The LA Lakers finally won a game.
There are no NBA teams that have a chance at going 0-82 this year.
Archive for October, 2022
Your loser update: October 31, 2022.
Monday, October 31st, 2022Obit watch: October 30, 2022.
Sunday, October 30th, 2022Thomas Cahill, author. (How the Irish Saved Civilization)
D.H. Peligro, drummer for the Dead Kennedys. (Actually, he replaced the original drummer, “Ted”, in early 1981. Also, if you haven’t looked at the recent history of the Dead Kennedys, it’s a pretty sad story.)
Obit watch: October 29, 2022.
Saturday, October 29th, 2022Jerry Lee Lewis. THR. Variety. Pitchfork.
Noted: Jimmy Swaggart is still alive. (As you may recall, Mickey Gilley died in May.)
I feel like I’m not giving the Killer the coverage he deserves, and I’m sorry for that. At the same time, I’m really not a music guy and don’t have the knowledge to put him in context. Plus, everyone is on this story like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation.
“Patrick”, also known as “Patrick Non-White” formerly of Popehat. He passed away in September, and I had noticed his Twitter feed had been silent for a while. But I did not become aware of his death until yesterday.
I feel like Patrick and I would have disagreed somewhere between 25% and 50% of the time. But our disagreements would have been based on reason, not personalities. Patrick was incredibly kind to me when I first started out blogging, and I regret having lost touch with him. I knew he was having health problems, but I thought he was over the hump on those. I regret that I never got to eat barbecue with him.
Thinking about him, I kind of like this as a eulogy:
I didn’t know Patrick, but I doubt that he ever in his life glanced around him to see what other men would do before doing what he thought was right.
Obit watch note.
Friday, October 28th, 2022While the death of Jerry Lee Lewis is being reported, it was also reported earlier in the week by an unreliable source I don’t link to, and that report turned out to be false.
The latest report is apparently from the AP, and seems more reliable. But I am still going to wait until tomorrow to post the obit watch.
Your loser update: interregnum.
Friday, October 28th, 2022Lawrence pinged me this morning, but in truth, he was just nudging me to do something I was contemplating anyway.
Yes, there are no NFL teams that can go 0-17. Or at this point, even 0-16-1.
But: the NBA season has started. I don’t care much about basketball, but why not kick a few teams around?
NBA teams that have a shot at going 0-82 this season:
Orlando Magic
Sacramento Kings
Los Angeles Lakers
Obit watch: October 28, 2022.
Friday, October 28th, 2022Lucianne Goldberg, literary agent who was behind the Lewinsky scandal.
It was Ms. Goldberg who advised Linda Tripp, a Pentagon aide, to record her conversations with her young co-worker Monica Lewinsky, who as a White House intern had an affair with President Bill Clinton.
Those recordings became crucial evidence in the special counsel investigation that led to Mr. Clinton’s impeachment for lying under oath in claiming that he had not had an affair with Ms. Lewinsky.
Rod Dreher put up a very nice tribute to her, and links to John Podhoretz’s equally nice tribute.
Robert Gordon, musician.
Mr. Gordon had been the frontman for the buzzy CBGB-era band Tuff Darts when he traded his punk attitude for a tin of Nu Nile pomade and released his first album, a collaboration with the fuzz-guitar pioneer Link Wray, in 1977. At the time, 1950s signifiers like ducktail haircuts and pink pegged slacks had scarcely been glimpsed for years outside the set of “Happy Days” or the Broadway production of “Grease.”
But, turning his back on both the pomp of ’70s stadium rock and the rock ’n’ roll arsonist ethos of punk, Mr. Gordon helped seed a rockabilly resurgence that would flower during the 1980s, with bands like the Stray Cats and the Blasters hitting the charts and punk titans like the Clash and X also paying their respects.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Edward Dameron IV, SF and fantasy artist. He did illustrations for The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands and designed the base for the 1988 Hugo Awards.
Ian Whittaker, set decorator. Among his credits: “Alien”, “Tommy”, and “Highlander”. He did also do some acting. IMDB.
Obit watch: October 27, 2022.
Thursday, October 27th, 2022John Jay Osborn Jr., author. (The Paper Chase.)
Between 1978 and 1988, Mr. Osborn was credited with writing 14 episodes of “The Paper Chase” and one episode apiece of “L.A. Law” and “Spenser: For Hire.” In that period, he also wrote his fourth novel, “The Man Who Owned New York” (1981), about a lawyer trying to recover $3 million missing from the estate of his firm’s biggest client.
In the 1990s, he became a private estate planner and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and then at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he taught contract law until his retirement in 2016.
Mike Davis, author. I’ve heard a lot about City of Quartz, and should probably read it one of these days.
Detractors questioned the accuracy of some of Mr. Davis’s assertions and the hyperbole of his prose. That criticism seemed to peak after he won a $315,000 MacArthur “genius” grant in 1998.
“A lot of writers are tired of Mike Davis being rewarded again and again, culminating in the MacArthur fellowship, for telling the world what a terrible place L.A. is,” Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian, told The Los Angeles Times in 1999.
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Signed by Capitol Records as a folk singer, Ms. Miller released her first album in 1963 and cracked the Billboard Hot 100 the next year with the pop song “He Walks Like a Man.”
Her career took off in 1965 when Capitol, seizing on the popularity of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” had her hastily record “Queen of the House,” which set distaff lyrics by Mary Taylor to Mr. Miller’s melody and finger-snapping rhythm.
Where Mr. Miller (no relation to Ms. Miller, although they both grew up in Oklahoma) sang of “trailers for sale or rent; rooms to let, 50 cents,” Ms. Miller rhapsodized in a similarly carefree fashion about being “up every day at six; bacon and eggs to fix.”
“I’ll get a maid someday,” she sang, “but till then I’m queen of the house.”
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Obit watch: October 26, 2022.
Wednesday, October 26th, 2022Michael Kopsa, actor.
Other credits include “Black Lagoon: Roberta’s Blood Trail”, “The Dead Zone”, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show”, and lots of voice work, especially on “Mobile Suit Gundam” related properties.
Jules Bass, the “Bass” in “Rankin/Bass Productions”, the folks who brought you such timeless classics as “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”, “Frosty the Snowman”, and “Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town”.
“Mad Monster Party?” on IMDB. Oddly, it seems to be available on blu-ray (affiliate link).
Lawrence emailed an obit for Ashton B. Carter, defense secretary under Obama.
Obit watch: October 25, 2022.
Tuesday, October 25th, 2022Dietrich Mateschitz, Red Bull guy. He didn’t invent it, but he adapted and “Westernized” an existing Thai energy drink.
More gun books!
Monday, October 24th, 2022Another batch of books is icumen in, so time for some more documentation. I’m happy about this first one, as it fills a much needed void in my collection.
Smith and Wesson Hand Guns, Roy C. McHenry and Walter F. Roper. Standard Publications, 1945. As far as I can tell, this is a first printing. Riling 2527.
This was the first book that attempted to comprehensively cover S&W history (up through about 1944), and remains an important work for collectors.
I can’t find a flaw in this. I’d call it “fine”. Bought for just under $60 from a eBay vendor.
My Ropers, let me show them to you:
These are all (as far as I can tell) firsts of all three books Walter Roper wrote or co-wrote. They’re not quite three of a perfect pair, as the Experiments has a bit of wear. But I’ve still never found another first in the wild in a better state.
(Previously on Pistol and Revolver Shooting. Previously on Experiments of a Handgunner.)
After the jump, another small curiosity…
Obit watch: October 23, 2022.
Sunday, October 23rd, 2022Ian Hamilton, historical footnote.
Mr. Hamilton was the last survivor of the four men who stole the Stone of Destiny on Christmas Day in 1950.
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“You sort of know that when you take a crowbar to a side door of Westminster Abbey and jimmy the lock that there really isn’t any going back, don’t you?” Mr. Hamilton told British newspaper The Telegraph in 2008.
They moved swiftly into the darkness of the abbey and found their way to the Coronation Chair. They pried off a wooden retaining bar across the front of the chair, but freeing the stone was more difficult. They pushed and jimmied it until they were able to lift it and carry it for a yard before realizing that it was too heavy to take any further.
They then heaved the stone onto Mr. Hamilton’s coat, hoping to slide it to freedom. But as he pulled at one of the stone’s iron rings, it came apart, one chunk of about 100 pounds, another more than double that weight. Mr. Hamilton ran outside, almost giddily, lugging the smaller piece. The fourth member of the group, the getaway driver, Kay Matheson, drove up, and Mr. Hamilton laid it on the back seat.
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Mr. Hamilton returned later with the other car, dragged the remaining stone to it, and drove off.
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The four plotters were interrogated by a Scotland Yard detective in March 1951, but they denied any involvement and none were arrested.
In April, deciding that he had done all he could to advance Scottish nationalism, Mr. Hamilton decided to surrender the stone anonymously. He, the politician who had repaired it and another nationalist friend laid it at the altar in the ruins of the Abbey of Arbroath, about 100 miles northeast of Glasgow.
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Leonard, part II.
Sunday, October 23rd, 2022Neat profile in the Detroit Free Press of Gregg Sutter. Alt link.
“Who?” For many years, he was what the Freep refers to as “Elmore Leonard’s leg man”.
He also operates ElmoreLeonard.com and oversees a Leonard Facebook page, lends periodic expertise to the archivists handling Leonard’s papers at the University of South Carolina, and leads the push to put Leonard on a 100th anniversary postage stamp.
Actually, he is the push. His idea, his research into the postal service’s Literary Arts series, his three-page nominating letter that will, according to the Oct. 6 response, “be submitted for review and consideration before the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee at their next meeting.”
Damn skippy Leonard deserves a stamp.
In early October, he stumbled across the unveiling of Mama Cass Elliot’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with Stephen Stills and the Monkees’ Mickey Dolenz in attendance, and it reminded him of a disappointment.
“I have inquired about getting Elmore a star on Hollywood Boulevard,” he said, “but that costs $55,000,” and the appetite for a deceased author and screenwriter seems slight.
Kickstarter or one of the other funding services. (Not GoFundMe, because GoFarkThem.) I’d throw a few dollars in the direction of the Elmore Leonard Hollywood Boulevard Star. I bet you could get at least a few more out of the producers of “Justified” and “Justified: City Primeval”.
Mr. Sutter is also writing a memoir about his time with Leonard.
The library hopes to build an event around Leonard’s 100th birthday in 2025, she said, with exhibits, a movie or two, and presentations by Sutter and Leonard’s authorized biographer, C.M. Kushins, who has written books about rockers John Bonham and Warren Zevon.
That will require Sutter to finish his memoir. He says he will, in plenty of time.
I’ll be looking forward to both these books.
Obit watch: October 21, 2022.
Friday, October 21st, 2022Ron Masak, actor.
He had a pretty extensive movie and TV career. Beyond being the guy who let Jessica Fletcher get away with all those murders, he was in “Laserblast”, “Tora! Tora! Tora!”, and “Ice Station Zebra”. TV credits include late period “Columbo”, “McMillan & Wife”, “Mission: Impossible”, multiple appearances on “Police Story”, “Quincy M.E.”…
…and “Mannix”. (“The Sound of Murder“, season 5, episode 17. He played “Barry Gates” in an unaccredited appearance.)
Obit watch: October 20, 2022.
Thursday, October 20th, 2022Charley Trippi, football player.
Although he was a football star at a time when many players appeared on both offense and defense, Trippi was especially renowned for doing just about everything but kicking field goals and extra points and snapping the ball.
In his nine years with the Cardinals, he ran for 3,506 yards, threw for 2,547 yards and amassed 1,321 yards in pass receptions — the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to have exceeded 1,000 yards in each category. He played at left halfback and quarterback, punted and returned punts and kickoffs, and finished out his career at defensive back.
Trippi took Georgia to an unbeaten 1946 season when he was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy behind Army’s Glenn Davis. He received the Maxwell Award, which also honors college football’s leading player.
He was a member of both the College Football Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame. Mr. Trippi was 100 when he passed, and at the time was the oldest living member of both.
Roger Welsch, tractor guy.
Okay, that’s a little misleading. He was also a regular on CBS “Sunday Morning”, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska, founder of the Liars Hall of Fame:
and a honorary member of the Pawnee, Omaha, and Oglala tribes. And a tractor guy.
His practical interest in tractors, especially antiques, became a fixation in his writing and speaking, and for years he maintained a popular website full of geeky farm-implement arcana. In 1988, The New York Times wrote that Mr. Welsch “is to tractor restoration, and the Allis-Chalmers in particular, what Thoreau was to the lakeside cabin.”
He wrote more than 40 books about love, tractors, dogs and women, including “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor” (2002) and “Busted Tractors and Rusty Knuckles: Norwegian Torque Wrench Techniques and Other Fine Points of Tractor Restoration” (1997) — a book as funny as its title is droll.
Obit watch: October 19, 2022.
Wednesday, October 19th, 2022Sergeant Major Dean Walton, of the British Army.
Sgt. Walton was a member of the Red Devils parachute demonstration team, and died during a training jump.
Obit watch: October 18, 2022.
Tuesday, October 18th, 2022General James A. McDivitt (USAF – ret.), Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 astronaut.
When he joined the Air Force in 1951 as an aviation cadet after attending junior college, Mr. McDivitt had “never been in an airplane, never been off the ground,” as he recalled in an interview for NASA’s Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.
He went on to fly 145 fighter missions during the Korean War, became an Air Force test pilot, then was selected by NASA in September 1962 as one of nine astronauts for the Gemini program, the bridge between the original Mercury Seven astronauts and the Apollo missions leading to the moon landings.
Mr. McDivitt was in command of the Gemini 4 capsule, which orbited the earth for nearly 98 hours over four days in June 1965, a record for a two-person spaceflight.
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Mike Schank, from “American Movie”. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Memo from the police beat.
Monday, October 17th, 2022Two really weird crime stories from the past few days.
1. Four bicyclists went missing in Oklahoma last week.
Later in the week, police pulled human remains out of a river.
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“We believe the men planned to commit some kind of criminal act when they left the resident on West 6th Street,” Prentice told reporters.
“That belief is based on information supplied by a witness who reports they were invited to go with the men to ‘hit a lick’ big enough for all of them,” he said, using slang for obtaining money illegally.
It is a shame that Big Don Westlake is dead, as this sounds like something out of a Parker novel.
2. The Mad Midnight Bomber What Bombed at Midnight was a cosplayer. And a sex offender.
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The victim, identified in court documents as NK, suffered serious injuries. He and his girlfriend, identified as SB, were members of the “Dagorhir” gaming community along with McCoy.
The game is described as “a live-action roleplaying (LARP) battle game” involving medieval costumes and mock combat with prop weapons.
McCoy approached SB over Discord and confessed his romantic feelings for her. She turned him down, reminding him she was dating NK. So McCoy built a homemade bomb, gift-wrapped it and dropped it off at NK’s doorstep, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland.
He researched how to build it, bought materials in cash from multiple stores to conceal his efforts, and ultimately built a package bomb that he placed inside a shipping box, which he drove to the victim’s house himself, according to prosecutors.
The bomber seems fairly clever. But not clever enough: they got DNA, they got location data from his cellphone, and they got video from a neighbor’s doorbell camera.
Firings watch.
Monday, October 17th, 2022Executive vice president of football operations Jack Easterby out in Houston.
More from Pro Football Network by way of Lawrence.
Not much more to add to this, really: nobody seems unhappy with Easterby’s performance in the role. There’s a lot of “it was just time”.
The Texas are 1-3-1 and had a bye this past week.
Obit watch: October 14, 2022.
Friday, October 14th, 2022He wasn’t someone whose work I have a lot of familiarity with, though I’ve heard good things about “Cracker”. Other credits included some “Blackadder”s, “The Pope Must Diet”, Falstaff in “Henry V”, and “Frasier”.
Dr. Vincent DiMaio, forensic pathologist. He was the chief medical examiner of Bexar County (which covers San Antonio) from 1981 to 2006. In that capacity, he testified for the prosecution against Genene Jones, who was convicted of killing a 15-month-old baby, and may have killed up to 60 other children.
Dr. DiMaio, who had been a medical examiner in Dallas from 1972 to 1981, was later called on to look into allegations that President Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a look-alike whom Soviet officials had trained to assume his identify. Michael Eddowes, a British lawyer and restaurateur, had made the allegations in a 1975 book, “Khrushchev Killed Kennedy,” which he published himself.
After the author persuaded Oswald’s wife, Marina, to have his body exhumed in 1981, Dr. DiMaio was recruited to help examine the remains. But his team quickly debunked the theory, confirming through forensic dentistry that the physical characteristics of the man buried as Oswald matched those on Oswald’s passport and his Marine Corps records.
As a private consultant, he also worked with the authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh and came to the belief that Vincent van Gogh’s death was murder, not suicide. He also testified for the defense in the George Zimmerman trial.
He also wrote four books: Morgue: A Life in Death (with Ron Franscell) was nominated for a “Best Fact Crime” Edgar award. (The NYT says it won, but the Edgar Awards database says The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale was that year’s winner.)
Bernard McGuirk, Don Imus’s producer.
Obit watch: October 13, 2022.
Thursday, October 13th, 2022Andy Detwiler, YouTuber.
He had a popular channel, “Harmless Farmer“. What distinguished him from other farming YouTubers was that Mr. Detwiler had lost both arms in a farming accident when he was two years old, and did everything with his feet and other body parts.
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Obit watch: October 12, 2022.
Wednesday, October 12th, 2022Angela Lansbury. THR. Appreciation. Variety.
Everybody has something to say about this, and I don’t have anything profound to add.
Headline of the day.
Tuesday, October 11th, 2022Obit watch: October 11, 2022.
Tuesday, October 11th, 2022Austin Stoker, actor. Other credits include “Riding with Death” (“Dimwitted, meaty guy foils criminals by turning invisible.”), “Airwolf”, “Lou Grant”, “Chopper One”, “McCloud”, and “Airport 1975”.
Lawrence sent over an obit from Publisher’s Weekly for Jill Pinkwater, author, illustrator, and spouse of Daniel Pinkwater.
Eileen Ryan. Credits include “Eight Legged Freaks”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Cannon”, and “Marcus Welby, M.D.”.
NYT obit for Nikki Finke, just for the record.
Firings watch.
Monday, October 10th, 2022Matt Rhule deposed as head coach of the Carolina Panthers, in the first NFL coach firing this season.
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As with the offensive coordinator dilemma, Rhule never identified a long-term, efficient quarterback. The team signed journeyman Teddy Bridgewater to lead the offense in 2020, but he was traded to the Denver Broncos following a 5-11 debut season under Rhule.
The Panthers traded three draft picks to the New York Jets for former first-round pick Sam Darnold last offseason. Darnold faltered as the franchise QB in Carolina, as he did in New York, and the Panthers remained on the hook for his salary through this season after picking up his fifth-year option following the trade to acquire him.
This summer, the Panthers tried to upgrade the QB spot by trading for former first overall pick Baker Mayfield. Through five games, Mayfield has struggled mightily, completing just 54.9% of his passes for 962 yards, four touchdowns and four interceptions.
Obit watch: October 10, 2022.
Monday, October 10th, 2022Anton Fier, noted drummer.
His career rose to new heights in the mid-1980s: He toured with the jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock following Mr. Hancock’s 1984 pop-funk crossover hit “Rockit,” and played on Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed 1984 album, “Mister Heartbreak.”
By that point his musical ambitions could not be contained behind the drum kit, so Mr. Fier formed the Golden Palominos, an ever-evolving indie-rock supergroup that attracted a parade of guest stars, including Michael Stipe, John Lydon and Richard Thompson, through the rest of the 1980s and into the ’90s.
Peter Robinson, crime writer. (“…DCI Alan Banks, hero of a series of Yorkshire-set novels that spanned 35 years and sold more than 10 million copies.”)
Douglas Kirkland, celebrity photographer.
(Hattip on the previous two to Lawrence.)
Nikki Finke, founder of Deadline.com.
At L.A. Weekly, Finke headed its Deadline Hollywood Daily column from 2002-09. In 2006, she launched Deadline Hollywood Daily, an around-the-clock online version, and became a key source of news surrounding the 2007 WGA strike.
That year, The New York Times‘ Brian Stelter wrote that Finke’s blog had “become a critical forum for Hollywood news and gossip, known for analyzing (in sometimes insulting terms) the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of moguls,” with her reporting on the strike ultimately solidifying “her position as a Hollywood power broker.”
She went on to sell the site to Penske Media for $100 million in 2009.
Speaking to her legacy and that of Deadline‘s in a 10-year anniversary post for the publication, she wrote that the concept behind her original blog — using a URL purchased for “14 bucks and change” — was to get breaking news out faster than she could with her column.
“I didn’t set out to be a disruptor,” she wrote. “Or an internet journalist who created something out of nothing that put the Hollywood trades back on their heels, and today, under Penske Media ownership, is a website worth $100+ million. Or a woman with brass balls, attitude and ruthless hustle who told hard truths about the moguls and who accurately reported scoops first.”