.
Now I want to write that book.
A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations.
I don’t think this detracts from the detective novel, if it is well done. Would this count as “atmospheric preocupation”?
(Yeah, granted, not a novel, but it could have been.)
On the other hand, Van Dine’s advice reminds me of Elmore Leonard:
Which makes sense.
A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story.
I can see ways of making that a compelling story. Thomas Perry’s Pursuit (affiliate link) is a very good example of this. But Van Dine would probably argue it isn’t a detective story, and I’d disagree with him. Then we’d end up having martinis (with bathtub gin, of course, because prohibition).
A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide.
I’d say I want to write this, and I can see ways of doing this, but Van Dine may be right here: it’d be a lot of effort, and I’m not sure there would be a payoff at the end. Then again…what if the detective is investigating a suicide or accident, trying to find out why it happened, and it ends up being a crime? Say the suicidal individual was being blackmailed?
The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal.
Arguably, if the motive is impersonal, it’s probably a professional criminal. (Or maybe action by a foreign power.) See my comments above on that subject.
And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective-story writer will now avail himself of.
This is a decent list. It does have some things in I’m rather fond of (like dogs and tobacco) but those date back a ways. I think Van Dine was right about them being overused devices when he put the list together. But:
The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.
Fortunately, spiritualism (at least in the sense Van Dine was familiar with) is dead. But I can see working the bogus fortune teller/séance/other modern spiritualist equivalent into a story.
The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unravelled by the sleuth.
Of course, Van Dine’s list predates the Zodiac Killer by a good bit. But by now, even that trope may be overused.
Last week, I was in Concord, North Carolina (a little outside of Charlotte).
Why?
The Smith and Wesson Collectors Association symposium, of course.
Yes, I did have a great time, thank you very much. No, I can’t talk a lot about what went on at the Symposium, since it is a closed meeting. I don’t think I’m revealing too much by saying there was an interesting presentation on a very early production S&W (serial number five) and another presentation on tracking down old NYPD guns. Not just “was this a NYPD gun?” but who carried it, when they carried it, and even background about the person who carried it.
(Fun fact: at least for the period of time under discussion, there was no such thing as a NYPD “issue” gun. Police officers were responsible for purchasing and providing their own firearms, based on what the department approved. There are some very limited exceptions: the department did have some “loaner” guns for officers whose weapons were being repaired, and some “specialty” guns for certain situations. But generally, if you were a NYPD officer, you bought your gun, it had your shield number engraved on it, and the NYPD kept track of what type of gun and what serial number was used by the officer with that shield number.)
I picked up some paper (S&W instruction sheets and promotional items). I didn’t buy any guns (which legally would have to be shipped to my FFL anyway), though there were a couple that tempted me. Bones, one of my friends in the association had a 638 that he offered me at what I think is a fairly good price. If I hadn’t already bought that Model 38…also, there’s another gun that I have my eye on.
(I’ve been telling people “I have Smith and Wesson tastes, but a Jennings Firearms budget.” I used to say “…a Taurus budget”, but someone pointed out to me that Taurus firearms are getting expensive.)
There are always some folks selling books as well. Generally, it isn’t their main focus, but incidental to the guns/parts/accessories on their table. Another one of my good friends had two Julian Hatcher books on his table that I think were original Samworths. But when I went back, he’d sold both of them to someone else. We did end up having a nice conversation about the Samworths, though: both of us were happy to find another SATPCO fan. (And he’s offered to sell me some of his surplus Samworths.)
Someone else was selling a copy of Elmer Keith’s Safari. For $1,000. But: this copy wasn’t just signed by Elmer Keith, it was signed by Elmer Keith to Bill Jordan, and included letters between the two of them. I can see the associational value justifying the extra $600 or so, if you’re a serious gun book crank.
(The same guy has another book I want, but the price is giving me the leaping fantods. And they weren’t on sale, but there was a guy there who had a couple of books on H.M. Pope to accompany his display: S&W target pistols that had been re-barrelled by Pope. Since I’m already interested in barrel making, that’s another rabbit hole to go down. Fortunately, those prices are more reasonable. Relatively speaking.)
I did get some good barbecue at Jim ‘N Nick’s in Concord. Thing is, it seems like it was more Alabama ‘que instead of Carolina ‘que. But it was still good. As was the chocolate cream pie. And the cheese biscuits were excellent: I’d buy a package of the mix, except shipping costs more than the mix itself. (I didn’t bring any back with me because I wasn’t sure I could fit it in my bags.)
Other than that, food was iffy. The hotel had an excellent free breakfast. Not a “continental breakfast”, but a real hot breakfast with an omelet and waffle station, eggs, biscuits and gravy, and etcetera. The hotel restaurant, on the other hand, didn’t have any wait staff: you had to order at the bar and a runner would bring the food out to you. And it honestly was not very good food.
Traditionally, there’s a “cocktail party” (which is really more like a full-blown dinner buffet, complete with prime rib carving station) and a sit-down banquet two nights during the symposium, so I didn’t go out those nights. My other meal out was at a Jason’s Deli with a bunch of my friends from the S&WCA so we could talk shop about some projects we’re working on.
I really didn’t do any touristy stuff. The convention runs Thursday through Saturday, and I spent all of that time gawking at guns and catching up with my friends. Sometimes there’s an excursion arranged as part of the Symposium, if there’s a point of interest nearby, but not in this case. Sunday was the only day I had free to explore. And I didn’t have a car. I looked into renting one just for Sunday, but that was so difficult I gave up the idea.
As it turns out, the hotel in Concord was almost right on top of Charlotte Motor Speedway. Apple Maps has it as two minutes (.5 miles) by car, and I could see the lights of the speedway from my (second floor) room. There is a tour offered, but it wasn’t available on that Sunday. Hendrick Motorsports is big in the area (the hotel is almost literally surrounded by various Hendrik auto dealerships). Their facility was also close to the hotel, and apparently used to offer tours: “Campus remains temporarily closed to the public.”
(It isn’t that I’m a huge NASCAR fan: I try to keep up with the sport as a background process, but not seeing the speedway or the Hendrik campus didn’t break my heart. On the other hand, I really enjoy going to obscure places even if they may not line up with my current interests: you never know when you’ll come out of a new place with another rabbit hole to go down.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a long Smith and Wesson related to-do list to work on. Only 363 days until the next Symposium.
Remember Andrew Gillum? Ran against Ron DeSantis in 2018? Crystal meth?
The 21-count indictment, which was unsealed Wednesday following his arrest, accuses Gillum and another associate, Sharon Janet Lettman-Hicks, with conspiracy, wire fraud and making false statements, according to a news release from the Department of Justice.
Federal prosecutors allege that between 2016 and 2019, Gillum and Lettman-Hicks, a consultant and one of Gillum’s closest advisers, solicited and obtained money from people “through false and fraudulent promises and representations that the funds would be used for a legitimate purpose,” according to the news release. Instead, that money was diverted to a company owned by Lettman-Hicks, who paid Gillum “disguised as payroll payments … for his personal use.”
Since the indictment is fresh (thanks to Mike the Musicologist for letting me know about it) there’s not a whole lot more information beyond that. If I see any interesting updates, I’ll add them here.
Jaylon Ferguson, linebacker for the Baltimore Ravens. He was 26.
Maureen Arthur. Beyond “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”, she was also in “The Love God?” as “Evelyn Tremaine” (the wife/cover girl of pornographer “Osborn Tremaine”). Other credits include “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, “Night Gallery”, “Mork & Mindy”, “CPO Sharkey”, and “Get Smart”.
Gleycy Correia, former Miss Brazil. She was 27: reports state that she died from complications of a “routine operation to have her tonsils removed”.
Caleb Swanigan, former Purdue and NBA basketball player. He was 25 and apparently died of “natural causes”.
Catching up on a few I missed while I was on the road, just for the historical record:
Mark Shields, TV pundit.
Tim Sale, comics artist.
Jean-Louis Trintignant, French film star. 146 acting credits in IMDB.
Heading home. Lack of content ahead. Will be getting in kind of late. Updates to follow.
I am still on the road, reuniting with one of my tribes and having more fun than I am legally allowed to have.
But I didn’t want to let today’s anniversary pass, even if I don’t have time to do a full detailed post.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break in.
Lawrence, we should add that to the list.
As a shiftless and lazy blogger who is on the road, I’m going to point to this Reason essay by Glenn Garvin, which I rather liked. Garvin’s one of the better crop of their current writers.
Light blogging ahead.
Updates will be catch as catch can through next Monday.
I was constantly hearing “Get to the Austin airport three hours early! It’s a cluster! Three hours ahead of your scheduled flight!”
So I got to the airport at 0330 for my flight at 0640.
My bags were checked and I was through security by 0400. And the TSA people were actually pleasant.
(“Why are you taking a flight at 0640?” Wasn’t my choice: I originally booked it for 0830, which I thought was more reasonable. But Southwest changed it.)
Baxter Black, former “large-animal veterinarian” and NPR guy.
Black was keenly aware that he didn’t sound like anyone else on public radio, with former Morning Edition host Bob Edwards recalling that “he knew our audience and he knew how he fit in.”
“He would gear some of his commentary in that way, like the people who were against …. fur coats, use of fur, and Bax thought you should recycle roadkill and use the fur as clothing for dolls,” Edwards said. “So Barbie would have a fur coat from a dead possum or something. That was one of his tweaks at public radio right there.”
Other credits include “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “Quincy M.E.”, “The Man with Bogart’s Face”, “Ghostbusters II”, “The John Larroquette Show”, and “Cradle Will Rock”.
NYT obit for Julee Cruise, which makes explicit something that the other obits only implied:
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Here’s a name to conjure with, for those of us who were fans of High Weirdness By Mail and related stuff in the 1990s: Peter Lamborn Wilson.
Mr. Wilson’s book “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism,” was a slim volume first published by Autonomedia, Mr. Fleming’s company, in 1991. Mr. Wilson wrote it under a pseudonym, Hakim Bey. (He liked to pretend that his made-up alter ego was a real person.)
The book’s central premise was that one could create one’s own stateless society — the goal of anarchy — with simple and poetic acts like creating public art and communal exercises like dinner parties. It quickly acquired a cult following, particularly among those who frequented the aisles of alternative bookstores looking for inspiration on how to sidestep or disrupt the capitalist mainstream.
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“T.A.Z.” seems to take its cues from the Situationist Manifesto and its prose style from Allen Ginsberg. A sample: “Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earthworks as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects.”
Additional bullet points include exhortations to boycott products marked as Lite; hex the Muzak company; go on strike; dance all night; start a pirate radio station; put up posters; home-school your kids or teach them a craft; don’t vote; be a hobo.
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He worked out his disillusionment with the failed promise of the 1960s — the revolution that never came — in provocative writing that appeared in avant-garde journals like Semiotext(e), where French intellectuals like Michel Foucault mingled with American Beats like Ginsberg and William Burroughs and radical feminists like Kate Millett and Kathy Acker, the postpunk novelist and performance artist.
By all accounts, Mr. Wilson was erudite about the recondite, a prolific author of some 60 books on topics ranging from angels to pirate utopias and all manner of renegade religions. He was for years an East Village fixture and the host of “The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade,” a late-night program on WBAI, Manhattan’s countercultural radio station. On his show, he might declaim on higher mathematics, play a selection of esoteric music like Sufi chants or Greek rembetika, and review zines, the D.I.Y. journals that flourished in the late 1980s and ‘90s.
But because his writing often included erotic imagery of young teenage boys, he was controversial.
“I always had a fairly conflicted position about how to handle the issue,” Mr. Fleming said. “Whether to downplay it or try to defend it in some way. He identified as gay, but I never knew him to have a sexual partner, or an actual sex life. His sexual practices were what I call Whitmanesque, imaginal only.”
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“He was a fascinating character,” said Lucy Sante, the cultural historian and author of books, like “Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York,” that tell stories of urban fringe dwellers. Ms. Sante often took Mr. Wilson to lunch — as many did; it was understood that you would pick up the tab — in Woodstock, N.Y., where Mr. Wilson was living for a time.
“He knew a lot about everything,” Ms. Sante said. “The thing we had in common was an interest in dropout culture, in all the ways of not participating in the charade of modern life. And he was encyclopedic in his knowledge of all that material. He was an eccentric, but also I think what he was doing was scattering bread crumbs for others to pick up.”
Julee Cruise, musician. You probably recognize the name from “Twin Peaks”:
She also toured with the B-52s (“from 1992-1999 as a fill-in for member Cindy Wilson“).
Two interesting obits from the NYT for somewhat obscure people:
Jim Murphy. He specialized in history books for kids.
I’m a little old to be his target audience, but the books on yellow fever and the “blue baby” operation sound right up my alley.
Oris Buckner. He was a homicide detective with the New Orleans Police Department in the 1980s – the only black homicide detective at the time.
Then things went to hell. Briefly (the obit goes into more details) other homicide detectives beat witnesses to the killing of a police officer until they implicated two men, then killed both men, along with the girlfriend of one.
Mr. Buckner testified against the other officers. The local grand jury refused to indict them, but seven officers were eventually charged with federal civil rights violations. Three were convicted and sentenced to five years.
Jim Seals, of Seals and Crofts.
Paul Vance, most famous for “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”.
No punny title, because it has been a busy day and we have multiple firings out of LA to report.
Joe Maddon out as manager of the Los Angeles Angels.
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Derek Fisher out as coach of the Los Angeles Sparks (of the WNBA). 54-46 over “less than” four seasons, 1-4 postseason, and 5-7 to start this season.
And the Lakers, having just hired a new head coach, fired a bunch of assistants: David Fizdale, Mike Penberty and John Lucas III.