Trent Baalke is out as general manager of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Sounds sort of like a combined resignation-firing, so I’m chalking it up as a firing.
Firings watch.
January 22nd, 2025Obit watch: January 22, 2025.
January 22nd, 2025Jules Feiffer, artist. He was perhaps most famous as a cartoonist for the “Village Voice”, but he also did some movie and theater work.
…
…
In May 1997, Mr. Feiffer ended his affiliation with The Village Voice over a salary dispute. “It’s not that I’ve slipped,” he said at the time. “It’s that I’m too expensive.” (In April 2008, he returned for a one-shot, full-page take on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.)
Later in life he derived great pleasure from writing and drawing children’s books, some in collaboration with his daughter Kate, among them “The Man in the Ceiling” (1993), “Bark, George” (1999), “By the Side of the Road” (2002), “The Daddy Mountain” (2004) and “A Room With a Zoo” (2005). A 2010 reunion project with Mr. Juster, “The Odious Ogre,” was warmly reviewed.
Garth Hudson, of the Band.
During its peak, the Band was famously a collaborative operation informed by the songwriting and barbed guitar playing of Robbie Robertson and the soulful singing and musicianship of Levon Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel. But critics and his fellow band members agreed that Mr. Hudson played an essential role in raising the group to another level entirely.
Mr. Robertson, quoted in Barney Hoskyns’s 1993 book, “The Band: Across the Great Divide,” called him “far and away the most advanced musician in rock ’n’ roll.” “He could just as easily have played with John Coltrane or the New York Symphony Orchestra as with us,” Mr. Robertson said.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#140 in a series)
January 18th, 2025Remember Sheng Thao? The former mayor of Oakland? “Former” because she got tossed out of office in a recall election in November?
She was indicted on Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her “boyfriend”, David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.
Patrick D. Robbins, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said on Friday that Ms. Thao in October 2022 had agreed to extend a city contract with the waste company, California Waste Solutions, buy housing from the Duongs and use her influence to help them in exchange for a campaign mail effort and side payments that would benefit her and Mr. Jones.
California Waste Solutions then spent $75,000 on an attack mailer that helped Ms. Thao’s campaign in the 2022 mayoral election, prosecutors said. After Ms. Thao took office, the company paid $95,000 to Mr. Jones for a “no-show” job and had promised additional payments to the couple in exchange for Ms. Thao’s influence at City Hall, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors alleged that Ms. Thao followed through by taking steps to help companies owned by the Duongs and by appointing a high-level city official that they had selected.
The charges against her are pretty much standard. You got your mail fraud, you got your wire fraud, you got your bribery and conspiracy.
…
Obit watch: January 18, 2025.
January 18th, 2025Jean Jennings, automotive writer. I remember her from back in the day when I was reading Car and Driver (she went by Jean Lindamood at the time).
Mrs. Jennings was hired at Car and Driver by David E. Davis Jr., a renowned figure in automotive journalism. In 1986, he took her with him after Rupert Murdoch offered to support a new type of car magazine, Automobile, which was aimed at more discerning readers and featured writers like P.J. O’Rourke, David Halberstam and Jim Harrison. Mrs. Jennings proved more than capable of keeping up with them.
“She and David were the only ones writing anything other than fanboy notes,” Kathleen Hamilton, a childhood friend who later worked for her at Automobile, said in an interview. “It was enthusiast writing, and she brought adventure to the car-world reader.”
I sort of halfway read “Automobile”, by which I mean I mostly thumbed through it on the newsstands but never bought an issue. I think I had checked out of the car magazine scene by the time she became Mrs. Jennings.
She was 70, which seems awfully young to me these days. Alzheimer’s got her.
Obit watch: January 17, 2025.
January 17th, 2025As promised, David Lynch. NYT. This is the same THR obit link from yesterday, but I think they’ve substantially updated it since I originally posted.
David Lynch PSA for the New York City Department of Sanitation. (Hattip: NYPost.)
Roger Ebert’s one-star review of “Blue Velvet”.
Joan Plowright, actress. IMDB. I feel bad that I don’t have more to say about here, but I just don’t.
Nathalie Dupree, cookbook author and personality. She’s actually someone I’d heard of, but didn’t really have a lot of context for. The obit makes it sound like she would have been a fun person to know, more so in her Diet Coke days.
Ms. Dupree had a particular blend of Southern hospitality and risqué charm. Over the course of her career she was called “the Julia Child of the South,” “the queen of Southern cooking” and “the anti-Martha Stewart.”
She shocked the host Katie Couric by ending an elegant entertaining segment on the “Today” show, in which she prepared an entire pork crown roast, by presenting a supermarket chocolate cake. She filmed episodes of her television show with a red AIDS ribbon pinned to her apron, a bold move in the 1980s, when conservative suburban women made up much of her audience.
“She is one of the few people in my life who seems more like a fictional character than a flesh-and-blood person,” the novelist Pat Conroy wrote in “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes and Stories of My Life” (2009), after taking one of Ms. Dupree’s classes. “You never know where Nathalie is going with a train of thought; you simply know that the train will not be on time, will carry many passengers and will eventually collide with a food truck stalled somewhere down the line on damaged tracks.”
…
Her early television shows, orchestrated solely by Ms. Graubart, were sponsored by a Southern flour company. Ms. Dupree wanted the kitchen segments to run with no edits. With a smear of flour on her face, she might leave ingredients half prepared or forget to add them altogether. She wiped her hands on her apron a lot and once searched around for her diamond ring that had fallen off as she cooked.
“Whatever happens to me is going to happen to you,” she’d tell audiences after a mistake.
“She was a hot mess, and that’s what people loved her for,” Ms. Graubart, who coauthored “Mastering the Art of Southern Cooking” in 2012 with Ms. Dupree, said in a phone interview.
Random crankery (mostly gun books, a little gun stuff, a little electronic stuff).
January 16th, 2025I didn’t manage to get everything done that I wanted to get done during my extended vacation from work. In particular, gun crankery and gun books kind of went by the wayside, for reasons of time and weather.
The gun crankery is still coming. And a thought occurred to me the other day: I can actually do some quick gun book crankery, because I have three new gun books in the stack and can just point folks to those books online. Don’t need to pull out the bibliographies or take pictures. Yes, it is lazy, and yes, there will be less lazy gun book crankery coming. Consider this a stopgap.
More seriously, I do think these new books are worth writing about and promoting to my readers.
In order to avoid disappointing my gun book buddies, I’m going to put the gun books up front. After those, I’m going to talk about one new gun-related item, and one new non-gun related item, so anyone who wants can skip over the non-book parts (or can skip to the non-book parts).
Obit watch: January 16, 2025.
January 16th, 2025This is breaking news, but: David Lynch. I wouldn’t ordinarily post anything this early, but I happened to be writing this obit watch when the news broke. Expect more tomorrow.
Bob Uecker. ESPN. IMDB. Baseball Reference.
Administrative note.
January 16th, 2025For the record, my plan is to update the various politician lists (city council, commissioners court, reps, senators) sometime after, but close to, January 20th.
I know some of these folks have been sworn in already, but waiting until after the 20th gives people a chance to get their web sites updated and things in order.
Obit watch: January 13, 2025.
January 13th, 2025Leslie Charleson, actress.
Other credits include “The F.B.I.”, “O’Hara, U.S. Treasury”, “Emergency!”, “Search”…
…and “Mannix”. (“A Chance at the Roses”, season 3, episode 16.)
Firings watch.
January 13th, 2025This is still breaking, but: Mike McCarthy is supposedly out as head coach of the Dallas Cowboys.
ESPN, who is attributing this to “a source”.
Obit watch: January 11, 2025.
January 11th, 2025Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave.
At their peak in the 1960s, Sam & Dave churned out rhythm-and-blues hits with a regularity rivaled by few other performers. When “Soul Man” topped the R&B charts and crossed over to No. 2 on the pop charts in 1967 (it also won a Grammy), its success helped open doors for other Black acts to connect with white audiences.
Sam & Dave’s live shows were so kinetic — they were known as the Sultans of Sweat and Double Dynamite — that even as charismatic a performer as Otis Redding was hesitant to be on the bill with them, for fear of being upstaged. Mr. Moore once spoke of his need to “liquefy” the audience before he considered a show a success.
“The strength of Sam & Dave,” he said, “was that we would do anything to please the audience.”
…
…
(Dave Prater died in a car accident in 1988.)
Burning in Hell watch: James Arthur Ray. People who have been reading this blog for a long time may remember that name, as I covered his actions and the resulting criminal case early on.
Mr. Ray was a “self-help guru” who killed three people in a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona.
Mr. Ray packed about 50 people into a temporary structure made of a round wood frame covered in tarps, measuring about 25 feet in diameter and only five feet at the center. He poured gallons of water over fire-heated rocks, filling the lodge with hot steam.
Though he told participants they could leave at any time, many said later that they felt pressured by him to stay. Eventually the conditions inside grew unbearable, and the crowd flooded out; many people collapsed on the ground.
Someone called 911; one first responder later said that the scene looked like the site of a mass suicide. Twenty-one people were taken to the hospital.
Three of them died — James Shore and Kirby Brown were declared dead on arrival, while Liz Neumann died nine days later. Mr. Ray was arrested shortly afterward on manslaughter charges.
Mr. Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years in prison.
“I am responsible,” he said about the sweat-lodge disaster.
At the end of the film, he added: “It had to happen, because it was the only way I could explore and learn and grow through the things that I’ve done. Am I drinking the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but the Kool-Aid works for me.”
Am I reading that right? Three people had to die in great agony so James Arthur Ray could “explore and learn and grow”?
Hell is too good for him.
(Obligatory note that it was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.)
–Roger Ebert
Firings watch.
January 10th, 2025On Tuesday, the Las Vegas Raiders fired Antonio Pierce as head coach.
Yesterday, they fired Tom Telesco as general manager. One season, 4-13.
In other news, Sean Dyche is out as manager of Everton. Everton is apparently a soccer team.
(I would have sworn I posted this yesterday, but I just found this in my drafts. Apologies.)
Noted.
January 10th, 2025This came across Greg Ellifritz‘s “Weekend Knowledge Dump” a few weeks ago, and I thought it was worth sharing:
“46 Things (and Counting) a Young Man Should Know”.
47. Carry a sharp knife, unless precluded by law or venue policy. It doesn’t have to be a machete or Bowie knife: even a small Swiss Army knife or pocketknife is worthwhile.
48. Carry a small flashlight. You can get ones that clip on your keychain and throw a surprising amount of light, and you have no idea how handy they are until you start using them.
Also by way of Mr. Ellifritz: “52 Things I Learned in 2024”.
And by way of Mike the Musicologist: “Big Pistols vs. Small Pistols”, by FotB (and official trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn.
Obit watch: January 10, 2024.
January 10th, 2025The NYT obit wants to attribute her career decline to her anti-gay views. But was that really the case? Or did her career go into eclipse because American musical tastes changed? I honestly don’t know.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#138 and #139 in a series)
January 9th, 2025Mike the Musicologist tipped me off to an interesting story from Louisiana.
Tyrin Truong is the mayor of Bogalusa. He’s 23, which makes him the youngest mayor in Bogalusa’s history, and one of the youngest ever in the state.
And he got busted on Tuesday for drug trafficking.
But, apparently, no blow. Which is kind of disappointing, because:
…
“unauthorized use of a moveable”?
Even before officially becoming mayor, Truong did not shy away from political battles and controversies. As mayor-elect, he pushed for the resignation of the Bogalusa police chief after a Black man died in the department’s custody.
During his tenure he encouraged law enforcement to patrol more in Bogalusa, but also suggested the city could dissolve its 33-officer police force and transfer responsibilities to the Washington Parish Sheriff’s office to save money.
What kind of expenses?
The articles don’t specify if that was a down payment on a new Prius or an outright purchase of a used one. I did run the numbers, and that works out to $14.61 a pound for the bourbon steak tips. I don’t know if that’s a good price or not: my H-E-B app does not list steak tips (with or without bourbon) at my local store. I also can’t find “bourbon steak tips” online – I was thinking that might be something Omaha Steaks sells – but I did find lots of recipes for “bourbon” and “honey bourbon” steak tips online. Might be something worth trying.
Clasby also arranged for the city to pay over $38,000 to a New York consulting company owned by his friend, federal prosecutors said.
The consulting company didn’t provide any goods or services to Quincy, federal prosecutors said. Instead, Clasby’s friend cashed the city’s checks and gave Clasby the money at three separate places: A rest stop in Framingham, a ferry terminal in Bridgeport, Connecticut and at the friend’s New York apartment.
Okay, now you’re just being scummy instead of amusing. But we’ll always have the “signed, lacquered, framed portrait” and the studio recordings of his singing. Not that I’ve found those anywhere yet, but I’m sure prosecutors will be entering those into evidence and playing them for the jury.
Obit watch: January 8, 2025.
January 8th, 2025Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front party in France (now the National Rally).
An arm-waving reactionary with the swagger of a circus pitchman making outrageous claims, Mr. Le Pen ran unsuccessfully for the French presidency five times, making it to a runoff in 2002, riding waves of discontent and xenophobia and raising specters of a new fascism as he excoriated Jews, Arabs, Muslims and other immigrants — anyone he deemed to be not “pure” French.
Mr. Le Pen’s youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, succeeded him as leader of his party, the National Front, in 2011 and rose to prominence on a tide of populist anger at the political mainstream. She was defeated in France’s presidential elections three times — in 2012, placing third with 17.9 percent of the vote behind François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy; in 2017, with 33.9 percent, losing to the centrist Emmanuel Macron; and in 2022, with 41.5 percent, defeated again by Mr. Macron.
But that year’s elections also sent a record number of representatives from the party, renamed National Rally, to the lower house of Parliament — 89 in all — testimony to the success of Ms. Le Pen’s efforts to normalize it and moderate its message in some regards.
By then it had became the leading opposition party, no longer an outcast widely viewed as a threat to the republic, and in 2023 the National Rally backed Mr. Macron’s bill restricting immigration, an embarrassment for the French president.
Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary.
The classics.
January 7th, 2025There was a story in the NYT the other day that I thought was interesting, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.
Yujin Choi was a rising young prosecutor in the Denver district attorney’s office.
In 2021, Ms. Choi made her first allegation against Dan Hines, a criminal investigator in the district attorney’s office. She told supervisors that he had made an inappropriate comment to her.
Mr. Hines, who joined the office in 2019 after spending 10 years in the military and 20 years with the Pennsylvania State Police, retiring as a troop commander, denied the allegation.
“The investigation was closed as unsubstantiated,” according to the ruling, but Mr. Hines was transferred within the office and was ordered not to contact Ms. Choi.
…
In October 2022, Ms. Choi said that Mr. Hines sent her four inappropriate text messages.
So what makes this story interesting? Turns out…
While she provided screenshots of the messages, questions about their authenticity quickly surfaced.
The first text had a time stamp that was about 40 minutes after Ms. Choi had already reported it to her superiors, according to the ruling.
She said that she did not want a formal investigation and did not cooperate with it, the ruling said, but the prosecutor’s office felt obligated to move forward with an inquiry.
When confronted with the new allegations, Mr. Hines immediately demanded a polygraph test and offered his phone for inspection. A forensic search of his phone did not show any communication between his number and Ms. Choi’s, according to the ruling.
The investigation further revealed that Ms. Choi had texted the inappropriate messages to herself. In addition, she changed the name in her phone to make it appear as though Mr. Hines was the one who had sent them.
The investigation found that Ms. Choi downloaded and altered a spreadsheet containing her Verizon message logs before she provided those records to investigators.
Yes, it is the all-time, but not often seen, classic “B—h set me up!” story. And it seems like she was singularly inept at the “setting up” part. But wait, there’s more.
The weekend before her phone and laptop were to be examined for evidence of the alleged misconduct by Mr. Hines, Ms. Choi told investigators that her phone had fallen into her bathtub after she had drawn herself a bath and put her phone on a tray.
She said that she dried it right away but found that it was not working. She then went to her desk to make a video call to a colleague, according to the ruling. After the call, still in a panic over her phone, she knocked over a bottle, spilling water on her laptop, and leaving that disabled as well.
…
Ms. Choi has been disbarred.
…
Ms. Choi told the disciplinary office that she did not intentionally harm Mr. Hines because she did not make any formal statement against him until the office forced her to participate in its investigation.
In asking for leniency, she said that she was under financial stress and that she had been a lawyer only for a short time. The court office noted in its ruling that Ms. Choi’s repeated deception and lack of remorse persuaded it to go beyond suspending her law license and to seek disbarment.
Mr. Hines said he was livid about the way the internal investigations were handled, and the damage done to his reputation and mental and physical health. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against the district attorney, Beth McCann, the city and county of Denver and the prosecutor’s office.
In case you’re wondering, the DA’s office says that “Ms. Choi’s casework was later found to be in ‘excellent order,’ with no evidence of fabrications.”
Firings watch.
January 7th, 2025Bloody Monday felt like sort of a nothing burger. I think what we may see is firings trickling out over the course of the week.
Starting with today: Ran Carthon out as general manager of the Tennessee Titans.
The Titans, by the way, have the number one pick in the upcoming NFL draft. Also by the way, they are keeping Brian Callahan as head coach.
Personally, I’d like to see Carthon, Callahan, Amy Adams Strunk, and every other person who was involved with the Titans wearing Houston Oilers throwback uniforms placed in stocks in front of the stadium and pelted with rocks and garbage.
ESPN.
Brian Schneider out as special teams coach of the San Francisco 49ers, who were 6-11 this year.
Edited to add: ESPN is reporting that Antonio Pierce has been fired as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders. This seems to be backed up by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, but that’s not a great newspaper, so I’m sticking with ESPN.
The Raiders were 4-13 this season: Pierce came on as an interim coach in 2023 (and went 5-4), and this was his first and only full season.
Monday, Bloody Monday.
January 6th, 2025This is your official thread for today’s NFL coach firings. I will try to keep this thread updated throughout the day, but I have some things going on later in the afternoon that may interfere.
Doug Pederson out as head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars. (That link may give you trouble about your ad blocker, but if you reload that seems to clear it. Archive.is seems to be having problems right now, or I would put up the archive version.) 4-13 this season, and 22-29 in Pederson’s three seasons. However, the team is keeping Trent Baalke as GM. ESPN.
Interestingly, the New York Football Giants have apparently decided to keep general manager Joe Schoen and head coach Brian Daboll, even though the team finished 3-14 this season and 6-11 last year.
Edited to add: “Sources say” Lou Anarumo is out as defensive coordinator of the Cincinnati Bengals.
Not a NFL firing, but Wes Goodwin is out as defensive coordinator at Clemson.
Edited to add: Ryan Grubb out as offensive coordinator of the Seahawks according to “sources”.
The NYPost is running their own “Black Monday” ticker as well.
Hold the Mayo!
January 5th, 2025It’s the hap-hapiest time of the year. That is, the final Sunday of the NFL season, and the lead-up to Bloody Monday.
Except Bloody Monday has increasingly started on Sunday. Like it did this year.
Jerod Mayo out as head coach of the New England Patriots. One year, 4-13.
Meanwhile, the Cleveland Browns have fired offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey and offensive line coach Andy Dickerson. Cleveland finished the season on Saturday, and went 3-14.
I’m going out this evening with friends, but if I get a chance and if there are more firings, I’ll try to update here.
Obit watch: January 2, 2025.
January 2nd, 2025Lenny Randle, who the obits describe (not without reason) as “the most interesting man in baseball”. He was 75. NYT. Baseball Reference.
…
Randle’s Rangers tenure ended when he punched manager Frank Lucchesi on March 28, 1977. Randle had lost his second base job to Bump Wills during spring training and asked to be traded if he wasn’t going to play regularly. Lucchesi told media he was tired of “$80,000‐a‐year punks” complaining.
Randle punched Lucchesi three times before a spring training game against Minnesota, and the manager suffered a triple fracture of his right cheekbone and needed plastic surgery. Randle said he approached Lucchesi along the third‐base line to talk to him and Lucchesi told him: “What do you got to say, punk?”
…
Texas suspended Randle for 30 days, fined him $10,000 and withheld $13,407.90 of his $80,000 salary.
Randle issued a public apology. He was charged with felony aggravated battery, pleaded no contest to misdemeanor battery and was fined $1,050. In 1978, he settled a lawsuit filed by Lucchesi.
Mr. Randle does, of course, show up in Seasons in Hell. Mike Shropshire I think makes a good point about the Randle/Lucchesi incident: Mr. Lucchesi apparently did not understand that “punk” had a very specific and highly offensive connotation at that time (3b). I’m not saying I condone it, but I sort of understand it…
Obit watch: December 30, 2024.
December 30th, 2024I have been running around with Mike the Musicologist, and will be continuing to do so through the first of the year. So I’m a little behind in obits, but I’m trying to catch up.
Warren Upton. He was 105.
Mr. Upton was the oldest living Pearl Harbor survivor, and the last remaining survivor of the Utah.
Mr. Upton was serving as a radioman aboard the U.S.S. Utah on Dec. 7, 1941. He was below deck, reaching for his shaving kit, when the Utah was struck in quick succession by two torpedoes at about 8 a.m.
“It was quite an inferno,” Mr. Upton, a resident of San Jose, Calif., told the San Francisco TV station KTVU in 2021. “I went over the side then,” he added, “and slid down the side of the ship as she rolled over.”
The ship began capsizing within minutes. Mr. Upton and others left the ship and swam to Ford Island, adjacent to the row of battleships in Pearl Harbor. Along the way, he helped another shipmate who couldn’t swim.
The NYT quotes the Sons and Daughters of Pearl Harbor Survivors as stating there are 15 remaining survivors.
Former president Jimmy Carter, for the historical record: NYT. WP. I don’t have a lot to say about this, and it has been thoroughly covered elsewhere. But: I am excited that we’re going to get a new stamp.
Linda Lavin. I don’t know how many people realize she had a considerable Broadway career in addition to “Alice”. Other credits include “Harry O”, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent”, and “The Muppets Take Manhattan”.
Olivia Hussey. Other credits include voice work in “Pinky and the Brain”, “Death on the Nile”, and “Black Christmas”.
Fiction has to be believable.
December 27th, 2024Mike the Musicologist sent this over to me. While WFLA is a Florida news site, the most unbelievable part of this story (to me, anyway) is that the events took place in Maryland, not Florida.
A man was arrested and charged after disrupting religious services at two Maryland Catholic churches on Christmas Eve, according to the St. Mary’s County Sherriff’s Office.
A release from SMCSO said that around 5 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Thomas Campbell Bolling Von Goetz, 56, entered Holy Angels Catholic Church during Mass. He then proceeded to disrupt the service by dropping an onion in the aisle.
A citizen who followed Von Goetz into the church ushered him outside where, SMCSO said, Von Goetz began pelting the individual with tangerines.
Onions and tangerines? I guess there are worse things than being pelted with tangerines.
But wait, there’s more!
Later Tuesday night, deputies were called to a similar disruption at St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Leonardtown during Midnight Mass. According to them, Von Goetz poured whiskey into the holy water and threatened parishioners who tried to intervene.
While being escorted from the building, Van Goetz attempted to strike church attendees with a whiskey bottle.
I don’t think this is what the Irish mean by “Uisce beatha“. Also, seems like a waste of both good whiskey and good holy water.
The gentleman in question is now facing a laundry list of charges, some of which I’ve never heard of before: “Obstructing a religious exercise”, “Religious crime against a group”.
Obit watch: January 27, 2024.
December 27th, 2024Geoffrey Deuel, actor.
Other credits include “In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders”, “The F.B.I.”, “Mission: Impossible”, “The Magician”…
…and “Mannix”. (“Eagles Sometimes Can’t Fly”, season 3, episode 1. “Chance Meeting”, season 8, episode 15.)
(Lawrence, I’m about halfway tempted to add “In the Line of Duty: The F.B.I. Murders” to the list. It is available on DVD at a reasonable price, and it seems like a lot of big names from the time are in it. My only issue, other than convincing folks to watch it, is that Ed Mireles says it isn’t completely accurate. We might want to accompany that with the “FBI Files” episode, which I think is more historically accurate.)
Post Christmas gun book blogging.
December 26th, 2024“Did you get any gun books for Christmas?” asked nobody, ever.
Yes, actually, I did. Lawrence gave me a batch of older softcover books he picked up while shopping over Thanksgiving, including a Gun Digest I didn’t have. Someone at work sent me some “funny money” as a thank you for services rendered, which I plan to use to purchase the Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson, 5th Edition in both the physical and Kindle editions. (It is supposed to be out January 7th according to Amazon, but some people on the forum have reported they’ve already received their copies.) And I’ve been told that I have at least one more present coming, but shipping has been delayed, so I don’t know what that is. Could be a gun book, could be not a gun book. Could be not a book at all.
I also got some books I ordered from Callahan and Company in two separate orders, so I am a bit backlogged. It is probably a good time to start cataloging those. All four of these came in the same C&C order, and there was a total of $8 media mail shipping on top of the stated prices.