Another one of those stories of purely local interest, as a friend of the blog likes to say:
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Archive for May, 2026
Well, isn’t THIS special?
Wednesday, May 13th, 2026Obit watch: May 13, 2026.
Wednesday, May 13th, 2026Betty Broderick passed away last week. She was 78.
Some folks may remember this from the late 1980s. Ms. Broderick’s husband dumped her for a younger woman.
On Nov. 5, 1989, Ms. Broderick entered the home of her ex-husband, Daniel T. Broderick III, a prominent malpractice lawyer in San Diego, and Linda Kolkena Broderick, a former flight attendant who became his legal assistant and, while he was still married to Ms. Broderick, his lover, and shot them in bed with a .38-caliber pistol.
Ms. Broderick, then about to turn 42, immediately turned herself in to the police, and never denied firing the fatal shots at her former husband, 44, and his second wife, 28. But she denied committing murder, claiming in media interviews and in the courtroom to have been a victim of years of psychological abuse.
It was one of those minor sensations at the time.
Ms. Broderick spoke to magazines and newspapers before and after her trials, and twice appeared from prison on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” angrily venting about her husband.
“He went off with the bimbo at 40, driving a red Corvette — haven’t we heard this before?” she told The Los Angeles Times three weeks after the killings.
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At her first trial, mental health specialists called by both the prosecution and the defense testified that Ms. Broderick was narcissistic and histrionic. Melvin G. Goldzband, a psychiatrist who testified for the prosecution, refuted her claims of emotional abuse.
“She wanted not to be rejected,” he said, adding that she would have been angry even if her husband had agreed to an extravagant monthly support settlement.
“People extend battles because it’s the only form of the relationship that they have,” Dr. Goldzband said.
Ms. Broderick was sentenced in 1992 to the maximum possible term: 32 years to life in prison. She was twice denied parole.
Rex Reed, noted (and I kind of want to say “notorious”) movie critic.
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You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#158 in a series)
Monday, May 11th, 2026Eileen Wang resigned as mayor of Arcadia, California, today.
She also took a Federal plea deal.
Eileen Wang agreed with prosecutors that she worked with the People’s Republic of China to boost propaganda with a fake news website on US soil between 2020 and 2022. She was elected to Arcadia City Council in November 2022 — the city is located in the San Gabriel Valley within LA County.
Wang, 58, worked with her then fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, on a web site called “U.S. News Center,” which claimed to be news source for Chinese Americans, according to court documents.
But in reality the pair were carrying out Beijing’s orders through the site.
Wang and Sun “executed directives” from the Chinese government, posting propaganda designed to boost China, all while reporting back to their masters with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories, according to the plea agreement.
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Prosecutors in 2024 charged Sun with conspiracy and acting as an illegal agent of a foreign government.
Wang said her relationship with Sun ended that year. Her ex-lover also served as campaign manager for her City Council run. The mayor of Arcadia is drawn from the Council on a rotating basis.
Wang tried to distance herself from Sun in 2025, saying she “not responsible for the action of others,” and would not resign from the post she then held on the City Council.
Sun in February was sentenced to four years in federal prison for acting as a covert agent of the PRC.
Here’s an example:
In one case, Wang’s spymaster ordered her to post pre-written news articles, including a PRC official-written essay in the Los Angeles Times, the plea deal states.
“There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor is to defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability,” wrote Wang’s master, according to the plea agreement.
And maybe there’s not a whole lot of difference between China and Buzzfeed:
Obit watch: May 9, 2026.
Saturday, May 9th, 2026Philip Caputo, author and Vietnam vet.
The Vietnam War, which cost the lives of at least one million Vietnamese and 58,000 American service members, generated an outpouring of fictional and nonfictional books, by some reckoning more than 3,500 titles.
A few works came to be widely regarded as classics because their authors captured unflinchingly the peculiar mix of boredom and terror in combat, the ambivalence about fighting a war that often seemed pointless and unwinnable, and the disheartening malaise that followed America’s first military defeat.
The standouts include works of fiction, including Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (1990), and nonfiction ones like Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” (1977), Ron Kovic’s “Born on the Fourth of July” (1976) and Mr. Caputo’s “A Rumor of War” (1977), which sold two million copies and was translated into 15 languages.
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Mr. Caputo wrote in “A Rumor of War” that his book was about “the things men do in war and the things war does to them.” It opens with an account of Mr. Caputo’s enthusiastic enlistment in the Marine Corps as a 24-year-old Midwesterner, driven by a need to prove his courage and manhood, followed by his 16-month tour of duty as a platoon commander and infantry lieutenant.
He vividly recorded the toll on the soldier’s spirit of the punishing heat, dust, malarial mosquitoes, disease-laden water and minimal hygiene. Those physical challenges were augmented by the confusion about what the platoon under his command was supposed to accomplish in its daily patrols — purportedly to secure the perimeter around the Danang airstrip essential to the safe passage of supplies and soldiers.
It was especially difficult to pinpoint an enemy, hidden and shielded as they were by the thick growth of jungle and by their deadly mines and booby traps. The Vietcong — guerrilla fighters supporting the Communist government in Hanoi — were experienced at warfare, and the periodic skirmishes were bloody, costing the lives of men to whom Mr. Caputo had grown close.
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Alex Zanardi has passed away at 59.
For those who may not remember, Mr. Zanardi was a prominent and talented racing driver.
On Sept 15, 2001, he entered an Indy-style race near Klettwitz, Germany. Originally called the German 500, it was renamed the American Memorial 500 in honor of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks four days earlier. Zanardi was leading with 13 laps remaining, when he appeared to accelerate too quickly while exiting a pit stop.
He lost control, and his car swerved across a grassy area and onto the track. He spun into the path of an oncoming driver, Alex Tagliani of Canada, who broadsided Zanardi’s car while traveling roughly 200 miles per hour.
Zanardi’s chassis was split in two, and debris scattered across the track. He said in a 2004 appearance on “The Late Show With David Letterman” that he was administered last rites with the oil of his car’s engine. He was airlifted by helicopter to a Berlin hospital, and doctors amputated both legs above the knee. Tagliani was not seriously injured.
My understanding is that what the doctors did was less “amputation” and more “cleaning up what was left” and replacing Mr. Zanardi’s blood. His legs were scattered all over the track.
I’ve mentioned this book before, but the first chapter of Stephen Olvey’s Rapid Response: My Inside Story as a Motor Racing Life-saver describes the accident and the medical response. Nobody, ever survives a bilateral traumatic amputation of both legs. The fact that Mr. Zanardi did is a tribute to excellent medical planning, especially by Dr. Olvey, some luck, and Mr. Zanardi’s toughness.
Charming, optimistic and an easygoing storyteller, Zanardi often joked about making himself taller with his prosthetics. In his droll appearance with Letterman, who is co-owner of an IndyCar team, he said that he no longer had to worry about washing his socks, and that he received so much German blood during transfusions in Berlin, he should have been given a German passport.
Then he swiveled his left prosthesis to eye level and placed a drinking cup on the bottom of his shoe.
Some people wondered whether he was scared to drive again, Zanardi told Letterman, but he considered himself less vulnerable than before his accident. “If I break one of my legs, I only need a 4-millimeter screw and I can fix it very rapidly,” he said to laughter from the audience.
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He began competing in touring car championships — street cars modified for racing — along with sprint series races. In 2019, he drove the prestigious 24-hour endurance race at Daytona with three teammates, using a modified BMW steering wheel that permitted him to drive without wearing his prosthetics.
“I feel a bit like Jimi Hendrix,” he told The New York Times before the race. “I play with both my hands.”
He also became a competitive hand-cyclist.
In 2011, he won the handcycle division of the New York City Marathon and followed by winning two gold medals and a silver medal at both the 2012 Paralympics in London and the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro.
He was credited in 2017 with becoming the first adaptive athlete to break nine hours in an Ironman Triathlon: swimming 2.4 miles with a buoyancy device and without his prosthetics; using a handcycle to bike 112 miles; and completing the 26.2-mile marathon in a racing wheelchair. He finished in 8 hours 58 minutes 59 seconds.
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Obit watch: May 6, 2026.
Wednesday, May 6th, 2026
Screenshot
NYT.
Mr. Turner put together a top-notch crew that helped him win the 1977 America’s Cup races off Newport, R.I. But he did so only after coming close to being thrown out of the races once he had been accepted. “During the Cup eliminations,” Time magazine reported, “he flirted with every girl in sight, crawled pubs with his crew, got tossed out of chic clubs and restaurants for boozy behavior and turned Newport’s blue bloods positively purple.”
The Cup organizers forced Mr. Turner to apologize publicly to one elite club, the Spouting Rock Beach Association, for accosting female members. “I wish to apologize profusely because I certainly did have a couple drinks too many that Saturday night,” Mr. Turner wrote to the club president.
But on winning the Cup, he surrounded himself with young, attractive women and was too drunk to finish a victory speech at a nationally televised news conference.
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He wooed [Jane Fonda – DB] — just after her divorce from the liberal activist and California state legislator Tom Hayden — by emphasizing their similarities, including as the children of a suicidal parent (in Ms. Fonda’s case, her mother) and their friendships with icons of the far left, like Mr. Castro. She later wrote in a memoir that she had been dazzled by his charisma, which she likened to “a 3-D stereophonic, Shakespearean-level, sound-and-light show.”
The couple married in 1991 — the third marriage for each — and in subsequent years, Mr. Turner devoted more of his time to environmentalism and global peace, while Ms. Fonda virtually retired from Hollywood to devote herself to Mr. Turner and his new causes.
Their marriage lasted 10 years, with Ms. Fonda saying his insatiable need for other women and her own deepening spirituality, including an embrace of Christianity, were underlying causes.
Gun news.
Tuesday, May 5th, 2026A few months ago, I mentioned that Beretta was engaged in a hostile takeover bid for Ruger.
Yesterday, the two companies announced a “strategic cooperation agreement”.
This is good news for me, if I want to sell my Ruger stock. (Full disclosure: I own Ruger stock.) As I write this, Ruger is trading at $41.04.
Beretta had been promoting four individuals for seats on the Ruger board. But, according to this agreement, Beretta will “nominate up to two independent directors following the 2026 Annual Meeting of Shareholders and regulatory approval. At that time, the Company will temporarily expand the Board. The nominees will be subject to Ruger’s Nominating and Governance Committee process and qualification criteria.”
Also, per this agreement, Beretta will not, “among other things, initiate or support any proxy contest or similar action,” for at least three years. “These provisions, together with other provisions in the agreement, are designed to safeguard Ruger’s independence and stability while increasing alignment of Beretta Holding with all shareholder interests,” says the release.
I have no idea what this actually means. Will Beretta start selling Ruger guns in their retail stores? I’ve never been to a Beretta retail store: the nearest one to me is in Dallas, and I have the impression that they cater more to people who drive a Bentley or Rolls rather than a Honda. (On the other hand, that Red Label III is supposedly really nice.)
Will Ruger start making more left-handed guns? Or even some ambidextrous ones, like Beretta’s BRX1? That’d be nice.
I report, the market decides. I wish I could give some definitive answer, but I don’t think there is one right now.
When the Magic Goes Awry.
Monday, May 4th, 2026Jamahl Mosley out as coach of the Orlando Magic.
The problem seems to be that they’ve gone to the playoffs three straight times…and lost in the first round each time.
The Magic still haven’t won a series since 2010 despite three trips to the playoffs under Mosley.
Most recently, they took the Detroit Pistons to seven games, and lost game 7, and the series, on Sunday.
ESPN.