The Houston Texans have fired general manager Brian Gaine.
Lawrence tipped me off to this and forwarded a link to Battle Red Blog, which uses the word “bonkers” to describe this. It does seem odd to me: the season hasn’t started, after all. But it makes more sense to fire him after the draft – especially if the draft was a bust – than to fire him before and leave a new GM scrambling.
But was the draft that bad for the Texans? Honestly, I don’t know. I didn’t follow it closely.
Malcolm John (Mac) Rebennack Jr.
You know him better as Dr. John.
Mr. Rebennack belonged to the pantheon of New Orleans keyboard wizards that includes Professor Longhair, James Booker, Huey (Piano) Smith and Fats Domino. What distinguished him from his peers was the showmanship of his public persona.
Onstage as Dr. John, he adorned himself with snakeskin, beads and colorful feathers, and his shows blended Mardi Gras bonhomie with voodoo mystery.
He recorded more than 30 albums, including jazz projects (“Bluesiana Triangle,” 1990, with the drummer Art Blakey and the saxophonist David Newman), solo piano records (“Dr. John Plays Mac Rebennack,” 1981) and his version of Afropop (“Locked Down,” 2012). His 1989 album of standards, “In a Sentimental Mood,” earned him the first of six Grammy Awards, for his duet with Rickie Lee Jones on “Makin’ Whoopee!”
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I really don’t have anything to say about the 75th anniversary of D-Day that I haven’t already said.
Borepatch has a couple of good posts up. Also worth noting: “D-Day + 75: Arms of the Airborne“. (Edited to add: Also, Lawrence.)
(When I win the $520 million in the MegaMillions drawing this coming Friday, I think the second full-auto gun I’m going to buy (after the Thompson) will be a vintage BAR. Or a Colt Monitor.)
I’ve written about this before, but I couldn’t let today pass without noting:
It is the 45th anniversary of Ten Cent Beer Night.
Semi-oddly (I guess because it isn’t a big anniversary) there’s nothing about it on Cleveland.com today. Not seeing anything on MLB.com either, and DuckDuckGo doesn’t turn up a whole lot.
I did find this amusing (but old) article from ESPN.
Let us pause to remember. Cheap nasty beer is optional.
Leah Chase, New Orleans restaurateur.
I haven’t managed to eat at Dooky Chase yet, though I have heard of it (probably by way of Calvin Trillin). As much as I prefer to link to local obits, I like the way the NYT puts it:
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Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, always adhering to a code shaped in large part by her Catholic beliefs. She held up Gen. George S. Patton of World War II fame as a hero and was a fan of baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
“I just think that God pitches us a low, slow curve, but he doesn’t want us to strike out,” she said in a New York Times interview. “I think everything he throws at you is testing your strength, and you don’t cry about it, and you go on.”
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I love this, too:
During that period, Mrs. Chase started catering the openings of fledgling artists so they could offer hospitality to people who had come to admire – and, perhaps, buy – their creations. She helped them pay their bills, and she hung their works in the restaurant.
This love of art, born when she studied art in high school, led to service on the boards of the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Arts Council of New Orleans. Mrs. Chase also sat on the boards of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, the Urban League of Greater New Orleans and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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Mrs. Chase regularly provided food for nonprofit organizations’ fundraisers and refused to submit bills, said Morial, the widow of one New Orleans mayor and the mother of another.
“She provided food for the Amistad Research Center and would not take money. That was her contribution,” said Morial, an Amistad board member. “We’d tell her this was a fundraiser. She said, ‘I know, and you need all the money you can raise.’”
My feelings about baseball are well known, but I thought this was an interesting obituary: Marc Okkonen.
Mr. Okkonen, a commercial artist and baseball aficionado with an appreciation for vintage apparel, spotted flaws in the purported uniforms of the Pittsburgh Pirates and Chicago Cubs and wondered why they were not precise replicas of the originals from 1939, when the movie takes place. Given how thoroughly documented baseball’s history is, he thought, accurate details would not have been too difficult to uncover.
But, to Mr. Okkonen’s surprise, he could find no single volume containing images of historic uniforms, so he set out to fill that void. He spent the next five years poring through books, microfilms and archives, including those at the Library of Congress and the Baseball Hall of Fame, to find images of every home and road uniform worn by all major league teams, starting in 1900.
And then he wrote that book: Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century: The Official Major League Baseball Guide. This is the kind of obsessive historical study that I find admirable, in the same way that (for example) some people document the minute details of Smith and Wesson history…
(Eight days and a wake-up in country, and then I’m off to the S&WCA symposium.)
Roky Erickson, noted psychedelic musician with the 13th Floor Elevators. I wish I had more to say about this, but I pretty much missed the psychedelic era. Also, the treatment of Roky Erickson (and Daniel Johnston) locally seemed, to me, to be kind of “let’s point and laugh at the weirdo”. Not everyone was that way: I’m sure there were some people who were motivated by compassion and love of the music, but I felt like that was an undercurrent running through the scene. Perhaps some of my musician readers will have more to say on the subject.
(Edited to add 6/4: NYT obit for Mr. Erickson.)
Last and least: infamous heroin dealer Frank Lucas, whose life was adapted into “American Gangster”.
Leon Redbone has died. He was 127.
Well, that’s what the press release said. Most sources I see say he was 69, though Wikipedia footnotes that as “disputed”.
The “Variety” obit (hattip: Lawrence) is pretty good. If it seems like I’m giving Mr. Redbone short shrift, well, I don’t have a lot to say: I never really caught that particular gene. I’ve been told he was on “Prairie Home Companion” a lot, but since that show basically makes me want to stab myself in the thigh repeatedly with a spork…
Also among the dead: Thad Cochran, congressman for 45 years.
And finally, Claus von Bülow, who was not a murderer. Really. Two out of three courts said so.
Seriously, this was one of the great true crime circuses of the 1980s. Mr. von Bülow was charged with attempting to murder his wife by giving her an overdose of insulin. She went into hypoglycemic comas twice (in December of 1979 and December of 1980). She recovered the first time, but her second coma was irreversible.
Mr. von Bülow was convicted in his first trial, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. (His legal team included Alan Dershowitz, Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer, and Jim “Mad Money” Cramer.) He was tried a second time and acquitted.
I’m glossing over a lot of stuff here (because I don’t have time), including the testimony in the second trial from Truman Capote and Johnny Carson’s wife. Wikipedia has a pretty good summary, though you have to read both the Sunny and Claus articles. (There’s a great story in one of them about Norman Mailer and his wife attending a dinner party with Claus and Dershowitz. You have to read it: I won’t spoil the punchline.)
Sunny von Bülow never recovered from her second coma, and remained in a vegetative state until she died in 2008.
I haven’t found a print obituary to point to yet, but Lawrence tipped me off to a Facebook post: multiple award winning horror writer Dennis Etchison has passed on.
Also by way of Lawrence: Louis Levi Oakes, last of the Mohawk code talkers.
The veteran was one of 17 Mohawks from Akwesasne, which straddles the Quebec, Ontario and New York state borders, who received code-talker training while stationed in Louisiana.
Kanien’kéha, the Mohawk language, was one of 33 Indigenous languages used during the war to send encoded messages between Allied forces so enemies could not understand what was being said.
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“I only knew Levi for a very short period of time, but he meant a tremendous amount to me,” said Marc Miller, parliamentary secretary to Canada’s minister of Crown-Indigenous relations. “I can only imagine what he meant to his family and his people who had the privilege of knowing him for far longer.
“Due to the secrecy of his mission in WW II, the extent of his contributions as a Mohawk code talker have only recently been known and honoured. My hope is that we continue to honour his memory and contributions in death much longer than we did in life.”
Tony Horwitz, prominent journalist and best-selling author. (Confederates in the Attic, Blue Latitudes)
He was only 60.
“Last week I saw my cardiologist,” Mr. Horwitz wrote in The Times last month. “He told me I drink too much.”
Mr. Horwitz acknowledged his occupational hazard, but made a case for what he called bar-stool democracy. His sojourn in the South, he said, had him discarding stereotypes and seeing blue-collar conservatives as “the three-dimensional individuals I drank and debated with in factory towns, Gulf Coast oil fields and distressed rural crossroads.”
He expressed the hope that they would remember him not as “one of those ‘coastal elites’ dripping with contempt and condescension toward Middle America,” he wrote, but “rather, as that guy from ‘up north’ who appeared on the next bar stool one Friday after work, asked about their job and life and hopes for the future, and thought what they said was important enough to write down.”
Bart Starr, one of the greatest of the Green Bay Packers. NYT.
Starr’s name may have been the most flamboyant thing about him. But he proved to be skilled, sly and, by at least one measure, incomparably successful: He won three N.F.L. championships (for the seasons played in 1961, ’62 and ’65) in the pre-Super Bowl era, and then the first two Super Bowls, in January of 1967 and ’68. That Packers’ run of N.F.L. championships helped bring new attention to professional football as it moved into the Super Bowl era. (With his victory in 2019, Tom Brady has won six Super Bowls with the New England Patriots.)
Starr was named the league’s most valuable player in 1966 and received the same honor in Super Bowls I and II. He was selected to the Pro Bowl four times. And on a team known for running — with the flashy Paul Hornung and the rugged Jim Taylor (who died in October) — Starr was one of the league’s most efficient passers. He led the N.F.L. in that crucial category in three seasons and, on average, for all of the 1960s — even though his rival Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts was often viewed as better. Starr set career records for completion percentage, 57.4, and consecutive passes without an interception, 294.
Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel prize winning theoretical physicist.
Much as atoms can be slotted into the rows and columns of the periodic table of the elements, Dr. Gell-Mann found a way, in 1961, to classify their smaller pieces — subatomic particles like protons, neutrons, and mesons, which were being discovered by the dozen in cosmic rays and particle accelerator blasts. Arranged according to their properties, the particles clustered in groups of eight and 10.
In a moment of whimsy, Dr. Gell-Mann, who hadn’t a mystical bone in his body, named his system the Eightfold Way after the Buddha’s eight-step path to enlightenment. He groaned ever after when people mistakenly inferred that particle physics was somehow related to Eastern philosophy.
Looking deeper, Dr. Gell-Mann realized that the patterns of the Eightfold Way could be further divided into triplets of even smaller components. He decided to call them quarks after a line from James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”: “Three quarks for Muster Mark.”
Edmund Morris, biographer. I’m slowly working my way through his Theodore Roosevelt biographies, and I’d argue he’s at least as famous for those as he is for Dutch:
The columnist George Will attacked “Dutch” as “dishonorable,” and the writer Joan Didion accused Mr. Morris of resorting to the fictional device to conceal his own inadequacies as a fact-gatherer.
One of his toughest critics, Michiko Kakutani of The Times, called the book a “loony hodgepodge of fact and fiction” about a president that mimicked “the very blurring of reality and state-managed illusion that that president was often accused of perpetrating.”
No judgment intended here: this is in last place because it is breaking news. Bill Buckner passed away a short time ago.
He was most famous, unfortunately, for bobbling a play during game 6 of the World Series in 1986, costing the Red Sox the game and probably the Series. But there are other Sox fans who can speak with more authority on Mr. Buckner and his legacy.
Dick Ellis, noted local TV anchorman and journalist.
Former KVUE anchor Judy Maggio, who sat next to Ellis at the anchor desk in the 1980s, said she considered Ellis a brother.
“We went through the golden years of TV together,” she said. “He never stopped wanting to be a newsman. He never stopped wanting to be a journalist. He just loved it.”
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KVUE.
…at least, if you want to teach kids that crime does not pay.
85 years ago today, Bonnie and Clyde got turned into chunky salsa by Frank Hamer and his posse.
FBI page: “At the time they were killed in 1934, they were believed to have committed 13 murders and several robberies and burglaries.” Those 13 murders include several police officers: these were not nice people.
I haven’t been able to get a copy of Boessenecker’s book yet, or watch “The Highwaymen”, but both are on my list.
Technically, this is a couple of days old, and I’m not going to reproduce it here, out of respect for the NYT‘s intellectual property rights.
But if you ever wanted to see a large photo of Thomas Harris (yes, the Hannibal guy) holding a live possum named Bruce…here you go.
Stanton T. Friedman, UFOlogist.
Mr. Silverstein was serving three consecutive life terms for the killing of two fellow prisoners and a guard while behind bars. He had been incarcerated continuously since 1975, originally on an armed robbery conviction. He was said to have joined the Aryan Brotherhood, the white nationalist prison gang, while serving time at Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas.
He was in solitary confinement for 36 years, more than half his life. The American Civil Liberties Union has cited his case in its campaign against long-term solitary confinement.
More:
In 1981, Mr. Silverstein and another inmate, Clayton Fountain, were convicted of murdering Robert Chappelle, a member of the D.C. Blacks prison gang. During the trial, the gang’s national leader, Raymond (Cadillac) Smith, was transferred to Marion, apparently intent on killing Mr. Silverstein in revenge. (Prison officials, Mr. Silverstein said later, were aware of the threats but “didn’t take any action to make me safe.”)
Mr. Silverstein and Mr. Fountain got to Mr. Smith first, stabbing him 67 times with makeshift weapons, then dragging his body along prison catwalks as an object lesson. Mr. Silverstein received two more life sentences, for the murders of Mr. Chappelle and Mr. Smith. He insisted that he was innocent of the Chappelle murder and that he had killed Mr. Smith in self-defense.
By 1983 Mr. Silverstein had taken up art, teaching himself and becoming accomplished at it. One day, on his way back from showering, another prisoner handed him another makeshift knife and a homemade key. Using it, he managed to unlock his handcuffs and then fatally stabbed Merle E. Clutts, an unarmed correction officer, about 40 times.
His running buddy Mr. Fountain killed another guard that same day. These incidents are (at least in part) what prompted the construction of the SuperMax prison in Colorado.
Mildly interesting fact that I ran across last night: Clayton Fountain, who was also confined in solitary, took theology courses, converted to Catholicism, and was accepted as a lay brother by a Trappist order after his death.
Niki Lauda, one of the greatest racing drivers ever.
In his 17-year career (1969-1985) in the open cockpit of Porsches, Ferraris, McLarens and other high-tech torpedoes on wheels, mostly in Formula One competition, Lauda won 25 Grand Prix races. Points are awarded to the top six finishers in a race, and by amassing the highest point total in 16 authorized races, Lauda won the Formula One world driving championships in 1975, 1977 and 1984.
Since the crowns were first awarded in 1950, only five drivers have surpassed Lauda’s three titles. The record, seven, was set by Michael Schumacher, of Germany, between 1994 and 2004.
I wasn’t an avid follower of Formula 1, but I kind of liked Mr. Lauda. Especially after reading about him in Reader’s Digest. (I want to say it was a “Drama In Real Life”.)
But in his next race, the German Grand Prix at Nürburgring, a 14-mile, 76-curve course, things went drastically wrong for Lauda and his 1,300-pound blood-red Ferrari.
It had rained and he hit a slippery patch at 140 miles per hour. He spun out, broke through a restraining fence that snagged and tore away his helmet, then hit an embankment and bounced back onto the track, where he was hit by several following cars. His ruptured fuel tank burst into flames that engulfed him in the cockpit.
By the time three other drivers pulled him from the wreckage, he had severe burns of the face, head and hands, a concussion, a broken collarbone and other fractures. His right ear was badly burned. Noxious smoke and gases from the car’s burning interior seared his lungs. He was rushed to a hospital in a coma, then to a burn center, seemingly near death.
On Lauda’s third day in intensive care, a Roman Catholic priest gave him the last rites of the church. Lauda was conscious, and the rites only made him angry. “I kept telling myself, if he wants to do that, O.K., but I’m not quitting,” Lauda told Newsday after he began a remarkable recovery.
He had a series of operations and skin grafts that left permanent scarring on his head. He lost part of his right ear, the hair on the right side of his head, his eyebrows and both eyelids. He chose to limit reconstructive surgery to the eyelids, and thereafter wore a red baseball cap to cover the worst disfigurements. But he began talking, walking and making plans for his return to racing.
See how powerful the last rites are? Either the person dies in a state of grace, or they get real angry and tell Death, “Not today, mofo.”
But I digress. Six weeks after the accident, Mr. Lauda finished fourth in the Italian Grand Prix. He finished the 1976 season in second place behind James Hunt, and won the championship in 1977.
For many years, Lauda championed safer racecar and track designs, and urged tighter controls over driving conditions and rules governing race organizers.
“Racing on substandard tracks or in unsafe weather doesn’t test courage,” Lauda told The Boston Globe in 1977. “At present, some of the Grand Prix circuits we drivers are asked to race on do not fulfill the most primitive safety requirements. Also, the decision to call off or stop a race can’t be left entirely to the organizers, who too often put prestige before the safety of the drivers. We need independent experts whose authority should be supreme.”
More:
Lauda Air 004 crash from Wikipedia. This is one of those crashes that’s always fascinated and scared me: it seems unclear (the flight data recorder was badly damaged), but the apparent cause of the crash was that the thrust reverser on one engine deployed in flight causing the pilots to lose control, and the aircraft to break up.
“Personally involved” seems like a bit of an understatement. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Lauda was basically in Boeing’s face:
I would have liked to have met Mr. Lauda. He seems like another one of those kind of men they just don’t make these days.
It is…well, not exactly “rare”, but at least uncommon for a player to be thrown out of a league completely. The most recent example I can think of before last week was Johnny Manziel’s CFL expulsion.
But we had two last week.
Lawrence pointed out that Tyreke Evans had been “dismissed and disqualified” from the NBA. Mr. Evans was a guard with the Indiana Pacers last season: his dismissal was for unspecified violations of the NBA’s anti-drug policy.
He can apply for reinstatement in two years, but that will require approval from both the NBA and the player’s association. More from ESPN.
Meanwhile, in Australia (we love you, amen) rugby player Israel Folau had his contract voided for a “high level breach of the players’ Code of Conduct”.
Apparently the breach involved Folau posting a Bible verse that condemned “homosexuals” as well as “drunks, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists and idolators” on social media. (I’m not clear if this was a tweet or an Instagram post. I’m also not clear if the post is still up.)
Rod Dreher put up a couple of posts last week about this, and there’s lively discussion on both sides in the comments. He also suggests that Folau’s punishment may have been a factor in the election results. More on those from everyone’s favorite political blogger.
I’m not sure what side I come down on in the Folau situation, though I do think the parallels to Kapernick made by some of the commenters are instructive. Then again, as I’ve also said, if Kapernick could produce at the level of a Tom Brady or Drew Brees for an NFL team, nobody would give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what he said or thought. I don’t know enough about rugby to know if Folau is that kind of star player.