I think it is time to bring back chariot racing.
No politics, no political statements: just chariot racing. I’m sure we can get a TV deal, and not just on ESPN 8, “The Ocho”. Given a choice between televised chariot racing and televised cornhole, what do you think people are going to watch?
Apparently, the NFL started their regular season this weekend.
I just barely noticed.
It isn’t so much the politics, although McThag has a good post up on that. I’m just finding it really difficult to care.
Still, one of the motivations for starting this blog was the NFL loser update, and as a wise man once said…
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
San Francisco
Carolina
Tampa Bay
Atlanta
Dallas
Philadelphia
New York Football Giants
Minnesota
Detroit
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Denver
Indianapolis
Houston
New York Jets
Miami
In other semi-related football news, I have been reading as much of Gregg Easterbrook’s Twitter as I can stomach, and there has been no mention of “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” at all. Not just a lack of pointers to the current column, but also a lack of “if you liked it, write our sponsor” messages. I have to assume that he’s not doing it this year, though his silence on the subject is a little strange.
I feel like opening the liquor cabinet.
Anthony Bourdain makes a Negroni.
The Negroni has been a favorite cocktail of mine during my Wednesday night drinking bouts. One of the online sources I’ve been using suggests shaking rather than stirring.
Next up: of course, the Sidecar. With a diversion into why you should use quality ingredients.
I kind of like this guy. He doesn’t seem to be putting on a YouTube persona, unlike a lot of the other cocktail video makers. As a wrap-up, here’s another one of his: this time, on the Moscow Mule, another one of my go-to Wednesday night cocktails.
There seem to be people who think you should make your own ginger syrup. I’m just a simple home drinker who works 40 hours a week and doesn’t have time to mess with that, so I use a good quality bottled ginger beer. I’ve had good luck with Fever-Tree, but I’m out of that at the moment, and am thinking Fentimans might be worth trying if I can get my hands on some. (I’ve been using Tito’s vodka, not because it is local, but because it seems like a decent vodka that doesn’t break the bank or give you hangovers.)
Jack Murphy, aka “Murph the Surf”, the man who stole the Star of India. He was also a convicted murderer.
At the J.P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals at the American Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West, they noted lax security and gawked at what they found there: the Star of India, a 563-carat, oval-shaped blue sapphire, 2.5-inches long (a golf ball is 1.68 inches in diameter); the DeLong Star Ruby, at 100.32 carats; and the 116-carat Midnight Star, one of the world’s largest black sapphires.
On the night of Oct. 29 [1964], a Thursday, with Mr. Clark on the street as lookout, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Kuhn, carrying a coil of rope, scaled a tall iron fence behind the museum, climbed a fire escape to the fifth floor and inched along a narrow ledge. Tying the rope to a pillar above an open fourth-floor window, Mr. Murphy swung down and used his foot to move the sash.
They were in.
The glass protecting the important gems was a third of an inch thick, too strong to break with a rubber mallet. Instead of risking noise with heavy blows, they used cutters to score circles of glass; duct tape to cover the circles, to prevent shattering and muffle the sound; and a rubber suction cup to pull the pieces out.
They opened three cases and bagged 22 prizes: emeralds, diamonds, rubies, sapphires and gem-laden bracelets, brooches and rings. Finally, they went out the window, climbed down and walked away, encountering several police officers on their beat.
“Good evening, officers,” Mr. Murphy said. They gave him a nod and kept walking.
They were caught within days and served time.
In 1967, he and a Miami thug, Jack Griffith, met Terry Rae Frank and Annelie Mohn, secretaries who had stolen $500,000 in securities from a California brokerage where they worked. Prosecutors later said Mr. Murphy had conspired with the women in the theft, and gave them a hide-out in Miami.
Mr. Murphy and Mr. Griffith took the women on their last ride: a midnight speedboat excursion to Hollywood, north of Miami, ostensibly to discuss disposing of the securities (worth $4 million in today’s dollars). But in a waterway called Whiskey Creek, the women were bludgeoned and hacked to death, and their bodies, anchored with concrete blocks, were dumped overboard.
Traced through the stolen securities, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Griffith were charged with the killings. In a 1969 trial in Fort Lauderdale, they blamed each other for the murders and were both convicted. Mr. Griffith was sentenced to 45 years and Mr. Murphy to life in prison.
After 17 years in Florida prisons, Mr. Murphy was released in 1986, vowing to spend his remaining years on “God’s business.” For three decades, supported by groups like the International Network of Prison Ministries, he traveled from his home in Crystal River to preach to inmates in a dozen countries.
He appeared on Christian broadcasts and at criminal rehabilitation conferences, sometimes with an entourage of major league athletes and popular singers. In 2000, the Florida Parole Board ended his lifetime parole.
Today: the majestic moose!
From the Simple Living Alaska channel, “Butchering a Moose”.
278 pounds of moose meat!
Okay, that was a little long, so here’s a coffee break sized one for you. I’ve written before about the legendary Broadway flop “Moose Murders”. (Which, of course, I never saw, because I was just under 18 at the time, didn’t live in New York City, and it opened and closed on the same night.)
So this wonderful eccentric decided, as the final for a class he was taking, to direct the opening scene of “Moose Murders”. And now it is up on the ‘Tube.
Bonus bonus, also short: “B-roll” from the Beautiful Soup Theater Collective revival.
For that reason, I don’t want to say this is the stupidest thing I’ve seen this year, as I’m sure that if I apply myself, I can come up with stupider things. Also, if I do say it is the stupidest thing I’ve seen this year, Lawrence, Mike the Musicologist, or both will provide me with at least 10 stupider things.
That said, I still think this is pretty stupid.
“Mean Girls” themed toaster strudel. Yes, I’ve never seen “Mean Girls”, yes, I do get the fact that it is a reference, but themed pastry for a 16 year old movie? Here’s an idea: an all-black toaster pastry with slightly off-white icing that you can use to draw Stonehenge.
Science Sunday!
Here’s something a little off the beaten path for you: “The Story of Dr. Lister”, a 1963 dramatization from Warner-Lambert Pharmaceuticals, about the life of Dr. Joseph Lister.
For those of you who aren’t big medical history buffs, Dr. Lister was one of the pioneers of antiseptic surgery.
Lister promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Lister successfully introduced carbolic acid (now known as phenol) to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds.
Applying Louis Pasteur’s advances in microbiology, Lister championed the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic, so that it became the first widely used antiseptic in surgery. He first suspected it would prove an adequate disinfectant because it was used to ease the stench from fields irrigated with sewage waste. He presumed it was safe because fields treated with carbolic acid produced no apparent ill-effects on the livestock that later grazed upon them.
Bonus: I spent some time trying to find a decent video about Ignaz Semmelweis, but couldn’t. So for a change of pace, please enjoy an Army Air Corps video from 1944 on what is rapidly becoming a lost art: “Celestial Navigation”.
(Yes, even though this is a military training film, I do think understanding the relationship of celestial objects to one’s position on the Earth does count as science.)
Toots Hibbert, of Toots and the Maytals.
Lawrence has a good tribute up.
Kevin Dobson. He never did a “Mannix”, but he did a fair number of other cop shows. His two most famous roles were as Kojak’s sidekick, and as a detective on “Knots Landing”.
Mr. Dobson was less active on the big screen than the small one, but he did appear in some notable films, including “Midway” (1976), as part of an all-star cast that also included Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston, and the 1981 romantic comedy “All Night Long,” in which his character was married to Barbra Streisand’s.
In 1981 he played Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective created by Mickey Spillane, in the CBS television movie “Margin for Murder.” “Mr. Dobson is given a valuable opportunity to step outside of his usual ‘nice guy’ image,” John J. O’Connor of The New York Times wrote in a review. “He makes the most of it, reinforcing Mike’s toughness with an impeccably accurate New York accent.”
My current boss is an amateur radio operator, and has far more experience and knowledge than I do. Since the lockdown started, my work group has been holding virtual “happy hours” outside of the work context (consumption of wine, beer, and spirituous liquors is allowed, but not required) and amateur radio is a frequent topic of discussion.
So I thought Saturday might be a good day for some radio related stuff.
First up, “What Happened to the Numbers Stations?”
(Numbers Stations Research and Information Center. Which is kind of a misnomer, because they cover things that aren’t numbers stations as well.)
Bonus #1: “HM01 – The Ultimate Radio Mystery”. HM01 is a numbers station broadcasting out of Cuba.
Bonus #2: “Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher”. The first video above mentions the Lincolnshire Poacher early on, but if you didn’t watch it, LP is another famous numbers station.
Bonus #3: For something different, “Listening to Astronauts ON THE ISS with a Baofeng UV-5R”.
Baofeng UV-5R+ on Amazon. (Affiliate link.) It is a very slight exaggeration to say that you can get one of these with the change you dig out of your couch cushions.
Here’s something kind of odd for everyone.
“Aerospace Communications: The Reins Of Command”. This is another one of those Cold War DEW Line/SAGE/BMEWS propaganda films. What makes it interesting as far as I’m concerned is: it features the late Brigadier General James M. Stewart (United States Air Force – ret).
Bonus: “Food Supply After The Bomb”.
Personally, I’m not a big apricot preserves fan, but I do like me some orange marmelade. Also, are those two of the most stilted performances you’ve ever seen in a propaganda film?
Travel Thursday!
Upstairs in my “to read” pile, underneath my three volumes of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I have both volumes of Pierre Berton’s books about the construction of Canada’s transcontinental railroad (The National Dream and The Last Spike). What can I say, they were cheap at Half-Price.
I thought it might be fun to put this up: “Great Canadian Railway Journeys ‘Kamloops to Banff'”. I’d like to visit both Kamloops and Banff one of these days: I’ve been to Vancouver, but Kamloops is about three and a half hours away. Also, I kind of like saying “Kamloops”.
Bonus: “Port Moody to Kamloops”.
It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.
But that doesn’t matter, because Diana Rigg would have gotten one no matter what. THR. Variety. BBC.
Rigg was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1959-64, touring Europe and the U.S. as Cordelia in a RSC production of “King Lear” (she revisited the play in 1983, when she was Regan to Laurence Olivier’s Lear); she was also Viola in a 1966 RSC staging of “Twelfth Night.”
Rigg appeared on Broadway three times, starring in “Abelard and Heloise” in 1971 (her nude scene in the play and critic John Simon’s tart assessment of her body generated publicity); a revival of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope” in 1975; and a staging of “Medea” in 1994 — drawing a Tony nomination each time for best actress in a play and winning for “Medea.”
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As the third of four female sidekicks to Patrick Macnee’s dapper John Steed on ITV’s The Avengers, Rigg’s Peel became an icon in England and the U.S. The show centered on the duo — Steed with a bowler hat and umbrella, Peel in cutting-edge mod fashions — working as partners for a secret British intelligence agency in an over-the-top, sometimes surrealist England.
“She was ahead of her time,” Rigg said at a 50-year anniversary tribute to her character hosted by the British Film Institute. “Quite by accident she became this avant-garde woman, and dear God, was I lucky to get the chance to play this woman. For years afterward, people came up to me and said, ‘You were my heroine’ — not me, Emma — ‘and encouraged me to do this and that.’ Without overembellishing her influence, I do think she was a very, very potent influence in women claiming their place in this world.”
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The actress also starred with George C. Scott in the Arthur Hiller-directed, Paddy Chayefsky-penned satire “The Hospital” (1971); the classic Vincent Price horror film “Theatre of Blood” (1973); the 1982 Agatha Christie adaptation “Evil Under the Sun,” in which she played the despised and thus dispatched Arlena Marshall; and most recently 2006’s “The Painted Veil,” in which she played the Mother Superior.
Other film credits include “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1968), “The Assassination Bureau” (1969), “Julius Caesar,” starring Charlton Heston (1970), “A Little Night Music,” with Elizabeth Taylor (1977), “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981), “Snow White,” as the Evil Queen (1987), Bruce Beresford’s “A Good Man in Africa,” starring Sean Connery (1994), “Parting Shots” (1998) and “Heidi.”
What a life.
I think this is the first time I’ve done an entire daily entry devoted to a single person.
“Leadership Lessons from Gen. James Mattis (Ret.)”.
Bonus #1: the general’s speech to the OSS Society on receiving the 2019 William J. Donovan Award.
Bonus #2: General Mattis speaking at commencement for Central Washington University in 2011.
By way of Hacker News, I found this obituary for Verne Edquist on the Glenn Gould Foundation website.
Mr. Edquist was born with congenital cataracts and was nearly blind. He trained as a professional piano tuner.
He moved around a lot, sometimes working for piano makers, sometimes working as a freelance tuner.
One afternoon about a year after Verne started at Eaton’s, Miss Mussen sent him across town to Glenn Gould’s apartment to tune Gould’s old Chickering. All Gould wanted, he told Verne, was for the tuner to do what had been done hundreds of times before: get the piano into playable condition, if only for the time being. But Verne refused, telling Gould that the tuning pins were so loose they needed to be replaced.
Verne’s stubborn insistence on doing things his way had endeared him to Gould, and the encounter galvanized what was to become a decades-long association between a pianist and his technician.
Verne tuned for many famous musicians over the years, including Duke Ellington, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin, Victor Borge, and Liberace. But it was the business he got from Gould that eventually enabled him to quit Eaton’s employ and sustain his family for two decades.
Each tolerated the other’s idiosyncracies, which were in ample evidence in both men. Gould’s quirks, of course, were legion and legendary. One of their earliest conversations was about Verne’s physical limitations. “I can’t see very well, but I get the job done,” Verne told Gould. And Gould replied that of this he had no doubt. Nothing further on the topic was ever said.
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I’m not a musician, or a piano tuner, but that Katie Hafner book (affiliate link) sounds fascinating to me for some reason.
I haven’t posted any vintage police training videos in a while, because I really haven’t been finding any. At least, none have been popping up in my YouTube feed.
However, I went looking for a specific FBI video that Bill Vanderpool mentioned in his book, Guns of the F.B.I. : A History of the Bureau’s Firearms and Training. (Longer write up about that book to come.) I couldn’t find it, but I did find this:
“Officer Down Code Three” from 1975. This is one of those Motorola videos, but the quality of the transfer seems to me to be a bit higher. It is also interesting for another reason: this video is adapted from Pierce R. Brooks’s book of the same name.
Officer Down Code Three is considered by some to be the first “officer survival” book. It precedes the somewhat more famous Street Survival by about five years.
Rather than going into more detail about the book and author, I will refer you to this excellent review from FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training.
Bonus: vintage LAPD recruiting film from the 1950s.