You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#74 in a series)

October 5th, 2021

I would have missed this one if Mike the Musicologist hadn’t pointed it out to me.

Remember Lovely Warren, the soon to be former mayor of Rochester, New York? Indicted for criminal possession of a firearm and endangering the welfare of a child?

She’s going to be the former mayor sooner than expected: Ms. Warren took a plea.

Warren, 44, was readying Monday for what was expected to be a month-long trial on felony charges that she and two assistants violated campaign contribution limits, but she pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor, admitting that she knowingly exceeded the $8,557 limit, the Democrat & Chronicle reported.

Also taking pleas: “campaign treasurer Albert Jones Jr. and Rosiland Brooks-Harris, treasurer of political action committee Warren for a Strong Rochester”.

The campaign finance charges go back to an earlier indictment. But as part of the deal:

Warren, Jones and Brooks-Harris had faced up to four years in state prison if convicted on the felony charge, according to WHAM. But a judge sentenced all three to a year-long conditional discharge, meaning they could face additional penalties if they commit additional crimes during that period, the Democrat & Chronicle reported.

…

Warren’s plea deal Monday also resolved separate gun and child endangerment charges. In July, a grand jury indicted her and her estranged husband, Timothy Granison, with criminal possession of a firearm and endangering the welfare of a child and failure to lock or secure firearms in a dwelling, the newspaper reported.

So the way I’m reading this, she pled guilty to a single misdemeanor, if she keeps her nose clean for a year that goes away, and she gets to keep her law license.

But as part of the deal, she has to resign by December 1st. She’d already lost the Democratic primary, so she would have been out as of January 1st next year anyway: this just speeds things up a bit.

As best as I can tell, the charges against her “estranged husband”, the alleged dope dealer, are still pending.

Posted in Guns, Law, Politics | Comments Closed

Most Shocking!

October 5th, 2021

Here’s a surprise for you:

Federal investigators on Tuesday morning raided the Manhattan office of one of New York City’s main police unions in connection with an ongoing investigation, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
The union, the Sergeants Benevolent Association, represents about 13,000 active and retired police sergeants in New York. Its headquarters were searched as part of an investigation by the F.B.I. and the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, the people said.

The home of the union’s president, Edward D. Mullins, was also searched.

Though the focus of the investigation into the Sergeants Benevolent Association is unclear, it comes as Mr. Mullins faces departmental discipline over his conduct on social media. Known in recent years for making brash and incendiary remarks on Twitter, particularly about Mayor Bill de Blasio, Mr. Mullins declared war on the mayor last year after two officers were shot, accusing Mr. de Blasio of promoting anti-police attitudes.
Mr. Mullins is being brought up for department discipline over his posts on Twitter, including for sharing a police report documenting the arrest of Mr. de Blasio’s daughter, Chiara, during protests over police brutality and racial justice in New York last year. The Police Department does not typically release internal reports, and the one that Mr. Mullins shared contained personal information about Ms. de Blasio.
A disciplinary hearing on the charges started last month and is scheduled to resume on Oct. 27. Mr. Mullins’s lawyer, Andrew C. Quinn, has defended his conduct as free speech and as part of his obligation to advocate on behalf of the union’s members.

…

Mr. Mullins also faces internal discipline over tweets in which he used profane language against Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the former city health commissioner, and Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democratic congressman who represents the Bronx.
Mr. Torres, who has called for Mr. Mullins’s resignation over what he has described as racist, misogynistic and homophobic remarks, tweeted on Tuesday that Mr. Mullins had received a “first-class raid” from the F.B.I.
Mr. Mullins has also drawn scrutiny for his outspoken right-wing politics in a city where Democrats significantly outnumber Republicans. Both the sergeants’ union and its larger sister union, the Police Benevolent Association, have been run mostly by conservatives whose views are not widely shared by many in the metropolis they police.
Mr. Mullins has praised former President Donald J. Trump, a Republican who was deeply unpopular among city residents. He also came under fire from liberal lawmakers after giving an interview to Fox News surrounded by paraphernalia linked to QAnon, a fringe conspiracy theory popular among Trump supporters.

(Side note: “one of New York City’s main police unions”? You may be asking: how many police unions does NYC have? Mike the Musicologist asked me that same question a while back, in relation to a different scandal. Other than the Sergeants Benevolent Association, there’s also the Police Benevolent Association, which represents the line officers, and the Detectives Endowment Association, which represents the detective ranks. It isn’t clear to me if the command ranks (above sergeant) and the civilian staff have their own unions.)

Edited to add 10/6: Sergeant Mullins resigned his union presidency last night, after I posted this. The Post reports that he remains a NYPD sergeant, and that he made “$88,757 from the union and $133,195 from the NYPD” last year.

When was the last time there was a shootout on a train? Maybe the Long Island Rail Road, but was that a shootout?

Posted in Cops, FBI, Law, NYPD, Trains | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 5, 2021.

October 5th, 2021

Alan Kalter, David Letterman’s announcer on CBS.

The red-haired Kalter took over for the retired Bill Wendell as the Late Show announcer in September 1995 — about two years after Letterman moved from NBC to CBS — and remained through the host’s final program on May 20, 2015. On his first day on the job, Letterman tossed him into a pool.
With musical accompaniment from Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra, Kalter announced the guests and cheekily introduced the host at the top of each show, then voiced the comic one-liner over the Worldwide Pants title card on the end credits.
In between, Kalter often acted in funny sketches that included hosting “Alan Kalter’s Celebrity Interview” after Letterman was finished with the guest and speaking from his announcer’s podium as the studio lights dimmed, trying to come on to lonely, divorced women as “Big Red” — much to the dismay of a “shocked” Letterman.

…

“When I came home and said I was offered the job as the announcer on the Late Show, I told my wife I wasn’t sure if I really wanted it because it would really rock the boat on those commercials I was doing around the country,” he recalled in 2019. “I wouldn’t be able to go away for three or four days at a time whenever I wanted to, to do that work. And my kids, who were in high school at the time, sort of immediately in chorus said, ‘Dad this is the first cool thing you’ve ever done in your life. Take it!’”

Pearl Tytell has passed away at 104. She was a leading examiner of questioned documents.

Mrs. Tytell worked with her husband, Martin, at their typewriter repair and rental business on Fulton Street in Lower Manhattan, which branched out into the scientific examination of documents in the early 1950s. A rare woman in a male-dominated field, Mrs. Tytell ran that end of the business and trained her son, Peter, a widely known examiner of documents until his death last year.
Mrs. Tytell was an expert witness for the federal government in 1982 in the tax-evasion case against the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the head of the Unification Church. By analyzing changes in his handwriting — particularly how his printed “S” had turned cursive — she testified that he signed checks in 1974, not in 1973 as his lawyers had said.
At another point, Mrs. Tytell used paper-mill records and her knowledge of watermarks to prove that a piece of paper had not been produced until after the date written on it.
“She was an exceptional witness,” Martin Flumenbaum, a prosecutor in the case, said in a phone interview. “She dominated the courtroom. I remember the jury being enthralled by her testimony.”

…

In one of her best-known cases, she was hired in 1972 by International Telephone and Telegraph to analyze a politically explosive memorandum written a year earlier by one of the company’s lobbyists, Dita Beard (who denied writing the memorandum). Its existence was revealed by the investigative journalist Jack Anderson.
It suggested a connection between the settlement of a government antitrust lawsuit against I.T.T. and a pledge by the company to pay $400,000 in costs for the 1972 Republican National Convention.
A report issued by I.T.T. said that Mrs. Tytell and a chemist, Walter McCrone, had used “microscopic, ultraviolet fluorescence and highly sophisticated micro chemical analyses” of the memorandum and other samples that had been typed on Mrs. Beard’s typewriter between June 25, 1971 (the date on the document) and February 1972. They determined that the memo had most likely been written in January 1972, nearly six months after the antitrust settlement, meaning a connection to the payment was not likely.
Their report — submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which investigated the financial pledge made in the memo — contradicted the F.B.I.’s analysis of the document, which suggested it had been written on June 25.

Todd Akin, former House member from Missouri. He gave up that seat to run for the Senate, and lost after making some controversial remarks about rape.

Angelo Codevilla, conservative author and theorist. (The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It)

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Politics, TV | Comments Closed

Travel day.

October 4th, 2021

Heading home. It will be a long day of driving. Expect blogging to resume sometime tomorrow.

Posted in Admin, Travel | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 4, 2021.

October 3rd, 2021

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Detroit
Jacksonville

So as soon as I call out both New York teams, both of them win – in overtime, no less.

Always bet against my picks. I guess that’s the moral here.

Lawrence made a point to me the other day that I had totally missed: Jacksonville is now on a 19 game losing streak. They’re playing Tennessee next week, so it isn’t impossible that they’ll run the streak to 20. The only other teams that have lost 20 straight games are the 1942-1945 Chicago Cardinals (29 straight) and the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers (26 straight).

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

More adventures in hoplobibliophila.

October 3rd, 2021

The Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association Symposium has wrapped up.

I thought I’d stay over a day, relax, and kick around a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of the places I’d like to kick around are closed on Sundays. But my loss is your gain. At least if you like gun books.

Pistol and Revolver Shooting by Walter F. Roper. The colophon lists it as Macmillan, 1945, and “First Printing”, but the “Olympic Edition” on the cover makes me wonder. Maybe first printing in this edition?

Mr. Roper was a prominent gun guy and gun experimenter: here’s a short article by John Taffin from Guns magazine about him. Purchased for $40 from a fellow collector at the Symposium.

I would have sworn great and good FotB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training had reviewed this book on his blog. But if he did, I can’t find the review now.

Two of a perfect pair:

(Previously on Experiments of a Handgunner.)

I do have a copy of what I believe is Mr. Roper’s only other book, Smith and Wesson Hand Guns (with Roy McHenry) but I didn’t bring it on the road with me, and my copy is a reprint anyway.

Not exactly a gun book, but worth noting, in my humble opinion:

Smith and Wesson ties, tie bar, and tie pin. The tie bar and pin were purchased from one collector, the ties were purchased from another. I think they add that subtle touch of class when I’m wearing a suit. And I paid $25 for both ties (and another $10 for the bar and pin).

There was another very classy S&W tie in the auction on Saturday: sadly, it got bid beyond what I was willing to pay early, and I did not get a photo of it. You’ll have to trust me when I say this tie was about as subtle as a sledgehammer.

Final totally unrelated side note: of course there’s an Internet Movie Firearms Database entry for “Johnny Dangerously”. Just in case you were wondering what the “.88 Magnum” actually was.

Posted in Books, Guns, Hoplobibilophilia | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 2, 2021.

October 2nd, 2021

For the historical record: NYT obits for Tommy Kirk and Commander Cody. The obit for the latter includes a video of “Hot Rod Lincoln”, which I was intending to go back and embed anyway.

Carlisle Floyd, opera guy.

Among the leading 20th-century American opera composers, Mr. Floyd is often cited with Ned Rorem, Philip Glass, John Coolidge Adams, the Italian-American Gian Carlo Menotti, Samuel Barber and others whose works have joined the standard repertory, including George Gershwin, who called his “Porgy and Bess” a folk opera, and Leonard Bernstein, whose “Candide” was an operetta.

…

His best-known opera was “Susannah,” based on the Apocrypha story of Susanna and the Elders. Taken from the Book of Daniel to the Tennessee hills and rendered in Smoky Mountain dialect, it portrays a young woman wrongly accused of promiscuity and a traveling preacher who incites a mob, then seduces her. The preacher is slain by her brother, and Susannah stands defiant, holding off the mob with a shotgun.

…

Other notable Floyd operas included “Of Mice and Men,” his adaptation of John Steinbeck’s story of two tragic migrant farm workers in the Dust Bowl; “Willie Stark,” his treatment of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” about a ruthless politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey P. Long; and “The Passion of Jonathan Wade,” about a Reconstruction-era love affair destroyed by intolerance and hate.

Posted in Movies, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 30, 2021.

September 30th, 2021

Still on the road, but arrived safely at my destination yesterday. Blogging is still as time permits, but a few obits:

Tommy Kirk, of “Old Yeller”.

George Frayne, also know as “Commander Cody” of “Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen”.

(Hattip on those to Lawrence.)

NYT obit for Clive Sinclair.

Updates later.

Posted in Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Travel day.

September 29th, 2021

Going to be driving pretty much all day. Blogging will be catch as catch can today and for the next few days.

Posted in Admin, Travel | Comments Closed

Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#AG of a series)

September 28th, 2021

I was not expecting this.

When last we left Art Acevedo, he was the new police chief in Miami.

How’s that working out for him?

Now Chief Acevedo is at the center of an archetypal Miami political drama, replete with references to Cuban Communism and corruption, that has roiled City Hall and threatened his job.

…

…the Miami imbroglio is not over policy. It is a clash of personalities between an ambitious new outsider and powerful city commissioners miffed over both Chief Acevedo’s surprise appointment and his tendency to say exactly what he thinks.

…

Chief Acevedo has accused several commissioners of thwarting his attempts to “change the culture” of the department, as he said he had been hired to do, by improperly meddling in personnel decisions.
“These events are deeply troubling and sad,” he wrote in an eight-page letter on Friday in which he denounced how commissioners tried to influence an internal affairs investigation and then retaliated by defunding top positions in the Police Department’s budget. “If I or M.P.D. give in to the improper actions described herein,” he added, “as a Cuban immigrant, I and my family might as well have remained in Communist Cuba, because Miami and M.P.D. would be no better than the repressive regime and the police state we left behind.”

The commissioners can’t directly fire him, only the city manager can. But they can make things uncomfortable.

…he wasted no time in generating controversy of his own. He terminated two high-ranking officers and demoted the department’s second-highest-ranking female Black officer. He said his own department — rather than the Florida Department of Law Enforcement — should investigate police shootings. And he angered the police union by telling a local radio station that officers should get vaccinated against the coronavirus or risk losing their jobs.
Last week, a majority of members polled by the Fraternal Order of Police said that they had no confidence in the chief and that he should be fired or forced to resign.

…

What especially incensed commissioners, in addition to the housecleaning at Police Headquarters, was when Chief Acevedo told a group of officers this summer that the department was run by a “Cuban mafia.” The chief later apologized, saying he intended it as a joke and had not realized that Fidel Castro had used the same phrase to refer to Cuban exiles in Miami who opposed his Communist regime.

…

At one point, Commissioner Joe Carollo frame-grabbed a video clip of Chief Acevedo, taken before he worked in Miami, performing a raunchy dance at a fund-raiser. (In another clip, he was dressed like Elvis, prompting Mr. Carollo to tut-tut the tightness of the chief’s pants.)
A supporter of the chief at one point yelled at the dais and, as he stomped out of the chambers, extended a finger to the commissioners.
Mr. Carollo spent several hours reading news clippings and other documents about Chief Acevedo’s record in law enforcement agencies in California and Texas, including at least one allegation of sexual harassment that the chief has denied. Mr. Carollo repeatedly asked Mr. Noriega if he had been aware of those controversies before hiring Chief Acevedo.
“No, sir,” Mr. Noriega responded.
“He’s not accountable to anyone,” Mr. Carollo said of Chief Acevedo. “He’s not accountable to the city manager, not accountable to the residents of Miami — not accountable, period.”

…

…Chief Acevedo never applied for the position. Now he makes $315,000 a year, though his total compensation package, with benefits, is worth more than $437,000.

Chief Acevedo is the sixth police chief in 11 years.

Posted in Cops, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 27, 2021.

September 27th, 2021

Frances T. “Sissy” Farenthold, noted female Texas politician of the 1960s and 1970s.

I wouldn’t have picked up on this if it wasn’t for the NYT obit: the HouChron ran one, but it was kind of buried, and they just re-ran the WP obit. The Statesman ran one…from the Corpus Christi newspaper.

Ms. Farenthold was a two-time candidate for the Texas governorship, the first chairwoman of the National Women’s Political Caucus, a college president and a nominee for the vice presidency of the United States a dozen years before Geraldine A. Ferraro became the first to be chosen for that office by a major party.

Yeah, she was a progressive, and I probably would have disagreed with her about everything. But she was a significant figure in Texas politics. Also, her story is full of sad.

Owing to the efforts of a slightly older brother, Benjamin Dudley III, to pronounce the word “sister,” the infant Mary Frances would be known to the end of her life as Sissy.
When Sissy was 2, and Benjamin 3, he died from complications of surgery to remove a swallowed coin. Her parents’ grief suffused the household ever after, she said.

…

In 1960, Ms. Farenthold’s 3-year-old son Vincent bled to death after a nighttime fall that went unheeded. Like several of the Farenthold children, he suffered from von Willebrand disease, a clotting disorder.

…

Three days after Ms. Farenthold’s runoff defeat, the body of her 32-year-old stepson, Randy Farenthold, from her husband’s prior marriage, was found in the Gulf of Mexico near Corpus Christi. His hands were bound and a concrete block was chained round his neck.
The younger Mr. Farenthold, described in the press as a millionaire playboy, had been scheduled to testify in the federal trial of four associates alleged to have defrauded him of $100,000 in a money-laundering scheme reported to involve organized crime. (One of them, Bruce Bass III, was indicted in the murder in 1976 and received a 16-year sentence in a plea agreement the next year.)

…

In 1989, her youngest child, Jimmy, disappeared, at 33. Jimmy, who was Vincent’s identical twin, was said never to have gotten over his brother’s death; by the time he was a young man he was addicted to drugs and drifting around Texas. Despite extensive searches, he was never found and is presumed dead. (The family held a funeral for him in 2005.)
Ms. Farenthold’s marriage ended in divorce. She is survived by her son George Farenthold II, who said the cause of death was Parkinson’s disease; another son, Dudley; a daughter, Emilie C. Farenthold; a sister, Genevieve Hearon; three grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a step-grandson, Blake, the son of Randy Farenthold. A younger brother, Dudley Tarlton, was killed in a helicopter crash in 2003.

Jean Hale, actress. She was in “In Like Flint” and “The Oscar”, appeared on “Batman” twice, and did guest shots on the good “5-0”, “Cannon”, “Perry Mason”, and “The Wild Wild West”, among other credits.

Bobby Zarem, noted PR guy.

Mr. Zarem’s clients included (in alphabetical order) Alan Alda, Ann-Margret, Woody Allen, Michael Caine, Cher, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Jack Nicholson, Diana Ross, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.
He publicized the films “Tommy” (by staging a gala party in a Midtown Manhattan subway station) and “Saturday Night Fever” (after stealing stills of the production from the studio, which expected the movie to flop and neglected to distribute photographs of John Travolta), as well as “Rambo,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Pumping Iron,” the 1977 documentary about bodybuilding, which starred Mr. Schwarzenegger. For that film, Mr. Zarem arranged a meeting with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that helped elevate Mr. Schwarzenegger to global superstardom.

Posted in Obits, Politics, Texas | 2 Comments »

Your loser update: week 3, 2021.

September 27th, 2021

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Detroit
New York Football Giants
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville

Still a little early, and I apologize to Infidel de Manahatta, but I’m starting to think there’s a good chance of at least one New York team going winless this year.

Maybe both: it doesn’t look like the Jets and the Giants play against each other this year.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

And speaking of my odd sense of humor…

September 25th, 2021

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 25, 2021.

September 25th, 2021

Cliff Freeman, advertising guy.

Among his credits: “Where’s the beef?”

In 1984, Wendy’s was looking to differentiate its burger, the modestly named Single, from McDonald’s Big Mac and Burger King’s Whopper. Research found that the Wendy’s Single patty was larger than the patties of the Big Mac and Whopper.
Working with the director Joe Sedelmaier, Mr. Freeman created separate commercials, one with three old women and one with three old men, scrutinizing the fluffy hamburger bun before seeing the tiny patty inside. The breakout version was the one with the women, specifically the squawky octogenarian Clara Peller, who demands to know where the beef is.

…

Mr. Freeman was still at Dancer Fitzgerald a year later when he wrote another popular Wendy’s commercial, which promoted the chain’s breadth of food choices by parodying the lack of choices in Soviet society. In a faux Russian fashion show, a heavyset woman struts on a runway, modeling the same shapeless dress for day wear, evening wear (accessorized with a flashlight) and swimwear (with a beach ball).
Mr. Freeman said it was his favorite ad, in part because of the response.
“The entire Russian government protested it,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 2003. “How much more reaction can you get than that?”

I know it is advertising, and I know my sense of humor is sometimes lowbrow, but I think that’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on television. (I’m also a sucker for jokes about Communism.)

He also did commercials for Little Caesars, Outpost.com, and Fox Sports.

But Cliff Freeman & Partners lasted only 11 more years. Amid a recession, executive turmoil and client departures, it shut down in 2009.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 24, 2021.

September 24th, 2021

Basil Hoffman.

He had more than 200 acting credits across film, television and stage. He appeared as Sloan in Ordinary People (1980) and as an auctioneer in The Artist (2011). Both dramas won best picture at the Oscars. Hoffman also had roles in the films My Favorite Year (1982), The Last Word (2017), All the President’s Men (1976) and Rio, I Love You (2014). Some of his television credits include recurring roles on the 1980s series Hill Street Blues and Square Pegs.

He was also in “Hail, Caesar!” and had parts on a few cop shows, including “Columbo” among other credits.

Posted in Movies, Obits | 2 Comments »

I’m cold, and there are wolves after me.

September 23rd, 2021

Gersson Rosas out as “President of Basketball Operations” for the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Throughout the past few months there has been growing discord and strained relationships among Rosas, the front office and the rest of the organization, sources said. Sources also said Rosas’ recent actions involving a female employee of the team played a role in the decision and the timing of it. The woman is no longer with the team as of Wednesday.

(Hattip: Lawrence.)

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 23, 2021.

September 23rd, 2021

Melvin Van Peebles.

A Renaissance man whose work spanned books, theater and music, Mr. Van Peebles is best known for his third feature film, “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” which drew mixed reviews when it was released in 1971, ignited intense debate and became a national hit. The hero, Sweetback, starred in a sex show at a brothel, and the movie sizzled with explosive violence, explicit sex and righteous antagonism toward the white power structure. It was dedicated to “all the Black brothers and sisters who have had enough of The Man.”

…

In addition to making movies, Mr. Van Peebles published novels, in French as well as in English; wrote two Broadway musicals and produced them simultaneously; and wrote and performed spoken-word albums that many have called forebears of rap.
Over the course of his life he was also a cable-car driver in San Francisco, a portrait painter in Mexico City, a street performer in Paris, a stock options trader in New York, the navigator of an Air Force bomber, a postal worker, a visual artist and, by his own account, a very successful gigolo.

…

…Columbia Pictures then hired him to direct “Watermelon Man” (1970), a satirical comedy about a white bigot, played by Godfrey Cambridge, who turns into a Black man.
Columbia wanted Mr. Van Peebles to shoot alternative endings — one in which the protagonist becomes a Black militant, and another in which he discovers that it was all a dream. Mr. Van Peebles said he “forgot” to shoot the second ending.
Disliking working for a studio, he set out to be an independent filmmaker. To make “Sweetback,” for $500,000, he combined his $70,000 savings with loans, used a nonunion crew and persuaded a film lab to extend him credit.
The plot of the movie concerns a man who attacks two crooked police officers and then escapes as a fugitive to Mexico, vowing to return and “collect some dues.” Only two theaters, in Detroit and Atlanta, would show the movie at first, but it caught fire and for several weeks outgrossed “Love Story.” Its American box office exceeded $15 million (about $100 million in today’s money), a bonanza for an independent film at the time.

Barbara Campbell Cooke. She actually passed away in April at 85, but her family didn’t make an announcement until recently.

Their story started out as if lifted from one of his love songs. Sam Cooke was 18 and Barbara Campbell was only 13 when they met on the South Side of Chicago.

She married Sam Cooke in 1959 (or 1958, according to Wikipedia). When he died in 1964, she married Bobby Womack (who worked with Sam Cooke) three months later. He was 19, she was 29, and a lot of fans were not happy.

But it upset many people to see Mr. Womack, sometimes in Mr. Cooke’s clothes, squiring Mr. Cooke’s widow about. The couple received hate mail, including a package containing a baby doll in a coffin. At a Nancy Wilson concert, when Ms. Wilson introduced the couple sitting in the audience, the crowd booed. In his telling, Mr. Womack, goaded by his new wife, took to cocaine. He also began a sexual relationship with the Cookes’ daughter, Linda, by then a teenager. When Barbara found them in bed, she shot Mr. Womack, the bullet grazing his temple. (Ms. Cooke was not charged, according to Mr. Womack’s book.) They divorced in 1970.

The sad goes on. The Cookes had a son who died at 18 months. Ms. Cooke and Mr. Womack also had a son who strugged with addiction and killed himself at 21.

Bobby Womack experienced fame early on when the Rolling Stones covered his 1964 song “It’s All Over Now,” their first No. 1 hit. He died in 2014 at 70, but not before suffering other tragedies. Another son of his, Truth, died when he was a baby, and Mr. Womack’s brother Harry was murdered by a girlfriend.
“I don’t speak to Barbara no more,” Mr. Womack wrote in his memoir. “Linda doesn’t speak to her. Haven’t spoken to Cecil for years. No one speaks to no one.”

Al Harrington. He was “Ben Kokua” in the good 5-0 (his character replaced Kono), and was a surf shop owner in the bad 5-0. Also a couple of appearances on “Jake and the Fatman”, among other credits.

When Harrington left the show in 1975, he launched a second-act career as a Waikiki showroom headliner and recording artist known affectionately as “The South Pacific Man.” He retired from the stage in 1992, and spent the next 13 years living on the mainland doing film work in Utah and California.

Roger Michell, director. Most of his films were British, but he’s perhaps best known for “Notting Hill” (that Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant movie) and “Changing Lanes” (the Ben Affleck/Samuel L. Jackson movie).

Later films included Hyde Park on Hudson, a historical drama starring Bill Murray as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and The Duke, a real-life art heist story starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren that premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.

NYT obit for George Holliday.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 22, 2021.

September 22nd, 2021

Loral I Delaney, well known dog trainer…and legendary trapshooter.

An animal lover who as a young girl kept as pets every creature from raccoons to skunks, Delaney at age 5 headlined her first dog act in 1943 at the Northwest Sportshow in Minneapolis.
When she returned to the same stage a year later, the Minneapolis Tribune gushed, “The tiny daughter of Fred Armstrong put her two beautiful black Labradors through a retrieving act that literally brought down the house.”
In the nearly six decades that followed, Delaney and her dogs would appear at sports shows from New York to Los Angeles. She often drove herself, pulling a trailer full of Labradors, setters, pointers and Chesapeake Bay retrievers.

…

Trapshooting brought Delaney still wider acclaim. The first time she competed at the Minnesota State Trapshoot at age 19, she won the women’s title, breaking 197×200. At the same competition, she won the handicap in a shoot-off with five men.
A member of the National Trapshooting Hall of Fame, Delaney was named to every All-American Trapshooting team from 1966 to 1981, with the exception of one year. She won the Women’s World Flyer Championships four times. She shot on the U.S. Women’s Trapshooting Team before women’s trapshooting was included in the Olympics. And she and Chuck won the husband-wife U.S. trapshooting title four times.
Delaney also won seven Grand American World Trapshooting Championships, include five years consecutively, and was the only woman to win more than two in a row and more than four total.

Bennie Pete, leader of the New Orleans brass band, the Hot 8.

The Hot 8 began playing for tips on Bourbon Street and in Jackson Square, in the heart of the French Quarter. They performed outside a housing project in the Central City neighborhood, where people sat down with bags of crawfish and bottles of Abita beer to listen. Mr. Pete once found himself leading a jazz funeral for a dog.
“He was a popular dog for one of the popular musicians,” he told Esquire magazine in 2014, “and they threw a big second-line parade through the streets for him. They’d make a reason to party.”
By 2000, the Hot 8 had established itself as part of a vanguard of young brass bands that were upholding the jazz and funk traditions of New Orleans yet playing with a contemporary sound. The Hot 8’s repertoire included songs by the Specials and Marvin Gaye, and the band incorporated rap and hip-hop into its style. The musicians led second lines on Sundays for social aid and pleasure clubs; crowds formed at night to watch them play in bars in the Treme neighborhood.

Post Katrina, the Hot 8 led the effort to keep New Orleans’s musical heritage intact.

Two months later, the Hot 8 regrouped to lead the first jazz funeral in New Orleans after the storm. The band played with donated instruments, and members of the procession wore salvaged pieces of finery. The parade, which honored a celebrated chef, Austin Leslie, started at Pampy’s Creole Kitchen in the Seventh Ward before ambling to the former site of Chez Helene, where a sign greeted the marchers: “We won’t bow down. Save our soul.”
As despair weighed on the city, the Hot 8 began performing at evacuation shelters and emergency medical centers. They drove around in a van, stopping to jam for crowds until little second lines formed, before heading to another part of town. It wasn’t long before they became local heroes.
“Bennie wanted to play for these people to give them that New Orleans love that was missing,” his wife said. “He and the band got busy spreading the culture around.”

They were featured in Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” and got a record deal.

Released in 2012, “The Life & Times Of …” was nominated for a Grammy Award as best regional roots music album. The group released “Tombstone,” a sister album also based on the theme of remembrance, the next year. The Hot 8 was also featured on a 2015 compilation album, “New Orleans Brass Bands: Through the Streets of the City,” on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.
“Everything kind of worked,” Mr. Pete told Esquire. “Yeah, we are the Hot 8 who went through these things, but we’re still here, and this is who we are after the storm.”

…

But even as music returned to New Orleans after the storm, the Hot 8 endured more misfortune. Their snare drummer, Dinerral Shavers, was shot dead in his car in December 2006. It was only the latest in a series of tragedies for the band.
In 1996, the trumpet player Jacob Johnson was shot in the head at his home. In 2004, the trombonist Joseph Williams was killed in an encounter with the police. And just after Katrina, the trumpeter Terrell Batiste lost his legs in a road accident.

Mr. Pete was 45 years old. He died from complications of COVID and sarcoidosis, according to his family.

Willie Garson, from “Sex and the City”.

In addition to the “Sex and the City” movies, Mr. Garson worked with the Farrelly brothers in some of their films, including “Kingpin” (1996), “There’s Something About Mary” (1998) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).
He also played Lee Harvey Oswald three times, in the film “Ruby” (1992) and on the TV shows “Quantum Leap” and “MADtv.”

Saadi Yacef. He was a major figure in the Algerian revolt.

Mr. Yacef became involved in opposition movements while still a teenager and in 1954 joined the Front de Libération Nationale, the F.L.N., the leading nationalist organization during the war for independence. The war lasted from 1954 to 1962, ending with the country’s liberation from France.
He became the organization’s military chief in Algiers in 1956, ordering bombings and other guerrilla attacks until his arrest by French paratroopers the next year in the part of the city known as the casbah. He was sentenced to death.
“While I was in prison the executions were always done at dawn,” he told The Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in 2007, “so when I saw the sun coming through the prison bars I knew I was going to live through another day. But I was very certain that I would be executed.”

Charles de Gaulle eventually freed him. And then he went on to act in Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers”.

With a script based on his book, he met with Mr. Pontecorvo, who was said to have been considering his own movie about the Algerian War, one that he hoped would star Paul Newman as a French paratrooper turned journalist. Mr. Yacef and his backers nixed that idea, and Mr. Pontecorvo found Mr. Yacef’s script propagandistic, but they continued to talk. Mr. Yacef arranged to bring Mr. Pontecorvo and his screenwriter, Franco Solinas, to Algiers for an extended stay so they could study up on the revolution, see locations where the fighting had occurred and meet people who had fought.
The resulting movie, filmed in Algeria with Mr. Yacef as a producer, had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and caused a sensation for its startling realism. Some scenes, especially of bombings, looked so authentic that the film in its initial showings was preceded by a disclaimer saying that no newsreel footage had been used.

I have “The Battle of Algiers” but haven’t watched it yet. It is a tough sell for the Saturday Night Movie Group, especially since I sort of forced them to watch another movie about the Algerian revolt (“Lost Command“, based on The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy).

Posted in Guns, History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 21, 2021.

September 21st, 2021

Lawrence sent over an obit from – I kid you not – the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services” for actor Tim Donnelly.

He only has 19 credits in IMDB. No “Mannix” but he did appear on the 1960s “Dragnet” multiple times, and also did a guest shot on the good “Hawaii 5-0”. Other credits include “Adam-12”, “Parts: The Clonus Horror”, and “Project U.F.O.”

Why the “Journal of Emergency Medical Services”, though? Mr. Donnelly’s most famous role was “Chet Kelly” in “Emergency”.

That was one of the great ‘staches in 1970s TV.

More seriously, I loved “Emergency” as a child, and I’m sad to see him go. (Kevin Tighe and Randolph Mantooth are both still alive, though.)

FotB RoadRich sent over the obit for George Holliday. Mr. Holliday was the man who filmed the Rodney King beating.

Reuben Klamer. Mr. Klamer was an inventor and toy creator: among other things, he invented “The Game of Life”.

His creations included his own version of the hula hoop and a variation on the Erector Set. He came up with a Pink Panther show car built on an Oldsmobile chassis and rode around in it to promote the “Pink Panther” cartoon series.
He also worked closely with television producers and built props for popular shows, including the Starfleet phaser rifle, which could stun or disintegrate living creatures, for the original “Star Trek” series. (He said he had an agreement for the toy rights to the rifle, but it fell apart and his toy phaser was never produced.) He made a special Napoleon Solo gun for “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” that was so popular, the gun itself received fan mail. (He successfully created a toy version of that one.)

Anthony Johnson, “Ezal” in “Friday”.

This isn’t exactly an obit, but I think it’s worth noting.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports, TV | 2 Comments »

Your loser update: week 2, 2021.

September 21st, 2021

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

Atlanta
Minnesota
Detroit
New York Football Giants
New York Jets
Indianapolis
Jacksonville

Still early enough in the season that I don’t have much to say yet. Perhaps by next week the picture will come into greater focus.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 17, 2021.

September 17th, 2021

Jane Powell. THR.

She was one of the old time greats: she co-starred with Fred Astaire in “Royal Wedding”, and also had a starring role in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. Unfortunately, she had trouble finding good roles after that. She did some TV work, including appearances on “Fantasy Island” and “The Love Boat”, and was a semi-regular on “Growing Pains”.

She also performed in touring productions of musicals, including “My Fair Lady,” “The Sound of Music” and “Carousel.” She made her Broadway debut in 1974, when she replaced her friend and frequent MGM co-star Debbie Reynolds as the title character in the hit revival of the 1919 musical “Irene.”
She never returned to Broadway, although she played the queen in a 1995 New York City Opera production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella” and occasionally appeared Off Broadway. She seemed headed back to Broadway in 2003, when she played the mother of the entrepreneurial Mizner brothers in the Stephen Sondheim musical “Bounce” in Chicago and Washington. But the show was poorly received and never made it to New York. (It was later reworked, retitled “Road Show” and staged at the Public Theater in New York in 2008, without Ms. Powell in the cast.)

I don’t intend for this to be all Norm Macdonald all the time, and I know “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. But this is a cool story, and I believe this person is telling the truth.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Brief memos from the legal beat.

September 15th, 2021

Well. Well well well. Well.

Alex Murdaugh, the prominent South Carolina lawyer whose wife and son were shot and killed in June, asked a former client to kill him this month so his other son could collect a $10 million insurance payment but survived being shot in the head, the police said on Tuesday night.

…

The former client, Curtis Edward Smith, 61, of Walterboro, S.C., was arrested and charged with assisted suicide, aggravated assault and battery, and insurance fraud in connection with the shooting on Sept. 4, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division said.
The state police agency said that Mr. Murdaugh, 53, had admitted to the scheme on Monday and that Mr. Smith had admitted to being at the scene and getting rid of the gun. Mr. Murdaugh’s lawyer did not respond to inquiries about the arrest, and it was not clear if Mr. Smith, who was booked in the Colleton County jail, had a lawyer.

…

Mr. Harpootlian said Mr. Murdaugh had concocted the plan for Mr. Smith to shoot him after trying to stop abusing oxycodone and suffering from “massive depression.” Mr. Murdaugh had wrongly believed that his older son, Buster, would not be able to receive any life insurance payout if he died of suicide, Mr. Harpootlian said. Another lawyer for Mr. Murdaugh, Jim Griffin, said in an interview that Mr. Murdaugh had told the police that Mr. Smith was whom he primarily bought oxycodone from.

I haven’t written a lot about the Backpage trial, though I have been following it from a distance. Yesterday’s development: the judge declared a mistrial. Why? Grotesque misconduct by the prosecution.

The government’s goal with prosecution is “not to win at any cost” but to “win by the rules, to see that justice is done,” [U.S. District Judge Susan] Brnovich pointed out. “If the government can prove that the defendants … knowingly facilitated prostitution, then they will be punished. But it should be done correctly.”
In her view, that hasn’t happened. The opening statement from federal prosecutor Reggie Jones “was close to causing mistrial,” she said. Then, despite agreeing “to minimize the focus on child sex trafficking” from then on out, the government continued to harp on it. And despite being told that witnesses could only talk about Backpage’s general reputation if it was tied to communication with specific defendants in this case, government witnesses like Sharon Cooper “talked about the reputation of Backpage untethered from communications with the defendants,” Brnovich pointed out.

This is a kind of long, but interesting (to me, anyway) piece about how corrupt San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection is.

Infamous engineer and permit expediter Rodrigo Santos has been hit with a bevy of both federal and local charges. Former DBI senior inspector Bernie Curran has resigned after being suspended for taking an undisclosed “loan” from a developer and then traveling out of his district to sign off that developer’s projects.
The feds on Friday announced fraud charges, in fact, against both Santos and Curran. The former is accused of expediting his permits by instructing his clients (in writing, and captured by the feds) to write charitable checks to Curran’s preferred youth hockey and rugby organizations. Curran then returned the favor by issuing certificates of final completion on these projects, however shoddy or incomplete they may be.

…

Curran and Santos, notably, pleaded the Fifth at a level exceeding the Dave Chappelle “Tron Carter Law and Order” sketch. But Santos did, notably, admit to having employed not one, but two of former DBI director Hui’s children. We are informed these are Hui’s only children, and that makes sense; if there were more, Santos probably would’ve hired them, too.

Posted in California Über Alles, Law, Murdaugh, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 15, 2021.

September 15th, 2021

Norm Macdonald. THR. Variety. Lawrence. Ben Sixsmith.

(If there are any of my readers who are unfamiliar with Albert Fish, he was a real jerk, and I strongly encourage you to think twice before you DuckDuckGo him.)

Hacker News thread (pretty respectful, and lots of links).

I thought about embedding some of his bits from YouTube, but Variety already pulled a bunch of those together (including OJ).

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch update.

September 14th, 2021

I’m going to wait until tomorrow to do a Norm Macdonald obit watch, so that things have a little time to shake out.

Posted in Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 14, 2021.

September 14th, 2021

This one goes out to FotB Dave: Don Collier. He did a lot of work on Westerns: “The High Chaparral”, “Bonanza”, “Death Valley Days”, “Branded”, and so on. He also did some movie work, including “Seven Ways from Sundown” (with Audie Murphy) and “Tombstone” (credited as “High Roller”).

NYT obit for Art Metrano.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

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