In some haste, because I am on the road for a wedding. But:
Willie Green out as head coach of the New Orleans Pelicans. ESPN:
The team is 2-10 to start the season. Which, sort of surprisingly, isn’t the worst record in the NBA so far this season: Brooklyn, Indiana, and Washington are all 1-11.
And I’m looking forward to full on flames.
Headline on the front page of the NYPost:
Dem rep’s $1.2 million DC home target of DOJ mortgage fraud criminal referral
We’re almost getting to the point where “politician charged with mortgage fraud” is the new “car bomb explodes in Beirut”.
But this one is special.
You may remember Eric Swalwell for such hits as “banging a Chinese spy”:
In January 2023, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) kicked Swalwell off the House Intelligence Committee, following reports three years prior that a suspected Chinese spy had infiltrated the congressman’s campaign — and got close to him.
Fang Fang, also known as Christine Fang, was a purported honeytrap who entered the US from China as a college student in 2011 — but allegedly spent the next four years wooing state and federal lawmakers to potentially obtain sensitive government intelligence.
At least two mayors of midwestern US cities had a romantic or sexual relationship with her, a US intelligence official and former elected official told Axios in 2020.
You may also remember Rep. Swalwell for threatening to use nuclear weapons against gun owners.
If Rep. Swalwell is convicted (and as much as I despise the man, he is still entitled to the presumption of innocence) he will, of course, lose all rights to own guns. I assume this includes any access he may have to nuclear weapons.
Sally Kirkland, actress.
Other credits include “Supertrain”, the good “Hawaii Five-0”, “Bronk”, and an uncredited role in “Blazing Saddles”.
Tatsuya Nakadai, Japanese actor.
He did a lot of work with Akira Kurosawa, including the lead role in “Kagemusha”. He was also the lead character in “Ran”, Kurosawa’s version of “King Lear”.
Early in his career, Mr. Nakadai often worked opposite Toshiro Mifune, one of Japan’s best-known acting exports. They could not have been less alike: Mr. Mifune, untrained as an actor but with wild energy, often presented a gruff, overtly physical persona, while Mr. Nakadai took on vastly different characters and delivered subtly intricate performances.
They usually played adversaries. In “Yojimbo” (1961) and “Sanjuro” (1962), both directed by Mr. Kurosawa, and “Samurai Rebellion” (1967), directed by Mr. Kobayashi, the two meet in climatic duels, with Mr. Mifune’s character winning each time with a horizontal slash to the midsection. In “Sanjuro,” the fatal cut released a towering fountain of blood.
…
Nico Harrison out as general manager of the Dallas Mavericks. ESPN.
They were 182-157 over four seasons, with three playoff appearances. But they’re 3-8 so far this season, and…
…Harrison will long be remembered as the architect of what’s been called the worst trade in NBA history. His decision last season to trade Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers in exchange for Anthony Davis and Max Christie yielded immediate backlash from fans, whose chants of “Fire Nico” became a universal swan song anytime the Mavericks found themselves in an unfortunate position.
They chanted the phrase in the team’s first home game following the trade. They rallied together and chanted it the first time Doncic returned to American Airlines Center as a member of the Lakers. Nine months later, they’ve chanted it during home games as Harrison sat from his new seats inside the arena, several rows behind the team’s broadcast booth.
I’ve been hacking around for the past few days, and will be today as well. So I don’t have as much time as I would like to put together a proper post.
Instead, I’m going to refer you to two outside sources.
Heather King (who is a great writer) did a “Credible Witnesses” piece in this month’s Magnificat about Michael Anthony Monsoor. I can’t find it online, so instead I’m going to quote from his Congressional Medal of Honor citation.
The award was posthumous.
UPS Flight 2976 was flying from Muhammad Ali International Airport to Daniel K. Inouye International Airport in Hawaii. I’m kind of cynical about naming things after people, but if there are two people who deserve to have an airport named after them, it is probably Ali and Inouye.
I don’t know if most people remember Daniel Inouye. He was a long-time senator from Hawaii (until he died in 2012). Yes, he was a Democrat. But the man had cojones like you wouldn’t believe.
He was in the 442nd Infantry Regiment during WWII. You may remember the 442nd Infantry Regiment as “the guys who were of Japanese ancestry and decided to fight for the United States anyway”.
He was leading an assault in Italy on April 21, 1945. From his Congressional Medal of Honor citation:
Wikipedia describes his right arm as being blown mostly off at the elbow: the rifle grenade didn’t explode, but the impact resulted in a blunt force amputation. Wikipedia further describes Lt. Inouye seeing his arm lying on the ground…with a live hand grenade clenched in it.
So what did he do? He waved the men off who were coming to help him, because he was afraid his hand was going to unclench at any moment. Then he pried the live grenade out of his right hand with his left and threw it into a German bunker.
He and Bob Dole met in a rehab hospital after the war and were lifelong friends.
Sen. Inouye was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on June 21, 2000, along with 19 other members of the 442nd.
This is breaking, but I want to get something up now: I’m going to be out this afternoon and evening.
Brian Daboll out as head coach of the New York Football Giants, according to “sources”. ESPN.
2-8 so far this season, they lost to Chicago 24-20 on Sunday, and he was 20-40-1 overall (roughly four seasons).
Robert H. Bartlett, big damn hero. He was one of the pioneers of ECMO.
An ECMO machine consists of an external circuit of tubes, a pump that functions as a heart, and a membrane that serves as an artificial lung. The device continuously pumps blood out of the body, adds oxygen, removes carbon dioxide, warms the blood and returns it to the body.
ECMO treatment can continue for days or weeks or longer, allowing the heart and lungs to rest and try to heal from traumas like acute respiratory distress, a blood clot, a heart attack or an injury from a car crash. It can also be used for patients awaiting a heart or lung transplant, and it is increasingly being used in emergencies for people experiencing cardiac arrest.
According to a registry kept by the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization, which Dr. Bartlett founded, more than 260,000 critically ill newborns, children and adults around the world have received the treatment, and roughly 800 medical centers in 66 countries offer the procedure; about 54 percent of patients treated with ECMO survive to leave the hospital, and more than 100,000 lives have been saved.
…
In 1975, while he was at the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Bartlett and his surgical team, including Dr. Alan Gazzaniga, successfully used ECMO treatment for the first time on a newborn who was experiencing lung failure and had been left at the hospital by her mother, an undocumented immigrant.
The infant — named Esperanza, or Hope, by the nurses — recovered after spending six days on the machine. Over the years she remained in touch with Dr. Bartlett, joining him at conferences and attending University of Michigan football games with him, one of his favorite activities.
Thanks to ECMO, what had once been a mortality rate of 80 percent in newborns struggling to breathe became a survival rate of 80 percent.
“If Dr. Bartlett wasn’t there that day I was born, I wouldn’t be here today,” Esperanza Pineda, who is now 50, said in an interview.
Betty Harford, actress. Other credits include “T.H.E. Cat”, “The Name of the Game”, and “Mrs. Columbo”.
Paul Tagliabue, former commissioner of the NFL. ESPN.
Brief because I’ve covered this several times before.
The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was 50 years ago today.
I have not read it yet, and I’m probably going to wait for the trade paperback, but: The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon looks like it could be an interesting book on the subject.
James Watson, DNA guy.
…
Dr. Watson’s tell-all memoir, “The Double Helix,” had also provoked his colleagues when it was published in 1968, infuriating them for, in their view, elevating himself while shortchanging others who were involved in the project. Still, it was instantly hailed as a classic of the literature of science. The Library of Congress listed it, along with “The Federalist Papers” and “The Grapes of Wrath,” as one of the 88 most important American literary works. (The list was later expanded to 100.)
But it was in discerning the double-helix physical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, the chromosome-building molecule and medium of genetic inheritance, that won Dr. Watson and his co-discoverer, Francis H.C. Crick, enduring fame and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.
…
In 2007, Dr. Watson became the second person to have his full genome sequenced. The first was J. Craig Venter, who as president of the Celera Corporation started a human genome sequencing project originally in competition with the government effort. Both men made their genomes available to researchers.
Today, commercial concerns sell sequencing efforts to the public. And the double helix has entered popular culture. Its image has appeared on commercial products ranging from jewelry to perfume and on postage stamps issued by countries as various as Gabon and Monaco. Salvador Dalí incorporated the image in a painting, and the performance artists who make up Blue Man Group use the image in their shows.
John Cleary. You probably don’t recognize the name, but you might recognize the photo:
He was shot and seriously wounded at Kent State on May 4, 1970.
Ed Moloney, historian of the Troubles.
I wanted to note his death because of this:
After moving to the Bronx in 2000 to help care for his mother-in-law, Mr. Moloney directed the Belfast Project at Boston College, a collection of audio interviews with paramilitary fighters on both sides of the Troubles conducted by two people, one a loyalist and the other a former I.R.A. volunteer who had served 17 years in prison for murder.
The tapes were to stay sealed until the interview subjects died. Mr. Moloney used interviews with two of them for his 2010 book, “Voices From the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland,” which was adapted into a documentary film of the same name that year.
…
After the British government learned of the archives — which, among other things, implicated Mr. Adams in the McConville killing — it asked the Justice Department, under a mutual assistance legal treaty, to compel Boston College to turn over the tapes.
Under a federal subpoena, 11 of the 200 tapes were turned over in 2013. The college offered to return the tapes to the participants in the project and has done so in some cases, said Jack Dunn, a university spokesman. The archive is closed to the public.
I’ve had this in my back pocket for a couple of days, waiting to use it. As you know, Bob, I am an unabashed and unrepentant Smith and Wesson fanboy.
Honesty compels me to link to this post from the Revolver Guy blog:
“S&W 432 Ultimate Carry Ti Review: No Thanks!”
It is about 5,800 words, but I think you can see where the author is going from the headline.
I actually own one of these revolvers, as well as one of the earlier Lipsey’s Ultimate Carry guns in .38 Special. I haven’t had a chance to go to the range and give them a through workout yet, but my extended Christmas/end of the year vacation is coming soon. I’m also not carrying either until I have a chance to put rounds downrange: for right now, I’m relying on either a Beretta in .25 ACP or one of my old-school J-frames.
Greg Ellifritz also linked to this review in his Weekend Knowledge Dump for this week, and he has some additional comments. I would encourage you to read, not just his comments, but the whole Weekend Knowledge Dump. There’s some additional fun stuff in it: I would also recommend “DesertTech MDRx – Dubious Gun, Horrific Customer Service” and “The Open-Bolt MACs”. Or, as the article by Dr. Dabbs puts it: “The Open-Bolt MACs: The Worst of Absolutely Everything”.
NBA teams that still have a chance to go 0-82:
None.
The Brooklyn Nets were the last team standing. But, sadly, they beat the Pacers last night for their first win.
Both teams are now 1-7, along with the Washington Wizards.
A reliable source has informed me that the NRA is ending publication of Shooting Illustrated and America’s First Freedom. I have not found a link for this, and when I checked the NRA website earlier today, I still had a choice of these magazines with my membership.
The same source also informs me that the NRA is switching to quarterly print publication for American Rifleman and American Hunter. Again, I have no link for this. I’ve checked the NRA’s website and done a lazy Google search. But this is not a person prone to misinformation or falsehood, so I trust them implicitly. If I find a link, I will update here.
I think this is just another example of what Roy Huntington is talking about: the gun, ammo, and gun accessory manufacturers are dropping print advertising in favor of the Internet, and the print market just isn’t sustainable any longer. Of course, nobody’s considered what’s going to happen when the big companies that effectively control the Internet start hating guns again.
Edited to add: link from Bearing Arms, dated October 30th. It doesn’t name the magazines, but my source tells me they are named in the linked Cam and Company interview.
Link from News2A, also dated October 30th.
On a happier note, “Teen Vogue” has snuffed it. More or less.
“Teen Vogue”, the print publication, actually ceased publishing in 2017, but it continued on as a website under the Condé Nast brand until yesterday. Condé Nast is folding the website into the regular “Vogue” website. I’ve seen one report that says 75% of TV’s staff was fired, “including its entire politics team”.
I would be happier about this if they had snuffed regular ‘Vogue”, too, but you take your victories where you find them.
And, finally, Gannett announced today that they are changing the name of the company. The new name? USA Today Company.
Other credits include “Carnosaur”, “White Lightning”, “Then Came Bronson”, and “The Fugitive”. And the pool of living “Alice” actors gets even smaller.
Former vice president Dick Cheney. WP (archived).
Victor Conte. I’m not sure how many people will remember that name: he was the founder of Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), the people who provided “performance enhancing drugs” to various athletes “including baseball stars Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi and Olympic track champion Marion Jones”.
Hugh Freeze out at Auburn. ESPN.
15-19 in “two plus” seasons, 6-16 in the SEC, and they lost to Kentucky yesterday, 10-3. They are 4-5 this season.
And the NYPost is reporting that, with Mr. Freeze’s $15.8 millon buyout, the count is now up to $182 million owed to fired college coaches.
70 years ago today, United Flight 629 (a DC-6B) disintegrated near Longmont, Colorado. There were no survivors among the 44 passengers and crew.
Chris Grier out as general manager of the Miami Dolphins.
The spin on this is that it was by “mutual agreement”. But the Dolphins are 2-7, and lost last night to Baltimore. So…yeah.
ESPN.
“50 Years Ago, My Father Wrote the Headline That Refuses to Die” in the NYT.
Is it “Headless Body in Topless Bar”? No, but that does get a shout-out in the article. In this case, it is the other one.
NBA teams that still have a chance to go 0-82:
Indiana Pacers
Brooklyn Nets
New Orleans Pelicans
And today’s bonus firing for you: Scott Woodward fired as athletic director at Louisiana State University.
As you may recall, LSU fired Brian Kelly and owes him $54 million. This has attracted the ire of many, including Louisiana governor Jeff Landry. Gov. Landry went as far as to state that Mr. Woodward wouldn’t be picking the next football coach.
Additional coverage from ESPN.
Dalya Attar is a state senator in Maryland.
Dalya Attar has been indicted on federal charges of, believe it or not, extortion. Most of the time, it is mail or wire fraud, often in conjunction with bribery. Extortion is so rare, let us savor that for a moment. The indictment was handed down October 23rd, but I’m only seeing reports of it today.
Reports say that there were two people who were “detracting from or negatively influencing her election campaigns”.
This dates back to 2020, when she was working on her re-election to the Maryland House of Delegates. Reports say she had a falling out with a consultant who had previously worked on her 2018 campaign. The consultant became a vocal critic of Ms. Attar, and Ms. Attar wanted her to be “a non-issue in my mind”.
Ms. Attar allegedly conspired with her brother and a Baltimore police officer.
…and others involved in the plot allegedly placed a tracker on the consultant’s car and installed hidden cameras in a smoke detector in an apartment the victim used to rendezvous with her married paramour.
“Damn, I wish I had [the man’s] stamina,” Finklestein stated in a WhatsApp voice message after installing the cameras, according to the indictment.
…
In December 2021, Joseph Attar allegedly met with the man who’d had an affair with the consultant at a Baltimore-area shopping center and claimed to have “hours of footage of you in bed with [her] … the only thing you need to do is very simple, is go to [the consultant] and tell her, leave Dalya alone. Don’t bring her up anymore to anyone. Stay out of this election … and make sure she doesn’t do anything against Dalya.”
According to the indictment, Joseph Attar also told the man that if he didn’t do what he asked, “I’ll share this video with everybody you know, everyone she knows, every Rabbi in town, your kids, your wife, her daughters … I already have all her daughters’ phone numbers, right? And every shadchan [matchmaker] in Israel who is trying to set up her daughters, I’ll share these videos with.”
Sen. Attar wasn’t elected to the Senate: she was appointed in January, but she is currently running for the seat.
I’m linking to the Sun’s coverage, but it is kind of thin right now. “This article will be updated.” The NYPost is a little more detailed, but also “This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.”
LaMar Cook is a staffer for Maura Healey, the governor of Massachusetts.
LaMar Cook has been charged with various crimes.
“unlawful possession of a firearm”. As we all know, Bob, Massachusetts never met a gun control measure it didn’t like.
“unlawful possession of ammunition”. See above.
And “trafficking over 200 grams of cocaine”. Way over 200 grams. Try eight kilos of cocaine. Which he had delivered to the state office building he worked in.
As a great philosopher once said, “Cocaine is a hell of a drug.“
Smith and Wesson has a new series on their YouTube channel: “Tales From the Vault”, with Jerry Miculek.
The first episode dropped Tuesday, and it covers the Smith and Wesson Model 76. You may remember the Model 76 from various movies, such as…
As we like to say around here, “If the future was bad, CHeston was there.”
There was a gentleman at one of the S&WCA symposiums some years ago who had a display of Model 76s. As I recall, at the time, you could get a transferable one for about $8K. I checked GunBroker, and it looks like they are going for $18K to $20K now.
My brother sent me an interesting note yesterday: the revived Marlin (a division of Ruger) introduced a new lever gun in their Trapper series. Short barrel, compact, probably quick handling…and chambered in best mil.
I have not seen any lever guns chambered in 10mm until now, but it does kind of make sense. (There may have been some custom or semi-custom low production 10mm lever guns that I don’t know about.) Heck, I don’t even feel like I have a use case for a pistol-caliber carbine, and I find the 10mm Trapper an interesting proposition. I bet this would be a great gun for hog hunting.
I promised a couple of weeks ago to post photos of my old 1911 with the Battleship Texas grips.
I do think they look nice. Of course, I kept the grips that came with the gun, in case I ever want to restore it back to the original config. The gunsmith did have to do some hand fitting on these grips, so I’m not sure they’d go on any other gun.
Preview of coming attractions. As my regular readers know, I am a bore. Either a small bore or a big bore, depending. In this case, I am a small bore.
But: I am also PC.
Over at RevolverGuy.Com, Mike Wood has a nice piece up about the demise of the print editions of Guns and American Handgunner (previously), which includes reviews of several FMG Publications books. Some of those I’ve written about here. There’s also an appearance in the comments by Editor Roy Huntington, who explains the economics: “With the loss of print advertising, it was simply not sustainable to keep the presses rolling.”
RevolverGuy also has an after-action review of Revolver Fest 2025. I wanted to mention that because I thought this, from the comments, was interesting:
So was this:
As your resident unabashed Smith and Wesson fanboy: guys, do better, please.
Bjorn Andresen. There’s a certain lack of notability here, but I think it is offset by the sadness of this story.
Mr. Andresen was 15 when Luchino Visconti cast him as Tadzio, the object of desire in his adaption of “Death In Venice”.
Visconti called him “the most beautiful boy in the world”.
Visconti was also fixated on Mr. Andresen. During the boy’s screen test, the director asked him to strip to his swimsuit.
“When they asked me to take off my shirt, I wasn’t comfortable,” Mr. Andresen told Variety after the release of “The Most Beautiful Boy in the World,” a 2021 documentary about him directed by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri. “I wasn’t prepared for that. I remember when he posed me with one foot against the wall, I would never stand like that.
“When I watch it now,” he said, “I see how that son of a bitch sexualized me.”
He told The Guardian that Visconti was “the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.”
…
During the making of “Death in Venice,” Visconti acted protectively toward Mr. Andresen. But the boy felt unprepared when Visconti took him to a gay club after the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1971.
In the documentary, Mr. Andresen recalled feeling besieged by “voracious looks, wet lips and rolling tongues” and getting drunk to cope with the unwanted attention. He wondered if Visconti, who was gay, was testing him to see if he was also gay, which he wasn’t.
…
Over the last 20 years or so, his flowing hair became gray and he obscured his face behind a beard that made him look something like Ian McKellen as the wizard Gandalf in the “Lord of the Rings” films.
Mr. Andresen continued to act, mostly on television in Sweden but also in films, including a memorable turn in Ari Aster’s 2019 horror movie, “Midsommar.” He was also a keyboard player in a dance band, a composer of jazz and bossa nova music, the arranger of the music for a Swedish production of “The Rocky Horror Show,” and the manager of a small theater in Stockholm.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Pierre Robert, long time Philadelphia DJ. The NYPost ran one as well.
This isn’t quite an obit, but I don’t know where else to put it. I also don’t quite know how to write about it, so I’m just going to do the best I can.
Officer Lauren Craven of the La Mesa (California) Police Department was killed on October 23rd. She was 25 years old, and had joined the department in February of 2024.
She came upon a deadly rollover crash on Interstate 8 northeast of San Diego just before 10:30 p.m. last Monday, officials said.
She reported the incident over the radio before stepping out and walking toward a car that had flipped over.
Craven was struck by another car, which triggered a chain reaction, smashing into the vehicles involved in the initial crash.
David Pearce was sentenced yesterday.
Pearce met Christy Giles, 24, and Hilda Marcela Cabrales-Arzola, 26, at a rave party in Los Angeles and lured them back to his place — plying them with fentanyl-laced coke and drugged drinks and then refusing to call for help when they overdosed.
A witness claimed Pearce said “dead girls don’t talk” when he begged the killer to call 911.
Instead, Pearce dragged their limp bodies into his Toyota Prius and dumped them on the sidewalk in front of two different hospitals.
After the girls were murdered and scumbag Pearce was charged, seven other women came forward and said they’d been assaulted by him.
It came out yesterday, during the sentencing, that one of those women was Ms. Craven.
…
Pearce was sentenced to a total of 146 years in prison for his crimes…
She was assaulted by someone who isn’t even worth being called “human”, but she didn’t let that stop her. She worked her butt off to get through the police academy and get sworn in as an officer, and she died a hero.
Anybody else notice that there’s an awful lot of dust in the air today?
Holly Hill. She was 30 years old, a third-grade teacher, and had three kids.
On Valentine’s Day 2023, she went out to a Mexican restaurant in Elgin, Oklahoma, and ordered a margarita.
The margarita was contaminated with a corrosive industrial cleaner that burned a hole in her esophagus. Her death is being attributed to complications from the incident.
“Avoiding Poisoned Alcohol in Foreign Countries” from Active Response Training.
…
Prunella Scales, actress. NYT (share link).
Other credits include “The Boys from Brazil”, “Wolf”, and “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1978).
For the record (I got behind over the weekend): June Lockhart. THR.
Other credits include “Babylon 5”, “The John Larroquette Show”, “C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud”, three episodes of “Quincy, M.E.”, “Sword of Justice”…and pretty much every other darn thing.
Except she never did a “Mannix”.