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He also played “Jerry Singleton” on three episodes of “St. Elsewhere”, and voiced “J.D. Salinger” on four episodes of “Bojack Horseman”. IMDB.
Unfortunately, I can’t find the bit from “The In-Laws” I really want to use, so how about this one?
And, of course…
So where was I last week?
Glendale, Arizona, for the annual Smith and Wesson Collectors Association Symposium.
This ordinarily would have been a flying situation, but when Mike the Musicologist heard where the Symposium was, he offered to drive. He’s not a S&WCA member, but he is a gun guy, and I bought him a guest pass so he could look around. Plus he wanted to see Taliesin West, which he has been hosed out of seeing in the past. Plus driving allowed us to take guns more easily than flying.
MtM did see Taliesin West (finally) but they don’t offer guided tours during the summer. Which is odd to me, because I took a guided tour when the S&WCA Convention (it wasn’t a symposium back then) was in Tuscon in the summer of 2010. (I had a rental car and drove from Tuscon to Scottsdale on one of the off days.) MtM did get to take the audio tour, and had a good time as far as I can tell.
I can’t talk a lot about what goes on at the Symposium, since it is a private meeting. I don’t feel like I’m giving too much away by saying Smith and Wesson actually sent a factory rep (for the second year in a row!) to talk with us and hang out at the convention. The gentleman in question even sat at our table during the Saturday night banquet that closed the show, and both MtM and I were able to chat him up about some…things, which I will keep secret but expect to be announced soon.
(Full disclosure: I own some stock in Smith and Wesson Brands, the holding company for the gun business, and American Outdoor Brands, the holding company for the non-gun business.)
The Symposiums are always like old home week to me. I get to meet up with friends that I only see once a year, though some of those folks were missing this year for various reasons. I get to talk shop with my people. And I get to relax for a few days, or in this case an entire week.
The question people always ask me: “Did you buy any guns?” The short answer: no, just paper and trinkets. The long answer: I came very close to purchasing one, and even had a handshake deal with the seller. But we mutually called the deal off for reasons that I don’t think I need to go into here. MtM and I traveled about 2,700 miles round trip…and I did end up buying a gun, not at the Symposium, but about five miles from my house. (Photos to come after part 2 of Day of the .45.)
It was a two-day drive both ways. We decided to take a scenic route going out to Arizona and went down to Del Rio and along the Rio Grande, paralleling the river and stopping overnight in Marathon at the Gage Hotel (and eating at the 12 Gage Restaurant). We did drive through Marfa (and past the Prada Store, but we missed the world’s smallest Buc-ees by just a few days). We also drove through Alpine and past Sul Ross State University, which gave me both an excuse and a captive audience to talk about Jack O’Connor (who, as you know, Bob, taught English at Sul Ross for a while). The second day we drove through Hatch, New Mexico, and up into the national forests before reaching Glendale late in the afternoon.
For the curious: we were stopped by the Border Patrol three times, twice out and once back, though the third time they just waved us through the checkpoint. The longest exchange we had: “Are you both US citizens?” “Yes.” “Anybody else in the car?” “No.” “Okay, go ahead.”
I don’t think we had a bad meal on the trip, though we did eat catered hotel food two nights. (There’s a “cocktail party”, which is really more like a buffet dinner, on Thursday night of the Symposium, and a sit-down banquet to close things out on Saturday night. The hotel food was somewhat better than decent.) Mike and I ate at The Wild Thaiger on Tuesday night after we got in, and I thought that was very good (I had the Mi Dang and we split an order of Dragon Eggz). Wednesday night we took a couple of my friends to the Barrio Cafe, which was another solid choice that everyone loved. Friday night we took a larger group to Giuseppe’s on 28th, which was also universally beloved by everyone who went.
(MtM picked all the restaurants. His secret: he picks places that have been on “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives”.)
I heartily endorse all three of these restaurants, and The Old German Bakery and Restaurant in Fredericksburg.
We took advantage of one of the slower days to go visit some bookstores and some gun stores. The one bookstore we visited (Bookmans) I didn’t buy anything at, though I did think it was a good store. Tombstone Tactical was more of a modern firearms store. They had good prices on new guns, but I didn’t find anything I wanted. Legendary Guns, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of funky mixed gun shop I love. And I bought some books there.
We took I-10 coming back, and stopped for dinner at the Cattleman’s Steakhouse in Fabens (also heartily endorsed), staying overnight at the Hotel El Capitan before the final push back to Austin the following day.
Thanks to MtM for driving, and to everyone who attended the Symposium. Next year: back to Tulsa (which is not that far).
I missed this anniversary by a few days, partly because it came up right after I got home from my road trip.
But:
This was the first aerial refueling in history. According to the linked article, the Air Force did flyovers over all 50 states: a reliable source informs me that there was a flyover of the Texas capital, which I missed.
In honor of the anniversary, I considered embedding the entire MST3K episode featuring “Starfighters”, which I have sat through. However, I do not feel it would be right to subject you, my loyal readers, to the full movie. Especially since I believe this kind of cruelty is outlawed by the Geneva Convention.
So I’ll just embed this part of it:
If you want to watch the full movie, and get your fill of aerial refueling and Robert “B-1 Bob” Dornan, a YouTube search should turn it up.
Edited to add: interesting article from The Drive that I missed earlier, about the history and current state of aerial refueling.
It almost got past me again this year, but I made a spectacular last minute catch.
Please observe a moment of silence in honor of the late guffaw.
On a semi-related note, especially given past comments about Barbara Tuchman: I recently read The Zimmermann Telegram, and that’s a swell book that I wholeheartedly recommend.
Lowell Weicker, former Connecticut governor and senator.
Bobby Osborne, of the Osborne Brothers.
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To the surprise of some people, the Osbornes were vindicated over the next decade and a half for steadfastly breaking with tradition. Among other accomplishments, they were named vocal group of the year by the Country Music Association in 1971. They were also one of the few bluegrass bands to consistently place records on the country singles chart.
Along the way they built a bridge between first-generation bluegrass royalty like Bill Monroe and the duo of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and intrepid latter-day inheritors like New Grass Revival and Alison Krauss.
Foremost among the Osbornes’ 18 charting singles was “Rocky Top,” an unabashed celebration of mountain culture that reached the country Top 40. Written by the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who also wrote hits like “Tennessee Hound Dog” for the Osbornes — and even bigger hits for the Everly Brothers — “Rocky Top” was adopted as one of Tennessee’s official state songs and as the fight song of the University of Tennessee football team, the Volunteers.
I know I’ve posted this before, but I don’t think I’ve used the 4K remaster. And I still like the song.
Robert Black, bassist. He was part of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and also worked with Philip Glass, John Cage, and many other composers.
Frederic Forrest. IMDB. Other credits include “Lonesome Dove”, “Tucker: The Man and His Dream”, and “Mrs. Columbo” (though not “Columbo”).
Lawrence sent over an obit for John B. Goodenough, Nobel Prize winning battery innovator and professor at UT Austin.
Until the announcement of his selection as a Nobel laureate, Dr. Goodenough was relatively unknown beyond scientific and academic circles and the commercial titans who exploited his work. He achieved his laboratory breakthrough in 1980 at the University of Oxford, where he created a battery that has populated the planet with smartphones, laptop and tablet computers, lifesaving medical devices like cardiac defibrillators, and clean, quiet plug-in vehicles, including many Teslas, that can be driven on long trips, lessen the impact of climate change and might someday replace gasoline-powered cars and trucks.
Like most modern technological advances, the powerful, lightweight, rechargeable lithium-ion battery is a product of incremental insights by scientists, lab technicians and commercial interests over decades. But for those familiar with the battery’s story, Dr. Goodenough’s contribution is regarded as the crucial link in its development, a linchpin of chemistry, physics and engineering on a molecular scale.
In 2019, when he was 97 and still active in research at the University of Texas, Dr. Goodenough became the oldest Nobel Prize winner in history when the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that he would share the $900,000 award with two others who made major contributions to the battery’s development: M. Stanley Whittingham, a professor at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Akira Yoshino, an honorary fellow for the Asahi Kasei Corporation in Tokyo and a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan.
Got home last night. Post about my wanderings to come later.
Ryan Mallett, former NFL quarterback. (Hattip: Lawrence.) ESPN.
The death of Julian Sands has been confirmed. For those who were not following this: he went missing during a hiking trip in January. Remains that turned out to be his were discovered last Saturday.
Lew Palter. IMDB. Other credits include the “Columbo”/”McMillian and Wife”/”McCloud” trifecta, “Richie Brockelman: The Missing 24 Hours”, “The F.B.I.”, and “Badge of the Assassin”.
Nicolas Coster. IMDB. Other credits include “By Dawn’s Early Light”, “Midnight Caller” (anyone remember that series?), “Hooperman”, and one of the spinoffs of a minor SF TV series from the 1960s.
Still alive, just having more fun than humans should be allowed to have.
I did want to note the passing of Henry Petroski. I read To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Also: Teresa Taylor, of BH Surfers and “Slacker” notoriety.
It is that time of year again, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
I’m going to be on the road for a bit. Blogging will be catch as catch can, but I will try to keep up with obits and maybe even post a few photos here and there.
In the meantime, how about a musical interlude?
Daniel Ellsberg, notorious leaker.
The disclosure of the Pentagon Papers — 7,000 government pages of damning revelations about deceptions by successive presidents who exceeded their authority, bypassed Congress and misled the American people — plunged a nation that was already wounded and divided by the war deeper into angry controversy.
It led to illegal countermeasures by the White House to discredit Mr. Ellsberg, halt leaks of government information and attack perceived political enemies, forming a constellation of crimes known as the Watergate scandal that led to the disgrace and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.
And it set up a First Amendment confrontation between the Nixon administration and The New York Times, whose publication of the papers was denounced by the government as an act of espionage that jeopardized national security. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the freedom of the press.
Mr. Ellsberg was charged with espionage, conspiracy and other crimes and tried in federal court in Los Angeles. But on the eve of jury deliberations, the judge threw out the case, citing government misconduct, including illegal wiretapping, a break-in at the office of Mr. Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist and an offer by President Nixon to appoint the judge himself as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Brett Hadley, actor. Other credits include “The Rockford Files”, “McMillan and Wife”, “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, and “The F.B.I.”.
Richard Severo, NYT reporter with an interesting backstory.
…while reporting for The Times’s science section, Mr. Severo ran afoul of his bosses when he decided to write a book drawn from his articles about a patient with neurofibromatosis — known as the “Elephant Man” disease — whose face was reconfigured after grueling surgery.
Accounts of what happened next vary, but The Times, through its publishing subsidiary Times Books, was said to have claimed first rights to the book because it was based on Mr. Severo’s work for the newspaper. Mr. Severo, however, through his agent, had already begun auctioning the rights to other publishers. Times Books eventually bid $37,500 (about $110,000 in today’s dollars), but Harper & Row, with an offer of $50,000 (about $145,000) won the rights.
The paper of record reassigned Mr. Severo to the metropolitan desk, which he considered to be a demotion and retaliatory behavior.
Four years of arbitration hearings ensued, during which Mr. Severo took an unpaid leave. Along the way an internal rebellion was mounted by a cadre of Pulitzer Prize winners when management demanded that Mr. Severo hand over his diaries and other personal papers. In the end, in September 1988, an arbitrator ruled in The Times’s favor.
Ending his leave, Mr. Severo returned and accepted the transfer to the metropolitan desk. He was later assigned to the obituaries desk, where he prepared many in-depth obituaries about luminaries in advance of their deaths.
According to the obit, current NYT policy is: reporters have to notify the paper in advance if they plan to write a book based on their work, and they are not allowed to accept a bid from another publisher until the NYT decides if they want to make a “competitive offer”.
Review of Lisa H: The True Story of an Extraordinary and Courageous Woman by the late and sorely missed David Shaw for the LAT. You can find used copies on Amazon cheap.
This is somewhat unusual. It isn’t common to fire a whole team from a league.
The only example I am aware of before the past few days is NK Veres Rivne, an “association football” team, which got thrown out of the Ukrainian Second League in 2011 for not paying dues.
On Thursday, the Albany Empire (“Albany?”) was thrown out of the National Arena League…for not paying dues.
The Albany Empire was recently aquired (maybe: it is complicated) by Antonio Brown, former NFL player.
Since Brown bought the Empire — becoming a part-owner in March and taking over a 94% stake in the franchise in May — the team has been through multiple coaches, and both quarterbacks on the roster were released after last weekend’s loss to the Orlando Predators that dropped Albany to 1-6. The Empire had entered the season as two-time defending champions.
Brown, a four-time NFL All-Pro wide receiver, had vowed to play for the Empire but had yet to do so. He practiced Wednesday and caught passes from quarterback Dalton Cole — who played at Division III Brevard College and played for the Sharks for a short time — before giving an interview in which he questioned whether “AB” was going to pay him; Brown has stated in the past that AB the owner and Antonio Brown the player are different people.
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Glenda Jackson. NYT (archived).
Other credits include “T.Bag’s Christmas Ding Dong”, “The Patricia Neal Story” (she played Patricia Neal), and “The Nelson Affair”.
Robert Gottlieb, noted editor.
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His memoir offered a highlight reel of snarky critiques of authors — the Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (“a snob”), Ms. Tuchman (“her sense of entitlement was sometimes hard to deal with”), William Gaddis (“unrelentingly disgruntled”), Roald Dahl (“erratic and churlish”).
“He wasn’t just an editor, he was the editor,” Mr. le Carré told The Times. “I never had an editor to touch him, in any country — nobody who could compare with him.” He noted that Mr. Gottlieb, using No. 2 pencils to mark up manuscripts, often signaled changes with hieroglyphics in the margins: a wavy line for language too florid, ellipses or question marks advising a writer to “think harder and try again.”
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Mr. Gottlieb joined Knopf in 1968 as vice president and editor in chief. He edited Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-Prize winning biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974), cutting 400,000 words from a million-word manuscript with the author fuming at his elbow. Despite the brutal cuts, their collaboration endured for five decades and became the subject of a 2022 documentary, “Turn Every Page,” directed by Lizzie Gottlieb, Mr. Gottlieb’s daughter.
“I have never encountered a publisher or editor with a greater understanding of what a writer was trying to do — and how to help him do it,” Mr. Caro said in a statement on Mr. Gottlieb’s death.
Flashing his range, Mr. Gottlieb also edited “Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life” (1981), by Henry Beard, ghosting for the Muppets starlet, and Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” (1988), which prompted the outraged Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to issue a fatwa urging Muslims to kill the author.
LeAnn Mueller, co-owner of the highly regarded Austin barbecue restaurant la Barbecue and member of the prominent Mueller barbecue family. She was 51.
I have not seen any updates on the criminal case against the la Barbecue owners. The only obit I’ve found that even mentions it is from the Austin Chronicle.
Jim Turner, former kicker for the Jets.
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The most memorable game of Turner’s career was the Jets’s face-off against the Baltimore Colts on the afternoon of Jan. 12, 1969.
The Colts belonged to the older and better established National Football League, while the Jets were part of its upstart competitor, the American Football League. The Super Bowl, held for the first time in 1967, then pitted the best team from each league against the other.
The Colts, led by quarterback Johnny Unitas and coach Don Shula, had beaten the powerhouse Green Bay Packers, winners of the previous two Super Bowls, en route to qualifying for the 1969 championship.
While Unitas and Shula epitomized the stoic masculinity that many fans associated with football, Namath, the Jets’ quarterback, nicknamed Broadway Joe, was a figure of loudmouth swagger, and none of his public comments had ever seemed less creditable than his guarantee that the Jets would become the first A.F.L. team to win the Super Bowl by beating the Colts.
Namath played well — completing 17 of 28 passes for 206 yards, earning him the Most Valuable Player Award — but it was Turner, a decidedly Off Off Broadway figure, who was the decisive player. He provided the Jets with their margin of victory and alone scored more points than the Colts did.
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Homer Jones, wide receiver for the New York Football Giants.
Jones was a member of the Giants from 1964-1969, where he was named to the Pro Bowl in 1967 and 1968.
“Homer Jones had a unique combination of speed and power and was a threat to score whenever he touched the ball,” said John Mara, the Giants president and chief executive officer.
“He was one of the first players (if not the first) to spike the ball in the end zone after scoring a touchdown and he quickly became a fan favorite. I remember him as an easygoing, friendly individual who was well liked by his teammates and coaches.”
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Not quite an obit, but Nautilus reran a nice article about Cormac McCarthy at the Santa Fe Institute by one of his co-workers.
The entrance to SFI also serves as a mail room. When I first entered the building there was behind the front desk a permanent massif of book boxes. It was clear that the boxes were constantly cleared and just as quickly replenished. In this way the boxes achieved a dynamical equilibrium. In the study of complex systems this is called self-organized criticality and was made famous as an explanation for the constant gradient of sand piles and the faces of sand dunes.
The agent of this critical state was Cormac, who busied himself digging—like Kobo Abe’s entomologist in Women in the Dunes—to ensure balance at SFI and the growth of his library.
Shot:
Chaser:
It seemed to me that much of the etiquette I was learning had to do with never having to tell yourself, “I’m stupid and now I’m dying.”
–Tim Cahill, Pass the Butterworms: Remote Journeys Oddly Rendered
LA City Council member Curren Price was charged yesterday with:
There are a couple of things going on here.
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According to the complaint, Del Richardson & Associates received six checks from companies either incorporated or co-owned by affordable housing developers whom Price later voted to fund projects for or sell city property to.
In 2021, Price voted to slash the price of a property sold to GTM Holdings from nearly $1 million to $440,000 six months after a company incorporated by GTM Holdings wrote a check to his wife’s firm for about $51,000, court records show.
In 2019, according to the complaint, Price voted to fund a $4.6-million real estate project involving developer Thomas Safran & Associates after his wife’s firm received checks totaling about $35,000 from a company incorporated by Safran.
The second thing that’s going on involves health insurance, believe it or not.
Noted:
Price is the fourth current or former council member to face criminal charges in four years.
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This year, Councilmember Mark Ridley-Thomas was found guilty of conspiracy, bribery and fraud for extracting benefits for his son from USC while voting on issues that benefited the school.
Councilmembers Mitch Englander and Jose Huizar also pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges in recent years after an FBI investigation.
Cormac McCarthy. NYT (archived). “Cormac McCarthy Loves a Good Diner” (archived). THR. Publisher’s Weekly.
Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.
“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”
I can’t find it now, but I saw the same story recounted in a tweet somewhere: in that version, the McCarthy’s were so poor, they couldn’t afford toothpaste. And that explains why she became the second ex-Mrs. McCarthy.
Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.
“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.
Noted:
Layers and layers of editors.
This tableau inspired one of the funniest pieces of wildcat food criticism I’ve ever read. The essay, by Helen Craig, was titled “A Meat Processing Professional Reviews Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road.’” It ran in 2014 on a website called The Toast.
Craig pointed out that such a “living larder” is wasteful. Every day they’re alive, she wrote, “these people will be depreciating in calorific value.” Craig suggested, as any good butcher would, that “the ribs will be good fresh, and a pickling and brining process for the thighs and haunches should result in a product that is similar to ham.”
“The Toast” essay (archived).
Jacques Rozier, who the NYT describes as the “last of the French New Wave Directors”.
John Romita Sr., Marvel comics artist.
In 1966, Romita began a five-year run working Marvel editor-in-chief Stan Lee on The Amazing Spider-Man. He took over for artist Steve Ditko, who had created the famed webslinger with Lee in 1961 before leaving in a spat with the comic book legend.
Romita’s run on Spider-Man saw the introduction of a number of the property’s most memorable characters, including Spidey love interest Mary Jane Watson and crime boss Kingpin; it was during Romita’s time as artist that Spider-Man overtook Fantastic Four to become Marvel’s top-seller, with the masked man becoming the face of the company.
Patrick Gasienica, Olympic ski jumper. He was 24, and died in a motorcycle accident.
Park Soo Ryun. She was the star of a Disney+ show, “Snowdrop”. I note this because she was 29, and her death kind of scares me:
Ryun slipped down a flight of stairs Sunday at a property on Jeju Island, South Korea’s largest island, where she was scheduled to perform, according to the Mirror.
The actress was reportedly taken to the hospital for emergency treatment and was pronounced brain dead by medics after attempts to revive her failed.
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Fellow “Snowdrop” star Kim Mi-soo also died unexpectedly at age 29 last year.
We had not checked Gregg Easterbrook’s Twitter in a while before today, so we were somewhat surprised to find out that Tuesday Morning Quarterback will be back…
Indeed, Gregg has already published two columns back in April tied to the NFL draft.
Will TMQ Watch Watch return in the fall? Reply hazy, ask again later. Basically, it depends on our mood, what else we have going on, and (the big issue) if Easterbrook starts charging for his Substack. We apologize, but we are not made of money, and probably would not pay to read and comment on TMQ.
Unless someone wants to pay us. Barstool Sports, we’re not proud. Feel free to call us.
This is actually not quite obligatory. It seems to be a big story in both Little Rhody and Philadelphia (though I think I-95 has knocked it off the front page in the later). And it has been a minute since I used the “Rhode Island” tag.
They went to Philly to visit Bok. Bok is an old vocational school that’s been turned into a “workspace”.
The people behind Bok had made a deal with Rhode Island to re-purpose an old state building. But that was under a previous administration, and now they were trying to convince the current administration in Rhode Island to go ahead with the deal, which was worth $55 million.
Hilarity. Ensued.
Lindsey Scannapieco is a managing partner at Scout, the company behind Bok. David Patten is (or was) the director of the state’s property management division. James Thorsen was the “director of administration”.
Some highlights from the press coverage:
According to the email, there was “…an irate phone call from the US CEO of Diadora, Bryan Poser, at 5:12pm asking us ‘who these people were and why we would have allowed them into his space (with many expletives in between)…He is also married to a Chinese woman and has two half-Chinese children.”
Quote from an earlier article:
About the lunch at Irwin’s, where entrees start at $28 on the dinner menu — and no lunch menu is featured — [Patten] wrote: “Those reading this memo should know that Irwin’s looked like it was vandalized just before our arrival at 11:30 a.m. for lunch.”
“Imagine my surprise when I learned that Bon Appetit magazine rated it one of the top ten restaurants in the United States! The cuisine at Irwin’s did not disappoint. The word ‘understated’ comes to mind.” (The Journal has not yet been able to reach anyone at the restaurant for elaboration on why the dinner-only restaurant opened for lunch.)
Speaking of vegan cheese, they also apparently made “condescending remarks” to the vegan cheese maker and a glass blower: “…there were questions about paying above a minimum wage and shock that these businesses made any money or could pay rent.”
There was also an argument about someone’s dog being overweight. And I’m leaving out the “Mazel tov” conversation. And the vanilla syrup. But I can’t leave this next one out.
Patten is currently on “paid administrative leave” and seems to be attributing his behavior to a mental breakdown. It sounds like he was the main source of the issues. If it really was a mental breakdown (or a substance abuse problem, as some suggested) I hope he makes a full recovery and amends to the folks he hurt. If he’s just a jerk, I hope he has a long unhappy life asking people if they want to supersize that lobster roll.
Thorsen didn’t do anything about Patten, even though people were pulling him to one side and telling him “this s–t needs to stop. NOW.” However, he’s the former director of administration: he resigned before the trip and now works for the Treasury Department. I’m thinking he was probably like honey badger, just don’t care.
It makes me miss the class and sophistication of Buddy Cianci.
You post the obit watch on your lunch hour. You’re thinking, “Oh, it looks like a slow day. No big news is going to break after lunch.”
Big news breaks after lunch.
Cormac McCarthy obits tomorrow. The NYT‘s current one is a kind of lengthy preliminary one (probably pulled from the files) with the standard “A full obituary will appear shortly.” tag.
Treat Williams. Tributes. NYT (archived). IMDB.
I hear “Prince of the City” is pretty good. Haven’t seen it yet, but just ordered the blu-ray.
Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian prime minister.
This is incredible. Berlusconi possibly the single most Italian man to have ever lived. https://t.co/jZwOSb76zf
— Niall Gooch 👍🇻🇦🏴🚅🏏✒ (@niall_gooch) June 12, 2023
Mike Batayeh, actor and comedian. NYT (archived). Other credits include a show I do not acknowledge the existence of, “The Shield”, and “Life”.
Burning in Hell watch: Ted Kaczynski.
His terrorist strategy, and the ideas that he said undergirded it, enjoyed an afterlife few would have predicted in the 1990s.
The Norwegian news media reported that Anders Beivik, who killed dozens of people at government buildings and at a youth summer camp in 2011, lifted passages from Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto in a manifesto of his own. More curious was the way a variety of law-abiding Americans developed an interest in the same line of thought.
In 2017, the deputy editor of the conservative publication First Things, Elliot Milco, credited Mr. Kaczynski with “astute (even prophetic) insights.” In 2021, during an interview with the businessman and politician Andrew Yang, Tucker Carlson cited Mr. Kaczynski’s thinking in detail without any prompting.
Online, young people with a variety of partisan allegiances, or none at all, have developed an intricate vocabulary of half-ironic Unabomber support. They proclaim themselves “anti-civ” or #tedpilled; they refer to “Uncle Ted.” Videos on TikTok of Unabomber-related songs, voice-overs and dances have acquired millions of views, according to a 2021 article in The Baffler.
Hugh Scrutton, Thomas Mosser, and Gilbert Murray were unavailable for comment.
James G. Watt, former Secretary of the Interior and notorious Beach Boys hater.
As planning for the 1983 Independence Day celebration on the National Mall began, Mr. Watt said that pop-music groups retained in recent years had attracted “the wrong element” — presumably young people drinking and taking drugs. The Mall’s most prominent band had been the Beach Boys, popular since the 1960s.
Mr. Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist who did not smoke or drink alcohol, proposed the Las Vegas entertainer Wayne Newton, whose signature song was “Danke Schoen,” and military bands, saying they would better represent the patriotic, family-oriented themes he preferred.
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Carroll Cooley, historical and legal footnote, has passed away at 87.
Mr. Cooley was a detective with the Phoenix Police Department. In that capacity, he was the person who took Ernesto Miranda’s original confession.
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The Miranda case was by far the most significant of Detective Cooley’s law enforcement career. Mr. Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping by a Superior Court jury in June 1963; the conviction was upheld nearly two years later by the Arizona Supreme Court, which ruled that his confession was admissible despite his not having had a lawyer present.
In late 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review four cases, including Mr. Miranda’s, in which indigent men had confessed after being interrogated. The next year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that the Fifth Amendment required the police to advise suspects that they had the right to remain silent once they were in custody and to have an attorney present during interrogations. The rights, almost from the day of the decision, became known as the Miranda warning.
Mr. Miranda’s conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, but he was retried on rape and kidnapping charges and found guilty again in 1967. (The confession was not used in that trial.) He was paroled in 1972 and stabbed to death four years later in a barroom fight. After his death, it was reported that he had been trading on his legal celebrity by selling Miranda warning cards for $1.50 each.
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In 1976, he defended his actions in the Miranda case to The Republic, saying that Mr. Miranda’s confession had been written voluntarily and that Mr. Miranda knew his rights.
“He was not un-knowledgeable about his rights,” he said. “He was an ex-convict and served a year in prison” — for auto theft — “and had been through the routine before.”
Noreen Nash, actress. Other credits include the original “Dragnet” TV series, “77 Sunset Strip”, and ‘Yancy Derringer”.
George Winston, of Windham Hill fame.
…His 1994 record, “Forest,” won a Grammy Award for best new age album — a category that was relatively new at the time — and he was nominated four other times.
Those nominations were evidence of the range of his musical interests. Two — for “Plains” (1999) and “Montana: A Love Story” (2004) — were for best new age album, but he was also nominated for best recording for children for “The Velveteen Rabbit” (1984; Meryl Streep provided the narration) and for best pop instrumental album for “Night Divides the Day: The Music of the Doors” (2002).
Mr. Winston recorded two albums of the music of Vince Guaraldi, the jazz pianist best known for composing music for animated “Peanuts” television specials. In 2012, he released “George Winston: Harmonica Solos,” and in 1983 he created his own label, Dancing Cat Records, to record practitioners of Hawaiian slack-key guitar, a genre he particularly admired.
…
Mr. Winston knew his music wasn’t for everyone, and he was self-deprecating about that.
“One person’s punk rock is another person’s singing ‘Om’ or playing harp,” he told The Santa Cruz Sentinel of California in 1982. “It’s all valid — everybody’s got their own path. I wouldn’t want to sit around and listen to me all day.”
NYT obit for The Iron Sheik (archived).
NYT obit for Barry Newman (archived).
He was better known under his professional wrestling name, The Iron Sheik.
Edited to add: THR.
He was a great admirer of his country’s most famous Olympic wrestler, Gholamreza Takhti. When Takhti was found dead of an apparent suicide in his hotel room in early 1968, theories circulated that he had been murdered, spurring Vaziri to leave the country.
“If Iran is no good for Gholamreza Takhti, the greatest champion we had, Iran is never going to be good for me. So I decided to come to America,” he said.
…
I wasn’t originally planning to link the obits for Andrew Bellucci, NYC pizza guy, because they seemed excessively local.
But the NYT obit (archived) is…interesting. Mr. Bellucci had a colorful history.
Although he had 18 pizzas on the menu, three kinds of dough and any number of toppings, two aspects of his trade preoccupied Mr. Bellucci above all. One was what Mr. Katakis called “a borderline lunacy” about dough. The other was clam pizza.
“Other people put clam pie on the menu but nobody’s that meticulous,” Mr. Katakis said. “He figured out that the clams were going on the pizza cold, so he figured he should sous vide them,” heating them in a hot-water circulator for 45 seconds before baking.
Mr. Bellucci was preparing clam pizzas as a surprise for some guests when he died.
I like seafood, and I’m fond of clams. Clam pizza is a little hard to get in Texas, though: Home Slice Pizza does it, and I’ve had it once, but I haven’t been able to make it back since. Plus nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded. And clam pizza is a hard sell for the rest of the Saturday Dining Conspiracy.
Astrud Gilberto, of “The Girl From Ipanema” fame.
Jim Hines. He set a world record by running the 100 meter dash in 9.95 seconds at the 1968 Olympics: that record stood for 15 years.
Roger Craig, noted split-fingered fastball pitcher.
Bobby Bolin, former pitcher for the Giants (also the Brewers and the Red Sox).
Bolin made his MLB debut in 1961 and was on the 1962 pennant-winning Giants, appearing in two games in the World Series against the Yankees, a series San Francisco would lose in seven games.
The sidearmer went a career-best 14-6 in 1965.
The following season he set career-highs with 10 complete games and four shutouts despite a pedestrian 11-10 record.
Mike the Musicologist sent over an obit for Kaija Saariaho, composer. He says some of her late works are appealing: I am unfamiliar with them myself.
George Riddle, actor. Other credits include “Arthur” and “The Trial of Standing Bear”.
Burning in Hell watch: Robert Hanssen, notorious spy.
I usually don’t like to cover politics here, even Texas politics, because it tends to drive me up a tree.
In this case, I haven’t seen anyone else pick up on this, and it’s an interesting story.
The Texas Legislature has eliminated annual safety inspections for cars, starting in 2025.
The Libertarian side of me thinks this is swell: as far as it was concerned, the annual inspection didn’t do much of anything except put money in the pockets of certified state inspection stations for “adjusting your headlights” and “replacing your wiper blades”.
The less Libertarian side of me is skeptical for a few reasons. While I think most people are motivated not to drive with bad tires and brakes, and those kind of things can be picked up when you take your car in for an oil change anyway, there probably are some folks who got some warning out of the annual inspection process. Then again, the people who did drive with bad brakes and bad tires probably would be driving even if they didn’t have an inspection or registration, and these days the odds of getting caught seem to be slim.
If safety is really a concern, the insurance companies can start requiring a “voluntary” inspection: you get a discount if you get your car inspected yearly at an approved facility. Or even better, no inspection, no insurance. Worst case, you go through the assigned risk pool.
Secondly, this doesn’t eliminate the state inspection fee: the state is still going to make you pay $7.50 (or $16.75 if it is a new car) as part of the annual registration.
Also, if your car is registered in one of the areas that requires emissions testing (that includes Travis, Williamson, and Harris counties, among others: full list in the article) you still have to get your car emissions tested before you can register it. (There’s an exception for cars that are 25 or more years old: I managed to get out of emissions testing for a few years before my old Honda blew a head gasket.)
I thought most states still required at least a safety inspection, but I was wrong, according to Wikipedia: “Fifteen states have a periodic (annual or biennial) safety inspection program, while Maryland requires a safety inspection and Alabama requires a VIN inspection on sale or transfer of vehicles which were previously registered in another state.”
Interestingly, Louisiana requires a safety inspection, and “New Orleans requires a “brake tag”. In addition to the state requirements, if the vehicle is registered in New Orleans, the brakes must be tested annually with a short stop test.”
Must be fun to get your car inspected in the Big Easy.