Blood! Blood in the streets!

January 5th, 2026

As foretold in the prophecy, this is your annual Monday morning after the end of the season NFL firing thread.

Raheem Morris out as coach in Atlanta. Also fired: GM Terry Fontenot. (Sorry about the ESPN link: the Atlanta newspaper won’t even let you look at the front page with an adblocker on.) Morris had been with the team for two seasons and had a 16-18 record: Fontenot had been with the team for five years.

One of my Christmas presents was a delightful little book: Cleveland’s Greatest Disasters! Speaking of Cleveland and disasters, Kevin Stefanski out as head coach of the Browns. But they kept GM Andrew Berry. Stefanski had been with the team for six seasons, and went 45-56 in the regular season. The Browns finished 5-12 this year, and 8-26 over the past two seasons.

I’ll update this post if there are more firings today.

Edited to add: and now, as expected by pretty much everyone, Pete Carroll is out as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. He was 3-14 in his one season. But hey! The Raiders have the number one draft choice! And they’re keeping John Spytek as GM! (Again, sorry about the ESPN link, but the Oakland newspaper is…not good.)

Edited to add 2: Four! A-ha-ha! (Okay, technically, the Atlanta firing was the yearly “you didn’t even wait to get the [man] in the house” firing.)

Jonathan Gannon out as head coach of the Arizona Cardinals. They were 3-14 this year, and 15-36 in three seasons with Gannon as the coach.

Heading into Sunday’s game against the Rams, Arizona had 42 different players miss a combined 309 games with injury and had 25 players on injured reserve — the most in the NFL — including quarterback Kyler Murray, running backs James Conner and Trey Benson and wide receiver Marvin Harrison Jr.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: January 2, 2026.

January 2nd, 2026

Back on the train.

Philip Schreier, director of the NRA Museums, passed away on Monday.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Schreier, but by all accounts he was a swell guy.

Throughout his career, Phil was a trusted and respected voice within the firearms community. He became the public face of the NRA through countless television appearances and public engagements, always warmly received wherever he went. Phil was not only an ambassador for the NRA but also a devoted advocate for the Second Amendment.

Ben Nighthorse Campbell, former senator from Colorado.

Irreverent, blunt and independent, the rough-hewed Mr. Campbell was a fiscal conservative and a social liberal who favored gun rights and abortion rights, billed himself as the champion of the average voter and refused to be bound by party lines. He switched allegiance from the Democrats to the Republicans in 1995.

…

From 1960 to 1964, Mr. Campbell studied Japanese and judo at a university in Japan. He won 48 of 50 tournament matches, earned a gold medal at the Pan American Games in 1963 and joined the United States judo team at the 1964 Olympics. (He tore a ligament, lost his first match and retired from active competition, ranked fourth in the world.)

Isiah Whitlock Jr., actor. Other credits include “Cocaine Bear”, “Law and Order”, “L&O: Criminal Intent”, “L&O: SVU”, and “Lightyear”.

Cecilia Giménez. You probably don’t recognize the name, but you may recognize this:

The group called her “a great painting enthusiast” and acknowledged Mrs. Giménez’s efforts to restore the nearly century-old fresco of Jesus. “Because of the poor state of conservation, Cecilia, with the best intentions, decided to repaint over the work,” it said.
But when Mrs. Giménez’s handiwork came to light in August 2012, the authorities initially suspected that the church had suffered an act of vandalism. The delicate misery on the face of Christ en route to the crucifixion had been replaced by a misshapen head.

…

But her artistic mishap created an economic boon for Borja, a town of 5,000 inhabitants.
Tourists flocked to see her efforts. Less than three years later, more than 150,000 visitors from Japan, Brazil, the United States and elsewhere had made a trip to Borja, paying one euro, about $1.20, to view her work under a protective clear cover.
Local officials told The Times in 2014 that the tourism spike had stabilized the town’s restaurant industry and helped the area’s institutions. The nearby Museo de la Colegiata, which houses religious medieval art, experienced a rise in annual visits to 70,000, from 7,000. Vineyards in the region squabbled over the rights to put Mrs. Giménez’s Christ on their labels. In 2016, two Americans even staged an opera about the affair in the same church.

Louis V. Gerstner, former IBM CEO.

Posted in Art, Guns, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: December 28, 2025.

December 28th, 2025

Brigitte Bardot. THR.

After making nearly 50 features, she dedicated her life to defending animal rights. Through her Fondation Brigitte Bardot, created in 1986, she took on such issues as seal hunting, poaching, the fur trade, bullfighting, the captivity of wild animals in zoos and circuses, conditions in slaughterhouses and the farming of horse meat.
“I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she said. “I am going to give my wisdom and experience, the best of me, to animals.”
Bardot supported National Front candidates including Catherine Megret and Marine Le Pen and spoke out against the “Islamisation” of France. A 1996 interview in Le Figaro had her condemned for inciting racial hatred, while a paragraph in her book comparing homosexuals and pedophiles was widely criticized.

Few of Ms. Bardot’s movies were serious cinematic undertakings, and she later told a French newspaper that she considered “La Vérité,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Oscar-nominated 1960 crime drama, the only good film she ever made.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 27, 2025.

December 27th, 2025

Robert Lindsey, author and NYT reporter.

He ghostwrote autobiographies of Ronald Reagan and Marlon Brando. He also wrote A Gathering of Saints (about the Mormon forgery murders). He may be most famous for The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage (which won the Edgar for best fact crime in 1980).

He credited his inspiration to become a journalist to the radio soap opera “Front Page Farrell,” starring Richard Widmark, which captured his imagination when he was home sick from school in the fourth grade. In the fifth grade, he started a student newspaper at his parochial school. In the sixth, he received a red-penciled “A” on one of his compositions. He was hooked, he said.

“Front Page Farrell” on the Internet Archive.

“With a notebook and a great deal of curiosity, I traveled the world, top to bottom, from the Arctic Circle to the South Pole,” he wrote in his memoir. “I hung out with murderers, spies, a president, mobsters, generals, movie stars and scientists who helped shape our future. I watched history unfold and wrote about it.”
He added, “What could be more fun than being a reporter?”

Annette Dionne, last of the Dionne quintuplets. I don’t want to seem like I’m giving her, or the very sad story of the quints, short shrift. But I wrote about this back in August when Cécile Dionne passed away, and the obit also does a good job of recapping the story.

Posted in Books, History, Law, Obits | 1 Comment »

Flaming hyena watch.

December 26th, 2025

(Previously on WCD.)

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Merry Christmas!

December 25th, 2025

The great and good Pat Cadigan posts her favorite Christmas story every year (Merry Christmas, Pat!) so I’m going to post my favorite Christmas joke. This year’s version comes from the Straight Dope Message Board: my favorite joke is at the very top, but there are some other great ones in there too.

Mike and I were making a tour of gun stores over the past weekend. We went into the Gun Connection in Taylor (endorsed: this is the kind of funky store that I like) and they were playing this.

My kind of Christmas music.

Merry Christmas, one and all. Special regards to Jimmy McNulty, T Migratorious, Pigpen51, Lawrence, and Borepatch.

And I’m pretty sure I’ve used this song before, but not this version.

Posted in Christmas, Endorsements, Guns | 2 Comments »

The Spirit of Christmas 5.

December 24th, 2025

For all the issues I have with Gregg Easterbrook, I do think this is a pretty swell meditation on model trains and Christmas.

Adults who today are deep into model railroading – usually retired men from industrial careers, though including Rod Stewart and Michael Jordan – construct elaborate sets representing real locations in railroading. Jordan favors the tiny N gauge. Stewart likes HO. His diorama, which he says took 25 years to complete – I believe him! – suggests Pittsburgh in the 1940s.

While this is on the “All Predictions Wrong” substack, it is a re-run, so Easterbrook doesn’t have it paywalled.

Posted in Christmas, TMQ watch, Trains | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 23, 2025.

December 23rd, 2025

This is a couple of days old, but it got past me because the weekend was busy: May Britt.

She had a career as an actress, including the original “Mission: Impossible” and the 1959 “The Blue Angel”. She married Sammy Davis Jr. in 1960.

The couple planned their wedding for that October but ended up pushing it back to November. It took place in Hollywood; Frank Sinatra served as best man, and several other members of the Rat Pack were in attendance — including Peter Lawford, who was married to Kennedy’s sister Patricia. (Mr. Davis was a core member of the group, known for performing in Las Vegas together.)

There was a lot of backlash at the time, and the marriage pretty much cost Ms. Britt her career.

Chris Rea, musician. I wouldn’t say I was a big fan of his work, but back in the day when I listened to the radio, KGSR would play “Texas”. I thought that was a pretty swell song.

And it is Christmas, right?

Posted in Christmas, Music, Obits | 2 Comments »

Crazy horse people update.

December 22nd, 2025

Previously. Previously.

Tatyana Remley took her own life outside a bar in San Diego Thursday night, authorities confirmed to the Daily Mail.
Remely, 44, died from a “gunshot wound to the head” after she called her estranged husband from the bar, complaining about her new partner, her husband, Mark Remeley said.
“She FaceTimed me while in the bathroom stall and told me, ‘I’m with this guy and he’s being a jerk,”‘ Mark Remely told the Mail.

…

In August 2023, she was charged with trying to take out a hit on her ex, along with charges of carrying a concealed weapon in a vehicle and possessing a firearm in public.
She pleaded guilty to the charges and served one year of her nearly four-year prison sentence.

Posted in California Über Alles, Horses, Law | 1 Comment »

The Spirit of Christmas 4.

December 22nd, 2025

A 2025 RevolverGuy Christmas Story.

It isn’t required, and it isn’t a Christmas story, but it might help put some of the “theology” here in context if you also read “Homecoming Day” from earlier this year as well.

Posted in Christmas, Guns | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 22, 2025.

December 22nd, 2025

James Ransone, actor. NYT (archived). Other credits include “Oldboy” (the Spike Lee remake), the bad “Hawaii Five-0”, and “Law and Order”.

Theodor Pistek, artist. As the NYT notes, he won an Academy Award for costume design for “Amadeus”. He was also a racing driver, and did paintings inspired by racing. I find “Ecce Homo” (reproduced in the obit) particularly striking.

Posted in Art, Cars, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 19, 2025.

December 19th, 2025

Peter Arnett, noted war correspondent.

From Vietnam’s jungles to Iraq, where he interviewed President Saddam Hussein, Mr. Arnett broke news and rules, infuriated national leaders and inspired generations of journalists. He was twice among the last Western TV broadcasters in Baghdad — as the Persian Gulf War began in 1991 and as an American-led coalition invaded in 2003.
Over 45 years, by his own account, he covered 17 wars in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America, first for The Associated Press and later for CNN and other television and print organizations. He made television documentaries, wrote two books, lectured widely and in 1997 interviewed Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, somewhere in Afghanistan.

…

Late in his career, he ran into trouble for crossing journalistic lines of propriety. He left CNN in 1999 after reporting a Vietnam War atrocity that apparently never happened, and was fired by NBC in 2003 for claiming on Iraqi state television that the war plan of the American-led coalition against Iraq was failing.

…

Mr. Arnett left CNN in 1999 after anchoring “Operation Tailwind,” a documentary broadcast that claimed that the United States used poison sarin gas in a Laotian village in 1970 in an attempt to kill American defectors in the Vietnam War. After denials and protests by Washington, a CNN investigation found the allegations to be largely unsupported. CNN issued a retraction and fired nearly everyone involved in the program.

Sue Bender, author.

In Ms. Bender’s 1989 book, “Plain and Simple: A Woman’s Journey to the Amish,” she recounted how she learned from her hosts to recognize the beauty in the everyday, the peace that comes from slowing down and the dignity of ordinary work. The book became a best seller and one of the go-to texts of an anti-materialist movement of the 1990s known as voluntary simplicity.

Greg Biffle, former NASCAR driver. He, his wife and two children, and three other passengers were killed yesterday when their small plane crashed on approach to Statesville Regional Airport.

Posted in Amish, History, Media, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

The Spirit of Christmas 3.

December 19th, 2025

Another good Christmas story, this one from Dr. Dabbs. And I’m not just saying that because the story features a F-4 Phantom II jet.

Also, LawDog is still writing about the Flickerfoxes.

Posted in Christmas, Planes | Comments Closed

Flaming hyena update.

December 18th, 2025

Remember Marty Small, Sr., the mayor of Atlantic City? Charged with beating the s–t out of his teenage daughter?

Merry Christmas! Not guilty on all counts!

Mr. Small was accused of using a broom to strike his daughter in the head, causing her to lose consciousness. At other times in the two-month period, he hit her in the legs repeatedly, causing bruising, and threatened to “earth slam” her, prosecutors said.
“We’re not saying there shouldn’t be disagreements in the home,” a prosecutor, Elizabeth Fischer, told jurors Tuesday in a closing statement, “but we’re saying it shouldn’t be met with violence.”
The jury began deliberating late Tuesday. Almost immediately, the panel requested to listen again to a recording, made by Mr. Small’s daughter and her boyfriend, in which the mayor can be heard threatening to slam her to the ground.
Prosecutors had said that the threats were meant to instill terror; Mr. Small’s lawyers argued that they were the warnings of a parent trying to correct the behavior of a child who, in a video also shown to jurors, was prone to extreme agitation when punished.
“A father takes a phone away from his daughter, and that results in the Tasmanian devil coming out,” Mr. Small’s lawyer, Louis M. Barbone, told jurors after replaying footage taken during a separate family conflict.
In New Jersey, corporal punishment that is not considered excessive is legal.

The charges against his wife are still pending.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

December 17th, 2025

Brian Smith out at Ohio University.

“For cause”.

“The termination follows an administrative review of allegations that Smith violated the terms of his employment agreement by engaging in serious professional misconduct and participating in activities that reflect unfavorably on the University,” the release from Ohio University reads.

Not much more information than that, though he had been previously placed “on leave”.

He was hired almost exactly a year ago: the team was 8-4 this season.

ESPN.

Posted in Firings, Sports | 1 Comment »

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